This is one slippery, goth text. "Girls surely do come in all sizes" (p.5) Ahem.
"Lean and loved, the sun would clay bake them into midmorning flesh heaps..." (p.7) The text describes a consuming affair that obliterates the self - the lovers share the same side of the table they are, as in the beginning, not in opposition to each other, and from the first moment I held this slim book in my hands it weighed heavily with a sense of doom and loss.
The image describes what the text is not prepared to reveal: on page two, a rose is deconstructed by forks. The rose is a heart, to be eaten. It's cannibalistic and self annihilating.
On the facing page, the interior pre-nup is described, with the narrator's? hand reaching down to the splendid table, knife like fingers encased and manacled. A pinky ring is affixed to a ball and chain? A spoon is the spear in a cherry atop a sundae. I'm blushing.
The text pretends to make light, drawing parallels of the wedding ring to a nursery rhyme, but haven't we all heard that ring around the rosie is about the plague?
On page 4, quicker and harder... in image: the body as a guitar to be played. I'm not sure what to do with the leggy harmonica, but give me time...ohhhh, those are cricket legs! rubbing together, "churning something sonic". It's perfect and lyric harmony of text and image.
The black background is darkness that is often required... the red text represents the beating, bleeding heart. The evocative images are floating free and often take over. (in the final analysis, which is poetic impressionism at best, I think that the blackness swallows the text, and the images become the greatest natural resource of this memoir...)
At the end of Christmas Myth, the images grow in complexity and busyness, but the repeating, totemic images have been warped. We are left with twisted forks and shattered glasses.
I began this post as the book begins, but it quickly becomes a bad trip into dark corridors and painfully excavated rooms. Eroticism contains a dark side, but here it is totally eclipsed by it.
Eroticism is replaced by psychedelica, as the memoir descends with the narrator into the consequences of drugs. Page 10 is a testament to the way drugs become everything to an addict. There is not a corner of this image that doesn't hold addiction. In such an altered state everything is loaded and laden. The images almost need a map key. It was impossible for me to approach this text with a clear eyed rational response. A close reading is mind altering and disturbing. This is a trauma narrative.
I would like to talk more in class about the relationship between author and illustrator.
In other chapters the story seems even more abstract, poetified and romanticized. There are many images that seem like myth making, another kind of fairy tale. Such as the underwater image of the window washer, on page 29. The woman in the image holds a car that is bigger than her (pet) baby, and more colorful: red. A story of misplaced priorities....Her world is littered with cars, and she holds her foot in an almost caress, around a bucket of rock while the baby floats without any support, in her lap, blowing bubbles...
This book is a cave I don't want to go into. If it's an urn, it has blown apart the meaning of container.
Some literary trauma theory brings up the idea that events can "shatter" conceptual frameworks (this idea seems fraught re: the space for agency within trauma narrative, etc.). Mother's Urn may walk readers through the process of shattering archetypes they may hold around motherhood and tropes that they may hold about abuse (i.e. it's nuanced...like life). It feels like the text then builds something else, a trauma narrative, out of what "has blown apart the meaning of container."
ReplyDeleteThe eroticism never sleeps, and it refuses dichotomized correlations with addiction or absent addiction/non-addiction, violence or absent violence/no violence/less violence, preventing any simple reductions or romanticism. This isn't eroticism that you can turn away from, but nor is it eroticism that you can every fully engage. It's always escaping and trapping readers in what it describes. As you say: "Eroticism contains a dark side, but here it is totally eclipsed by it."
In response to both K and Jenny, if Mother's Urn shatters conceptual frameworks/archetypes, what does it put in their place? I think the lack of a new container leaves readers puzzled and breathless which was probably the creators' intent but I'm not sure I find it interesting (it's been done before). I want to see trauma narratives that are triumphant.
DeleteOn another note as K and I were discussing this book last night, I want to know if the visual artist was commissioned to draw Kalamity's stories or if it was more of a 50/50 collaboration. It felt like the former.
yes, we will talk about the relationship and how that differs with fiction.
ReplyDeletethere's something you do here, Kristen, that talks about pace in a way that we haven't looked at yet and how the juxtaposition of words and pictures bring that.
More about trauma too
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