Descent of Alette

*Descent of Alette*, by Alice Notley, published in 1992

## Summary

*Descent of Alette* is an epic quest poem, a long poem, a poem where we follow Alette, the hero, into the depths of decaying subway stations, underground, a space of many metamorphoses, on a mission to find, expose, and destroy the tyrant--a representation of masculine supremacy--all supremacy, but def male--and heal the world. Mainly to point out is that the tyrant continues to *not be people, to be invisible*, and shows up *in people* but then moves away. Ie., when I think Alette kills a man in the subway she thinks is the tyrant, but then someone tells her that wasn't the tyrant. The goal of the epic quest was the feminized *telos*. Offers a new reading of our history, of Western history and poetry, and is an allegorical, utopian call for "tyrannicide" in the name of a postcapitalist, postpatriarchal future.

## Quotes

"A word about the quotation marks. People ask about them, in the beginning; in the process of giving themselves up to reading the poem, they become comfortable with them, without necessarily thinking precisely about why they’re there. But they’re there, mostly to measure the poem. The phrases they enclose are poetic feet. If I had simply left white spaces between the phrases, the phrases would be read too fast for my musical intention. The quotation marks make the reader slow down and silently articulate—not slur over mentally—the phrases at the pace, and with the stresses, I intend. They also distance the narrative form myself. I am not Alette. Finally they may remind the reader that each phrase is a thing said by a voice: this is not a thought, or a record of thought process, this is a story, told." -- Author's Note

(http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/67 -- A Playful Reading of the Quotation Marks)

> "One day, I awoke" "& found myself on" "a subway, endlessly"
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> “In a station” “I saw” “a woman crying” “She stood against”
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> “the wall” “looking dirty” “& exhausted,” “crying quietly”
> “I asked her who she was” “& why” “she was crying” “She
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> said: ‘I” “am a painter” “I have been trying” “to ﬁnd”
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> “a form the tyrant” “doesn’t own—” “something” “he doesn’t
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> know about” “hasn’t invented, hasn’t” “mastered” “hasn’t
> made his own” “in his mind” “Not rectangular,” “not a
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> sculpture” “Not a thing at all—” “he owns all things,”
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> “doesn’t he?” “He’s invented” “all the shapes” “I’m afraid he’s”
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> “invented mine,” “my very own” “body’” (“she was hysterical”)
> “‘Did he invent me?” “I want” “to do something like
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> paint air” “Perhaps” “I even want to” “invent air” “I’ve
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> painted” “thin transparent” “pieces” “of plastic” “They—”
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> “the pictures on them—” “always turn” “rectangular,” “circular”
> “I once painted” “on a bat’s wings” “I caught a bat” “painted
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> colors on” “let it loose &” “watched the air change…”
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> “He owns form,” “doesn’t he?” “The tyrant” “owns form’”
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> --
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Soldier:

"I need to find" "our father" "our fathers...'" "'but what about"

"our mother?'" "I said auto-" "matically," ....

"But I am agonized,' he said," "I killed for him,"

"I was a soldier'" "The train stopped" "He abruptly" left the car"

"Disappeared" "disappeared"

"No remembrance" "No remembrance" "No remembrance" "of our mother"

"No remembrance" "of who we really are" "Thus a woman" "may be"

"already dead" "born dead"

*The old has refuge only at the vanguard of the new: in the gaps, not in continuity. (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory)*

from "*Homer's Art"*

"Both of Homer's public stories--as everybody knows--are generated by a war and are male-centered--stories for men about a male world. The epic poem is taught in universities as the epitome of achievement in Western poetry--a large long story, full of "cultural materials," usually involving a war either centrally or peripherally, the grand events of men. Men who have written them since Homer have tended, or tried, to be near the center of the politics of their time, court or capitol. Thus, how could a woman write an epic? How could she know if she were to decide the times called for one? Meanwhile we ourselves have experienced a rather strange faraway but shattering war."

## Notes, Connections, Context

Reclaiming the sign

Poetry is a defamiliarized language, doorways between sounds and phrases, feet, of the line

irony and emphasis

telling a story, claiming the story

found language, the way as soon as language hits page it is not yours

never was yours either

Of course the TYRANT, and Alice wanted to make an epic poem, an adventure poem, an Orpheus-like poem, where one must go into the underworld, a feminist poem, one told by the allegorical woman

> "If the goal of the epic quest is a feminized *telos*, we might think of the opposition between the epic and lyric genres as marked by gender as well. ...Sappho "composed lyrics set deliberately, contradictorily within the received matrix of Homeric epic. In fragment sixteen, for example, she sings:
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> "Some say an army of horsemen, some of foot-soldiers, some a fleet of ships to be the most beautiful thing on the dark earth, but I say it is whatever one desires..." The use of the first person singular in this very early lyric fragment positions a critical female self and established a perspective on war and its beauties and pleasures that is rejected for other pleasures, especially *eros* and the sight of the beloved." "This is a defining moment for a feminine self, set against militarism and the plural int he name of a general definition that procedes to the specific object of eros a particular individual who excites a particular desire." (Dubois) (Feminism, War, and Violence)
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Difficulty writing an epic, who loses someone to war, distant from events

Here sets herself apart from American lyric tradition, discontinuous genealogy--claims a space in line of epic poets--themes of Homer--war, death, loss, the father

Epic--*urgent teleological drive*

 paradoxically lyric focus on stopped time

intense imagism

"Alette is also a play on the Greek word *aletheia*, "out of forgetfulness" often translated as truth

"epic technique of posing the concrete--with its potential for disrupting tyrannies and hardened "truths"--against the mythic"

episodes framed on a page, paratactically/Homerically contained within the matrix of a narrative whole

 Woman and man and baby on fire: recalls Vietnam, drug addiction, AIDS, banality of the subway systems of great cities, and a welfare system that takes children from their mothers and their ghostly fathers -- god of moses, burning bush, Eliot's Wasteland, Dante, of course,

 The first person voice must survive the ordeal--ie., Grey's Anatomy, Harry Potter ;)

 Tension between its narrative movement and the vivid imagery, *ekphrasis---*

 Adorno: tension in the epic between the general and the particular, the mythic and the "eventual", the particular historical occurrence:

> "The amorphous flood of myth is the eternally invariant, but the telos of narrative is the differentiated, and the unrelentingly strict identity in which the epic subject matter is held serves to achieve its non-identity with what is simply identical, with unarticulated sameness: serves to create its differentness. The epic poem wants to report on something worth reporting on, something that is not the same as everything else, not exchangeable, something that deserves to be handed down for the sake of its name."
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*the epic exemplifies the generation of new movement, or "temporal change" from the repetition and sameness of myth.*

*NOTLEY's EXPERIMENT WITH BREATHING (connecting with breath behind the poem, Amiri Baraka, etc.?) mark the breath, return to the oral*

***Epic is a dead genre but also has unrealized potential for revolutionary temporality within mythic repetition.***

> **A woman and poet's attempt to return, discontinuously, to the great epic questions of loss, mourning, war, death, and liberation from tyranny, to generate resistance from within a form that resides uneasily with modernity.**
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