The Demons of Leonard Cohen - (Canadian Studies) by Francis Mus (Paperback)

About the Book

'With my jingle in your brain, allow the Bridge to arch again'. How are we to understand Leonard Cohen's plea? Who speaks to whom in this oeuvre spanning six decades? Francis Mus considers the different guises or 'demons' that the Canadian singer-songwriter assumes.

Book Synopsis

Who speaks in Leonard Cohen's oeuvre? By identifying the many guises in which Cohen presents himself to his audience, Francis Mus seeks to formulate an answer to this question. The countless roles assumed by Cohen's persona are not some innocent games, but strategies in response to the sometimes conflicting demands of a 'life in art' they serve as masks that represent the performer's face and state of mind in a heightened yet detached way. In and around the artistic work, they are embodied in different guises or 'demons' image (the poser), artistry (the writer and singer), alienation (the stranger and the confidant), religion (the worshipper, prophet, or priest), and power (the powerful or powerless).

Ultimately, Cohen's artistic practice can be read as an attempt at forging interpersonal contact. The wide international circulation of Cohen's work has resulted in a partial severing with the context of its creation. Much of it has filtered through the public image forged by the artist and his critics in concerts, interviews and reflective texts.

Consequently, this monograph is less a biography than a reception study, supplemented with extensive archival research, unpublished documents, and interviews with colleagues and privileged witnesses. This book sheds new light on the dynamic of a comprehensive oeuvre spanning a period of sixty years.

Published in English.

Review Quotes

Cohen is turning into a "secular saint," as Brian Trehearne, the McGill professor, points out in his foreword to Francis Mus's The Demons of Leonard Cohen. A large part of Mus's project is teasing out significance from a vast genre of ephemera, such as album covers and minor sketches, but the book is broadly a study of Cohen's personas -- what Mus, who teaches at the University of Antwerp, refers to as his "demons"-- as well as how audiences have received these poses.
(...)
Mus helps us to think about how the grandiosity of Cohen's claims to grace managed not to fall flat because of his persistent irony about himself and his poses.

(https: //reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2021/09/in-the-human-frame/)

--Jessica Duffin Wolfe "Literary Review of Canada"

About the Author

Francis Mus (1983) est chercheur à l'Université d'Anvers (Belgique). En 2015, Francis Mus a publié en néerlandais une monographie sur Leonard Cohen, qui a gagné le Prix littéraire de la Province de Flandre orientale. Par ailleurs, il a donné de nombreuses conférences sur l'oeuvre de Leonard Cohen et a consacré à ce sujet de nombreuses publications académiques incluant un des chapitres de l'ouvrage collectif primé, intitulé Les révolutions de Leonard Cohen (2016).