An Examination Into Absence and Desire for Self and Subjectivity in Anne Carson' S Men in the Off Hours and Gail Scott' S Main Brides

BORDERS OF BECOMING

An Examination into Absence and Desire for Self and Subjectivity in Anne Carson' s Men in the Off Hours and Gail Scott' s Main Brides

Erin Wunker Department of English McGill University, Montreal, February 2004.

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Masters of English.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper could not have been undertaken without the moral support of my parents, Owen and Leah Percy, and Jessica Langston. 1 extend many thanks to François Ricard, Jane Everett and the Groupe de recherche sur Gabrielle Roy for employment and encouragement-merci mille fois. 1 am grateful to Alexie Lalonde-Steedman and Sophie CoupaI for their translation skills. Thanks to Professor Miranda Hickman who se comments on early drafts of these ideas were extremely helpful. To my advisor, Nathalie Cooke, this could not have come to fruition without your guidance, patience, employment and faith. To Brett Parker-there are not words enough. Thank you for countless hours spent discussing, encouraging, coaxing and editing-no one could hope for a better partner and friend. iii

ABSTRACT This paper examines the way in which two contemporary Canadian women writers, Anne Carson and Gail Scott, integrate subjective theory into two of their respective texts (Carson's Men In the Off Hours, and Scott's Main Brides). This study rejects the presentation of a single protagonist and instead focuses heavy emphasis upon the presentation of subjective experiments. In this paper the subjects in Men In the Off Hours and Main Brides are examined through the desires they exhibit for the absent other-that which the subject perceives he/she does not have-as central to his/her own conception of him/her self The paper first acknowledges that subjective theory, the quest for the self, has maintained a central position in scholarly studies. It then proceeds to disseminate and critique Lacanian subjective the ory thereby setting the stage for close readings of Carson's Men In the Off Hours through theorist Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection, and of Scott's Main Brides through Jacques Derrida's theory of the borderline. The paper closes by questioning the possibility of a fully realized subject. IV

RÉSUMÉ Cette thèse propose une étude de la façon dont deux écrivaines canadiennes contemporaines, Anne Carson et Gail Scott, intègrent une théorie du sujet dans leurs œuvres respectives. Nous rejetons la présentation d'un seul protagoniste dans chacun des textes à l'étude (Men In the Off Hours de Carson et Main Brides de Scott) pour mettre clairement l'accent sur une exploration des expériences subjectives. Dans le cadre de cette thèse, les sujets mis en scène dans Men In the Off Hours et Main Brides seront envisagés à travers le désir qu'ils éprouvent pour l'autre absent-le manque perçu par le sujet - désir qui est au cœur de la conception que le sujet a de lui- ou d'elle-même. Dans un premier temps, nous rendrons compte de la position centrale occupée par les théories du sujet, la quête de soi, au sein de la recherche universitaire. Nous entreprendrons ensuite une dissémination et une critique de la théorie lacanienne du sujet, pavant ainsi la voie à une lecture minutieuse des œuvres. L'analyse de Men In the Off Hours se fera à l'aide de la notion d'abjection mise en avant par Julia Kristeva et celle de Main Brides, en recourant à la théorie des frontières de Jacques Derrida. La thèse se conclut par une remise en question de la possibilité d'un sujet pleinement accompli. TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 3

1. 1 Do Not Stand Alone: A Brief Introduction to Lacanian Subjective Theory 8

2. Lean on Lacan: A Brief Dissemination and an Interesting Investigation

a. 1 am YOU, but are you me: The Mirror Stage Il

b. Forever choking: The Endlessness of abject petit a 12

c. (m)Other may 1?: The Problem of Pemale Desire and Subjectivity 16

CHAPTERI:

ANNE CARSON' S MEN IN THE OFF HOURS READ THROUGH JULIA KRISTEV A 18

1. "This paradox of absent presence": The Role of Absence in Subjective Desire

2. "Something ta be afraid of": Introducing Julia Kristeva 19

a. Horror of the Void 20

b. Approaching "Approaching Abjection" 21

c. "Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War" 24

d. The Epitaphs 28

e. "Sumptuous Destitution" 32

f. "No Epitaph" 44 2

CHAPTERII:

GAIL SCOTT' S MAIN BRIDES, JACQUES DERRIDA AND THE BORDERLINE 54

"Writing Is About Constructing A Subject": Scott and Derrida Create Anew 54

2. Is This a "Fiction of Linguistic Practice": Writing From the Borderline 55

a. The Contract and the "living Mother" 59

b. Inside-Out: The Borderline in Action 61

c. The Brides, or Portraits of- 63

d. Oscillation, (dis)Placement and the Intertextuality of "Real Life" 66

e. The Moving Language of the Living Mother 68

f. Night Music: The Proof at the Center of Truth 72

CONCLUSION:

THE POLITICS OF DESIRE, READING BEYOND THE ENDINGS 77

BIBLIOGRAPHY 81 3

INTRODUCTION

If subjectivity is based on desire for the absent object as the theories of Jacques

Lacan, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida suggest, then 'self' can be defined and is guaranteed by an unending desire for the absent other. 'Self' is a problematic term.

What does it mean? With whose 'who' are we concemed? Derrida has claimed "this question of the subject and the living 'who' is at the heart of the most pressing concems of modem societies" ("EW" 115). Indeed 'self,' and the search for subjectivity, form a troubling imago, one that has been scrutinized, theorized and de-constructed to the degree that it could be argued to be the central conundrum of post-modemity. How to begin talking about that which has so many definitions while simultaneously having none?

Moreover, why are scholars (myself included), theorists and writers still grappling with the much-attended subject of subjects? The answer is, in short, that we still don't know who we are. Our desires for self and subjectivity remain insatiate.

This paper is concemed not only with the way that three of the major French theorists of modemity and post-modemity theorize human subjectivity, but also with the way in which two contemporary Canadian writers integrate subjective theory into their

"fictional" writing. 1 will interrogate why subjectivity still matters both in the Academy and, more importantly, in the space where scholarly theory meets fiction. The focus is ultimately on the way our desire for the absent other is still so very intrinsic to the way we define who we are.

Subjectivity is a necessity. In one manner or another, a pers on needs to conceive of himlherself. Judith Butler tells us, "without a discreet subject with intemally 4 consistent desires the morallife remains indefinite; if the subject is ambiguous, difficult to locate and properly name, then to whom shaH we ascribe the life?" (SD 4). It is the subject' s desire for the absent other that guarantees definition and, therefore, we shaH begin our examination at the logical beginning: the subject and his/her desire. Butler goes on to point out that Hegel claims, "self-consciousness in general is Desire," in other words to be conscious of one's selfis to desire (7). But as Butler acknowledges, this requires a degree of reflexivity: the desired other must be one's own self. The post modem French thinkers who foHowed Hegel noted, in varying respects, that this degree of reflexivity is not a satisfactory mode in which to discuss desire of the self. The progression of the discussion on subj ecti vit y and desire is navigable: from Jacques Lacan to Julia Kristeva and from Julia Kristeva to Jacques Derrida this paper, in part, plots the way in which modem and post-modem French theorists approach the matter of the desirous subject. Theorists have altered their notions of subjecti vit Y and desire continuously, however Butler cites the move away from Hegel in the post-modem French thinkers to be divisible into two modes of thinking about the subject: "1) the specification of the subject in terms of finitude, corporeal boundaries, and temporality and 2) the

'splitting' (Jacques Lacan), 'displacement' (Jacques Derrida), and eventual death (Michel

Foucault, Gilles Deleuze) of the Hegelian subject" (175). Lacan's work centers on the notion that "desire no longer designates autonomy," (Mansfield 44) that is ta say desire for the other, that which is outside, assures the systematic relationship between signifier and signified. Because of the importance 1 place upon a space/void waiting to be filled this paper beings with a discussion of the splitting of the subject, and the space created by the split. 5

It is important to note, as Butler does, the various trajectories that theories of subjectivity take. But if a study is to go beyond a mere synopsis of subjective the ory it must make a claim. In my paper, the emphasis is upon the way in which contemporary writers Anne Carson and Gail Scott converse with subjective theories in their own writing-the result being a unique conversation between theory and fiction. And to what end? With writers' work on subjective theories, there is a subtle change in process. My aim is to make visible the way in which Carson and Scott try on various subjectivities within their work in order to plot the desires of the singular subject. Men In the Off

Hours and Main Brides point to a different and more interactive attempt to unveil the subject. Through the integration of academic subjective theory, Carson and Scott push the reader to become involved in the process of searching out self. Here, desire for the absent other is revealed in a new light. Absence desired is rendered present, conceivable, and the subject (the writer, the reader) finds another piece to the puzzle of self.

Desire, especially for that which is absent, occupies a central position in the writing of both Carson and Scott. In their work, fissured plot lines, fraught with desire and absence, indicate their common preoccupation with different ways of writing the self.

Feminist critic and writer Hélène Cixous exc1aims, "writing moves at the pace of a hand, life and death go by in a flash. We catch fire, surprised. Writing is far behind. Howare the fiery moments to be grasped?" (39). To grasp, on paper, the struggle to find and define the self has engaged writers and theorists throughout post-modemity, yet the subject1 has not been exhausted. The question of the definition of self endures, but, like post-modem theorists, contemporary literature is beginning to alter its methods and formats for discussion. Carson's and Scott's innovations on self-definition raise many

1 The pun is intended. 6 questions. 1 ask: How are these two contemporary writers using desire for the absent other to discuss self! How do their stylistics influence their relationship with the reader, and the reader's own desire for subjectivity? How does theory aid the reader's approach to a text? And why is it important to look specifically at works by Carson and Scott?

The latter of these questions is, at least in certain respects, an easy one. As 1 begin this study, 1 situate myself as a contemporary Canadian scholar-my nationality and my profession inform not only my ideas about myself, but also the way in which 1 write. While this is certainly not the sole reason, nor necessarily the primary one, for utilizing Carson and Scott (who are Canadian women writers and scholars), it should be acknowledged as an important factor, especially in relation to the central topics: absence, desire and the search for subjectivity. In his autobiography, Roland Barthes probes his feelings about contemporary avant-garde texts, wondering if they please or bore him solely because they are obviously concemed with the theories of the day that certainly include his own work. He complains that he often feels "blackmailed" to laud the texts because they are so clearly indebted to his and his colleagues' work (RB 54). In choosing to focus on writers contemporary with my own existence, 1 am consciously entering into the discourse on how what we want (read, are informed by) informs our notions of self Likewise, 1 have chosen such contemporary writers with a motive contrary to Barthes' concem: whether or not subjectivity is acknowledged as 'the theory of the day' it informs every piece of writing produced. Both Carson and Scott converse with theories of self, and both approach these theories consciously. In the case of the se two texts the reader, as 1 will argue, is meant to recognize the theoretical references and decipher their relevance. Carson's Men ln the Off Hours and Scott's Main Brides 7 strikingly similar insofar as they are both hyper-conscious of the conundrum of the subject' s des ire for the absent object, and each text approaches this problem through an integration and manipulation of subjective theory. The theorists through whom 1 approach the texts are selected for a similar reason: Lacan's notions of subj ecti vit y engage me as a reader and a writer, yet their conclusions leave me unsatisfied; Julia

Kristeva diverged from Lacan for a similar reason; and Jacques Derrida's theories are products of consideration and deviation from both Lacanian and Kristevan influences. It is fitting, then, to read such self-conscious writers as Carson and Scott through the lenses of subjective theorists.

"Anne Carson," says Susan Sontag "is one of the few writers in English that 1 would read anything she wrote" (qtd. in Zinnes 6). Similar comments are given about

Scott who, according to Lianne Moyes "derail[s] thinking, moving outside the ordinary circuits" (16). Both Carson and Scott draw from a distinctly Lacanian model in which desire for the (absent) other is a formative factor in subjectivity, and both delineate from

Lacan' s model just as distinctl y. While Carson appears to adhere to a post- Lacanian mode of conceptualization, which is more akin to Julia Kristeva's idea of the subject as continually in-process, Scott pushes the boundaries even further, collapsing the space between reader and writer and confounding notions of desire for the other, which is much in the fashion of Derrida' s borderline. In other words, then, 1 have chosen to focus on

Carson and Scott because they work with subjective theory in a forum that is widely accessible, their books operate on both theoreticallevels and fictive levels. Carson and

Scott are ideal for this examination of the desiring subject because, on a visceral level, 8 their texts seek to define themselves and to incorporate the work of the reader in this on going search for subjectivity.

This study is structured in terms of the subject's desire for the (absent) other.

Carson and Scott, as 1 have stated, draw from a Lacanian model of subjectivity and th en deviate from the mode!. The introduction of this paper will necessitate a sketch of

Lacan's own theory of self and subjectivity so as to build a foundation upon which to expose the implications of Carson's Kristevan schema and Scott's affinity to Derridean theories. In order to ground this sketch, 1 will use, as a text, one of Nathalie Saurraute's

"tropisms." Saurraute's early work, contemporary with the work of Freud, to whom

Lacan is indebted, is concemed with what she caUs "the superficial dramatic action [ ... ] constituted by plot, which is nothing but a conventional code we apply to life" (ix). In short, this tropism will act as a foundation upon which to ground and demonstrate

Lacan's own thoughts on the matter of desire and self. The framework will then be set for an in-depth analysis of the way in which Lacan's work has been taken up and altered in contemporary writing.

1. ! do not stand alone: A Brief Introduction to Lacanian Subjective Theory

ln his comprehensive book on the subject of subjects, Nick Mansfield describes subjectivity as "an abstract general principle that defies our separation into distinct selves that encourages us to imagine that [ ... ] our interior lives seem to involve other people, either as objects of need, desire and interest, or as necessary sharers of common experience" (3). In other words, notions of self must always be connected to something outside the self. !, then, is not an island. If, as Mansfield has outlined in his distillation 9 of subjectivity, self depends on something beyond its own boundaries, then we must consider the properties of that thing upon which it relies.

ln his introduction to The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis entitled "Excommunication" Lacan sets out the guiding components of a hysteric's desire:

The fact that, in order to cure the hysteric of aIl her symptoms, the best

way is to satisfy her hysteric's desire-which is for her to posit her desire

in relation to us as an unsatisfied desire-leaves us entirely to one side of

the specific question of why she can sustain her desire only as an

unsatisfied desire. (12)

Gendered language aside, for the moment, what Lacan argues is simply that the hysteric maintains those symptoms of hysteria (which define her as hysteric) only through a continuing, unsatisfied desire. A distinct move away from Hegel's reflexive self consciousness, this constant depravation of what she desires guarantees that she is hysterical, that she is, in Lacan's view, a she.

