Gro Dahle's Confessional Abjection House - "the sofa that smiles from ear to ear"
Art by Loren Crabbe, from the series “Purging Abjection.”
The avenues of exploration and interpretation in Gro Dahle's A Hundred Thousand Hours are so plentiful, that for the sake of purely instigating a discussion of this collection with specific regards to our class's most recent conversations, I'll focus on a few larger avenues to get the ball rolling.
Dahle's poems have all the elements that should signal them as confessional- domestic space, shame (sexual), emotive lyrical language, etc. Yet from the opening poem, with the room standing to greet the speaker, we know that there are elements of surrealism and abject, radically diverging from confession. Julia Kristeva, in "Approaching Abjection," characterizes elements of the abject that are at play within Dahle's poem though they are written under the guise of confessional moments. Kristeva says there is something about the abject that poses a threat, but rather than direct danger, it comes from an ambiguity of what is normal and possible, that it is "a dark revolt of being" (1). Dahle's collection poses as an invitation to something humanistic and tender, relationships between mothers and daughters, but we are immediately moved into a "vortex of summons and repulsions" as she uses that beautiful lyric to imbue ambiguity within the limitations of those relationships (Kristeva 1). For example, the speaker and her mother have subtle sexual (and sometimes not to subtle) language:
“I’m / not coming home, Mama. Hit me. Hit me. I am / cheating on you.” (37)
“When she asks what I’m thinking / about, I kiss her.” (35)
"...my mother / punishes me in the bathroom. I take it. The shame / tightening across my crotch that grows wetter and wetter." (27)
If the sexual language wasn't unsettling us enough into a mode of creep/abject, the poems then go into an unabashed violent mode, unsettling the boundaries of traditional mother/daughter roles even further. The most blatant poems of this ilk are on pages 81 and 85.
The poems progress from speaker/mother to speaker/lover and eventually speaker/daughter, which should be a beautiful procession of lineage and motherhood, but the daughter is one of the clearer examples of abjection in action. The child is stitched onto her mother's body, becoming an extra breast, and such a disconnect between mother and child could be portraying Kristeva's notion that the abject "fails to recognize kin" (Kristeva 4). Dahle pushes this even further when the child consumes her mother (goes into Kriteva's imagination where “a child (has) swallowed up his parents”)
“It is the child who devours me. Sucks me out of my breasts. Empties me hour by hour. She is a cannibal. And I scream: Eat me. Eat me.” (Dahle 83)
In terms of the abject being something that troubles boundaries to such an extreme degree, Kristeva says that there is "a certainty that protects it from the shameful" (1). This was one of those moments where I saw Dahle's poems resisting confessionalism by enacting the abject's ownership of the inherent shame. Just a few instances of outright shame:
"I am filth” (Dahle 31)
“Don’t look at me in the white bathroom light. Don’t
look at me before I put on my waist. I’m trapped in my pale
belly. A hostage. And my breasts look down at the floor and
are ashamed.” (107)
The abject's feminist history and how that's at play in Dahle's poems re: shame, confession, women's bodies, etc (especially in art, hence the piece I put at the top here, there was an entire installation exhibit called "Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire In American Art" at the Whitney Museum of American Art)
Kristeva's model of the ambiguous opposition of “I/Other, Inside/Out-side” with relation to the domestic settings in the poems? Especially how they the interior/exterior collapses.
So much to think about here--thank you, Kim!
ReplyDeletea part one from me:
A Hundred Thousand Hours windowed open for me the tension I hit against at the word "confessional"--the protocol of intimacy Dahle enacts here makes implicit the space of "inside" we share with the "speaker." This shared-insideness (for me) is not about vehicular-conduit-reception, about being handed privated/precious/otherwise secret info containing the power to reveal the speaker's guts. Instead, it feels to me as if we're mutual liquids and mutually immersed/submerged/incorporated. There's an it-goes-without-sayingness about what it means to share this intimate space. It is not based on Trajectories, but instead, on Presence (insert wormhole of present-absence spectres)..."when I wake up, the room stands and waits for me" and we, the reader have always been right there, there with the close intimacy of light on "the corner of a button"--in this space the reader remains open and culnerable to the "furniture ready to run" suggested into our awareness by the charged-and-cutting linguistic specificity [of] "my side-sight".
