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| Truth in
Abjection: Towards an Aesthetics of Fear |
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| “A
poet's work… To name the unnamable, to point at frauds
to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to
sleep. And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict,
then they will nourish him” —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses “For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, / and we are so awed because it serenely disdains / to annihilate us.” —Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies |
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| “I
resist this vision of yours about serial killers. What would you have
me learn? Or is simple enjoyment of turned phrases enough?” This
was the sole response offered by Carolyn Forché in the bottom margin
of a poem I'd submitted to her workshop—one from a series of love
poems in the voice of Jack the Ripper. During their composition, I
encountered a few moments of moral quibbling—was I killing these women
over again? was I, as my Philosophy professor suggested, internalizing
and practicing the habits of the Ripper by writing in first person?—but
these questions pointed back to me and not the potential audience of the
poems. What, as Forché asked, is the audience to learn from
such poems? What is the aesthetic draw of fear? And further,
what is the poet's responsibility when handling horror, victimization, politics? Negative Capability, the Aesthetics of Abjection, and the Gothic Sublime One possible entrance into this subject is the idea of Negative Capability. Keats defines Negative Capability in an 1817 letter to his brothers as when one is capable of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” going on to say that “with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration” (Keats 43). When attempting to construct an aesthetics of fear, we must start with the advantages of being placed in such a condition. In her Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva applies the term “Abjection” to cover the instances of uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and fear which Keats describes. When abjection occurs, there is no proper object upon which the terror is fixed, nothing to relate to the self so that one can begin to detach oneself through the act of understanding. For Kristeva, the only relation between that which is abject and the self is that the abject is in full opposition to the self. She goes on to write that “If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 1-2). There are common objects which remind us of our mortality and which we find fearful—blood, waste, the flatline of a heart monitor… these all serve as signifiers of death, and are therefore more easily set aside. These are, as Kristeva says, “what life withstands…” leaving us “on the border of [our] condition as a living being” (3). The collapse of meaning forces us to move forward and attempt to come to terms—to grow and redefine, or to expand, our sense of meaning. While this is not necessarily easy to accomplish, we are left with a semblance of hope or resolution which we did not have before. But it is death stripped of signifiers that is truly abject. A cadaver, the witnessing of a murder—these are moments where we no longer have control of the border between life and death. We can no longer ignore or feel in control of such a situation. It is the abject, now, that encroaches upon us. It is in this extreme uncertainty—the balancing next to a truth too large to be understood—where we take Keats' next step towards the Gothic Sublime. In his book on the subject, Vijay Mishra paraphrases Kant's idea of the sublime, saying that “the effects are the consequence of the mind's confrontation with an idea too large for expression, too self-conscious to be contained in any adequate form of representation, but which idea, as representation, in a momentary surrender of the law of reason the mind nevertheless grasps” (Mishra 19). The sublime, it seems, is a moment of understanding the absence of understanding, producing both a sense of repulsion and attraction. Imagination is stimulated beyond its limits, resulting in terror, while reason is still able to comprehend the enormity of the situation. The reader is left to linger in the doubt and Mystery that Keats desired without reason being overwhelmed, to linger comfortably next to Truth, experiencing it without full comprehension. There must be a certain distance, however, which is achieved through Beauty. As countless writers from H.P. Lovecraft to Joyce Carol Oates have said, fear is the oldest and strongest emotion we are capable of feeling. To place a reader so close to this level of terror, one where comprehension is impossible, without allowing the intellect even the smallest foothold, would work against the purpose. For the sublime to occur, the intellect has to be active and calm, able to account for the overflowing of emotion. As Terry Heller writes in The Delights of Terror, “The sublime brings into aesthetic experience the irrational, the unknown, and the terrible, thereby transforming pain and danger into parts of beauty” (Heller 201). If we are unable to understand the full truth of an experience, we are allowed in the sublime to at least experience it aesthetically. Whatever the level of fear and abjection, we are left aware of our lack of absoluteness and are thrust (against our will or not) towards filling whatever voids we've found at least to satisfaction. We are forced to question and engage that which we usually turn our heads from. The practical application of this is described by Joyce Carol Oates in her essay The Aesthetics of Fear. “We can presume that aesthetic fear is not an authentic fear but an artful simulation of what is crude, inchoate, nerve-driven, and ungovernable in life; its evolutionary advantage must be the preparation for the authentic experience, unpredictable and always imminent” (Oates 26). The aesthetics of fear in a sense allows us to come to terms with our status as human, both inwardly towards the self as well as towards the world around us. The Poetry of Witness: