The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

“‘The way they live up in their fine old private estate, with their fences and their private path and their stylish way of living.’ He always went on until he was tired. When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry. Besides, each time he repeated himself he thought it was funnier; I knew he might go on like this until he was really sure that no one was listening any more, and I made a rule for myself: Never think anything more than once, and I put my hands quietly in my lap. I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have a little house all by myself on the moon.”

“It is always risky to rub sand
In real time
Over a diminishing plot
Each of whose elements is lost in personality
When the personality consists of nothing but doubts
It desires to put between
I’m thinking, someone mumbled
Thinking that the attention his hands are paying is wandering
Effacing one distinction only to discover another
A vast difference between two loves
And perhaps this can account for the enormous fear some people have of women
That’s easily aroused
By the invisible realities
Between beginning and end
The real plot lying between
But when we’re alone we revert
To love, and why not? who will know?
We share in the capacity of narrative to submit to the desires of this or that mind
Without giving up its secrets
And speak when no one answers
I think, the Nightingale Girl said to the Singing Man
That time requires anecdotes to contradict it
No answer
Time longs undividedly for something…”

A housewife is best understood not as a discrete unit, but rather as a smattering of gestures and objects that to the casual eye may seem unrelated. She is essentially a concatenation. Even an observer long habituated to the wiles of housewives will have considerable difficulty determining the precise composition of any one of them. If he guesses–correctly–that the hand raised to turn off the television and the dropped nickel circling the floor are both elements of the same housewife, he may overlook the coat slumping off its hanger, or the cigarette left burning but unsmoked on the edge of the stove. And if he does succeed in locating all of a housewife’s parts, he will still face the daunting task of understanding both their proper sequence and the symphonic relations between them.

How, then, to detect any housewives who may have insinuated themselves into your home? Install a strobe light in likely haunts such as the kitchen and bathroom. In that hesitant light, a housewife’s tics and fidgets should separate from the objects that contain them. The ruffled pages of a book, which in daylight appeared to contain only text, may suddenly become legible as aspects of her face. The electrical cord in the corner might take on an umbilical cast, linking the housewife to her most furtive movements. If you suspect a continuing infestation you should leave the strobe on permanently.

When the fire starts, at least you will know whom to blame.

As part of my ongoing study of horror I’m reading Marina Warner’s book on monsters, No Go the Bogeyman. And at the halfway mark the most intriguing thing (in a lovely, complex, charmingly ornate book) is her diagnosis of a debate buried in the subtexts of our culture: which member of the family is the monster, or more precisely, which position in it is the monstrous one? (As I write this, Andrew Bird is singing through my headphones: “Monsters will walk the earth!”) Monsters used to be identified primarily with child mortality, the constant menace that children wouldn’t live to adulthood. Warner makes the case that, since the odds of our children surviving are now quite good, we’ve been liberated to relocate the monster inside the child. Now that we’re not afraid monsters will eat our children, we’re free to be afraid that the children will eat us. (Of course, as some housewives out there are well aware, questions of children’s perceived monstrousness are dear to my heart.)

Warner’s hostility to this idea is clear. If there are cannibals in the family, she says, then they’re certainly the adults. Of course it’s easier to deal with the indictment children represent if we can turn the blame on them. Then the questions cease to be the hateful ones (what hellish legacy have we left them, what have we done to their planet, how has our personal darkness imprinted them?) and become instead more palatable (will they devour our bones, our homes, and our lives? Will they simply squeeze us out of existence? Isn’t there a fucking food crisis? Why can’t they just stop eating already?) As she notes, it’s far more likely that parents will do physical and emotional harm to their children than the other way around. During sieges and famines cannibals snatch children as the easier prey. If adults think of children as monsters, they’re only projecting their own sadism. And so Melanie Klein, who wrote a lot about children as loci of violent appetite, comes in for some criticism.

Warner hasn’t yet mentioned how overpopulation might enter into this suppressed identification of children with consuming monstrosity. I can’t help thinking it’s a pretty serious oversight. We may indeed be approaching a moment when humanity could eat itself: a kind of monstrosity involuntary and innocent, but devastating all the same.

(click for pronunciation)

“There was two babies in the White House and one of them said, ‘Look at that crazy man’! It happened to be Nixon. And Nixon said, ‘Boy, you dirty little midgets, I’m going to kill you. I want my Watergate money back. I want my money back. I want a pizza’!

And the baby flew through the air and landed in a car and then drove to New York City and then into the Atlantic Ocean. And an octopus said, ‘Hey look, a hotdog’. Because their weeners were so long, they looked like a hotdog. It’s longer than the ocean, so it took five hundred oceans to fit it in.

