repetition: class2
Girl. Boy. Horse. Relationship. Arrows of Stress. Shall I take them as I delivered them to you? Or shall I deliver the initial commonality: genre and gender. These texts have something in common beyond repetition, and maybe that is no coincidence. They have in common the heaviness of expectation. They have in common the resistance to binary thinking.
But wait--you might say to me. Aren't they all in the business of emphasizing expectation? Isn't that what repetition does? Doesn't it serve to hammer in all the assumptions, to beat us down with them, to pound home ideas of what a good girl is, how boys become men. Doesn't Bausch's repetition tell us what a heteronormative romantic drama is, how it is scripted and replayed until it is impossible to inhabit? Doesn't Bourgeois explain how stress is attached to a female-coded body and how that stress is dealt with by excision of the head/the mind/the face/the very identity of the body's agent?
The answer? I think it is yes, and no. This is my hidden agenda this week. You all just spoke and eloquently, about the many many things that repetition can do in a text:
it can teach, and it can idealize (practice makes perfect)
it can bore
it can emphasize (but to what end?)
it can insist, sometimes to the point of doubt (the lady doth protest too much, methinks)
it can terrorize (my name is inigo montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die)
it can wound and kill, as in: death by a thousand cuts
it can fail, the engine worn down
it can become an engine itself (I think I can, I think I can), revving towards discovery (the Meisner technique in theater does this--two actors repeating an interchange until one feels compelled to change their response)
it can mimic the mundane or the bureaucratic cycling of our lives, and signal resistance to it (Melville's Bartleby preferred not to)
it can depress
it can drone on and on and on and on and on and on and on
it can make a rhythm, a refrain, it can inaugurate song
it can steal our breath, and it can echo the constancy of breathing
it can become familiar, and thus invisible, and thus insidious
it can build a sameness that makes surprise the more surprising, and also (paradoxically) inevitable
But one of the more hidden effects of repetition is that it undermines itself. Whatever it is trying to do--by introducing itself more than once it invites a second reading, and by reading I mean interpretation. It doubles itself, it is its own mirror, it offers the sci-fi possibility of two-roads-diverging in a yellow wood, and these roads indicate not mere geographic choice but multiverse. There is twinning, cloning, and with those come the non-identical, the corruption of the file, the doppelganger, venom. In short, slippage--to the side or to the dark side. Luke, I am your father.
Thus, the insistence of the mother to the girl in Jamaica Kincaid's near (but not complete) monologue is authoritarian, absolutely. It is also a compressed repetition of all this woman learned, and it is her time travel back to herself to deliver essential information to herself when she was a girl--so much so that she ignores, the first time, her own daughter's interjection. This monologue is both cruel and fueled by love. It is a set of rules to follow and it is a warning of what happens when they are not and then plan the bs and cs for the inevitable slippage. It is an admonition and it is a confession. There is terror here and contempt and kindness and worry and they are difficult to separate. For some readers, it is easy to hate this mother. For some readers, it is easy to excuse her. It is a miracle of a text that can make a person want to do both.
Rick Moody's Boys exhibits the anaphora that is the hallmark of Joy Harjo's poem, and a kind of exact internal rhyme throught. At the beginning and at the end of so many sentences and scenes, he has the boys entering the house. The entrance is both opening and closing and this may be a key. It is all back doors with this text. You only realize what has been done to you once you are inside, if you have allowed yourself to get there, the density of non-paragraphing such a commitment these days. Years you must commit to in a single reading, and if you could stop, if you could get out easily, how then would the reading have been? The cycle as writ is unbroken, wearing a rut into the idea of the American nuclear family, so much so that all of them are spokes, and these twins sometimes so close, sometimes oppositional, but the wheel moves on relentlessly... so much so that when a spoke falls out and the sister dies, no one speaks, the loss goes unspoken. Only when (and Rick Moody relies on this, he relies on Freud and our knowledge of an Oedipal world, so that though they do not kill their father, for the boys to become not-boys requires his death, another part of the cycle Moody will not release us from). And yet the language does. The closed cell of the language can make a reader angry as well as heartbroken. Can make a reader question: must we? Must we live inside this thing? Is there no refusal to be had? No mother or sister or even brother who can truly break from this inevitable narrative loop? So, in this piece, the potential for rejection might live outside the text... but we are still alerted to it, as I would argue we are in the Bausch choreography, specifically told that a heartless world has imposed these expectations on this couple, since what symbolizes a heartless world better than a humorless white man in a suit?
As will happen in so many of our weeks, the poem offers a different possibility. Try. Try to map a singular interpretation on horse in Joy Harjo's poem. Try to find a word that equals horse. Her poem is about slippage. And horses is not the only word that slips. So does "had" - what does it mean to "have" something? To possess it? To know it? To comprehend it? To be afflicted with it, like a disease?
In the Oxford English Dictionary (which you should become well-acquainted with this term), the definition of the verb *have* runs for several pages. It is a Germanic word, and in addition to the more obvious possibilities, definitions include: to be comprised of - as in the family has five members, to possess (as in knowledge) - I have most of the verses by heart, to be in relations with - I wanted to have him as my advisor, to wear - he has on a clean shirt, to host - she had them over for dinner.
The reasons poems are so instructive / will be so instructive in this class - is because they are of a questioning genre. They question language. Which brings me back to the idea of the day... that repetition cannot not (note the litotes) undermine its own insistence just as genre and genders cannot not fracture/fragment and in all other ways gesture at their own inadequacy... because categories are all established by repetitive performance, and that conformation to expectation will necessarily eventually slip and reveal itself as performance (this we have from the theorist Judith Butler), and when a convenient category slips we will see the moustachio-ed huckster behind the proverbial curtain. There is no Oz. There is only Zuul.
Look again to the OED and you will see that genre and gender come from the same root - the french gendre - and in the 14th century that word was used to denote kinds/types/categories - as in our word genre, but it was also a verb that meant both to copulate and to give birth, to give rise to-- to *create new forms* - we have this echo still in the verb "to engender." So gender, when it was first formed, in its infancy as a word, was never meant to stop at two. That was a truncation that happened in its adolescence as the meanings imposed upon it grew rigid and calcified and finally settled. Never settle.
The French might say: have your horses, and eat them too.