Political Poetry and Victim Art The poet simply needs look to the everyday to find fodder befitting the fear aesthetic. In her essay “Poetry, Prophecy, and Survival,” Denise Levertov writes that “We live in an unprecedented time, a time when as we all know the fate of the Earth itself lies in the balance as never before; when day by day powerful forces all over the globe are tipping that balance further towards extinction” (Levertov 149). The objects of fear surround us, ready to be engaged. Political poetry and “Victim Art” fall into the category of the Poetry of Witness. The poet's job is to engage the evidence of the turmoil surrounding us truthfully and with hope for change. The audience of a poem is often aware of the subject—the holocaust, for example, the latest serial killer, Bosnia…—but, like the blood and waste Kristeva speaks of, these things are easily cast aside because of their geographic distance or filtering through newspapers or television. The poet forces the reader to become aware of the situation through more than just reminding them. The reader is dropped into the situation focused on the emotions rather than the facts. Because every reader enters a poem with a set of personal and emotional responses, their contact with the victim forces them to draw correlations between their own experiences, to put themselves in the victim's place and therefore feel the need for change. It is for this reason that the poet cannot hold back. Many critics of political as well as horror writing claim that a work should show the human condition rising above that which is attacking or oppressing it. This leaves no avenue for change, leaving the experience in many ways as distant as it was to begin with. There may be a lingering of apprehension, but coming through more strongly is the (usually false) notion that whatever happens we can overcome. To provide a “happy ending” or to lessen the experience of the victim for the sake of the audience is, according to Oates, “another kind of tyranny” (Oates 72). Not only does it lessen the possibility of change, but perhaps more importantly, it downplays the gravity of the victim's situation. It's the aesthetic equivalent of adding insult to injury. Poetry of the Victimizer It was Forché's role in the Poetry of Witness that caused my initial surprise at her response to my Ripper poem. There were, after all, victims. One thing that must have troubled her first off, however, was that I was not witnessing from the viewpoint of the victim, but of the victimizer. The moments of moral quibbling I referenced in the introduction were regarding this—the fact that I would research one of the victims, reading the autopsy reports and seeing the crime scene photos, then start the new poem in the voice of the one who actually did it, all the while referencing “my knife.” If aligning the reader with the victim allows a manipulation of emotions to work towards some sort of change, is there anything to be gained in forcing the reader to associate with the victimizer? The most basic response is that if poetry of the victim is abject and fearful, and finds the strength of its effects in those qualities, poetry of the victimizer takes the reader even further down the road of abjection. It is one thing to associate with a character who is being acted upon. They are helpless and therefore so are we. We have no power to struggle and can only piece together what we've learned after the fact. To associate with the character who has the power, however, touches something much more fearful deep within us. Kristeva writes: If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than the abject (Kristeva 5).We are forced to reckon with humanity not in terms of the entire species, but in terms of the self. Having put aside or stifled the truth of our evolutionary heritage, as we do with signifiers of mortality, we are now reminded of the primitive and bestial. The Antihero and the Dramatic Monologue In workshops where I've shown the Ripper poems, the most common response is that people were most uncomfortable not with the act of murder and its descriptions, but with the fact that they were actually starting to sympathize with Jack. I have heard the same regarding Browning's Porphyria's Lover, in which a man in a chair quietly watches his lover start to undress, sit on his lap, and kiss him before he winds her hair around her neck and chokes her. As long as there's a glimmer of insight into the motivation of the killer, the reader may find him or herself sympathizing and, consequently, struggling desperately for definition. It is this sympathy that makes Browning's monologues unsettling, and their success largely depends upon how easily our sympathies rise without our realizing. The Dramatic Monologue achieves this through its point of view, giving (as M. W. MacCallum said) “facts from within,” and forcing us to draw our meaning from the matter of the poem itself without inflicting judgments based in anything outside of the piece (Langbaum 78). The suspension of judgment is another essential to the monologue's effectiveness. In his book on the genre, Robert Langbaum writes “When we have said all the objective things about Browning's My Last Duchess, we will not have arrived at the meaning until we point at what can only be substantiated by an appeal to effect—that moral judgment does not figure importantly in our response to the duke, that we even identify ourselves with him” (Langbaum 82). The simple fact that the poem is in the duke's voice and is spoken (essentially) to us is not enough to create the effects of sympathy. One cannot write a poem simply describing a murder in the first person and expect the audience to forgive. It is the style and charisma of the character that draws us in and makes his actions, in some strange way, seem actually logical. He shows us exactly who he is and what he has done, as well as the fact that he's going to get away with it; has worked his charm on us just as easily as the envoy he is speaking to in the poem. As Langbaum writes, “The duke reveals all…about himself, grows to his full stature, because we allow him to have his way with us; we subordinate all other considerations