The weight of nothing must have a hefty value, for nothinglabsence acts as the guarantor that something is missing. Patrick Fuery evaluates absence in degrees, primary absences being those that operate outside the cognitive scope of presence, while secondary absences are defined in relation to presence, that is, they "imply presence" (2).

Thus we can infer that what Lacan refers to, and what we are talking about are secondary absences. The hysteric is hysterical based on the fact that her desires cannot be filled, although they appear as though they could be. A twist on the proverbial carrot on a stick:

1 am lacking because 1 am desiring that which 1 feel should be here, but is not here. This 10 is demonstrated throughout writing about the self as, for example, early on in A Lover's

Discourse when Barthes acknowledges that "absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is 1 who remain" (13). Likewise, Marcel Proust's oeuvre is constructed by attempts to recapture what is not present. Similarly, in her feminist philosophical work Luce Irigaray notes that desire "demands a sense of attraction [ ... ] in relations on nearness or distance" (7). Desire for the (absent) other so often becomes the one guarantee of subjectivity. According to Lacan. 1 know 1 am me because 1 can feel the pain of not having YOU.

2. Lean on Lacan: A Brief Dissemination and an Interesting Investigation

Lacan draws much of his theory from Freud's thoughts on the unconscious

(Mansfield 38). In saying that the unconscious is 'structured like language,' Lacan gives a nod both to earlier statements that language greatly affects life, and elaborates on

Freud' s notions of the role language takes by giving form to the unconscious (38).

Thanks to Lacan we can revoke our control on language and acknowledge that we were born into a pre-existing system. As Derrida puts it, who can point to the origin of language (OG)? This is, granted, the barest of re-capitulations not only of Lacan's the ory of language, but also of those who came before him, namely Hegel, Freud, Wittgenstein, and Saussure. As the focus is on absence as a definitive property of subjectivity, however, the nuances of Lacan's intellectual history, and that of his predecessors, are left to be desired. 11 a. 1 am you, but are you me: The Mirror Stage

That which is referred to as "the mirror stage" is arguably Lacan's most lucid explanation of the way in which he conceives the subject is formed. It is in the example of the mirror stage that the first concrete depiction of the subject, based on desire for the other, is laid out: a child first forms a notion of himlherself in infancy when he/she looks into a mirror and recognizes that the '1' in the mirror is not the 'I(eye)' from which he/she looks. When we wave to the figure in the mirror, it waves back. However, as we shall see in the upcoming chapter on Carson, there may not always be a distinguishable figure looking back from within the mirror.

As Butler has already pointed out, the main thrust of the mirror stage is the way in which Lacan's notion of selfhood differs so distinctly from those of his predecessors. In his own words, Lacan de scribes this as "the unconscious [ ... ] always manifested as that which vacillates in a split in the subject, from which emerges a discovery that Freud compares with desire-[ ... ] speaking of the function of desire, 1 have designated as manqué-à-être, a 'want-to-be'" (28-9). This manqué-à-être denotes a deliberate and systematized existence between the subject (1) and the signified (desired other)-the child's picture or image of himself is provided by the reflection in the mirror, "something outside the body-proper" (Mansfield 45). The subject is no longer defined by his/her own reflexive self-consciousness, but, rather, is dependent on sorne outside force: the desired, and inherently absent, other, what Lacan calls "the order of the non-realized"

(22). However, this "order of the non-realized" becomes increasingly problematic. 12 b. Forever choking: The Endlessness of object petit a

The "order of the non-realized" is that which Lacan goes on to term objet petit a:

The question of desire is that the fading subject yeams to find itself again

[ ... ] in its endeavor it is sustained by something which 1 calI the lost object

[ ... ] which is such a terrible thing for the imagination [ ... ] and which in

my vocabulary 1 caU the object, lower case, a [ .... ] But the relation

between this barred subject with this object (a) is the structure which is

always found in the phantasm which supports desire, in as much as desire

is only that which 1 have called the metonymy of aIl signification.

(qtd. in SD 194)

Hence, for Lacan, desire is inextricably bound to the endless attempt to regain that which is impossible to regain: the "petit a ne ver crosses this gap. [ ... ] This a is presented precisely, in the field of the mirage of the narcissistic function of desire, as the object cannot be swallowed as it were, which remains stuck in the gullet of the signifier. It is at this point of lack that the subject is to recognize himself' (270). Speech becomes intrinsic to the process, functioning as a displacement of desire (Butler, SD 193). That which, in speech and text, is denoted as the desires of the '1' becomes key. Yet, what if the '1' were absent? Lacan's slippage stems from his refusaI to push his theories to their logical conclusion-one can certainly assume that 1 have desires, and that my individual use of language earmarks those desires. The question, however, that must be posed is what is the impact on the desired (absent) other if the desiring subject does not acknowledge his/her own subjectivity? As we shall see, Lacan does not provide an answer for this. 13

ln order to ground Lacan's theories in text and demonstrate an important omission, we will rely on an excerpt from Nathalie Saurraute's work Tropisms.

Saurraute calls these pieces "movements, of which we are hardly cognizant, [they] slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness [ ... ] hide behind our gestures, beneath words we speak, the feelings we manifest [ ... ] they seemed, and still seem to me to constitute the secret source of our existence, in what might be called its nascent state" (vi). In short, tropisms are depictions of subjects unconsciously desiring subjectivity relegated through the gaps and fissures of the absent other. In Tropisms, we decipher textual experiments with Lacan's objet petit a, and we find an interesting twist, in Saurraute's revocation of her characters' ability to conceive of themselves as selves. The removal of the pronoun

'1' appears to, in this case, exacerbate the subject' s dependence on their desires for the absent others. In other words, Saurraute's subjects wholly rely on the other for self definition, because their capability to conceive '1' has been revoked. The result is an extreme exacerbation of Lacan' s theory at work-or not at work as the case may be.

As we have seen, Lacan frames the search for self through desire for the other in terms of the repetition of this search: continued desire continues the self. He talks about this repetitive process in relation to "the tuché-as if by chance" (54). Tuché, according to Lacan, first surfaced as a concept in psychoanalysis through the trope of trauma: after a subject undergoes a trauma, the trauma reappears in varying forms (55). Through dreams, neurosis, memories and so forth, the process of the trauma is repeated, despite the fact that the 'actual' incident has passed. Butler clarifies this point:

Lacan does not conceive the unconscious topographically, but as various

negatives-gaps, holes fissures-that mark the speech of the "1" [ ... ] the 14

conscious subject cannot account for this discontinuity through recourse to

itself, because it is subjected to this discontinuity, signified by the

unconscious, which is an absent signifier. (SD 189)

The searching subject loses sight of "1" in the face of what recurs, as if by chance.

ln Saurraute's "tropism l," we are presented with a tex tuai example of the abject petit a operating in the spectral field of the tuché:

They seemed to spring up from nowhere, [ ... ] they flowed gently along as

though they were seeping from the walls [ .... ] They stretched out in the

long, dark c1usters between the dead house fronts [ ... ] before the shop

windows, they formed more compact, motionless little knots, [ ... ] A

strange quietude, a sort of desperate satisfaction emanated from them.

They looked c10sely at the piles of linen in the White Sale display [ .... ]

They looked for a long time, without moving, they remained there, in

offering, before the shop windows [ .... ] And the quiet little children,

whose hands they held, weary of looking, listless, waited patiently beside

them (1-2).

Perhaps the most glaring aspect of "tropism l," as noted, is the absolute lack of the pronoun "1" or its plural form "we." ln revoking her characters' right to name themselves in language, Saurraute has deftly illustrated Lacan's notion that the "gaps holes fissures

[ ... ] mark the space of the '1''' (Butler, SD 189). Here, we see that the search for self is not only manifested by l~ck, it is necessarily maintained by that lack. From where does this lack of 'l'arise? ln "tropism l," there are no 'l's' because the women have so deeply embedded themselves in their desire for the items behind the glass at the White 15

Sale. The manqué-à-être, has manifested itself as an utter displacement of selfhood-'I' is overtaken by desire for the absent other. While in this case the other can be read as either the literaI items behind the glass window, or, more plausibly, the women's visions of who they would be should they own those items, Lacan's abject petit a is enacted.

The women want petit linen a, and their desire for themselves with it is so subtle, as if by chance, that they displace their notion of self onto the petit a behind the window.

Further, does it matter that we, the readers, assume that aIl these subjects are women? Of course. "Desire," Lacan tells us, "[ ... ] is a lack engendered from the previous time that serves to reply to the lack raised by the following time" (215). As we recall, much of Lacan' s work draws on the work of Freud, and as we also know, Freud views the ownership of a phallus to be the definitive guarantee of power and selfhood

(Mansfield 49). In Lacan's rendition of the search for selfhood, it is le nom du père, or

Name-of-the-Father, that operates as the trump card in the desiring subject's que st for subjectivity. Le nom du père is what Lacan sees in language as the inherent gender inequity, which guarantees a certain (phallocentric) order (48). J, that lamentable signifier, guarantees that the Lacanian masculine subject will always be, for he will always desire the absent other (abject petit a), the constant flux of his desire rendered new and surprising (hopeful, even?) due to the way in which his desire seems to be revealed and re-revealed to him as if by chance (tuché). The female desiring subject, however, is not so easily dealt with. 16 c. (m)Other may 1: The Problem of Female Desire and Subjectivity

The subjects in Saurraute's tropism are intentionally refused direct linguistic subjectivity: there are no l's. However, in light of Lacan's nom du père, the question is raised as to whether or not female subjects could ev en hope to engage in the struggle for subjectivity. As Butler astutely points out, le nom du père institutes a limit to desire, and

"female desire is resolved through the full appropriation of fernininity" insofar as it becomes "a pure reflector for male desire, the imaginary site of absolute satisfaction [ ... ] the woman learns to embody the promise of a return to preoedipal pleasure, and to limit her own desire to those gestures that effectively mirror his desire as absolute" (SD 203).

Thus Lacan renders subjectivity a realm meant only for male subjects.

This is c1early an unsatisfactory explanation of the search for subjectivity, as it does not even allow a binary: for Lacan, woman is not the opposite of man, but rather a looking glass, the rnirror stage, for male subjects. In her own work, Butler proposes one of many reasons for rejecting Lacan's model of desiring subjects. She suggests that the body proper "always already a cultural sign, [ ... ] sets lirnits to the imaginary meanings it occasions, but is never free of an imaginary construction" (BTM xiv). The body, then, can be thought of as gendered through culture. Like Butler, l, too, must diverge from

Lacan. 1 diverge not only because 1 disagree with his reactive explanation for female subjectivity, but also because 1 believe that there are more factors inforrning subjectivity than the few (namely language) offered by Lacan.

To tum from Lacan to Kristeva, is to tum from the singular masculine '1' to a space opened for feminine plurality. In Men ln the Off Hours, Carson amalgamates the voices of men and women in order to trouble the notion that gender is the decisi ve factor 17 in subjectivity. Similarly, the protagonist of Scott's Main Brides renders her own sexuality ambiguous in order to try on the 'selves' of other characters. Clearly Lacan, in relegating desire to be a masculine privilege, is an unsatisfactory means through which to read these texts. In the following chapter, we will examine the way in which post

Lacanian theorists, namely Kristeva, work to refigure the project of subjectivity in terms of women and men, rather than men and mirrors. The emphasis of the remainder of the paper will focus upon the subtle ways in which Carson and Scott manipulate the forum of fiction to try on, to investigate, and to evaluate subjective theories. Through the interplay of subjective theories with Carson's and Scott's texts, we can investigate the role that subjective theories play in daily life, and perhaps discover how these desires for the absent other denote something about our culture in general. 18

CHAPTER 1: ANNE CARSON' S MEN IN THE OFF HOURS READ THROUGH JULIA KRISTEV A

1. "this paradox of absent presence [ ... ] an act ofnegation": The Role of Absence in

Subjective Desire

"Negation," says Carson speaking of the Grecian poet Simonides, "is a shape that characterizes not only the poet's syntax but also his concepts, epistemology and biographical persona" ("SANA" 4). According to Carson, to read Simonides is to engage in a cycle of deprivation, absence and 10ss (5). A similar description could be given to the reader's engagement with Carson's own work. As Chris Jennings alludes, in his article "The Erotic Poetics of Anne Carson," Carson's writing is in many ways geometric: by means of setting up discussions into triangular tensions Carson trains the reader's eye toward the gap in the center (23). This study, by contrast, argues that desire is conceptualized when the reader not only views the gap, but also deciphers the void as meaningful. Carson's structure is "an issue of boundaries [ ... ] in the interval between reach and grasp, [ ... ] the absent presence of desire cornes alive" (EB 30). Reach and grasp are crucial. The actions, and the space between the actions, operate as keys to

Carson's methodological work on locating the self. Desire is not stagnant. Self and subjectivity must move in both the realm of the unreachable, and the pause-that absence which exists before the reach is tried again. To read Carson, then, is to engage in a continuum, each 'truth' once deciphered points to another conundrum. This continuum is our first distinct divergence from Lacan.

Ian Rae suggests, citing Manina Jones, that Carson "could be situated in the

Canadian tradition of 'documentary collage'" (18). While this is a useful approach for 19 comprehending Carson's fractious style (to which we shaH retum), we must still ask how we, as readers, are meant to understand why she uses it? Can we read Carson through a

Kristevan lens of psychoanalysis in order to decipher her methods? We shall see that

Kristeva's notions regarding the subject as being in process are useful to intuit the implications of Carson's methods and to uncover the layers of meaning in Carson's text.

The textuallayers will peel back to reveal an underlying framework of desire-a new means of defining the selfthrough 'fiction.'

2. "Something ta be afraid of": Introducing Julia Kristeva

ln order to begin answering these questions, we as readers must first assess

Kristeva's tenets. It is through Kristeva's theories of the subject as continually in process that we will examine Carson's Men ln the Off Hours. 1 will first plot out Kristeva's main theoretical points about the subject's search for self. 1 will then tum to a close reading of

Carson's work in terms of Kristeva's theories in order to draw out the figure that the desiring subject takes, in Carson's text. Sorne questions and concems about Carson's work will hinge around the apparent lack of plot, the problem of subjective voice, and the defiance of "normative" time, and the crossing of gender boundaries (Harris 1).