Then a boat came along and a lady who was watching, while pouring a half bottle of Ajax down her apron, said, and she was burping. Then she said, ‘Look, a couple of hotdogs’. And Nixon happened to be on it, and Nixon tried to bite off the tip of the weener, thinking it was a hotdog. And the kid pissed in Nixon’s mouth, and he pissed so much it filled up all five of the oceans, and there was no room for all of the water. Then his mother came and said, ‘Hey, Sweetie Pooh’! Then Nixon just happened to make a poop-oh of his own self.”

Though we take pains to conceal it, our bodies are permanently in decay. Give thanks that neither your eyesight nor that of your guests is keen enough to detect the detritus you’ve inevitably scattered about.

(Should you one day be struck with blindness, and should your other senses stretch out in reply, you will be pleased to discover that the bits of flesh you’ve left behind will make your house still feel your own.)

But be careful with houseguests or, equally so, bees, for should your detritus become fertilized or pollinated, you may be displeased with the results.

And most importantly: should you hear a shuffling while you sleep, fear not, for it is most likely your scattered, fallen cells attempting to scurry closer to their source. Lie still. Pretend to sleep. You’ll feel more whole in the morning.

(click for pronunciation)

Use ink to draw dotted lines around frequently used kitchen implements. This will not only make them easy to locate later, but will also restrain their tendencies toward metamorphic creep. When you decide to attempt a lemon meringue pie, you will not find your eggbeater covered in snake skin.

You should also find that ink controls your own unwelcome impulses. Cover your extremities with small, round dots about the size of dimes. If this proves insufficient, try inscribing your signature several hundred times across your feet and ankles. You may then rest assured that they will stay where you put them.

Ink can also help in obliterating objects that have lost their usefulness. Coat them thoroughly. Any remaining bare spots will permit the unwanted item to retain a worrying ontological persistence.

Similarly, a slow drip of ink placed above the heads of visitors or children will not remove them completely, but it should at least reduce their obtrusiveness.

I’ve only just started reading Nathalie Stephens’ The Sorrow and the Fast of It. It’s a slim book — the publisher’s filing directive on the back says “Literature,” The Strand nonetheless shelved it under poetry — but it seems to ask for a slow read. “Book-length prose poem” would probably be accurate, but the way it hints toward narrative makes me think we might be able to call it a novel before too long. At this point it feels like it’s brushing up against narrative, like we’re meant to divine the novel it isn’t through the tea leaves it’s left us with. It’s an interesting effect.

So I like it so far, but I like it despite cringing at a number of phrases. The sentence I felt obligated to remove from yesterday’s quotation, for example, was “It was madness even as it wasn’t.” Ugh. And there are a whole slew of these: “It not so much is as isn’t.” “[…]I will write down all that I can’t remember.” “[…]less the appearance of a self than the disappearance[…].” “I anticipated everything save that very absence.” You can note the pattern, the too-simple mid-sentence logic-reversal, the too-easy-to-articulate paradox. Read the rest of this entry »

“There is a fever that overcomes.

The first time was summer and the dogs were delighted in water. The second was spring breaking. Both were evocative. A skin detaching from bone. And something scraping thinly between. [….] There was a plank of wood and I laid my body on it. That became the city for falling. Bone was more breakable. And the fragility of it was unbearable. Duras would have termed : la femme. Am I wrong to contest? My sexe is limp for days. Even as my fingers.”

“Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting directly upon some great voyage; and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts of a play that had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over.”

Mrs. Dalloway has taken to following her when she goes out shopping, or to visit with friends. It’s not really a problem: the chick is presentable enough, you can take her anywhere, and it’s not like the clerks will think she’s shoplifting or anything. She’s mute, although sometimes her thoughts nudge Sally more than words would. Still, Sally makes the best of it, even tries to make it fun, sometimes using Mrs. Dalloway as a hat stand or hooking an umbrella over her stiff pale arm. She can’t help feeling Mrs. Dalloway’s mooning silences and twitchy eyes as an incitement to chaos, though: Why don’t you put that in your purse? Why don’t you try lying down on the sidewalk for a while, and just see what happens? The problem with her is that she wants to go somewhere, like maybe to some vapid colonial paradise where the palm trees mimic sustained explosions, and she’s got the crackpot idea that if she just follows Sally long enough that’s where they’ll end up. It could start to get kind of galling. The joke of it is that Sally’s not going anywhere wilder than the nearest Woolworth’s.

