Through its concern with historicity, the unboundedness of the past and its claims on the present, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora almost constantly performs a sort of temporal collapse; however, rather than doing so only to highlight history’s hold, it draws our attention to the subsumption of particularly located bodies under the wave of the slave trade and its reverberations. There are three examples I want to specifically point out here.
The first is when Cat is talking to Ursa and she tells her about the white woman and man she works for. Cat says, “‘You don’t know what it’s like to feel foolish all day in a white woman’s kitchen and then have to come home and feel foolish in the bed at night with your man. I wouldn’t a mind the other so much if I didn’t have to feel like a fool in the bed with my man’” (64). Cat functions as the moving body that links the space of the kitchen and the bedroom as well as the bodies of her man, the white woman, and the white woman’s husband. This collapse works to establish Cat’s feeling of foolishness as an affective through-line.
The second example occurs as Ursa’s mother is telling her about her conception. After describing a scene of mounting sexual tension between herself and Ursa’s father, she says, “‘It was like my whole body wanted you, Ursa’” (116). In a moment that may work against the grain of our expectations, the novel gives us Ursa’s mother’s desire for Ursa. Ursa’s body fills the space we might expect her father’s to fill as the object of desire. Thus, the novel complicates traditional paradigms for thinking desire by highlighting the erotics of kinship and generational yearning.
In the third example, Ursa’s mother is speaking, but the story she is telling is that of Ursa’s Great Gram. Great Gram is talking through the voice of Ursa’s mother about the black man that is escaping while Corregidora is fucking her. She says, “‘He must’ve been fucking me while they was chasing after him’” (127) and later “‘And then somehow it got in my mind that each time he kept going down in me would be that boy’s feets running. And then when he come, it meant they caught him…’” (128). I find this to be one of the most compelling examples of collapse. In one sense, we have the collapse of the actual speaker since Great Gram speaks through the body of Ursa’s mother, but we also have the narration of the collapse between the scene in bed and the escape scene outside, the moving body of Corregidora and the moving body of the black man escaping. It is important to note that all of these examples are rendered through stories—Cat’s, Ursa’s mother’s, and Great Gram’s via Ursa’s mother—which allows us to think about the way in which these bodily and spatial subsumptions are made possible within the particular space of the story.
In turning to look at how evidence and witnessing function in the novel, it is clear that stories told from one generation to another become a valuable evidentiary vehicle. How do we think through non-legal evidence, evidence not validated by court systems or, on a broader level, by the knowledge legitimation practices of dominant culture? What evidence or evidences are permissible? What gets a hearing? Ursa remembers being told “‘They burned all the documents, Ursa, but they didn’t burn what they put in their minds. We got to to burn what they put in our minds, like you burn out a wound. Except we got to keep what we need to bear witness. That scar that’s left to bear witness. We got to keep it as visible as our blood’” (72). What I find interesting here is that this quote comes close after the conversation where Sal tells Ursa that she can pass not for white but for, “Spanish or something” (70). Therefore, the proximity of this memory to the conversation about passing between Sal and Ursa establishes a connection between passing and passing down. Ursa’s anxiety about the evidence that she does not visibly bear on her body as a potentially passing woman is connected to her anxieties about her inability to fulfill the genealogical call of passing evidence down.
This is a very brief illustration of some of the themes that I find most compelling in Jones’ Corregidora, so I invite you to continue thinking through form, temporality, and evidence (as well as whatever else you’d like to!) in the comments. How does the blues manifest itself in the textual space of the novel? I will be talking more about Roland Barthes’ “The Grain of the Voice” in my presentation and in relation to the activity, but does Corregidora foreground stylistic, temporal, dialogic, performative, expressive, affective, etc. modes that allow us to resist relegating our conversations to “communication, representation, expression, everything which it is customary to talk about” (Barthes, 182)? If we were to attempt to unhinge ourselves from the definitions of permissible evidence most present in dominant culture, or even in the academy more specifically, and to instead look to Corregidora to give us a conception of evidence, what would that look like? What kinds of meaning-making structures would we come up against?
