In Powers of Horror, Kristeva posits that art offers a unique gateway to the unconscious mind. She specifies that:
On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject (Kristeva, Powers 207).
This essay delves into Ai Ogawa's "Cruelty" and Norman Dubie's "Pastoral"—through an extensive examination of these works, the following highlights how poetry, as an art form, provides exceptional insight into the depths of the unconscious, particularly in relation to the themes of desire, mortality, and the maternal body.
Cruelty by Ai Ogawa
The hoof-marks on the dead wildcat
gleam in the dark.
You are naked, as you drag it up on the porch.
That won’t work either.
Drinking ice water hasn’t,
nor having the bedsprings snap fingers
to help us keep rhythm.
I’ve never once felt anything
that might get close. Can’t you see?
The thing I want most is hard,
running toward my own teeth
and it bites back. (Ai, 6)
Ai Ogawa, an American poet and educator, verbalizes the prelinguistic, unrepresentable evocations of the unconscious Self and the female primordial instinct in her works. In “Cruelty,” Ai conveys a violent sexual scene of perversion, despair, and frustration, and thus captures a sense of self-reflexive grotesque cruelty within the desire that marks intimate relationships.
The first two lines, “The hoof-marks on the dead wildcat / gleam in the dark,” transgresses the boundaries of light and dark, setting up the simultaneous recognition and dissolution of binaries for imagery and characters within the poem. This transgression is followed by the lines “You are naked, as you drag it up on the porch / That won't work either.” Here, as Ai juxtaposes the lifelessness of the “dead wildcat” with the abject nudity of the hunter, she inflects Kristeva’s notion that our species “either binds together or splits apart to perpetuate itself… with no other significance than the eternal return of the life-death biological cycle” (Kristeva, Desire 239). In portraying the hunter’s vulnerable physical state of nakedness and the death-marked wildcat, Ai emphasizes the abject mortality of both and dissolves the borders between hunter and prey, symbolic of man and woman. The line “That won’t work either” alludes to Kristeva’s conception of the insatiable maternal phallus and anchors the desirability that exists within the very withdrawal of desire—Ai crafts an interplay of dynamics between the maternal body of the Master and the devalorized man.
In the lines “Drinking ice water hasn't, / nor having the bedsprings snap fingers / to help us keep rhythm,” Ai delineates the harshness of labor, romance, and loneliness. She couples sexual intimacy with external forces, the ice water and personification of bedsprings, to highlight the invasive pressure of desire and connection, and thus resonates with Kristeva’s description of the maternal body: “Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on” (Kristeva, Desire 237). Neither physical nor psychological closure exists within the poem’s lovers. The imploring diction and second-person narrative in the lines “I've never once felt anything / that might get close. Can't you see?” connotes an evocative mental whirlpool of anxieties, contempt, and condescension, an urgency that calls upon the “homosexual-maternal facet” that is absent of meaning and seeping in rhythmic displacement (239). The question “Can’t you see?” is irreconcilable; its kind bluntness is irreconcilable; its unintentional cruelty and deprecation are irreconcilable—within these three words, Ai penetrates the paper and brilliantly challenges the territories of the private emotional and public biological spheres.
“Cruelty” ends with the speaker’s nefarious and devious predilections: “The thing I want most is hard, / running toward my own teeth / and it bites back”. Ai’s abstraction of “the thing” she wants elucidates the inherent instability of the maternal body as a site of birth, sex, and death and in turn, elucidates the unfulfillment and discordance between the speaker and her partner. By envisioning a sense of self-inflicted grotesquerie and displaying the speaker’s brutally depraved self-eroticization, Ai signifies the obsessive presence of violence and death within the stamp of isolation and emptiness in the maternal body. Ai disturbs and reveals identity, system, and order, compelling her audience to understand the kaleidoscopic positions of perpetrator and victim, hunter and prey, as well as the complexities of domination and surrender. Thus, Ai’s vigorous depiction of sexual intimacy spotlights the unconscious of the maternal phallus that lies behind a “little death.”
If Ai’s works access the unconscious of the maternal Self, Norman Dubie’s poetry accesses the unconscious on a macroscopic, biological level and manifests an enunciative disposition that relocates the imagination and understanding of motherhood out of its own time and place. In “Pastoral,” Norman Dubie visually delineates an old man’s terror on the brink of his death and the birth of his grandson. He explores the old man’s distorted, tumultuous interiority as he grapples with the transience and eroticization of life in conjunction with the piercing, hard grip of death.
Pastoral by Norman Dubie
It happened so fast. Fenya was in the straight
Chair in the corner, her youngest sucking
On her breast. The screams, and a horseman
Outside the cottage. Then, her father in a blue tunic
Falling through the door onto the boards.