I haven't believed in "confessionalism-as-such" because that word enforces a non-permeable, strictly communicable structuring; it hasn't felt true to my experience of convergence which (for me) is more delightfully insidious than the clear/rigid/metal boundaries of a 'confessional' presume / pretend.
A question is lingering on my side: How (?!) does language inform aesthetic?
Forgot I also wanted to include a poem from Ai, which feels relevant to the poems where the woman heaves her child out a window and strangles her. They both liken daughters to dogs as well...
ReplyDelete"Child Beater"
Outside, the rain, pinafore of gray water, dresses the town
and I stroke the leather belt,
as she sits in the rocking chair,
holding a crushed paper cup to her lips.
I yell at her, but she keeps rocking;
back, her eyes open, forward, they close.
Her body, somehow fat, though I feed her only once a day,
reminds me of my own just after she was born.
It's been seven years, but I still can't forget how I felt.
How heavy it feels to look at her.
I lay the belt on a chair
and get her dinner bowl.
I hit the spoon against it, set it down
and watch her crawl to it,
pausing after each forward thrust of her legs
and when she takes her first bite,
I grab the belt and beat her across the back
until her tears, beads of salt-filled glass, falling,
shatter on the floor.
I move off. I let her eat,
while I get my dog's chain leash from the closet.
I whirl it around my head.
O daughter, so far, you've only had a taste of icing,
are you ready now for some cake?
Reading this book, something that immediately comes to mind is the trailer for the film Hereditary, which comes out in June.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6wWKNij_1M
(more comments later today)
-M
I’m interested in how the “domestic space” of A Hundred Thousand Hours, as recognized by Kim, is exploded and/or magnified and/or violently abject(ed). In this way, and to gesture towards Trish’s question, language (may) inform aesthetic—the way in which poetic space is shaped. Specifically, I’ve been interested in the time and place questions in “Approaching Abjection” (“An Exile Who Asks, ‘Where?’” and “Time: Forgetfulness and Thunder”) and how they relate to this book—*and* each of our respective poetics.
ReplyDelete“The abject is edged with the sublime,” Kristeva writes, following these spatial and temporal questions. “As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the sublime triggers—it has always already triggered—a spree of perceptions and words that expands memory boundlessly.”
Dahle questions, too: “When is a room a room?” The interior spaces of the book—the house—conjure fear-induced visions (and/or transformations) of “The dark that seeps in through the cracks in the wall,” “[the windows with] someplace to go”… and, to grasp onto a single image, “My hands a part of the chair” – the chair that “screams,” the chair that “rides…without a creak.”
What I’m calling exploding and/or magnifying and/or violently abject(ing):
The room and the mind as containers, both “edged with the sublime,” allow for sensory transference, and even alchemy. Experiences in the room(s)—of abundant and sometimes ambivalent abuse—catalyze household objects into sites of trauma/transference back to body/psyche (again, the chairs, the envy of windows). There is a quiet catastrophe within each transference, building to what I see as the book’s aesthetic vision. We talk in translation theory about “foreignizing,” and here I see a similar effect/affect wherein the abject is foregrounded, and its inherent sublimity allows for a festering propulsion towards the anti-resolution of setting “the chairs free.” And there's an air beyond this all: "no justice," "no memory."
(Also interested in the chairs “bleeting,” and thinking about sacrificial lambs.)
These quotes are probably from pgs: 61, 63, 69, 153, 155, 185.
Thanks to Kim for getting this thread started!