After a few days Sally tries shutting the door of the luncheonette in Mrs. Dalloway’s face. Still the woman lingers persistently outside, her breath fogging up the window more than you’d think could be possible. First her mopey, drapey face, then her elegant feathered hat and sloping shoulders, all disappear behind a sweaty gray round on the glass. Once the gray circle is large and even enough, a few drops spatter onto it–tears, Sally assumes–but instead of trickling down the way they ought to they trace recursive loops through the cloud on the pane.

Sally does her best to ignore it; this way Mrs. Dalloway has of fucking with gravity strikes Sally as the most perverted thing she’s done yet. And why can’t she keep her tears on her own damned face? The droplets stroke up, coil back, then take small leaps across empty space, cutting trails through the gray as they go so that scribbles of Mrs. Dalloway’s face start to show through again. Her wet black pupils track the ham sandwich all the time Sally eats it. Sally feels like she’s caught at the center of two sticky, elliptical orbits, and although she doesn’t want to watch she finds herself glancing over at the window more frequently. And then she gets it: those tears are writing on the picture window. Of course the script is backwards from where Sally is sitting, but there’s no mistaking it. It looks like a love letter. Sally tries to pretend she isn’t reading it, but she can’t help smiling to herself. So Mrs. Dalloway is finally coming straight out with it, and asking Sally to take her away!

The letter isn’t to her, but to someone named Richard. Sally doesn’t even know the guy.

Mrs. Dalloway is asking him, twenty times in a row, if she can finally come home.

“Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single–sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the manwomanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women. And if it be true that it is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain that condition now than ever before. Here I came to the books by living writers, and there paused and wondered if this fact were not at the root of something that had long puzzled me. No age can ever have been as stridently sex–conscious as our own; those innumerable books by men about women in the British Museum are a proof of it. The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion; it must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics which they would not have troubled to think about had they not been challenged. And when one is challenged, even by a few women in black bonnets, one retaliates, if one has never been challenged before, rather excessively. That perhaps accounts for some of the characteristics that I remember to have found here, I thought, taking down a new novel by Mr A, who is in the prime of life and very well thought of, apparently, by the reviewers”

“—I wonder, said Carlyle, what it would be like to be shut up in glass and tucked away in the ground like this. To have one’s redness of blood sway slightly at the world’s turn, at the pull of the moon, at the tremor of a near footstep. But to be passed again and again and never chosen. Do you think they want to be chosen, James?

—I couldn’t say, said James. For myself, I would want to be broken against the side of a ship by a distinguished-looking older man in front of a cheering crowd prior to the sailing of said ship on its maiden voyage, which would also be its last, as the ship would sink when it reached deep water and no one would survive. Songs would be sung of the ship. In that way I would survive.”

In the course of thinking about which texts generate fear and why, I’ve found myself recalling the book that might have scared me more than any other in my life: Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, a long narrative poem published in 1862. I was probably five or six years old when it was first read out loud to me, and it’s formed an undercurrent in my mind ever since, a private haunting. And even now rereading it sends shivers through me, though I find it hard to communicate the precise quality of dread it inspires.

The story involves two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, who go every evening to fetch water in a glen where the goblins sell fruit. Like many of the best horror stories, this is a seduction narrative: the girls know that the fruit is dangerous, but it’s still terribly beautiful. (Can there be terror unless the victim is complicit? I suspect that real dread is provoked by the treachery inherent in the self, its hidden pitfalls.) Rossetti offers a refrain, always in parentheses: “(Men sell not such in any town)”, and each time those parentheses seem to enclose a soft patch in the mind. The words affect me as if my foot had slipped into quicksand.

Lizzie runs from the goblins; Laura lingers behind, and trades a lock of her hair for the fruit. It’s a potent image of seduction, addiction: offering part of your own body in exchange for an experience both violent and transcendent. (”She sucked and sucked and sucked the more/Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;/ She sucked until her lips were sore”). But the passage which has stayed with me more than any other comes once Laura finally wanders home, only to be scolded by the unsuspecting Lizzie. I’ll quote it in full:

“‘Dear, you should not stay so late,/Twilight is not good for maidens;/Should not loiter in the glen/In the haunts of goblin men./Do you not remember Jeanie,/How she met them in the moonlight,/Took their gifts both choice and many,/Ate their fruits and wore their flowers/Plucked from bowers/Where summer ripens at all hours?/But ever in the noonlight/She pined and pined away;/Sought them by night and day,/Found them no more, but dwindled and grew gray;/Then fell with the first snow,/While to this day no grass will grow/Where she lies low:/I planted daisies there a year ago/That never blow./You should not loiter so.’”

