short paper for my methods and materials class

Heather Beatty
Jamieson
English 200A
20 May 2008



The Heart of Darkness Falls Apart: The Collision of Two Great Texts

To enter into a dualistic dichotomy regarding Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, implying a necessary scholarly preference of one or the other, is an inappropriate and an essentially flawed and fruitless project. Each text stands alone as a veritable representation of a particular time and place, with a particular set of values and social structures. And yet, neither will indifference do when it comes to an appraisal of literature’s social roles and implications. The authors of these two texts had two very different agendas, and thus to place them head to head is a dubious and unnecessary endeavor. Edward Said writes that “narrative is crucial” in understanding cultures and that stories are vital to tell untold truths: they “are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world” and also act as the “method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history” (xii). All stories, then, should be considered with appropriate concern.
The two texts in question fall perfectly into place in the balanced sides of Said’s equation: one as the colonialist novelist depicting a “strange region” of Africa and the second as a voice from the “colonized people” seeking to assert a specific cultural identity. Neither text, then, can be right or wrong. Both texts provide descriptions of flawed societies, although arguably Conrad’s text indeed reveals a deeply wrought racism that allows for the system of exploitation that he challenges. To read Conrad’s presumptive text in the environment of current scholarship simply requires great sensitivity and thoughtfulness. A text is only as powerful and destructive as readers and interpreters make it. To closely examine a text with attention to its contextual implications is to undermine its explosive power and see it for what it is: a collection of words and phrases strictly representative of one person, one place, and one story.
It is true that Chinua Achebe has called Conrad a “bloody racist” in his scathing piece, “An Image of Africa” and rightly so. The allegations he proposes are reasonable and his cited quotations hit the mark. There is no denying that to compare a Europeanized African to “a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs” (38) leaves a bitter taste in a postmodern, postcolonial reader’s mind. To ignore the multifaceted possibilities of diversity and refuse any intelligible communication to the African characters in the story is to deny a voice, whether through the narrator or as author, is to engage in racism and repression. What good is an author is he or she cannot take responsibility for the words of the proffered text? However, this is a diversion from the real argument, the real question. The real question about Heart of Darkness is, given its time and place, is it revealing and indicative of a higher social purpose? Even a cursory reading of this Conrad’s novella exposes a political agenda of the highest order, contextually speaking. Conrad seeks to subvert the entire system of colonization, to confront the motivating industry: capitalism and greed, and to shake the very roots of British imperialism. Whether or not his text accomplishes this task is beside the point. The racist undertones of his text are beside the point, essentially. But here it gets complicated.
Conrad’s self-appointed project, clear in the text of Heart of Darkness whether or not we consider Marlow to be the voice of Conrad, is to expose the social degradations of imperialism. However, Hunt Hawkins wrongly asserts that Conrad’s attitude is “itself critical of racism” and here I disagree. On the contrary, Conrad indeed utilizes images and terminologies of racism as the color of skins and the social equality of “primitive” people is not his concern. His concern is the greed, waste, and exploitation of rampant European capitalism and imperialism. As Hawkins argues, Heart of Darkness is a “powerful indictment of imperialism,” citing the passage in which Marlow states that “the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking of it away from those who have a different complexion or slighly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing.” Hawkins cuts off the quote here, but to continue to quote Conrad’s passage proves revealing: “is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it, not a sentimental pretense but an idea, and an unselfish belief in the idea” (10). Disregarded by Hawkins, Marlow has gone on to uphold the idea of imperialism as a good one, just one which put into practice creates real-world horrors. Never once does Conrad or Marlow imply that imperialism is wrong because it abuses the other because he or she is Other, per se. In fact, the novella reads in such a way that I was convinced Conrad/Marlow would celebrate African colonization if it were “simply” for religious purposes, the “civilizing” of the Other. His moralistic tone is misplaced, completely corrupted by the social standards of his time.
As Said writes, “this narrative in turn is connected directly with the redemptive force, as well as the waste and horror, of Europe’s mission in the dark world” (23). Conrad addresses the waste and horror, but relying on the traditional image of Africa as a “dark world,” connotatively dark in every metaphorical sense of the word. In my reading, as a student of literature interested in a different kind of necessary redemption; that is, a full redemption from the horrors of colonization, I read Heart of Darkness with a different horror. Kurtz’s horrors, and Marlow’s “immensely compelling” (Said 23) narrative find no sympathetic reader in me. I, too, am a product of my time. For me, reading Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a completely different story. The voice of the colonized, in our contemporary globalized world, is infinitely more fascinating and dynamic, than the voice of the colonizer.
Chinua Achebe writes of worlds and people previously unknown to his very particular audience. He wants to tell this particular story to this particular audience; he wants to shed light on the so-called “darkness” and he wants to expose both the previous voicelessness of this region and this group of human beings and the possible contemporary interest that the previously dominant society might now take in it. He utilizes British literary terminology, even in the title and epigraph of his novel, and appeals to an English-literary audience with his repeated use of Igbo figurative phrases, translated into English of course, that reveal a complex reverence for the power of language. In this way, Achebe makes it metatextually clear that, self-conscious of the fact or not, Amer-European readers encounter a foreign world at once attractive and repellent. Chinua Achebe gives voice to the invisible, to hidden forces and spirit worlds, as well as victims of an insane power dynamic at the hands of imperialist Europeans. At this point in time, Western readers must realize that this voice, so long silenced, is more important than the voice of the standardized axiom, the unmarked sign, whether quasi-rebellious or not.
To argue that one should not be offended by Conrad’s text would be, to put it bluntly, offensive. If that argument comes from a white, Amer-European reader, even more so. The unmarked reader can never understand the marked; can never put him-or-herself into pure embodiment of the Other. But it is vital, in a postmodern world, to try. This is why, as I wrote earlier, students and teachers of literature must proceed with utmost caution, respect, and care. We must provide broad understandings of cultural dynamics, history, and identity. Literary study should no longer be the domain of the “new critic,” as this is an axiomatic, non-inclusive and monologic perspective doomed to fail by virtue of its repetition and repression.
And yet we should continue to read all stories, and as scholars of literature we should always remain open to reading all stories. Heart of Darkness still tells us something about Conrad’s world and conception of masculinity and self. To read it, as J. Hillis Miller has argued, “by no means exonerates Conrad from responsibility for what is said within it.” In fact, to read it parallel to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, or better yet, Achebe’s “An Image of Africa” would offer students and immensely broader scope of perspectives.

