The Dictionary of Silence and the Diseuse in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “Dictee”

“Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word ‘silence,’ the one that, aiming at the impossible, stops short before the word ‘impossible’ and writes it as ‘the end.’ ” (Cixous 2049)

“May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.” Attributed to Sappho, written by Cha[i], who then later writes, she is “exchangeable with any other heroine in the story.” (30)… Sybil. Demeter. Persephone. Gertrud. Princess Pari. Queen Min. Yu Guan Soon. Joan of Arc. St. Therese of Lisieux. Laura Claxton’s sister. Clio. Calliope. Urania. Melpomene. Erato. Elitere. Thalia. Terpsichore. Polymnia. Mnemosyne. Hyung Soon Huo. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Daughter. Mother. Unnamable Women.

 

Dictee is a nonlinear, multilayered, fragmented, cyclical text written in white ink,[ii] an act of giving blood. The life force transfers from one body to another. The self dissolves into, with, because of, the transmutability of selves.

 

Before we recognize the fluidity of selves and language, there must be a brief paragraph given to the “Word,” the “One.” This Signifier[iii], this One, has been all pervasive, has dominated social structures, linguistic structures, and narrative structures. Everything was (arguably still is) in a hierarchy. The binary structure of opposition. In short, there is a cage match.

 

In the red corner: Man! With his… speech, immediacy, presence, light, truth, logos, oneness, his God and his penis.

 

And.

 

In the blue corner: Woman! With her… deferral, difference, absence, darkness, lack, lawlessness, multiplicity, her heterogeneity, and her vagina, that terror.

 

But. The blue corner never wins.[iv] She’s been doomed, damned, cunt-shunted. So she’s kept quiet, silent, living in veils and shadows, wrapping herself in shawls and enigmas. This is where Cixous asks women to break through, start an aphonic revolt, leave not a single space untouched within language that is man’s alone. She wants us to “dislocate this annihilating within….explode it…impregnate it!” (Cixous 2049) Cha does exactly this.[v]

 

She writes in a borrowed tongue, in her allotted English language, and several others, but asks the reader to translate (part of) the text into French. This is not written solely for a bilingual audience; she wants the reader to experience the “in between.” Her side-by-side prose of English and French[vi] requires something to be lost in the (impossibly) direct translation. French to English, and vice versa, will never be, it cannot be exact. Her words, no matter the language, are then veiled as well, exposed as being cloaked in mystery, proving that that the invisible is complicated, but not unexplorable.

 

Silence, Mnemosyne[vii], memories, passivity, waiting, they’re all part of the invisible. Cha describes the pain of waiting inside a pause, waiting inside herself, as unbearable. “The wait from pain to say,” (4) she says, the mute diseuse, who secretly waits within their structure, multiplying, wrapping every word in tinfoil or black lace. She lives inside the void, inside the terrifying in-between structure, the space where the she makes her voice, gets the strength to speak. Just to speak.

From: ‘Dictee’ Takes the Stage. Author: Julie Ha

This is not a matter of castration, of control, of winning, but rather the point is to “dash through and to fly.”[viii] (Cixous 2050) Woman’s subversiveness is her own anonymity. Cixous claims women are givers, they can merge without annihilating themselves, flow from one woman to the next. “Her language does not contain, it carries.” (Cixous 2052) Words blend from one word to the next. Women, like words, are alive because they transform. They are always becoming.

 

“The woman arriving over and over again does not stand still; she’s everywhere, she exchanges.” (Cixous 2056) In other words, she is a metamorphosing collage of multiple voices. Cha’s (re)writing history, embodying the Muses, giving them voices, freeing them from their original patriarchal shackles, and this includes not making them speak only through men, in their male language, with their phallologocentric stories of beginnings, middles, and ends, their epic poems.

 

All Cha’s figures, all her narratives, begin in the middle; they always relate to another story: the Mother.

 

Dictee is not a traditional epic poem. It is not about man’s rise to glory, the glory of the gods, or a best or first of anything.[ix] Helene P. Foley argues “that the female version of the heroic quest is defined by issues relating to marriage and fertility and ends with a cyclical reunion and separation that also mitigates death.”[x] Dictee’s Muses no longer conceal their sorrow. They illustrate that there is something inherently traumatic in the female position.

 

Cha speaks of a series of concentric circles, which can be translated to a series of returns and departures, a code of trauma, meaning both the traumatic event is cyclical, perpetually returning to haunt the survivor contemplating the impossibility of their own death, and also that one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another. Trauma has a mute repetition of suffering,[xi] a festering silence, a wound. “Trauma seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains to be unknown in our very actions and our language.” (Caruth 4)

 

The wound is another, an Other, a foreign object inside the body[xii], a divided self. “It festers inside. The wound, liquid, dust. Must break. Must void.” (3) The Koreans, and women, do not own their imagery. They must dictate what is spoken to them using the oppressor’s language. They swallow the wound. It weeps.

 

Dictee is the wound crying out. And because it’s not fully understood, because it’s related to the suppression, to a mini-death, the speech comes out broken, in fragment – without the attempt at sewing them together. To create links is to manipulate; to do as the oppressors do. According to écriture feminine,this is a masculine trait of dominance, and consumption.[xiii] The one creating the links is the one that controls the image-repertoire. Cha, like Cixous, is requesting a new mode of reading, a new mode of listening, not a new language.

 

This is further explored with Cha’s use of curtailed images of suppressed history. Anne Anlin Cheng suggests that “redeeming these images has frequently only served to re-violate them.” (Cheng 121) The repressed no longer own the images of themselves. These images become images of the action, belonging to the oppressors. Cheng follows with both the urgency and the impossibility of rerecording history, echoing the mindset of Caruth: History arises within the impossibility of understanding.

 

Cha is (re)presenting the trauma of an entire nation and the female gender. Both language and image are insufficient to accurately describing the horror, the subjugation, the effacement. “Unfathomable the words, the terminology: enemy, atrocities, conquest, betrayal, invasion, destruction.” (32) These words are the opposite of Cha’s epitaph, they do not recognize the irony of their own stability as words. The act of seeing these images reappropriated into Japanese history, or hearing the empty signifier, erases the reality of any event. Cha is preventing that from happening again; she’s preventing the reoccurrence of removal by not attempting to explain, to master. The image, like trauma, cannot be mastered. This is an embrace of the cyclical quality of trauma, its arrivals and departures, the series of concentric circles.

 

Through her analysis of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Cathy Caruth discusses a similar situation about both Korea’s oppressors. “The knowledge of Hiroshima, for the French, understood not as the incomprehensible occurrence of the nuclear bombing of the Japanese but as the knowledge they call ‘the end,’ effaces the event of a Japanese past and inscribes it, as a referent, into the narrative of French History.” (Caruth 29) Cha understands that this is a nationwide, corrosive occurrence. The postmodern subject has a difficult time grounding herself within the constructs of the image and the reappropriations of words, languages, and texts. The abstract enemy, the relationship between self and enemy, becomes larger because of what’s at stake: total consumption. In the language of binary opposition, the enemy is all that the self is not, and therefore, runs, and fears the constant risk of its own “ontological security.”[xiv]

 

The self recognizes itself as a being in the world, inextricably dependent on that world, and not the other way around.[xv] People exist as beings defined by Others who carry models of us in their heads, just as we carry models of them in our heads. Laing explains that a schizophrenic turns herself into a “thing”[xvi] to reduce herself from being in the world. When one’s identity is constantly being threatened, and because the being relates to the world through her body, she disembodies herself to transcend the world and be safe.

 

If Dictee’s subject(s): Woman qua silence, qua subservient, Other, separated from Mother, from Motherland, experiences a double separation, double subservience, then what is lost turns into loss. The reader is asked to empathize, particularly during Calliope’s segment where the text is written in second person, but Cha refuses to let the reader get grounded in a particular protagonist, a particular subject. Cha seeks to break down the representation of trauma as liminality. Both Dictee and trauma deny any sort of mapping within the ontological framework; R.D. Laing would consider this kind of division schizophrenic.

 

I would argue this “divided self” represents yesterday’s woman,[xvii] the woman that turns herself into an object, that defines her sexuality only through the male gaze, through the masochistic desire to be looked at; this is the woman that completely identifies with the androcentric stagnation of masculine “Truth.”

 

The Freudian system of sexuality is based on looking because it privileges the penis,[xviii] thus privileging the visible. This masochism is forced upon the woman, meaning pleasure does not reside in her, but refers back on male sexuality.

 

Luce Irigaray reminds us that the very nature of woman’s self, her sexuality, is auto-erotic, in that the woman is constantly touching herself[xix] since her vagina is composed of two embracing lips. She says that with herself, woman is already two, and not divisible into one, and she translates this feminine auto-eroticism into feminine discourse or writing. “This ‘style’ does not privilege sight; instead it takes each figure back to its source, which is among other things tactile. It comes back into touch with itself in that origin without ever constituting in it, constituting itself in it, as some sort of unity… It is always fluid, without neglecting the characteristics of fluids that are difficult to idealize: those rubbing between two infinitely near neighbors that create a dynamics.” (Irigaray 79)

 

According to Irigaray, the feminine “style” of writing is filled with ebb and flow, multiple beginnings, and multiple paths. And this is what Cha emphasizes with the nonlinear narrative of her female heroines, all of which transcend the patriarchy, all of which ebb and flow into one another.[xx] This nonlinear approach interferes with historical practice, which is most ironically portrayed by Clio. Not only does Cha connect historical events with fragments of Guan Soon’s biography, she also literally rewrites history in order to voice a history from a woman’s perspective.[xxi]

 

Every character loops around and connects to every other female character through the omnipresent trope of the mother-daughter relationship. And she mythologizes her “real life characters” in order to make the personal public, thus furthering the subversion of the epic poem.

 

Each woman is connected through various mothers as well as their refusals to yield to the oppressive patriarchal forces of imperialism. The Elysian Fields, to which Cha alludes to, are not just a place of heavenly female experience, but a place of real heartache as well. Cha promotes the experience of woman by trickling one woman into the next in such a way as to disrupt all linear assumptions by deleting the bridges history deems necessary to create.

 

The nonlinear is deeply connected with the unnamable in that there is no determinable beginning or end, and without the abrupt packages the masculine “style” creates, all “Truth,” in its phallologocentric forms, is unraveled and taken away from its inherent morbidity. Men have thought that the only two unrepresentable things are death and the female sex,[xxii] but Cha shows that the female sex is not unrepresentable, it was just unrepresentable within the oppressive confines of the masculine system of referents. But now the ironclad chain linking the signifier and signified is broken.

 

Again, this breaking is not a violent castration, but a delicate process of veiling and unveiling. As a woman’s body may become “full” with child, language, words become full with double meanings. The Freudian binary system of sexuality explodes with this addition of multiplicity. And by the very definition of multiplicity the penis is not excluded, just no longer privileged. Cha is refusing to call herself, which at this point includes all women, a lack, a nothing: “transform this nothingness into fire.” (111) She wants love to lower itself to nothingness, to the realm of the woman, for a true and total union. Echoing the words: “I do desire the other for the other, whole and entire, male or female; because living means that everything lives, and wanting it to be alive.” (Cixous 2054)

 

And in this transition, death cannot, and will not be privileged over life. A mother lifts her child up to the window. The daughter witnesses the pulleys, the machine, the language of her mother’s time; she wants to see, to become a part of it: “Lift me to the window to the picture image unleash the ropes tied to weights of stones first the ropes then its scraping on wood to break stillness as the bells fall peal follow the sound of ropes holding weight scraping on wood to break stillness bells fall a peal to the sky.” (179) Break the stillness. Break the silence. Perpetual motion. Perpetually becoming. Peal away the layers. Appeler: to name. A peal. A name. Peal a name back, reveal more than one, render the thing, the itness of it, and all that entails, indescribable, unnamable.