ReplyDeleteI felt at “home,” if you will, with A Hundred Thousand Hours in a number of ways—primarily, in the “life” that Dahle gives to the home and furnishings within the book and, secondarily, as a child and parent. While Dahle populates this series with the things surrounding the “I,” the momentum of the poems remain assorted according to the section breaks (the daughtermother relationship, the courting/dating/love relationship with the “you,” the motherdaughter relationship, the aging “I” in isolation, etc.) Thus, the “abject” of the work, in keeping with Kristeva, enacts the “casting off” that A Hundred Thousand Hours leans into—an opposition to the “I”:
Particularly resonant to my reading of Dahle was Kristeva’s sense of the “Abjection of Self”:
“If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject. The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being. There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded.” (Kristeva 3)
At first read, Dahle’s text did call to mind being “at home” with the book of course via the uncanny (Heimlich and Unheimlich) in Freud’s thinking, but Kristeva challenged that distinction in asserting that “Essentially different from ‘uncanniness,’ more violent, too, abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory” (4).
That fuzzy line between the uncanny and the abject in Hundred Thousand Hours is probably what fascinated me most—at least on a theoretical level. Kristeva, of course, seems to draw a strong distinction between the two (the uncanny and the abject), but I’m left grasping at their interplay. Were I to diagnose my confusion, I would point to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves—a novel that reads both as a love story and as a ghost story, complete with a sense of the “living” architecture/furnishings that Dahle plays with in her text. And, were I to point to the oscillation between the uncanny and the abject in Dahle’s work specifically, I look to page 83:
It is not me who devours my child. It is
the child who devours me. Sucks me out of
my breasts. Empties me hour by hour. She is a
cannibal. And I scream: Eat me. Eat me.
Wavering between resentment and admiration, disgust and love, these lines exemplify the feelings that “must be left unsaid” in relationship(s). That’s what really drew me (in)to the work, a moth to a streetlight.
In the domestic space of A Hundred Thousand Hours, the furniture acquires human consciousness, and fills the room with uncanny feelings. The anticipation of the space for its occupants occur in the beginning of the book, “when I wake up, the room stands and waits for me.” The objects in the room also actively exhibit their interpretation to my actions by reacting subtly to it: “When I spill sugar on the floor … I see the furniture ready to run.”
ReplyDeleteFurniture is the mediation in the daughter and mother encounter. On page 15, the mother speaks to the daughter “through the chairs” and “through the liver paste on the table”. In the previous section, “my mother sits in the rocking chair and watches me” before “she begins to rock.” The initiation of mother’s communication to the daughter starts with the movement of the furniture. “When I smile, it stings my lips” suggests that the object in the room transfers the sensation (possibly from the mother) to the daughter. The objects’ reactions contradict these of the daughter when acting between two characters and acting on their own (“I” perceiving spilling of sugar as a good sign versus the furniture wanting to run away in a fugitive manner + the daughter’ smile as a physical expression of happiness versus pain of being stung by the milk glass).
In addition to the physical violence between the mother and the daughter (mother cutting into the daughter and the cannibalistic move of eating the daughter’s body/sucking her thoughts, as well as daughter stabbing the mother and “traversing through her uterus), furniture establishes intimacy between themselves through the physical interaction (“the standing lamp touches the chair’s back) and sexual behaviors (mounting + riding on each other).
"Everything waits. The curtains. The flies on /
ReplyDeletethe windowsill. In time even the stool / has begun to fidget." (39)
This stillness here reads both as ambivalent and antic. This ambivalence brings me back to that trailer for Hereditary. That camera's crabbing/tracking movement, at a distance (physical and emotional), seems similar to the way the poem moves from image to image. But I'm not really convinced.
Of course the trailer's treatment of each domestic space, each room (like each poem), seems to work in a similar way.
"My one heart says: Wait. My other / heart says: I can't wait." (21)
Another poem struck me (on 67):
"with my back against the carpet, I am a /
helpless landscape. In the dim light you conquer me /
nation by nation, continent by continent. Right to /
the magnetic poles."
