First up, however, I need to finish the chapter I'm writing on a feminist reading of Neil Gaiman's stories in Who Killed Amanda Palmer, as well as a conference paper I had accepted for the fall on reading Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood along with the Ministry song "Jesus Built My Hotrod." I wanted to get this read first so that I could incorporate Kristeva's ideas into a rewrite of a paper on ugly women in Eudora Welty's "Curtain of Green" stories which I'd like to get done this summer.
I'm hoping, though, that the combo of my copious outline along with this more informal writing will reinforce the important parts of the book. Quite a bit of the book focuses on the work of C éline, whom I've never read, so a lot of this was lost on me. Apocalyptic laughter versus grotesque laughter. I'm intrigued by Kristeva's characterization of the abject as an apocalyptic thing, in contrast to the carnivalesque nature of the grotesque. And yet, in its connection to the grotesque (in the carnivalesque, Bakhtinian sense of the word), there is a way in which the abject is connected to the sublime. The abject blurs the lines between inside and outside (blood, excrement, the decay of dead bodies) which is what evokes this sense of horror we feel at the abject. In Kristeva's understanding, though, it is more complicated than that.
From what I understand, considering the centrality of the incest taboo in this way allows us to consider the meanings of what is considered abject.Ībjection is what is thrown away, what is on the outside. However, what I did get from this reading was that Kristeva made the mother a more central figure in this drama and looked at the ramifications of this refocusing. I'm still not comfortable with theories which take the Oedipal triangle as their beginning, which much of French feminism seems to do. * I think it's partly because of the nature of French writing itself, with so many double meanings (diff érance, anyone?) and the attempt by the translator to use English to try to convey such things (as here, Leon Roudiez uses "scription" to convey a stronger form of ecriture). As it's a translation from the French, Kristeva's work is like a lot of French feminism for me-dense and rewarding, but *slow going. I didn't expect this would take quite so long to read. As I ultimately want to write my dissertation on the figure of the ugly woman in southern literature, this idea of abjection is one I really need to wrap my head around as a way of figuring out just what I mean by the word "ugly." I've poked through this book before, but now I've finally read it all the way through.
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