Bibliography

DICTEE. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. University of California Press. 2001.

UNCLAIMED EXPERIENCE; TRAUMA, NARRATIVE, AND HISTORY. Cathy Caruth. The John Hopkins University Press. 1996.

THE LAUGH OF THE MEDUSA. Hélène Cixous. THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF THEORY AND CRITICISM. W.W. Norton & Company. 2001.

THE SEX WHICH IS NOT ONE. Luce Irigaray. Cornell University Press. 1985.

THE DIVIDED SELF. R.D. Laing. Pelican Books. 1965.

REWRITING HESIOD, REVISIONING KOREA: THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA’S DICTEE AS A SUBVERSIVE HESIODIC CATALOGUE OF WOMEN. Kun Jong Lee. COLLEGE LITERATURE 33.3. Summer 2006. Pg. 77

MEMORY AND ANTI-DOCUMENTARY DESIRE IN THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA’S DICTEE. Anne Anlin Cheng. MELUS 23.4. Winter 1998. Pg. 119

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End Notes

1 “One of the first female writers who put women into the text, world, and history was Sappho… Cha [also] manifests her feminist position by identifying with Sappho: she writes the epigraph herself and attributes it to the Greek poet.” (Lee 78)

[ii] Not an obscure, angry, flat, and unreadable feminist text.

[iii] Penis.

[iv] In reality, given the Master/Slave dialectic, neither ever wins.

[v] “She begins the search the words of equivalence to that of her feeling. Or the absence of it. Synonym, simile, metaphor, byword, byname, ghostword, phantomnation. In documenting the map of her journey.” (140) The double-meanings, the nonwords, the semantics game.

[vi] Dare I say two lips?

[vii] In the Theogony, Mnemosyne disappears after giving birth to the nine muses.

[viii] Voler: to fly and to steal. The double meaning was originally implied.

[ix] M.M. Bakhtin: “The world of the epic is… a world of bests and firsts.” (Lee 87)

[x] As explained by Kun Jong Lee on pg. 92.

[xi] In contrast to the language of pain: the scream, cavewoman utterances.

[xii] A Migraine.

[xiii] Whoever controls the present controls the past…

[xiv] Phrase coined by Dr. R.D. Laing describing people that feel persecuted by reality itself.

[xv] Unless you’re a solipsist.

[xvi] He gives various examples from patients, such as a piece of wood floating in a pond.

[xvii] Cixous’s woman of yesterday: the woman silently dwelling.

[xviii] Hence, penis envy.

[xix] As Dictee illustrates in Erato’s Love Poetry section.

[xx] All of which transcend the limitations of their bodily identities.

[xxi] Guan Soon did not organize the March 1^st riots in Seoul, but in her hometown Aunae, nor were the March 1^st riots started after the assassination of Queen Min, who was murdered 24 years earlier. Cha specifically manipulates these details because she truly “regards the Queen as the symbol of Korea colonized by Japan and situates her at the origin Korea’s nationalist struggle against Japanese colonialism.” (Lee 87) And Guan Soon was popularly called the Joan of Arc of Korea; Cha wanted to “situate Guan Soon at the origin of the March First Movement, to portray the ‘woman soldier’ as an active agent of history; and to recenter the feminine voice from the margins of Korean nationalism.” (Lee 87)

[xxii] Which to men, Cixous points out, is equal to death.

The Sands of Kate’s Dasein.

 

1. Epigraphs.

 

“I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist.’.”[1]

         – Ludwig Wittgenstein       (A Lecture on Ethics)

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy . Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds, many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea, fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.”

         – Homer             (The Odyssey: Book 1, Lines 1-6)

“Language is the house of Being. In its home human beings dwell.”

         – Martin Heidegger            (Letter on Humanism)

“Although what one might now wish one’s self is that Wittgenstein had been in the basement with me yesterday, so as to have given me some help with all that Dasein.

Well, or perhaps with that other word, bricolage, that I woke up with in my head, that morning.”

          – Kate                (Wittgenstein’s Mistress)

 

 

2. Keeper of the Ghosts.

 

Wittgenstein can well understand why children love sand.

Kate writes messages in the sand, including the last line: “Somebody is living on this beach,” with her stick that she never loses. Messages that will be erased by the tide. Keeper of the Ghosts was David Markson’s working title. As his protagonist is the last living being on earth, Kate is responsible for all the ghosts of the past. They exist as traces in her mind of what once was. They exist only in the shape of language. Kate is also the keeper of language. The sands of English, the last living language, barely alive on a respirator, awaiting the tides. All other languages are dead.

As dead, those languages are no longer subject to any changes in meaning, “whereas in any ‘living’ language contexts of meaning change with changes in the interpretation of historical Dasein at the time.”[2]

Dasein is translated as Being- making sure to always capitalize the B- but the literal translation from German is “the to-be”, though it has also been referred to as Da-sein, which could read as there-to-be, or being there. It was once thought that to-be, one either had to exist as an object present in space and time, or as a subject capable of self-consciousness and self-presence.  Heidegger adds the element of historicity to the “presence” of the subject, saying that humans are Beings whose past and future collaborate in order for them to deal with all the other beings they encounter.

Our world is essential to who we are. Being always means Being-in-the-World.

Kate’s mode of being in Wittgenstein’s Mistress is much like that of a rosy-fingered dawn. Of course, not in content, but in style, and by style I do not mean the symbolism of roses, fingers, or even the dawn. What I intend to say, to write, is that Kate exists metaphorically, as a constructed work of art, a poetic figure. And further nested within that work of art, she exists as an artist.

Kate is both the art and the artist.

Being as Art, she can transcend the limitations of mortal flesh. She is lucid and authentic, a thing. As art she functions both allegorically and symbolically, meaning she brings together both the thing and something else: her unconcealed presence as truth. As artist she is often thrown back into the inauthentic state of everydayness, struggling with depression and madness, attached to her body, just another derivative. 

As a work of art, Kate is perpetually present.

According to Heidegger, if we identify Being with presence, it is easy to become obsessed with getting Beings to present themselves to us perfectly and in a definitive way, obsessed with re-presenting Beings accurately and effectively. Accurate representation is what Kate tries to accomplish in her language, her only medium of existence. When she refers to subjects in the past, she is re-creating them as present, giving them an irreal quality, while wondering herself what is their mode of existence in her mind.

Objects and Beings in the mind are not nothing, they are something. Sartre defines the matter in the mind as analogons, but he splits from Heidegger, saying that consciousness, instead of being an opening within the world, is an empty parasite on it, merely reflecting our subjective experience. This is what he argues in Nausea, claiming that once this inner nothingness is realized the feeling manifests in a need to vomit.

Markson does not take the Sartrean route of existentialism, but instead sticks to a more optimistic Heideggerian model, representing his protagonist’s ongoing monologue in very raw phenomenological form.

It’s as if Kate’s Dasein is naked.

“Thus, to work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity- the inquirer- transparent in his own Being.”[3]

 

3. Kate, the nucleus of a blinding gessoed Cingulum.

 

As the only Being, Kate is the center of the circle from which all things are equidistant. The ultimate solipsist. The loneliest cynosure.

All Beings inherit a past tradition and are thrust into a future. It is our own temporality that makes us sensitive to Being. As we pursue future possibilities that define us as an individual, the world opens up for us, pulsates and expands, and Beings get understood. In these moments Heidegger says, the Being is authentic, conscious, anxious of its mode as Being-towards-death, but it’s unpleasant to think about our temporality so we slip back into our routines, our everydayness, into moments of inauthenticity: the creamy fillings that make up life. (This is the stuff Kate mentions when speaking of other great artists.)

We do this because Being is an issue for Dasein.

Dasein “specifically picks out our individual possession of our existence and the fact that it is a question for us, a question which concerns the nature of Being as such.”[4]

This is where Kate’s identity begins to unravel. There are no other Beings off of whom Kate can bounce her identity anymore. She can no longer anticipate the kind of unpredictable future that an Other could bring. She is stuck in the present, only able to refer to the past.[5]

She now has the responsibility of keeping two kinds of past. The first relates to her subjective experience; these are her personal memories, which belong to her alone. The second is the cultural sphere of memory, which includes art and history, and once belonged to everyone. While Kate could a have direct experience considering a work of art, authentically being in a mode of interpretation, her subjective experience of history lies only within archival sources. She did not witness Rembrandt mistaking a painted coin for a real one, nor could she have seen Tchaikovsky holding onto his head while conducting his first orchestra.

Kate wishes to eradicate herself from the first kind of past. She says she normally does not allow herself to indulge in thinking about it, but when she does, and of course it’s inevitable, depression washes over her.

“In fact when I finally did solve why I had been feeling depressed what I told myself was that if necessary I would simply never again allow myself to put down any of such things at all.”[6]

This bout of depression is the first of many instances when she takes long sabbaticals from writing. Only a superficial reading assumes loneliness as the cause of her temporary vacation from typing.

“Wittgenstein was never married, by the way. Well, or never had a mistress either, having been a homosexual.

Although in the meantime when I just said in the meantime I truly did mean in the meantime.

It now being almost an entire week since I additionally said I would doubtless think of my cat’s name in a day or two.”[7]

According to Kate, what caused her sojourn was forgetting then remembering the memory of her son’s serious responsibility of naming a cat and how it paralleled her own plight. But by a deeper investigation of the text, in conjunction with the title, the sojourn followed her realization of her own undoing: Wittgenstein never had a mistress.

There are no chapter breaks, no breaks of any kind, so when Kate tells us that she has taken leave, it is a signal for the reader to pause and digest. A “mistress” has two connotations, the first being analogous to “master”, meaning Kate would be the master of Wittgenstein, and the second being Wittgenstein’s paramour, complete with all the trappings of loneliness due to Wittgenstein being unable to identity Kate as the loved being, the object of his affection. Either way, as mistress she is the perennial Other to Wittgenstein. Her Being is dependent, and in realizing, or stating that Wittgenstein did not have a mistress, she is suffering an existential crisis, a lapse of ontological insecurity.

Fingers outstretched with hope, Kate consistently reaches outside of herself into the collective past. She very well may be like the rosy-fingered dawn. In the beginning her search for somebody, anybody is surely a sign of optimism, and the haunting last words may still signify hope, albeit a futile one as the tides are ineluctable, but still she has not committed suicide, which is more that a lot of us would do. She is more comfortable in the shared realm of historicity, and Kate’s preferred subjects of historicity are classical representations which mirror her situation and the artists that created them. For Kate, these mirrored images are much easier to reflect on than the geography of her own Dasein.

As a protagonist, a work of art, as a masterpiece she will live forever, but as an staining artist with aches and pains, forgetting and confusing facts, she too will cease to be.

“Even if life does go on, of course.

Although when I say does go on, I should really be saying did go, naturally.

Having let any number of similar mistakes in tenses slip by before this, it now strikes me.”[8]

Life does did goes on. Kate is further undoing herself. She sees little point of a future, or rather, she cannot imagine one outside of the predictable routine she is living. This fictitious world is blank, like her 45 square footed canvas. And like her canvas, which is like a mirror, she wishes to set fire to it. She wants to live her life in a past that isn’t wholly her own. She wants to be able to reach out, be at the heart of the circular world, because without the collective past there is only herself, no one else whom she can be equidistant from.

