SLEIGHT: DISARTICULATION OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MOTHER by KIRSTEN KASCHOCK (Under the Direction of Reginald McKnight) ABSTRACT The apologia is a fragmentary document delineating some of the major concerns addressed in the novel Sleight. It traces the themes of artistic production, selfhood and the sublime back to Longinus, pausing at Schiller, Burke, Adorno, and a few others. The twelve sections alternate between discussions of poetics and issues of craft. The personal is political is poetic, yet cannot be limited to the figure of the poem. Indeed, the poetic has exploded its form as the issues of womanhood have exploded the female body. Bodies are not their own. Our books are not our own. Our words are not our selves. Sleight is a story-driven if de-centered and speculative narrative which concerns itself with artistic production. Four main characters eventually come (or are dragged) together to create a performance that, for each of them, serves a different but essential—and perhaps apocalyptic— purpose. Major themes in this book are: sisterhood, motherhood, otherhood, desire, love, performance, and atrocity. INDEX WORDS: art, performance, poetry, feminism, sleight, language, the sublime, apologia SLEIGHT: DISARTICULATION OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MOTHER by KIRSTEN KASCHOCK B.A. Yale University, 1994 M.F.A. University of Iowa, 1998 M.F.A. Syracuse University, 2002 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2006 © 2006 Kirsten Kaschock All Rights Reserved SLEIGHT: DISARTICULATION OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MOTHER by KIRSTEN KASCHOCK Major Professor: Reginald McKnight Committee: Judith Cofer Jed Rasula DEDICATION for my love, who does not make me need to disappear iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My deepest gratitude to the following people, without whom this book would not be: Reginald McKnight, Jed Rasula, Judith Cofer, Sabrina Orah Mark, Madonna and Daniel F. Marenda, Ann and Alex Kaschock, Alexander Kaschock, Mary Oliveira, Taryn Kaschock Russell, Misha Kaschock, Danny, and Simon, Bishop, and Koen Kaschock-Marenda. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………....v APOLOGIA……………………………………………………………………………………….1 SLEIGHT………………………………………………………………………………………...24 SECTIONS BOOK 1………………………………………………………………………………….40 BOOK 2………………………………………………………………………………....180 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………...343 vi APOLOGIA 1 ___________________________________________________________________________ 1. Apologia. Manifesto. Poetics. Simper, dogmatize, vivisect. Reduce. Any attempt at accuracy would move in the direction of ten thousand things. The paper would need ten thousand nouns, ten thousand verbs, ten thousand pronouns to in/de/circumscribe the author as she moves toward any one of her goals. I grant you movement. And that I am not the same person. I is another.1 Yet, I do not believe, dead.2 But, if I must, vivisection seems the likeliest choice. I have done it before. To cut into the flesh of Sleight is to cut into ghost. One gets the vapors. It is all very gothic, with a cello. Practically, it is difficult to write an apologia for an apologia. My book is not wholly a feeble defense of my need to exploit, but it is partly. It is also part analysis, critique, exorcism3, and love letter to that same need. 1 “Je est un autre.” Arthur Rimbaud. 2 See Barthes. 3 Louise Bourgeois, sculptor, describes her drawings (not what she conceives as her main body of work) in this way: “If your emotions have a forbidden quality and arouse guilt and other negative feelings, how are you going to get rid of those feelings? They belong to your demon. You have to accept, visually, that some things you explain as good and some things as not good. Good is a dirty word—a confusing word. Of course this opens up a whole moral field that is disgusting, really, when you talk about the visual. We should not be moral…” (22). Agreed. 2 “To begin with, I could have slept with all of the people in the poems” (Spicer, 117). I, too, desire only this much realism. That characters be bodied. A man had built a machine. …Which does what? said his father. Which gets red with rust if it rains, wouldn’t you say so, father? But the machine is something to put a man out of work, said his father, and as work is prayer, so the machine is a damnation. But the machine can also be sweethearts, growing cobwebs between its wheels where little black hands crawl; and soon the grasses come up between its gears—And its spokes laced with butterflies… I do not like the machine, even if it is friendly, because it may yet decide to love my wife and take my bus to work, said the father. No, no, father, it is a flying machine. Well, suppose the machine builds a nest on the roof and has baby machines? said the father. Father, if you would only stare at the machine for a few hours, you would learn to love it, to perhaps devote your very life to it…4 Like this man, I try not to be concerned with the traditional functions of the machine I built. And like his father, I distrust machines in general. And like the man, my machine is to me, the exception, especially beautiful in the ways it does not work. My book does not try to represent reality. My book does not attempt to deeply penetrate the minds of its characters (note the 4 from “A Machine” by Russell Edson. 