Kristeva began her work as a Lacanian psychoanalyst, but soon felt a need to disassociate herself from what 1 have established as Lacan's unsatisfactory means of explaining the female subject' s search for self (Mansfield 79). Unwilling to be a mirror for male desire, Kristeva embarked on her own post-Lacanian trajectory that views the subject as continually in process (Mansfield 79). Subjectivity "never quite forms,"

Kristeva tells us, "it is [yet] important to emphasize the dramatic nature of this 20 subjectivity is experienced as intense ambivalence. The subject never feels itself to be ordered and knowable. It is always under threat, in an unresolved state that is exciting and dangerous, as tempting as it is condemned"(pH 1). Subjectivity in Kristeva's work is constantly in crisis, a position that, as we shall see, allows for a great degree of fluidity.

Indeed, it will become apparent that the subject can only commence conceiving him/herselffrom within a state of motion as being as in a state of motion.

a. Horror of the void

For Lacan, desire and the search for subjectivity are continually located in sorne version of (phallic) order. This is not the case with Kristeva. Rather, she views order as a fictional ideal: "this longing to break down neat limits and ordered processes is a functionally indistinguishable part of the very operation" of gaining subjectivity

(Mansfield 88). 'Self,' for Kristeva, cannot occur without being simultaneously connected to what she terms the abject: those things that are most contemptible

(disorder, dislocation and fragmentation) are all those attributes that she views as necessarily couched in the maternaI (88). Again, Butler offers a concise expianation:

Following Lacan, Kristeva argues that the symbolic constitutes the roie of

the Phallus, and that the entire system of the symbolic language is

predicated not only upon the denial of dependency upon the maternai body

but, as a consequence, implies the repudiation of femininity. The

"subject" who emerges as a result of this internalized repression is

necessarily dissociated from his own body as well, a subject whose unit y 21

is purchased at the expense of his own drives, and whose denial is

renamed desire. (SD 233)

Thus, as 1 have suggested, Kristeva's theory of the subject's search for self is almost in direct opposition to Lacan's. Rather than sublimating female desire to male desire as the nom du père would do, Kristeva retums aIl desire to its nascent site: the mother. The mother, in Kristeva, will take on a conceptual role that differs radicaIly from the foundations laid by Lacanian theory.

b. Approaching "Approaching Abjection"

Abjection, Kristeva posits, is not a namable object: it is "not an ob-ject facing me, which 1 name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an othemess ceaselessly fleeting in a systematic quest of desire" (pH 1). Abjection is, in short, the desired other that guarantees the self. Contrary to Lacanian desire, Kristeva conceives of the subject's 'l' as undergoing a complicated thought process: 'l' thinks it must deposit "to the father's account [verse au père-père-version]: 1 endure it, for 1 imagine that such is the desire of the other [ ... ] Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either" (2). This is not Lacan's version of the self. This is not the self who depends for selfhood on hislher desire for the absent other. Instead, this is a self who struggles with hislher desires for the absent other within his/her own body proper. This is a visceral rather than purely interfacial desire. Rather than uphold imposed limits and boundaries, Kristeva's theory of subjectivity depends on the fact that, in her work, if borders exist at aIl they exist to be crossed, deconstructed and rendered ambiguous: it "is thus not the lack of c1eanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order" (4). It is the subject's feelings of abjection 22 within his/herself--the knowledge of things regarded as most base and deplorable-that indicates the subject's "want" (5).

Want, in Kristevan terminology, warrants more importance than does its near relative desire in Lacanian terminology and is a word we must examine c10sely before moving on:

[ ... ] if one imagines (and imagine one must, for it is the working of

imagination who se foundations are being laid here) the experience of want

itself as logically preliminary to being and object-to the being of the

object-then one understands that abjection, and even more so abjection

of the self, is its only signified. Its signifier, then, is none but literature.

(5)

Want functions as the result of a primary absence: the subject desires to fill a space within himlherself before he/she is even brought into being. In other words, we can understand the lack, the desired and absent object, as a void and a need inherent to the subject' s own composition. The subject is, in fact, missing something. What, then, does

Kristeva mean when she says that literature functions as the signifier of the subject's inherent desire? Here, the word 'literature' acts as a "bracket" for the subject's terrible and abject void. The subject must retum to language to confront his/her desire.

Literature acts as a magician, rendering the absent mother/abject void something that is aimast approachable (6). That is to say that, in Kristevan logics, subjectivity is not sustained merely by desire, as it is in Lacan, for desire is always for a tangible samething.

Instead, Kristeva views the subject as being in a constant state of defense against the absence/abject void within himlherself. 1 read the use of want in Kristeva to denote 23 desire elevated to the nth-degree. As the difference between the Lacanian use of desire and the Kristevan use of desire has been noted, 1 shall here on use the word desire to infer the highest degree of desire within a subject.

The chaotic subject continually attempts to fill the abject void, as we shaH see in

Carson, in an attempt to feel whole. But what must the subject defend his/herseifrrom? ln Kristeva's own words the subject's "'unconscious' contents remain excluded but in a strange fashion: not radically enough to allow for a sec ure differentiation between subject and object, and yet c1early enough for a defensive position to be established-one that implies a refusaI but also sublimates elaboration. As if the fundamental opposition were between 1 and Other" (7). A figure is erected. The subject is at odds, defensive, against 1 and Other, thereby creating a triangle. The triangle exists within the subject's own self-in-process, and is certainly in a constant state of flux. The middle of the triangle, the hollow void, which operates as the abject, is necessarily aligned with the mother, the womb, and all those distasteful qualities that are attributed to the ambiguity of woman. Within the abject void of the triangle, the subject searches to fill its desires.

Since we have established that the abject is a part of the searching subject, we can, for the moment, refer to the abject within the void as an exile? The exile wanders around the void and, as Kristeva posits, instead of deciphering his/her identity, the exile instead attempts to locate his/her position (8). Rather than establish identity (an impossibility in the ever-changing, ever-ambiguous void of the abject), the exile devises signs, markers, languages and territories that are constantly in flux-in short, the exile's

2 "Exile" is what Kristeva terms the subject in whom the abject exists, however 1 find this limitation problematic and choose instead to qualify the term (8). 24 work is never fini shed (8). Thus the subject-in whom the triangle exists, in which the exile subsists-is unstable. The subject feels impure, not wholly him/herself (though this, of course is the crux of the matter), and wishes to be rid of the objectionable abject material. The subject wishes to be purified of those fluidities, those demarcations, those instabilities and voids associated with the primordial mother. We must ask ourselves whether this purification is possible. Can the subject give form to the formless, evict the exile and speak him/herself?

According to Kristeva, poetic "catharsis, which for more than two thousand years behaved as an underage sister of philosophy, face to face and incompatible with it, takes us away from purity" (29). She goes on to cite Hegel who conceived of no other form of ethics apart from the act, and within the historical act he views "fundamental impurity(ies) being expended" (29). Desire, she notes, is made normal in an attempt to escape the void of the abject. One must intuit meaning into the silences, just as one must incarnate the abject. It is with these aspects of Kristeva's the ory of the abject in mind namely, that the struggle for subjectivity is an internaI and visceral process-that we shaH commence our reading of Carson's Men In the Off Hours.

c. Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War

"What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning," writes Carson in an early work (Plainwater 141). Fear thrives in the void where, as Kristeva points out, the exile wanders around and says "what" and "where" but ignores the obvious question, "who" (8)? A subject cannot hope to attain subjectivity while being utterly lost within him/herself. Carson opens Men In the Off Hours with a 25 conversational essay that embodies the avoidance of subject questions: here, Thucydides and Virginia Woolf are juxtaposed to emphasize the differing ways in which men and women keep time, but there is virtually no explanation of who either of these people are.

Carson depicts Thucydides as "sharp": he "fixes the commencement of the war according to the forms of reckoning customary in the three most important Hellenic states; [ ... ] Thucydides sets us on a high vantage point above such facts, so that we can look down as if at a map of the Greek states and see lives chuming forward there" (3).

Woolf, on the other hand, does not allow the reader a high vantage point: she "stays in her own time. She stays right in the middle. 'It was the middle of January in the present year when 1. .. ' But how do you know what is the middle?" (4). Where and when are established, but no one asks who-why is it these two people are juxtaposed? Why

Woolf and Thucydides and not Marguerite Duras and Heroditus, or any other possible pairing? What are we as readers meant to intuit? It is as though, within the first four pages, Carson has juxtaposed not only Thucydides and Woolf, but also Lacan and

Kristeva-on the one hand, there is Lacan and Thucydides and Phallic organization; on the other hand, there is Kristeva and Woolf in the midst of the abject matrix. We must decipher Carson's choices.

Once "upon blotted-out time, the abject must have been a magnetized pole of covetousness" (Kristeva, PH 8). Thucydides' time is that of the endlessly rendered, endlessly desired present, he records the dates of war in accordance to nature, a marker weIl outside the body proper. In Thucydides' writing, there is no ambivalence: the facts are separate, but govemed by the overarching authority of seasons. For Woolf, however, time is blurry: "when a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened. There will be 26 nothing but spaces of light and dark" (Men In the Off Hours 6). Kristeva reminds us that forgotten time, time rendered ambiguous, is a delegate of the abject realm, it is time from the middle of the void: "the time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation burst forth" (9). In juxtaposing

Thucydides's clear, masculine and unambiguous time with Woolf's emotive, elusive and unclear time Carson has given the reader a clue. She has sided with Kristeva by appropriating Woolf' s words and presenting them as testament to the power of the ambiguous void of the abject. Speaking to the "someone" in Woolf's essay Carson says:

The odd thing is, and although incident al it may be the reason that she ends the

essay this way, you grasp at once without any mention of the fact that the

someone is a man. He could be no more woman than Thucydides [ ... ] because he

at once identifies the mark on the wall as what it is. A snail is a snail. Even in the

off hours, men know marks. (7)

Carson no more concedes to Lacan's nom du père than does Kristeva. Carson's es say does not end here, with the knowledge resting firmly in the phallic mark. The page tums, the readers are confronted with an unexplained excerpt from Woolf, remembering the day she wrote "The Mark on the Wall": "all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking for months [ ... ] and then Leonard came in and 1 drank my milk and concealed my excitement" (8). The double time of abjection is affirmed: both oblivious and thunderous, Woolf's subjectivity is abject, and refuses the stable authority of her husband's presence.

Why does Carson open her work with this essay? Nothing "to me is more interesting than the spaces between languages," Carson has said (qtd. in D'Agata "MOH" 27

2). As we have established, spaces, especially in language, bear huge implications about the speaker. Fissures denote absence and want. Through her contrast of Thucydides' masculine language with Woolf' s feminine language, Carson creates a tex tuai representation of the difference between Lacanian and Kristevan theories of desire for the absent other. The difference between Woolf and Thucydides is, of course, the difference in the way they choose to record time-a difference embodied in their respective uses of space. While Thucydides manipulates time from above looking down, Woolf works in the midst of time, from the center of the triangle. In her work on Proust, Time and Sense,

Kristeva ponders the possible existence of non-linear time:

Perhaps because there was once another time and another experience in which

time-thought-Ianguage had not taken place. Regaining time would thus me an

more than merely attempting to be reconciled with what aroused us and what we

later repressed (a desire, an object, a sign). Regaining time would also mean

causing it to return: extracting it from the inexpressible and granting a sign, a

meaning, and an object to something that possessed none of the above. (239)

Here, Carson plots her course through the center of the self, through the abject, by means of extracting "memories" from oblivion and imbuing them with new meaning in order to create a dialectic of self. As Freud posited, "absence and the negative are linked to the act of repression [ ... ] it becomes a denial of the existence of something in an attempt to safeguard the subject's position," but as we have established, there is not yet a singular subject position to be safeguarded (qtd. in Fuery 3). Thus, the question to which we must turn: Through whose omissions are we, the readers, traveling? 28 e. The Epitaphs

Travel always requires motion of sorne sort. Travel, especially mental 'travel,' is very often undertaken alone. The traveler writes post cards, sometimes, to fill-in hislher absence. While this is admittedly an extended metaphor, it serves to underscore the problematic nature of the desiring subject's search for self. If, as we have acknowledged, the subject is continually in process, then we must assume that there are gaps and fissures in the 'travel story.' In other words, the subject, especially Carson's seemingly fictive subject voice, may omit certain details. Discussing the problem of omission Annette

Kuhn says, "stories are made in a tension between past and present [ ... ] solving the puzzle and acknowledging in the present the effects in the past of a disturbance [ ... ] must be the necessary conditions of a retelling" (23). Carson appears to adhere to this notion of temporal tension, as her text is peppered with epitaphs that catch a reader's attention and remind himJher that nothing has been written by accident. This is readily apparent in the poem that follows the "Ordinary Time" essay. "Epitaph: Zion" presents two problems, both of which are grounded in inherent absences (if such a thing can be).

Firstly, the poem is an epitaph, and secondly, it is an epitaph for Zion:

Murderous little world once our objects had gazes. Our lives

Were fragile, the wind

Could dash them away. Here lies the refugee breather

Who drank a bowl of elsewhere. (9)

An epitaph can either be a smaIlliterary piece commemorating a deceased person, or an inscription on a tombstone. However in this case there is neither person, nor tombstone, only the hint of body, only breath. Zion exacerbates the problem. What can be inferred 29 from an epitaph not for a person, but for an ideal? In order to address this question more whoIly we willleave Zion for a moment, and look toward the other epitaphs-a matter of the pause between the reach and the grasp.

Carson places seven epitaphs throughout her text, and, also, one poem that claims to be "no epitaph." The impact of these strangely labeled poems is subtle-the poems are imbued with the traditionallanguage of lament. Carson, by invoking the language of longing, manipulates the absence of a single body-a body to whom one could address an epitaph. Instead, she focuses the lamentation toward the void. Fuery suggests

"absence as a négatité is important because it illustrates absence not as a nothing, or a nothingness, which might in turn reduce things and subjects to nothingness, but as a part of an active process" (5). Carson's epitaphs work in this way. The active process, in this case, is that of the subject' s dynamic and ongoing desire for self. Desire, as we have established, is a part of the active process of self, and insofar as it is mobile, its action is that of oscillation in the void. That is to say, the motion of desire acts both as a furtherance of the subject's travel towards self, and simultaneously holds the subject in sway as though running on the spot without realizing it. In Carson's texts, the epitaphs appear to serve a similar purpose: verses mourning Utopie womb-like places, verses for the dead who are not dead, presented to the living reader aIl act as grotesque reminders that none of us are unified subjects, we are aIl in process, informed and made up not only of what we know, but also of what we want without knowing.