So she retreats into facts, contemplating the men dying at the Dardenelles, the Hellespont, then a different set of men dying 3000 years later on the same soil during the Great War. She finds comfort in that “extraordinary” coincidence. Kate unites herself with others through history, and this gives her a sense of unity, the only union that she can muster given her circumstances.

 

4. Palimpsest, or all the Dasein downstairs.

 

Like Joyce’s Ulysses, where the title is given as a guide to read the text’s structure like an Odyssean map, Wittgenstein’s Mistress renders “the very bleak mathematical world Wittgenstein’s Tractatus [Logico-Philosophicus] revolutionized philosophy by summoning via abstract argument.”[9] Kate is living in an imaginary portrait- the kind of world the logic and metaphysics that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus posits.

The Tractatus philosophy sees “language, like math, as logic-based: and [Wittgenstein] viewed the paradigmatic function of language as mirroring or ‘picturing’ the world. From this latter belief, everything in the Tractatus follows, just as Kate’s own fetish for paintings, mirrors, & the status of mental representations like memories & associations & perceptions forms the canvas on which her memoir must be sketched.”[10] According to Wittgenstein, or as some differentiate, early Wittgenstein, the world is nothing but a massive compilation of data, logically circumspect facts, that have no intrinsic relationship to one another.

And language is the world’s mirror, created by man to reflect, communicate these facts with other Beings.

Language can never merely be a tool because we owe our Being to language. It plays a part in the rudimentary revelation of the world; it is part of what enables us to be someone and notice things in the first place. Like the first time we look into a mirror, for instance.

And here is where ontological security breaks down. Words do not have  “unambiguous” or “literal” meanings. Sure, there are assumptions within language, otherwise simple communication would be impossible, but these meanings are only seemingly obvious. Once the word is deconstructed, it becomes muddled and a case of philosophical inquiry in and of itself.

Heidegger began elevating poetry in his later works, saying that poetry recaptures the illuminating power that secretly resides in our ordinary words, allowing us to see the world as if for the first time. As Dasein is primarily disclosed, he thinks our most authentic relationship to language is poetic because it displays an act of “unconcealment.” And according to Heidegger, ordinary prose is just poetry that has lost its disclosure force.

What Heidegger is forgetting, or dismissing, is all the narrative devices tilling within a work of fiction. Leaving aside prose poetry, or even lyrical prose, the metaphors, synecdoches, tropes, metonymns, ironies, etc. of the novel also unveil Dasein’s existential predicament, its generally evaded Being-towards-death.

“But then what is there that is not in my head?

So that it is like a bloody museum, sometimes.

Or as if I have been appointed curator of all the world.

Well, as I was, as in a manner of speaking I undeniably am.”[11]

Kate’s job is to display, organize, structure, and oversee the ghostly world, which is a synecdoche for the mind of a solipsist. The passage above, in conjunction with Markson’s novel as a whole, reveal, unconceal, a “truth” in Dasein, but in a way that requires hermeneutical interpretation.

“What occurs for the phenomenology of the acts of consciousness as the self-manifestion of phenomena is thought more originally by Aristotle and in all Greek thinking and existence as aletheia, as the unconcealedness of what is present, its being revealed, its showing itself.”[12]

Because Heidegger gives careful analysis to the different senses of appearing and strongly emphasizes that cases where things show themselves as what they are not- dissemblance, appearance, semblance, and illusion- are all secondary senses dependent on the primary meaning of “phenomenon” as that which shows itself in itself.

Can Kate, as both art and artist, truly show herself in herself?

And as Wittgenstein’s Mistress can be seen as “translation” of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one that has Kate living alone in a mathematically factual hell, Heidegger would think her Dasein doomed from the start.

Heidegger fears thinking has become a kind of technical information processing. For him, this is the greatest threat to human existence because it leads to a fundamental homelessness, or rootlessness. When he said that language is the house of Being, he meant poetic language. Thinking philosophically, living as an artist, or rather creating art, are ways of guarding the essential nature of the human relation with Being.

Kate is stuck in oscillation, swaying back and forth not just between authenticity and inauthenticity, but also between the data filled isolation of the Tractatus and a constant attempt to set Dasein free.

 

5. Nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like, an assemblage.

 

Homer’s Odyssey takes place over the same amount of time that Kate has been isolated. The twists and turns that drive Ulysses off course can stand as metaphors for Kate’s prose, but that would be assuming that Wittgenstein’s Mistress has a purpose, an end to the journey.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation, an approximately programmatic emblem of what used to be called the Age of Anxiety, in other words, the epoch of Heidegger.

All the while having been created in the postmodern era.

“What I know is that Martin Heidegger once owned a pair of boots that had actually belonged to Vincent Van Gogh, and used to put them on when he went for walks in the woods.

I have no doubt that this is a fact either, incidentally. Especially since it may have been Martin Heidegger who made the very statement I mentioned a long while ago, about anxiety being the fundamental mood of existence.

So that what he surely would have admired about Van Gogh to begin with would have been the way Van Gogh could make even a pair of boots seem to have anxiety in them.”[13]

Again, for Heidegger, the work of art emerges within the gap between the temporality of the body and nature and the meaning bestowed on history and the social. He gives a hermeneutical interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting , discussing how these luminous peasant shoes, these inert objects, immediately re-create the peasant’s life, somehow illuminating the shoes’ memories. “In them,” says Heidegger, “there vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.”[14]

It is a cliché within postmodern works of art that there is no space for the viewer, no room for hermeneutical interpretation. And yet Wittgenstein’s Mistress, considered a postmodern novel, almost seems to be written specifically for the viewer, and furthermore, screams for interpretation.

Just as Kate is screaming at us to validate her Dasein.

This brings me to the hermeneutical circle.

All questioning carries certain presumptions that oversee the inquiry and even predetermine to a certain extent what can be discovered. We are then unveiling the answer in the light of what we already know. “If we must first define an entity in its Being, and if we want to formulate the question of Being only on this basis, what is this but going in a circle?”[15]

But the circle is neither heartless nor closed, it just entails a certain relatedness backward or forward. This means our awareness grows or decays depending on the kind of lives we lead or the kind of social, or cultural, situations we dwell in.

This seems rather bleak for someone dwelling entirely within language. 

Kate’s prose clearly mirrors the Tractatus, but does more than epitomize Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Her epigrams also speak with the lyricism and precision of Beckett, and the faintly mad Lockean associations are reminiscent of Lawrence Sterne.

She does seem to go in circles, or spirals, or loops, but there is method to her madness. “Kate’s textual obsession is simply to find connections between things, any strands that bind the historical facts & empirical data that are all her world comprises.”[16] If the content should dictate form, and the content is Kate’s mind, then the structure must follow the logical jumps her mind makes and the (seemingly) irrational moods from which she views the world, and record with absolute, mathematical precision the directions in which they both take.

“In fact Paris himself has gone to Mount Ida to die by then, as well, because of still another arrow.

Even if one is forced to read books by people with names like Dictys of Crete, or Dares the Phrygian, or Quintus from Smyrna, to learn such things, since the Iliad does not go that far.

I dropped the pages from those books into the fire after reading the reverse sides of each too, as I recall.

In the Louvre, this would have been, which is perhaps three bridges away from the Pont Neuf.

Once , that same winter, I signed a mirror. In one of the women’s rooms, with a lipstick.”[17]

Not only do these sentences link one after the other, the images communicate, look back at one another, sprout other metaphors. Through two sentences’ distension there is a quiet copulation, a seductive dance that can override logic. In this kind of manipulation, facts can appear funny, or sad, or full of anxiety. But more importantly, facts are fallible. Kate as keeper of ghosts and data is subject to her own ego and consciousness. She may have control over what she writes, as to avoid typing Magritte, but she has no control over the tortuous nature of how a mind thinks, or even her need to write, whether it is to communicate or record. It’s the need to prove her existence that drives the narrative forward.

That and it’s the nature of Dasein: even if she couldn’t go on, she must.  

Much like Tchaikovski, she seems to be making art with one hand and holding onto her head for dear life with the other.

Despite the lack of other characters, there is a dramatic tension, there is a kind of suspense. And despite this nonlinear format, there is a plot. Things happen.

As Kate is perpetually present, the novel must move forward, even as it’s moving inwards, and upwards, and twirling, twirling.

When she signs the mirror she signs her own image, but then she signs another name: Jeanne Hébuterne, and immediately after that line she tells us that she is staining, staining her own image, staining the name of Jeanne Hébuterne, staining the mirror.

One’s sense of self is contingent on how others see us from the outside. There is no need for an identity when you’re the last Being on the planet. The future possibilities that define one as an individual would be moot, as there is only one individual. No need to distinguish, no negative to reflect off of.

Therefore our identity is authored by other people.

Kate begins to wonder if she exists, or in other words, if she is nothing.

 

6. To be or not to be?

 

When thinking about writing an autobiographical novel, a very meta thought, Kate says,

“Except that what one senses even this readily is that there would very likely be almost no way for such a novel to end.

Especially once the heroine had finally become convinced that she may as well stop looking after all, and so could also stop being mad again.”[18]

Earlier she tells us that madness is the only way to maintain sanity. She then burns a few houses to the ground. As Kate sets fire to her past, she becomes more and more vague. She, as in her body, and even the accuracy of her facts, not because she is lying, but it seems as if she too, like The Last Supper, is already beginning to decay.

“In fact I believe there is a representation of a person lurking at the window of my very bedroom in it, even, although one had never been able to be positive about that.

Well, because of the brushwork being fairly abstract at that point, basically.”[19]

Twelve paragraphs later she follows in that specific line of thinking:

“And even if I am still at a total loss in regards to that painting.

Which I may or may not have painted myself, incidentally, if I have not said.”[20]

At first the person in the painting made her feel as if she were not alone, that the image of the mysterious person in her bedroom were actually upstairs in her bedroom. In this instance, art makes her feel among others.

But as her mind begins to deteriorate, she reveals that the person in the painting may well be an image of her, recalling the past question: do things, people, Willem de Kooning, continue to exist after they are erased? Or is it more likely that Kate never existed, and only in the end began to realize that? And as the realization slowly began to take effect it was as if the Hemlock began coursing through her veins, or rather, the turpentine, and that thought opened her eyes to an existence that was already illusory in the first place. 

---

[1] It has been pointed out by David Foster Wallace that “extraordinary” in Danish is accusative as opposed to nominative, meaning “extraordinary” has also been translated as “terrible” and “fearful”.

[2] Heidegger; an Introduction. Richard Polt, quoting Martin Heidegger’s History of the Concept of Time. 175-176.

[3] Being and Time. Martin Heidegger. 27; 7

[4] Introduction to Phenomenology. Dermot Moran. 238.

[5] We are only given her dull, predictable existence, therefore assuming it will continue in this manner unto death, but there is a glimmer of possible dread or even anticipation of an unforeseen natural (supernatural?) catastrophe.

[6] Wittgenstein’s Mistress. David Markson. 228.

[7] Markson. 220.

[8] Markson. 225.

[9] The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. David Foster Wallace. 219.

[10] Wallace. 224.

[11] Markson. 227.

[12] On Time and Being. Heidegger. 79

[13] Markson. 171.

[14] Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Fredric Jameson, quoting Heidegger. 8.

[15] Being and Time. Heidegger. § 2, 27; 7

[16] Wallace. 225.

[17] Markson. 154-155.

[18] Markson. 231.

[19] Markson. 237.

[20] Markson. 238.

