Eric Selinger

Dept. of English
University of California at Los Angeles
eselinger@aol.com

 

Thanatos undercuts, overrides Eros, his sweet, belated sibling–so says Freud.¹ And in Revolution in Poetic Language, her closely argued brief against paranoid Unity and culture as theology, Julia Kristeva more than agrees. Like the Accusing Angel that she calls “the text,” Kristeva puts the writing subject, in her now famous phrase, en proces–in process and on trial–charged with denying the very spark that drives him: the “jouissance of destruction (or, if you will, of the ‘death drive’)” (150). This drive lies below language, she argues; it underwrites or even is desire (49, 131). Even oral pleasure, that link between infantile suckling and the poet’s honeyed words which at one moment in her account “restrains the aggressivity of rejection,” thus holding the death drive in check, amounts in the end to “a devouring fusion,” “borne” and “determined” by the very rejection one hoped it would restrain (153, 154). Avant-garde social and textual “practice,” along with the critic’s own, must on account of this be strict, undeceived, and unsentimental. There’s no entry for “love” in the index to Revolution. No Eros peeks out from Psyche’s cupola, offering readers shelter from the storm.

 

At moments Louise Gluck’s Ararat calls to mind such passionate strictness. “The soul’s like all matter,” the poet observes. “Why would it stay intact, stay faithful to its one form,” when it could fly apart into “particles” and “atoms,” disintegrate, “be free?” (“Lullaby” 28-29). The Kristeva I’ve cited so far would take this as a rhetorical question; and indeed, on first reading, so it seems. But these lines, like the rest of the volume, are spoken by a self-professed “Untrustworthy Speaker” (34). Suppose we read deeper, then, and hazard an answer? Recall another myth of rejection, the sentence passed on another subject on trial: Job, who refused to curse God and die (the biblical version of Kristevan “practice”). He survives to see an erotic restitution, his second crop of daughters, Dove, Cinnamon, and Eye-shadow, married with children and grandchildren of their own (Mitchell xxx, 91). A taste of fairy-tale closure, this end equally hints at that love “fierce as death” we read of in the Song of Songs (8:6), the book which follows Job in the Hebrew Bible as its countersong, a promise and a kiss.

 

The effort to unlock a love like that, a fierce erotic drive to hold life together, propels Gluck’s sequence from scene to stark, lyric scene. And the etiology of the affections we find in Kristeva’s more recent volumes can illuminate both the particulars and quiet formal imperative of the poet’s mourning work and self-analysis. “Beyond the often fierce but artificial and incredible tyranny of the Law and the Superego,” she writes in Tales of Love, postmodern love has been undermined by an “erosion of the loving father”: the one that Freud called the imaginary Father in Individual Prehistory, whose love for us ushers us out of melancholy longing for a lost maternal presence and into speaking subjectivity (378). Two musings from this book might serve as epigraphs to Ararat, highlighting the questions the poet sets herself as she attempts to reconstitute a vision of such paternity. “Love as unacknowledged lament?” Kristeva asks. “Lament as unsuspected love?” Tales 88).

 

It’s easy to read Ararat as a book about death, a fatalistic “family tragedy” (Cramer 102). The passing of the speaker’s father precipitates portraits of earlier losses, of a distance and coolness in the family’s past, and of the uneasy relations that remain. “Long ago, I was wounded,” the first poem begins (15); the last poem echoes the phrase, suggesting that no cure has been effected in between. “I thought / that pain meant / I was not loved,” the volume all-but ends, and no sunburst of metaphor, rhythm, or rhetoric amplifies the retraction of the line that follows to close out the book: “It meant I loved” (68). And yet, for all Gluck’s restraint–she’s no Mahler, massing brass fanfares to signal the shift–this quick modulation from minor to major ripples back to revise our sense of everything we’ve read before. Thus while “Ararat” is the name of a Jewish cemetery in the text, as a title for the book it also suggests something rather more hopeful, a place to settle, a mountain that peeks into view as the high waters ebb. Somewhere to speak from, perhaps, for in Kristeva’s tale “our gift of speech, of situating ourselves in time for another, could exist nowhere except beyond an abyss” Black Sun 42). We might paraphrase that as “after a flood,” with Matthew Arnold’s “salt, estranging sea” filling the developmental gulf between child and mother that the theorist has in mind. And if we took this as a book about Thanatos, did we brush past its actual epigraph on the way? “Human nature was originally one and we were a whole,” Gluck quotes from Plato’s Symposium, “and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love” (11).

 

The androgynes split up by Zeus have long since lost their cartwheeling brio, their mocking, comic tone as a myth for the origin of sexual lack and desire. Gluck herself sets them aside, turning instead to the two visions of union that our modern myths allow: that between mother and infant, and the “coagulation of the mother and her desire” that intervenes in the mother/infant dyad as a third term, and that reveals to the child that “mother is not complete… she wants…who? what? … ‘At any rate, not I'” Tales 41). Through a “primary identification” with this third, whom Kristeva, following Freud, names the “father in individual prehistory,” we may be reconciled to the loss of primal symbiotic bliss (see Tales 21-56; Black Sun 6, 13). He, or he-and-she (since the Third “possesses the sexual attributes of both parents” [“Joyce” 172]) is the seed of the Ego Ideal, our original constitutive metaphor: “I’m like that.” Split off from mother, taking ourselves for, or becoming like, this other object of her affection, we thus inaugurate, all at once, subjectivity, metaphor, identification, idealization, symbolicity, and love. “The speaking being is a wounded being,” Kristeva explains; “his speech wells up out of an aching for love” Tales 372). Primary identification cannot heal the wound, but it sutures, salves, and compensates the pain. When it fails or is too fragile I lapse melancholic, have only the sense “of having been deprived of an unnameable, supreme good” as I run my thoughts over, in numbed, dumb repetition, the “unnameable” loss Black Sun 13, 12).