There is, inherent in the reader, a desire to rush Carson, and to explain into being what appears to be missing. In his review of Men in the Off Hours, John D'Agata3

3 Carson's book reviewers are notoriously obtuse, see especially Steve Harris' review of Men In the Off Hours, Harriet Zinnes article in The Rollins Review entitled "What 1s Time Made of?"and 30 attempts to explain Carson's somewhat elusive reasons for employing multiple styles

4 when he claims that a single style, namely essaie, "is a hard sell in America " ("MOH"

2). He goes on to fill in the blanks by engaging in a history lesson:

The wordprose came into English use by way of the Latin prosus, the Vulgate's

paired-down simplification of prorsus, itself the contracted form of proversus, "ta

move forward," as in Cicero's prosa oratio, "speech going straight ahead without

tums." Notice, however, that the Latin root of prose has in it the word versus [ ... ]

In Latin, verso became versus and its verb form vertere meaning "to tum" [ ... ]

No wonder this scholar of classical texts is blurring distinctions. (2)

While this is a fascinating etymology of technical writing terms, D'Agata has been distracted from his initial aim: rather than rendering Carson' s work the work of a conflicted scholar, one with two desks to separate her "academic" work from her

"creative," he has in actuality attempted ta fill the absences Carson has deliberately placed throughout the text.

In my reading, the epitaphs do not merely signal a stylistic tum, as they do in

D'Agata's review, but rather exist as the linguistic markers of the exile, wandering through the void of the abject. To speak of death from a point beyond death is ta underscore the absence of a stable subject. The subject cannat speak for himlherself because such a self has yet to be established: there is only the desire to fill the absence,

D'Agata's own interview with Carson wherein she, herself, points to his consistent misreading of her work ("A-with Anne Carson"). To date, aside from Canadian Literature's Spring 2003 issue on Carson, no critical anthology of her work has been completed. 4 This statement is inherently false. Carson has enjoyed wide reception among American readers, has been the recipient of both the prestigious Griffin Trust Award, worth $40,000, and the MacArthur Genius Award worth $500,000, and has recently taken up a professorial post at the University of Michigan. 31 and it is this desire that motivates and moves Carson's text. This notion of the unstable subject in process is furthered in "Epitaph: Evil":

To get the sound take everything that is not the sound drop it

Down a weIl, listen.

Then drop the sound. Listen to the difference

Shatter. (29)

In this poem, the apparent subject, evil, is never explicitly mentioned. Instead Carson relies on the absence of explication to render the absent present. As Kuhn has asked,

"what happens if we take absences, silences, as evidence?" (24). What occurs, in

Kristevan terms, is a movement: an "'1' overcome by the corpse-such is often the abject [ ... ] for it is death5 that most violently represents the strange state in which a non- subject, a stray, having lost its non-objects, imagines nothingness through the ordeal of abjection" (pH 25). Movement is an indication of the subject trying to maneuver out of the void of the abject. Georges Bataille refers to this as the ontology ofpresence: the horror6 is "partly based on the compulsion for needing something which is al ways denied

(desire for the Other) and as something which acts as a determining process for the subject's being" (18). "Epitaph: Evil," then, as weIl as the other epitaphs, can be read as the non-voice of the Kristevan exile wandering in the abject void. The persistent, yet enigmatic quality of the epitaphs jar the reader and make himlher ponder the owner of the voice-yet there is no unified voice to be had. The epitaphs do not eulogize anyone. As

Kristeva suggests, the epitaphs work to deconstruct the unified subject, fracturing it and

5 l am interpreting Kristeva' s use of the word death as both literaI and metaphoricaI: literaI in terms of the biologicai death of the physical body, metaphoricai in terms of death as being metaphoric for absence of both subjectlsubjectivity as weIl as the absence of stability which, of course, refers back to the self as unstable and in-process. 6 In the case of this poem, the horror indicates the horror of silence. 32 leaving it scattered in its many different psychic states (Butler, SD 233). This is a method Carson refers to as the stereoscope, her "metaphor for making what is and what could be visible," or, in the terms of this paper, coloring the void with language so as to make visible the subject's desire for its self (qtd. in Jennings 928). In the epitaphs, the absence of a unified speaker's voice, the absence of a single (dead) body, the absence of ideals (Zion, a single Europe) imply an intense desire for unification and singularity while absolutely refusing just that.

Desire, linguist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray tells us, "occupies or designates the place of the interval. Giving it a permanent definition would amount to suppressing it as desire. Desire demands a sense of attraction: a change in the interval, the displacement of the subject or of the object in their relations of neamess or distance"

(10). The epitaphs in Carson's text act as displacers: their fundamental ambiguity not only sustains the reader's desire to understand what they mean and where they fit in the tex tuaI scheme, but also suggests a near solution. The titles of the epitaphs suggest to the reader that there is a schema, yet refuse to answer what they are for/about, thereby guaranteeing a change in interval. In Carson the spaces in language are fluid. The fluidity simultaneously avoids providing clarity, and maintains the reader's desire for textual clarity-in this way, ambiguity guarantees existence of both textual and readerly desire. Desire is "committed to permanent revolution, to an enduring disappointment as a way of guaranteeing its survival" (Kristeva, DIL 3). There is a method to the madness. e. "Sumptuous Destitution"

My use of Carson's title, "Sumptuous Destitution," is somewhat oxymoronic, for while sumptuous implies lavish splendor, destitution, of course, means lack or deficiency. 33

What 1 see as Carson's intentional juxtaposition of positivity and negativity again represent two points of a triangle-but the third point is less obvious. Kristeva tells us that, in discussing the subject in process, we must necessarily incorporate not only want, but also aggressivity (pH 39.) Fear, which arises from the abject center of a subject's being, is manifested in aggression that in actuality ricochets back and threatens the already unstable subject:

1 refer to the modeling and, in the final analysis, determining role of the

symbolic language relation. From the deprivation felt by the chi Id because

of the mother's absence to the paternal prohibitions that institute

symbolism, that relation accompanies, forms, and elaborates the

aggresivity of drives, which, consequently, never presents itself in a 'pure'

state. (39)

Recall the relevance of Bataille's ontology of presence in "Epitaph: Evil." The same absolute fear of silence can be interpreted as a fear of the abject center-the horror of silence is in fact a horror of self. Carson suggests, through yet another juxtaposition

(sound and not-sound) that there is indeed a geometric triangle occurring within the subject: the positivity and negativity create a third term. "Sumptuous destitution," then, is an indicator. To discuss one polarity without the other is to repudiate the other. The subject's ability to enter the position of the (desired and absent) other, what Kristeva calls

"syntactical passivation," is the third point of this figure. In the poem "Sumptuous

Destitution," the reader encounters Carson the writer oscillating between the points of positivity, negativity and the position of syntactical passivation. The role of the desired and absent other, as we shall see, is undertaken through a strategic sleight of hand. 34

In "Sumptuous Destitution," Carson employs poetic license to re-work the words of the enigmatic Emily Dickinson into her own meanings. In her encyclopedic work,

Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia calls Emily Dickinson "Amherst's Madame de Sade

[ ... ] the greatest of women poets" (623). She goes on to posit that, aside from sadism,

Dickinson uses linguistic techniques to morph herself into a hermaphrodite and rid herself of her "female internality" (640). Dickinson, in other words, is an ambiguous figure. It should come as no surprise, then, that Dickinson figures into Carson' s own text as weIl as my Kristevan reading. As we have already established, the abject is inextricably bound to the maternaI: "devotees of the abject, she as well as he, do not cease looking, within what flows from the other's 'innermost being,' for the desirable and the terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the mother' s body" (pH 54). AlI the chaos allied with the abject can arguably be found in Dickinson.

In Carson's text, Dickinson takes on the role of the Kristevan subject in process-she is, through Carson's re-working, at odds with herself and within her self.

Dickinson is a figure that Carson addresses in her own work time and again. In

Autobiography of Red what Rae calls "an important fissure [ ... ] in the narrative" is allied to a poem by Dickinson (32). She surfaces again in Guy Davenport's introduction to

Glass. Irony and God, this time as an earlier version of Carson herself "she may seem unpoetic, or joltingly new, like [ ... ] Emily Dickinson" (viii). Unlike her other favored

Emily, Emily Brontë, Carson retains Dickinson's own words: she intertwines her own lines with those from letters between Dickinson and her mentor Thomas Higginson. The effect is startling:

"Sumptuous destitution" 35

Your opinion gives me a serious feeling: 1 would like to be what you deem me. Is a phrase You see my position is benighted Scholars use She was much too enigmatical for me to solve in an hours interview. Offemale God made me [Sir] Master-I didn't be-myselJ. Silence [ ... ] (13) We can decipher much from this intermingling of phrases. In The Canadian Post Modem

Linda Hutcheon suggests that the manipulation of narrative frames allow a writer the leeway to unpack the "obsessive dualities," "genre paradoxes," and "split senses of identity" (4,5). The interplay of speakers presented in "Sumptuous Destitution," both as one speaker and as many speakers, certainly engages Hutcheon's criteria. The poem can be read not only as a meta-poem, by addressing first the epistolary excerpts and then tuming to Carson's contributions, but also as a single body at odds with itself. Here, the speaker' s voice is enhanced and indeed founded upon the words of others. In the words of Miriam Hirsch, Carson' s interplay works to "reframe images so as to discover fissures and absences that make space for a revision of [ ... ] positions" (46). While Hirsch is referring specifically to the re-contextualization of photography the point is still useful: by re-contextualizing the letter fragments of Dickinson and Higginson, Carson has effectively pointed toward the fissures inherent in (or fundamental to) the coherent self.

Rae cites a Derridean point that is poignant: he suggests that we see "those elements marked as extrinsic to the ergon, or principle artwork, in fact perform an intrinsic function in the borders of that artwork" (36). Carson, as she simultaneously dons and appropriates the words of Dickinson, accentuates the tenets of the desiring subject. Look 36 here, she seems to say, 'my' voice is more unified through the inclusion of other voices.

In Kristeva's words, "the metaphor that is taxed with representing want itself(and not its consequences, such as transitional objects and their sequels, the 'a' objects of the desiring que st) is constituted under the influence of a symbolizing agency" (PH 35). Carson 's re renderings of Dickinson's words lay the groundwork for her interrogation of wantllack itself: the many-peopled voice acts as a metaphor for the desiring subject. The desiring subject 'tries on' the mantle of others in order to make clearer the lack within himlher self.

In the following poems, Carson's encryption continues to pair unlikely bedfellows. She sets up Hokusai (the self named "mad painter") with the curiously pragmatic Audubon, and thereby sustains the tension created through the desiring subject's search to 'fill in' the abject void. Carson refrains from providing that which the reader desires to know. The gap in expectation, present only because Carson has not placed aIl her cards on the table, leaves the reader's desire unfettered, as text/reader interaction remains in motion. In the poem about Hokusai and his lions (which he paints over and over again in various states of movement, and gives as a daily charrn) are no more capable of truly encapsulating the object of the abject than Audubon's lovely, and predictably soul-less birds. Hokusai gave ten of his lions to Miyamoto Shinsuke, warrior of the Matsusairo clan, with a note saying "Nissin-Joma." Loosely translated this means

'daily charm against evil' and carries with it the implication that each day is a new moment to be captured without the hindrances of evils from the day before. Hokusai continues drawing "hoping for a peaceful day," while Audubon constructs hollow facsimiles that cause the onlooker to "tum away. / And you do tum away. / There is 37 nothing to see" (16, 17). The problem of not seeing is one both Audubon and Hokusai are aware of. While the mad painter struggles his entire life to render true images,

Audubon is content with creating affordable "cloudless poses" (18). Carson is aware of the paradoxical nature that confronts the work of these characters, as well as her own.

The problem of apprehending desire lies inherent in the fact that the instant one grasps at desire, it becomes irretrievably lost. Neither Hokusai nor Audubon capture desire; neither man is able to successfully apprehend desire: each man seeks desire, but no man achieves desire. Similarly, Carson's inclusion of numerous drafts enacts the same pattern: desire is sought but ne ver found.

There are ni ne poems that purport to be drafts in Men ln the Off Hours: "Freud"

(draft 1 & 2), "Lazarus" (draft 1 & 2), Flatman (draft 1,2 &3), "Essay on Error" (draft 2),

"Irony Is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve" (2nd draft). Carson tells us, in Eros the Bittersweet, that:

Whenever any creature is moved to reach out for what it desires [according to

Aristotle] that movement begins in an act of imagination, which he calls

phantasia. [ ... ] Phantasia stirs minds to movement by its power of representation;

in other words, imagination prepares desire by representing the desired object as

desirable to the mind of the desirer. (169)

Remember that Kristeva claimed, in the introduction to her theory of self as being in process, that "[ ... ] it is the working of imagination whose foundations are being laid here" (pH 5). 1 propose, then, that Carson's drafts may be read as versions self created and re-created by the desiring subject. Consider "Lazarus (1 st draft)":

Inside the rock on which we live, another rock. 38

So they believe.

What is a Lamb of God? People use this phrase.

1 don't know.

1 watch my sister, fingers straying absently about her moustache,

no help there.

Leaves stir through the house like souls, they stream

from the porch,

catch in the speaking hole, glow and are gone.

[ .... ] Actions go on in us,

nothing else goes one. While a blurred and breathless hour

repeats, repeats. (21)

Carson has placed Lazarus, the man who was not Christ, and yet rose to 'new' life, in a

Kristevan subject position. Lazarus is in a defensive stance against the abject, he questions those things that cannot be answered, he questions the fluid and unstable

"rules" of existence, he cornes to a conclusion that is not a conclusion: "actions go on in us" (21). Kristeva suggests that the borderline/abject of consciousness, the "ambiguous opposition I10ther, Inside/Outside," is what maintains the subject's tenuous position. In

"Lazarus (1 st draft)" Carson has presented a voice from just that position-the position of 39 ambiguous opposition (pH 7). She the goes on to alter, or perhaps re-present, Lazarus's stance in "Lazarus (2nd draft)":

Other bait pushed their way past me with cloaklike flutters.

Whitish clouds puffed from the smoke machine.

It' s nontoxic said God.

Nothing is nontoxic.

God laughed.

Dear old red eyes, what did you hope

Just shove it through the night slot

and lets go.

Free use of one's own being is most difficult,

Is it not.

That painting-

1 shaH,

When shall 1 not

hear it. (28)

Movement is altered; abject time is double time. Lazarus speaks in two voices that overlap ("1 shaH/ When shall 1 not"), and the reader is presented with a textual rendering of the subject' s inner ambiguous opposition. Carson' s two drafts of Lazarus are offered as just two drafts of an infinite number of drafts that continuaHy overlap and overwrite 40 each other. Instead of leading to a conclusive subject position, they present a visual reference for the subject as desirous, in process, and on trial.