A rare but necessary personal post

I have been on sabbatical. Clearly. With good reason. I gave birth to both a novel and a child. Both are currently soundly sleeping beside me, and, looking at the two of them, each bound and swaddled, my heart bursts at its borders. I am wildly in love, and it’s the best fucking feeling in the world.

Ms. Aria Josephine Block was not planned. I was on the pill. My partner and I had just moved from Minnesota to Chicago. One of our two extremely beloved cats had just passed away and we had had four thousand dollars, our entire nest egg, snatched from our future. We were unemployed and homeless, squatting in a house whose owner, an old family friend, was dying inside a nursing home. It was our job to pack up her things and bring them to Goodwill. We were sad and deflated. The stereo was often playing a requiem and once again I had a cigarette in my hand.

Surrounded, overwhelmed, choking on self-imposed meaninglessness, I longed for something different, an unforeseen lightening bolt of unfamiliar. Then, in May, I noticed I hadn’t had a headache in five days, which for me is both a record and a signal. I had read that migraines are supposed to improve with pregnancy. Suddenly, ubiquitously, all I could feel was my uterus expanding. So we bought a pregnancy test.

We weren’t concerned about every crushing horrible thing that had happened to us; at this point the bulk of it had surpassed embarrassment and transcended to the level of comedy. And with this flash of potential good news we reflected on how awesome and amazing our relationship truly is. We had met in grad school. In class I had compared something, love probably (we were reading Ovid’s METAMORPHOSIS), to being hit with a refrigerator door. “Did you just quote Elaine Scarry?” He said. I immediately was in love. To get him to ask me out I followed him down the stairs to the bathroom. I was wearing a mini skirt with royal blue tights underneath. I thought if I waited on the stairs and started ascending as he emerged from the bathroom he would look up my skirt and fall into a frenzy of lust and ask me out. It completely worked. Our first date was thirty-six hours long and within a week we were practically living together, combining our cats and naming our potential children. Boys names were invariably harder but we knew we wanted an Aria.

And now, saying goodbye to Joy Division really made us realize how much we wanted a family. We were emotionally ready, all we needed was financial security, and that would happen. It had to. If I was pregnant we were going to make this work one way or another. We had no choice.

As we waited for that torturous plastic stick to reveal our destiny, we held hands, giggled, and were astonished at the irresponsibility of our blatant desire to see two pink lines appear. When they did we cried.

That was maybe the highlight of my pregnancy.

Not that I had a high-risk pregnancy, or even a bad one, I just didn’t so much enjoy being pregnant.

There were other moments of bliss and happiness, particularly our wedding, which was such a simple affair we did it in our living room in slippers. I did wear a white dress just because I loved the symbolism of wearing white while eight months pregnant. I also really wanted the dress Beatrix Kiddo sported in the opening scene of KILL BILL. I scoured etsy for days, and just my luck a hand sewn, close-enough replica arrived on my doorway first class from Argentina.

At that point Aria was on my sciatic nerve, I was waddling, my throat was raw from reflux, and I still could only barely stomach my dinner. Truth be told, and no one warned me, pregnancy blows. There are a thousand things that could go wrong, but even when it goes right it’s still dangerous, uncomfortable, and damaging. But it’s all worth it, friends would say. Obviously! If it wasn’t I would’ve had an abortion. Sure, it was nice to feel her kick inside, and I did enjoy watching my belly expand and that feeling of a higher purpose, but that’s all merely a consolation prize.

I was sick. The entire time. The nausea I felt in my first trimester was unlike any nausea I had ever experienced. I could taste the human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) hormone coursing through my body. Though it was powerful and relentless, I never vomited, mainly because I’ve developed emetophobia from the migraines, but I was constantly wishing I would, or could, even though there was something about the nausea that told you you could puke until it was down to bile and still you wouldn’t get a shred of relief. It wasn’t like being hung over. It wasn’t like food poisoning. It was like a super nausea gnawing away at your will.

My body was revolting against the creature taking possession of it. Every cell wanted this foreign usurper out of me. I spent three months rolling on the floor eating nothing but apple sauce.

I am only kidding slightly. I lost twenty pounds and developed an intense anger toward men.

Not Ryan. Men. The patriarchy.

Simone de Beauvoir writes,

When two human categories find themselves face to face, each one wants to impose its sovereignty on the other; if both hold this claim equally, a reciprocal relationship is created, either hostile or friendly, but always tense. If one of the two has an advantage over the other that one prevails and works to maintain the relationship by oppression.

Pregnancy, a sickness really, left me weak and vulnerable. In other words, I was at a disadvantage, and though I knew that this state has been what had kept women oppressed since the dawn of people, I never quite felt it so acutely until now. And I was pissed. I began devouring narratives, particularly those of crappy television, and becoming more and more irate with each innocently misogynistic joke or the turgid bulk of reminders beaming our objectification. We are rarely protagonists, and when we are it’s still in the vein of chick lit, something to do either with love or motherhood. Though shockingly all of the pregnancy movies I watched were about men coping with the impending change, as though it were their show. Women are still written as passive, or obversely, as males masquerading as “strong females,” à la Starbuck or Lisbeth Salander.

Also, my hatred of organized religion started rising to a level of an obsession as a I tallied all the truly awful headlines shouting at me from around the world, particularly in the east. It didn’t help that A SUBURB OF MONOGAMY, my novel, deals with a Catholic mistress struggling to admit that she’s an atheist, that she never believed, that her god had marked her a second class citizen.

Ultimately all this, and that I was getting so much mail sent to a Mrs. Ryan Block, made me finally decide not to take Ryan’s name. (We also decided not to hyphenate because Block-Borders sounds too anti-immigration.)

Women didn’t escape my ire either. So many of them happily signing themselves up for this, not caring, or worse, wanting to be enslaved. So many of them following a book that refers to them as property, that calls for their own limitations, and advises brutal beatings and killings for those who step out of line. And yet so many of them stupidly tout that feminism is a dirty word, that whine about the death of chivalry, that say they enjoy being the fairer sex, all in the name of vanity, lust, and a fear of rejection. Yes, I hate a lot of women too.

And I felt all this hate growing inside of me as though it were Aria’s sinister twin.

This festered and manifested in physical discomfort.

I was unable to concentrate on much anything other than what was happening, and what would happen to me. I was becoming a mother, and I could not wrap my head around that.

I never felt “one” with Aria. She was always separate, her own person, an alien occupying my uterus.

My body was no longer my own. In a sense I was giving up my individuality for the benefit of my baby, for the benefit of the species that demands this abdication in order to ensure its future. I was a servant, and yet, I felt empowered. I became a waddling contradiction. All at once I was alienated from myself and completely consumed with myself. Growing a baby was greater than my ego but also incredibly narcissistic. I was creating someone I hope outlives me. I was creating someone I would die for. In a sense, I was preparing myself for my inevitable death, but also, deeper in my subconscious, I was in denial, thinking that I was cloning myself, that through my child I would live forever, that what was happening was not mitosis, more like I was asexual, splitting myself, undergoing meiosis. 

Another thing I wasn’t prepared for was how exhausted and stupid I had become. I could sleep thirteen hours and still be tired. I developed the memory of a goldfish. My analytical skills evaporated. I’d miss obvious connections and insights. I’d reread old books and instead of making new connections I was impressed at what I had already written in the margins. So I took a break.

And now I have a baby. A fiercely independent, adorably curious, dangerously intrepid baby who’s eager as hell, often impatient, and sometimes lazy. She has her father’s eyes and my nose. When I look at her I am so unbelievably inspired to make this world better for her, for all little girls. In her room I had framed a poster of a little girl in knight’s armor, wielding a sword and riding a stallion. Underneath her it reads, i can save myself. And I want to teach her that, Yes, Aria, you can save yourself.

All of this is the basis for my next novel, a young adult fantasy with more than “a strong female lead,” with a real person filled with contradicting and dynamic thoughts and feelings. A human being in search of values, dealing, coping with her own temporality and authentic self. Because women have existential crises too.

She has changed both me and my work forever. Not to say I’ll stop running my literary erotica journal, Omnia Vanitas Review, whose next issue is due out in a month or two. I’m just so full of love and joy. I’m beyond ecstatic and grateful for this baby who’s now strapped to my chest (Moms, if you don’t have a Moby Wrap, get one!), sleeping, but facing me with the most adorable, wonderful little face. And though pregnancy does totally suck, cuddling with your baby may be the greatest thing ever. Even now, as I type this, I know I will miss it forever once it’s gone.

Someday maybe I’ll write about our protracted, hellish labor and delivery, but that is an entirely separate affair.

This all has been one utterly amazing experience. One that has been oppressively time consuming and often very painful, but one that has made me feel so alive! And I wouldn’t give any of it up for anything.

Call for Submissions

I should’ve posted this soooner…

Tuesday is Omnia Vanitas Review‘s “deadline” for our second issue: Operatic Veils.

And as we know the chicanery surrounding the Ides of March, we understand if some people are too superstitious to submit on such an ominous date. Therefore, let it be known that our supposed deadline is merely a suggestive approximation. We will consider any and all late submissions as long as they are not grossly late, but in that case, there’s always next issue! We’ll post on the website when we’re officially closed for Operatic Veils submissions.

So, without further ado:

Omnia Vanitas Review is now accepting submissions for their upcoming second issue: “Operatic Veils.”

This can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways, however, only the ways that suit us best will be considered for publication. We are interested in defining, defiling, and defending barriers. We are interested in operas, mechanical operations, and operational machinations. We like layers upon layers of everything and words richer than cream. An…d we love literature that skirts the edges of what language can do.

Please take a look at our past journal, “The Invisible Corset,” to get an idea of what we’re looking for.

http://omniavanitasreview.com/invisiblecorset.html

We will be considering poetry, fiction, creative-nonfiction, essays, as well as both visual and video art, though some of the latter pieces may only be featured on the website (for obvious reasons).

Please send all submissions to Omnia.Vanitas.Review@gmail.com

Please include the word “submission” in the subject line.

Multiple submissions are okay, but send each submission as an individual Microsoft Word document (.docx okay) or PDF email attachment.

“Deadline” to be included in our “Operatic Veils” Issue: The Ides of March, 2011.

As we are an aspiring literary journal, we regretfully are unable to pay our authors, but what we lack in cash we make up for in love.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely,
Catherine Borders, Oleander Underhill, and Lily Robert-Foley

Any other questions any of you may have please refer to our website: http://omniavanitasreview.com/

And, of course, if you wish to “like” us or “friend” us on Facebook we would love to have you!

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SKIN

In 2004 Shelley Jackson launched her project SKIN, a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers. One of those volunteers is one of Omnia Vanitas Review‘s very own lovely editors, Ms. Lily Robert-Foley.

This is part of that story as told through those voices and read on their marked bodies with their own stories.

What’s so fascinating is how each word, already inscribed on a text, moves through texts, bonding to and inserting itself within other texts, exists outside of both their own text and Jackson’s texts, creating a third text of immeasurable size and weight, leaving the reader of the word, the wearer of the word, aware of the inevitability of natural erosion. Rebutting the claim that “writing is words that stay,” this story moves, it breathes, it hurts, it loves, and, eventually, it dies.

From this time on, participants will be known as “words”. They are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as its embodiments. As a result, injuries to the printed texts, such as dermabrasion, laser surgery, tattoo cover work or the loss of body parts, will not be considered to alter the work. Only the death of words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words.

2. Michael Almereyda’s Nadja

The second post in my Dracula Series.