final paper - myth criticism class

Heather Beatty
Hennelly – Engl. 260A
Myth Criticism
05/15/08


Maya’s Legacy: Return to the Great Mother in A.S. Byatt’s Possession

According to Erich Neumann, the Great Mother functions as one of the most powerful archetypes in the human psyche, emerging from the primordial Feminine and handed down through time from ancient history, exhibited in multiple human expressions. Neumann writes that the transformative power of the Great Mother serves as “mankind’s instinctive experience of the world’s depth and beauty, of the goodness and graciousness of Mother Nature who daily fulfills the promise of redemption and resurrection, of new life and new birth” (Origins 40). Throughout A.S. Byatt’s mythically rich novel Possession, the developing characters must renew themselves through symbolic encounters with the Great Mother in order to achieve integration between their conscious and unconscious selves. Roland Michell, postmodern scholar of Victorian poetry, in particular must find his way back to the nurturing and creative expression of the Great Mother, with the help of feminist scholar Maud Bailey (who undergoes her own transformation as well) in order to fully complete a personal cycle of individuation and rebirth. Byatt uses imagery of sexuality and the body, nature and gardens, and poetry and language to follow Roland’s journey along with other characters in the text as they return to the inherent power and energy of the Great Mother. The novel culminates with a return to origins in Maya, a daughter of great love and sacrifice whose name resonates with the power of the Great Mother.
In her psychoanalytic studies involving women and language, Julia Kristeva has also written on aspects of the Great Mother or maternal connection in human development. She sees the maternal realm or chora as pre-Oedipal and pre-verbal, opposing Lacan’s symbolic order with the semiotic modality. The semiotic may be expressed in poetic language; it is tonal and rhythmic and sensual, suggesting the mother’s heartbeat, rocking motion, breastfeeding, song, and bodily movement. Kristeva’s theories relate to Roland’s ultimate reconnection with maternal principles through language. He learns to write, and even think and dream, with a return to the semiotic, in a way that combines both male and female in a great continuum. This oneness, Kristeva would assert, is found in the domain of the expansive maternal, or, in Neumann’s term, the Great Mother. Separation or differentiation is no longer valid or possible in the maternal realm of understanding Kristeva calls the chora, in which one enters a cosmic time of joy and ecstatic creativity.
In Possession, Roland begins his mythic journey utterly disconnected from the mysterious Great Mother in his conscious academic life. His first encounter with the fecundity of the Great Mother actually begins with his growing romantic interest in the beautifully cool Maud, who, as a feminist scholar, appears self-possessed, confident and brilliant. Significantly, she is a woman constantly surrounded and accompanied by verdant shades of green; she wears “shining green shoes” and smells of “something ferny and sharp” (44). Even her car, “a glossy green Beetle” gives a nod to the Victorian poet Ash’s lush living world of insects and suggesting Neumann’s assertion that the Great Mother presides as “mother of all vegetation” (Great 48). But despite all this apparent signification of the color green as the living earth, fertility and growth, both Maud and Roland are hopelessly distanced from their bodies and sexuality: Maud is “a most untouchable woman,” and for Roland, “sexuality was like thick smoked glass” inscrutable and off-putting (55).
This inability to recognize, accept, and exuberantly embrace the sensual body initially reveals a deep rift between these postmodern scholars and the physical embodiment of the Great Mother. As the two delve into the unfolding stories of the discovered letters, they must begin to experience the human body, the realm of the maternal, earthy and redolent. Roland fears the physical presence of Maud, with its “down,” “hair,” “narrow haunch” and the smell of “wet freshness” (162). When they meet accidentally outside the bathroom he is initially resistant to the physical energy between them and he cannot connect with Maud in any profound sense. “He did not trust his body,” Byatt writes, placing Roland in the role of frustrated youth still differentiated in his selfhood who retreats to his own “clean white bed,” a recurring symbol that illustrates both Roland and Maud’s inherent detachment from the sexual fecundity of the Great Mother. This episode is followed by a sensual dream in which Roland is “hopelessly entwined” with “twisted rope” and “running water” and covered in “every kind of flower.” A mysterious “something” slides around him, alternatively “clutching” and “evading” his touch and smelling “dank…yet also rich and warm.” Most importantly, “something struggled to get out” and the language of his dream asserts that “It is wringing wet” (165). As Neumann points out, archetypes are demonstrated in “dreams, fantasies and creative works” (Great 3) and Roland’s dream life, so closely following his ineffectual encounter with Maud, clearly signifies an urgent need to return to the passionate preverbal expression of the Great Mother by acknowledging the physical body’s rhythms and desires.
Gradually throughout the course of the novel and the scholars’ adventurous project and joint quest, they begin to touch. After a separation, Roland meets up with Maud again and their relationship suddenly evolves past the purely intellectual stage and into that of passion: “they rushed into each other’s arms” (360). This initial mutual transformative touch allows them to eventually reach out further: “a hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle” (458). They are beginning to enter the territory of the semiotic, bodies touching, nonverbal communication suggesting a previously-inaccessible openness. Their growing physicality allows them to access the Great Mother archetype latent inside themselves. Especially for Roland, possession of his physical self and sexuality will eventually allow for a fullness of individuation, but the fully transformative sexual experience comes later.
For now, Roland must not only draw closer to his own earthy bodily presence, he must also forge a living relationship with the earthly maternal realm in nature. He has been “forbidden” from the garden at his own home in London, where his landlady allows “no right of entry” (22). So distanced is Roland from the natural world that while reading Leonora’s review of LaMotte’s poetry, at first Roland “could not imagine a pool with stones and water” (268). Failing to imaginatively connect with the mythical world of the Great Mother offered in the text, he is cut off from the vegetative earth and his own physical presence in it. Reading alone will not initiate his true experience with the Great Mother, he cannot fully engage until he acts. He must immerse himself physically in the growing natural world; he must retrace the Victorian poets’ excursion a hundred years previous, traveling with Maud to Yorkshire in order to begin to connect with archetypes of the Great Earth Mother.
In Yorkshire, Roland is able to finally experience the wild landscape of the garden that had been forbidden in London. He now finds himself in a land of stone and water, “river paths above the running peaty water,” “patches of greensward between rocks,” “standing stones and mysterious clumps of spotted purple foxgloves” (287). Insects, frogs, marshland, peat bogs: the countryside visibly drips and throbs with the life force that Neumann considers essential “vessel symbolism” of the Great Mother, in which “the primordial womb of life” is found in “the realm of the earth water” (Great 48). Here Roland truly begins his own transformation: he “discovered…the lairs of tunnel spiders,” “looked at the greenish-goldish-white rush of the fall,” and “observed a curious natural phenomenon…flames of white light appeared to be striving and moving upwards.” Roland is finally able to engage in the natural world of this strange, enchanted place and thereby begin to feel his way back to the Great Mother: he sits, watches, contemplates, imagines. Naturally, it is here that he first truly connects with Maud, envisioning the intimacies of love and desire that both they and the Victorian couple faced and thus beginning to comprehend the scope of the Great Mother’s loving power.
Here in the fertile mother-land of Yorkshire, the scholars begin to trust their unconscious selves and drives. They leave their books and pens behind when they go to Boggle Hole, a place they choose to visit simply because they like the sound of its name, significantly rejecting the implements of their conscious existence for a reconnection with a dreamy otherworld in which the Great Mother reigns. A “cove tucked beneath cliffs,” its very form suggests the curvature of the female body. It is a place of abundance and fertility, with an “extravagance of wildflowers,” softened by “warm air” and “gleaming scented life.” Roland and Maud pass “shelf after shelf of wet stone,” “violently coloured: pink stone, silvery sand under water, violent green mossy weed” (292). Colorful and sensual, wet and growing, the place is alive with “the highest and most essential mysteries of the Feminine,” which Neumann asserts are “symbolized by the earth and its transformations” (Great 51).
In this primordial setting Roland is on the path to both internal and external self-fulfillment. He is able to open up to Maud, persuading her to take down her mysterious masses of pinned-up hair. The letting-down of hair is mythically symbolic: ancient priestesses “needed their hair to work magic spells,” and Isis recreated Osiris’s life with her hair (Walker 367). Later, elderly and oft-ignored Ash scholar, Beatrice Nest, a sort of real-world mother figure for Roland, emerges to battle for her scholarly territory with “streaming white wooly hair descended…like a witch or prophetess” (539). In this text and mythologically, a woman’s hair serves as a striking indication of female power. In Yorkshire, Roland’s experience with Maud’s hair, “the whirling mass;” a “sea of gold lines, waving,” and this moment’s transformative effect on the relationship, represents the power of Kristeva’s chora. The light and fluidity of both the hair and the water in the Yorkshire setting suggests water in motion that is “undifferentiated and elementary,” according to Neumann, a symbol that is “uroboric,” “containing male elements side by side with the maternal” (48).
Later, deeply ensconced in their journey of textual understanding, Roland and Maud again follow the century old path of Christabel LaMotte to an enchanted region: this time to Brittany in France. This journey is even longer, the destination more remote; they drive “through Brittany, to the ends of the earth…through the forests of Paimpont and Broceliande…to the quiet enclosed bay of Fouesnant” (363). A land of “wind-battered ruggedness,” it is nevertheless “dreamier and softer” than the north; Brittany is a place of wind and stone and ancient secrets. Here Roland and Maud read the story of LaMotte’s hideaway here in France, her pregnancy and the ensuing deepening of the Victorian story’s mysteries that also correspond to an urge toward the Great Mother through actual human fertility: pregnancy and childbirth. Meanwhile they immerse themselves in a physical landscape rich with mythical symbolism and stories that link them to the ancient secrets of this fairy-land region that suggests the archetypal maternal imagination. Here Roland admittedly finds his own deep joy in the presence of Maud, poetry, and the mysteries of the Great Mother, becoming wary of returning to the “unenchanted” region of his “thinking” life, away from “the dreamy days, the pearly light alternating with the hot blue” (454). Entering the realm of the unconscious, and discovering the power of the Great Mother has had its narcotic effect. Now he must learn to reconcile this new grasp of integration with his real life. This he intuitively learns to do through language, through poetry, which Kristeva claims has the power of transformative revolution.
Roland has struggled with his own relationship with language and reading throughout the novel, trapped by his scholarly one-sidedness, but his experiences with Maud and in the great fertile regions of England and France open the door that allows his understanding of the Great Mother and her restorative creative powers to bloom. He finds himself constructing “lists of words that resisted arrangement” and begins to experience “intimations of imminence” that he shall write poems. The listed words flow from his chora with the expressive power that defies symbolic orderliness: words like “blood, clay, terracotta, carnation.” The words he lists reflect motifs of the archetype of the Great Mother, her bodily cyclicality (blood) and her earthy rootedness (clay) as well as her power of growth and fertility (carnation). He is now accessing Kristeva’s semiotic phase of expression, foregrounding the rhythmic and intuitive language of the mother’s embracing touch. He even significantly considers this a “primitive language,” one that “circles and loops” (467) as it allows him imaginative play in the wild unknown territory of the Great Mother’s psychic realm.
Ultimately, all of Byatt’s chosen modes of expression of the Great Mother: sexuality, garden, and language must fully flourish in Roland’s transformative experience of full integration. In a chapter preceded by Ash’s poem “The Garden of Proserpina” itself rife with mythic imagery of the archetypal feminine, “The garden and the tree/The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold,” Roland eventually returns to his flat in London and finally enters the forbidden garden (503). He heads “up the stone steps, and round the wall, beyond the extent of his confined view” until he finally “stood in the narrow garden under the trees” (514). Here he connects with his own internal understanding of the Great Mother, on his own terms in the place that he has grown beyond. His previous vantage point was “confined” because he lacked union with the maternal aspects of his own unconscious.
Roland is now able to appreciate the garden fully, with its complexities and colors: “some of the trees were still green…They held up their complicated arms, black against the pink haze” (515). He admits to himself that “in his imagination, when he could not get into the garden, it had seemed a large space of breathing leaves and real earth. Now he was out, it seemed smaller, but still mysterious, because of the earth, in which things were growing.” Roland is able to acknowledge, grasp and respect the true nature of the garden, both physically and mythically, now open enough to his unconscious to embrace the mysteries of the archetypal mother in the “growing” earth. He further connects to the natural environment of this garden by recognizing the cats with their “snaking bodies” which shine “glossy in the light” and “velvet black in the dark” (515). The cats, both feline and serpentine, represent symbolic aspects of the archetypal feminine and it is significant that Roland assumes care for these creatures of the garden.
This transformative moment in the once-forbidden garden allows Roland to finally securely embrace his new role as poet. As night falls, “he began to think of words, words that came from some well within him.” This unnameable “well” within him corresponds with the chora, providing words that keep him in touch with his own unconscious with the semiotic and symbolic union allowed by the artistic expression of poetry. The words come to him in “patterns made by a voice he didn’t yet know, but which was his own” (515). Roland is finally accessing the Great Mother buried in his own unconscious that allows for juicy, creative flow. Her symbolism haunts the words as many of the poems he invents take the shape of cats, mirroring his interest and care for the feminine feline garden inhabitants. Neumann writes that the “poetry of the world might be classified according to the archetype it expresses” (53) and here Roland happily expresses Kristeva’s jouissance of the continuum present in the maternal realm of the chora. He is finally self-regenerative, and his renewal is nearly complete as the poems that were not there an hour before now “came like rain and were real” (515-516).
In the final chapter of the book, Roland is able to at last unite sexually with Maud Bailey indicating a complete realization of the oneness possible with a full acceptance of the power of the Great Mother. He takes on the nurturing role: “I’ll take care of you Maud,” and his full embrace of the female physicality takes place with feminine attention and care, with “gentle delays and delicate diversions” but also with an “indirect assault” hinting at masculine aggression. Byatt’s terminology here is notable in that it illustrates Roland’s full integration of the male and female, the maternal and paternal, semiotic and symbolic realms. Finally there are “no boundaries” and the two find joyful fulfillment in their lovemaking. In the morning they are confronted with a particular odor:
a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful (551).