In "Iron y Is Not Enough: Essay On My Life As Catherine Deneuve (2nd draft),"

Carson appropriates yet another figure through which to further the trope of the searching subject. In this poetic essay, first written in verse form and published in a separate work,7

Deneuve overtly meditates upon the ways in which desire determines existence. The opening section of the poem entitled parts (which can he read both in English as pieces of an individual whole, or in French as he, she, it has left) Deneuve thinks to herself: "Half- burnt. You have to wonder. Sappho, Sokrates, is it aIl mental?" (120). Deneuve continuaIly plays out what appear to be fictional scenarios in her mind, aIl the while reminding herself and the reader "this is mental" (122). The emphasis on the fictionality of her thoughts serves to underscore her attempts to relegate aIl emotion to one part of the mind, the imagination, thereby avoiding the pain and ecstasy of the impossible: attaining the desired object. In the tiny section entitled "details" the reader is presented with the pattern of the fiery images that resurface overtly: "AIl the same there are sorne smaIl questions one would like to put to Sokrates. Or better still, Sappho. Avec tes mains brulées" (125). The preference for conversation with Sappho can be read as Deneuve's recognition that sorne questions can never be answered. Sappho, she notes, threw herself off a cliff. The answers hang on the wind, and Deneuve's desire is insatiate. The "one who tries to utter this 'not yet a place,' this no-grounds, can obviously only do so backwards, starting from an over-mastery of the linguistic and rhetorical code" says

Kristeva (PH 38). Through presenting and re-presenting drafts of selves, Carson has

nd 7 "My Life as Catherine Deneuve (2 draft)" was published in Seneca Review, in a substantially different stylistic layout, in 1997. 41 made visible the fissures created by the absence of the desired object. But the question of whose desire, and whose subjectivity is yet to be answered in any draft. The central section of Men ln the Off Hours is taken up by a series of poems-some published elsewhere (including placement in one of Carson's earlier books8)-called "TV Men." 1 read this section with syntactical passivation in mind.

Carson opens the sequence with the elucidating fact that television cornes from the Latin ward videre, "to see" (61). The "TV Men poems," says Harris, "to sorne extent are the least enjoyable. These poems come across as clipped bullets lacking depth" (1).

Indeed in our post-modem existence, television has come to represent a hold on vision: moments are captured, framed and presented to us in the comfort of our own homes. As 1 have suggested, however, the "clipped bullets" work well to support a Kristevan reading of the work. In watching television, one is experiencing second-hand moments of action, the action of others is appropriated into the self and made into new action. Desire is corrupted, displaced.

Sappho' s piece begins with the French "avec ma main brulée j'écris sur la nature du feu" (62). The reader is retumed to the notion of fashioning images from fire, though

Sappho makes the conundrum explicit. Her bumt hands know fire because the y experienced it, but the y can no more write fire than she can speak fire, the moment has passed. The truth of the action and emotion lies in her inability to encapsulate it.

Furthermore, the reader now occupies the position of syntactical passivation: he/she wants to understand Sappho's bums, her pain, to engulf her into hislher abject void. This is, of course, an impossibility: "if incorporation marks out the way toward the

8 Glass, Irony and God. New Directions Corporation: New York, 1995. 42 constitution of the object, phobia represents the failure of the concomitant drive introjection" (pH 40).

Carson emphasizes the impossible task of capturing the object of desire through a sequence of 'film takes' that focus on Antonin Artaud. This impossibility is what Artaud himself referred to as his utter failure "to possess my mind in its entirety" (14).

Artaud's madness stems directly from his attempts to fill the abject void. He says,

"having thought means that process by which thought sustains itself, manifests itself to itself, and is answerable to aIl the circumstances and feelings of hfe [ ... ] its unseizability and flux-is hello The real pain is to feel one's thought shift within one's self' (16).

Kristeva also addresses Artaud directly: the "death that '1' am provokes horror, there is a choking sensation that does not separate inside from outside but draws them the one into the other, indefinitely" (pH 25).

Carson's integration of Artaud is genius, insofar as she grasps his writing as a struggle for selfhood. In the section entitled "LUNDI" she says:

For Artaud the real drawback of being mad is not that consciousness

Is crushed and tom but that he cannot say so,

Fascinating as this world would be, while it is happening.

But only

later when somewhat "recovered" and so much less convincingly. (66)

Carson interprets Artaud' s work, both his poetry and his theatrical theories, as efforts to apprehend desire for the absent other within himself. Her incorporation of Artaud serves to further couch her text undeniably in the realm of subjective theory: the figure of

Artaud has not been overlooked by major theorists, but rather is used as a figure to 43 demonstrate the role of desire in the subject in process. Derrida too, as Carson notes, recognized Artaud's struggles. In his work on Artaud, Derrida meditates on the practice of crossing out words and its function in Artaud's writing. He theorizes that:

By scratching 1 purify, 1 appease, 1 efface what has been written in order to

continue writing [ ... ] using an instrument which at the same time scratches

and prepares the surface, on which new inscriptions, which l 'scratch' as

weIl, could tell the truth unless the exposure of the support or the

subjectile by the scratching itself constitutes in tum the operation of truth.

(Derrida, SAA xx)

Avec ma main brulée j 'écris sur la nature defeu. Both Derrida and Carson comprehend

Artaud's attempts, yet both fail as he did in their attempts at amendment. One can write about fashioning images of fire, but one cannot encapsulate, truthfuIly, the desired object itself: the abject slides out of reach.

Interestingly, because it seems at first to be contradictory, Carson allows her TV

Men to understand this concept as weIl. The TV Men at first appear to understand nothing-they cut Sappho's dialogue down to a few broken lines, they impose themselves on the chaos of their subject's lives-but they reveal themselves to understand the impossibility of capturing the desired object. They cannot make the film of Akhmatova "1 suppose 1 could have made the film anyhow-what can 1 say. Combat went out of me" (114). They cannot capture the truth of Tolstoy's struggles. AlI they can do is only create a bleak documentary. Lazarus, at once the most visible and the most invisible rendering of desire for the absent other, proves to be so difficult that the

'shot' of him transformed from death to life is gruesome and wrong: "Lazarus!/ A froth 44 of fire is upon his mind./ It crawls to the back of his tongue,! [ ... ] he cries, making a little scalded place! on the billows of the tomb that lap our faces as we watch" (94-5). The desiring subject is scourged by fire. In a similar manner, Thucydides and Virginia Woolf re-enter the text to discuss the Peloponnesian War. Their attempts to perfectly enact the feeling of war are rendered comical. Woolf cannot co-ordinate her lines with her movements, and Thucydides curmudgeonly offers no helpful advice. The effect of this poem is hard to miss: Thucydides and Woolf, brilliant and erudite though they may be, are incapable of encapsulating the truth of the moment. The desired object is not meant to be captured and yet there is, within Carson and the characters she employs, and within the reader who continues to read, an unsettling need to understand it and to say it completely.

f "No Epitaph"

There is no proper name for a verse that is given for a death that did not happen, and yet, in this text, an epitaph is given for an absent object that is always missing. 1 see

Carson, at the 'end' of this text, portray herself as both the searching subject, composed of a collage of voices, and as the scholar, devoid of desire. There is no name for the position of the in-between. In a section of Plainwater entitled "The Life of Towns" she daims:

To explain what 1 do is simple enough. A scholar is someone who takes a

position. From which position, certain lines become visible. You will at first

think that 1 am painting the lines myself; it's not so. 1 merely know where to 45

stand to see the lines that are there. And the mysterious thing, it is a very

mysterious thing, is how these lines do paint themselves. (91)

Of course, to believe her is to believe that the authorial voice is a singular, whole, authoritative voice belonging to the author, and to undermine everything we have established thus far. This question of authorial authority is, of course, a question of desire and absence. Carson points to this, in her work on Simonides and Paul Celan,

Economy of the Unlost, when she states "negative is a peculiarly linguistic resource who se power resides within the user of the words. But verbalization in itself is not sufficient to generate the negative. Negation depends upon an act of the imaginary mind"

(102). Despite the fact that she, the author of the text employs certain linguistic tricks, much depends on the reader, who se "imaginary mind" desires to fill, or at least interpret, the absences. This is a matter of "making use of the void to think the full," Carson tells us. We must acknowledge the way in which this use of the void affects the formation of subjectivity. And, we must decipher whose subjectivity is in formation: Carson's, or ours, as readers' .

In Desire in Language, Kristeva elaborates her subjective theories and applies them to literature-as we remember, literature is, for Kristeva, the ultimate signifier. She says:

Negation is [ ... ] repeated in the affirmation of duplicity. The

exclu si veness of two terms posited by the novel' s thematic loop is

replaced by a doubtful positivity in such a way that the disjunction, which

both opens and closes the novel is replaced by a yes/no structure (non

disjunction). This function does not bring about a para-thetic silence, but 46

combines carnavalistic play with its non-discursive logic; aIl the figures in

the novel found in the novel function: ruses, treason, foreigners,

androgynes, utterances that can be doubly interpreted. (43)

This is to say that, in Carson's work, which is neither wholly essay nor wholly poetry, we encounter a conflated example of Kristeva's theory. As we shall see however, in our examination of the concluding pages of the text, Carson' s work does not fit into

Kristeva's notions as neatly as it would appear. Is it possible that the abject, when coupled with desire, is so entirely a void as to be genuinely unnavigable? And what of the tenuous borders of the maternaI, that Kristeva suggests are so threatening to create a subjectivity founded by defensive stances? To address these questions we will (re)tum, in something of a thematic loop, to Sappho.

Carson revisits Sappho in the penultimate essay, "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the

Phenomenology of Female Pollution In Antiquity." The title clearly implies a link to

Kristeva's theory of the abject:

For with the misfire of identification with the mother as weIl as with the

father, how else are they [the subject] to be maintained in the Other? How

if not by incorporating a devouring mother, for want of having been able

to interject her and joy in what manifests her, for want of being able to

signify her: urine, blood, sperm, excrement. (54)

In "Dirt and Desire," Carson moves away from what has thus far been a deft and subtle alliance to Kristevan theories to what may be, at first glance, a direct allusion. After pages of stoic observations on the ways in which women were viewed as polluted in antiquity, Carson turns to examine the long poem-fragment, fragment 31, by Sappho. 47

Carson focuses her argument on the Sapphic fragment that observes the marriage of two people. She notes specifically the refashioning of the bride from a rough, abject, boundless figure into one that is finite, clean and proper (145). This poem, she says, "is framed in verbs of seeming [ ... ] devised 'out of revelation itself,' as Longinus says"

(151). The crucial point of this observation is that Sappho manipulates the light of meaning. "Sappho has chosen the most solemn and authoritative of the rituals that sacralize female boundaries and used it to exp Iode the distinction between the inside and the outside of herself' (152). Sappho writes about the borders of subjectivity, the fissures within her self, which are made visible by her desires for the bride:

He seems to me equal to gods that man

who opposite you sits and listens close

to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing-oh it

puts the heart in my chest on wings

for when 1 look at you, a moment, then no speaking

is left in me

no: [ ... ]

1 am and dead-or almost

1 seem to me ... (150)

As Carson has observed, the poem is framed by vision-verbs: "he seems to me," "1 seems to me" (151). This frame, she suggests, is in actuality a clue to the idea that

Sappho does not desire the bride, nor the bridegroom, but rather her self. 48

Sappho has constructed her poem as a playon the ritual formalities of the

unveiling ceremony in order to situate her own emotions, which are

intensely personal and properly hidden emotions, at the single most

extraordinary moment of exposure in female life so as to bend its ritual

meaning onto herself with an irony of reference as sharp as a ray of light.

(152)

Sappho's fragment, c1aims Carson, is a magisterial rendering of the notion that women overspill their boundaries insofar as Sappho has c1aimed the self-making moment of another woman for her own self. Can we read this as Carson reconciling the way to encapsulate the way in which subjects, namely female, use desire for the absent to manipulate the abject? Is it merely a matter of manipulating verb usage and social ritual to make the abject not so objectionable?

Certainly not. "Ifyou can read this, you 've come too close" she warns, appropriating Dorothy Parker's epitaph (152). Carson, then, continues to play with the reader, finishing the aforementioned essay with fifty-nine footnotes, leaving the impression that the text is finished, a warning of the abject firmly in place. The reader then stumbles upon the poem entitled "No Epitaph." This poem could easily be read as a delicate piece on the Chinese Cultural Revolution if it weren't for the problematic title.

In light of the proliferation of epitaphs throughout the text, one cannot dismiss a poem that is vocally not an epitaph. The poet in the poem reflects on his survival of the revolution:

Thinking back on this saddens him now. Okay who is that man? He asks

[ ... ] What was it like? Quiet he says. Each night for a week 49

He kept company beside the empty arms of the dead.

Looking out the door we can see Venus rising.

Okay there she is.

Cold rushes in.

No needfar men ta chatter sa. (162-3)

There is no need for epitaphs. The poet sees Venus rising as he holds vigil beside the body of a worker. The emphasis on the poet finding quiet can be read as the poet finding peace from the mental racket of the revolution, but could we not also consider it to be the poet coming to sorne reconciliation within himself? The vision of Venus rising prompts the line "no need for men ta chatter sa, " which hearkens the reader back to Virginia

Woolf and Thucydides. Thucydides, we remember, was writing and observing chaos while in exile from his own country. Carson emphasizes the displacement by saying he

"wr[ote] up his notes at night- he marks the start of that long interval: 'about the first watch of the night''' (4). Likewise ,Woolf displaced her emotion: "1 drank my milk and concealed my excitement" (8). This displaced Chinese poet, like Thucydides and Woolf, learns that to retain something of himself, he must accept that there are sorne things that cannot be reconciled. The irony of the abject is often that in accepting its impossibility, sorne resonances of self surface.

The final section of Men In the Off Hours works to frame the text, as it is referred to as an appendix to the first essay. "Appendix to Ordinary Time" is written in a tone far more intimate and confessional than any other in the text. In this piece the reader is presented with Carson herself, struggling with her own desire for the absent/abject. In this case however, the shifting borders of the maternai are in actuality aligned to a mother 50 figure. In the wake of her mother's death Carson tells the reader that she has no one, there is a void within her. She then cites Virginia Woolf who, speaking of her father's death, says "forming such shocks into words and order was 'the strongest pleasure known to me'" (165). It is this attempt to fill the abject void, and formulate it into language, that keeps Carson' s speakers afloat amidst grief. She recognizes in Woolf, as Derrida did in

Artaud, that though these desires cannot be entirely reproduced or explained, a great deal of their energy is whispered through the marks made atop them:

Crossouts are something you rarely see in published texts. They are like

death: by a simple stroke-all is lost, yet still there. For death although

utterly unlike life shares a skin with it. Death lines every moment of

ordinary time. Death hides right inside every shining sentence we grasped

and had no grasp of. (166)

Death is a supreme example of the abject within the self: it is the most reviled of exiles, it is the one glistening interloper able to cross borders of the self, despite their constant state of flux. It is that which "most violently represents the strange state in which a non subject, a stray, having lost its non-objects, imagines nothingness through the ordeal of abjection" (Kristeva, PH 25). Death epitomizes desire: it is unencompassable, its elusivity seems to provide answers that are beyond the subject's reach and grasp, and yet it is so foreign that the subject simultaneously recoils in horror. Carson, by embracing crossouts, is embracing the death of a line, and the tiny flutter its transformation allows.