Here: the dissection with which Jake's poetry engages, but reaching a climax (& a charge) exemplifying the abject...
This & the poem Kim references on pg. 27 reminds me of Unica Zurn's Dark Spring. I can't really summarize, but after a sexual assault, there a several surreal rape-fantasy-scenes that link themselves to colonialism in an oblique way, and bring us and the text into an abject sublime -- the 'vortex of summons and repulsions' (re Kim & Kristeva).
The antic, going back to the poem on pg 39, comes in when the stool starts "to fidget."
The way these poems orbit between death, the fecal, the sexual, and the feminine immediately brings Kara Walker to mind. I'm also thinking of Nathalie Djurberg's films (Delights of an Undirected Mind among them) -- Erik showed me her work. Lines like "I stitch my child onto my body. She is an extra / arm. She is an extra breast. And I breathe / through her..." (79) seem to resonate with these visual texts.
There are also these trauma-/song-like repetitions on pg 69 (& elsewhere), "The night's in all / the walls. The night's in all the walls." Reminds me of A.M.'s repetition-work -- the one from this past fall with the "tree in Galilee".
Anyway, still working through this book, but its range/affect: really breathtaking.
other great quotes:
[35]
"The squabbles grow out of her scalp and lie and / wait in her hair."
[51]
"Your name grows in my mouth-hole and forms / my whole skull in its image."
[55]
"...when I breath, it is through your mouth. /
Respiration put in pawn. How I am a monument in / honor of you."
[57]
"The voice is the throat's flower./
I speak with two mouths. /
One on the outside. One on the inside."
[63]
"Outside the shadows mate on the lawn. Up until the evening /
comes and makes all shadows into a body"
[17]
"This is my little one-dog-show. / It's all I can do."
Wanting to return to Djurberg, b/c while her work does provide some kind of textural frame (the domestic, the erotic, the abject), I think she provides a link between Dahle's work, and my own.
Deletehttps://vimeo.com/31622059
These shots from her exhibition, The Parade, their vibrancy, and the way these animals move into/between these sculpted strung-out looking black bodies (which I find disturbing and a little offensive, but also beautiful), seems to resonate with me.
Of course the movement between animal bodies, particularly as it relates to the female body, sexuality, and abjectification, also seems at play in Dahle's text.
Lastly, to link the film clips from Hereditary, Djurberg and Dahle, I think the uncanny effect created by using dolls and clay-models, obscene or otherwise, adds a textural element to their abjection. I'm not sure if I can pinpoint exactly how the figures in Dahle's text are doll/clay-like, but maybe that's something we can talk about on Tuesday.
DeleteHey one more, re Djrberg; found this review of her exhibit at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Deletehttp://x-traonline.org/article/nathalie-djurberg-with-music-by-hans-berg-the-parade/
That show was absolutely stunning. One of the best ive ever been to.
DeleteIn a more lyrical reading, the "vortex of summons and repulsions" could also be Dahle's insistence on reassigning the characters' breath:
ReplyDelete“And when I breathe, it is through your mouth.” (55)
“And I breathe
Through her. I smile with her mouth.
The world is only as big as the space between
her forehead and my mouth.” (79)
“I speak with two mouths.
One on the outside. One on the inside.” (57)
And the how the reassigning moves into other parts of the body (Synthesis of grandmother and mother holding daughter: 87)
And a final synthesis when the speaker is left with only violence and the house, no more vortex just a final repulsion of other characters (the aging "I" in isolation, as Jake put it)
“I blend in with the patterns of the wallpaper. My feet
a part of the carpet. My hands a part of the chair. How
I become more and more a piece of furniture” (155)
Dahle relentlessly troubles the mother-daughter relationship(s) and domestic space. The generational violence becomes non-specific in several cases, as the act of breast feeding, cradling and simply coexisting in the same home are seen through a different lens (83: "It is not me who devours my child. It is / the child who devours me (...)"), the layer of glamorous skin removed to show the organs of a certain reality, as if a particularly unpleasant or nihilistic thought in the shower (or a 'When you really think about it..'). The incestuous and sexual violence/cannibalism visited upon the female body pushes conceptions of existence to a base, primal level. Repulsive and repelling dehumanization are tied to the destruction and questioning of agency and the self.
