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1. Gregory Betts
Aliens in the Void: Writing Beyond
the Limits of Language in bpNichol’s
The Martyrology (and (Luigi Serafini’s
((Code)x Seriphian(us))))
Abstract: Aliens are, by definition, out beyond our language system and thereby
attest to the limits and barriers of our words. They, inevitably a presumptive pro-
noun for an unknowable subject, embody a void in and of our knowledge of the
universe. In literature, aliens are coded through the human imaginary, creating a
projection of the nonhuman by the human as writers seek to imagine conscious
life in the void. This paper turns to the insights of phenomenology, particularly
Edmund Husserl and Bernhard Waldenfels, to examine how such experimental
writers, particularly bpNichol and Luigi Serafini, push against the limits of lan-
guage and use the trope of the alien to establish a space of linguistic rupture and
freedom, a clearing away of cultural and linguistic detritus, as a provocation
against knowledge and the closed habits of perception. In these works, the
avant-garde intersects with science fiction representations of life beyond the lim-
its of human culture. A unique kind of phenomenological utopianism emerges in
this mix, in the idea of presenting alienated language – a space of saying where
communication has yet been omitted – as if it were a portal out of the human
world, but also, potentially, out of alienation.
bpNichol, Canada’s most celebrated experimental poet, wrote a series of books of
lyrical, freeplay poetry called The Martyrology (1972–1993)1
that is particularly in-
vested in exploring the alien as mark of the end of human knowledge and com-
munication. He presents a series of saints arriving amongst us from an imaginary
planet called Knarn. The disturbance they embody provokes intense meditations
on the relation, responsibility, and boundaries of self and other. Luigi Serafini’s
The Codex Seriphianus (1981),2
meanwhile, presents an imaginary encyclopedia
from an alien universe, written entirely in a strange, inaccessible script, affording
readers an encounter with one of the most mysterious and indeed inhuman
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Books 1 & 2 [1972], second ed. (Toronto: Coach House Books,
1998).
 Luigi Serafini, Codex Seriphianus [1981], 40th anniversary ed. (Milan: Rizzoli, 2013).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-012

2. books ever produced. My paper turns to the insights of phenomenology, particu-
larly Edmund Husserl and Bernhard Waldenfels, to examine how such experi-
mental writers work with the excess of language and use the trope of the alien to
establish a space of linguistic rupture and freedom, a clearing away of cultural
and linguistic detritus, as a provocation against knowledge and the closed habits
of perception. In these works, the avant-garde intersects with science fiction rep-
resentations of life beyond the limits of human culture. A unique kind phenome-
nological utopianism emerges in this mix in the idea of presenting alienated
language – a space of saying where communication has yet been omitted – as if
it were a portal out of the human world, but also, potentially, out of alienation.
The imaginary saints in bpNichol’s The Martyrology pose a unique problem
in their metaconscious genesis. They were born out of language, we are told re-
peatedly, and trapped by it: “this is a real world you saints could never exist in /
born in an imperfect reading of the stars.”3
Informed by chance and the wonder
of language, they become embodied meditations on the relations of self and
other through the alien technology of language that mediates between both. In
Book Five, he compares “how the saints come to me in the writing / how i speak
to you Lord” as “moments when the channel opens.”4
The channel in this case is
language and perception, both of which occlude the full feeling of presentation.
The phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels attends to the mediating cate-
gory of “the third”5
as the constitution of a space in which relations become
possible. He uses language as a poignant example of this idea of the mediating
third: “We cannot utter a word or carry out a gesture of action without a third
coming into play, which can neither be reduced to the behavior of the ad-
dressee nor to that of the addresser.”6
Language, with its rules, orders, and
laws, is given this consensual authority to become the silent stage of our com-
munication. Nichol’s aliens, though, reverse that transparency here and make
the purported neutrality of language a central theme of his writing. As he and
his frequent collaborator Steve McCaffery write, “To be born into a particular
speech community entails inheriting that community’s modes of perception
and system of values.”7
If you question or have doubts about that system of
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “Scenes from the Lives of the Saints,” n.p.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 5, “Chain 3,” n.p.
 Bernhard Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Aliens: Basic Concepts [2006], (Evanston, IL:
Northwest UP, 2011): 80–83.
 Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Aliens, 81.
 bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, “Report 1: Translation,” in Rational Geomancy: The Kids of
the Book Machine, The Collected Research Reports of the Toronto Research Group 1973–1982,
ed. Steve McCaffery (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992): 27–43, 27.
194 Gregory Betts