Existential. Pretentious. Sexy. When I see these three words in a blurb I assume I’ll love the film. And that was certainly the case with Michael Almereyda’s Nadja. “Hal Hartley meets David Lynch” says the Chicago Review. Shot in black and white, almost like a film noir, philosophical riffs are delivered with deadpan irony. Lonely, isolated characters touch each other briefly, and for a moment they seem to really communicate, but then their own alienating drama pulls them back into themselves. Everyone exudes empathy but disregards sympathy. Everyone’s a protagonist. Everyone’s heart is bleeding. Everyone’s consumed.

But for a vampire movie, there is very little blood or human consumption.

The film opens with Nadja, Count Dracula’s daughter, picking up a man at a bar. She’s discussing the difference between European cities and New York, the city she inhabits, the city she embodies. She gets him alone and the camera pixilates as she feeds, as the man dies, Nadja receives a “psychic fax” from her father, who is dying. Still pixilated, we see him stumble down a street, wooden stake sticking out of his chest. “My father is dead.”

Killed by none other than Van Helsing, but a parody of Van Helsing. In the Annotated Dracula, I read many a footnote questioning Dr. Van Helsing’s version of medical knowledge. Apparently, a great deal of Van Helsing’s medical practices, for instance, pumping Lucy full of four different men’s blood without being at all concerned whether or not any would poison her, were outdated for modern Victorian standards. Van Helsing cared more about philosophy, more about chasing vampires, than medical science. He was blunt and matter-of-fact but this came across more humorous and cold as opposed to serious and thoughtful. Many papers have been written on him as a fraud, or even an unprofessional boob, and Almereyda chose to represent him in the latter’s clothes, as the bicycle-loving, long haired eccentric, whose special vampire detecting gear boils down to a pair of John Lennon sunglasses.

Lucy's safe. She has a reflection.

Though Dracula is depicted as hundreds of years old, Van Helsing is not, and while tinkering with Bram Stoker’s narrative is not uncommon, exhibiting Dracula, as both a character imprisoned inside a text and as an ubiquitous culture icon reaching outside of the text, is a postmodern phenomenon.

Nadja is an early nineties stylized indie film. And just as Nadja is Dracula’s daughter, Nadja is Dracula’s daughter. As Van Helsing tells us, Nadja is one of many children. Just as Nadja is one of many texts carrying on the count’s legacy.

Van Helsing’s nephew, Jim, is married to Lucy. Lucy doesn’t like Van Helsing, so Jim tells her to stay home while he goes and bails his uncle out of jail for driving a stake through Dracula’s heart. Van Helsing relays the tale, as if he were simply regurgitating a myth, and Jim tells him that it seems as though he’s gone through something but hasn’t come out the other side. Van Helsing’s story is a burden to Jim, it’s what keeps him away from Lucy, but it seems to essentially bore him. All Jim’s concerned with is how unmoved his “demented,” as Lucy put it, uncle is. And though Van Helsing’s supernatural tale is exciting and interesting, especially since we know he isn’t spinning any yarn, we end up siding with Jim, possibly because the story of Dracula is exhausted. It’s old and stale, like Van Helsing and Dracula, its time is over. They are mere figureheads, settings, moods for new texts to stand in their place. As Van Helsing says about Dracula, “like Elvis at the end. Drugged, confused, surrounded by zombies. He was just going through the motions. The magic was gone. And he knew it.”

Nadja is about the children. It’s about Jim and Lucy, Nadja, Renfield, Edgar, and Cassandra. Lucy and Renfield both echo the original Lucy and Renfield, just as Van Helsing echoes Van Helsing. This is to keep us grounded in the Dracula metaphor, to remind us that the past is prologue, that the present is doomed to repeat the past’s mistakes, especially if they were never understood.

Nadja wants to change her life. She’s sick of killing for the sake of killing, of living her father’s life. She walks down the street, Portishead plays in the background. I’ve got nobody on my side and surely that ain’t right.

Lucy, as the perpetual victim, as the blonde innocent, is seduced by the vampire, by the femme fatale, Nadja. They meet at a bar, exchange family traumas. Lucy’s brother is dead. Her mother is dead. Her father is born again, he doesn’t talk to Lucy. She’s familyless, rootless, she belongs with Jim.

Nadja’s mother is dead. She was a mortal who died during childbirth. Nadja’s father is dead. Nadja’s brother is gravely ill, refuses to feed, hates vampirism, hates Nadja.

Both women are anxious. They are honest and sad. Both are fascinated with the other, but their fascination is subdued. Nadja gets up, goes to the jukebox.

“Life is full of pain. But the pain I feel is the pain of fleeting joy… I’m with someone I love I feel so much joy then I have to go away, even if it’s only for a day I’m sure I’ll never see them again I feel so alone. I don’t know what’s in front of me. I can’t breathe. The pain of fleeting joy.” Nadja.

Lucy understands. She takes Nadja home. Jim isn’t there. She shows Nadja her tarantella. She shows her an ornament on her Christmas tree, an ornament of Dad, of Dracula. Lucy presses the button and scary music shakes the kitschy doll, Nadja becomes frightened. “Why do you show me that!” Lucy becomes maternal, she takes her tarantella back. Nadja apologizes. “I’m anxious,” she repeats. They take photographs and play with sparklers. Fleeting joy. They turn on the stereo, My Bloody Valentine.

They make love in front of a mirror. They make love while Lucy’s on her period. (I’ve always wondered why I had never seen menstruation represented in vampire fiction before.)

They make love under pixilation.

Scenes of passion are all pixilated, shot with a Fisher Price Pixilvision, to represent alienation, how we only know the world from our perspective, how we try to communicate with others and what gets lost in the translation. Almereyda wants to remind us that we’re voyeurs, and we’re only human. There’s so much we can’t know. Vampires aren’t human, they feel their kin’s pain, they know, they understand, for a moment, when they receive the psychic fax, what it’s like to be somebody else. We don’t have that luxury, or curse, if you’d rather. As humans, we translate, we empathize, but we don’t know, we can’t see, our psychic vision’s blurry.

Nadja doesn’t want to kill her. She’s in love, she tells Renfield, who’s in love with her, his maker. He asks her how she knows. “Because I feel terrible.”

The pain of fleeting joy.

Renfield doesn’t want Nadja to turn Lucy, but he has no choice. He is Nadja’s slave, he loves her as the original Renfield loves Dracula, his master. Lucy is as Lucy does, is almost turned. She’s not herself, she’s sick, dying, pining, struggling, zombified.

Nadja goes to her twin brother, Edgar. He’s also dying. He’s also in love with a mortal, Cassandra, his nurse. His love is requited, and for that, or because of that, Edgar hates himself. He wants to die. Nadja convinces Cassandra to bring Edgar to their father’s house in Manhattan. She tells Cassandra that she and Edgar have the same disease, that she’s not dying, that Edgar just needs his special medicine, shark embryos, she says.

Lucy is lost in a trance of forced obsession. Jim finds her at a copy shop (the same one I printed my graduate thesis at!), and leads her to the bar Nadja had picked her up at.

“We can be totally honest? There’s no point in anything, right? And lately I’ve been feeling so disconnected from everything. I take long walks, I go to the park. Sunsets help, somehow. Calendar art, the cornier the better. Once or twice a day I see a woman on the subway I think I can fall in love with. No reason, except, I like her face, her hands, her neck. Then I come home and you’re there and I realize I should be completely happy. I mean, today, seeing you sick, I got so worried. I felt so helpless. All I know is I want to be with you forever.” Jim.

Lucy replies.

“Life is full of pain, but I’m not afraid. The pain I feel is the pain of fleeting joy.” Lucy.

Lucy’s gone. First mentally, then physically. She flees, comes to Nadja’s call. Jim is concerned. He follows her. Van Helsing wants to kill Nadja and Edgar, he thinks he’s leading the charge. He still thinks it’s his narrative. But really, he’s just in the way. Jim doesn’t care about vampires, or Dracula, or all the terrible, mystical horrors surrounding him. He doesn’t care about killing Nadja. He just wants Lucy back. But she’s gone.

“She can’t sort out her feelings. She can’t tell the difference between caring and wanting, emptiness and hunger, loneliness––” Jim

Edgar receives a psychic fax from Nadja, who has taken Cassandra to their homeland, to Transylvania, by the Black Sea, in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains. They all travel to Transylvania, just as the crew in Dracula travels to Transylvania. They use Edgar’s connection to Nadja to locate them, just as Mina’s connection to Dracula is her crew’s compass. Just like her father, Nadja’s emotions are like big storms. Just like her father, Nadja is killed. Just like her father, Nadja’s spirit lives on.

Again, the plots of Nadja and Dracula intersect just as the characters and themes intersect. Nadja takes a little bit of everything it wants, but instead of the philosophical question of morals that the Victorian age obsessed over, Nadja reflects the jaded spirit of the nineties, with its existential angst, apathetic malaise, and narcissistic ennui. Cassandra’s monologue is a mirror.

“The problem is we’ve lost our spirituality. We’ve lost contact with ourselves and what our purpose of existence is. We’ve lost contact with God, and I don’t mean God as a man with a beard, a father, a punisher, but God as a source, a spirit, a stream of energy and light that links all things. We feel empty. We have a huge hole in ourselves. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a huge emptiness in their lives. We look away otherwise you start acting yourself, Why does one day merge with another day? Why does a black night gather in the mouth? Why all these people dead?” Cassandra.

P.S. Netflix‘s description of Nadja is inaccurate.

1. Dracula

I had decided, as an adjunct to Bataille’s Erotism, I would read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but, given vampirism’s relationship with sexuality and Catholicism, the side project mushroomed into something of its own accord. For the next couple of posts I’ll be unpacking various texts surrounding Dracula, starting, of course, with Stoker, then moving on to Coppola’s 1992 film, Guy Maddin’s silent ballet: Dracula; Tales from a Virgin’s Diary, Nadja, and finally, Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker. As usual, though plot isn’t at the forefront of my concern, it shall however be revealed as I discuss the more alluring pieces of these texts.

[…]

Vampires are neither dead nor alive. They are undead, or, Undecidable: a puncture in the Life/Death dichotomy, waffling between life and death, undermining and subverting hierarchical order, marking and signifying the structures and limits to binary oppositional thought. The desire to kill a vampire is not to abolish the hedonism vampires represent, or rather, suffuse (restoring straitlaced Victorian prudishness), but, as Derrida suggests, to return the world back to a system of order.

Just as humans are driven to love they’re also driven to die.

That being said: it’s not death we abhor, it’s chaos.

Vampires as figures, as myths, had been around for centuries before Stoker’s creation of Count Dracula in 1897. Based partly on Vlad Ţepeş/Vlad the Impaler/Vlad Dracula the warrior prince of Wallachia, partly on the aristocratic and charismatic nosferatu in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre, partly from Varney, the Vampyre by James Malcom Rymer, but mostly Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Carmilla, the story of the gorgeous and charming vampire Countess Mircalla posing as Carmilla, and her fatal tryst with the lonely, ingénue Laura.

Dracula is an epistolary novel, meaning, it’s told entirely through journal entries and letters. So just as Dracula has no reflection in the mirror, the narrator(s) cannot reflect him either. He is never recorded in “real time.” The reader can only see (experience) him through misty and unreliable subjective memories, the veils of anecdote.

Dracula exists only as an afterthought.

But an afterthought our male characters are Hell-bent to destroy.

Though the Count is only in a small fraction of the text, his presence can be felt through out. His specter permeates the entire narrative in the negative, through negative space He is what is not being said like a shadow to the action, walking death, a toothsome vagina in which our characters boldly traverse to protect their women, their livelihood, their sacred act of procreation, the God-given right to penetrate a nonthreatening toothless vagina, manhood intact, in control, on top of the hierarchy, Missionary-style.

