critical gestures

To Be Liked By You Would Be A Calamity

"Attack is more piquant than concord," but when

You tell me frankly you would like to feel

My flesh beneath your feet,

I'm all abroad; I can put my weapon up, and

Bow you out.

Gesticulation--it is half the language,

Let unsheathed gesticulation be the steel

Your courtesy must meet,

Since in your hearing words are mute, which

To my senses

Are a shout.

Marianne Moore

on metaphor and metamorphosis

"To put it differently, the word « water » not only represents the encounter of the “Earthwoman” saint with her heaven, but in the state of prayer, Teresa immerses herself above the barrier of word-signs in the psyche-soma. It’s through her fiction ( better and differently than with her epilepsy) that she escapes the “powers” (understanding, memory, imagination). Thus, that which remains « words » is no longer a « signifier-signified » separated from « referent- things », as is customary with « words- signs » in an exterior reality. On the contrary, prayer, which amalgamates the ego and the Other, also amalgamates the word and the thing: the speaking subject undergoes, or nearly undergoes a catastrophic mutism, the self « loses itself », «liquefies », « becomes delirious ». Half way between these two extremes, a thin membrane rather than a bar separates the word from the thing: they contaminate each other and alternately dissociate. The self loses itself and finds itself again, devastated and jubilant, between two waters. Collapse on one side, rapture on the other : the fluidity of the aquatic touch accurately translates this alternation."

Julia Kristeva, "The Passion According to Teresa of Avila"

Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1652)

current events

from Henry James, The Scenic Art; Notes on Acting & the Drama (1872-1901), ed. Allan Wade (New Brunswick, 1948)

"The Théâtre Français has had the good fortune to be able to allow its traditions to accumulate. They have been preserved, transmitted, respected, cherished, until at last they form the very atmosphere, the vital air, of the establishment. A stranger feels their superior influence the first time he sees the great curtain go up; he feels that he is in a theater that is not as other theaters are. It is not only better, it is different. It has a peculiar perfection--something consecrated, historical, academic. This impression is delicious, and he watches the performance in a sort of tranquil ecstasy. [...] He has heard all his life of attention to detail, and now, for the first time, he sees something that deserves that name."

"The Théâtre Français" (1876)

"It is enough to be sorely puzzled, and have carried away a considerable store of tough problems, to be solved at leisure. One of those, for instance, will be connected, as we may surmise, with the extraordinary vogue of Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt, and will concern itself with enquiring into the sources of tender interest excited by this lady. I speak of her 'vogue' for want of a better word; it would require some ingenuity to give an idea of the intensity, the ecstasy, the insanity as some people would say, of curiosity and enthusiasm provoked by Mlle. Bernhardt. I spoke just now of topics, and what they were worth in the London system. This remarkable actress has filled this function with a completeness that leaves nothing to be desired [...]."

"The Comédie Française in London" (1879)

c.f. Jennifer Fleissner on the fad; here Bernhardt is the "vogue," filling her function to the end point of desire, using up the movement of curiosity and enthusiasm which is the movement of (cultural) history, the construction of "currency" (the temporality of the "current event," the movement of currency, and the tidal motion of currents all apply here).

corporeality

"In The Bostonians, the analysis of women and publicity describes a broader dilemma: the more rationalized the analysis of human lives, the more uncertain the question of human agency--but also the more compelling the figure of woman as a representative of modern subjectivity. Among its other critical insights, the distinctly cerebral brand of literary analysis undertaken in realism discovers the power of a corporeal figure--the public woman--that is no longer explicable as merely an unreal spectacle."

Nancy Bentley, Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920 (Philadelphia, 2009).

Sarah Bernhardt as Theodora in Victorien Sardou's Theodora (1882).

see Jennifer Fleissner on woman as the 'emblematic' subject of naturalism. representations of modern political subjectivity?

(more).

"Velocity, mechanics, heat, thermodynamics, light, chaos of formulae, electromagnetic induction must be called back into the Sublime, found and forgotten. Dickinson was expert in standing in corners, expert in secret listening and silent understanding. Bristling with Yankee energy, chained to an increasingly demanding agoraphobia, she moved through that particular mole of nature in her--she studied Terror. Adopted parataxis and rupture to tell the feverish haste, the loss, to warn of storm approaching--Brute force, mechanism. Cassandra was a woman. All power, including the power of love, including the nature of Time, is utterly unstable." (Howe, 116)

"Poetry is the great stimulation of life. Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender. Poetry is redemption from pessimism. Poetry is affirmation in negation, ammunition in the yellow eye of a gun than an allegorical pilgrim will shoot straight into the quiet of Night's frame." (138)

Susan Howe & Joan Richardson on the work of writing as encoding the precedent and the Other, DNA and ventriloquizing, genetic code and inspired vocalization. But: poetry beyond gender?

my susan

Ammunition from Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 2007):

"My and me. In this unsettling New England lexical landscape nothing is sure. In a shorter space (woman's quick voice) Dickinson went further than Browning, coding and erasing--deciphering the idea of herself, dissimulation in revelation. Really alone at a real frontier, dwelling in Possibility was what she had brilliantly learned to do." (76)

"Inside the highly formalized rhetoric of Poetry's reason, stalks unreason of perverted sexuality." (90)

"What light smiles in this unsurveyed valley of great memory? Materialistic light from the man-made Gun's forged yellow barrel merely mincing Nature's pure Idea of light as power, as fire mimics the sun? What revelation waiting to be born must be shot violently into leering flame? Now all aspects of the poet's self are homeless. Mistress of suspicion, what is there, who? Simpering smile of layer on layer. Who or what smiler? The Vesuvian face, a mask, veils fire, chaos, original will, vapor. Will that is searing lava and sulfurous power." (100)

(Toward a reading of gender and the volcanic: Alcott/Jo March's linguistic eruptions, the ground trembling under the domicile; Yezierska, immigrant conversion and overflow)