3. values, you quickly encounter the limits of your own language. Translating be-
comes a problem of seeing beyond one’s inherited perception and a portal into
another way of seeing. Nichol’s linguistic alien artifacts, imaginary translations
taken to the furthest extreme, foreground his efforts to perceive language from
another perspective. They create a trope for exploring the alienating effects of a
language that prevents contact and real exchange, even while it invents the
possibility of communication.
By philosophical convention, the alien belongs within the category of the
other, as a subset but at the extreme radical end of the type. Its extremity and
inaccessibility has led some philosophers to note how it might be said to elude
and even empty the meaningfulness of categorization – the anomaly that breaks
the rule. The other unto itself, described as noumena by Kant, is only imaginable
as an object of perception by the self.8
Similarly, the noumena only becomes rec-
ognizable through direct perception (whether visual or mental) that creates a
“central noumatic nucleus” that allows the noumena to be meaningful, thinkable,
recognizable as something by the perceiving self.9
And while the self or ego must
contend with itself as noumena, the relation establishes the field of ethics. The
alien, though, falls outside of any dialogical relationship of perception, perceiv-
ing, or being perceived. It exists so far outside of relation, indeed of coherence, as
to disrupt the presumptive legitimacy of self/other (or ego/noumena) binaries
through which the self comes to constitute itself. The alien exceeds the noumena.
Waldenfels, working from Husserl’s anticipation of the alien, ponders
whether there is “a secret horror alieni” inherent to philosophy that strives to
dispel the alien rather than think through its harrowing implications.10
It is for
this reason, too, that Richard Kearney reads the alien as a manifestation of
sublimity, calling forth all of the repulsion and attraction of the abject.11
We
are drawn to the inherent horror of the “no-thing, that is to an archaic and un-
nameable non-object that defies language,”12
both for the illusory freedom of
being outside the rules and the desire to redeem “that which is defiled and
needs to be purified” or brought into the rules of knowledge.13
 Immanuel Kant, Inaugural Dissertation, trans. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2002): 397.
 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. Boyce Gibson
(New York: Macmillan, 1931): 260.
 Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien, 20 [emphasis in original].
 Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Rout-
ledge, 2003): 88–95.
 Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 89 [emphasis in original].
 Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 91.
Aliens in the Void: Writing Beyond the Limits of Language 195

4. Avant-garde writers, since at least Stephan Mallarmé’s ambition to “Donner
un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu” [“purify the words of the tribe”], have
sought to mobilize the seeming purity of the radically new.14
Kearney, though,
resists both the attraction and abstraction of the alien precisely because neither
attends to or prepares for the genuine, potential threat of the alien. Alien infat-
uation is naïve. We need to recognize evil as such, he argues, before succumb-
ing to inaction in the face of a threat to our security – physical and mental, but
also ontological in the very constitution of our being. It is insufficient to merely
play host to the radical other given the risks (a recurring premise of science fic-
tion and horror narratives). Indeed, the alien embodies the possibility of our
ontological dissolution as a species.
In contrast, the Canadian science fiction author Phyllis Gotlieb proposes the
alien as a mode of disconnection and as a problem of dis-affect: “She felt no pity
or horror. They were purely alien.”15
In her short story collection, she writes
about characters struggling to empathize with the alien, who eludes the em-
pathic response needed to establish relations; there is no reason to care for some-
thing outside our cosmology, something not afforded Being or recognized by our
social milieu. Writing about or even through the problem of non-relations and
non-meaning is a particular facet of the literary investigations of the alien.
For phenomenologists like Waldenfels and Ian Bogost, the encounter with the
purely alien, and this kind of empathy barrier, provokes a category of experiential
knowledge that disrupts all other categories, that exists outside of experience as
such, exposing that “the fact of reason is not itself reasonable.”16
Encounters with
something radically different from ourselves that is beyond a possible object of
consciousness, outside of our general semiotic economy, exposes the limits of our
knowledge of how things work and what the universe is, disrupting the centrality
of self and other to models of ontology. There is a reason that phenomenologists
continue to return to the trope of the alien as the ultimate test of intersubjectivity.17
Such work follows from Husserl’s own endeavor to make philosophy a “rigorous
 Stephan Mallarmé, “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” in Poésies [1887], eighth ed. (Paris: Nou-
velle Revue Française, 1914): 132–133, 132.
 Phyllis Gotlieb, Blue Apes (Edmonton: Tesseract Books, 1995): 217.
 Waldenfels, Phenomenology, 13.
 Cf. Cristin Ellis, “Object-Oriented Ontology’s Endless Ethics,” Postmodern Culture 25.2
(2015), <http://www.pomoculture.org/2018/11/25/object-oriented-ontologys-endless-ethics/>
(acc. 8 June 2021); Elisabeth Pacherie, Melissa Green, Tim Bayne, “Phenomenology and Delu-
sions: Who Put the ‘Alien’ in Alien Control?,” Consciousness and Cognition 15.3 (2006):
566–577; Bernhard Leistle, Anthropology and Alterity: Responding to the Other (New York:
Routledge, 2017).
196 Gregory Betts