Fenya leaned over him, her blouse
Still at the waist and a single drop of her yellow milk
Falling into the open eye of her father. He dies
Looking up through this screen. What he sees
Is a little lampglow,
Like the poet describes less often even than harness bels
Or the icon with pine boughs. He sees snow
Falling into a bland field where a horse is giving
Birth to more snow, dragging its placenta all over
The glaze which is red; all the snow is red, the horse’s
Blood is white. He sees tears on Fenya’s face and
Milk coming like bone hairpins from her breasts.
The straight force in the twig that makes a great black
Branch. Two of which are crossed over his chest. Terror is
The vigil of astonishment. (Dubie, 33)
In the first stanza, Dubie contrasts the liveliness of Fenya’s child “sucking on her breasts” with the morbidity of her father “falling through the door onto the boards.” The juxtaposition between life and death climaxes: “Fenya leaned over him, her blouse / Still at the waist and a single drop of her yellow milk / Falling into the open eye of her father. He dies Looking up through this screen.” This line fantastically parallels Kristeva’s description of “sound, flashes, and fantasies clinging to the maternal body as a screen against the plunge”—Dubie’s portrayal of the nutritious, life-giving milk as a perforating indicator of imminent death in the old man’s screen/eyes substantiates the maternal body as the module of human’s biosocial program (Kristeva, Desire 240).
In addition, the poem’s setting in the lines “The screams, and a horseman / Outside the cottage” alludes to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Christianity—conquest, war, famine, and most starkly, death. As the vitality of Fenya’s child and the act of breastfeeding seemingly taunt the old man, he imagines a vision where the horseman of death darkens the door of his house. Dubie opens an unstable space of the unconscious in “Pastoral” where youth mixes with oldness and life mixes with death, a space of “phantasmic nuptials” that sublimates the father-daughter incest and dissolves the conventions of sexual identification (Kristeva, Desire 239).
In the second stanza, Dubie illuminates the dying man’s state of psychosis primarily through the colorful imagery of a horse giving birth to snow, in which the violent red blood from the horse’s placenta seeps into the innocent whiteness of the snow. As the ominous imagery of body parts in the lines “dragging its placenta all over / The glaze which is red; all the snow is red, the horses’ / Blood is white” coalescences with “tears on Fenya's face and / Milk coming like bone hairpins from her breasts,” Dubie details how the old man’s vision of childbirth is incurably tainted with undertones of death and suffering in his dying state of delirium. Here, the old man inhabits the transitional and liminal space between life and death at the scene of breastfeeding—Dubie ingeniously presents the maternal body as a “place of splitting” (Kristeva, Desire 238).
Overall, “Pastoral” not only reads as an uncanny text due to its fluctuations of biological perspectives in the subject matters of childbirth and breastfeeding but also due to the old man’s psyche of conscious confusion between “fantasy” and reality. The poem ends with “The straight force in the twig that makes a great black / Branch. Two of which are crossed over his chest. Terror is // The vigil of astonishment.” The religious symbolism of the cross harkens to Christian theology’s definition of maternity as “an impossible elsewhere, a sacred beyond, a vessel of divinity, a spiritual tie with the ineffable godhead, and transcendence’s ultimate support” (Kristeva, Desire 237). The old man’s astonishment characterizes his flash of epiphany before motherhood’s inconceivable syllogism, and thus brands Dubie’s access to the unconscious in “Pastoral.”
In conclusion, through the exploration of Ai Ogawa’s “Cruelty” and Norman Dubie’s “Pastoral,” it becomes evident that poetry, as an art form, offers a unique pathway to accessing the unconscious, as set forth by Kristeva. These poems delve into the depths of human experience, confronting the abject and the sublime in ways that challenge traditional boundaries and reveal the intricate interplay between desire, fear, and mortality. As Kristeva suggests, literature, particularly poetry, serves as a space where language grapples with its own limitations and exposes the underlying anxieties and desires that shape our understanding of the world:
Not a language of the desiring exchange of messages or objects that are transmitted in a social contract of communication and desire beyond want, but a language of want, of the fear that edges up to it and runs along its edges (Kristeva, Powers 38).
Through their vivid imagery and evocative language, Ogawa and Dubie confront us with the rawness of existence, inviting us to contemplate the complexities of human nature and the enigmatic workings of the unconscious mind. In this light, their poetry stands as a testament to the power of art to illuminate the darkest recesses of the human psyche and to offer glimpses of transcendence amidst the chaos of existence.
Works Cited
Ai. Vice: New & Selected Poems. Norton, 1999.
Dubie, Norman. The Mercy Seat: Collected & New Poems, 1967-2001. Copper Canyon Press, 2004.
Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Columbia University Press, 1980.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, 1982.
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