Alice Notley’s Culture of On e(2011)is a“poet’s novel”about a woman who lives in the dump of a U.S.Southwest desert town.The female character who“inhabits”the dump-and this poet’s novel-is both metonym for and ...Alice Notley’s Culture of On e(2011)is a“poet’s novel”about a woman who lives in the dump of a U.S.Southwest desert town.The female character who“inhabits”the dump-and this poet’s novel-is both metonym for and guide into the lost representation of“the abject,”a concept developed by Julia Kristeva as a psychic state of horror and response to that which lies outside culturally“normalized”subjects and objects,and our“desire for meaning.”Utilizing her dump refuse for its materials,the main character,Marie,creates her own“culture of one,”standing as figure for the artist/writer plunging not“meaning”but meaninglessness and its abject association with death,which is prefigured as the unclean,the improper,rejected body parts,deviant“non-existent”personae-and,ultimately,Marie’s figural status as marginal inhabitant/“culture remaker”/older woman/multi-media“poet”artist.Without traditional conventions of novelistic character development,plot,and visual description,Notley’s“poet’s novel”formally engages in what Viktor Shkolvsky,in his well-known essay“Art as Technique,”terms“defamiliarization”or“strangeness”(“ostranenie,”in Russian),including those principles he cites of“deceleration”and“deviation of the norm.”Notley’s work twists the binary logic implied in Shkolvsky’s“deviation”versus“norm”further by revealing abjection’s“strangeness”in the poet’s novel itself as form,”a text that is always becoming its own site of the linguistic abject,never codifying identity,or the interpreted known.展开更多
文摘Alice Notley’s Culture of On e(2011)is a“poet’s novel”about a woman who lives in the dump of a U.S.Southwest desert town.The female character who“inhabits”the dump-and this poet’s novel-is both metonym for and guide into the lost representation of“the abject,”a concept developed by Julia Kristeva as a psychic state of horror and response to that which lies outside culturally“normalized”subjects and objects,and our“desire for meaning.”Utilizing her dump refuse for its materials,the main character,Marie,creates her own“culture of one,”standing as figure for the artist/writer plunging not“meaning”but meaninglessness and its abject association with death,which is prefigured as the unclean,the improper,rejected body parts,deviant“non-existent”personae-and,ultimately,Marie’s figural status as marginal inhabitant/“culture remaker”/older woman/multi-media“poet”artist.Without traditional conventions of novelistic character development,plot,and visual description,Notley’s“poet’s novel”formally engages in what Viktor Shkolvsky,in his well-known essay“Art as Technique,”terms“defamiliarization”or“strangeness”(“ostranenie,”in Russian),including those principles he cites of“deceleration”and“deviation of the norm.”Notley’s work twists the binary logic implied in Shkolvsky’s“deviation”versus“norm”further by revealing abjection’s“strangeness”in the poet’s novel itself as form,”a text that is always becoming its own site of the linguistic abject,never codifying identity,or the interpreted known.