 

In Ararat this “father of imaginary prehistory” appears in several incarnations: the father as object of the mother’s love; other children, sisters, in the same position; the “family unit,” as we blithely say, in its full domestic happiness. Or, I should say, he fails to appear. For all these unities lie shattered, unrecognized, unimagined, or forgotten as the volume begins. “Long ago, I was wounded,” the first poem opens:

 

I learned
to exist, in reaction,
out of touch with the world: I'll tell you
what I meant to be--
a device that listened.
Not inert: still.
A piece of wood. A stone.(15)

 

The near-toneless abstraction, the muted affect here, is that of a poet cut off from the pleasures of language as tactile, material, rhythmic, “the world.” The register Kristeva calls “the semiotic,” words surging with instinctual energy, seems repressed or abandoned. “Why should I tire myself, debating, arguing?” the speaker demands, as though such efforts of control were the only language games she knew, or thought to play–at least with those near her, “those people [sisters? the rest of her family?] breathing in the other beds.” If she “meant” in the past to be silent, mechanical or symbolic (a “device”), she hardly escapes that condition in the present tense of the lines.

 

A slumber does her spirit seal, we might say, for surely the last line of this stanza distantly echoes Wordsworth’s “rocks, and stones, and trees.” Her words, arhythmic, breaking off in dashes, suggest the melancholy speech Kristeva describes as “elaborated with the help of much knowledge and will to mastery, but . . . secondary, frozen, somewhat removed from the head and body of the person who is speaking” Black Sun 43). But hers is a sleepless slumber, a restless depression, stirred by a turbulence instantly put down. “Those people” are “uncontrollable / like any dream–” the poet observes, then at the word “dream” breaks off to watch “the moon in the night sky, shrinking and swelling.” Perhaps phallic in its alternate tumescence, or like a mother’s heartbeat, throbbing in the dark, this moon supplies an image for that archaic force the poet calls “the dark nature,” to which birth and death itself “are proofs, not / mysteries.” Ominous, the moon still seems attractive, a source of the dynamism the poet lacks. As we move through the stasis of the next few poems, its changes will be missed.

 

The opening poem I’ve been discussing stands in a double relation to the rest of the book. Its title, “Parados,” names the choral ode sung at the start of a Greek tragedy, a dramatic form that Nietzsche reads as teaching that “the state of individuation” is “the origin and primal cause of all suffering . . . objectionable in itself” (73).² If we take the poem as a distinct dramatic invocation, thirty-one verses remain–and exactly halfway through the book, in “Brown Circle,” we find the pivot of confrontation and forgiveness on which its progress hinges. Gluck doubles up on organization, however, supplying a second structural logic I will follow from now on. After “Parados” we find five poems that move the sequence along, introduce characters, fill out the plot. Then we have “Confession,” which comments both on the speaker and, obliquely, on what we’ve seen so far. Five more poems, then another address from and about “The Untrustworthy Speaker.” Five poems later, after the halfway pivot, we find “Animals,” which treats the speaker and her sister together, and for the first time hints at the true bonds between them. Five poems, and we find a deus ex machina of sorts, a vertical turn to hear “Celestial Music,” followed by the coda, “First Memory,” which echoes and revises the opening ode: “Long ago, I was wounded. I lived / to revenge myself / against my father” (68). I don’t mean by spelling out these structures to suggest that the book is primarily organized by differences and distinctions, other than of course its division into separate poems. The sections I propose are nowhere marked. But by reading this way, against the grain, we can get below the speaker’s evident emotional stasis, and tune in to deeper, subtler, curative shifts.

 

“A Fantasy” To “Confession”

 

At the end of “Parados” we learn that birth and death “are proofs,” not the mysteries the poet must bear witness to. Proofs of the power of Thanatos, or so it seems as this section opens in “A Fantasy.” Here, though no familial relationship has yet been described between her and her subjects, the speaker watches birth and death lamentably converge as “every day, in funeral homes, new widows are born, / new orphans” (16). In the “new life” of each widow and orphan time flashes in jarring, paratactic fragments: “Then they’re in the cemetery”; “And after that, everyone goes back to the house / which is suddenly full of visitors.” The only force that counteracts this fragmentation and dispersal is the mourner’s memory: the imagination of “the widow” our attention has lighted on and entered into as the poem progresses:

 

In her heart, she wants them to go away.
She wants to be back in the cemetery,
back in the sickroom, the hospital. She knows
it isn't possible. But it's her only hope,
the wish to move backward. And just a little,
not so far as the marriage, the first kiss.(16-17)

 

The poet, we note, presses back a bit farther in the continuity than the widow allows herself. She lingers as the last line ends on the vision of a woman–the mother, we will learn–achieving her desire. And yet, as the focus widens again in the next poem to include the whole of “this family,” still unnamed as the speaker’s own, nostalgia withers and a harsher tone sets in. “No one could write a novel about this family,” this voice announces: “too many similar characters. Besides, they’re all women; / there was only one hero. / / Now the hero’s dead” (18).

 

Why this sudden shift in tone? It takes no particular psychological insight to see something defensive at work, signalling the importance of “the hero” when alive. The women may be “determined to suppress / criticism” of him, but in the speaker’s case, at least, they don’t succeed. His death “wasn’t moving,” the speaker insists; he was a “figurehead” alive, evidently narcissistic (the women are “like echoes”); “he’s weak,” she notes, “his scenes specify / his function but not his nature.” That function has something to do with narrative, with the making of sense and sentences through time. If at the gravesite a nameless someone instructed the mourners on “what to do next,” even that desiccated remnant of paternal function has now evaporated. “From this point on, nothing changes,” we are told. Not only is there “no plot without a hero,” but his absence rules out change as erotic development, new first kisses, escape. “In this house,” the speaker explains, “when you say plot what you mean is love story.” For Kristeva, love rests on a foundation of primary identification with the “imaginary father”: “a warm but dazzling, domesticated paternity” Tales 46). The recovery of such an imaginary father–the reconstruction of “the hero”–will be the poet’s task. As imagined here, he can only hurt and divide: in a brief flash of metaphor that perhaps signals his continued power, each woman’s heart is “pierced through with a sword” (19). But since the imaginary father does not simply equal the biological father, but incorporates whatever “not I” the child discovers its mother to desire, the poet must equally reconstruct the rest of her family. Her sympathetic imagination cannot jump past or exclude “these women, the wife and two daughters” and their children. These paired efforts will shape the first three sections of the book, starting with an admission that, indeed, this family is the speaker’s own.