ReplyDeleteI have my mother in my hands. It is she who
holds my daughter through me. And my mother
strokes my daughter across her back with my hands.
And my mother kisses my daughter's hair with
my lips. And my mother complains to her with
my mouth. I am so poor. I have borrowed everything.
This poem on page 87 really pushes the question of how much we are shaped by our own parents, our childhood, and trauma. The fear of non-existence, the terror of merely being a repetition of the previous iteration. The abject comes from figuring out where the mother ends and the child begins, and vice versa.
The discomfort from the violation of boundaries is amplified and mirrored by the domestic space coming to life in animal-like shapes and desires, in fidgets and trembles. It matches the reduction of the romanticized family experience to control and consumption. The furnishing serves as surveillance devices and tormentors, increasing the sense of being trapped, the shame and paranoia (27: "I'm more naked with clothes than without. And in the mirror I see / the bathtub mocking me. The walls laugh with the smooth white / tiles. And the faucet consents with silence."). There is a constant sense of being gazed upon and desire not to be seen combined with the failure to hide (25-26).
An interesting note is that A Hundred Thousand Hours finishes with a series of poems marked by a seemingly positive turn on pg 165 ("It is the wall lamp's charm. It is / the sofa that smiles from ear to ear for / the first time in a while."). The poems near the very end in particular suggest reconciliation between the grandmother/mother/daughter and reestablishment of the self and borders. The grandmother is given the moon ("It is the least I can give you."), the daughter the earth or nature with all the wild animals ("This is your legacy."), while the speaker keeps the sun "There must be limits / to how generous I'll be.) (179). I found it surprising how after all the deconstruction and escape/abandonment, Dahle moves back over (or transcends?) the point of no return involving writing the taboo in such visceral ways with declarations of survival and freedom.
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ReplyDeleteLoving this intertextual swoon of a discussion. Everyone’s insights into the congruences and -fluences between Kristeva’s abjection and the movements of Dahle’s poems—the figures that populate them, the language that bears them—seem to coagulate around the idea that these poems are choreographing abjection in a pretty obvious way—bodies merge, distend and separate; boundaries are vivified, irritated, and ruptured. Kristeva characterizes the state of abjection as the surprise opposite of the subject-object opposition and the abject as that which lies outside, banished from that inscribed duality, ceaselessly challenging. When I try to locate or circumlocute the abject in Dahle’s poems, I search for the abjected matter—is it mother? Daughter? The intractable animated furniture?
ReplyDeleteIn this search, one finds many recurrences that draw into eerie correspondence disparate moments in this “timeline”—for one, the spontaneously-generating, rectilinear rightness of the domestic space on p.43 sets the stage for “you” to come; then on p.47, a similar “spreading”/“in every direction” seems to gesture toward a second coming (not in the jesus sense). On p.19, “mother lives in my arms”, and on p.87, “i have my mother in my hands” On p.35, mother asks what I’m thinking and I kiss her; on p. 65, the [lover?] asks this again and the [speaker] flees into the dresser. Then of course there is the great concentricity/throughline of mothering-daughtering-mothering-again.
The precondition of abjection is the prelapsarian union with the motherbody; at first, these poems seem to “track”, in their nonlinear, unruly way, the process through which the body lives through and under its abjection of and by the (m)other. But when I read through these poems again with these ideas in mind, it suddenly occurs to me that the speaking I is the abject—it speaks as (or through) the abject itself…. the I who irritates and upsets, the unruly I who cannot be disciplined by mother and cuts loose from her, who collides violently with this cipherlike “you”, grows another one of herself…the I who speaks itself into being….