Tales from Storyville 3: The Poet and the Prostitute (Bellocq's Ophelia by Natasha Trethewey)

Photo of Natasha Trethewey by Nancy Crampton 

and photo of a Storyville prostitute by E. J. Bellocq

I.

According to Susan Sontag, only men find something romantic about prostitution; women look at things - including photographs of naked women taken in Storyville - differently don'tcha know. Nevertheless, there's something distinctly romantic about Natasha Trethewey's second collection of verse, Bellocq's Ophelia (2002). 

The work, divided into three main sections, consists of a series of poems in the form of an epistolary novella meditating on an imaginary and composite figure (Ophelia) supposedly captured by Bellocq's camera. It occasionally makes for uncomfortable reading, detailing as it does the life of a mixed-race prostitute in the early 1900s who had nothing to fall back on (as Toni Morrison would say).

But what's really interesting, philosophically, is that whilst Bellocq directs his gaze towards female flesh, Trethewey attempts to offer us a glimpse into Ophelia's soul; transforming her from an anonymous sex object into a unique subject whom we might know, value, and grow to love.

Most people would probably find nothing wrong with that; would think it a beautiful thing to do. But Foucault calls this process subjectivation and regards it as the exercise of power favoured by liberal humanism; i.e., the way in which the (amoral and irrational) forces and desires of the body are codified, coordinated, and given personal expression.

(I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, but it is something worth thinking about ...) 

II.

If asked to choose, I suppose my favourite part of the work is found in section two and entitled 'Letters from Storyville'; the part in which Ophelia recounts her initial experiences as a prostitute, including her name change to Violet, something which fans of the film Pretty Baby (1978) will knowingly smile at.

That said, I'm also very fond of this sonnet from section three of the book, with which I'd like to close this post:

'Storyville Diary,' Photography 1911

I pose nude for this photograph, awkward,

one arm folded behind my back, the other

limp at my side. Seated, I raise my chin,

my back so straight I imagine the bones

separating in my spine, my neck lengthening

like evening shadow. When I see this plate

I try to recall what I was thinking -

how not to be exposed, though naked, how

to wear skin like a garment, seamless.

Bellocq thinks I'm right for the camera, keeps

coming to my room. These plates are fragile,

he says, showing me how easy it is

to shatter this image of myself, how

a quick scratch carves a scar across my chest.

See: Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq's Ophelia, (Graywolf Press, 2002). 

Readers interested in part one of this post - a brief history of Storyville - should click here. 

Readers interested in part two of this post - on Bellocq's photographs - should click here.

Lose This Skin: Thoughts on Theodore Roethke's Epidermal Macabre

Juan de Valverde de Hamusco: 

La anatomia del corpo humano (1556)

According to D. H. Lawrence, Whitman was the great American poet-pioneer; the first to smash the old moral conception of man in which the body is conceived as but a shoddy and temporary container for some kind of ghostly essence; the first to seize the soul by the scruff of the neck and insist on her corporeal nature.   

This, for Lawrence, is crucial because he believes that the key to achieving what the Greeks termed εὐδαιμονία is "remaining inside your own skin, and living inside your own skin, and not pretending you're any bigger than you are."

Nietzsche also insists that man's self-overcoming does not correspond to the rapturous possibility of transcendence. The overman is not more spiritual, but more animal; complete with teeth, guts and genitals and all those things which idealists are embarrassed by and hope to see shrivel away. 

So, what's a reader of Lawrence and Nietzsche to make of the following poem by Theodore Roethke:


Epidermal Macabre

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes -
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

Initially, one is triggered - as people now like to say - by the narrator's physical self-loathing and his desire to make an ecstatic break from his own biology, conceived in terms of clothing that conceals true being in all its naked immateriality and innocence.

However, even the narrator - and, for convenience's sake, let's call him Roethke - recognises that such mad metaphysical exhibitionism in which one strips oneself of flesh and bone until one effectively becomes untouchable, invisible, and non-existent, is indelicate; i.e. not only insensitive, but also slightly indecent.

Further, whilst Roethke's hatred for his epidermal dress and the rags of his own anatomy is so profound that he considers willingly dispensing not only with his modesty but all vital feeling, he's honest enough to acknowledge that in death there's no liberation of the soul. All that remains is a decomposing corpse; that incarnadine and carnal ghost that refuses to disappear into thin air.