 

With the next poem, “Labor Day,” her mourning work begins. “It’s a year exactly since my father died,” she begins; everything snaps into focus with the first- person pronoun: the heat last year, a coldness now; a niece riding her bicycle out front. “There’s just us now,” the poet remarks, “the immediate family.” Immediate, since no longer mediated by a paternal third term, the family also seems trapped in an unhappy immediacy, a static present. Between the father as “a blond boy” and his appearance as “an old man gasping for air” we see nothing, no development, no life but “a breath, a caesura” (20); likewise, in the poem that follows, “Lover of Flowers,” we find references to “every spring” and “every autumn” as though years of seasons were compressed in the year that’s passed. Certainly immediacy does not equal closeness, for the speaker seems determined to mark off borders, to differentiate, particularly between her sister and herself. “In our family, everyone loves flowers,” she begins (21). But “with my sister, it’s different, / it’s an obsession.” When a set of poppies that the sister plants is beaten down by rain, we can glimpse the poet’s unacknowledged self-portrait in her mother’s words:

 

My mother's tense, upset about my sister:
now she'll never know how beautiful they were,
pure pink, with no dark spots. That means
she's going to feel deprived again. But for my sister, that's the condition of love.
She was my father's daughter:
the face of love, to her,
is the face turning away.(21-22)

 

The sister, too, was “wounded” it seems, perhaps by the father’s distancing love. Such separation marks “the face of love, to her,” the poet insists, as though this deprivation were not her own case, her condition as well. That acknowledgement would require more identification with the sister, and a stronger ability to idealize, to see the father or the parents’ love without dark spots, than she can summon up so early in the text.

 

If we’ve had a first sketch of the poet’s response to her sister, the next poem fills out the background, shifts our perspective back two generations. What we find bears little resemblance to the ease of partial differentiation, the reassuring presence of reproduced motherhood that critics of the Freudian scheme discover between women and their daughters.³ Gluck’s sibling mysteries play themselves out in a difficult key. Mother and aunt play cards, “Spite and Malice, the family pastime, the game / my grandmother taught all her daughters” (23). The immediate, all-female world we see at the start and close of this poem, where the mother and aunt “have cards; they have each other” and therefore “don’t need any more companionship”–this world and its games may be “better than solitaire,” but they ring a little hollow nonetheless. “In the end,” in their game, “the one who has nothing wins”; and the next poem, the first address-lyric or echo of “Parados,” picks up and deepens that conclusion. Not Carol Gilligan’s “ethic of care” but bracing competition motivates the women of this world, or at least their representative speaker. “You show respect by fighting,” she observes; that’s how her mother and aunt were raised. And something of that sororial strife has worked its way into the myths of the next generation. “Fulfillment” and “happiness,” the poet confesses, serve only to draw down the anger of the Fates: “sisters, savages–” who “in the end . . . have / no emotion but envy” (“Confession” 25).

 

Why does the speaker thus overstate the case against these women, evidently downplaying the affections of the scene? Why has she “learned to hide” her dreams, in other words, and what would those dreams contain? In her uncertainty we find a trace of resistance to that “sine-qua- non condition of our individuation” that Kristeva melodramatically calls “matricide” Black Sun 27-8). “Matricide is our vital necessity,” the theorist proclaims, for we must all extricate ourselves from undifferentiated infant bliss.⁴ But for women the violence of this process is harder to focus entirely outward. “Locked up within myself” it turns to “an implosive mood that walls itself in and kills me secretly, very slowly, through permanent bitterness, bouts of sadness” (29). The poet is trapped in this sort of bitterness, unable to blur her own borders, to metaphorize, to reach out in amorous idealizing identification to mother or sister, let alone to the dead hero or imaginary “loving father” she needs Tales 378). This family is indeed hers, but she stands outside it, at once unsympathetic and unable to acknowledge the roots of her pain.

 

“A Precedent” To “The Untrustworthy Speaker”

 

The five poems that come before “The Untrustworthy Speaker” hazard, if indirectly, one such identification. We learn of a death before the father’s loss–a sister to the speaker, one who died in infancy–and, more important, we find a new imaginative sympathy with the mother. As the poet details preparations for “the child that died,” a new delicacy of tone and loving accuracy of description breathes life into her voice. “Bureaus of soft clothes. / Little jackets neatly folded. / Each one almost fit in the palm of a hand” (“A Precedent” 26). We saw the mother’s capacity for care unfold in “Widows,” where she slept on the floor to be near her dying husband. But while the focus there was on her inability to get used to his absence after death, here we see her affections in full flower, as yet unthreatened, unhurt. When the hurt does come, when her daughter is lost, we see transformations in both the mother and the poet left behind:

 

    . . . when my sister died,
my mother's heart became
very cold, very rigid,
like a tiny pendant of iron. Then it seemed to me my sister's body
was a magnet. I could feel it draw
my mother's heart into the earth,
so it would grow.("Lost Love" 29)

 

This poem and “A Precedent” are more tender, more compassionate, more fluent in their sympathetic identification than anything we’ve seen so far. But if the poet can sense her way into her mother’s skin, she equally seems inclined to be the dead sister, to cure the mother’s wound, to offer herself in a risky but attractive sacrifice.

 

Perhaps we do not press too far to see a crucial early identification with the dead sister as, in effect, a dead “imaginary father”–recalling that the father was defined as such, in part, simply for being what Mama valued other than me. Stillness thus seems a virtue to the poet-child, one learned from the sister who died. As she wanted in “Parados” to be “Not inert: still” (15), in the final poem of this section, “Appearances,” we see her hazard an analysis of that longing, recall her childhood pride in its accomplishment: “It was something I was good at: sitting still, not moving. / I did it to be good, to please my mother, to distract her from the child that died. / I wanted to be child enough” (32). But this is too close for comfort to the stillness of the stillborn, of “the dying” who “spin so rapidly they seem to be still” (“Lullaby” 28) and to the inertia of the women who “can’t get moving” after the father-hero’s death, which itself “wasn’t moving” (18). If those who fall asleep “grow slowly calm,” soothed by a mother’s heartbeat–one thinks of the moon of “Parados,” and of the curative regressions in Whitman’s “The Sleepers”– those who fall apart in death refuse, or fail, to be comforted. The speaker, we sense, would gladly identify with the infant her mother holds, feeds, attempts to keep alive, in order to prove that she’d accept. On her the effort would be efficacious; loved, she’d stay alive.