to the business of understanding him” (Langbaum 85). A similar kind of manipulation occurs in Porphyria's Lover. It lingers for almost 40 of its 60 lines on giving the setup for its action. Porphyria comes home, tries to get her lover's attention (he sits quietly and does not respond), eventually performs a minor striptease before coming closer and speaking of her love for him. The poetic description of all of this abruptly halts, momentarily when the speaker says “I found/ A thing to do, and all her hair / In one long yellow string I wound / Three times her little throat around / and strangled her” (Lines 37-41). The statement is brief and, though the stripping of the poetic language that comes before makes it stand out a bit, the speaker moves along without describing the murder in greater detail. He quickly returns to a more poetic diction and attempts to cast himself as a caring lover, saying in the next line “No pain felt she; / I am quite sure she felt no pain” (41-2). For the rest of the poem, their encounter is described much as before, and, were it not for the single sentence confessing his murder, we would likely not even notice her death. (see page 15 for an example from my own Letters from Jack) The fact of the speaker's villainy is greatly downplayed. The rest of his argument describes how he simply wanted to be sure she truly loved him, and would continue to, which is easy enough an anxiety for any reader to relate to. Langbaum's assessment of the poem states that in it, Browning “is relying upon an extraordinary complication of what still remains a rationally understandable motive” (Langbaum 88). Though we are moved to sympathize, at least in some degree, with the villainous speakers in the Monologues, there is always an understanding of their faults. We do not believe, for instance, that Browning is attempting to actually convince us that killing one's wife or lover truly is a logical way to preserve her love or beauty. The speakers are not heroes but antiheroes, meant to force us to approach the situation from an alternative path in order to see a situation and gain knowledge of it from a different perspective. The antihero, then, is not the typical villain, but rather is a much more deliberate and crafted character. By telling their side of the story (or the narrator's focusing on it), they effectively replace the hero and our attentions are focused on what is happening to them rather than what they are doing to others. The envoy's account of duke, for example, would surely point out details that would change our perception of him. Our sympathies for the antihero make him a paradox, representing an opposition to the accepted ways of thinking. Victor Brombert in his study In Praise of Antiheroes writes that, “Implicitly or explicitly, they cast doubt on values that have been taken for granted, or were assumed to be unshakable,” concluding, “This may indeed be the principal significance of such antimodels, of their secret strengths and hidden victories. The negative hero, more keenly perhaps than the traditional hero, challenges our assumptions, raising anew questions of how we see, or wish to see ourselves” (Brombert 2). We have, it seems, worn the hero out, learning almost all that we can from him. The antihero, by subverting our notions of the hero, provides a new way to enter many of the same stories and see what else is there. The Poet's Responsibility Plato, as we know, wanted the poet out of the Republic. He saw the poet as disturbing and disruptive, as the rabble-rouser of this essay's Rushdie epigraph. Aristotle, however, saw these qualities as beneficial and, in the first true work of literary criticism (his Poetics), made the claim for the poet as a valuable citizen. The question still remains as to the poet's moral obligations and responsibilities. One could point to the separation of Aristotle's Poetics from his Ethics as evidence enough that there is a difference between poetic and ethical morality, but since some of what I've described above could be construed by some as sadism, we shall go further. In an essay entitled “Poetry and Morals,” W. K. Wimsatt offers some of the moral assessments of poetry. One critic mentions that just as it is unethical for an engineer to build a bridge whose durability he doubts, or for a chef to serve food he knows may be on its way to spoiling, the poet “may not express anything, however beautifully, which both he and his critics have reason to believe will be subversive to the thought or action on the part of him who reads it” (Wimsatt 90). Irving Babbitt and the neohumanists say that poetry gives “ethical insight” (89). To respond to Babbitt first, ethical insight is not the same as ethical instruction. A poem does not tell the reader what to think about an ethical choice, but simply presents a situation and the feelings connected to the situation. It is this ability of the reader to juggle right and wrong that refutes the earlier claim. The bridge and food prepared by the reckless creator, if and when they fail, leave the victim with no way out. A poem, its work done in the intellect and emotions, depends upon the soundness of the reader's own insights to determine whether it will succeed or fail. This is not to say that a poem can be created recklessly, or that the audience is to be forgotten. As mentioned before, special attention must be paid to the plight of victims, to the truth that hovers just next to or behind the abject. Wimsatt's critics would give us two alternatives: Either morals overtake poetry, or poetry claims and defines ethics (88). I would offer a third possibility—that the poem's distinct morality is the maintaining of its own integrity. The poet's responsibility, then, is to be true to the poem first—to its construction and its contents. Whatever the poem needs to accomplish its purpose, no matter how beautiful or vile it may be, must not be held back. Wimsatt quotes Maritain on this: The artist takes for stuff and substance of his work whatever is most profound, most exalted and most vile, the moral life of man, the heart of man “hollow and full of filth”—and the rarest passions and the life of the spirit itself, nay, the Gospel and