She, too, is someone who now knows the marks that surface both on the page and within the self during that moment of flip-over. "Here," she says "is an epitaph for my mother 1 found:" 51

such

abandon Obvioasly il is impossible, 1 thoaght, lookillg illto those

ment foaming waters, co

such compare the hvhig wîtR {Re dead make any companson

rapture glmpare-thetIl.

(166)

The possible and impossible meet, and on the "high ledge exposed in fulllight," before they separate, there is the briefest moment of comprehension (165). But Carson's speaker, like Woolf, Artaud, the TV Men and others, must bow her head to the elusivity of selfhood, the object of desire. She can no more sustain that moment between reach and grasp than could Hokusai's lions, or Woolf's crossouts.

The finalline of Men In the Off Hours is a testament to failure of sorts. Beneath a photograph of her mother there is a phrase: Eclipsis est pro dolore. Pain over aU. There is, in this single line, a move that takes the reader beyond the bounds of the maternaI, beyond the abject, insofar as death moves beyond the border of the body. Kristeva closes her work on abjection with a statement: "while everything else-[the abject's] archeology and its exhaustion-is only literature: the sublime point at which the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us-and 'that cancels our existence'"

(Louis-Ferdinand Céline qtd. in PH 210). Canceled existence seems to be, to a certain extent, the existence of a writer. Throughout this section we have attributed the first person voice to "the speaker" but the temptation is to attribute it to Carson herself, especially in light of the inclusion of her mother's photograph. The questions that we as readers must pose become: What happens when a writer manipulates the borderlines of 52 text, as well as the borderlines of desire for selfhood? What happens to the fissures and gaps between the reader's desire and the writer's? Derrida posits "the border between literature and its other becomes undecidable. The literary institution has imposed itself; it has also imposed the rigor of its right to calculate, master, neutralize this undecidablility, to make as if-another fiction-literature" (TEO 92). In other words, the reader must approach the text in a different manner than before, a manner in which the desires of the writer are made into a necessary concem, especially in terms of their interaction with the desires of the reader. 1 suggest that we see, in this exercise of intermingled desire, the formulation of another fiction, that we can read Carson's work as one that ends by pointing beyond the subject as being in process and on trial. We must ask, however: what that lies beyond the subject in process?

ln Carson the desiring subject's search for self and subjectivity is ultimately a matter not of certainty, but of want. Absence is inherent to the searching subject's composition and a factor of the continuation of his/her desire for the absent other.

Subjectivity, in Carson, is a continuaI, unending process of quest and revision spumed by the subject's desire for what is not there, but also by the reader's desire to decipher the subjectivity/ies within the text. The conclusion of Carson's text only concedes that the reader, too, must consider the likelihood that a conclusion is unlikely.

ln the following chapter this project is expanded. 1 will examine the way in which

Gail Scott, in her 'novel' Main Brides, pushes the discussion of desire further, and requires the reader's active desire to fuel the progress of the text. Rather than Carson's textual rendering of the subject in process, or her desire for the absent (m)other, we will encounter in Scott a deliberate conflation of fictional and non-fictional subjects. In Scott 53 we will confront a text in which desire becomes an even weightier aspect of subjective formulation, a text in which the absent other and the subjectivities of reader and writer take on a compounded IOle. 54

CHAPTER II: GAIL SCOTT' S MAIN BRIDES, JACQUES DERRIDA AND THE BORDERLINE.

1. "Writing is about constructing a subjecl": Scott and Derrida Create Anew

So far, 1 have plotted movement to establish that subjectivity exists on a continuum: desire has transformed from a Lacanian model in which the (male) subject's desire for the absent other guarantees subjective definition, to a Kristevan model in which a subject desires the absent/abject within him/herself. While the Kristevan model, which

Carson's text engages readily, presents the subject as instable, in process and in constant motion, it retains a degree of ambiguity. Such ambiguity, of course, is due in part to the nature of Kristeva's model. One may consider the ambiguity a natural component, then, and find it natural that the model embodies this quality of constant motion.

ln light of this ambiguous instability, we must pay attention to the questions exposed in the crescendo of Carson's work. We, as the readers, must intuit meaning and signification into the photograph of Carson's mother, the crossouts, and the hint that

Carson is aware that she writes from a writerly subjective position that is both she and not she. We must gain insight from a writer fashioning desire and absence as subject forming both within a textual work, and, seemingly, within the writer herse If. The main focus, from this point of instability on, must be to question the way in which the desire of the reader is co-mingled with the desire of the writer. Our focus, as readers, must be deliberate. The impetus to examine writing-as-autobiography is a misguided one. This process must not be, as Rodolphe Gasché wams, a process that is "confused with the so called life of the author, with the corpus of empirical accidents making up the life of an empirically real person. Rather, the biographical, insofar as it is autobiographical, cuts

9 Daurio 19 55 across both of the fields in question: the body of the work and the body of the real subject" (qtd. in Derrida, TEO 41). The spacethat exists between the reader and the writer is called the borderline. It is the space in which the reader and the writer interact.

A degree of oscillation is at work: neither the constant movement of the wandering of the exile within the abject void of the self, nor the continuaI motion of the subject as-in- process, but rather an exchange between reader and writer that takes place in the fissure that is the borderline. In order to work within the borderline, we as readers must open ourselves to the voice of the writer, and we must acknowledge that the desire for the absent other has changed. The writer must be consulted, certainly not at face value and with utter authorial authority, but as a desiring subject whose text functions as the borderline in which absences and omissions inform both his/her own searching self, and the searching self of the reader. It is this borderline oscillation that captures our interest in Scott's Main Brides, where the narrator 'writes' the stories while simultaneously writing, effacing and re-writing her own desiring self.

JO 2. Is This a "Fiction of Linguistic Practice ,,: Writing From the Borderline

In an interview with Beverley Daurio, Scott is asked whether or not ail her work is, on sorne level, autobiographical. She replies that the retour étemaZll employed in her fiction:

[ ... ] has to do partly with the displacement of the writing subject from a position

of certitude towards one of doubt, ambivalence [which] opens the space for

10 Butler, in Subjects of Desire, describes Derrida' s subjective theory in terms of what she caUs "fiction of linguistic practice" (179). Il Scott defines un retour éternal as "the way we go back to the old knots, the oid wounds, but aiso to the sites of pleasure, desire. This retour is profoundIy human" (Daurio 160). 56

constant slippage [ ... ] Julia Kristeva says somewhere12 that voyeurism is the other

side of abjection. That the voyeurism starts at the point where the writing stops (1

take writing here to mean creation, including self-creation). (Daurio 161)

Scott's statement is provocative, namely insofar as she underscores the "displacement of the writing subject." Her subjective displacement is extremely resonant of Jacques

Derrida's notions of the self. In Derrida's work, the fact that a subject is incapable of self definition and completion points to the notion of "subject" as linked to the "fiction of linguistic practice that seeks to deny the absolute difference between sign and signified"

(Butler, SD 179). Moreover, the subject is a subject inasmuch as it bears influence on a

"relationship to exteriority" (Butler 179). In the terms of this study, then, the writer

(Scott) will first be encountered as a desiring subject who displaces her desires on the

(absent) reader. Likewise, the reader of Scott's text will be treated as a desiring subject who displaces his/her desires on the (absent) specter of the writer. Movement occurs in this model, certainly, but unlike Kristevan movement, this is a motion of oscillation, one that exists in that fissure, the borderline. In Derrida's own words, the act of using fiction to ascertain desire and subjectivity is a matter of the borderline:

[ ... ] this borderline-I call it dynamis because of its force, its power, as

well as its virtual and mobile potency-is neither active nor passive,

neither inside nor outside. It is most especially not a thin line, an invisible

or indivisible trait lying between the enclosure of philosophemes, on the

one hand, and the life of an author already identifiable behind the name,

on the other. (TEO 5)

12 This is implied in "Philosophical Sadness and the Spoken Disaster of the Analyst" (PH 29-31) 57

The borderline, what Scott herself caUs "the uncanny edge of language," is that space in which the writing subject and the reading subject displace their desires onto each other

(SLS 62). The borderline itself is an absence that both implies presence and maintains a space for versions of presence-versions of subjectivity-to be tried.

Derrida, in his work on the borderline, suggests that this oscillation between reader and writer is contractual in nature. The writer, he suggests, has "implicated [the reader] in this transaction through what, on the force of a signature, remains of his text"

(TEO 8). The subtle contract, one that urges the reader to "trust" the writer as it were, exists on the "uncanny edge of language." The contract exists as the borderline and it is uncanny because it neither lives, nor is dead. The borderline, the dynamis in Derrida's terms, is a space of neither/nor, of both/and. The space of the borderline is neither living nor dead because it constantly works in and as the space between, it is a place of experimentation and of interaction where the reader and the writer, the living and the dead may interact on level ground. It is beyond the abject. 1 propose to use the concept of the borderline as a useful way to envi sion the space where the interaction between reader/writer, as weU as scholarly writinglfiction writing, takes place.

Scott's Main Brides begins with a co-founded contract between the reader and the writer. The reader is led by a disembodied voice past a parenthetical statement "(the sky is what 1 want)," over the knees of cyclists to a photograph of a "[ ... ] bride [ ... ] Rer soldier's X'd out" (9). There is not an immediate and overt contract, nor an obvious narrator, only an indication given by the first set of parenthesis, and the second that states

"(inside, a pair of eyes watches, astonished [ ... ])" (9). These parentheses are enough, however, to simultaneously draw the reader into, and out of the text. The reader's desire 58 to know the story silently invites himlher to concede to the contractual agreement. But what, exactly, does a reader/writer contract imply? What occurs when the contract is troubled from its basic format? ln order to address these questions, we must first tum to the place in which the contract is articulated. We must tum to the borderline.

Derrida has posited that there are two main constituents of the borderline: firstly, there must be an indivisible bond between the biological/biographical (living subjectl living text) and the thanatological/thanatographical (dead subjectldead text), and secondly, a writer, in setting about crafting an autobiographical work, "takes out a loan on himself and implicates us in this transaction" (TEO 5,8).13 The troubling suggestion that a writer creates an economic system of exchange between himself/herself and the reader works to simultaneously draw a reader in and formulate a contract between the writer and the reader. The contract disallows a reader's passive engagement with any text and uncovers the absences that both reader and writer use to negotiate their desires.

The reader is a part of the creation and perpetuation of the text (he/she reads the text into being). 1 propose that we see Scott's text as an experiment not only with various subjectivites, but also as an experiment with the interaction between the reader and the writer. Whereas Carson creates a text in which the reader' s desires are spumed on, Scott creates a text in which the reader's desires are crucial and the writer's desires are conflated.

ln order to continue the discussion of the borderline and to further the way in which it aids our reading of Scott, there is another point that must be fleshed out. 1 have noted that Derrida posits that the relationship between the biological/biographical (the

13 The use of us is strategie and refers, here, to the collective of readers. Derrida implies not only those people that read Nietzsche, but also the reader reading him while he in tum reads Nietzsche. 59 living writer/living text) and the thanatological/thanatographical (dead writer/dead text)14 is troubled, enhanced and reinterpreted in the borderline. 1 have also observed that the author, in signing his/her name to his/her work enters into an economic system in which he/she has taken a loan on his/her textual/physical self, thereby implicating the reader insofar as the reader' s response to the author will verify the contractual nature of the reader/writer relationship. What are the implications, then, of this contractual economic system? How and why is it intrinsic to the deconstruction of the readerlwriter relationship and the borderline? It "is only in the certainty that after 1 have fini shed speaking 1 will never have spoken," says critical theorist Paul Mann,15 "that it is possible to speak at all" (3). These answers cannot be found on the outside looking in, we must tum to the borderline in order to understand the borderline.

a. The contract and the "living Mother"

There is an abject aspect to the borderline: life, both textual and corporeal, assures the survival of death. The flipside of this must be true, as well. Namely, two truths exist, and between those truths exists a third fact that is paradoxical. To explicate this situation Derrida points out that Nietzsche, when he speaks of this dual

(textual/corporeal) existence, must tum to riddle (Ratselform) to allow the necessary fracture to take place:

The good fortune of my existence, its uniqueness perhaps, lies in its

fatality: 1 am, to express it in the form of a riddle, already de ad as my

14 The reader is correct in assuming that 1 am referring here, as is Derrida, to the metaphorical death of the Author as laid out by Roland Barthes in his later works. 15 Paul Mann, author of Masocriticism and The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, should not be confused with Paul de Man, though one may assume Mann to be acutely aware of the nominal resonance. 60

father [als mein Vater bereits gestorben}, while as my mother, 1 am still

living and becoming old [als meine Mutter lebe ich noch und werde alt].

(qtd. in TEO 15)

The "living Mother," that which is ever shifting, exists and endures precisely as the borderline does. It is continuaI, living, evolving and thereby escaping the act of definition that renders the patemal dead.

Derrida, suggests a similar evolution. He closes his essay with the suggestion that there is "no woman or trace of a woman [ ... ] the mother is the faceless figure of a figurant, an extra [ ... ] she survives on the condition of remaining at the bottom" (38). It would be easy to misread this statement as Lacanian, were it not clear that Derrida is using woman as a riddle, an abstract concept synonymous, 1 would argue, with desire.