5. science” of ontology,18
despite his lack of engagement with the idea of the alien
and its unique limit-case challenge to ontology. Science fiction has spent perhaps
the most time of any literary genre exploring this challenge, but in this paper I am
interested in how bpNichol and Luigi Serafini situate such a rupture in relation to
human communication.
Nichol’s saints, aliens from beyond our language system who arrive through
it, attest to the limits and barriers of our words. They are coded imaginary in that
the speaker of the poem invents them and acknowledges that invention, further-
more wrestles with the burden of their origination: “you become rhetorical.”19
While in Book One this invention is more often described as a process of finding
the saints buried in the language, their having been invented becomes an increas-
ing theme of the project the further on you get into the books in the nine-volume
sequence. Disrupting the saints’ alien backstory, Nichol writes about discovering
them in broken, misread language. He inserts a gap into a variety of ‘ST’ words,
such that, for instance, ‘stand’ becomes canonized as ‘St. And.’ As they come
from the space, the typographic pun on the gap between the letters opens further
and becomes a magical kerning portal to an alien cosmology. The new words
formed by the fissure offer clues about the individual personalities of the saints.
St. And, for instance, is a cosmic clown without a circus, an unnecessary supple-
ment to a culture already consumed by spectacle and entertaining diversions. The
alien backstory provides a different origin, however, as these invented saints with
“the strange distorted faces of the intergalactic crowds” come from a planet called
Knarn that was consumed by an exploding sun.20
In writing a section called “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” which has presum-
ably been translated from Knarnish to English, the author or speaker inside the
poems interrupts the writing to express dismay that our sun, too, “is dying,” ce-
menting a link between their fate and our own future.21
The possibility of writing
Knarn, of communication in toto, is disrupted, and spins out of the speaker’s con-
trol because of this parallel to an imaginary, alien reality. Furthermore, it is in
the parallel between the phantasy of Knarn and the presentational world that the
speaker discovers his own alienation from language: “i wish i could scream your
name & you could hear me / out there somewhere where our lives are.”22
This
 Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as a Riorous Sci-
ence and Philosophic and the Crisis of European Man, trans. and introd. Quenton Lauer
(New York: Harper and Row, 1965): 71.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 2, “fasting sequence,” n.p.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” n.p.
 bpNichol, Martyrology, Book 1, “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” n.p.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” n.p.
Aliens in the Void: Writing Beyond the Limits of Language 197

6. appeal to communication speaks well to the phenomenologist’s distinction be-
tween presentation (“Gegenwärtigung”), representation (“Vergegenwärtigung”),
and re-presentation or phantasy (“Darstellung” or “Vorstellung”), where in Hus-
serl’s distinction we encounter a split between the object of perception, the pos-
ited object of perception, and the expectation produced by the posited object of
perception.23
The speaker in Nichol’s work perceives the possibility (phantasy) of breaking
through the boundary of fiction (representation) to become an object in and of
direct experience (presentation) – but can only express that desire with/through/
in language. A key element of Nichol’s writing is that the speaker only exists in
language, trapped in representation. He likens himself a “kid of the book ma-
chine,”24
as if born into or within the technology, and spends an enormous
amount of energy attending to the interface. The Martyrology consistently returns
to the ways that language permits access to certain possibilities and revelations,
but also about how language disrupts direct experience and creates a perpetual
gap between our knowledge systems and the world “out there somewhere where
our lives are.”25
On the next page, he laments: “the language i write is no longer
spoken,” highlighting the gap between lived and literary language, another ele-
ment of abstraction inherent to his art. Later, he writes, “i want to tell you a story
in the old way / i can’t // haven’t the words or / the hands to reach you.”26
The
gap between ego and noumena overwhelms the limits of representation.
For many philosophers, such linguistic conundrums create an abyss of rea-
son, a gap in reason itself that undermines all categories of knowing (a predi-
cate of doubt shared by philosophers such as Nietzsche, Bataille, Lyotard, and
Derrida). Language communities, though, shape perception, including the per-
ception of philosophers. Linguist Edward Sapir shares or rather anticipates
their mistrust of language as mere “lever to get thoughts ‘across’”27
but won-
ders whether many of the great problems of philosophy are, in fact, products of
the internal machinations of our grammar rather than actual problems of the
world outside of the linguistic system. For instance, he explores the example of
the Kantian notion of causation, which has no correlate in the Inuit language.
While some use such a lack to justify a sense of cultural hierarchies (and,
 Cf. Regina-Nio Kurg, Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Image Consciousness, Aesthetic Conscious-
ness, and Art (dissertation, Université de Fribourg en Suisse, 2014): 5–9.
 The subtitle to his co-written book Rational Geomancy (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1973) is
“Kids of the Book-Machine.”
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” n.p.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “The Sorrows of Saint Orm,” n.p.
 Edward Sapir, “The Grammarian and His Language,” American Mercury 1.1 (1924): 149–155, 150.
198 Gregory Betts

