Bestial Rooms a Work of Prose Fiction
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bestial rooms a work of prose fiction Catherine Kidd A Thesis in The Department of English & Creative Writinp Presented in Partial Fuifilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada copyright Catherine Kidd, 1998 National Library Bibliothèque nationale 1*1 of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395. rue Wellington OttawaON K1AON4 Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une Licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or seli reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/nlm, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retallis ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts from it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substaotiels may be printed or otheMTise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. ABSTRACT Bestial Roorns Catherine Kidd This work of prose fiction traces the recollections of a young narrator as she attempts to piece together her own past through stories and letten wrinen to her infant daughter. Padcular emphasis is placed on the way the narrator's faltering memory figures and disfigures her sense of physical identity and gender, and also on issues surrounding the subjectification and objectification of desire. Focus is also placed on the narrator's consciousness of her wrinen medium and the degree to which it supplants expenence with an artificial facsimile; the narrator's inability to locate a consistent point-of-view in the vanishing world of her childhood points to the impossibility of constructing a reliable chronicle of the past. But unlike devices of mystery and suspense employed in fiction, the sense of mystery resulting from an incomplete mernory does not necessarily point toward singu1a.r revelation. hstead, the narrator recalls the elaborate mythologies which she had created in childhood to explain those aspects of her family history which had been left unspoken or kept hidden. Her memory begins to resemble a senes of rooms which the adult constmcts in order to retain and restrain the mythical beast of childhood, an obscure creature which seems to vanish whenever it is looked at directly. Although the narrator's past remains obscured in shadow, its negative shape begins to emerge as her stones describe the peripheral environment surrounding ber family's central inability to see, hear, or speak to one another. iii chap ters: -1 white elephant................................................ page 1 -2 the headless bride................................................ 17 3 a hollow leg ........................................................... 29 - . - -4 red delicious. ........................................................ 38 -5 yonder peasan t ..................................................... 4 1 -G i know you are but what am i ............................ 52 -7 isis millipede......................................................... 60 -8 oblique house........................................................ 69 -9 the innards & outards of spider eggs............... 77 -10 i'd give my eye-teeth for a set like yours...... 81 -Il horse-shoe crab the size of your head ........... 85 -12 cep halopod. ......................................................... -97 -13 tympanic membrane......................................... 102 -14 macula lutea ....................................................... I 1 I -15 to a field mouse................................................. 115 -16 shoel. .................................................................... 120 -17 the horse-leech .............. .... ..*.........*..........*....129 -18 stiIl-life................................................................ 135 -19 the walking man ................................................. 128 -20 pin k narcissus.................................................... 13S -2 1 bestial rooms...................................................... 145 -22 chat with buffalo mm............... .. ..................... 157 White Elephant The ma n from the riding stable sends flowers to my Mother. 1 neve:r see the little enclosure-cards but there must be some, hidden in a kitchen cupboard behind all her baking ingredients or somewhere upstairs. 1 don't snoop through her things anymore. After a certain point with people the case is closed, you stop trying to figure them out. You just let them be there in the room, like a lamp that's turned on. or one that's turned off. Right now she is sitting on the lawn like a chess piece near the bleached yellow circle where the inflatable turtle-pool used to be. She is snapping string beans. When 1 watch my Mother through the kitchen curtains, the flowers on the table blur and bleed, roses and baby's breath, corpuscles inside her house. If 1focus on the dozen red roses instead, it is rny Mother and the lawn and the pile of beans she's snapping which mesh together like cells, sunlit yellow-green, the cellulose fibres of a plant. Baby's breath. The smell of it, recalling nausea. Two lobes hang heavy on either side of Rose's face, those are her cheeks, with such tiny red lips between them like a cyclopean nipple. A cupid's bow, eructating. Rose is my little girl. 1 love her best when four fingers and her thumb are curled boneless about a strand of my hair, or held fast to one of my own fingers, which unlike hers are yellow and bony. 1love Rose best when her pastry-cheeks, her tiny restless mouth, are fastened sucking to my breast, suspending for a moment the crisis of being or provoking it. At times I hate the weight of her. You're hungry. My Mother says this. 1 step over the threshold of sliding glas doors ont0 the concrete patio, and then ont0 the lawn, and this is the first thing she says to me. She seems to Say it every time she sees me looking at the baby, whose crib has been set up out here on the patio like a cake with a gauzy cake-cover to keep mosquitoes away from her baby-blood. Sweetly, it seduces them. I am sulky today, apparently, but 1 step out of my shoes and tum a cartwheel on the gras Not gracefully. But for an instant my hands are feathered-green and my legs are spread wide open to the sky. 1 feel the oily sun-heat slide between them, and think of memaids in green bathing caps with sequins. They are turning and turning, their feet tuming to frns. I'm not hungry at ail, 1 tell my Mother as I crouch down beside the growing mound of string beans. Z are al2 those oysters, I tell her. 2 ate the whoie tirz. 1had even licked out the tin, unable to shake off the image of a cat cuning its tongue on the jagged Iid while licking oyster-juices from a can. God knows where these images corne from. The desire for symrnetry perhaps, or resoiution, the probable resolution of metai against skin. In my mind, any television army-doctor hunying toward a helicopter with supplies will always be decapitated by the spinning blades, just as my mother will always lose her fingers in the soup she purées in the blender, in my mind. It seems inevitable, aestheticdly. I will dways cut my legs in the shower, even if the razor sits untouched on the edge of the bathtub. Looking at a surface of skin inevitably recdls the fluids coursing beneath it. It is incredible to me that people manage to remain discrete and self-contained at dl, without somehow rupturing and flowing together like a broken yok or the piebald Fraser. Salmon Court. Salmon Court is the name of this cluster of housing-units where 1 live. The housing-units arrange themselves in a big circle, with a breech for cars to drive in and park in the centre like marbles in a chalk circle. AI1 the front doors of the cluster open ont0 the parking lot, at the very centre of which is a concrete-bordered island with a single tree growing nght in the rniddle of it. It is a very large oak tree. The housing units were built in 1967, but the tree must have ken there before that, judging from the size of it. Which is strange, when you think about it, to build a circular cluster of housing units around a single tree. 1 imagine the roots of it underground, pale as larvae fingering the soil, spreading out their shadow-branches like a phreatic brain. Around the outer circumference of the Salmon Court is the lawn, with ail the patio doors glinting their sliding glas Iike the grooves round the edge of a quarter. On the day- side of the circle where my mother siü snapping string-beans, the lawn slopes down to the highway. On the night-side, the side which seldom gets much daylight, it descends down into a ravine. 1 imagine that from the air, it looks as though we live in the green iris of a giant protrudent eyeball with a concrete highway brow and deep crease beneath it, with a single tree growing out of its pupil. Or it looks Iike we live on a giant cyborgian breast, part-organic part-architectural. On the lawn are a metal swing-set and a slide, and one of those carousels which you sit on while someone pulls you round in circles und ~ou'resick. The campus housing unit was built for manied students with children, that would be my parents and me respectively, though it's only relative to them that anyone wouid cal1 me a child. At her most sentimental, my mother occasionally rerninds me You know you 'll always be mg little girl. but it is only in this way that 1 am one, and it's only been since the birth of Rose that I've ever heard her Say it.