sanctity, everything; but with it all an absolute prohibition, upon pain of committing a sacrilege against art, against pursuing any other end than pure delight, order, richness, tranquillity, and rapture (Wimsatt 91-92).Maritain hits on all of it in this quote—the subjects of poetry, the fearful, the abject, the sublime—suggesting finally that if the poet has to morally answer to anything, it is the art of poetry itself. This is not to say there is not a line to be crossed, but rather that it is a line of aesthetics and integrity to the purpose of the work and not one of social morality. The poet we speak of in this essay has a definite purpose in writing the poem, else the considerations of the effects of all that has been discussed above would be unnecessary. If we return to Keats' assessment of Death on a Pale Horse in his letter on Negative Capability, he said that it had a sort of beauty on its own, but without anything to be intense upon. There was no truth to be gained from the beauty. The works of art that have sparked moral criticism have failed in their purpose mainly because there has been too much to be intense upon. Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, for instance, sets out to satirize media violence and its effects by hyperbolizing the representation of it in the film, but crosses an aesthetic line when the violence and gore in the film go far beyond what is necessary to make the point. By doing this, the film begins to glorify that which it satirizes, and the point it hopes to make is more or less obliterated. As mentioned above, the artist cannot hold back anything necessary to allow the piece to communicate its point to the audience, but once the point is secured he or she cannot cross the aesthetic line without putting the purpose in jeopardy. ____________ The draw of fear and abjection is constant and ever-present. A glance at everything from horror films to amusement parks to the History Channel's obsession with Nazi Germany prove that we have an interest in fear in every form. In poetry (and in all art) it is often fear or discomfort that drive us towards revelation, tempered for us in Keats' terms, by “their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth” (Keats 42). Some of us seek fear as a thrill, some as a means of exploring those things our culture or survival instincts keep at bay, while others go, as Stephen King writes, “to the forbidden door or window willingly because we understand that a time comes when we must go whether we want to or not…and not just to look, but to be pushed through” (King 394). However we come towards fear, it is never death itself that is the object. As Oates and Kristeva point out, simple death always means something. It is, rather, the loss of definition—the uncanny associations with the victim and victimizer, the realization of the self as other, the overwhelming of the intellect by a truth that gleams too brightly. Oates puts all of this best: “These fears, these anxieties, these recurring and compulsive nightmares, so powerfully dramatized by artists of the tragic and the grotesque through centuries, are not aberrations of the psyche, but the psyche's deepest and most profound revelations. The aesthetics of fear is the aesthetics of our common humanity” (Oates 35). To return to Forché's question, what are we to learn? The drive behind all of this—the effects of horror and abjection, the purpose in depicting victims and victimizers both historical and fictitious, the shift to from hero to antihero, the governing factor of the aesthetic line and the poet's responsibility to it—seems to be little more than Keats' own beloved Truth. Earlier this year, during another workshop in the same classroom where Forché had taught the year before, Li-Young Lee told us that “The purpose of poetry is to break the heart.” This can be done, he said, through both blissful awe or immense fear, giving as an example a man standing on a precipice. In his right hand he holds a rose, past his left he sees nothing but the void below. He looks at his right hand and quietly, inquisitively says “Whoa!,” then looks to his left and screams, terrified, “WHOA!!!!” The same reaction, and in both cases, an astonishment with the truth of something very complex. This essay has focused on the more frightening “Whoa,” partially because it is the most criticized, but also because its avenues in the search for truth and meaning are less explored. To say “truth” at all in a postmodern setting seems inherently laughable, but whether we believe it exists or not we continue to search for it. And if, in an aesthetics of fear it is, as mentioned above, both what governs our consideration and composition of such works of art, as well as what we are led to by them, we are left with the most hopeful of postmodern paradoxes—that the journey is indeed the destination.
Brombert, Victor. In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, 1830-1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Heller, Terry. The Delights of Terror. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Keats, John. Letters of John Keats. Ed. Robert Gittings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Berkley, 1984. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York. Columbia University Press, 1982. Langbaum, Robert. “The Dramatic Monologue: Sympathy and Judgment.” The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1963. 75-108 Levertov, Denise. “Poetry, Prophecy, Survival.” New and Selected Essays. New York: New Directions, 1992. 143-153. Mishra, Vijay. The Gothic Sublime. New York: SUNY Press, 1994. Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Aesthetics of Fear.” Where I've Been, and Where I'm Going. New York: Plume Books, 1999. 26-35. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Art and 'Victim Art.'” Where I've Been, and Where I'm Going. New York: Plume Books, 1999. 69-75. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1997. Wimsatt, W. K. “Poetry and Morals: A Relation Reargued.” The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meanting of Poetry. Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. 85-100. |
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