7. indeed, European colonialism), Sapir dismisses the lack as merely one of cul-
tural interest: “They [the Inuit] have no difficulty in expressing the idea [. . .].
All languages are set to do all the symbolic and expressive work that language
is good for, either actually or potentially.”28
The problem is not inherent to language, then, but yet offers a clue into how
language intertwines with culture. Elements of the form of a particular language,
such as German in Kant’s case, create conceptual gaps that puzzle philosophers
and lead speakers to particular orientations of thought. While fascinating, these
elements of the form can also be regarded as errors or logical glitches. In this
way, the philosopher, Sapir suggests, is no master of ideas and is more “likely to
become the dupe of his speech-forms.”29
Language and the arbitrary but internal-
ized rules of speech not only influence thought but establish the boundaries of
thinking – even, in the case of the philosopher, where language limits seem like
a separate concern from the act of thinking. Despite this seeming, though, lan-
guage remains the silent but not uninfluential third, subtly mediating the phan-
tasy of representation and the experience of presentation. It was precisely an
awareness of inherent bias that led Husserl to pursue a more rigorous stance in
philosophic enquiry.
For Nichol, the sense of language as mediator creates an insurmountable
barrier that disconnects all speakers from genuine, unmediated communication.
The silent third is far from neutral and actively prevents individuals from con-
necting to each other such that language is itself a problem in communication. It
creates a tautological mind trap where the alien interference creates alienation.
Nichol’s first visual poems, in fact, attempted to depict linguistically-inspired
tautologies (“Mind-Trap #1” and “Mind-Trap #2,” both from 1964).30
Working
from that recognition of the trouble with words, consequently, his writing aims
“to free the emotional content of speech from ideation or from words, necessar-
ily, and to just be able to let out the voice.”31
In other contexts, he connects his desire to transcend language-as-third, and
the illusions of unadulterated communication, to the wider crisis of modernity,
and to particular avant-garde efforts that “attempt to regain the magic to redis-
cover the basic tool [gap in original].”32
His faltering confidence in the ability of
 Sapir, “The Grammarian,” 152.
 Sapir, “The Grammarian,” 154.
 Both works are unpublished. Source: April 1964 Notebook, MsC 12, Simon Fraser University
Library Special Collections & Rare Books.
 bpNichol, “Interview,” The Capilano Review 1.8/9 (1975): 313–346, 325.
 bpNichol, “Passwords: The Bissett Papers,” in Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol,
ed. Roy Miki (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2002): 44–71, 56.
Aliens in the Void: Writing Beyond the Limits of Language 199

8. modern, avant-garde art to revivify language in this way helps to explain why
Frank Davey describes a project like The Martyrology, with its dramatis personae
of aliens, fantastical heroes, and science fiction mythologies, as a “defence against
darker thoughts, including suicide.”33
Indeed, the nine-volume project confronts
the abyss of communication directly, recognizing language as a dead tool that the
living are stuck with to survive. For Nichol, though, the book was not a concession
to depression, but a thinking through of the trauma of our linguistic separation
from each other – the alienation of the gap and the perils of the abyss itself: “i
grasp the edge of vision & am frightened.”34
Letting his worldview expand to in-
clude intense meditation on the structure of cultural thought, including his speech
and its grammar, created the possibility of genuine connection, a bridge over the
abyss, while possibly overcoming some of the grammatical traps identified by
Sapir.
He knew he wasn’t alone in this pursuit and likened this push beyond con-
ventional grammar to a language revolution occurring through the works of
writing peers like bill bissett in Vancouver and other international members of
the concrete poetry movement. Though the concept of a ‘language revolution’
is a little watery,35
they experimented aggressively, insistently, and collectively
believed, via the ideas of Edward Sapir and Marshall McLuhan, that a new, less
circumscribed relationship to language could establish a new culture entirely.
Hence, Nichol worked hard to (re)animate language, to transform single letters
into comic book frames and panels through which alternative modalities could
be imagined (see Figure 1). These alien dislocutions create possible sites of rev-
olution by presenting (Gegenwärtigung) new dimensions of expression.
While such texts trouble the possibility of language and expression – opening
up the division of tongues, the emptiness of speech, the haunting aforementioned
gap – Nichol’s visual work particularly explores interruptive layers that prevent
the fantasy of an internal fictional world and become themselves the subject of the
work.36
In his comics, as Borkent explores, the gap of the panel bursts over into
other frames, dissolving the logic of comicbook’s visual language. In phenomeno-
logical terms, the presentation forecloses form’s immanence and its transparent
 Frank Davey, Aka bpNichol: A Preliminary Biography (Toronto: ECW Press, 2012): 115.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 2, “Sons & Divinations,” n.p.
 See Eric Schmaltz, The Language Revolution: Borderblur Poetics in Canada, 1963–1988 (dis-
sertation, York University, 2018): 8–19.
 Mike Borkent, “Post/Avant Comics. bpNichol’s Material Poetics and Comics Art Manifes-
tos,” in Avant Canada. Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries, ed. Gregory Betts and Christian Bök
(Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2019): 95–115, 96.
200 Gregory Betts

