From: glj27240@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (the cult of Carrie )
Subject: re:  the business of poetry (1)
Summary: more fun than syntagmatics?
Keywords: sure!
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 20:00:36 GMT

What next?

i procede from this point:  i was talking a couple of weeks ago to a
roommate of mine, at one point i asked her why such apparent fear among
so many women of the word "feminist", or being associated with "feminisim".
Her response, in sum, alluded to a (perceived) association of 'feminist' 
with 'dyke', etc. and suggested this, then, as the reason (she/women) might
hesitate at being associated with the former.  this strikes me as a curious
example of 'subversion through language' or the denial of language to a 
particular group:  namely that of feminism without being tied to the notion
sexuality; more importantly both the endoxa and the curiousity of 'deviant'
sexuality Barthes speakes of on Sade.  i went on to state that i did not
understand how someone (esp. her, as a young woman) could think of 'entering'
a society whose 'system' she had no voice in creating.  her reply was to ask
me if i meant as in the situation where women do the same job as men yet still
get paid less? - yes, that upsets her.  but that misses the point, and more
than that has the effect of supporting and perpetuating the existent system.

it is curious that an analogy of a defiance of this system is found in the
movie La Lectrice.  And nothing here is inconsequential:  Sade's entire
libertine machination, Barthes' comments on the storyteller, the fact that
Miou-Miou is the actress. (the 'analogy' will rather come later when we view
the action of La Lectrice in terms of _here_)  the action is this:  La Lectrice
(the reader) hires herself out to read to people.  near the end she is hired
by an older man who, when they meet, produces a volume of Sade (from the shelf
in his library) as that which he wants her to read.  her instant dilema is to
whether she (can merely regard this as her profession, or does she refuse to
read it?)  she says she'll think about it.  he ask to hear her reading voice.
she sits down, he points out a passage, she reads it.  she agrees to come
back.  when she returns she meets the same man in the library, he takes her
into another room where two other men (his friends, he had invited, he said)
sit at a table, with him, to listen.  she askes what the reading material
will be.  he says the same as last time.  she contemplates a minute, then
leaves. taking the book and waving as she exits the doorway.

an appropriate action.  in what way?  i think in two.  first with regard
to viewing the men who would be listening in the way Barthes implicates
the majority of those who read Sade:  at the level of sadism, or the 
content - in Sade (if we view Barthes explication of the rest valid); and
secondly with regard to the later analogy, where the action becomes more
preeminent than the implication of perhapsual 'sadists'.

needless to say, perhaps, i think there is more, much more (to the question:
"Is there, ought there be, more?")  --- this should also satisfy those who
some time ago commented on never having read a poem which, reading it, left
them in a state of simple awe --- viz. :


	Premiere image d'une revolte
       


	La femme sans souvenirs
	A quitte pour l'herbe haute
	Le triste champs des aieux


	Dans les matins de la colere
	Elle court vetue de robes obscures
	Entre les troupeaux disperses


	Il n'y a rien alentour
	Seul un village nu
	Qui pese sur la colline.



later we posit on this hill the 'battlements' from which the revolte
is carried into revolution.  if this is all allegorical, and with it
the image, then so too are these 'battlements' :  nothing more than
peaceful homes in a quiet village, apart from the 'troupeaux disperses',
society.  superflous, perhaps, to explicate the contents of the village.
in one regard we see them (La Femme) in those kitchen gardens in Edith
Sitwell's facetious "Abaude", yet more of an eveningsong.  where (ascending)
(the stairs/to the village):  "each tenuous cloud of formless flight / floats
lifting like the dawn's first light" and:  "silk hair in the warm breeze / 
flows wild - conceals with ease / battered continent's forever masking /
of supplication's bitter asking".  again 'facetious':  deceptive -- the
same caustic irony of 'bondage' in a language still belonging to the
patriarchy.  irony not only in the languaging (itself, as act) but in the
ability to see through what is produced to what becomes then the caustic.

pointedly. this is where we saw, earlier, the mastication of dead institutions
the 'dead' and the 'mastication' wishful, perhaps:  portentious.  nevertheless
at the same time accompanied by a genuine, if slight, diachronic 'coup' on
language.  the mastication was commenced by the opening of sluice gates.  where
all significance for a moment converges (or visits, for a moment) this single
word:  not only in the general evokation (by etymology) the general notion of
that/those 'held out' (the 'exiles' of the village) --- yet in also its
primary imaginative use (the image of the real or metaphorical waste/water
from this village draining on the city); as well as the renewed act of
signification:  where the sluice, or sluice, was once associated with mouth,
more harsh or 'realist' (perhaps) demands are put upon it to signify, now,
a rather, linguistically, disenfranchised "cunt".  finally this allows, with
properly evoked imagery, the ablution of not only the word (no longer a tool
of defamation used (to) etc.) but of the 'city' in the mastication of the
'dead' institutions by this same ablution.  there are little, if no, illusion
here.  it is still caustic rhetoric.  caustic of itself and caustic with the
'hope' of being acidic.  still, by what is presented, the 'city' receives the
ablution second-hand, while the concrete-imagery is still one of (at worst)
waste which affects the 'mastication' of the 'dead institutions'.


the earlier-mentioned analogy will have to be put under (2).

-- 
							 
                                                  the cult of Carrie 
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