Noble spirit, Roethke concedes, is entirely dependent upon - is an epiphenomenal effect of - base matter. And just as truth needs to be concealed behind lies and illusions in order to remain true, spirit needs to be wrapped in flesh.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 161. 

Theodore Roethke, 'Epidermal Macabre', from the debut collection Open House (1941). See The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, (Anchor Books, 1975).

Musical bonus: The Clash, 'Lose This Skin', from the album Sandinista! (CBS, 1980); written and with vocals by Tymon Dogg: click here. 


Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting a post on this poem.

Give Your Heart to the Hawks: On the Inhumanism of Robinson Jeffers

Photo of Robinson Jeffers 
by Carl Van Vechten (1937)

As for me, I would rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.

It's only very recently that I've become familiar with the American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887 - 1962) - this despite the fact he's highly regarded by admirers for his Nietzschean philosophy of Inhumanism and came spinning out of the same cultural vortex as D. H. Lawrence.

Like Lawrence, Jeffers wrote of the astonishing beauty twinned with the savage cruelty of the natural world and contested all forms of anthropocentric conceit. His uncompromising relationship with the physical world is described in often brutal verse and, like Lawrence, Jeffers also had a penchant for exploring controversial subject matter, including rape, incest, bestiality and murder.

Both writers, we might say, subscribed to a model of the sublime that was erotico-daemonic in character. The key question was how mankind could find its proper place in the world as a being amongst other beings (be they animals, flowers, or rocks). This, Jeffers suggests, would involve men and women learning how to uncentre themselves and accept that all things have an element of divinity and are interconnected in what is essentially a tragedy of existence.  

Sadly, like Lawrence, Jeffers has largely fallen from favour and been marginalised in the mainstream academic community during the last thirty years. And probably for some of the same reasons; how many students today care about the extraordinary patience of things or want to hear that the universe is absolutely indifferent to them and their narcissistic politics of identity and social justice?

Still, Jeffers does have his followers and devotees; particularly within the burgeoning discipline of eco-poetics where his effort to shift emphasis from man to not-man is met with approval. And I certainly intend to read his work closely and at length over the coming months; who knows, I may even become a member of the Robinson Jeffers Association ... 

Notes

Readers interested in the Jeffers-Lawrence connection might like to see Calvin Bedient's essay, 'Robinson Jeffers, D. H. Lawrence, and the Erotic Sublime', in Robinson Jeffers and a Galaxy of Writers, ed. William B. Thesing, (University of South Carolina Press, 1995).

See also the foreword written by Jeffers to Fire and Other Poems, by D. H. Lawrence, published by The Book Club of California / The Grabhorn Press, 1940, in a limited edition of just 300 copies (with an introductory note on the poems by Frieda Lawrence).

Robinson Jeffers, The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Vols. I-V, (Stanford University Press, 1988-2000).
Robinson Jeffers, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt, (Stanford University Press, 2001). 


Thanks to Simon Solomon for introducing me to the poetry of Robinson Jeffers and inspiring this post. 

Roethke and the Bat Boy (A Post on American Poetry and Popular Culture)

And when he appears upon a TV screen,

We're afraid of what our eyes have seen.

The highly-regarded American poet, Theodore Roethke, grew up surrounded by natural beauty subject to German discipline in a giant greenhouse. The perfect conditions in which a sensitive young boy's Romanticism might flourish ...

However, as Camille Paglia points out, there was always something queer about Roethke's lyricism; his "portraits of nature are often eerie or unsettling", particularly when he attempted to connect the world of the greenhouse to his own (often profoundly disturbed) inner experience.

Perhaps this explains why the last lines of his poem 'The Bat' have been haunting me for days: 

For something is amiss or out of place

When mice with wings can wear a human face.

Either that, or they caused me to reflect once more upon the terrifying case of the Bat Boy, discovered living in Hellhole Cave, West Virginia, by Dr Ron Dillon, as reported in the pages of the Weekly World News back in the summer of 1992, and now established as an iconic figure within the popular imagination ...

See: 

Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn (Vintage Books, 2006), p. 146. 

Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems, (Faber and Faber, 1968).

To read 'The Bat', please visit the Poetry and Literature page of the US Library of Congress: click here.