A Feminist Poetics of the Unsayable in Twentieth Century Literary & Visual Culture

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2014 "She said plain, burned things": A Feminist Poetics of the Unsayable in Twentieth Century Literary & Visual Culture Leah Souffrant Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/287 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] “SHE SAID PLAIN, BURNED THINGS”: A FEMINIST POETICS OF THE UNSAYABLE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERARY & VISUAL CULTURE by LEAH SOUFFRANT A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2014 © 2014 LEAH SOUFFRANT All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Engineering in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Meena Alexander Date Chair of Examining Committee Mario Di Gangi Date Executive O icer f� Wayne Koestenbaum Nancy K. Miller Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract “SHE SAID PLAIN, BURNED THINGS”: A FEMINIST POETICS OF THE UNSAYABLE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERARY & VISUAL CULTURE by LEAH SOUFFRANT Adviser: Professor Meena Alexander This dissertation examines the way silence, blank space, and other forms of creative withholding attempt to translate the unsayable, or to convey the unsayability of language in artistic form. Through a study of the works of Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Rachel Zucker, Marguerite Duras, Anne Carson, and visual images, this work observes the connection between women’s writing in the 20th century and the communication of painful subject matter through attention to absence. This study attends explicitly to how formal qualities in artistic works attend to ontological concerns through an examination of the intersection of concerns with phenomenology, feminism, and formal aesthetics. iv Acknowledgements I would especially like to thank Meena Alexander, who has served as advisor and mentor on this project, giving intellectual guidance and creative insights throughout the process. Without her rigorous yet sensitive support, this dissertation would not be the work it is today. In addition, I thank the other members of my committee, the always inspiring and meticulous Wayne Koestenbaum and the wise and insightful Nancy K. Miller. Their suggestions, feedback, and finally appreciation of my work have been extremely valuable. Thank you to Anne Humpherys, who served on my orals committee, and the Center for the Study for Women and Society, which recognized this dissertation with a Nina Fortin Memorial Dissertation Proposal Award. Over the course of the writing process, many colleagues have provided singular intellectual insights and personal gestures of support. I would especially like to acknowledge my colleagues and dear friends from the Graduate, including but not limited to my GC Poetics Group co-chair Corey Frost, Margaret Galvan, Louis Bury, Tonya Foster, Fiona Lee, and Ashley Foster, as well as all others who have provided important feedback on this work as it has progressed. Individuals outside the Graduate Center have been extremely generous and instrumental in the writing of this work. I would like to acknowledge Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei for welcoming me into her classroom, Torsten Wiesel for supporting my endeavors in providing a generous understanding of the necessary work-life-mind balance needed for graduate work, and Nicholas Birns for being a regular source of learned encouragement and reading and supporting my work in its myriad forms. I would like to thank the late Jason Shinder (1955-2008), my first poet-mentor, who nurtured and edited of my very first essay on the poetics of silence, which was the seed of this project years before its current fruition. And the often silent supporters of this work deserve a great deal of gratitude and acknowledgement: Jacklyn and Richard Paciulan, John Carimando, Abby Paige, Melissa Scardaville, Jennifer McCarthy, Hyon Su Kwon, Jeanne Louks Bruce, Caitlin McDonnell, Geoffery Milam, Gabrielle Hamill, Arnold Barkus, Quentin Ball. And the most motivating inspiration, the silent yet deeply moving presence throughout my work: Elsa Souffrant. Thank you. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Prologue Page 1 Introduction: Plain, burned things: Attending to the Unsayable Page 7 Chapter One: No Mark, Nothing: A Maternal Poetics Page 25 of the Unsayable in Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, and Rachel Zucker Chapter Two: “You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima”: An Erotics Page 67 of Witness: Toward an Iconography of Consciousness Caesura Page 104 Chapter Three: Poetic Time Machine: Translation as Page 110 Interpretation of Interstitial Space in Anne Carson’s Antigonick Chapter Four: A Looking Through “The Glass Essay”: Reaching Page 138 Toward Absence might be Seeing the Unsayable Bibliography Page 184 vi List of Images Fig. 1 Lorna Simpson, Details. published in Enwezor, Okwui. Lorna Simpson. American Federation of Arts catalog, 2006. Fig. 2 Lorna Simpson “Reckless” detail from Details. published in Enwezor, Okwui. Lorna Simpson. American Federation of Arts catalog, 2006 Fig. 3. Lorna Simpson “Carried a gun” detail from Details. published in Enwezor, Okwui. Lorna Simpson. American Federation of Arts catalog, 2006. Fig. 4 Mary Kelly. from The Post-Partum Document. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Fig. 5 Georgia O’Keefe, Red Canna, University of Arizona Museum of Art website http://www.artmuseum.arizona.edu/wp- content/uploads/2012/10/1950.001.004_m.jpg Fig. 6 film stills from Hiroshima, Mon Amour, published in Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Trans. Richard Siever. New York: Grove Press, 1961. Figs. 7-13 Sophokles, tr. Anne Carson. Antigonick. New York: New Directions. 2012. Images by Bianca Stone. Fig. 14-18. David Salle Untitled (The Coffee Drinkers), published in Kardon, Janet. David Salle. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania,1987. vii Prologue In this writing, I employ a deliberately elliptical method. It is the method which serves the work I am doing and it is borne of the nature of deliberate attention the texts I study demand. In the words of poet George Oppen, I might hope for “Clarity//In the sense of transparence,/I don’t mean that much can be explained.//Clarity in the sense of silence” (162). It is a bit of a conundrum, to quote a poet saying, “I don’t mean that much can be explained” in the service of a dissertation, which is presumably explaining something. But rather than emphasizing explication, I am moved by Oppen’s language of clarity. If I assert that looking at the works in this dissertation illuminates the way art exposes something unsayable, then it makes sense to hope this study clarifies that illumination, brightens it, while yet maintaining the understanding that the unsayable remains such. Looking at the unsayable more and more doesn’t make it sayable. I cannot say and explain the unsayable matter of the soul, for example, better than a harrowing work of art conveys it. What arrogance it would be to attempt it! The ellipses must remain in order to show this thing about the unsayable, to point at it and work to understand it better. “Clarity in the sense of silence,” as Oppen says. This problem is not new to thinking about language, or new to poetry. What interested me as a younger poet, prior to graduate school, began with Tsvetaeva’s stuttering poems of 1 heartbreak; Rilke’s tracing of feeling, echoing presences; Dickinson’s dashes more than her words. From those poetic interests, which nurtured my creative writing, I found an early interest in translation. What can be translated from language to language? What is impossible to translate? These questions – and their answers in my rich study of the Russian language, in particular, as an undergraduate – led me to an understanding of the ways in which even the words in English are taking shape around a cavernous space of impossible connection. Writing poetry is a relentless exercise in putting into language what is outside language, and reading lyrical writing at its best is an experience of capturing some of this slippery experience in art. This I began to know as the unsayable, and to find in all works of art that struck me with profound power, a power sensed in shadowy Vermeers and bright Pop art paintings, works that communicate – perhaps about feelings, perhaps about a culture -- without explicitly “telling” us what they might mean. I found this unsayable in the works of Marguerite Duras, whose writing revealed that other, often darker secrets of the body may be mysteriously exposed in language’s silences. What were these unsayable things, and how were they coming through, being translated? How might we learn something through the attention we pay to moments when voices go mute? What draws us to pay attention to these critical moments in history, in our memories, to look towards the dark moments that obscure meaning, making history messy and memory unreliable? These were questions raised by the most difficult experiences, and the questions addressed in powerful works I have been drawn to. Addressed, attended to, if yet hovering unanswerable. 2 When I joined the doctoral program, my interests in the unsayable – those fascinations driving my writing, my studies, my curiosities, and my creativity – began to intersect more explicitly with my lived experience. I found that there was a connection between what was not said and the experiences specifically of the body. I found that there was no language for certain terribly significant experiences, yet writers and artists created works expressing this very impossibility of communication. Reading Jean Rhys, again Marguerite Duras, and contemporaries such as Rachel Zucker exemplified this tension between saying and not- saying.

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