accouchement

I got a call at 5:30 this morning. Stéphane was informing us that Maïa had lost her waters and that her contractions had begun. I haven't heard from them since and hope everything is OK.

As Maïa labours to deliver her baby, I spend my first evening (so after Ben comes home from work) on my iBook, writing away. I'm working on my first chapter and it's going well. Following is an excerpt of what I'm doing, the dialogues going on in my brain:

“If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject. The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being. There is nothing of the abjection of the self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire if founded” (Kristeva, 5).

==> In the English version of Kristeva’s text, the word ‘want’ is translated from the French ‘manque.’ As a French speaker, I find this translation to be questionable. ‘Manque’ can be interpreted as ‘want,’ but a closer definition to the noun would be ‘lack.’ I prefer this term not only because I find it a more natural translation, but also because the word ‘want’ signifies the action of desiring. If the subject’s objects are based on the inaugural loss, I believe the recognition of the basis of its being, of meaning, language and desire should not be infused such an active word, so closely related to desire. If all objects are based on loss, then all means of expressing and knowing these objects are based in the result of loss: lack.

==> In the process of reading these stories, hence of re-creating them for themselves, the reader is placed in a position of identifying with the text. The novels are no longer external medium but internalized situations, stories, places of being. It is by internalizing the abject story that the subject (reader) finds this “impossible within,” that this “impossible constitutes its very being.” The process of reading an abject novel causes the reader, through the internalization of the abject novel, to experience abjection of self. It is this experience, this expulsion of self expressed through the act of rejecting (yet after coming back to) the writing that constitutes the experience of reading the abject, or, in other words, abjection reading.

==> The act of rejecting the writing referred to here can be interpreted quite literally. As discussed in the Contemporary Montreal Women Writers class, the physical act of rejecting a piece of writing such as Nightwood, Hush or Scott’s My Paris has been done by either choosing not to read the book, changing one’s reading pattern by sporadically reading different chapters, reading the novel from end to beginning or by alternating reading it from the beginning and from the end until the centre is reached, or by simply throwing the book against a wall or the floor. I myself once reverted to the last option while reading Stein’s Tender Buttons.