 

There is of course more to say about the middle poems in this bundle of five, and I will return to examine the father’s role in them shortly. But I want to focus on “Appearances,” the last of them, especially on its description of the living sisters’ relations to one another and their mother, and its invocation of a new character from outside the family, an artist. For if “forgiveness emerges first as the setting up of a form . . . [and] has the effect of an acting out, a doing, a poiesis,” Black Sun 206), the progress of the book requires this new intercessory term: a figure at once for the poet and for the loving father she lacks.⁵

 

What, first off, needs to be forgiven? In poems of this section we’ve seen the mother’s love in action: folding baby clothes, holding a child that doesn’t want to be fed, lulling husband and infant to sleep, and into death. (“I can’t say / what she did for my father,” the poet reassures us, and herself; still, “whatever it was, I’m sure it was right” [28].) And yet, when the speaker considers the portraits her parents commissioned, looking with the eyes of an adult, one who’s “been analyzed,” who can “understand our [her and her sister’s] expressions” (31), she sees something more painful and troubling:

 

My mother tried to love us equally,
dressed us in the same dresses; she wanted us
perceived as sisters.
That's what she wanted from the portraits:
you need to see them hanging together, facing one another--
separated, they don't make the same statement.
...........................................
She likes to sit there, on the blue couch, looking up at her daughters,
at the two that lived. She can't remember how it really was,
how anytime she ministered to one child, loved that child,
she damaged the other. You could say
she's like an artist with a dream, a vision.
Without that, she'd have been torn apart.(31-32)

 

The mother’s ministration to the living, unlike her care for the dying, calls pain to the poet’s mind in a new, post- analytic specificity. As usual, though, we see more than the words acknowledge. The mother’s desire to have her daughters “hanging together,” eyes fixed on one another, counters the potential dispersal by death of two generations. It works at once between the sisters (they won’t be torn away from each other) and in the mother’s heart (I won’t be torn apart by another loss), calling to mind and helping justify the grandmother’s attempt to make mother and aunt a sufficient pair: the attempt we read about in “Widows.”

 

And yet the poet withdraws from the potential identification I am, like my mother, an artist. She doesn’t reject it, I hasten to add, since we find none of the dismissive force she mustered in “A Novel.” She merely steps back to the solid ground of her painful individuation. She still wants, first off, to be set off from her sister: to be either the loved child or the damaged one. “You had to shut out / one child to see the other,” she recalls, clearly hungering for that specific attention (33). She gets it from the most successful imaginary father so far, the portrait painter, “Monsieur Davanzo.” He, like the poet herself, insists on distinctions and accuracies. He notices the difference between flesh tones, for example, against the identical green cotton dresses the two sisters wear: the sister, who’s been linked with reds and pinks, is “ruddy”; the poet’s “faintly bluish,” recalling the daughter who died. We have seen no play so far in the poem, whether in the language or by children or with parents; but here, “to amuse us, Madame Davanzo hung cherries over our ears,” reminding us that the imaginary loving father, the critical third term the poet lacks, is in fact a “father-mother conglomerate” Tales 40), pictured here, if briefly, as an actual couple. But the poem ends with “the painter” himself marking in his portrait what is at least the child’s interpretation of her mother’s wish that her children always be bound up together. Does she want me to stay with her, with women, forever? Never turn to a sexual Other, fall in love with a man? “Every morning, we went to the convent,” we read of her summer schedule. “Every afternoon, we sat still, having the portraits painted”; and the artist Monsieur (“my lord”) Davanzo understands her expression. “A face already so controlled, so withdrawn, / and too obedient, the clear eyes saying / If you want me to be a nun, I’ll be a nun” (33).

 

Does the mother really want this? Again, as after “Widows,” we sense an unfair accusation, and again we find a confession: the third of the “Parados” poems, “The Untrustworthy Speaker.”

 

Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken.
I don't see anything objectively.
I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
that's when I'm least to be trusted.

It's very sad, really: all my life, I've been praised
for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight.
In the end, they're wasted--(34)

 

This poem marks the speaker’s first acknowledgement that she has cut herself off from something, someone; that the analysis she’s brought to bear so far has failed. We note the self-criticism as a flicker of Eros, a latent desire to “see myself, / standing on the front steps, holding my sister’s hand,” even if that means having to call herself to account for love’s sadisms and failures, “the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends” (34). This would entail, in part, an observation of her own masochism, of the degree to which the “wound” or loss she mourns is self-inflicted, a condition of her speech. An exculpation of the mother indeed soon follows, set in motion by the “criticism of the hero” (18) suppressed earlier. This combination will bring the book to its pivotal moment of confrontation and crisis.

 

“A Fable” To “Animals”

 

This central section of the book begins with its first extended metaphor for the poet’s situation: “A Fable.” “Suppose / you saw your mother / torn between two daughters,” she demands, the daughters identified with those competing self-proclaimed mothers who fought over a single baby before Solomon (36).

 

What could you do
to save her but be
willing to destroy
yourself--she would know
who was the rightful child,
the one who couldn't bear
to divide the mother.

 

Setting aside the admission of masochism here–itself a step beyond the mere victimhood of “Appearances”–we find a curious blur of familial roles. The mother plays at once the parts of a “wise king” who judges and a child under threat; the poet too is at once mother (the one who can’t bear to divide) and child. Not her own but the mother’s pain attracts the poet’s attention: an unsettling shift, apparently, as the short lines and shivering enjambments suggest. If indeed “the transfer of meaning” in metaphor “sums up the transference of the subject to the place of the other” Tales91), we can understand the fragility of the poem’s presentation, as it ferries the poet oh-so-nervously across the flood waters, the gulf or “abyss” of individuation.

 

Who, though, is the other daughter in this scene? The living sister, or the dead? Both sisters have divided their mother’s affections; and if we keep our eyes on the function of each sister, to borrow a term from the sequence itself (see “A Novel” and “The Untrustworthy Speaker”), we note that each acts for the other, in this emotional division, like the “imaginary father” Kristeva describes. As though to reinforce this connection the following poem, “New World,” turns from the sisters’ relations to those of the husband and wife. What role, the poet asks, did that Ur-Other play, and how did I imagine it at the time?

 

As I saw it,
all my mother's life, my father
held her down, like
lead strapped to her ankles.
She was
buoyant by nature;
she wanted to travel,
go to theater, go to museums.
What he wanted
was to lie on the couch
with the Times
over his face,
so that death, when it came
wouldn't seem a significant change.