3 semi-detached, semi-attached third person narration). My book is a fable-machine, and the fables it tells are all about the making of books, about the need to be making books. (My machine does want baby machines.) My book is precisely about such questions as: What if a need, any need, were real—I mean, really real? This book owes much to a bastardized line about the philosophical literature of an imagined world in Borges’ Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius: “A book that does not loathe itself is considered incomplete.”5 Sleight loathes itself. My characters loathe themselves and each other and their art, as they submit to it. And I their book. This beloved is a hole. This, beloved, is a hole. ___________________________________________________________________________ 2. In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke renders the physicality—the inwardness—of self- definition: “Now you have gathered yourself together into yourself, see yourself ending ahead of you in your own hands; you trace from time to time with an uncertain gesture the outline of your face. And there is scarcely any room inside you; and it calms you to think that nothing very large can possibly abide in this narrowness; that even the stupendous must become an inward thing and restrict itself to fit the surroundings.” Later of course, things must move, even for Malte: 5 The translation I have (by James E. Irby) reads: “A book that does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete.” I assume Irby’s translation is more accurate than my hazy and projected one, but I have never learned enough Spanish to check. 4 “Your heart drives you out of yourself, your heart pursues you, and you stand almost outside of yourself and cannot get back again” (69). This proprioceptive description of angst—its contradictory location both in and then outside of the self (as embodied by the second person/self-address)—is something I have attempted to capture in Sleight. Rilke’s rewriting the abstract—“the stupendous”—as spatial I also took into my own work. Others, certainly, have made similar gestures, but Rilke uses his plastic imagery to find his way into Malte’s interior life, which becomes, in some senses, a bodied mind. And a bodied mind, a mind you can both inhabit and be exiled from, is a cumbersome one. Which leads me to two questions—one from outside of my work, one from within it: 1. Is it wise, from a mental health standpoint, to interpret one’s work—to do, in other words, what I am doing? (i.e. making the mind very heavy—medicine-ball-heavy—the mind hurled into the gut) 2. Why, if the interior is such a tight enclosure, should I have given Lark’s Needs wings? ___________________________________________________________________________ 3. The book I have written does things and then, afterwards, I decide upon reasons for them. This is one definition of a poetics. Sometimes, my fabricated reasons and the effects of my work mismatch: this is what makes a poetics interesting to read if it is. For instance, my reason for Sleight being longer than most poems—I couldn’t get it out and there is no pitosin for prose. It is very much a temporal matter of how form is bound— 5 not to content exactly—but to the process of eliminating from the self what is alien: the two- year labor.6 And yet, despite that feat, the tabloids will always focus on DNA over the childbirth. Who/what is the father? My answer is : there were hundreds… some of them were even women.7 Will you keep it? they ask. No, I am actively trying to give it away (this is popularly called publication), but it is a big baby, with too many appendages. Extraneous limbs tend to make potential parents nervous: future marketing strategies and/or ballet classes become difficult to envision. This metaphor—book as the birth of an alien love-child/product of gang-rape—is tired and overused and impossible for me to do without. It says more about me, I’m afraid, than my work. A poetics is funny that way. Or it isn’t. The book is written in small sections divided by lines.