9. function as the silent third. The breaking releases a palpable indeed revolutionary
force for a new vitality (Vorstellung).
It is in a similar fashion that The Martyrology proposes alien-saints created
out of broken language. The dead language is opened up, renewed, and brought
back to life. Our quotidian language is saved by the presence of holy beings hid-
den inside that burst forth. Consequently, the alien in Nichol is not the raw hos-
tile agent from a movie like Alien (a film by English director Ridley Scott, based
on a story by Canadian science fiction author A. E. Van Vogt) or the time-
travelling enigma in Arrival (a film by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, based
on a story by American science fiction author Ted Chiang). Ultimately, the sci-
ence fiction element is beside the point for Nichol: our language – our point of
access to the world and the silent third mediating our connection to each other –
is already a source of alienation easily exposed in such games as his creation of
these saints. He reverses that alienation, though, by suggesting a possible re-
demption within the alien operatives inside words.
The Codex Seraphinianus is an encyclopedia, as if from and about an alien world
beyond the gap between speakers that haunts Nichol’s writing, inattentive to the
foibles of human grammar and philosophy. Because the idea of its alien origins is
Figure 1: bpNichol, Grease Ball Comics, Issue 1
(Toronto: grOnk, 1970). Series 8, Number 1.
Used with permission of the Estate of
bpNichol.
Aliens in the Void: Writing Beyond the Limits of Language 201

10. never directly expressed within the book, this lack of signification creates the effect
of a radical estrangement, an alien encounter, through an unknown script and
abundant images that depict impossible, irrational objects collected and assembled
by the internal, fictional botanist. At first glance, the script offers no clues to inter-
pretation or decoding (see Figure 2). Readers are kept firmly out of the internal nar-
rative universe, opening up a gap of understanding between the text and its wider
context: such alienation perfectly aligns with its alien depictions. Textual anoma-
lies, like the red O and seemingly related red sphere in Figure 3, lead and mislead
us simultaneously. Like Arrival’s Dr. Louise Banks, readers are stuck trying to read
through the mystery of the text, reading against its alien difference for clues to in-
terpretation. While there is a strange pleasure in encountering such a mystery, it
has predictably attracted cryptographers and linguists who have deployed the
tools of their disciplines to crack the alien.37
These efforts have been mildly suc-
cessful, picking up on the trace of human conventions that make the book recog-
nizable as a book and as a genre. Such attempts to solve the game, though, merely
overstep the radical gap the book proposes – the idea of an outside to human lan-
guage and knowledge presumptions. Unlike Nichol who pursues communication
across the gap (while keeping the gap firmly in mind), Serafini dismisses such at-
tempts to find the secret message in his alien script directly: “It doesn’t matter
much to me, it’s an obsession related to the persistent fascination with mystery. I
always said that there is no meaning behind the script; it’s just a game.”38
Figure 2: Detail from the Codex Seraphinianus © Luigi Serafini.
 See Tomi S. Melka and Jeffrey C. Stanley, “Performance of Seraphinian in Reference to
Some Statistical Tests,” Writing Systems Research 4.2 (2012): 140–166; Klaus Schmeh, “En-
crypted Books: Mysteries That Fill Hundreds of Pages,” Cryptologia 39.4 (2015): 342–361.
 Andrea Girolami, “Look Inside the Extremely Rare Codex Seraphinianus, the Weirdest En-
cyclopedia Ever,” Wired (25 October 2013) <https://www.wired.com/2013/10/codex-seraphinia
nus-interview/> (acc. 10 June 2021).
202 Gregory Betts