 

This life study, our first glimpse of the father in life, not death, treats him with imagistic specificity, as though to flesh out his “nature” in the way obscured at the start of the book. If he still seems the “someone remote” he was named in “Mount Ararat,” doing nothing but preparing to die, his association here with time and a certain style of language, the restrained clarity of “the Times,” is now insisted on through a new flair of metaphor. (So that’swhere the poet learned her style, we note in the margin.)

 

This subtle change of style marks a quiet change of heart. “I thought my father’s death / would free my mother,” the poet observes; and while “in a sense, it has”– she can travel, go to her museums at last–something valuable’s been lost as well. The mother “isn’t held” anymore; “she’s free . . . / Without relation to earth” (39) –a phrase that echoes the speaker’s own original condition: “out of touch / with the world” (15). It’s not that being earth-bound was so good, but the inverse seems equally unfortunate. For the first time the father seems a figure of curative attraction–like the dead sister’s body in “Lost Love,” he draws, or drew, the mother down to earth. But the speaker seems loathe to articulate this attractive quality, her focus on the mother occluding the father as an object of desire, whether her mother’s or her own. Thus in “Birthday,” the next poem, we find a stand-in for him: an “old admirer” who, even after death, continues to send roses on the mother’s birthday, “his way of saying that the legend of my mother’s beauty / had simply gone underground” (40). A figure for the loving, living father–an alternative to that morbid silence below the Times–he’s both Persephone to the mother’s Demeter and, in his “ministering,” a mother too.⁶ “I thought / the dead could minister to the living,” the poet remembers. “I didn’t realize / this was the anomaly; that for the most part / the dead were like my father.” Hard words, if she means “like my father when alive.” And even if she means like the father after death, a certain harshness comes through the allegation, for if “my mother doesn’t mind, . . . doesn’t need / displays from my father,” surely his daughter suffers as the mother spends her birthday “sitting by a grave,” “showing him she understands, / that she accepts his silence / . . . she doesn’t want him making / signs of affection when he can’t feel” (40-41). “Hates deception”; “can’t feel”–the present indicative tense sweeps together the obvious lack of response from the dead with a vision of the father as there, watching without response or turning his face away. Did he not feel before his death, not live up even then to the “standard of courtesy, of generosity” the old admirer set? One might read the lines that way, written by a daughter who prefers to rest, like her father, undeceived.

 

We have reached the hinge of the book, “Brown Circle.” Whatever objections we might have had to the speaker’s unforgiving stance toward her mother and sister, to the tone she’s taken toward her father until now, are suddenly voiced as this poem starts with a question from one who’s been silent so far. “My mother wants to know,” it begins, “why, if I hate / family so much, / I went ahead and / had one” (42). Why indeed? Freudian theory no less than the Bible finds the sins of the fathers visited on sons, and daughters here seem no exception. The cutting lineation of her response suggests the speaker’s uneasiness, the way she halts and stammers her way through to an unspoken answer.

 

        I don't
answer my mother.
What I hated
was being a child,
having no choice about
what people I loved.
I don't love my son
the way I meant to love him.(42)

 

How close she comes to simply saying “I don’t love my son”! Or, as we might expect from the end of the first stanza, “I don’t love him / because I must, but because I choose to.” In fact, of course, we find something quite different: a recognition that choice and love are uneasy bedfellows; that while we may choose to have our children we can’t choose who they are or even, often enough, what they do. Their ways are beyond us, have their way with us. How culpable, then, can we find each other and ourselves? If the poet loves like a scientist, unwilling to set down her magnifying glass and leave off her scrutiny “though / the sun burns a brown / circle of grass around / the flower”– and we think of her unyielding observation of the older generation so far–was she herself not similarly burned? Such scrutiny is “more or less the way / my mother loved me,” she admits, and the stanza ends on that line, backing up the recognition: my mother loved me, not just, as in “Appearances,” “one child . . . that child” or “the other.” “I must learn / to forgive my mother,” the poet admonishes herself, as the play of mother-daughter identifications we saw in “A Fable” becomes literal. It’s the only way to forgive herself, “now that I’m helpless / to spare my son” (43).

 

Ararat revolves around “Brown Circle” in two ways. First, and most obviously, the book now focuses on the poet’s sister and her daughter, the poet and her son, and on the father himself, with the mother largely absent. But behind this lies the more crucial shift from a poetry of hazarded, uneasy identifications, verse searching for its sponsoring imaginary Other, to a poetry of calm, practiced distance, observation, and compassion. “It is by making his words suitable to his commiseration and, in that sense, accurate,” Kristeva explains, “that the subject’s adherence to the forgiving ideal is accomplished and effective forgiveness for others as well as for oneself becomes possible” Black Sun 217). None of this is entirely new to the volume: we saw such accuracies at work in “A Precedent” and at moments elsewhere. But by bringing a new generation into focus the poet lets go of certain earlier obsessions, and clears a path for forgiveness in substance as well as in style. No longer, for example, does she insist on distinctions between herself and her sister. Both have children itching for independence: the sister’s daughter in the first panel of the triptych “Children Coming Home From School,” the poet’s son sulking in her driveway in the second, “accus[ing] me / of his unhappiness.” In the third panel the poet and her niece, both of whom can be said to be “growing up with my sister,” equally learn “to wait, to listen,” to grapple for verbal advantage. And in the poem that stands where we’ve come to expect a version of “Parados,” some confession of the speaker’s untrustworthiness, we find the unsentimental sororial accord of “Animals” instead:

 

My sister and I reached
the same conclusion:
the best way
to love us was to not
spend time with us.
...................

My sister and I
never became allies,
never turned on our parents.
We had
other obsessions: for example,
we both felt there were
too many of us
to survive.

We were like animals
trying to share a dry pasture.
Between us, one tree, barely
strong enough to sustain
a single life.(47-48)

 

The poet’s growing ease with metaphor allows her, for the first time in the sequence, to unite the parents in either a phrase (“the” or “our parents”) or a figure (the “one tree”). Where once the sisters tugged at and split up their mother’s love, here they stand off warily from parents who cannot “bring themselves / to inflict pain” on either. (“You should only hurt / something you can give / your whole heart to,” the speaker mordantly observes.) The chosen metaphor of “Animals” would seem to suggest an inevitable competition or natural selection between the two; and we’ve been led to expect something rather like this through the first half of the book. An unspoken pact emerges in its place, however, marking our transition to the fourth group of poems, focused for the first time on connections. Neither girl, each staring the other one down, will move to “touch / one thing that could / feed her sister” (49). What comes between them now, if only it were a little bit stronger, could keep them both alive.

