“Creating the Senses” Sensation in the Work of Shelley Jackson
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Tove Solander “Creating the Senses” Sensation in the Work of Shelley Jackson Umeå Studies in Language and Literature 18 Department of Language Studies Umeå Centre for Gender Studies, Graduate School for Gender Studies Umeå University, 2013 “Creating the Senses” Sensation in the Work of Shelley Jackson Tove Solander Umeå Studies in Language and Literature 18 Department of Language Studies Umeå Centre for Gender Studies Graduate School of Gender Studies Umeå University 2013 Department of Language Studies Umeå University SE-901 87 Umeå http://www.sprak.umu.se Umeå Centre for Gender Studies Umeå University SE-901 87 Umeå http://www.ucgs.umu.se This work is protected by the Swedish Copyright Legislation (Act 1960:729) ISBN: 978-91-7459-558-1 Cover illustration: Mats Tusenfot http://www.tusenfot.com/ Cover layout: Hans Karlsson, Print & Media Electronic version available at http://umu.diva-portal.org/ Printed by: Print & Media Umeå, Sweden 2013 Distributor: eddy.se ab, Visby To Shelley Jackson, for writing stuff (and encouraging others to steal it). Table of Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviated Titles of Jackson’s Works Introduction 9 Primary Material 10 Theory 13 The Literary Sensorium 17 Minor Writing for Queers to Come 20 Visual Realism 26 Object Writing 30 Body Writing 37 Disposition: The Sensorium of Shelley Jackson 45 Smelling Sense: The Stink of the Real 49 Undead Smells 54 Odor di Femina 60 The Smell of the Beast 65 Rank Fecundity 73 Reading as Becoming 85 Tasting Texts; or, “I can’t say it, I won’t chew it” 87 Tasting as Knowing 91 Eating Books or Licking Language? 97 Dilation 103 An Aesthetics of Distaste 109 Phantom Tastes of Fat and Sugar 115 Reading as Licking 123 Touching Thoughts: The Heft of Writing 127 Doll Games 129 Tactile Metonymy 134 Exquisite Corpses 139 Conceptual Intimacy 147 Reading as Playing 154 Seeing Sight: The Anatomy of Vision 157 Auto-anatomisation 161 Anatomising the Eye 165 Anatomising Sight 173 In the Virtual Museum of Writing 181 Reading as Auto-anatomisation 187 Hearing Voices: Writing as Ventriloquism 191 Hearing Voices 194 The Stuttering of Language 201 Body Language 205 Singing Language 211 Reading as Singing Along 219 Coda: A Phantom Tail 225 Sammanfattning 233 Works Cited 235 Works by Shelley Jackson 235 Works on Shelley Jackson 236 Other Works Cited 238 Acknowledgements Naturally I wish to thank all those without whom this dissertation would not be what it is. I take full responsibility for its flaws but not for its strengths. First of all, thanks to my supervisor Maria Lindgren Leavenworth for bearing with my irregularities, for careful close readings with an editor’s eye and for stimulating conversations on fan fiction and other unrelated interests. Thanks also to my second supervisor Gabriele Griffin for agreeing to supervise me twice, for insisting I read Bartlett and Carrington, and for your humour, precision and high demands. Thank you Jane Elliott and Jenny Sundén for your invaluable comments on my work in progress as special readers at my mid and final seminar. Thanks to all of my colleagues at the Department of Language Studies, especially to the participants in the English literature seminar for engaging seminar discussions and meticulous feedback. I must also thank my seminar group at the Gender Research School with seminar leader Sara Edenheim, as well as fellow PhD students from the research school such as Tamara Andersson and Petra Green, for sharing the joys and troubles, mostly troubles, of dissertation writing. Special thanks to InterGender for arranging the very best courses and for putting together the D09 PhD network led by the always supportive and inspiring Nina Lykke and Cecilia Åsberg. In that vein, thanks to truly great teachers on PhD courses such as Judith Halberstam and, especially, Elizabeth Grosz, without whose smittening enthusiasm for Deleuze (and barnacles) this PhD project might have taken a very different turn. Thank you Mats Tusenfot for graciously allowing me to adorn my dissertation cover with your art, and for even asking to read the darn thing. Many thanks to friends and a special mention to those of you who have been through PhD hell yourselves, such as Annie Mattsson. My warmest thanks to my family for putting up with me all these years and especially of course to Linn Saarinen – now it’s my turn to see you through your PhD. Abbreviated Titles of Jackson’s Works Angel: “Angel” Body: My Body Cat: “The Cat’s Meow” Church: “Here is the Church” Consuetudinary: “Consuetudinary of the Word Church” Doll: The Doll Games Early: “Early Dispatches from the Land of the Dead” Flat: “Flat Daddy” Friend: “My Friend Goo” Gallows: “(the gallows)”1 Hagfish: “Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo” Half: Half Life Hook: “The Hook” Husband: “Husband” Ineradicable: Shelley Jackson’s Ineradicable Stain Interstitial: The