I have decided to blog my ongoing work on my MA thesis. As with most graduate students, I'm sure, the whole thing is taking much longer than expected.

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Céline

Kristeva first presents the psychoanalytical make-up of the deject, the one who suffers abjection. Fine.

She then goes into short analyses of representations of abjection in literature, its main cultural manifestation. She speaks of Artaud, Proust, Lautréamont and Joyce. I've only ever read Joyce. My cégep French lit classes shied away from the other authors, I guess, and I just never got around to _Un amour de swan_, even if I've owned it for the past few years. She then goes into an extensive study of Céline's work, another man I've meant to read yet have never gotten around to it.

She does say that abjection is not something that should be looked at and considered only as far as a book's thematics are concerned. Yet then she explains the themes of the abject work as being mostly concerned with horror. So I ask myself, which is it? And which to what extent?

After much searching throughout the city of Montreal, I have found and bought Céline's _Voyage au bout de la nuit_. Written as if spoken, it concurs with Blau DuPlessis's idea or writing as breaking the sequence. It also deals with the first world war and is essentially rather morbid and a bit depressing. His horror is not at all hushed. He describes it. He philosophies it (a French trait?). He truncates it, but his text is not inscribed with silences. But yes, the writing is changed and the theme is horror. Yes, yes.

(I've not read him before because he was anti-semetic, which made it feel a bit yucky...)

Barnes and Stone, on the other hand, and as I mentioned to Lianne in an email this week, seem both transcribed in an economy of silence. Barnes, through verbal garbage, extensive eloquence, parler pour ne rien dire pour, en fait, tout dire. Stone, on the other hand, avoids, plays with readers' expectations, conceals and lets you imagine what you wish. She does so by the very way she writes her sentences. Cut in weird places. Unfinished. Interrupted.

I asked Lianne if such an economy of silence would be a female trait. I hate bringing things back to gender. It feels so limiting. At the same time, I sometimes have the impression that it is very hard to avoid. Yet I am sure that if my authors were male, gender would not even be considered. (But of course, me being me, I would...) So much feminist work done on and about gender and female constructions of narrative, and here I go thinking it doesn't matter, or just really wishing really really hard that it wouldn't.

I'm reading Céline to get a better idea of what Kristeva was aiming at when she wrote _Pouvoirs de l'horreur_. I don't want to imitate her, but I do want to learn from the master, so to speak. I'm liking Céline. The *argot* is sometimes difficult to read. The greater good of it is to help me understand what I should be doing with my texts.

(Oh yeah, revising the work I did last summer made me realise that though it wasn't useless, most of it is not useful. So it's back to the drawing board for me, and the anxiety of needing to write...)

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