 

“Saints” to “Snow”

 

Two paragraphs ago I quoted Kristeva as saying that the forgiver’s commitment to accuracy demonstrates an “adherence to the forgiving ideal.” The nature of that ideal should by now be clear–the Third, the imaginary father–and, in fact, Black Sun names it as such elsewhere. “Whoever is in the realm of forgiveness–who forgives and who accepts forgiveness–is capable of identifying with a loving father, an imaginary father,” Kristeva propounds, “with whom, consequently, he is ready to be reconciled, with a new symbolic law in mind” (207). That new law–a covenant after the flood–will remain unspoken until the penultimate poem of Ararat, but already we can see the reconciliation proceed. At first the imaginary father appears as female, and as a familial ideal. “In our family, there were two saints,” she startles us by writing: “my aunt and my grandmother” (50). Generations flicker, linked by metaphor: of these the grandmother seems to stand in for the speaker’s own mother, “cautious, conservative,” the aunt for the speaker, suffering repeated losses and haunted by jealous Fates familiar from “Confession.” (The mother suffers and loses too, you say? Ah, but these are ideals, desires, imaginings…). The aunt’s marked as a saint by her refusal to “experience / the sea” that steals away her loved ones “as evil. To her, it is what it is: / where it touches land, it must turn to violence” (50). This stoic acceptance, a model for the poet’s own work, prompts her into accepting complementary opposites that must also remain “what they are” in the pair of poems that follow: herself and her sister, her niece and son, as treated in “Yellow Dahlia” and “Cousins.”

 

In the interest of space I will set these poems aside– suffice it to say that, despite Kristeva’s allegation that art forgives by giving shape “without exegesis, without explanation, without understanding” Black Sun 207), Gluck here demonstrates ample talent at all three. Let me rather turn to the central stanzas of “Paradise” and the final poems of the section, “Child Crying Out” and “Snow,” for here we see the slow introduction of the father as a loving Other in his own right. Once “remote,” a hero in disgrace, he approaches; and the poet admits an identification:

 

In some ways, my father's
close too; we call
a stone by his name.
.....................
They always said
I was like my father, the way he showed
contempt for emotion.
They're the emotional ones,
my sister and my mother.(54-55)

 

We have, perhaps, suspected this deep congruence all along. The poet’s distance, her sense of deprivation, made her seem her father’s daughter as much as or more than the sister named as such back in “Lover of Flowers.”

 

But is “contempt” quite the right word here? “Child Crying Out” suggests that something else is at stake, a basic resistance to the claims of emotion to overwhelm the distance between individuals, to offer immediate access to the soul. This poem, an answer to Adrienne Rich’s “Night Pieces: For a Child,” refuses to assume a mother’s fundamental maternal connection with and insight into her child. Rich mourns her son’s slipping away into patriarchical terrors; here, the son has never been close enough to keep:

 

The night's cold;
you've pushed the covers away.
As for your thoughts, your dreams--
I'll never understand
the claim of a mother
on a child's soul.

 

Does she mean the “claim” on his imagination, the way one’s mother slips into dreams as abject “death’s head, sphinx, medusa” (Rich 67)? Or, conversely, the claim to understand (a mother knows)? Though the former sticks in the back of our minds, the latter seems Gluck’s explicit quarrel:

 

So many times
I made that mistake
in love, taking
some wild sound to be
the soul exposing itself--
But not with you,
even when I held you constantly.
You were born, you were far away.

Whatever those cries meant,
they came and went
whether I held you or not,
whether I was there or not.(56-57)

 

The son’s sleep, like the father’s face turned away, stands for a certain “condition of love” (22), of accepted alterity, “a basic separation that nonetheless unites” (Kristeva, Tales 90).⁷ It hints that the absence of “signs of affection” on either side of the grave won’t necessarily mean that the loved one, unlike the old admirer, “can’t feel” (41). Did the father, though we’ve never seen it, therefore love? And how would we, or the poet know?

 

“If [the soul] speaks at all,” “Child Crying Out” ends, “it speaks in dreams.” Fair enough: and in “Snow,” the last poem of this fourth group, we get our first dream-vision (though it’s phrased as a memory) since the moon in “Parados.” Poet and father are on their way to New York, waiting for a train.⁸ “My father liked / to stand like this,” the poet recalls, “to hold me / so he couldn’t see me,” but so that she can stare into the world he sees, “learning / to absorb its emptiness” (58). A father, then, of both connection and withdrawal, he stands implicated in the narcissistic emptiness of the subject split off from maternal plentitude, the disjunction from the earth we’ve watched the poet suffer. (The snow’s not falling but whirling, we notice, borne up against gravity.) Their love, for we edge into calling it that, rests on the same disengaged commonality we saw between mother and son, the sort Frank Bidart calls “the love of / two people staring / / not at each other, but in the same direction” (“To the Dead”). A love, it happens, closer to that shared gaze on the Good that Socrates offers than to Aristophanes’s erotic myth–though here the good stays elusive, out of sight, lost in the empty white-out of the flurries.

 

“Terminal Resemblance” to “Celestial Music”

 

The final sequence of Ararat, these five poems hover and turn from portrait to portrait without anxiety, with the sense of at last accomplishing that “promise, project, artifice” Kristeva sees as integral to writing as love, mercy, transformation, forgiveness Black Sun 216-17). We get a last clear look at father and mother, father and daughter, daughters and mother, sisters and children, along with two poems that stand out from the rest: a nod to aesthetic religion in “Lament,” and the turn to religious aesthetics of “Celestial Music.” Rather than treat each poem individually, as I’ve done so far, I will first explore the way these as a group echo and revise the themes and images of the book. “Celestial Music” deserves to be looked at alone, since it stands out from the rest as a deus ex machina, a tribute to love, to the Third, as quite literally “a godsend” Tales 40).