Interstitial Library King: “King Cow” Melancholy: The Melancholy of Anatomy Memorial: “Short-Term Memorial Park” Musée: “Musée Mécanique” Moth: “The Moth Duchess” (Front Page Stories) N: “’N’” Original: “The Original Death and Burial of Cock Robin” Patchwork: Patchwork Girl Pollen: “The Pollen Letters” (Front Page Stories) President: “The President’s Mouth” Putti: “The Putti” Stitch: “Stitch Bitch” Swan: “The Swan Brothers” Tour: Tour Diary Word: “Word Problem” 1 The actual title of this short story is a picture of a gallows. Introduction Introduction [A]rt forms take shape around our ability to perceive beauty, but our ability to perceive beauty also takes shape around what forms become possible. Hypertext is making possible a new kind of beauty, and creating the senses to perceive it with. (Stitch)2 How does the contemporary American author and multimedia artist Shelley Jackson achieve her “body writing,” which not only deals thematically with the body but employs a “bodily” style and seems to address the body of the reader (this reader, at least) more than most forms of writing? This is the driving question behind this dissertation, and in order to answer it I turn to sense impressions and the literary techniques used to evoke them. I argue that references to the senses and to sensory qualities work to create what I term “phantom sensations” contributing to the experience of the written work as a sensible material object. Thus, I do not consider literary representations of the senses primarily as representations but as linguistic performances potentially rewriting and prosthetically extending the sensing body of the reader. Devoting a chapter to each of the Aristotelian five senses in turn, I consider the literary techniques used to evoke sensations and the specific functions of such sensations in the literary work, but also how they relate to, interplay with and differ from sensations in other sensory modalities. I briefly compare literature to art in different media and discuss how the relative sensory poverty of the literary medium (the visual uniformity of linguistic signs compared to for example paints or musical notes) relates to the phantom sensations it can nevertheless produce. By “phantom” I do not mean to imply a phantom of something; literary phantom sensations as vague and disembodied echoes of “real” sensations. Rather, I wish to indicate the intense realness of phantom limb phenomena in spite of the absence of a concrete limb to provide the sensory stimulus. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work on literature, I argue that literary phantom sensations are virtual sensations which could only exist in literature, being dependent upon the material of language as actual sensations are dependent upon sensory stimuli. As such, they cannot be disconnected from the referential aspect of language, from cultural discourses or literary traditions surrounding the senses, although they ultimately exceed and elude these.3 2 I henceforth refer to Jackson’s works by abbreviated titles; see the list of abbreviations and the reference list for full bibliographical information. 3 Other art forms produce their distinct kinds on phantom sensations, related in similar ways to their respective materials. 9 Primary Material I think more about literature than art, not just because I love it, but because it needs me more. I want to force its borders open, and so I call myself a writer, and will probably keep on doing so even as I get further and further from what most people would call writing. Because literature is so tightly circumscribed, one can import just about any question from conceptual or performance art and get something new in response: (Jackson in Rettberg, “Written”) Jackson’s literary works consist of the hypertexts Patchwork Girl (1995),My Body (1997) and The Doll Games (n.d.; co-authored with her sister Pamela Jackson), the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy (2002), the novel Half Life (2006), three works of illustrated children’s fiction and numerous short stories published in various anthologies and magazines. My dissertation treats Jackson’s œuvre as a whole and posits her experiments in different forms and media such as hypertext as part of her larger artistic project. It deals with all of her major works, apart from her children’s books, and with most of her short stories and essays.4 Besides body writing, I would characterise Jackson’s work as a form of “object writing” in which the distinction between literature (conventionally perceived as a narrative art form) and the visual arts is troubled. Jackson’s prose resembles poetry in that it experiments with objects, juxtapositions and perceptions rather than being plot-driven, although what she terms “story” is important to it too.5 Using Jackson’s literary works as my primary sources, I consider questions imported from her experience with art in other media: language as the artist’s material and the literary work as a conceptual piece.