11. While the linguists in Arrival would have loved a book like this from the
Heptapods, who came to earth with the specific intention of communicating
with us, readers have no comparable indication about the desire of the Codex’s
aliens to speak to us. This difference matters, for as Waldenfels notes, the first
step in a conversation with aliens is the realization of the aliens’ own gaze
upon us.39
It is through this recognition of their recognition that they become
recognizable as something (Bogost would protest the anthropocentric nature of
that kind of recognition). Instead, we have something more mysterious, a pro-
jection of human self-consciousness onto an alien universe.
This book, the full-color, hardcover, high-production value fact of it, attests
to a human desire to encounter aliens and to see something else as something.
While aspiring to the intellectual freedom of a counter-environment, the book
encodes a worldview that is yet shaped by the contours of specific human cul-
tures and expectations – that proposes but does not escape an inherited percep-
tion. The Codex follows a conventional linear arrangement of textual objects,
like chapter headings and section breaks, modeled after early encyclopedias by
the likes of Carl Linnaeus (see his binomial nomenclature from the Systema Na-
turae in 1736, for instance). The Codex similarly features illustrious hand-drawn
representations of various creatures and handwritten texts that accompany
their documentation. The content of scientific knowledge and discourse, the
foundations of contemporary Western culture, was created by such texts.
I also think about Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings (1957)
that maps out a compendium of fictional, surreal creatures. If you combine
even just these two texts, you have enough of a precedence to start to recognize
this book as something, if only as a reflection of the human desire to know and
map out the known world, combined with a reflection of the human desire to
be amazed by impossible, fictional, mythological beings that defy our reason
and sense of how the world works. The very human desire to find something
suggests deeper possibilities and alternates to our consensual reality. In that
way, this book functions like the wardrobe access point to Narnia, or the board
game in Jumaji, or the rabbit hole, and so on. Western readers love stories of
finding things that reveal secrets about our world, especially if they lead to
other worlds or ruptures in the scientific laws. The Codex functions like one of
those fictionalized, happened-upon portals, akin to the frame disruptions in
Nichol’s comics. Thus, there is pleasure in the occasion of the textual anomalies
re-appearing, morphing, or defying even our tenuous assumptions. In Figure 3,
 Waldenfels, Phenomenology, 21.
Aliens in the Void: Writing Beyond the Limits of Language 203

12. we encounter the red O from Figure 2 as an anthropomorphized monarch writ-
ing the asemic script of the Codex, as if in parodic imitation or interruption.
Interruptions are also an important mode of Nichol’s exploration of the alien.
Right from the start, The Martyrology begins with a long series of false starts and
broken frames: an epigraph (taking the form of a quotation from Gertrude Stein);
a dramatis personae; a blank page; a half-title page; an illustration; an excerpt
from a previous, imaginary work (“The Chronicle of Knarn”); a second illustra-
tion; a title page; a second epigraph from an imaginary work (“The Writings of
Saint And”); a dedication; a blank page; a volume title page with an illustration;
a blank page; an epigram (“the breath lies”); a blank page; a section title page
with illustration; a blank page; and, finally, a text on page nineteen that reverses
the feeling of arrival into the text: “so many bad beginnings // you promise your-
self / you won’t start there / again.”40
The paratext pervades and indeed prevents
the book from beginning – unless the book is recognized as an interruption of
inherited perceptual habits. He provides a date of composition (“dec 67”) and
proceeds, in the next line, to write about “the undated poem.”41
What to do with
a text that so flatly, so brazenly contradicts itself, undermines itself, undoes the
Figure 3: Detail from the Codex Seraphinianus © Luigi Serafini.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, n.p.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “The Martyrology of Saint And,” n.p.
204 Gregory Betts

13. magic escapism of literature? In a book about aliens, alienation, and failures of
communication, it seems appropriate that readers should also feel alienated from
the very start of the text, if only for a moment.
Back at the first “bad beginning”42
he gives us an overview of the saints, a
dramatis personae that is undermined on the second page: these details are
“nothing but a history,” highlighting the chronological gap between the past and
the present. As a gap-crossing text, this history implies a future – or, more specif-
ically, a “premonition of a future time or line we will be writing.”43
I like this line
very much for the way that it highlights how the grammar of our language and
our literary conventions create an order for the imagination that invents a future
in which the past is re-presented. While operating without recourse to a truly
alien order (such as proposed in Villeneuve’s movie Arrival, where time for the
Heptapods is experienced as cyclical), Nichol maps out the implications of a re-
newed linear linguistic experience. In Sapir’s sense, the foundational importance
of grammar shapes cultural expectation, such that the causality of linear expres-
sion and grammar creates an experience of time and chronology, shaping in Hus-
serl’s terms both representation and phantasy. The “we” that “will be writing”
thus creates a future community invented by the act of writing, even as it erases
alternative possible experiences of the present. As with all language acts, it also
invites the addressed reader into a shared experience with the author. This helps
give additional nuance to the lines that follow:
one thing makes sense
one thing only
to live with people
day by day
that struggle
to carry you forward
it is the only way44
Though the lines appear to (attempt/fail to) reach outside of the text, scholars
suggest that the “you” evoked in such recurring direct addresses is actually the
‘mad’ language that bp is stuck writing within, implying that what will turn out
to become a life-long writing project is in fact a “vast insanity [. . .] anamorpho-
sis in language itself.”45
Nichol died tragically young at age 43, and what
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “The Martyrology of Saint And,” n.p.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “of those saints we know the listing follows,” n.p.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “of those saints we know the listing follows,” n.p.
 Steve McCaffery, “In Tens/tion: Dialoguing with Bp,” Tracing the Paths: Reading ≠Writing
The Martyrology (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1988): 72–91, 77.
Aliens in the Void: Writing Beyond the Limits of Language 205