 

Since the start of the book the father has been linked to time, the Times–or, to be more accurate, the father’s absence has marked time’s failure to pass. In “Terminal Resemblance,” a poem about the poet’s last meeting with her father, we learn “he wasn’t . . . pointing to his watch” as he waited for her, signalling not only that “he wanted to talk,” but also certain relief from the earlier deathly, encompassing stasis. Gluck hints at this return to mutability at the close of the poem as well. “For a change, my father didn’t just stand there,” she writes; “this time, he waved” (60, my emphasis). Even the idea of immediacy is transformed in these last poems, appearing now in the mode of aesthetic appreciation, and not of numb, paratactic sequence:

 

Your friends the living embrace one another,
gossip a little on the sidewalk
as the sun sinks, and the evening breeze
ruffles the women's shawls--
this, this, is the meaning of
"a fortunate life": it means
to exist in the present.("Lament" 61-6)

 

Words and phrases culled from earlier poems make these last five seem a final tally, a summing up. In the first section we read about gardens and flowers; here we see a “gardener’s truck” (59). The grandmother-saint escaped suffering; so does the dying father (60). “It frightens” the mother, we read, “when a hand isn’t being used” (60); the poet’s sister wouldn’t let her daughter walk with both hands “totally free” in “Children Coming Home From School,” a poem whose title is given to a second poem, the fourth of this group, where the “children” are again the poet and her sister. The poet’s sadness over losing the mother’s complete, swaddling attention has been visible between the lines from the first. At last it is named outright: “I continued, in pathetic ways, / to covet the stroller. Meaning / all my life” (64). “Amazons” plucks the word “end” from the all-woman scenes of “Widows” and “Confession” and runs it through revelatory changes:

 

End of summer: the spruces put out a few green shoots.
Everything else is gold--that's how you know the end of the growing season.
..................................
My sister and I, we're the end of something.
...................................
I can see the end: it's the name that's going.
When we're done with it, it's finished, it's a dead language.
That's how language dies, because it doesn't need to be spoken.
My sister and I, we're like amazons,
a tribe without a future.
I watch the children draw: my son, her daughter.(65)

 

The father’s name will be lost; the maternal tradition of sufficient, respectfully fighting pairs of daughters, too, will soon die out, written as it was in “soft chalk, the disappearing medium.”

 

In such recapitulations Ararat comes to terms with its own ending, with the way that writing finishes, so unlike life. Do we see here that “unease over the final, masterful accomplishment” Kristeva sees as returning the writer to the need for forgiveness once again Black Sun 217)? That would perhaps explain the sudden entry of a “friend who still believes in heaven,” one who “literally talks to god” in “Celestial Music.” This poem, which in its sustained long lines and metaphorical resonance stands dramatically apart from the rest of the volume, snaps us back to the grander dimensions of the book’s long quest to imagine a loving father, a Third. For if the love of “primary identification” founds and figures both “Greek Eros–violent, destructive, but also platonically ascending towards the Ideal,” and “the Christian Agape which, emanating from the Other, descends upon me” (“Joyce” 168), why not identify with a father in heaven, that God who is, or so we’re told, Love?⁹

 

Such a turn seems at first promised by the poet’s praise of her friend, and the effects of her faith. “On earth, she’s unusually competent,” we learn. “Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness” (66). She’s like a mother, an “adult”; in the poet’s dreams she’s a lecturer on love. (“When you love the world,” she admonishes, “you hear celestial music.”) But a turn to on-high would belie, not enrich, the poet we’ve come to know; and, indeed, identification is extended only horizontally, on the human axis of friendship. If she starts by asserting her differences from the friend, as with her sister, similarities follow:

 

It's this moment we're both trying to explain, the fact
that we're at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt....
She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image
capable of life apart from her.
We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition
fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering--
it's this stillness we both love.(67)

 

The success of the volume, not simply as a group of poems, but as a progress from loss, depression, the narcissistic wound, through “the narrow pass of identification with flawless ideality, loving fatherhood” Black Sun 216), into the formal aesthetic accomplishment of an ending, can be measured in the believability of these lines. Though different from the rest of the volume they must not seem out of place or make us frown in vexation at the poet’s claim to be “at ease” at last. For them to work we must have been prepared to see a metaphor for the poet’s own structures and symmetries in the friend’s dirt circle, that “composition” that surrounds a torn and dying (read: “wounded”) caterpillar. “The composition / fixed,” she writes; and the heavy stress of an enjambment forces us to pause, to read “fixed” as healed, made “whole” and “beautiful.” Fixed means “still” as well, and in “the stillness we both love” the twinborn but separated longings for stillness and new life of earlier poems are rejoined. Where it once implied a stunned fixity in the present, or a desperate identification with the dead in order to restore a mother’s love, stillness here suggests the reassurance of completion, the satisfactions of order and limit, an artist’s “it is finished” (if not Christ’s). A stillness bound up in the accomplishment of love, she suggests, telling over the word three times in the last two lines. “It’s this stillness that we both love. / The love of form is a love of endings” (67).

 

Though it brings Ararat to conclusion, “Celestial Music” is not the last poem we read. That place belongs to “First Memory”: a reprise of “Parados,” a piece whose title suggests both that this memory delves as far back as the poet can and that she can now truly remember for the first time. On a first read through the book we come upon “First Memory,” not with a shock (as with “Celestial Music”) but with a shiver at its spare, discursive, chilly, familiar style. The poem is short enough to quote in its entirety:

 

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was--
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.(68)

 

We can at last gloss those critical, open-ended phrases on which the poem ends and folds back on itself. “For what he was”: quiet, affectionate only at a distance, too hard to idealize, to imagine as the object of mother’s desire. “For what I was”: quiet, distant, longing to picture myself once again the sole focus of care, more like my father than I could bear to admit. But why does the poem not end with a perfect reversal, with “It meant I was loved,” which is equally true? Why does the pain mean she was a lover, too?

 

In part, and on the book’s own terms, this ending includes and implies my suggested alternative. If pain meant I loved, then I loved my family; which means I wasn’t incapable of love, as I thought my father was; which means, since I’m like him, that he wasn’t incapable of love either; which means that he loved mother and me, and so was in pain, was wounded too; which means that under all the relations in the book, painful or strained, we might find love, denied or distorted, as well. And, indeed, if we look beyond Ararat, place it in a broader context, we find a further sanction for this reading. In the final chapter of Tales of Love, Kristeva records her sense of the narcissistic crisis in which we find ourselves. We are, as a chapter title claims, “Extraterrestrials Suffering for Want of Love”: as cut off from the earth as the poet of “Parados,” lacking “the secular variant of the loving father” to ensure our identifications, our ability to “elaborate primary narcissism,” to love and be loved in return (374). (“The unsure narcissist,” we might paraphrase Robert Creeley, “is not good for himself.”¹⁰) “Because today we lack being particular,” she writes, “covered as we are with so much abjection, because the guideposts that insured our ascent toward the good have been proven questionable, we have crises of love. Let’s admit it: lacks of love” (7).