After aIl, in subjective theory, desire (and more specifically female desire) has proven thus far to be an elusive and un solvable riddle. In Scott's text, as we have glimpsed, the purported narrator of the text is constructed of absences that ask to be filled. Scott scoms linearity and order. She finds such "delays infinitely aesthetic," as waiting "opens up the space" (Main Brides 33). Barbara Godard suggests that this woman, whose name the reader only learns in the third section, desires boundlessness, which implies both infinitude and undefinability, or an absence of the finite (118). Derrida's riddle that he names woman, like desire, implies a necessary lack. Both the riddle and desire require absence to perpetuate their existence: should either be completed, they would each be obliterated. Derrida's riddle is a retum to the riddle of the borderline, and a retum to the role of the reader. 61

ln this exercise, deciphering the role of borderline and the role of the reader will shed light upon this shrewd contractual ruse. As Mann, suggests "the psychic economy is driven by a desire to preclude change through repetition, that is to say, through a principle of constancy. But this princip le of constancy is itself the expression of a deeper principle: a zero principle" (11). As we tum to textual analysis, the riddle of the borderline will be given a zero at its end, its repercussions and implications rendered larger by increments.

b. Inside-out: The Borderline In Action

A text's impact on its reader, in the terms with which 1 am concemed (namely the oscillation between the reader' s desire for the absent other and the writer' s desire for the absent other), multiplies and compounds its impact when it itself is engaged in multiple languages. Very simply, a multi-lingual text is, in parts, accessible to more people, though perhaps not entirely accessible throughout. Scott's Main Brides is written mostly in English, but as Godard points out Scott' s tendency of "writing out of French-language literary codes on Quebecers toward an English-speaking reader" leaves the text in a liminal space that refuses fixity (120). Scott's text reminds the reader over and over that it exists, indeed is being created, in the fragmented space of a bar where the patrons speak

English and French. In a bar, patrons pause and take a moment from their lives. The

Montréal bar functions as a linguistically desegregated space where cultures intermingle and the borders between become blurred. The result of Scott's language collage is the creation of a hyper-borderline text. Barthes, aiso concemed with the confusion of space when writing the self, speaks to this issue when he says, "1 cannot write myself. What, 62 after all, is this '1' who would write himself? Even as he would enter into writing the writing would render him null and void-futile" (LD 98). Scott, like Barthes, cannot

'write her self' but she can open the text up to influence from the reader, from multiple readers. Through the creation of a text that defies definition, a text that is neither English nor French and is situated in an unstable locus, Scott fashions a space in which the desires of the reader and the writer are displaced upon each other. Such negotiations of subjectivity, in terms of displaced desire, require precise textual maneuvers.

The "law of the Mother, as language," Derrida says "is a 'domain,' a living body not to be 'sacrificed' or given up dirt cheap [... ] the master must suppress the movement of this mistreatment inflicted on the body of the mother tongue" (TEO 22). Scott's Main

Brides employs just such precision. The narrator of Main Brides, Lydia, is situated in a real bar on the real St. Laurent in the real 16 city of Montréal. She is fluently bilingual and is one of those people you meet traveling who is more comfortable in another culture

(136). Lydia functions as a signifier of the borderline-she oscillates between languages and concedes to neither one, not the other. Lydia is a signifier of the borderline, and as such Lydia herself is necessarily both biographical and thanatographical. She is and is not Scott, she does and does not exist in an actual space. She is often aligned with the

Portuguese woman in the bar "who's dressed as conservatively as she" (33), and confuses her-self with the Portuguese woman. Lydia's actions are sometimes blurred with the other woman's, thereby confusing not only the reader, but also Lydia herself. She operates as though between bodies, both herself, and the Portuguese woman, her movement is rendered indefinite: "instead-she lights a cigarette. Eyes fixed obliquely

16 1 am using the word 'real' in this context to indicate that these locations are. The bar from which Lydia negotiates the borderline can he found on Boulevard St. Laurent near the corner of Boul. St. Laurent and Roy. 63 on the Portuguese woman, herselfjumping up" (132). Lydia's position, both as character and narrator, is not defined. In a similar mien, Scott often neglects subjects in her sentences, thereby assuring a certain degree of confusion. Situating Lydia in the bar

Scott writes:

Breathing rapidly, deeply, to stay in her state of somnambulism-almost:

head in the clouds, feet on the ground. Which state permits en largement

of exterior perception without interior disturbance [ ... ] Or on giant

boulders at crossroads, carved to wam off evil female spirits. (100)

The omissions of subjects work to reassert the Law of the Mother (the riddle of woman) by underscoring absence as a means through which to evade definition. What 1 suggest is present in Scott's text is a manipulation of the borderline such that absence, both of sentence subjects and of characters, works to render the Law of the Mother/riddle of woman as the law by which this text' s borderline exists. Scott' s use of absence to animate the borderline embodied in her absence of subjects and characters represents a lack of character and subjectivity. That is, it arouses the reader's desires for subjectivity.

c. The Brides, or Portraits 0/-

Desire, Eugene Goodheart tells us "[ ... ] is itself a subject. Its freedom, if that is what we wish to call it, consists in its refusaI to be constrained by the satisfactions that would extinguish it" (2). The reader' s desires, displaced within the borderline, function in terms of the 'freedoms' Scott employs in her text. The reader desires to know, but what he/she desires to know is coloured not only by Scott's displaced desires, but also by the absence of fixity in the text. That is to say, the reader's interaction with the text, 64 his/her desire to understand sustains the text' s freedom and allows its desire to move freely within the borderline. Scott organizes her text in such a way that Lydia, the purported creator of the text, fabricates the other characters in the work.

Though she draws inspiration from the other patrons in the bar, Lydia's brides are entirely her own creations. Only the reader's speculation and desire for the real, for a degree of truth, sustains Lydia's brides as real and truthful. The brides are conceived and placed, one by one, on the pediment Lydia sees from the bar window:

What she really wants is "brides." Women on the roof. So the skyline

(around the pediment) won't be empty at this moment of the day [ ... ]

When the great gap opens up before the night: manufacturing a1coholics

[ ... ] "Brides," she repeats, smiling. Because, for a single moment, the

Main thing in the picture. (35)

The brides function not only as something to fill the skyline, but also as versions of subjectivities-not only for Lydia! Scott to try out, but also for the reader's experimentation. Lydia projects her desires on to the women who are absences waiting to be presences. Scott, certainly, is involved in this process of displacement-so is the reader. The layers of narrative draw in the writer and the reader, and oscillate between them within the borderline. The contractual nature of the situation allows for revision in order to heighten a sense of desire. The text is made and re-made while it mayes between reader and writer, Lydia and her brides.

Lydia herself continually interrupts her own narrative in order to perfect it. In the case of the first bride, Nanette, she pauses mid-portrait to speculate about how to continue: 65

The woman sits still. Watching the line of Nanette's cheek in profile,

looking out the bar window [ ... ] Nanette, crouched near the tap in the

park, legs apart, curled hair, full skirt, ballet slippers, splashing water on

the fat body of sorne baby [ ... ] Or on a bench with her friends [ ... ] Or el se

walking with her mother. (17)

Lydia, over and over again, reworks her story of Nanette and tries her in different places, outfits and situations. Even Nanette re-writes herself within Lydia's portrait: handing in

"the same term paper to every teacher [ ... ] Until, feeling slightly weird, she decided to rewrite and update a little. The teacher said: '1 suspect you of plagiarizing.' 'You wouldn't believe,' the girl answered, 'that 1 plagiarize myself'" (24-5). Here, the hyper conscious manner in which Scott reminds the reader of the borderline simuitaneously functions as an insight into Lydia. Mann speculates whether or not it is the reader' s role to feel as though s/he must immerse fully in the face of a "master text" behind which exists the "utterly malleable figure of the author," or if perhaps the reader' s role is to decipher the deeper meaning, the "desire" the text works to mask (23). The effect of either of these scenarios, he claims, results in a kind of stasis:

[ ... ] we encounter an ideality in who se name we can only produce sorry

approximations, rninor surrogacies, distorted interpretive emblems, figures

that aiso thereby take up, reflect, and distort the aggression we have

directed against this image of what we must and can never become. For

the internaI drama of one's thought rnirrors, as they say, what one believes

to be the drarna of those one most desires, or rather those one desires 66

instead of those one most desires but cannot afford to recognize, and for

reasons that one is never permitted to articulate. (23)

Reflexively, Mann can be interpreted as talking about the conundrum of the borderline, in a way that 1 suggest reflects upon Lydia's function within the text. He is correct in saying that one cannot full Y articulate one's desires. However, 1 would argue that, in certain cases, one's desires are articulated by another, as they are for Nanette by Lydia, as they are for Lydia by both Scott and the reader.

d. Oscillation, (dis )Placement and the Intertextuality of "Real Life"

Lydia's own narrative is, with very few exceptions, relegated to sections of the work entitled "(the sky is what 1 want)." In these sections, the reader is allowed a closer look at Lydia. She proves to be an interesting character, so interesting that it becomes easy to overlook or ignore the fact that Lydia's narrative is relayed by the voice of another. Likewise, it is hard to miss the intertextual references Scott makes to her own works. In the "Nanette" section, we are hearkened back to Heroine: "Splish Splash.

(someone in a bath)" (16). Another glaring self-referential moment occurs in "Canadian

Girls, " when the protagonist is with her Albertan lover who is "craz y about Greece"

(123). Scott describes the same scene in Spaces Like Stairs where she sits with Albertan poet Erin Mouré who "[ ... ] is reading me [ ... ] words of a Greek male poet translated by a

Greek-American lesbian, translated again into sound by the voice of Erin, who grew up in

Alberta [ ... ] a poet, a lesbian" (41, 54). Oscillation abounds. Is it, in Main Brides,

Lydia's desire the reader encounters, or Scott's? Or is it perhaps a translated representation of the reader's own desires? An answer is not imperative, nor is it 67 probable. The point is that Scott, building upon Derrida's theories, has manipulated the borderline is such a way as to imply that the reader must also be a part of the text. The reader may be seen as a part of the textual production insofar as it is he/she who accepts or declines the text. The reader's desire, be it for textual clarity or something else, allows the text to exist. The reader, in essence, is the one who desires the text into being.

The reader' s willingness to engage with such heterogeneous details-neither entirely fictional, nor entirely autobiographical-is a function of what, in a roundtable on autobiography, Gasché considers to be "this place of the programming machine" (qtd. in

Derrida, TEO 42). He suggests that, within a text of multiplicity, the programming machine works to maintain a heterogeneous space. The reader' s desire to engage with the text, and the writer's creation of a heterogeneous text, allow for a text's inherent autobiographical tenets to exist without disturbance. This is another function of the borderline, cutting across the fields of fact and fiction, and maintaining a space in which both categories intermingle. Lydia, who is and is not Scott, acts as the programming machine who cuts across these two fields-she desires the elusive 'real' yet cannot help but create liminal stories that draw attention to the inextricable interaction between desire and absence, fact and fiction, reader and writer, life and death.

As Lydia moves on into a new bride, the borderline asserts itself again:

But they're getting up to go. Nanette, hair now attached in wings atop her

head; vaguely Slavic eyes looking oriental with the additional strokes of

makeup; face white as a mask; lips cherry red; black décolleté leotard

un der her leather jacket. Walking by the woman's table she sticks out her

tongue. (30) 68

Lydia's attempts to fix her desire, to tell the 'real' story of Nanette, are impossible.

'Nanette,' who may or may not be named Nanette, has her own desires, her own wardrobe, and her own actions. By sticking out her tongue at Lydia, Nanette reminds the reader that aIl of this text takes place in the borderline. The reader regards the stories as real because he/she desires to know, desires subjectivity to be fixed and able to be pinned down. Jennifer Henderson points out, in her article "Femme(s) Focale(s): Main Brides and Post-Identity Narratives," that in narratology17 the "basic structure of a narrative is a subject' s pursuit of an object" (79). She goes on to suggest that in Main Brides "no object18 is pursued; it is hardly surprising then that the subject positions who 'engage in cogs of [this] narrative' (de Lauretis 106) are somewhat different from those of subject/object, self/other" (79). While Henderson's point that subject positions are

"different from those of subject/object, self/other" is useful, her suggestion that there is no object pursued is off the mark. Lydia, Scott and the reader are aIl subjects in pursuit of subjectivity, and desire functions as the accelerant for this pursuit.

e. The Maving Language afthe Living Mather

This pursuit of subjectivity becomes more apparent as the reader reads on and

Lydia/Scott create more brides. Gently, from the underbelly of linguistic gymnastics,

Scott reminds the reader of the reader/writer contract. The sketches of the brides work as

"graffiti indicating the small solidarities" between the reader' sand writer' s desires (Main

Brides 16). Derrida tells us that a life's coherence, what Lydia calls the 'real,' is always

17 Henderson states "Narratologists from Algirdas Greimas to Teresa de Lauretis agree that the basic structure of narrative is the subject' s pursuit of an object" (79). 18 1 read Henderson here as referring not to a literaI single object of pursuit but rather as a pluralistic quest. 69 prejudiced: "the life that he [the writer] lives and tells to himself ('autobiography' they calI it) cannot be his life in the first place except as the effect of a secret contract" (TEO

9). The text that belongs to Lydia and Scott, relies on the reader. Thus wh en Lydia tums to her next sketch, the Halifax bride, and thinks "still, the woman has spirit. Possibly a traveler [ ... ] Probably a train-traveller. Doing the run between Montréal and Moncton.

Or Kingston/Halifax," (36) the reader must put his/her desires with Lydia's. The Halifax bride can only come into being if the reader desires her, as well as the writer, as well as

Lydia. And how does this desire work toward the reader's search for subjectivity? For

Derrida, the "'l'of this récit"only constitutes itself through the credit of the etemal retum

[ ... ] It is the etemal retum that signs or seals" (13). 1 read Derrida to be suggesting that not only can the subject (the bride) be a subject through the engagement of the reader's desires (the contract), but also that the reader requires the displaced desire of the writer in order to exist as subject. AlI of this (the oscillation of desire) takes place within the borderline, that place of absent presence in the moving language of the living mother.

Woman, thinks Scott's Lydia, "in sorne ways impossible to grasp ... Always appearing in ambivalent and parsimonius fragments" (181,136). Godard suggests that, in Scott, the body, thefemale body, "appears on the surface as an abstraction, the mark for the absent object" (121), and lrigaray reminds us "desire is a revealed nothingness" (63). In this vein, the many brides operate as another facet of the borderline, as open parentheses in which the reader and the writer experiment with their desires for subjectivity.

ln her interview with Daurio, Scott says, "Lydia is both a female character naming, creating other characters, and a pers on of somewhat undefined boundaries [ ... ] her sexual ambivalence allows me to play with all sorts of codes" (161). Through Lydia, 70

Scott enters the borderline and is able to displace her desires: Lydia's sexual ambiguities allow her desires to reach a myriad of readers and displace her desires onto them, while holding their desires in a tight grasp. Lydia functions as Scott's trope, who is, at the same time, in the process of creating tropes of her own. Scott addresses this further:

These portraits are "tropes" (Lydia's favourite word) of the social context

in other ways, including "statistically" (although Lydia distrusts statistics).

