... thinking about the monstrous in language, some saying it is love ...
- refuse linear time, speak from multiple voices simultaneously, combine body and text, mix genres and forms, embrace contradiction, and celebrate excess
Majena Mafe - Ironing the sound
A thrown together list, of juicy quotes. But what do they spell out. Follow at your joy/peril. Joyperrillleeee. (a made-up word to describe the both as one)
Note: I think of theorists as those who think.
I explore the monstrous in my own writing. And I read as a monster, it seems. My writing is odd. Even monstrous. In my work and research, I struggled for a long time to find a language that would hold my "ME." How to find a language that I could wrap around my own unique tongue. Attempt to slur out what I felt I needed to say and to say what needed to be heard. Reading in this neck of the woods broadened the scope and 'sound' of language I could use, and too of my ability to hear other woman's voice.
Several feminist theorists explore the monstrous in language, in their own work. And I've come to use them as a map into the margins of saying and meaning and as a hand hold crossing my sense of being. I wanted to discuss here the key ones for me. I hope you enjoy them too.
The key of this (my) map has been the writer been Gertrude Stein. Stein, I have come to see/hear/read her as a brilliant brilliant crafter of 'other' meanings and dimensions of being though the simple language act of making a sentence. One. And then another. Step by step. Outside of meaning frames that are known. Brilliant. I see her as a theorist that has often been relegated to the odd ball list. She would have loved being on top of that one. But here I just want to outline, in no particular order and if your interested ... some more recent theorists ... read on. I will get to Stein soon/ next maybe. Yummy stuff.
Hélène Cixous has been key writer/ theorist for me. Her concept of "écriture féminine" in "The Laugh of the Medusa" reclaims monstrosity through feminine writing practices. I will talk more about her below.
Julia Kristeva - Works with the "abject" in "Powers of Horror," in exploring how language breaks down around horror and the monstrous maternal.
Gloria Anzaldúa in "Borderlands," explores how "wild tongue" and linguistic mestizaje create monstrous/powerful hybrid forms. Wildly.
Anne Carson - A poet-scholar and theorist, in her work "Autobiography of Red" explores monstrous mythological language.
A more recent writer worth pointing to is Jess Dobkin, who works on "monstrous embodiment" in performance and textual practice.
And there are all the artists, but more about them another time.
Further … ahem … I am particularly ie very very interested in the monstrous being read as an unbearable love. This is a seeming-ly even odder notion when one first hears of it, or thinks of it late at night - under the covers … in the dark.
… and though it may seem odd it appears in several of the works following the above listings:
Hélène Cixous specifically connects monstrosity to overwhelming love in "The Laugh of the Medusa," where she writes about how patriarchal culture makes feminine love appear monstrous because it exceeds containment. She sees this excessive love as revolutionary - it breaks language and creates new forms of expression.
Julia Kristeva explores this further in "Powers of Horror" through the mother-child relationship - a love so intense it becomes terrifying, breaking boundaries between self and other. She sees this dynamic as both destructive and generative.
Georges Bataille's concept of "excessive love" influenced and still does influence many feminist theorists. While not feminist himself, his ideas about love that exceeds rational bounds are picked up by theorists exploring feminine modes of desire.
Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous's "The Newly Born Woman," written as one, explore how feminine love becomes monstrous because or when it refuses the economics of exchange and possession - it gives without counting the cost. And we know how important the economy of the economy is.
Luce Irigaray's work on feminine multiplicity and love that exceeds singular identity in "This Sex Which Is Not One," also touches on this theme - love that destroys the very categories we use to understand it. I like her understanding. and use it as a diamond shaping facet working with language in my own work.
But to focus on just two gals here. Firstly in "The ... Medusa," Cixous reimagines feminine monstrosity through the figure of Medusa who laughs rather than petrifies. She writes about how women's excessive love has been made monstrous by patriarchal culture - but she reclaims this monstrosity as a source of power. She advises us to look again. Write again. Think it all over again. (good idea)
Women must "write their bodies" - pour their excessive love and desire into language that breaks traditional forms
The monstrous feminine isn't horrifying but joyful - Medusa is beautiful and laughing when we dare to look
Feminine writing is "volcanic" - it erupts with repressed love and desire that patriarchal language can't contain
This excessive love appears monstrous because it gives without expecting return - it operates outside masculine economies of exchange
She argues that when women write from this place of excessive love, they create new languages and forms that exceed rational bounds. The writing becomes "flying" and "stealing" - taking wing beyond traditional structures.
Cixous sees this monstrous love as revolutionary precisely because it can't be contained or commodified. It overflows and transforms everything it touches. Would you like me to expand on her concept of écriture féminine (feminine writing) that emerges from this monstrous love? In "The Laugh of the Medusa" Cixous says ...
"Write yourself. Your body must be heard."
"You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing."
"Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies."
"Writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures."
"There is always within her at least a little of that good mother's milk. She writes in white ink."
"I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies."
"Your body spreads out, your body breaks up the frameworks."
For Cixous the monstrous feminine isn't horrifying but joyful - Medusa is beautiful and laughing when we dare to look. And wasn't it her voice, that so called poison, her calling out "me too" that got her beheaded., that got her head filled with snakes, that got her shunned, and monstered.
Cixous says, "Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ... divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster?"
"Too bad for them if they fall apart upon discovering that women aren't men, or that the mother doesn't have one. But isn't this fear convenient for them? Wouldn't the worst be... that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning?"
"You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing."
"To love, to watch-think-seek the other in the other, to despecularize, to unhoard... Women's dispossession of writing is too distant for anybody, male or female, to have felt its effects consciously. This distance allows us to find the strength to break through and to get on with the job of putting the whole shebang back on its feet, alive, magnificent."
The theme here is transformation through facing what patriarchy has made "monstrous" - finding joy and power in what we've been taught to fear. Cixous connects this to feminine writing practices in that she connects this joyful monstrosity to feminine writing ("écriture féminine") in several keyways:
She argues that when women write from their embodied experience, they naturally overflow traditional structures - like Medusa's snakes, the writing moves in multiple directions at once. This isn't a flaw but a strength.
(This sort of) writing then becomes "monstrous" because it:
Refuses linear time
Speaks from multiple voices simultaneously
Combines body and text
Mixes genres and forms
Embraces contradiction
Celebrates excess
For Cixous, this "monstrous" writing practice is inherently joyful because it frees women from patriarchal constraints. When women write without trying to conform to standards, their texts become sites of pleasure and transformation.
She says: "When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love."
This kind of writing is revolutionary precisely because it takes pleasure in what it's been taught to fear - like Medusa's laugh, it turns weapons of oppression into tools of liberation.
Other writers echo Cixous, such as Lispector. Clarice Lispector embodies Cixous's concept of joyful monstrous writing particularly in "Água Viva," where she writes in fluid, non-linear streams that blur boundaries between human/nonhuman. Her writing literally "flows" like water, refusing traditional narrative.
Monique Wittig in "Les Guérillères" shatters traditional narrative, using circular time and collective voices. She creates new pronouns and forms to express feminine experience.
Kathy Acker in "Blood and Guts in High School," mixes genres wildly - drawings, poems, dreams, plagiarized texts - creating a deliberately "monstrous" text that celebrates its own excess.
Virginia Woolf, though earlier than Cixous, her "waves" of consciousness in novels like "The Waves" exemplify this fluid, multiple-voiced writing.
I want to talk here specifically about Clarice Lispector. In Lispector's writing, especially in "Água Viva" (Living Water/Stream of Life), embodies the joyful monstrous in several ways: Her prose moves like water - fluid, formless, refusing containment.
She writes: "I want to grab hold of the is of the thing" - reaching for what exists before language tries to contain it.
Aspects of how she makes, sees and experiences her/the monstrous in writing ...
Dissolves boundaries between human/animal/object
Writes from the body, especially through sensations
Refuses plot or linear time
Creates moments of ecstatic transformation
Embraces the unknowable
I like these little lists that break open how we write and think or is it think and write. In "The Passion According to G.H.," Lispector writes about a woman's encounter with a cockroach that becomes a mystical experience. Instead of recoiling from the "monstrous," her character moves toward it until she experiences a kind of holy communion with the insect.
Her novel "Hour of the Star" plays with multiple voices, with the male narrator constantly interrupted by other voices and possibilities. The protagonist Macabéa is described as both grotesque and sacred.
In starting to read Lispector, I'd suggest you start here and take this reading path in three big jump steps:
"Hour of the Star" - Most accessible entry point, though still experimental. It's shorter and has a more discernible narrative while introducing her key themes of transformation and the sacred in the ordinary.
"The Passion According to G.H." - This is her masterwork of metamorphosis. It follows one woman's encounter with a cockroach that becomes a mystical experience breaking down human/nonhuman boundaries.
"Água Viva" - Her most experimental work, pure stream of consciousness. This is where she most fully embodies Cixous's concept of écriture féminine.
In "Água Viva" Lispector says: "I achieve myself and then am alone from what I achieved - everything will have been me but now everything will be not-me."
And from "The Passion According to G.H.": "The world interdepended with me, and I am not understanding what I say, never! never again shall I understand what I say. For how will I be able to speak without the word lying for me?"
The word, my word waddling about in this dance of language stirred to these refrains is less the generic, grammer-ed order, common-sense laying out of meaning, it is more oddly mine.
My writing and other works can be seen here …
https://www.tongue-stitch.com/
and on my new substack, the detector the dummy the daughter .. majena mafe
thanks for the read, I like company :)