The scholar’s journey of integration ends with this exceptionally vital motif. Neumann notes the transformative nature of the elements of the Great Mother, the “perpetual transformation” and “the humble rotting” as the “seed lengthens into stalk and sprouting leaves” (Great 51). The Great Mother is hard at work here with all her regenerative power of abundance, growth, decay, death, and rebirth. The odor of renewal cannot be ignored, and its hopeful quality lends a spirit of new life to these new lovers. Ultimately, in Byatt’s poignant “Postscript,” the appearance of Maya, the product of Christabel Lamotte and Randolph Ash’s love, adds an evocative scene to that renewing presence of the Great Mother. As Maud’s ancestor, Maya, whose name rings with profound mythic associations as the mother of Buddha and the mother of Hermes the Enlightened One, holds the key to the perseverance of the story. It is through Maya, this dynamic symbol of the Great Mother, that rebirth is possible and the story continues.

Works Consulted

Byatt, A.S. Possession. Vintage International: New York, NY. 1990.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed.
Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press: New York, NY. 1980.

Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” The Kristeva Reader. Columbia University Press:
New York, NY. 1986. 187-213.

Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Pantheon Books,
Bollingen Foundation Inc.: New York, NY. 1955.

Neumann, Erich. The Origins and History of Consciousness. Princeton University Press,
Bollingen Series XLII: Princeton, NJ. 1970.

Walker, Barbara. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. Harper and Row
Publishers: San Francisco, CA. 1983.

paper for my melville class

Heather Beatty
Sweet
Engl. 250A
05/14/08



Eternal Mildness of Joy: Marriage and the Maternal in Moby-Dick


For a vast text that includes notably few women, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick continues to intrigue and frustrate contemporary feminist readers. In recent scholarship, critics have examined Melville and Moby-Dick with varying results regarding its relevance and functioning in current gender analyses. For example, while Elizabeth Renker explores Melville’s personal violently troubled relations with the women of his family, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis argues that some of Melville’s works may be read as “exposure of the exploitation of women” (1). Although Melville ostensibly had a problematic relationship with women and gender in his personal life, Moby-Dick yet appeals to readers, both male and female, in a deeply felt, sympathetic way that suggests an immersion into the traditionally female landscape of emotion in the psyche. The novel is rich with cultural and mythological imagery of the archetypal feminine that interacts with the explicit depictions of a patriarchal, masculine world.
Melville brings together the opposing binary of male and female in a way that evokes Julia Kristeva’s writings on the reintegration of the semiotic and the symbolic, the maternal and paternal realms. I will discuss his invocation of the semiotic, or pre-Oedipal expression of what Kristeva calls the chora or maternal realm, in his numerous descriptions of inscrutable signs such as Queequeg’s tattoos, the corresponding markings on his coffin and the body of the whale. Highlighting the value of the semiotic allows Melville to ultimately emphasize the necessity of masculine reunion with the feminine in order to find redemption. Melville uses the language of union or marriage in Ishmael’s relationship with Queequeg, as traced from their first night together to the “Monkey-rope” chapter to the epilogue in which Ishmael is saved by Queequeg’s strangely expressive coffin life-buoy. Melville repeatedly uses the word “connexion” meaningfully throughout the text, like his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne’s recurrent use of the term “sympathy,” and in the end it is this metaphoric union itself that allows Ishmael to survive to tell the tale.
The theme of unity as exemplified by Ishmael’s survival also plays out in the considerable structure of the text itself. In Moby-Dick, Melville creates a world occupied with dazzling characters, diversity, and interrelations much in the way of the carnivalesque as proposed by Bakhtin and elaborated upon by Kristeva. The carnival world, Kristeva explains, is “essentially dialogical,” that is, it is “composed of distances, relationships, analogies and nonexclusive oppositions” (78). The novel that creates this dialogical discourse and features carnivalesque motifs Kristeva calls “polyphonic,” in its incorporation of many voices and integration of dualities. Understood in this way, a novel that embraces both the semiotic and the symbolic is polyphonic, allowing for a “power of the continuum” where “symbolic relationships and analogy take precedence” (72). Through its repeated use of carnivalesque forms and imagery of “connexion” Moby-Dick takes on the power of “dream logic,” becoming part of Kristeva’s continuum in which a “poetic double” allows for a transgression of social divisions and prohibitions (71).
Moby-Dick’s occurrences of songs, theatrics, daydreams and madness create the carnivalesque scene that sets the stage for a dialogically discursive universe. Melville utilizes many forms Kristeva describes as typical of the carnivalesque such as the inclusion of many genres, a tending toward “the eccentric in language” and discourse on the “ultimate problems of existence” (Krisetva 83). This way the form of the novel itself reveals a reunion of the dualistic realm of the symbolic order. In the carnivalesque style, Moby-Dick uses songs, chants, dreams and humor to impart social messages. For example, Stubb has a dream that “made a wise man of [him]” with mythical imagery and trickster humor (143). Another carnivalesque scene occurs with the sailors’ carousing in the chapter “Midnight, Forecastle,” in which they shout out “Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it,” and “merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip…Split jibs! Tear yourselves!” (189). The festivities end with Pip crying out, “Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crash, crash! there goes the jib-stay” (193). Pip addresses the dangerous power of the mad revelries themselves to upset the stability of norms, just as the novel itself holds an implicit suggestion of transgression with its powerful descriptions of a polyphonic, dialogical otherworld. Herein lies the embedded implication regarding the value of recognizing and respecting the Other. In America in the 1850s, a world where prosperous society functioned on the basis of the violent oppression of natives, slaves and women, Melville’s structure and form here hint at an alternative in which union, or marriage, of the one (white, male) with the Other (dark, female) contains a hope for renewal and redemption.
In order to create a setting for this vital union of opposites, Melville introduces non-linguistic signs of the semiotic. The semiotic mode of expression may be traced back to the bond with the mother, Kristeva asserts, it consists of “an uncertain or indeterminate articulation” (Desire 133) that belongs to “the chora, matrix space, nourishing, unnameable.” (Women’s 472). The maternal aspect of these types of nonverbal expressions is essential: representing important aspects of the pre-Oedipal connection with the mother, they are built out of the unconscious: rhythmic, tonal, and sensual. Semiotic communication takes place in Moby-Dick in the numerous mysterious markings such as Queequeg’s tattoos, Ahab’s scar, the markings on Queequeg’s coffin, and the markings on the whale.
Ishmael’s primary introduction to Queequeg takes place in the gloom of midnight in the dark room at the Spouter Inn that they will be reluctantly cohabitating. Ishmael’s shock: “good heavens! what a sight! Such a face!” is announced upon noting the “stains of some sort or another” on Queequeg’s face and body (23). “Dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares;” these tattoos trouble and frighten Ishmael at first with their inscrutability. He decides that Queequeg must indeed be a cannibal and nearly absconds before realizing that “ignorance is the parent of fear” and giving this “purple rascal” another chance despite being “confounded by the stranger” (24). Contact with Queequeg’s foreign and indecipherable tattoos initiate Ishmael into a personal journey into the unknown, a mysterious territory mythically linked to the expressive quality of the maternal chora. In effect, Melville allows for what Kristeva considers a “resumption of the functioning characteristic of the semiotic chora within the signifying device of language” through the introduction of these mysterious semiotic signs (Reader 103). Ishmael’s eventual respect and appreciation for these tattoos indicates a willingness to return to the rationally inscrutable territory of the semiotic.
Queequeg later uses the markings from his own body as templates for the inscriptions he carves upon his coffin that becomes Ishmael’s life-buoy. The coffin itself is a mythical symbol of the Great Mother according to Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann, who describes “the fundamental symbolic equation of the feminine” as “woman = body = vessel = world” (43). The coffin fits into this formulation of the symbolism of the vessel (which also includes the ship) akin to the mother’s elementary protection. Significantly, Queequeg carves upon this maternal symbol with “all manner of grotesque figures and drawings” copying the “twisted tattooing on his body” (524). He reinscribes the semiotic figures of his own body, which
had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. (524)