14. would be the last and final books of The Martyrology appeared posthumously.
Others let this biographical fact overwhelm the writing and argue that the ulti-
mate subject of the book is Nichol’s own premature death, given his regular
self-denigration in the poetry, hence the entire project becomes a life-long
apostrophe to a doom foretold.46
The idea of living with people as the only way, however, adds an important
phenomenological gloss to the section. Regardless of the biographical dimension,
down the page, he begins this writing: “a future music moves now to be written” –
what follows is not the music, not the notes, not even a musical use of language,
but four apparently random letters.47
Now, to be up front, I have no idea why
these four particular letters are presented in this way. Is there a secret code here?
Some allusion? Perhaps. They are all in ‘writing’ but in different order. What is
clear, though, from this section is that Nichol intends to work through the Sapir-
ian delimitation of language and grammar as a cognitive environment. Nichol at-
tends to the secret form of language and its feeling orientation, create alternative
pathways to a future through re-assembling the secret form of the alphabet itself:
“its form is not apparent / it will be seen.”48
Language thus can be a phenomeno-
logical disruptive force, like a rune that alters the reality into which it is spoken.
The Martyrology laments the gap, the abyss of communication, but yet invokes
and deploys alien forces that defy such human boundaries.
Serafini, who revels in imagining impossibilities, betrays no such lament at
the gaps in communication. Given its inaccessibility, alas, it is perhaps not too sur-
prising that criticism of the Codex reveals an overwhelming tendency to rehuman-
ize, or de-alienate, the book. Just as the cryptographers and linguists have sought
to solve the secrets of the book’s invented language, other extant criticism has al-
most exclusively attempted to track the range of influences and comparisons to
existing literary forms and cultural products, to render its alien conventions recog-
nizable and coherent. Indeed, with so many identifiable features shaping the writ-
ing, from the use of chapters, page numbers, table of contents, to alien creatures
using or built from human technologies (such as a plant that grows in the exact
shape of scissors, or the fish whose tail is a usable, conventional broom), such
 Stephen Scobie, “The Death of Terry/The Death of the Author (bpNichol),” Signature Event
Cantext (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1989): 9–23; David Clark, “Monstrous Reading: The Martyr-
ology After De Man,” Studies in Canadian Literature 15.2 (1990): 1–32; Glen Lowry, “Where Do
We Go from Here? The Romance of Beginning The Martyrology Again,” in Beyond the Orchard:
Essays on The Martyrology, ed. Roy Miki and Fred Wah (Vancouver: West Coast Line, 1997):
59–75.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “of those saints we know the listing follows,” n.p.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “of those saints we know the listing follows,” n.p.
206 Gregory Betts

15. scholarship debunks the alien fantasy of the text rather than an elaboration or exe-
gesis of its hermetic artistry. Under the weight of such disillusioned attention, the
artifice of the text shatters into the splinters of borrowed fragments. In the 2013
edition of the Codex, Serafini toys with such critics by insisting that the book was,
in fact, written by a white stray cat that ambled into his scriptorium, and he
“merely its manual executor.”49
Such surrealist humor helps to remind critics of
the strangeness of writing itself, and of all the cultural conventions we take for
granted in the act of writing and producing a book.
While opposed to the troublesome fun of the book, the demystifying efforts
of critics is, inevitably, correct: the alien does remain outside Serafini’s book pre-
cisely because the alien, by definition, is that which remains inaccessible, that
which establishes the outer boundary of our knowledge in the present. Aliens, in
this way, are not just extra-terrestrials, though those two categories will overlap
until we make contact with life off planet. (Astrobiologists like to joke that the
study of life in space is the only scientific field without an actual object of study.)
The idea of alien encounter shapes Serafini’s project, but the desire for estrange-
ment embodied in the book as a commercial product is a distinctly human con-
vention. Again, though, the context overwhelms the content, despite the ways
the book entices us to encounter: “perhaps unintelligible and alien writing could
make us all free to once again experience those hazy childhood sensations” of
reading books before understanding language.50
The alien in Serafini’s alien en-
cyclopedia is, thus, intertwined with a liberatory impulse to release a reader’s
imagination from the circumscription of inherited perception. Its alien, certainly
a human conceit, presents as a boundary of the rupture, an acknowledgement of
the gap just beyond our cognizance that yet fills the remaining universe of ideas.
Like Nichol, when asked why he wrote such an alien book, and what it was really
all about, Serafini had no illusions or hesitation about the audience for the proj-
ect: “I was trying to reach out to my fellow people.”51
The phenomenological alien, the radical category disruptor, remains outside
the text. What is the alien within it then? Like Nichol, Serafini’s book presents a
disruption that establishes a liberatory perceptual shift that pushes the reader
into a feeling as if they occupy the space of the alien, the one whose perception
is not recognized as something by the text. Carlotta Vacchelli brings in Molotiu’s
idea of ‘iconostasis,’52
how comics tend to create an experience of reading the
 Luigi Serafini, “Decodex,” Supplement to the 2013 edition of Codex Seriphianus.
 Serafini, “Decodex,” 9.
 Girolami, “Look Inside,” n.p.
 Carlotta Vacchelli, “The Intelligible Book: Timothy Ely’s and Luigi Serafini’s Book Arts,”
Italica 96.2 (2019): 281–302.
Aliens in the Void: Writing Beyond the Limits of Language 207