That fine line… Sex is Life / Sex is Death.

“With [Dracula’s] left hand he held Mrs. Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white night-dress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare chest which was shown by his open dress.” Stoker. Dracula.

Each time we engage in the act of sexual intercourse, the brain goes through a moment of cognitive dissonance. On an unconscious level we wish to clone ourselves, live forever, but, obversely, we also want to obliterate ourselves, become one with the flow of the continuity of Being, dissolve into the great cosmos. We wish to fertilize, create another life, another death, pass along the existential torch to an unnamable baby, our pleasure centers are teeming with abundance, stretching at the seams, tumescent to the point of rupture. Then the crown of jouissance erupts, explodes in a paroxysm, annihilating our egos, our wills, sometimes, even our sight. In orgasm, we are our bodies, nothing more. We are simply here. Pure Being, like a dish of mold. In orgasm, the state, the quest of Eros is fulfilled, blowing open a door for Thanatos to slip into.

Percy Bysshe Shelley refers to the orgasm as “the wave that died the death which lovers love.”

La petite mort. A miniature death, a taste.

With each passing night, as Dracula visits Lucy, draining her of her life-blood, she experiences a miniature death as part of herself leaks out, passes from her body to his lips. Giving one’s life, the ultimate act of eroticism that parallels the sacrament.

“Life is always a product of the decomposition of life.” Georges Bataiile Erotism: Death and Sensuality.

A simple formula. The life cycle. It’s fascinating and horrible when it’s disrupted, when natural laws and social taboos are violated. Dracula combines the two Christian taboos of sex and death. He transgresses his own humanity and rises to the level of a god through steeping to the rung of a carnivorous animal; a sexual predator romanticizing the moment of death; eating the kill, not the meat. The victim is stripped of her clothes, her identity, and her will. She is under a spell, in a trance, hypnotized to a Bacchanal frenzy, begging for defilement. Her hymenal neck is penetrated, her life-blood is drained, satiating his hunger, giving him life. Sustaining his existence.

“In Dracula, vampirism is—to be pedestrian in the extreme—a metaphor for intercourse: the great appetite for using and being used; the annihilation of orgasm; the submission of the female to the great hunter; the driving obsessiveness of lust, which destroys both internal peace and any moral constraint; the commonplace victimization of the one taken; the great craving, never sated and cruelly impersonal. The act in blood is virtually a pun in metaphor on intercourse as the origin of life: reproduction; blood as nurture; the fetus feeding off of the woman’s blood in utero. And with the great wound, the vagina, moved to the throat, there is, like a shadow, the haunting resonance of the blood-soaked vagina, in menstruation, in childbirth; bleeding when a virgin and fucked. While alive the women are virgins in the long duration of the first fuck, the draining of their blood over time one long, lingering sex act of penetration and violation; after death, they are carnal, being truly sexed. The women are transformed into predators, great foul parasites; and short of that, they have not felt or known lust or had sex, been touched in a way that transforms being—they have not been fucked.” Andrea Dworkin. Intercourse.

Dworkin, of course, is arguing that once women taste the forbidden fruit of lust they become demonized, sex-crazed monsters, femme fatales, Sirens, Lilith, and therefore, must be destroyed. Women are supposed to be submissive, passive, pale and weak, tight-laced, painted, primmed and demure. Lucy, in other words. Not Mina, because Mina is the New Woman, a partner in every sense, but still devout and dedicated to both God and her husband. “Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina! She has man’s brain – a brain that a man should have were he much gifted – and woman’s heart,” gushes Dr. Van Helsing, who also had said:

“She is one of God’s women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth. So true, so sweet, so noble, so little an egoist – and that, let me tell you, is much in this age, so skeptical and selfish.” Van Helsing, Stoker.

Mina is the epitome of the perfect Victorian woman. She represents all that Dracula threatens to destroy. To play devil’s advocate with Dworkin, one can argue that Stoker was a feminist. He even heralds some queer themes. And while I do commend Stoker for being ahead of his times concerning issues of gender and sexuality, essentially Dracula is still a heteronormative text. With the Count, his fangs, his cock, as the fundamental patriarch. Logos shrouded in Eros.

Vampirism, the great, sharp, protruding fangs are symbolic for the phallus, while the pale, heaving necks supplant female genitalia. Thus gender roles are flipped when Jonathan Harker is seduced by the three vampire women. He writes:

“I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The fair girl went on her knees, and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited – waited with beating heart.” Jonathan Harker, Stoker.

Just as Victorian society feared a sexually aggressive, predatory, sexually assertive female, Jonathan Harker is both attracted and repulsed by the women vampires (just as Mina is to Dracula). But still, Stoker reversed the gender roles, yet in doing so, maintained the power structured of the traditional binary opposition: Light vs. Dark. Good vs. Evil. Cock vs. Cunt.

bell hooks writes on this branch of feminism, where women become men to assert equality and enact dominance, in her book Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, Chapter 2: “Power to the Pussy: We Don’t Wanna Be Dicks In Drag.” Using a photograph of Madonna brandishing a strap-on dildo climbing on top of Naomi Campbell, hooks argues that though Madonna as a name, a symbol has become synonymous with Girl Power and rebellion, taking the amaranthine mother, the holy virgin, and subverting that name, Madonna, to extrapolate the virgin/whore dichotomy of our culture. Instantly, Madonna was a hero to feminists, but, ultimately, hooks says, she only claims power by adopting masculine traits and genitalia. For Madonna, there is no power to the pussy, just a claim that pussies can be dicks too. (Though, an essential step in the sexual revolution and women’s equality––that can’t be dismissed––however, feminists should move beyond this line of thinking and reclaim their pussies as powerful in and of themselves. Reappropriation is more powerful than imitation. ‘Tis why I love Écriture Féminine.)

“The whole business of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still. The transition from the normal state to that of erotic desire presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity… In the process of dissolution, the male partner has generally an active role, while the female partner is passive. The passive, female side is essentially the one that is dissolved as a separate entity. But for the male partner the dissolution of the passive partner means one thing only: it is paving the way for a fusion where both are mingled, attaining at length the same degree of dissolution.” Bataille.

All victims of vampirism are cunts. The cunts are subsumed into the vampire, who, while in the throngs of ecstasy, forget themselves, devolve into pure predators, whose orgasm is life-affirming, as the victim’s orgasm is more of a L’appel du vide: a desire, a drive to leap into the abyss.

Because, as we all know, a cunt is a void and all voids need to be filled (ravaged).

Such is order.

Such is the state of being’s irreconcilable and oppressive loneliness, our own fundamental isolation. We try to fill that hole. We throw food into it, clothes, cars, football, narratives, anything that can be fetishized, loved. We even try to fuck our way out of it, fuck ourselves to the brim. I’ve heard pregnancy helps ease the pain. I expect that when one carries another, nihilism shrinks as a new purpose becomes so immediate and obvious. (A philosophical way to look at postpartum depression?)

“Beings which reproduce themselves are distinct from one another, and those reproduced are likewise distinct from each other, just as they are distinct from their parents. Each being is distinct from all others. His birth, his death, the events of his life may have an interest for others, but he alone is directly concerned with them. He is born alone. He dies alone. Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity.” Bataille.

This gulf, Bataille says, is hypnotic, meaning, we are hypnotized by our own deaths. The “Death Drive” in Freudian terms; “Being-Towards-Death” in Heideggarian.

So both Lucy and Mina are drawn to Dracula. They want him to touch them, to feed them and feed off of them. They welcome it L’apel du vide Lucy, the compliant female, the perpetual virgin, especially. Mina is more reluctant. She’s disgusted with Dracula, she hates and detests him, but she doesn’t quite fear him, she pities him, and though this baffles her, she’s drawn to him, she wants him, and he already has her:

“My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine – my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed.” Dracula, Stoker.

Dracula is a god. A Dionysus figure,  a murderous parasite, raw sexuality, hedonistic, red-blooded, animalistic, sadistic, father of death and carnal lust. His existence will corrupt the Victorian sensibilities, he will demolish and massacre the sacred order of life, the Christian hierarchy of things.

Dracula is a god that must be sacrificed.

For the love of God.

The 100 Most Beautiful Words

According to poet and dictionary writer, Dr. Robert Beard, these are the 100 most beautiful words in the English language, and though I haven’t created a list of my own, I am rather fond of his (which he has turned into a book of short essays).

Ailurophile	A cat-lover.
Assemblage	A gathering.
Becoming	Attractive.
Beleaguer	To exhaust with attacks.
Brood	To think alone.
Bucolic	In a lovely rural setting.
Bungalow	A small, cozy cottage.
Chatoyant	Like a cat’s eye.
Comely	Attractive.
Conflate	To blend together.
Cynosure	A focal point of admiration.
Dalliance	A brief love affair.
Demesne	Dominion, territory.
Demure	Shy and reserved.
Denouement	The resolution of a mystery.
Desuetude	Disuse.
Desultory	Slow, sluggish.
Diaphanous	Filmy.
Dissemble	Deceive.
Dulcet	Sweet, sugary.
Ebullience	Bubbling enthusiasm.
Effervescent	Bubbly.
Efflorescence	Flowering, blooming.
Elision	Dropping a sound or syllable in a word.
Elixir	A good potion.
Eloquence	Beauty and persuasion in speech.
Embrocation	Rubbing on a lotion.
Emollient	A softener.
Ephemeral	Short-lived.
Epiphany	A sudden revelation.
Erstwhile	At one time, for a time.
Ethereal	Gaseous, invisible but detectable.
Evanescent	Vanishing quickly, lasting a very short time.
Evocative	Suggestive.
Fetching	Pretty.
Felicity	Pleasantness.
Forbearance	Withholding response to provocation.
Fugacious	Fleeting.
Furtive	Shifty, sneaky.
Gambol	To skip or leap about joyfully.
Glamour	Beauty.
Gossamer	The finest piece of thread, a spider’s silk
Halcyon	Happy, sunny, care-free.
Harbinger	Messenger with news of the future.
Imbrication	Overlapping and forming a regular pattern.
Imbroglio	An altercation or complicated situation.
Imbue	To infuse, instill.
Incipient	Beginning, in an early stage.
Ineffable	Unutterable, inexpressible.
Ingénue	A naïve young woman.
Inglenook	A cozy nook by the hearth.
Insouciance	Blithe nonchalance.
Inure	To become jaded.
Labyrinthine	Twisting and turning.
Lagniappe	A special kind of gift.
Lagoon	A small gulf or inlet.
Languor	Listlessness, inactivity.
Lassitude	Weariness, listlessness.
Leisure	Free time.
Lilt	To move musically or lively.
Lissome	Slender and graceful.
Lithe	Slender and flexible.
Love	Deep affection.
Mellifluous	Sweet sounding.
Moiety	One of two equal parts.
Mondegreen	A slip of the ear.
Murmurous	Murmuring.
Nemesis	An unconquerable archenemy.
Offing	The sea between the horizon and the offshore.
Onomatopoeia	A word that sounds like its meaning.
Opulent	Lush, luxuriant.
Palimpsest	A manuscript written over earlier ones.
Panacea	A solution for all problems
Panoply	A complete set.
Pastiche	An art work combining materials from various sources.
Penumbra	A half-shadow.
Petrichor	The smell of earth after rain.
Plethora	A large quantity.
Propinquity	An inclination.
Pyrrhic	Successful with heavy losses.
Quintessential	Most essential.
Ratatouille	A spicy French stew.
Ravel	To knit or unknit.
Redolent	Fragrant.
Riparian	By the bank of a stream.
Ripple	A very small wave.
Scintilla	A spark or very small thing.
Sempiternal	Eternal.
Seraglio	Rich, luxurious oriental palace or harem.
Serendipity	Finding something nice while looking for something else.
Summery	Light, delicate or warm and sunny.
Sumptuous	Lush, luxurious.
Surreptitious	Secretive, sneaky.
Susquehanna	A river in Pennsylvania.
Susurrous	Whispering, hissing.
Talisman	A good luck charm.
Tintinnabulation	Tinkling.
Umbrella	Protection from sun or rain.
Untoward	Unseemly, inappropriate.
Vestigial	In trace amounts.
Wafture	Waving.
Wherewithal	The means.
Woebegone	Sorrowful, downcast.