The body, in Neumann’s configuration, contains “the whole scope of the basic feminine functions” (43) and Queequeg’s body with its mysterious markings that contain a “complete theory of the heavens and the earth” reflects the life-giving functions of the mystic feminine sphere. His body, then, taps into the psychological reality “whose fateful power is still alive in the psychic depths of present-day man,” (Neumann 43) a journey into the unconscious realm of the archetypal feminine. The semiotic quality of these mysterious coffin markings, not even comprehensible to Queequeg himself, mirrors poetic language, which Kristeva says, “awakens our attention to this undecidable character of any so-called natural language, a feature that univocal, rational, scientific discourse tends to hide” (Desire 135). In the end of the story, it is this coffin of course, rich with mythic connotations and carrying a secret language of the maternal semiotic, that saves Ishmael.
Even Ahab, the story’s most patriarchal and dominant character, is inscribed with a mysterious mark that may be read as a semiotic figure. Ahab’s “slender, rod-like mark” that goes “threading its way…down one side of his tawny scorched face” is “lividly whitish” (134). This scar, almost alive with angry energy, hints at unknown forces of rage and emotion that exist in the unconscious self. Ishmael likens the scar to “that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it” leaving the tree “branded” (134). Ishmael’s description of the scar links Ahab to the mythological world of Zeus; the scar represents the natural world’s mysterious caprices, whether encountered in the form of sudden lightning or a battle with a great whale. This reading also suggests the all-encompassing power of Neumann’s elemental Great Mother who contains devouring and destructive powers as well as nurturing and transforming. Whether inscrutable etchings of the semiotic mode appear benevolent or threatening, they are always interpreted as fraught with meaning that evades verbal human logic, linking back to the realm of the chora that lacks the cohesive structure of the symbolic order, rational and prohibitive.
Melville, through Ishmael’s observant voice, describes another type of semiotic marking with great detail: the etchings on the skin of the great whale. One of the “many marvels he presents,” the whale’s skin or “blanket” is marked by “numberless straight marks in thick array…like those in the finest Italian line engravings” (333). He is quick to remark as well that these engravings “to the quick, observant eye…afford the ground for far other delineations” (333). Ishmael acknowledges that many possibilities exist for interpretation, and that the markings suggest the effects of the unknown secrets of the deep sea. So great mysteries are present here, unknowable and haunting, in the semiotic riddle of the whale’s “hieroglyphical” marks. Ishmael’s attention to these marks once again speaks to a tendency toward the speechless territory of the chora. He compares the whale’s markings to “old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi” and emphasizes that, like “those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable” (333). He places the whale’s markings in league with other great secret messages from an ancient mystical culture so that the whale, too, acts as an emissary from the deep unconscious inscripted by this semiotic secret code.
In the same chapter, Ishmael goes on to rhapsodize about the “cosy blanketing” of the whale’s body which provides a homey sort of comfort that keeps the whale alive in Arctic waters. Ishmael declares to humankind: “admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice” (334). He seems to promote here a soothing sense domesticity within the self, a sense of built-in home and self that comes from “a temperature of thine own,” almost alluding to a soul (334). Following so quickly on the heels of the description of the whale’s semiotic signature, Ishmael seems to see the whale as a kind of mother-figure representing a positive metaphoric union of the maternal and paternal which holds the power for an ultimate sense of fulfilled self. Wilma Garcia claims that “the leviathan that embodies the enormity of non-human, inhuman creation—the great white whale is, like God the Father, a solitary male” (90). And yet, the whale seems virtually sexless, an enigmatic presence throughout the novel, often figuring into the story with maternal imagery.
For example, when Tashtego falls into the severed head of the giant whale as it descends into the ocean, Queequeg must “deliver” him, “thrusting in for him,” and finding him breach:
a leg was presented; but well knowing that was not as it ought to be and might occasion great trouble; --he had thrust back the leg, and…had wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way—head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected. (376)

The gentle humor of this passage lies in the fact that the language reflects precisely the style of obstetric reports of the 19th century, and Ishmael even ascribes Queequeg with “great skill in obstetrics” and asserts that “midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing” (376). The whale’s head here has taken on a completely maternal aspect, “doing as well as could be expected” after her harrowing delivery of a full-grown man. The language of childbirth and obstetrics serves to put readers in mind of the vital life and death processes engaged in by women similar to the whaling journey itself, and Melville’s sentence about the importance of “midwifery” among other male-dominated sports gives a nod of acknowledgement, albeit a bit derisive, to this most maternal of discourses.
Although Garcia does not attribute femininity to the whale, she does argue that the childbirth scene figures in to the development of Queequeg as what Leslie Fieldler, in Love and Death in the American Novel calls Ishmael’s “dark angel” (98). Both Garcia and Fiedler agree that the union of Ishmael and Queequeg provides symbolic and redemptive power upon which the narrative ultimately depends. In fact Fiedler asserts that Moby-Dick can actually be read “as a love story, perhaps the greatest love story in our fiction, cast in the peculiar form of innocent homosexuality” (372). For my purposes, the union of Ishmael and Queequeg does indeed read as a love story, one that brings together opposing systems of thought and being, the semiotic and symbolic modes, in a coalition that may be encompassed by the “plural, fluid” dynamism of Kristeva’s cosmic maternal continuum (Women’s 475). In Fiedler’s argument, “the male hierogamos [is] inter-racial as well as homoerotic” (366), so that the union takes place between a subject and the Other with sociological impact, a vital integration in Kristeva’s vision.
Fiedler has written on the implications and importance of Ishmael’s immediate recognition of his budding relationship with Queequeg as a marriage. Immediately upon waking up the first morning after they have been bedfellows, Ishmael describes “Queequeg’s arms thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner” and directly states, “You had almost thought I had been his wife” (28). His early acknowledgment of the relationship as a marriage, what Fiedler calls “an indissoluble union” reveals Ishmael’s growing trust in the implicit opening and offering of himself to the Other.
Immediately after this wifely recognition, while snuggled in Queequeg’s arms, Ishmael goes on to remember a disturbing childhood trauma, a punishment at the hands of his stepmother. Fiedler posits this as the recovery of an old ache that the marriage will now be able to help solve, beginning Ishmael’s “sentimental re-education” and freeing him “for a reconciliation with the tabooed mother” which, ironically “he will not know until the book’s end” (375). For now, the entire memory takes place as Ishmael attempts to reconcile himself to the “strangeness” of “waking up and seeing Queequeg’s arm thrown round me” with its “bridegroom grasp” (29-30). This particular expression of his wonder at the circumstances reveals the underlying importance of this new vital relationship to Ishmael’s unconscious and his renewing experience of maternal love. In fact it is later the same day that Ishmael feels, “a melting in me” as he and Queequeg become bosom friends: “wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him” (57). Now melted together, they smoke together ritualistically and then Queequeg proclaims their marriage: “ he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me around the waist, and said that henceforth we were married” (57). Completing this unusual marriage ceremony, they go to bed together “in our hearts’ honeymoon…a cosy, loving pair” (58). It is their very togetherness, their marriage, which will ultimately allow for a redeeming sense of integration and wholeness.
Fiedler has also written extensively on the ”Monkey-Rope” chapter, in which Ishmael and Queequeg intensify their marriage relationship. Interestingly, as Fiedler points out, this is the only instance in the entire novel that Melville apparently “makes a deliberate change in the facts of whaling procedure” (376). It is obviously a crucial point, then, that Melville desires to illuminate in his descriptions of Ishmael and Queequeg’s tying-together in Melville’s ever-important “connexion,” by the monkey-rope, each one relying on the other in a reciprocal trusting arrangement. Here Ishmael returns to the language of marriage: “for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded” (349). Ishmael’s contemplations celebrate this predicament, in fact “so strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that…I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two” (349). It is here in his role as spouse and friend that Ishmael proclaims one of the novel’s most poignant lessons: that every “mortal that breathes” is caught up in “a plurality of other mortals” (349). Ishmael’s words here remind us of the polyphonic novel, the many voices of the topsy-turvy world of the carnivalesque that allow for change and growth through shared ordeal. It is Ishmael’s poetic ramblings about the circumstance of dependence and love that allows it to shine here in print. Ishmael’s ramblings, of course, which would not have been possible, had not the ship sunk and Queequeg’s inscrutable coffin sprung up to save Ishmael’s life. The semiotic prevails on multiple levels.
It is a subject that becomes more and more important to our narrator Ishmael and the chapter entitled “The Line” offers another look at a symbol both semiotic and uniting, yet patriarchal and exploitive. The whale-line itself: “magical, sometimes horrible” has the capacity to create a terrible linkage of whale and ship that reads like another, darker, wedding ceremony. “You would not think it so strong as it really is” Ishmael assures readers, hinting at that indissoluble bond of marriage yet again (303). He describes the line-tub as “a prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales,” linking love and death in this terrible hunting marriage ceremony that is consecrated by the whale-line. Ishmael sees the line, with its “complicated coils” and its “perilous contortions” as the bond between the nature and industry, whale and ship. He later describes the ship and whale as “yoked together like colossal bullocks” but of course one is still in motion and the other has been hunted and killed. The line serves as a powerful image of the dualistic nature inherent even in marriage itself, the power of love to destroy as well as to create. The bond created here is one of power and death, and its mirror image, the umbilical cord, a line of love and nurturing, comes in a later chapter.
“The Grand Armada” chapter, in its vivid depictions of mother whales and nursing offspring, provides the essential image of the umbilical cord as a foil for the whale-line and shows Ishmael’s cresting awareness of this semiotic space with its inherent value and power. Garcia explores this chapter in relation to Ishmael, Starbuck, and Queequeg’s reverence in the domain of these literal great mothers. She writes that “the men in Starbuck’s boat alone are granted a glimpse of nature at her most benign…and only Ishmael seems to understand fully the significance of the images of fertility and sexual union” (99-100). Garcia suggests that Ishmael retains some hold on femininity that allows him to be saved in the end. In my Kristevan reading it is not so much his personal feminine aspect but an ability to integrate life and nature’s duality in a way in line with the poetic continuum of semiotic and symbolic, that enables and even requires his ultimate survival so that he may enact this integration through the writing of the novel.
This access of the semiotic climaxes in this scene with the maternal and nursing whales of the deep. Naturally, it is poetic Ishmael who takes special notice of “another and still stranger world” far below the surface, “suspended in those watery vaults” (423). It is Ishmael who describes the umbilical cord with its “long coils” as a “natural line, with the maternal end loose” (424), making the connection between the two opposing realms of domesticity and industry, maternal and paternal. This natural line becomes “entangled in the hempen one,” trapping the whale cub and introducing human destruction into the peaceful scene, just as another whale, wounded by the harpoon line, bursts in on the scene of “bridal-chambers and nurseries” and they vanish in the wake of fear and destruction (426). The sweet scene is vulnerable to penetration by violence, and yet Ishmael portrays it carefully as having the power to provide a place “deep down and deep inland” of the “eternal mildness of joy” (425). He is able to see human possibilities in this primal scene: the nursing babies and peaceful mothers of the deep show moving characteristics of nurturing and tenderness with power to stir the most masculine and toughened of hearts: the entire boat of seamen “thus lay entranced” (425).
This scene, which Fiedler asserts “constitutes Ishmael’s real descent into the whale,” carries Ishmael’s secret key for survival and renewal (382). Ultimately it is the recognition of the power of the chora: the nurturing, regenerative love present in the “dalliance and delight” of these families of whales, that shows the power of love and “connexion.” Ishmael takes a heart lesson from these whales that reinforces his “Holy Marriage” with Queequeg and all the non-verbal semiotic expressions he has encountered throughout the novel (Fiedler 280). Not Garcia’s “image of Ishmael as the bride who survives the doomed quest” (100) but Ishmael’s unconscious recognition and incorporation of the maternal into his own worldview as a budding poet, renders his survival necessary for the survival of the tale and the regeneration of humanity. This view is more aligned with Fiedler’s argument that the “coffin-lifebuoy” and the “plunge which eventuates in a resurrection” repeats the “holy marriage with Queequeg” who represents “the watery area of the world” (381). Thus it is Ishmael’s union with Queequeg, the Other, symbolized by his coffin covered in semiotic tattoos of eloquent mysteriousness, that eventually saves him: “Buoyed up by the coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft, dirge-like main” (625). Ishmael’s explanation to his readers in the Epilogue, using terminology like “buoyed up,” conveys that his spiritual marriage with Queequeg has ultimately been his savior.
Just as Kristeva urges a convergence of the semiotic and the symbolic, the psychological realms of the maternal and paternal, in the end it is “connexion” that redeems in Melville’s Moby-Dick. In order to fully apprehend the impact of the text we must leave Melville’s personal life and his troubled relationship with his wife aside and examine the words and evocations of the novel itself. We are left with Ishmael’s voice, the hopeful voice of a poet, saved from the great wreckage of the Pequod by his “love-union with the dark savage” which Fiedler goes on to suggest “signifies a life-giving immersion in nature or the id, a death and rebirth” (381). Fiedler’s mythical terms here are central to this kind of understanding of Moby-Dick as a socially fraught narrative with lasting historical impact.
To respect and celebrate the Other, to find one’s place in the continuum of dualities, to “strike through the mask” as Ahab so desperately desires (178), this is the role of the Carnivalesque, the role of poetry, the role of the semiotic and ultimately, the role of “connexion.” “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?” Ahab demands (178), a sentiment that Melville no doubt admires, but with a different wall in mind and within a different scope than Ahab’s mad revenge scheme. Melville’s wall is that of dominant structural society, those binds that trap humankind into unthinking acceptance of norms. The carnivalesque form of this novel with its polyphonic voices and semiotic expressions, presents a microcosmic world that emerges from the capitalism, greed, and corruption of the imperialistic patriarchal Western world and is finally able to send one emissary back who has struck through. Ishmael has experienced “that inscrutable thing” that Ahab hates, and found love and connection instead (178). He has integrated the semiotic into the symbolic order through his use of poetic language as a means to tell the story. Herein lies redemption.