 

In answer to this crisis Kristeva offers an aesthetic antidote: “the imagination” (381), which can “turn the crisis into a work in progress” (380), with no pretension to finality or ultimate satisfaction. “Let it [the self] remain floating, empty at times, inauthentic, obviously lying,” she proclaims near the end of Tales of Love. “Let it pretend, let the seeming take itself seriously, let sex be as unessential because as important as a mask or a written sign–dazzling outside, nothing inside” (380). But this is James Merrill’s solution, not that of Gluck, who may stun but rarely dazzles. The love elaborated in Ararat weathers the postmodern condition, with its lack of faith in the old codes of romance, less by insisting on the open- endedness of Kristeva’s “work in progress” than by reaching out to affiliate itself with a stern, more potentially moralistic tradition of love-theory: one in which love is defined (against desire) as that which “embraces the other’s limited and imperfect reality, and invites and accepts the binding and defining embrace offered by the other” (McWhirter 6). Such love, which “accepts, in other words, its own finitude” and resigns the Platonic quest for wholeness and reunion in favor of the bittersweetness of “the attainable” (7, 197), accords with Gluck’s undeceived stance, and it sponsors the collection’s final lines. The speaker, after all, has been “wounded” not only by the loss of the mother in her individuation, but by a series of more quotidian disappointments. She wasn’t “child enough,” and no one else was quite mother or father or sister enough either. That such disappointment is the inevitable “break- up” of any idealizing relationship, Freud and Kristeva and popular culture will all testify, since at heart we are all men and women who love too much.

 

Gluck’s poetic success lies in the way she turns the plot of a Donahue confession or an Oprah Winfrey show into memorable and particular verse, pressing her language to an antipoetic limit that marks, in some sense, her postmodernism as well. “Compared to the media,” as Kristeva explains,

 

whose function it is to collectivize all systems of signs, even those which are unconscious, writing-as -experience-of-limits individuates. This individuation extends deep within the constituent mechanisms of human experience as an experience of meaning; it extends as far as the very obscure and primary narcissism wherein the subject constitutes itself in order to oppose itself to another.("Postmodernism?" 137-8)

 

If we want to write love poems, Gluck’s book suggests, we have to start by pressing back into the depths behind our affections–not just to the power dynamics of a particular relationship, the culture it plays itself out in, or of the family romances that provide its local habitation and its names, but to what is at once our most and least private aspect: the way these construct the writing subject itself. Ararat takes us down to rock-bottom; it is a foundational text more than a therapeutic one. “Long ago I was wounded,” the poet’s choral ode begins, and she dares us as readers not to join in. This is not, I suppose, such a bleak rock song. “There is no imagination,” writes Kristeva, “that is not, overtly or secretly, melancholy” Black Sun 6). Yet “if it lives,” as she adds elsewhere, “your psyche is in love” Tales 15).

 

Notes

 

1. See Freud, 139; see also chapter four of The Ego and the Id, passim, and the final passages and footnote to Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

 

2. My thanks to my UCLA colleague Brenda Kwon for pointing out this connection.

 

3. I think here less of the work of Nancy Chodorow herself than the use of it made in Homans, for example, 1-39 passim.

 

4. For a dissenting view, at least so far as daughters are concerned, see Homans 11-15. For a persuasive argument that we are always already differentiated, and that mother-child union is a nostalgic fantasy not borne out by studies of child development since the 1980s, see Benjamin 16-21.

 

5. “The artist takes himself,” Kristeva writes, “not for the maternal phallus but for that ghostly third party to which the mother aspires, for the loving version of the Third, for the preoedipal father.” (“Joyce” 174).

 

6. I make this maternal connection because the mother in “Appearances” “ministered” to her children, though with unforseen and divisive consequences.

 

7. Kristeva likewise speaks of “the abyss between the mother and the child” in the lefthand column of the split essay, “Stabat Mater.” “What connection is there between myself, or even more unassumingly between my body and this internal graft and fold, which, once the umbilical cord has been severed, is an inaccessible other? My body and…him. No connection. Nothing to do with it. And this, as early as the first gestures, cries, steps, long before its personality has become my opponent. The child, whether he or she, is irremediably an other” Tales 254-55).

 

8. Or so I now normalize the scene. On first reading, I saw them walking along the tracks, watching “scraps of white paper / blow over the railroad ties” in a way that calls to mind the opening of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Chemin de Fer.” “Alone on the railroad track / I walked with pounding heart. / The ties were too close together / or maybe too far apart” (Bishop 8).

 

9. Such a heavenly identification may be implicit in forgiveness, which, Kristeva writes in Black Sun, “assumes a potential identification with that effective and efficient merciful divinity of which the theologian speaks” (216).

 

10. I misquote Creeley’s “The Immoral Proposition” (Creeley 125).

Works Cited

 

• Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
• Bidart, Frank. In the Western Night: Collected Poems: 1965-1990. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1990.
• Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1983.
• Cramer, Steven. Review of Ararat. Poetry (Nov. 1990): 101-106.
• Creeley, Robert. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-75. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1982.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” Papers on Metapsychology: the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. XIV. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.
• Gluck, Louise. Ararat. New York: Ecco, 1990.
• Homans, Margaret. Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth Century Women’s Writing. U of Chicago P, 1986.
• Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
• —. “Joyce ‘The Gracehoper’ or the Return of Orpheus.” James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth. Ed. Bernard Benstock. New York: Syracuse UP, 1988.
• —. “Postmodernism?” Bucknell Review: Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism. Ed. Harry Garvin. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP: 136-141.
• —. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
• —. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.
• McWhirter, David. Desire and Love in Henry James: A Study of the Late Novels. Cambridge UP, 1989.
• Mitchell, Stephen. The Book of Job. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage, 1967.
• Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-84. New York: Norton, 1984.