Wuthering Heights is…

Wuthering Heights is… the egg, the nest, the hut, the house, the town, the country, the cathedral, the prison, the dungeon, the cellar door, the attic stairs, the coffin, the hearth, the unlit fire, the beating heart, the bloated brain, the lockbox, the womb, the Mother, the chair of the Father, the castle, the sky, the illusion, the home, the body, the universe.

Wuthering Heights is sitting, is looking, looking in, looking at, looking through a window.

Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling. ‘Wuthering being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.’ [1]

tu·mult n

a.            a violent or noisy commotion

b.            a psychological or emotional upheaval or agitation (!)

1. House qua Universe.

The house is the first space a human being encounters. It is a representation, a trope of outside existence. Before a baby can understand itself as a thoughtful, rational, mortal being, before it can understand that it is a separate entity from its surroundings, it knows only the house and the people which inhabit it. “It is the human being’s first world.”[2]

It is where a child learns power dynamics, where they learn language, and (in most cases) love. It is the psychoanalytic seat of perpetual return. It is where the child forms, and creates, its self. “Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.”[3] The child’s first home is where Bacchelard locates memories. He says consistently, and constantly, that the adult will come back to it in daydreams, because s/he can’t think of anything more comforting than reliving the memories of early protection.

And it is in this comfortable, comforting way that Wuthering Heights retains the pleasures of the past. For Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights will always retain images of Catherine, of Mr. Earnshaw (the Father), and of overwhelming acceptance and love. This is why he is able to still desire and cherish the Heights when it changes into Hindley’s property. This is why the Height’s can still be his and Catherine’s, despite its sudden transformation into his and Isabelle’s. This is why Wuthering Heights takes on multiple meanings at once.

This is why Brontë only has a handful of characters, and all the action is centered around Wuthering Heights[4].

2. The Egg, not the embryo, the egg.

Though I do believe, and I will address this later in the paper, that, in a way, Wuthering Heights is an extension of both Catherine and Heathcliff’s body (in combination, can we say they fertilize the egg?), but my thoughts presently concern the house merely as a shelter, with a thin shell, a protective barrier. The creation of the embryo, or ovum, or life, is one of life’s greatest mysteries. “It is the formation, not the form, that remains mysterious.”[5] But the metaphysical can of worms aside, half of the egg is a container, and the other half precious cargo.

The narrative is born when Mr. Lockwood breaks, shatters, the protective barrier, the window, which Catherine Earnshaw/Heathcliff/Linton flies up against and tries to breakthrough. She inserts herself into the novel, propels the plot forward, and announces: “Wuthering Heights is haunted! Turn the page, find out how.” How dare Mr. Lockwood! But Heathcliff, the behemoth of a character, trembles, and falls into the nook, the even tinier home, the more enclosed, the safer bed/closet/dresser of Catherine Earnshaw. It is there he retreats to his memories, it is there he and Catherine made themselves “as snug as their means allowed in the arch of the dresser. [She] had just fastened [their] pinafores together, and hung them up for a curtain;”[6] It is there the children hid from their tyrannical dictators, dreamed, and disappeared. Like Aphrodite bursting forth from her shell, the love story of Catherine and Heathcliff begins.

3. The Nest/Womb.

“Happily, the architect had foresight to build it strong.”[7] The architect: Emily Brontë, God, the Father (Mr. Earnshaw), a bird? Either way, Wuthering Heights is a resting place for offspring, where they learn, and grow, and prepare themselves for the outside world. In this way, it is Catherine and Heathcliff’s first microcosm. Within Wuthering Heights they expanded, and smeared themselves all over its walls until there was little distinction between them and the space they inhabited. They spread themselves out, hid their traumas and daydreams in the various objects and nooks. They became one with the space, the thing, making the reader think: if the house would burn, our protagonists would burn with it. Even when Catherine left, Heathcliff is consumed with empty nest, and whether or not we are to accept Catherine’s ghost as real, his recreation of her presence is as real and ghost-like as an actual ethereal figure. And say, as I truly believe, that Catherine does exist in some form, and that she did return to Wuthering Heights, and that she wants back inside the home that she and Heathcliff “built,” the ideal situation would be for her and him to copulate, lay an egg. But Bacchelard argues that nests (love nests) are a childish metaphor; utterly absurd. “Among birds, need I recall, love is strictly extracurricular affair, and the nest is not built until later, when the mad love-chase across the fields is over.”[8]

As to not sound childish, I will abandon this metaphor. Catherine and Heathcliff built the nest as they were falling in love, and their lovechild is merely the nest. Their baby is the womb itself, therefore, is an utter impossibility, which does fit in with the theme of Wuthering Heights, but Bacchelard says it’s childish and my space is limited. But, and this is my raison d’être, the nest is [a] breakable thing [wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king[9]].

4. The Hut, possibly the Hearth, and dare I say, Mother.

The noble savages…their haven in the lonely moors of Northern England…their simplest of human plants, their hut. There is no need for our heroes to fantasize about their primitive solitude, about floating on the ether, in total isolation, protected from the society, from monsters, from whathaveyou. “The hut immediately becomes this centralized solitude.”[10] Catherine and Heathcliff are utterly alone, there are only the other members of the household, and it’s an us versus them attitude. And they fight. They fight, they fly, they flee, but only into corners…Their bond is sacred, indestructible, and has no real threat. [See Figure 9.] “The hermit’s hut is an engraving that would suffer from any exaggeration of picturesqueness. Its truth must derive from the intensity of its essence, which is the essence of the verb ‘to inhabit.’ ”[11]

in·hab·it v

1.            vt to live in or occupy a particular place

2.            vt to be found in or pervade something

3.            vi to reside permanently in a place (!)

Demeter, Goddess of the Hearth, Goddess of the fruitful earth…the mourning mother. Nelly, servant, sister, mother, narrator: “If I can make any sense of your nonsense, Miss…it only goes to convince me…that you are a wicked, unprincipled girl. But trouble me no more with secrets. I’ll not promise to keep them.”[12] Pandora’s Box. For the first time, at least to us, Catherine’s thoughts: Heathcliff the eternal rocks, without him the universe would turn into a mighty stranger, I am Heathcliff…materialize into the house. These words echo, they bounce, off the walls, right into Heathcliff’s ears. Nelly cannot keep what is now mortared to the house. Nelly, the unbridled momma of morality, cannot keep these two savages at bay, cannot control their wicked desires, cannot stay at Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff is abandoned yet again. There will be no more women on the Heights for awhile now.

Catherine as Persephone is taken away, but Linton is no Hades, she, herself, is her own Hades. She chose to eat the pomegranate, she chose to marry Linton (her justifications aside). Catherine is the underbelly, the underworld, the obverse of what is. Wuthering Heights moans and creeks in her absence, Catherine moans and croaks in its absence.

Demeter, giver of life, yet, also bringer of the dead. “As a fertility goddess, Demeter, concerned with what the earth brought forth, was connected with the dead.”[13] Life. Death. An unlit fire…Hearth. Listen to Lockwood speak of “what they call the ‘house’ preeminently” (the kitchen and the parlor) with my interruptions/interpretations/disfigurements: The kitchen is forced to retreat altogether into another quarter. No signs of roasting, boiling, or baking about the huge fireplace. (No sign of life, of the life force of fuel.) One end reflected (splendidly) both light and heat. (He gets the impression of the life force anyway from the objects, from the pewter, which tower with rows of silver, in an oak dresser, to the very roof.)[14] Does the whole house reflect Heathcliff’s demeanor? Is the attic collapsing into the cellar? Oh wait, I’m ahead of myself…

5. The Cathedral in/and the Attic. The Prison or Dungeon in/and the Cellar.

A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.[15] (Duh.)

The house is a vertical being, the proof is the dichotomy between the attic and the cellar. Think total opposites. White. Black. Above. Below. Angel, or God, whatever. Devil. The rationality of the roof. The irrationality of the cellar. That one was Bacchelard’s. It’s obvious though. “A roof tells its raison d’être right away: it gives mankind a shelter from the rain and sun he fears.”[16] (Duh.) He says that up in the rafters all our thoughts are clear. In Wuthering Heights, sometimes, on Sunday, the attic becomes a cathedral. Church (Joseph) in the garret. Church, God, the watchful eye, in the attic. (Corners were punishment.) Catherine and Heathcliff hide. Putting God in the attic makes sense, ‘tis closer to the Heavens. But say I want to say Catherine represents the attic: Catherine represents the attic. And, guess what, Heathcliff represents the cellar.

“Mr. Heathcliff forms a SINGULAR CONTRAST TO HIS ABODE AND STYLE OF LIVING[17]…dark-skinned gypsy, in aspect, in dress, and manners a gentleman.”[18] Heathcliff is the Earnshaw’s skeleton. He is the monster everyone is afraid of. “In the cellar, darkness prevails both day and night.”[19] He is the secret.[20] When it concerns Catherine, Heathcliff is not the rational one. Heathcliff is rational in finances, in manipulation (yes, sometimes even when it concerns Catherine). But. And I know one will argue and stamp that Catherine herself is the pure embodiment of irrational, I’m giving this to her A.) to put her on a pedestal B.) for the sake of my argument C.) because she came up with a plan to sustain her and Heathcliff’s irrational love. Which is more than he did.

[“He’ll love and hate, equally under cover.”[21] Under cover of the roof. Oh!]

Catherine dies, always on page 122. “The cellar then becomes buried madness, welled-in tragedy.”[22] Heathcliff, in a nutshell.

6. The Coffin. The Beginning. The Middle.

Middle:

Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you- haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe- I know ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always-take any form-drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! It is unutterable! [23]

Beginning:

Lockwood wakes in the oak closet. Rapping against the window. A tree, a watchful stick, an anthropomorphized plant, its branch, arm, raps against the window. He wants to open the window, the hook was soldered to the staple. He breaks the glass, HE BREAKS THE PROTECTIVE LAYER, and Catherine’s ghost grabs his hand with icy (outside) fingers (inside). “Let me in – let me in!… I’m come home, I’d lost my way on the moor…I’ve been a waif for twenty years.”…Lockwood screams, the language of pain…Heathcliff rushes in. “How dare you, under my roof?”[24] He strikes his forehead with rage (attic?). Heathcliff gradually falls back into the shelter of the bed, as Lockwood speaks, finally, sitting down almost concealed behind it.

7. Heart and Brain (the naughty bits…) under Lockbox and Key[25].

It is impossible to consider Wuthering Heights belonging to anyone other than the Earnshaw’s, (and in this instance I’m considering Heathcliff an Earnshaw). Brontë created the setting, Wuthering Heights, around the family, and this setting was a categorical one, not a dialectical one, each member maintained their roles until a new one was bequeathed to them (as in the case with Mr. Earnshaw to Hindley and eventually to Heathcliff).