Works Consulted

Avallone, Charlene. “What American Renaissance? The Gendered Genealogy of a
Critical Discourse.” PMLA 112:5, 1997. 1102-1120.

Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imgaination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press: Austin, TX. 1981.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. Revised Edition. Stein and Day
Publishers: New York, NY. 1966.

Garcia, Wilma. Mothers and Others: Myths of the Female in the Works of Melville,
Twain, and Hemingway. Peter Lang: New York, NY. 1984.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press: New York, NY. 1980.

-- The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. Columbia University Press: New York,
NY. 1986.

-- “Women’s Time.” Critical Theory Since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy
Searle. University Presses of Florida: Tallahassee, FL. 1986.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale. Penguin Books: New York, NY. 1992.

Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Trans. Ralph
Manheim. Bollingen Series XLVII. Pantheon Books: New York, NY. 1955.

Petrulionis, Sandra Harbert. “Re-reading ‘Bachelors and Maids’: Melville as Feminist?”
Melville Society Extracts 110:1, 1997.

Renker, Elizabeth. “Herman Melville, Wife Beating and the Written Page.” American
Literautre 66:1, 1994. 123-150.

Taylor, Mark Lloyd. “Ishmael’s (m)Other: Gender, Jesus, and God in Melville’s Moby
Dick.” Journal of Religion 72:3, 1992. 325-350.

paper for my postmodern class

Heather Beatty
Grandbois
Postmodern Fiction
05/19/08

Secretary of the Invisible: Embodying the Other in Postmodern Fiction
Or, Juntos

“Stories and myths are the connective tissue between culture and nature, between self and other, between life and death that sew the worlds together in their telling. And in the protective and connective body of the story the soul quickens. It comes alive.”
– Joan Halifax

Fear
I am awake in the dark heat of the night and I can hear the far off roar of machinery. There is a sense of pressure from the black air around me, from the quiet and persistent stirrings of my tribe, my Junto. Our bodies, sticky with sweat, brush against each other. Ada, my friend and comadre, hovers close and I know the diminutive shape of her bony back, her small head and perfectly curved nostrils as she breathes, carefully, discerningly. We move together toward the surrounding blackness, the mud the only cool under our feet in the close-crushing night air. The flies, omnipresent, still drone and hover, even in the dark, and I flick them away with my tail, wondering momentarily whether they are self-willed or simply fill the dark night with their incessant buzzing, mindless and monotonous. Ada and I move to the outside of the Junto as the tension grows. We are on the outskirts to the eastside of the flat, not far from the Boundary wall. We both move further east instinctively, sensing the threat of that sound, which grows louder, frightening and black and menacing. Where is my daughter? Corra is swift and as I think her, she comes to me, greeting me with her nuzzle to my cheek. We are together, I think, and my sigh rises in the dark. I know something is wrong when I hear Yerba, our matriarch, communicating softly through the sticky air. Her message tells us not to panic, to stand still, to stay close, but I sense that behind the message is the unknown, a dull nameless fear.

Postmodernism and Embodiment
To attempt to embody the Other, to imaginatively access foreign territory, J.M. Coetzee’s title character in his novel Elizabeth Costello explains when questioned about her beliefs, is the job of the writer. She considers herself a “secretary of the invisible” who records “all voices…as long as they speak the truth” (203-204). Deeply concerned with the invisible voices of the Other, with those whose voices are not readily accessible to prevailing human reason, Elizabeth Costello grapples with her role as the secretary from an ethical perspective. She asserts the reality of the experience of the Other, whether fictionalized or mythologized or tangible: “the ram is not just an idea, the ram is alive though now it is dying,” believing in it and “its blood too, this sacred liquid, sticky, dark, almost black” (211). And yet, as a scholar, she presents her ideas in cold terms of academic remove. Although she argues with herself that “Paul West was only doing his writerly duty” by “opening her eyes to human depravity in another of its manifold forms” she cannot accept the violent experience of reading Paul West’s The Very Rich Hours of Count Von Stauffenberg (178). She cannot fully reconcile herself with her own body and its reactions and expectations, and perhaps this is why we never see her actually attempting to encapsulate the voice of an animal.
Although she fails to take on the embodiment of a non-human animal voice, in the two chapters on “The Rights of Animals” Elizabeth Costello makes important arguments regarding the human misconception that animals have no thought-reason and therefore may be exploited. The fallacy, she argues, is that humans use human reason to come to this conclusion and to measure the animals’ reactions and behaviors. “Their whole being is in the living flesh,” she explains in order to convince a group of scholarly skeptics of the need to put oneself in the place of an animal. This empathy goes beyond imaginative speculation and must be enacted by embodiment of the animal, or the Other. She explains further: “If I do not convince you, that is because my words, here, lack the power to bring home to you the wholeness, the unabstracted, unintellectual nature, of that animal being” (111). Here she hints at the central postmodern dilemma of human experience and language. If we have come to the point at which our language may be deconstructed to be shown as an immense series of constructions, then all is part of a simulacrum that begins, as Baudrillard comments, “with a liquidation of all referentials” (343). In this case, we are moving toward what Baudrillard calls “an explosion towards the center, or an implosion” which he further describes as “a reversion of energies towards a minimal threshold” as opposed to the further distancing concentric cycles of simulation in the modern world (373). In Baudrillard’s vision, the real in the postmodern world becomes not only distant but unnecessary and inaccessible until the point that all the posturing is undone and results in some catastrophic reversal.
Is that unavoidable distancing what writers like Elizabeth Costello contribute to when they attempt to give voice to the Other? She herself seems to agree with the inherent danger of the predicament of language in a postmodern world, realizing that actual embodiment, a state of “fullness of being” is a far cry from the words used to attempt to explain it. Her ambivalence about language and literature lead to her eventual stasis in the between-world of the Gate, not able to move on after her death.
This dilemma suggests a fairly pessimistic view of literature’s possible role in Baudrillard’s vision of the future. His overall view is undoubtedly a bleak one, in which our globalized culture spins out of control toward a “culminating point of available energy and the maximization of systems controlling all energy” which grow “as fast as (and undoubtedly even faster than) liberating potentialities” (373). There is little to no hope in this equation. In his vision, all aspects of culture contribute to a negative “system of signs” (343) that end up replacing the real; this includes politics, science, sex, work, television, Disneyland, robberies, DNA: nothing seems to escape. Even his own discourse, the “critical mode, the analytic mode” comes into question as he cites the “vanishing point [which] is the horizon between reality and meaning” (365). However, in all his questioning of reality and meaning he avoids discussion of art as a meaningful cultural category. He does briefly mention Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty,” which he asserts was “still an attempt at a dramaturgy of life” that was the “last flickering of an ideal of the body, blood, and violence in a system already sweeping towards a reabsorption of all the stakes without a trace of blood” (372). In other words, he gives credit to Artaud for his moving recreation of cruelty because at least it attempts to reflect a basic reality rather than retreating into nostalgia. But he fails to recognize the ability of other art forms, such as literature, to attempt a similar re-creative effect.
Can postmodern literature attempt to reveal the real and participate in a meaningful human endeavor? Perhaps more importantly, should it? John Barth offers a different vision of what postmodern fiction can do, a postmodern ideal that could embrace a novel like Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Barth proposes that a postmodern novel should “rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and ‘contentism,’ pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction,” synthesizing these apparent opposing forces (203). In other words, Barth’s ideal postmodern novel bridges the gap between the pre-moderns who “carry the torch of romanticism” and the moderns with their “difficulty of access” (201-202). A story like Elizabeth Costello’s which attempts to place ethical questions set in scholarly discourse within a greater story of an elderly woman facing death, uses both realism and experimental form to address a wider audience and bring up serious issues. The novel itself an invention, arguably a part of Baurdrillard’s simulacrum, manages to ostensibly puncture that mask of simulation by presenting an unflinching account of an academic’s evaluation of the nature of the power dynamics of the world around us, with all its implicit violence, blood and cruelty.

