vomit, shit and corpses

Seems like these are recurring themes throughout my MA.

As I was saying...

Kristeva cites vomit, refuse and corpses as physical examples of abjection, and though she does not relate these precisely to abject literature, it is interesting to note their existence in these novels. For example, Roses vomits when she cannot remember the dream she had the night before. Her body physically and violently expulses the abject-object. Her dream brings her close to it, her awakening pushes it away and her body rejects it through the act of vomiting. This reflex is also triggered when she is being raped. Like anger, what Roses cannot swallow, she throws up. Whitley finds a relation between excrement and the construction of self and history in Nightwood. She states that the process of rejecting the excremental, rendering it external and Other to ourselves, and which is essentially a vital part of life, exemplifies the being’s process of construction through the inclusion of some matter and the exclusion of other. Likewise, the formation of identity is based on what we include and what we exclude, what we decide we are and are not. According to her, Barnes would be using excremental elements in her text to show that identity may include what is considered exterior and strange (Whitley 93). And while Jane Marcus claims that Nightwood is filled with references to bird droppings (especially in relation to Jenny, I would add), the most prevalent physical example of abjection in both novels is the corpse.

and onwards....