To think of Wuthering Heights as a skull, keeping the gray matter of the narrative within its boney walls, would be another way of viewing the Heights as a container, a shell. “Shells, like fossils, are to many attempts on the part of nature to prepare forms of different parts of the human body; they are bits of man and woman.”[26] Though this thought can easily be moved to Figure 1, its placement here denotes the dream-like function of the Heights as shell. A shell is mysterious, especially when the mind itself begins to regard itself as a prisoner inside such a shell. The mind both desires and dreads its freedom from its home, but like a snail without its shell, the body, the mucus membrane is vulnerable, and unless it returns has a much higher risk of death. And though this metaphor doesn’t hold true for children today, Catherine was unable to properly exude her hard shell. To her and Heathcliff the shell is not merely a covering that will be abandoned. Wuthering Heights is the home of her heart, without it she was doomed to perish.

“Everything about a creature that comes out of a shell is dialectical. And since it does not come out entirely, the part that comes out contradicts the part that remains inside.”[27] [Heathcliff.] In other words, the shell is a part of the creature. Just because the snail feels no pain when the shell is nicked doesn’t mean it could survive without it. Heathcliff realized this. Catherine, unfortunately, did only when it was too late. And now, because Heathcliff knows Wuthering Heights contains a part of her soul, is where her heart is, he keeps it safely secured, out of Hindley’s or Hareton’s hands. He keeps it bolted. Mr. Lockwood had to walk across the bleak hill. The earth was hard with black frost, it made him, the guest/intruder shiver. First, bushes blocked his passage. But then there was a latch. He was locked out. (“A lock is a psychological threshold”[28]…exactly.)

8. The Castle in the Sky.

The illusion: “ ‘Oh dear! I thought I was home,’ [Catherine] sighed. ‘I thought I was lying in my chamber at Wuthering Heights. Because I’m weak, my brain got confused, and I screamed unconsciously.’ ”[29] Catherine regressed. She retreated to her childhood home…to her soul. Living, existing in another space, another’s home, has driven her to madness. She begs for just a smell of the home so close yet so far away. She cannot bear the confinement of her new home, this foreign home. Catherine feels she has lost touch with herself; she feels as if she were not herself.

I wish I were out of doors- I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy and free…and laughing at my injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once again the heather on those hills…Open the window again wide, fasten it open! [30]

Catherine feels all would have been right had she still been safe under the protection of the Heights, had she been still inside the womb. She is recalling the moment she left home, her and Heathcliff’s endeavor into the other world, not out loud of course, but the regret trembles in the back of her throat.

First visit to Thrushcross Grange: the discovery of another universe. Catherine and Heathcliff ran from the top of the Heights to the park without stopping, Heathcliff recounts…“We crept through a broken hedge, groped our way up the path, and planted ourselves on a flower-pot under the drawing-room window. The light came from thence; they had not put up the shutters, and the curtains were only half closed.”[31] They were voyeurs, seeing the beckoning light, the Others, “through its light alone, the house becomes human.”[32] They saw the rich. They saw the Lintons. Crimson and gold, and no parents- no authority figures. They hated them. They shrieked. They ran. Catherine fell. The dog attacked her ankle, got her by her Achilles’ heel: her love affair with herself: her selfish self, and the selfish desire for money and power- her drive to hurt those she loves to ensure they love her back: Heathcliff.

Heathcliff’s illusions are more complicated than hers because his psyche is more complicated than hers. Mr. Heathcliff was the lover who waited, was the lover who returned. True, both lovers left and returned, but where Catherine left again (across the moors, to the same original point of departure), Heathcliff stayed (only Brontë knows where he ran off to) and cluttered the house with more sadomasochistic complexities, more illusions/delusions of grandeur. Also, and this will be further examined below, both protagonists suffer from their creation of horcruxes.

Not to mention the way both of them begin to view Wuthering Heights as the crème-de-la-crème of their happiness. If only, for once, they could own Wuthering Heights together, be the tyrannical Mistress and Master of their domain… They are dreaming/daydreaming, mythologizing the house into something sacred and healing. If only they could live together, inside their warm and wonderful womb, all would be solved and settled and perfect, forever.

[I am not dealing with the (metaphysical/metaphorical) debate surrounding whether or not Catherine’s ghost is Catherine (or at least a shade of her) or if it’s merely an illusion. It is more beautiful and relevant to accept the author’s words as fact, and it is highly relevant for my next figure.]

Also see Footnote 15.

9. The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Heathcliff’s first space, first resting place, in the Heights was at the top of the stairs, because, “from the very beginning, he bred bad feeling in the house,”[33] to everyone else, but not Mr. Earnshaw. But by Chapter 4, said Earnshaw grows weak and, to his resentment, is confined to the chimney-corner: the beginning of his immobility, his silence, his escaping into the walls. “The corner is a sort of half-box, part walls, part door.”[34] For Bacchelard, the corner is the chamber of being. Man is always half perpetual movement, half paralyzed parasite. The corner, the half wall, half open space, serves him as a metaphor for this duality. It is fitting that the final seat of the father, the space referred to earlier as “the house,” is the final resting space for Mr. Earnshaw. With his death, he’s passing down the human condition to his kin, and each behave according to their already assigned roles. Hindley becomes the tyrannical father. Catherine becomes the hot piece of ass on the market. Heathcliff becomes the dark man in waiting, the dweller in the shadows. And the house takes on these archetypes. It molds and reconfigures its space, its aura. Wuthering Heights becomes the place where memories are localized.

It is impossible to record thoughts and moments with perfect linearity. The very nature of thought resists such accurate archiving. As a result, people start to externalize their inner selves; they throw memories and feelings into objects. Memories, by definition[35], are motionless, it is space that relies on movement. “The finest specimens  of fossilized duration are to be found in and through space.”[36] This is exactly why Heathcliff keeps Catherine’s room intact, secure. Heathcliff is attempting to keep these memories as pristine, as untainted, as possible. This attempt is not irrational. If Lockwood, as he does, were to stay in Catherine’s room he would have wiped his being all over her walls, and quite possibly the new memory of Lockwood lying in her bed, reading her books, would not efface Heathcliff’s memories of Catherine in that space, but crowd them, force them to share that space. In a way, Heathcliff is safekeeping Catherine’s soul within her room, filling it with sacred objects, turning it into a shrine. In this way, Heathcliff has made a horcrux.

Of course, this rational protection requires Catherine’s absence. And though a ghost is in some form a presence, it is also, and mainly, an absence.

And of course also, it was that same impulse that inspires Heathcliff to fret about his will, namely who will inherit Wuthering Heights. “I wish I could annihilate it from the face of the earth.”[37] He cannot bear to think of another occupying his space, their space, the seat of his memories, the keeper of her soul, the space which contains their compressed time. He is not an organ donor.

10. House qua Body.

I think I have given sufficient evidence: the horcruxes, the beating hearts and bloated brains, that Wuthering Heights is alive, has flesh, and exists only because Catherine and Heathcliff exist inside of it. The day Heathcliff returns to Catherine, Brontë writes about Wuthering Heights and the mist surrounding Thrushcross Grange, the mist outside of the Linton’s window: “Wuthering Heights rose above this silvery vapour-but [the] old house was invisible- it rather dips down on the other side.”[38] Up until that moment Heathcliff was invisible. Catherine was not Catherine. (Catherine Linton ≠ Catherine Earnshaw.) Up until that moment both Catherine and Heathcliff were repressing the Heights, were repressing their childhoods, were repressing each other, their love.

Wuthering Heights has always matched the countenance of its occupants…“And far rather would I be condemned to a perpetual dwelling in the infernal regions, that even for one single night abide beneath the roof of Wuthering Heights again…I don’t like being left by myself in this grim house.”[39] But at one point Nelly blasted the day she left. Nelly is sensitive to auras…

Past, present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another. In the life of man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man be a dispersed being. It maintains him though the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. [40]

Soul, according to Bacchelard. But. And this is a big but. Brontë was a Christian. She believes in the whole duality of the mind and body thing. There was a reason Heathcliff had to leave the inside of the house to die. (I can’t say he had to leave Wuthering Heights because the entire property is Wuthering Heights, but since I have mainly/only worked on the inside of the home I shall stick with the strict dichotomy between inside and outside.) Anyhoo. Heathcliff left the house. And Bacchelard highlights the aggressive and hostile duality of inside and outside, and he states that “when confronted with outside and inside, [philosophers] think in terms of being and non-being.”[41] [Inside is to mind as outside is to body.]

If the house is his and her body, it is extraordinarily fitting that both of them had to leave its protective layer (lair?) to expire. One could say he left the house in order to meet her, since she was unable to get inside without the help of another. (Was Heathcliff punishing her again? Or could they not be together until death? Probably the latter.) And since they rejected Christian doctrines, according to their stricter times, and according to Joseph, of course they were denied entrance into Heaven. But really. Their heaven is Wuthering Heights. Their home is Wuthering Heights, now and forever. Little Cathy and Hareton move into Thrushcross Grange (her childhood home) and give Wuthering Heights to its rightful owners, Catherine and Heathcliff. Thus, completing their illusion, and giving the reader (me) the happy ending I crave. Of course, Joseph will still be there, but he will only live in the kitchen, and it was decided in class that he was merely part of the setting anyway.

---

[1] Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Pg. 2. Dover Thrift Editions. © 1996. From here on out I shall be referring to this book as Heights, without italics.

[2] Bacchelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Pg. 7 Beacon Press Books. © 1969. From here on out I shall refer to this book as Space, without italics.

[3] Space 7.

[4] This is why the title is the title.

[5] Space 106.

[6] Heights 14.

[7] Heights 2.

[8] Space 93.

[9] Heathcliff.

[10] Space 32.

[11] Space 32.

[12] Heights 60.

[13] Stapleton, Michael. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology. Bell Publishing Company. © 1978.

[14] Heights 2.

[15] Space 17.

[16] Space 18.

[17] My Caps.

[18] Heights 3.

[19] Space 19.

[20] In the Wuthering Heights in my head Catherine and Heathcliff get it on constantly. I prefer it that way.

[21] Heights 18.

[22] Space 20.

[23] Heights 124.

[24] Heights 18.

[25] Key will not be addressed.

[26] Space 114.

[27] Space 108.

[28] Space.

[29] Heights 91.

[30] Heights 92.

[31] Heights 34.

[32] Space 35.

[33] Heights 27.

[34] Space 137.

[35] mem·o·ry n

1.            the ability of the mind or of an individual or organism to retain learned information and knowledge of past events and experiences and to retrieve it

2.            an individual’s stock of retained knowledge and experience

3.            the knowledge or impression that somebody retains of a particular person, event, period, or subject

4.            the act or a specific instance of remembering

5.            the preservation of knowledge of and, usually, celebration of a deceased person or past event

6.            the knowledge or impression of somebody retained by other people after that person’s death

7.            the period of past time that a person or group is able to remember

8.            the part of a computer in which data is stored.

Also called memory bank

9.            the data storage capacity of a computer

10.            the ability of some materials, for example, plastics and metals, to return to their original shape after being subject to deformation

[36] Space 9.

[37] Heights 244.

[38] Heights 69.

[39] Heights 134 and 247.

[40] Space 7.

[41] Space 212.

The Great Hélène Cixous:

I have always played with God. For me, the signifier Dieu, as I have always said, is the synonym of what goes beyond us, of our own projection toward the future, toward infinity.

What I must say also is that clearly, like all writers who invoke Dieu the word and the word Dieu in their texts, I am religiously atheistic, but literarily deistic, that’s it. Ultimately I think that no one can write without the aid of God, but what is it, God? without the aid of writing, God-as-Writing.