Movement
The sharp roaring, clanking and grinding, like some mechanical banshee in the night grows louder, familiar yet frightening, blacker than the moonless night and closer. Somewhere in the vastness of the western hills I hear vampire bats, their faint frenzies. An owl cries directly above us, a warning, and for a moment I am with it in the sky, swooping high where a cloudless breeze flits through, overlooking all of us, hundreds of us crowded together in the sweltering night. Through her ancient eyes, I see us: Ada with her dreamy eyes, endless stories and ocean soul, despite her bony sides and her heaving heart. My daughter Corra with her lively gait and bounding energy, her ups and downs, now terrified beside me. Yerba, our patient and wise matriarch, who loves the mud, the sky, the beetles, the flies, all of it, acquiescent and serene, dedicated to our Junto. The sound of machinery stops abruptly now and we hear the voices of men. So faraway at first they sound gentle. A crashing slam, metallic grinding, tumult. Sounds so unlike our skin, our eyes, our whispers in the dark. The sounds of humans, or as we call them, Otros, are always grating and bitter, explosive to our ears.

We try to shut our ears. Our hearts are in our bellies. Somewhere near me I recognize the black circularly painted skin as that of old Letro, my amigo with the Sick-eye. He bends to eat from a weedy patch and I know he is simply trying to will the noises away. He came long ago from the Bad place (I have heard the Otros call it the stockyards). Watching him chew, I gulp deeply of the air: I want to eat, I want to sleep, I want to lie right down here in the mud and close my eyes but I cannot. Along with the dirt and heat and bugs, I know the earth has offered me goodness in my life, and I am alive, my belly rumbling, my heart trembling, my grown daughter beside me, my legs strong, my poor heart breaking. Too many stories have circulated, and we don’t want to know, and yet we know.

Moments pass as the voices grow closer, abrasive now. “Andale bitches,” we hear as a small man, eyes flashing in the dark, approaches us. More men appear opposite him and their language is harsh and rapid-fire, rising to unbearable pitches as they surround us. I am pushed toward the center of our group, away from Ada, my spirited little friend, but still beside Corra who is worried, asking me with her insistent voice, what is happening, Mother, where we are going? I have been transported before, and I dread my own false comfortings. Oh my dear, it is not far, stay beside me, and if we see a way, we shall run. All around us the voices of confused and frightened friends. Some of the younger ones just waking out of sleep, crying in the night like yearlings, seeking out their mothers. We revert to infancy in our fear, pissing down our legs, bellowing to the sky, that wise impassive sky. Now that we are on the move, jostled and crowded, I can see Letro vomiting as he tries to keep moving, the old Sick-eye bulging, his face a contorted disaster. My heart cries for him, for his intelligent mind and gentle heart, his resilience as he keeps moving. I call his name, my voice catching with sorrow. He turns his head, answers me, Don’t worry, Alma, my dear friend, I will be alright. Why are we all so damn hopeful, I wonder briefly, but the thought is buried in fear, hungry and alive.
We have come to the truck, a monstrosity in the black field’s night, foreboding and vicious. We are being prodded up a rickety metal ramp, one by one, two hundred of my friends and family, I can hear the awful words of the men and the awful sounds of electricity as some of my more resistant friends are jolted with the prod. Their voices rise in deep alarm and fade to stunned silence. Our Junto, so small on the earth, now seems massive, pressing, flurried. The men push us, and some of us are mild, moving cautiously with obeisance; others are wild, eyes searching frantically, pawing and stamping obstinately. Ada, my companion, my bosom friend, I see her! She is a little in front of me and she is furious; her temper has flared; she is near her young son she fought to hold onto last year when they came for branding; the men are menacing as she tosses her head, protective and fierce as possible for a small bony lady. Defiant. My eyes shine. She is so just, so determined. Then her body shakes with the sudden jarring of the prod, and she is jerked along, and her body trembles with agony, and her son moves gloomily behind her. The belly of the truck gapes, empty and black, and we enter one by one, spilling into that unfathomable deep. For a moment I am disconcerted, on slippery ground, calling out again, Corra! Corra! Ada! Where are you?!! until I feel I’ve lost control, and there is a sinking longing in me, and they come to me as I feel it. We huddle, crowded by those we know by feel and smell and sound. We communicate constantly; I can hear Yerba’s voice not far from me: Friends, Sisters, Brothers, we are together, at least we are together, my friends…oh my dear ones…I have heard stories…I am sorry my dear Junto…this may be the end, yes, this may really be the end…but we are together and we shall go in peace and dignity. Remember our role, to be solid and to hold our secret sermons in the heart-bellies of our souls…Remember my friends…we know who we are. There is some weeping now, but many of us attempt to remain calm as Yerba suggests, comforting those around us and gazing upon each other with peaceful understanding. It is true, what she says, we are together.

As we drive away, it is like the sound of sky giants sobbing.

Abjection
Perhaps, in order to disrupt the simulacra of postmodern existence and to further question our basic assumptions, one duty of the postmodern novel is to address the abject, the marginalized and repressed with which Julia Kristeva attributes the power to subvert society’s most oppressive norms. In our society, our most abject and ignored victims are arguably non-human animals, forced to live in hideous conditions until the day of their violent deaths. Kristeva links death and defilement with the “corpse, the most sickening of wastes, as “border that has encroached upon everything” (3). This border then becomes vital for understanding oneself in turn; we are life turning away from that border. “How can I be without border,” Kristeva asks, just as we human beings know we cannot be without death or corpse. The boundary of the corpse infects life and shows up as an uncanny reminder of the “real threat…engulfing us” (4). This we fear; this we avoid; this we abhor. And yet, most human beings imbibe meat, or in more realistic terms, animal corpses. To address the abject then, according to Kristeva, as part of ourselves, that part which we loathe to apprehend, is to “disturb identity, system, order” (4). She writes that once we come to grips with our fear, “discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject” (6). This introduction to abjection places a special role on the writer, similar to Elizabeth Costello’s self-appointed role that she struggles with, to expose and explore the abject.
Elizabeth Costello addresses the abject in her discussions on body and pain, shame and horror, in essence “the being of the other” (78). In her advocations, she identifies openly with those subjects oppressed, exploited, abandoned, stripped by contemporary society. “Open your heart, and listen to what your heart says,” she admonishes in answer to a question about animal rights activism. Ultimately she wants to trust the human heart to lead to right action. But it is words that shatter illusions. Note the unsavory reaction to her answer when questioned about her vegetarianism. After her retort that “I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death wounds,” her son, John, observes that “Plutarch is a real conversation-stopper: it is the word juices that does it. Producing Plutarch is like throwing down a gauntlet” (83). It is the word “juices” along with words like “corpse” and “hacked flesh” that jar her audience. We describe the undesirable with the language of the abject; John points out the power of the word to produce effects upon the audience.
But language must have power beyond shock value in our current society where the media throws around words like “carnage” and “terrorism” to instill fear and self-containment. Literary language must create a bridge between the signified and the signifier, to introduce shared experience and empathy. Literature of embodiment, using words that capture the sheer primal experience, opens doors into strange realities, going beyond Baudrillard’s hyperreal by accessing other-reals. It is this power that postmodern fiction should attempt to capture and utilize, in order to both get behind the veil of simulacra and to cross the bridge between realism and modernism, appeasing both Baudrillard and Barth.
Our earlier question about the power of literature may be answered, then. Stories, admittedly re-creating reality, or simulacra in Baudrillard’s view, still hold power. As long as that story contains motivation for change, it is viable and valuable in the postmodern world. Although Baudrillard writes that “even inverted, the fable is useless,” we find that stories with postmodern concerns and agendas are not useless at all and in fact are linked to the “visible continuum” that “we need” (343, 350). To enact social change, writers must utilize writerly tools: language, vocabulary, narrative, characterization, epiphany. We must put into words exactly that which troubles and haunts current society, that underlying abject fear and repulsion that moves beneath. To use Baudrillard’s terms, we must provide a “panic-stricken production of the real,” using “real writing of cruelty” to enact change within our current social context (347, 372). We may not have access to the atom bomb or Watergate or Disneyland, but we encounter and support systems of exploitation and power on a daily basis. These we have the power to expose and challenge.
On the other hand, we have Barth’s program for literary upheaval. He suggests that “artistic conventions are liable to be retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate new and lively work” (205). Indeed, in order to create renewable, sustaining literature for the future, our subject matter and our discourse must address the dynamic needs of a changing world. Our language must hold the power to overcome past prohibitions and move beyond social boundaries and norms into new territory. The aggressive literary defense of animals is yet one of these uncharted territories, one that Elizabeth Costello moves toward but never fully into.