Laura doesn’t listen. She’s still crazed from the fruit, already delirious in anticipation of getting more, but of course Jeanie’s story presages her own. The next night only Lizzie can hear the goblins calling them: having once eaten the fruit, you can never find it again. This is an element of the plot which has stymied interpreters who try to explain the story purely in terms of sex, which generally isn’t too hard to find a second time. It makes more sense as a depiction of the insatiability of addiction, but it doesn’t perfectly correspond to addiction either: the spell can be broken by a second taste of the fruit.

It might be that slipperiness which makes this poem so eerie: it can’t be reduced to something as simple as Laura’s losing her virginity, or getting hooked on coke. The otherness that consumes Laura is indwelling, close to home: a complex of destructive longings that ripens in permanent summer, and that doesn’t need to conform to any particular devastation, because it can transmute into any of them.

Octavia Butler’s “Near of Kin,” according to the jacket copy of her Bloodchild collection, is “her only non-SF story.” In this collection, at least, which is all I’ve read of hers, it’s the only story that doesn’t contain some sort of horror or fantasy element, the only story that rests perfectly within the rules of our real, everyday world.

It’s no coincidence, then, that this simple, touching story of a girl and her uncle going through the belongings left behind by her recently dead mother, his recently dead sister, is, in the end, an incest narrative. (The girl reveals to her uncle that she knows he’s her father). This isn’t to say that the specter of incest here takes on any of the uncanny qualities we see in, say, Les Enfants Terribles (see two earlier posts), but rather simply that incest, by virtue of its own cultural force, even without reinforcement by literary device, can take the place of the monstrous or uncanny for an author otherwise exclusively interested in those modes. Analogous in some ways maybe to Barthes’ photographic punctum, incest serves as the element of the story that pierces the reader, that jars us to attention. (Bloodchild’s first two stories, for counter-example, use the horror of bodily evisceration to similar effect).

One more thing: while looking around for a source online for this story’s full text (unfortunately not available), I came across another site writing about the Bloodchild collection. She sketches out their plots much more completely and elegantly than I have, so it’s worth taking a look for that alone. (It also looks like a great site in general.)

About “Near of Kin,” she writes that while “Butler calls this her sympathetic incest story I find it sad that there is very little in the way of redeeming human relationships in the story.” I wonder if this is a common reaction, because while the mother-daughter relationship is certainly depressing (the mother having all but abandoned her daughter as a child), I read the daughter-uncle relationship as really quite hopeful. It sounds like he’s always been a loving, if distant, figure in her life, and it sounds like he can now, with their shared paternity secret acknowledged, be a whole lot more.

A couple footnotes to last month’s post on Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles:

¹Let me point out here that intragenerational incest makes for the perfect tragic-romantic love story — much more fertile than any Shakespearean nonsense about warring families — partly because the familial closeness can easily read as Perfect For Each Other (bonus points if they’re twins, bonus points for you as a reader if you believe in Sameness as a proper romantic quality), but even more so because what keeps a story’s sibling lovers apart, what makes their love monstrous, what necessitates their narrative punishment, is the very prohibition-taboo upon which society is founded. Teenagers in love against their rival families’ wishes? Facile by comparison!

²When I was a third of the way through, and utterly taken with its uncanny charms, I assumed that Les Enfants Terribles was building up to a central taboo revelation, but it turns out that “incest” only gets mentioned once, only in the book’s final scene, only “one little moment” before the siblings death, “[…]where flesh dissolves, where souls embrace, where incest lurks no more.” Read the rest of this entry »

“What was happening to them was that every bad time produced a bad feeling that in turn produced several more bad times and several more bad feelings, so that their life together became crowded with bad times and bad feelings, so crowded that almost nothing else could grow in that dark field. But then she had a feeling of peace one morning that lingered from the evening before spent sewing while he sat reading in the next room. And a day or two later, she had a feeling of contentment that lingered in the morning from the evening before when he kept her company in the kitchen while she washed the dinner dishes. If the good times increased, she tought, each good time might produce a good feeling that would in turn produce several more good times that would produce several more good feelings. What she meant was that the good times might multiply perhaps as rapidly as the square of the square, or perhaps more rapidly, like mice, or like mushrooms springing up overnight from the scattered spore of a parent mushroom which in turn had sprung up overnight with a crowd of others from the scattered spore of a parent, until her life with him would be so crowded with good times that the good times might crowd out the bad as the bad times had by now almost crowded out the good.”

On those afternoons when you prowl inside the limits of your own exoskeleton, unable to locate its windows and doors, you may feel you are in for a dreary interlude.

We suggest you adopt a brighter view of your confinement. Take advantage of the enforced seclusion to catch up on the housework, do your nails, or read some Gertrude Stein.