16. entire page as a unified composition, reading not so much left to right or sequen-
tially, but taking in the whole at a glance. Arrival, as described above sans le
mot, also used iconostasis to establish the difference of alien perception. Vac-
chelli does a close reading of the final image in the book, which depicts the au-
thor’s dead hand, and argues: “My goal is to explain how the clash between the
unintelligible codes and the intelligible material with its visual characteristics ac-
tually form a specific aesthetic of communication.”53
She arrives at the conclu-
sion that, paradoxically, “unintelligible codes convey the idea of a universal
readability.”54
The empty codes of the Codex make every reader illiterate, estab-
lishing a universal illiteracy which reverses the closed experience of language.
She compares this book to Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006), a wordless graphic
novel that presents a delightfully bizarre examination of an immigrant’s arrival
into an impossible world. From this, and the difference with Serafini’s encyclope-
dia of nonsense, she concludes that the Codex is a “re-education into play [. . .]
the liberation of the meaning in the words serves as a machine for setting free
from a pre-existing knowledge.”55
Like Nichol, the alien conceit of the Codex is
merely a ruse or perhaps metonymy of the text’s deeper investigation of the phe-
nomenology of the alien in its disruption of perceptual habits.
Nichol confesses that the scenario of his devising fails: “you saints [. . .] i
don’t give a fuck for your history.”56
Instead, he turns to family, history, and,
through them, his ancestral Ireland to recall the ancient Celtic Runic tradition
as a possible valid, unalienated form of writing. While it is certainly not an
alien technology, or a radical departure from the Western tradition, the rune is
a visual-object language that demonstrates more alignment between sense and
sensibility, body and mind, than the pure, de-materialized abstraction of the
Phoenecian alphabet. Nichol’s consistent method of experimentation is to
break and disrupt sequential language experience and thereby draw the silent
third into the communication. Moments of rupture produce if not genuine
speech and connection then the idea of the possibility, the phantasy, of such
presentation. He does not want language to be a hindrance (he does not want
to become a ‘dupe’ of language, in Sapir’s terms). He wants to push language
right to the edge of communication, accept its alien nature as mark of our own
mutual alienation, and push through. As he writes in “from The Chronicle of
Knarn”:
 Vacchelli, “Intelligible Book,” 282.
 Vacchelli, “Intelligible Book,” 282.
 Vacchelli, “Intelligible Book,” 300.
 bpNichol, Martyrology, Book 2, “Friends as Footnotes,” n.p.
208 Gregory Betts

17. i don’t know where the rim ends
to look over
into the great rift
i only know i drift without you
into a blue that is not there57
This short passage enacts some of the ideas mapped out above in a very playful
way. The first line ends, peeks over and sees the line “to look over.” The line
cuts back to the margin and talks about a great rift. By the internal logic of the
paragram (and looking beyond the rift of semiotics), from rift we get the word
“drift” in the fourth line. Is that the great rift? That words appear in other
words? bpNichol deploys the multiple levels of meaning in poetic language,
and in the constantly shifting registers of his paragrams, to encode his proposi-
tion of a revivified language.
Finally, the idea in this section that he wants to look over and investigate
the great rift (perhaps the abyss between people that creates an alien division,
and an alien within) is pushed aside for his self-recognition that he only exists
as something in relation to the second person, “you.” Who is this “you”? Nichol
evokes the familiar Husserlian notion of the necessity of the Other for the in-
vention of the self but pushes past into the inaccessible space of a “a blue that
is not there.”58
This absence names the space outside of language and commu-
nication, the dislocuted realm of the alien. What prevents the disappearance of
the self into this kind of alienation? The presentation of another, the call of the
other, and the phantasy of reaching them. Waldenfels describes attention as
the conduit of thoughtfulness, the inventor of insight, the means by which we
come to be in the presence of something else. Nichol’s saints, like Serafini’s
book, are the embodiments of that kind of attention. They use the trope of the
alien to talk about the void, and use the void to propose a feeling of expanded,
perhaps limitless possibility in language.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” n.p.
 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” n.p.
Aliens in the Void: Writing Beyond the Limits of Language 209