The Chute
Much time passes as we roar through the land in the belly of this beast, pressed together and sobbing and talking and singing and hoping, always hoping. Then, it must be hours later, suddenly everything happens so fast. We feel ourselves slowing, we can feel the truck stopping, then going, then stopping and going again. At the last stop we wait, looking around at each other with questioning eyes; there is a moment of silence. And then, the grinding and grashing of the metal door sliding up, a sound that we shrink from. Pressed against each other into the aluminum walls and each other’s sweat and tears and piss, we cower. We gradually know that we are alone, abandoned by our sweet songs of hope and redemption, that we have no power, that no one will come to us and rescue us and guide us to safety where the earth grows green and rich for us.

We move out of the truck, wretchedly grateful, gulping the air of the morning; the sun is already blisteringly hot. It takes only a fragment of a moment to smell the death in the air and to see it in the vacant faces of los Otros milling about, doing their duty, doing their job, whatever it is they call it as they prod us toward brutal ends. Immediately madness ensues as we are ushered into the chute, a crowd of us bellowing and struggling. I stay close to Corra, who stamps apprehensively, and Ada, whose eyes are rolling from exhaustion and thirst. Yerba is one of the first through the chute. Ada stumbles and trips down the ramp and they prod her again. Her thin frame shakes violently and she is bleeding. She turns her head and calls for me. Single file, she cannot see me. I respond, I am here, my dear friend, I am right behind you, we are together. We move forward; the ground moves electronically beneath our feet. I had not expected this and I slip forward and lurch to catch myself. In a horrifying moment, I can see irritated men to the right of me, to the left of me. Suddenly I feel the arresting jolt of the prod, that petrifying and arresting grip vexing through my body; I can feel my blood shiver! I can feel my nerves twitch! It is a horrifying thing to try to explain and I do it no justice. My body quivers for moments after and I am surprised to be alive, electricity still in my bones. My blood that is cleansing, my blood that rushes; my blood means life. To fill my body with electricity means to substitute my blood with something false for a moment. My mind and heart reel. How in the name of earth’s holiness can they do this? I watch Ada carefully, calling out to her, please be good, don’t move abruptly. I don’t want them to shoot you with electricity, my friend. Be cautious. Move for them.

We are on some kind of track. We cannot veer side to side. I can see my friends. I know them all, their names, their habits, their likes and dislikes, their questions, their theories, their loves. My friend Letro, whom I have known this past difficult and dry and sickly year, whom I have slept next to and nuzzled and administered to in his need, is fighting. I see them attach some cold steel contraption to his sickly swollen head so he cannot see them or us. They try to pacify him, their words are dispassionate and all wrong: “C’mon you old fucker, get a move on, nothing’s gonna stop for you; fuckin getalong ol doggy, jesus christ you motherfucker, MOVE, stop your fucking whining.” Letro plods along in spurts of disjointed movement, disconsolate and removed, quieter now. I sense him away in some created world inside his mind, apart. I mourn the loss of my friend. The rubber belt beneath our hooves moves one, slowly. My daughter is behind me and I beg her to acquiesce, to go quietly. Her tremulous voice fills the thick air. I close my eyes briefly against the agitating light, the glint of the cold steel walls, the sight of Ada’s rump before me, the strange movement under our feet, and the smell of death everywhere, blood and excrement and flooding emotion. If only none of this were real, if only it were some great simulacrum, a trick played by the hand of an angry god, a trick played by fate or art or science or nonsense. I open my eyes and all I can see is blood, shit, power, madness, fear.



Literature and Change
In order for literature to maintain cultural viability in a postmodern world it must challenge systems of power so that readers may imaginatively engage and, to borrow Kristeva’s term, “ceaselessly confront otherness” (6). At its best, postmodern literature with all its imaginative experimentation, should give creative voice to the Other, in a sense giving abjection a living, breathing body. This embodiment, albeit fictional and thus still within Baudrillard’s system of representational simulacra, has the power to implicate readers. Reviewing Céline’s work on the horrors of war, Kristeva writes that:
Through his scription he causes it to exist and although he comes far short of clearing it up, he throws over it the lacework of his text: a frail netting that is also a latticework, which, without protecting us from anything whatsoever, imprints itself within us, implicating us fully. (156, emphasis mine)

It is important that the literature not attempt to “protect” readers from repulsive horrors, as the experience of abjection requires a visceral sympathy to attain an understanding. Elizabeth Costello’s personal reservations and revulsions that turn her away from West’s violent novel should ultimately be replaced by a wiser understanding of his literary latticework. As horrifying as they may be, even the criminal acts of the abject may shed light on social systems of power and exploitation. Even these most difficult of readings have the power of implication, challenging readers to courageous consideration.
As Doug Rice warns his literature students, “Reading is dangerous if you are reading well and experiencing. It becomes part of who you are.” Costello’s weakness is that she knows this and is frightened by the implications of absorbing what she reads into her own self. When speaking about the Holocaust, Costello explains that “the horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else” (79). She acknowledges here that human beings, as interpreters of the world around them, have the power to imaginatively embody the Other and, if necessary, to come to a new and fuller understanding of the powers at work. And yet she refrains from doing the dirty work; she criticizes West’s book, calling it “evil,” and she fails to give voice to the ultimate Other, whom she claims to advocate, the non-human animal.
As the ultimate emblems of the abject, the bottom of the hierarchical totem pole of sentient beings, animals are desperately in need of representation, especially as they figure in to the human schema of greed, industry, and consumption. Current practices of factory farming enact excessive wastefulness, degradation, terror and cruelty on a daily basis. Elizabeth Costello urges readers to “walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner” (111). She knows the power of experiential reading all too well; she knows the obscenity and evil lurking in human behavior. Her philosophies on physical otherness remind her audience that to embody another is to understand by “immersing ourselves and our intelligence in complexity” (108). This ability to immerse ourselves in the complexity of otherness, to embody identities of the abject, outside our scope of reason and our version of intellect is a direct reflection of the best possibilities of humanness.
There is an ecological vision implicit in this postmodern vision in which our stories weave together the secrets of the earth’s survival. In her insightful text The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth, Joan Halifax discusses the value of the story in the healing of the earth and its peoples. She writes that even though “we have wounded the world,” our stories and myths “remind us to turn toward creation, toward our extended selves” (124). She asserts that our imaginative engagement with others will lead us to more productive and restorative action. Like Coetzee, as spoken through Elizabeth Costello who uses her role as writer to fight against cultural arrogance and exploitation, Halifax envisions a hopeful future in which our literature, our stories, have the power to reconnect us with the earth and each other, reviving and redeeming us. This kind of literature builds a bridge, as Barth suggests, between realism and modernism, engagement and experiment, with the potential to inspire active change. Also, in Baudrillard’s view, this literature has the power to build a bridge between the real and the simulation as it encourages acknowledgement and accountability in the contemporary dynamics of a changing world. Conscientious readers will no longer be able to apathetically ignore the oppression inherent in dominant power systems. The stories will become part of readers’ identities, then part of the cultural fabric, and finally part of an ever-growing latticework of possibilities.

Slaughter
The sun is gone. We are inside a building, dank and depraved, the smell of death close and pungent. The Otros think that we are subdued at the end of the line, at the time of stunning, at the time of insensibility. In fact, our desperation hits us much earlier, our souls and minds sinking into the numbing anesthesia of fear and repulsion. We are no longer ourselves. Everything in me wants to turn around. The process is not slow, not fast: steady, monotonous, full of revolting noises of pain and woe. In front of me, Ada finally collapses after multiple proddings. Her blood pours upon the passageway and I stop behind her, gently comforting her again and again, oh Ada, my sweet friend, please get up, I don’t know where they’ll take you…O, friend, how I have loved thee…until they come with a great steel-pronged machine, pitchfork-strong, to poke at her poor heaving crumple of bones and then to finally lift her and move her out of the way. Our eyes meet, her body suspended: friend, go on without me, our hearts are together until death, this torture of the body is not all, fear is not all, wasted life is not the only thing on this earth. perhaps our lives are meaningless, perhaps it is so, but the grass grows green and the sun shines outside. we are held away from it, true, we are led to our death. I know you fear, fear not! the violence of men cannot touch your soul, friend, friend, friend of mine.

She disappears. They are jolting me, once, twice, again, violent shocks into my bones, I do not want to feel them; I denounce them; I want to grieve my friend here on this sickening slick conveyor belt covered in shit and blood and tears but I move shakily, wearily on. Far ahead of me I hear the voices of my friends and comrades. O, earth and sky, must I go now? I am afraid!! My child, I love you! Go in peace, friend! Our memories will live in our flesh, in our bones, in the grass! Oh death! I can no longer make out individual voices. One at a time, my friends voices are mysteriously eliminated, stunned into some kind of silence.

My daughter Corra is behind me and keeps close to my heels. I can feel her frightened breathing, her soft moaning of fear. Over and over I tell her, I love you, te amo, in every expression that I know. We sing a song of old:
I live but I cannot live forever
Only the great earth lives forever
The great sun is the only living thing (Halifax 121).

How I long to nuzzle her, but we are forced so separate and remote in this narrow chute toward death. Soon there is not much I can say anymore and we scream in fear as the word passes down the line, into our ears and mouths and hearts and we bellow, bellow, scream, shriek in utter horror.

Blood. Dismemberment. Family. Nothing. No sound. No floor. No hooves. Faces. Contorted. Madness. Blood splashing. Daughter. Son. All this rendered meaningless. All around us, everything falling, legs, kicking, stop, won’t stop, no one notices, eyes, staring, flailing, turning, head lifting, oh blood, oh earth, o yerba, o mother, it falls, my life falls, my blood falls, this room of stinking death, I remember a field, all I can think of is sky.















Works Consulted

Barth, John. “The Literature of Replenishment.” Class Handout.

Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello. Penguin Books: New York, NY, 2003.

Halifax, Joan. The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth. Harper
San Francisco: San Francisco, CA, 1993.

Huggan, Graham. “‘Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives.” Modern
Fiction Studies 50:3, 2004. 701-733.