Example: almost one third of the portrait subjects are rape/incest

survivors (1 was being conservative). But in taking on the task of

portraiture, Lydia feels certain guilt, which she attributes to her

voyeurism. (161)

Here, the oscillation of desire that takes place in the borderline is readily apparent-note the slippage between "1" and "Lydia." While "trope" is Lydia's favourite word, it is

Scott who uses it to describe what Lydia does when she creates her brides' portraits. For

Irigaray, trope "seizes on tropism. The tums of language capture, in their obligatory detours and in their relations between terms, the termless operations" (142). The desire for subjectivity is again allied with movement, with the absence of fixity. Likewise,

Scott earmarks the fact that one third of Lydia's brides (including Lydia herself) are sexual abuse survivors, but notes that "statistics" are facts that Lydia distrusts. Just as one of Lydia's brides crosses into Lydia's 'life' through the textual borderline and interprets her dreams,19 Lydia crosses with Scott and their desires are displaced onto each other. The self writing the self, the writing self, crosses boundaries and thrives in the borderline where it confounds notions of "reader" and "writer." Derrida tells us:

19 "You think you're so tough," said N.j. [to Lydia], waving the placemat in the air. "You don't even have the guts to caU this dream what it really is: "The Perfeet lncest Dream" (MB 196). 71

This récit that buries the dead and saves the saved or exceptional as

immortal is not auto-biographical for the reasons one commonly

understands, that is, because the signatory tells the story of his life or the

retum of his past life as life not death. Rather, it is because he tells himself

this life and he is the narration's first, if not its only, addressee and

destination-within the text. (TEO 13)

What Derrida points to is recognizable in Scott's text. Lydia (Scott) is telling to Scott

(Lydia), and vice versa, while in the border of the text the reader also becomes engaged in the reading and the making of the text. In formulating a sexually ambiguous narrator,

Scott has broadened the scope of readers with whom to interact. The novel becomes:

"Absence-Presence," Fuery suggests, "functioning in a dialectic and 'produces' a paradigm that sustains Subjectivity-Desire-Signification" (7). Does this statement seem out of synch with Derrida' s postulation that aIl texts are, to sorne degree, autobiographical? Certainly not, though we can take the notion further. If, as Derrida states, a text is always by a self, writing of his/her own self because it can be no other way within the text, then the specter of the reader in the borderline functions as an absent presence for the writer, and vice verse. As the reader is the author's absent other, the author is the reader' s absent other. In the final section of Main Brides, we encounter the way in which Scott has manipulated this model further to speak not only through and of reader and writer, but also of absence itself, the desired object.

f Night Music: The praof at the center oftruth. 72

The final section of Scott's text, entitled "Night Music (3 Scenes in 4Acts)," is different from the portraits of the brides and the "sky" sections that center around Lydia.

There is, in "Night Music," something of Bataille's ontology of presence-a subtle horror

"based partly on the compulsion for needing something which is always denied, something which acts as the determining process for the subject's being" (18). Lydia is almost al one in the bar. The reader can feel that there are few pages left to the text-and an ominous air seeps into the text. A disembodied voice cornes in through the radio:

"Bonjour, les amies. Time for a little night music," Lydia recognizes the voice (201).

Lydia, listening to the Cello's voice, remembers a triangulated dance in which the three women enacted a triangle that constantly "dissolved into a tango" (202). Again, we are faced with a triangle, but one that functions as a metaphor for something else.

"Je vous offre un tango," says Cello through the border of the airwaves "the dance of death and love" (203). The tango itself came into being in Argentina in the early 19th century and was performed as a dance of desire. Tango partners are to dance very closely, but rarely touch, thereby heightening the depiction of desire for the absent other.

A tango must be danced out to its' story's completion. The tango of Lydia's memory involves three women-Cello, Brucca and Montana-but there is another tango going on. Lydia/Scott comprise one of the dancers, and the reader another. Further, a third figure who functions as the space between the dancers, the one who is absence and renders the desired other absent. This figure is the figure of the unnamed walking women who cuts in and out of view in the text:

"Et maintenant, voici Paola Sola, singing ... " 73

The scene cuts to an early winter street. Two a.m. A woman walking on

it. Happy (sad) angry [ ... ] The woman thinks: no use going home [ ... ] As

long as conscious, she can main tain order in her mind [ ... ] "Ce tango est

dédié aux filles du 6 décembre." Cello's voice grave [ ... ] The woman

walks faster [ ... ] (204-5)

In The Politics of Everyday Fear, Elspeth Probyn says, in reference to the Montréal massacre that "the fact that it was women who were killed, that Lépine expressly was shooting at feminists, can never quite be forgotten. According to friends who were in

Montréal at this time, that fact altered the way in which women recognized each other"

(269). The spectre of the massacre joined with the nameless walking woman serves to underscore the solitariness of the women in this section.

Ellen Servinis, in her article "Urban Space and Barstoolflânerie in Gail Scott's

Main Brides," points out that not only is Lydia essentially alone in the bar, but also that

Cello is alone at the radio station, and the nameless walking woman is alone in the streets

(256-7). Likewise, the reader is alone. Desire for subjectivity guarantees that absence is present, and must be present if the subject is to continue to progress toward himlherself.

Who is the third dancer? The nameless walking woman, the absent narrator who tells the reader of Lydia, the voice who says from the darkness "Nous autres, on continue à vivre," the one who inserts the line "on le dansait avec les pauses" (205,213). Maurice

Blanchot, a writer who se work is genuinely concemed with the oscillation between autobiography and thanatography, suggests that:

The proof that a book of autobiography respects the center of truth around

which it is composed may be that the center draws it toward silence [ ... ] 74

There is something to be said which one cannot say: it's not necessarily

scandalous, it may be quite banal-a lacuna, a void, an area that shrinks

from the light because its nature is the impossibility of being brought to

light, a secret without secrecy whose broken seal is muteness itself. (151-

2).

The bodiless voice in the text is the voice of the borderline, the voice of inherent absences within subjects. Scott, through the construction of a text so layered and so fissured, figured in the voice of the borderline so subtly that we, as readers, almost miss it. Perhaps Scott misses it, too. The borderline sustains desire for the absent other while simultaneously allowing oscillation and displacement to occur between the writer and the reader.

The "destruction of life," Derrida says, "is only an appearance; it is the destruction of the appearance of life. One buries or bums what is already dead so that life, the living feminine, will be rebom and regenerated from the ashes" (TEO 26). As

Lydia exits the text, dancing a tango, which is itself the dance of stories, she ends the text in such a way that it is to rise, and begin again. The final act of the chapter is absent, waiting to happen. Again, a Derridean question is pertinent: "must there not be sorne powerful utterance-producing machine that programs the movements of the two opposing forces at once, which couples, conjugates or marries them in a given set as life (does) death?" (29). Scott's text itself exists in the borderline and is neither stable nor unstable.

It works to displace the desires of the reader with those of the writer through the transformation of said desires within the written Lydia. The result of this again tums us to the riddle of woman. Scott's use of the reader/writer contract holds the text above 75 death by withholding from the reader thorough comprehension. By refusing a neat textual thread that may be followed throughout the narrative, Scott has guaranteed her text 'life.' The reader will continue to desire a completion for all the narrative threads, and this desire ensures the subject's continuing search for subjectivity through repetition of itself as a textuallife. Likewise Lydia, who is and is not Scott, will continue dancing a tango, guaranteeing Scott textuallife beyond biological death. Scott's use of the borderline privileges the riddle of woman insofar as it uses the reader/writer contract to dictate its own interpretation (as well as lack thereof) and continuation.

Derrida brings his discussion of the borderline to a close with the ever-present and enigmatic riddle of woman, saying "everything cornes back to her, beginning with life; everything addresses and destines itself to her. She survives on the condition of remaining at the bottom" (TEO 38). The riddle of woman, which we view in conjunction with the role of the borderline, survives and indeed prevails by way of an open endedness. In the literary realm, the riddle of woman operates without rigid grammatical structure, without certain character relationships, without definite boundaries, thereby obtaining the crucial component to survival: the reader's desire. Desire refuses an ending. The borderline, in the Derridean sense, is that space where definition is denied and paradox rules. Scott has manipulated the borderline to great effect: by utilizing the reader's desire she has confounded the riddle of woman. The reader/writer contract is executed with an unflinching decision to direct reading from below. The borderline, properly used, allows Scott the subversive power of longevity: the texts will never end, they will be in permanent evolution, and permanent revolution. The reader and the writer become locked together, the writer urging the reader from within the borderline to enter, 76 and bec orne a part of the text. The "known and the unknown learn to align themselves one behind the other so that, provided you are positioned at the proper angle, they seem to be one and the same" says Carson. Indeed there is a risk that the reader will bec orne lost in the text, but it is desire that drives the reader, and it is desire the refuses ending.

What have we learned from the Derridean borderline? A text is never finished, if the borders are properly manipulated. The open-ended question that remains is whether or not a writer is, in actuality, ever able to divorce himlherself from the borderline? As we have seen, writing is always a matter of writing towards the self, and desire is both inherent and endless to that movement. This "moment," Scott admits, "is a parenthesis 1 open in the novel without closing" (Daurio 161). When Lydia "steps (a zigzag to the air of a tango) into the night," she continues, the writer continues, and the reader continues: absence, that "speculative negativity,"ZO raises the desiring subject to a higher level and refuses closure. It will always be a retum to the borderline: l "don't like the ends: the risk of the rhetorical clausule is too great: the fear of not being able to resist the fast worc!' (Barthes, RB 94). But no last word is given. No end, only the desire.

20 Patrick Fuery A Theory of Absence 6. 77

CONCLUSION: THE POLITICS OF DESIRE, READING BEYOND THE ENDINGS

This study has, from the outset, posited that the union of theory and literature is not only useful, but necessary. Furthermore, this study draws from a tradition, albeit a relatively recent tradition, of reading writing through theory. In the introduction to their collection What's Left of Theory, Judith Butler, John Guillory and Kendall Thomas ask a question pertinent to this work: they wonder if "there are ways of pursuing a politically reflective literary analysis that have definitively left theory behind [ ... ] and must 'theory' be left behind for a left literary analysis to emerge?" (x). In other words, what Butler,

Guillory and Thomas question is whether or not theory is in fact a useful way of approaching literature. In the case of this study, the question may be tailored to examine the relevance and effectiveness of my own pairing of writers and theorists/analysts? How does Kristeva elucidate our reading of Carson, Derrida our reading of Scott? And most importantly, why does this study suggest that the reader intuit a dialogue between sorne contemporary literature and certain subjective theory? Am 1 not, as the writer of this study, entrenched in the scholarly discourse, and therefore biased towards making a connection? Yes, of course. However, like the editors of What' s Left of Theory, 1 am a product of the academy in which the debate about the role of theory in literature studies has been underway:

The terms of the debate, however, are far from clear. What is meant by

politics? What is meant by theory? [ ... ] It is unclear why (a) the history

of literary theory should be collapsed into a synecdoche of

poststructuralism and (b) whether poststructuralism [ ... ] can be referred to 78

meaningfully as a unitary phenomenon [ ... ] If, the argument goes, the text

is not "about" something other than itself, it is certainly not "about" its

world. (viii)

1 read this to imply that the scholarly desire for subjective clarification, that which is pursued in the Academy, acts as a macrocosm for the individual's, the reader's, desire for subjective clarification. Literature, when read through the lens of subjective theory, provides the reader with a forum upon which to work out his/her desires. Thus, the literature exarnined in this study was selected not only because of its contemporanity and compatibility, but also because it addresses and functions as a forum for the writer to work out her subjective desires. Carson's crossouts and Scott's unclosed parentheses, though very different in form, both speak to a notion of a fluid and ongoing desirious subject. The desired absences, in both texts, act as a holding compartment: the absent other need not be defined, rather the spectre of the absent other guarantees that the subject will continue desiring and continue the process of seeking his/her self While this may appear to be an unsatisfactory conclusion, what we have uncovered in this study is that there can be no finite conclusion. To live is to refuse conclusion, to continue evolution, to time and time again, become a different subject.

As 1 noted in the introduction, 1 began this study situated as a contemporary

Canadian scholar. This fact still informs not only my ideas about myself, but also the way in which 1 write. It is prudent to assume, then, that my subjective desires have no doubt influenced the course of this study. At every tum my subjective desires hover behind the text. In the second section of The Bar of the Other, Derrida disserninates

Nietzsche's autobiography in terms of what he calls "academic freedom," the freedom 79 one has, after listening, to either accept or reject what one has heard. It is by way of academic freedom that Derrida raises the question:

Must there not be sorne powerful utterance-producing machine that

programs the movements of two opposing forces at once, and which

couples, conjugates, or marries them in a given set, as life (does) death?

[ ... ] Neither of the two antagonistic forces can break with this powerful

programming machine: it is their destination [ ... ] (29)

Literature and theory are a part of the same machine, the machine of subjective desire.

One helps the other function. It is through the interplay of theory and literature that the desiring subject is able to try out his/her desires. Eventually, however, the desiring subject-the reader-must move past merely trying out his/her desires in the borderline of literature/theory, and create a new system of desire utterly divorced from the system at hand. At this point in time, a subject's desire for the (absent) other must consciously be worked out through the act of reading.

Carson and Scott, as we have seen, utilize two different theoretical approaches to formulate texts through which the reader may enact his/her desires. Carson' s text works in the realm of the Kristevan abject. The reader must imbue the text with meaning from his/her own self in order to read. Similarly, Scott creates a text that exists in the space of the Derridean borderline. The reader and the writer engage in an interplay where roles are confused and linear plots are nowhere to be found. What we can see in the work of both Carson and Scott are examples of contemporary writers working to integrate the realm of the literary/theoretical with their own renderings of the world of the self. This is literature and theory conjoined in an utterance-producing machine that speaks subjective 80 desire. In their work on the collective subjective unconscious, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari encourage their readers to question them at every tum: open "the window," they say, "it is getting stuffy in here" (309).

Analysis and theory must relate to everyday life. The reader must read beyond the conclusion in order to reach his/her self. This paper, like any other, can never truly conclude.

We are aIl desiring subjects who have yet to reach absolute selfhood-otherwise, we cease to exist. The practice of reading beyond the end of the text is a political practice. A subject seeking himlher self based on his/her desires for the absent other will inevitably be confronted with the question of power. Why do we desire in this way?

What machine produces the utterance-producing machine of the literary academy? How can we create better interaction between scholarly writing and fiction writing? Although these questions are far from being answered, contemporary writers such as Carson and

Scott are indeed addressing them. The first task of the desiring subject must be taken up through an interaction with text. The next task of the desiring subject will be to ask who is writing the program to which theory, literature and society so willingly adhere. The question becomes: who is writing the way we read? 81

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Scott, Gail. Main Brides. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1993.

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Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1985.

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