Kafka, Franz. “A Report for an Academy.” Trans. Ian Johnston. Malaspina University
College, Nanaimo, BC. 20 April 2008. http://www.mala.bc.ca/johnstoi/kafka/reportforacadmy.htm

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.
Columbia University Press: New York, NY, 1982.

May, Brian. “Reading Coetzee, Eventually.” Contemporary Literature 48:4, 2007. 629
638.

Rice, Doug. Classroom Lecture on Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School..
English 180H: American Identities. 02/20/2006.

Tremaine, Louis. “The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J.M. Coetzee.”
Contemporary Literature 44:4, 2003. 587-612.

Watts, Jon M. and Joseph M. Stookey. “Vocal Behavior in Cattle: The Animal’s
Commentary on its Biological Processes and Welfare.” Applied Animal Behavior Science: 67:1-2, 200. 15-33.

cold moon

it was december 16 and i was driving home down the foresty winding road. through pine trees stretched across the path glittering with cold winter moonlight. light shone on frosty fields and pine needles gathered in warm clusters along the center of the road. i drove slowly, looking for moonshadows of deer and fox. i imagine their beds nestled between the trees near the bottom of our driveway. i see the deer get up and look at me startled, black tails flickering in the moonlight, and slowly proudly saunter away. they are young and fresh faced and strong and i feel that no one should hurt them. i pass burros, ponies, sheep and llamas too in the fenced farms and near the water troughs. everything is frozen and still in the light of the cold moon. i like to imagine a tiny baby born in a stable on a night like this, with softly lowing cows and shush of bats flying in the woodbeam rooftop. frogs hiccup and dragonflies sparkle and rabbits skid across the ice. this is a completely unrealistic idea of the christchild's birthday, totally romanticized and americanized. does it get icy cold in bethlehem? was he really born in december (no i don't think so) and for that matter was it really in a stable and was mary really a virgin. ah-hem. anyway i like the fable and the feeling of fantasy, like chronicles of narnia, what a tale, what an adventure!! believe in what you like, and your beliefs will be your truth. i believe in the cold moon, the animal friends of the forest, and my cozy home. i believe in myself and the endless love that is dazzling me inside out and turning into glittering moonlight and dancing away on branches and pinecones away into the elfish december night.

remedy

cuckoo
cuckoo
furrow-weed and vetiver
cockle spur
tamarind
burdock anise cassiabark
clorinda
snakeweed water lily fig
pepper tree
wild lemon rose
yerba buena
yerba buena
mexican marigold

if i could only plant you in my garden
sweet gales from the west
would sing to you good-night
and soft rain in october
would seep into your bed
and you would walk through the forest
into the hands of thankful spirits
brewing and chanting
away from the forgetters

tiger grass thyme

Romanticism swept the nation

i wrote this for my british literature class; it's a journal entry on a writer from the Romantic period. my teacher, professor Agosta, the most literary-passionate man i've even come across, (he literally leaps around the classroom sometimes reciting lines) liked it so well he wants to use it as an example in future semesters. I was kinda proud of that, so i'm posting it here. by the way, if he really does use it as a model that's totally embarrassing because i wrote it almost as personal as a real journal entry. but oh well, we are human, we need to glimpse inside each other sometimes even in school.


"A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where –
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill’d;"

These lines from Coleridge’s poem "The Eolian Harp" make my heart sing with joy when I read them with the thoughtfulness and attention they deserve. When I allow the words of this poem enter my brain and take hold, especially if I am out on my deck overlooking the valley of pine trees and oak, I feel more alive, more connected to everything around me, and more in love with this world. My favorite feeling, that sense of true bliss that fills me up sometimes with a nearly-impossible glory. The first time I ever remember feeling this I was driving my dad’s beat-up Toyota truck through Placerville listening to Cat Stevens sing "Peace Train" and heading for the metaphysical bookstore to buy myself some candles. I was seventeen years old and had money in my pocket from my job at the record store and was driving on an autumn day and the song was filling my heart and lungs as I sang along, loudly; I felt free and alive. These moments hit me seemingly randomly but their common denominator is they always have to do with freedom. It is the gladness to be alive and be able to make choices to move forward, to turn here, to start running down the street, to eat something, whatever I want, to look at whatever I want, to spend as much time pondering it as I feel necessary.
In my various readings of Romantic literature, I feel the glory of the Romantic vision has to do with this freedom. Coleridge’s passage above really intensifies this sense of freedom by merging sensual perceptions of light and sound. He imbues the "doors of perception" with the freedom to switch around on us, suddenly human beings can perceive light and sound in interwoven form, reality as we know it shifts, and the world becomes more open and yielding to possibility. Thoughts have rhythm, a phrase I immediately resonate with but cannot fully explain in a literal sense. It’s when your thoughts, well, your thoughts have rhythm. They fit together like a song, they carry you, your feet move, your heart beats, your voice sounds out, and all life around you moves in tune as well. I know these moments, I’m sure we all do, but they remain so elusive and difficult to articulate. This is where Coleridge comes in. His description of bliss in this poem leaves the reader breathless, and so aware of that feeling. From the glimpses of a faery-world to the noontime nap on a sunny hillside, we feel his joy. We understand completely why it is impossible not to love everything in a world filled with this kind of freedom.
My sister and I were in Forestville picking blackberries for the homemade jelly we planned to make. It was mid-September, the sun was shining, we wore soft cotton dresses and carried colored baskets we bought at the local thrift store. It could be any time, any place, as long as there were sweet blackberries, and richly stained fingers, and our own laughter. We felt the fullness of our own joy, as young women alive in a world with so many gentle and sweet luxuries. Bike paths where wild blackberries grow free. Caterpillars and white herons and butterflies and spiderwebs. We are connected to all of it, with freedom to move within it, a car to carry us there, jobs waiting for us at home, books and music in our backpacks, the world at our fingertips. We recognized our own complete freedom really, and let the joy of that fill our afternoon. She turned to me and said, "it’s impossible not to love everything!" I read this poem two or three days later. How perfect life feels sometimes. This is what Coleridge taps into, this is the rhythm of life’s interconnectedness that comes alive in this passage. This is why I love to study literature in school! To pay more attention to these glorious words that keep us all connected and alert to the idiosyncratic joys of all our lives.
I know Wordsworth and Coleridge and especially Keats were not all "sweetness and light." I, too, have to "come down" from moments of pure bliss and re-enter reality. Night falls, fingers chill, cotton stains, cars run out of gas, you can’t find parking in San Francisco, you go home, you have homework to do and dishes to wash and bills to pay. And these, of course, are just simple annoyances. We are haunted by a deeper darkness, by the "still sad music of humanity." This return to reality reminds us that we are never free, just as clearly as we are always free, because we are indeed connected to others and that means responsibility. Coleridge remembers in the last part of this poem, in which he responds to his wife’s disapproval and attempts to appease his Christian society. He passes off his own fanciful meditations as "bubbles." We are left aching for the loss of his joy. But once we have experienced the bliss of freedom, we never forget and we hope to access that deep sense of connection and benevolence and pure love again and again.

give said the little stream

today i am in love with being alive. i am listening to magnolia electric co. and the song is entitled "give something else away every day," and i am glad to know the song "give said the little stream" from church and to have grown up with that in my wonderful foresty subconscious, singing singing all the day, give away, o give away. now i listen to jason molina's haunting voice over and over again, endless, this world, these loves we thought we lost, you are never helpless, you can move through this world, choosing and loving and making decisions and trying. to try is so divinely human. it pulls us all together. we think we are alone and different and separate, trying to make our way in our little blue space of loneliness, and here we are, really, connected to everything.

not just people. everything. go outside and look at the trees. oak trees, dropping acorns, they can be used for food or medicine, look at the manzanita with its smooth soft bark, look at cedar and ash. grass growing, and wild yellow weeds, and dirt and dust.

i live on a dirt road and i thank god for that. i drive on dirt and when i open my windows i breathe a cloud of dust and i become the earth. my car is dirty every single day and i love it. i am sick of concrete and pavement, that is not real to me, or life. i want to drive on dirt roads until my car disappears and i am on a horse with a wagon, and later, until my feet feel the pebbles and dirt clods beneath them, and i walk. and i walk and walk and walk,


across south america, across jungle and desert and mountain, under canopy of sky, i know secrets are there, whether spiderweb or celestial cloud, they are one and the same, this earth, this universe. the secrets that are divine are inside me, and i am glad to know it. and i am glad to have the freedom and luxury to not HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT SURVIVAL but instead feel gladness at walking through this earth and noticing the intricacies of life and rebellion and thought and instinct manifest.

since i was tiny i dreamt of being a hobo. i remember, nine years old in citrus heights, and there were railroad tracks through our neighborhood, dusty rusted old ones, and they went behind my friend alison blazer's beautiful stone-lined pool in back of her perfect tracked house where we had girly slumber parties, and i saw old tin cans and pocket knives and i knew THERE WAS LIFE OUT THERE. i told my carpool, "my dream is to be a bum." for a while it was my mantra, i want to be a bum. the words were crude but how great a gift from god to know that there is so much more than you. i don't care what religion or ethnicity you are. when you realize that, when you feel it in your blood and when you have the capability of becoming one with a speckled butterfly flying over the azalea bushes, then you are one with all creation and you are part of the divine.

in the world we have created, even in the american paradigm, there are culutural anomalies and there are rebels and freaks and vision quests. thank you sweet goddess for that. i want to get outside the norm, to take my body and mind and heart into every gale and rift that's filled with ore. thank you for coleridge and keats, for oppressors but mostly for the revolutionaries.

we can be part of a revolution right now. break through the concrete jungle and the poverty and self-effacement and sadness. you are great, whoever you are! your litter and paper bag bottle and depression and lice and dirty nails mean nothing. you are part of me and we can together into a land of the endless fiesta. come with me. i will look at you and say it and if you want to come, come.