Below are two of the songs explicitly mentioned in the novel:
Trouble in Mind, sung by Nina Simone (Jones, 44)
The Broken Soul Blues, sung by Ma Rainey (Jones, 159)
Yasmine,
ReplyDeleteThe themes you emphasize here on collapse are really helpful for framing this book, which is just really dense with things to think about. I specifically find interesting how this collapsing, to use Barthes a bit, "change[s] the musical object itself" (180) which is to say how it refocuses our attention from just the words to the aspects of time and body that communicate them. If "[t]he 'grain' is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs" (188), then maybe this helps us frame embodied action as a transmitter of knowledge beyond discourse itself in the way that Taylor discusses re:the repertoire as opposed to the archive?
One thing I'm wondering about is how literally we might understand grain in voice as well; if we understand a voice that has audible texture (the most obvious example coming to mind is Louis Armstrong) as having grain, then does that allow us to both engage with the discourse of music or speech and the embodiment?
I was also really interested in the topics of evidence and witnessing you bring up, Yasmine. As we can see in the passages in italics throughout the book, Ursa's life and consciousness is made up of far more than what quantifiable/visibly lived experience. On pg. 101: "Still she carried their evidence, screaming, fury in her eyes, but she wouldn't give me that, not that one. Not her private memory;" here, even memory that is not actively, electively, or visually passed between people is eligible "evidence." Also , on page 50, when Ursa recalls Cat telling her that she had a "new voice. The one...you could hear what I'd been through in." The voice itself can relay things beyond and which elude the visual. This also reminds me of Barthes' questioning our helplessly limited vocabulary when describing the voice and the multitudes of knowledge, experience, witnessing a voice can contain; "are we condemned to the adjective?" he asks, "are we reduced to the dilemma of either the predicable or the ineffable?" (180).
ReplyDeleteThis also interacts with your ideas, Yasmine, on the collapsing of temporalities--although we often collectively attach memories and witnessing to stable visual representations (evidence collection in court proceedings, etc), these things often actually "live" within us and transfer in ways that are invisible, and often no less valid for being so.
I appreciate the way you articulate and explain the shifting tenses of Corregidora as collapsing temporalities, Yasmine. “Collapse” not only signals ruin but the blending of objects, spaces, affects; and in that way, “collapse” offers up the potential for new (or perhaps subaltern) knowledges and expressions. I found Corregidora an epistemological performance, at once refusal and reclamation. Ursa was urged to make generations not to (only) continue lineage but to pass down an inheritance of epistemological resistance and remembering. That is, Ursa’s family refuses to let the Corregidora family write history. Collapsing temporalities, then, becomes a crucial project for returning to and recovering memory. Which is not to say the memory is necessarily intact, or in some pure form that allows an easy kind of knowing, but that through collapse one can take up residence wherein “the knowledge of this positioning avails particular ways of re/seeing, re/inhabiting, and re/imagining” (Sharpe, Wake, 22).
ReplyDeleteCorregidora spans many years, excavating memories and (almost relentlessly) projecting a future, eliciting an affect that is both ephemeral and sticky, through which readers invest in song and memory over a narrative motor. I wonder if this facilitates intimacy between Ursa and the reader? Because though we witness her darkest traumas, including those passed down and regenerated, Jones’ character also sustains some distance. At the end we are left to wonder about the implications of her reunion with Mutt. Is Jones, in her commitment to exposing the ways trauma circulates, refusing the trope of a heroine who overcomes? Or are we just left to wonder, suspended in our epistemological requests? Perhaps such suspension disallows us from interrupting Ursa as she re/imagines her generations.
In your presentation, Yasmine, you noted your interest in part of the burden evidence places on bodies in Corregidora—the stress of continuing the line, of making the body its own evidence, as well as the evidence of the past—which got played out, I think, in your presentation which asked us to think about how written texts interact with the body such that the body might become the container for a text or evidence, too—the way that the trauma of the matrilineal line in Corregidora is in part that there is no healing in the telling of the story, only (as we discussed in class in Lana-Imani-Treviene's exchange) the holding fast to the specifics such that each woman becomes the previous woman in a line of knowledge holders. In the long italics section (in the newer edition 92-98) Ursa says, about her grandmother, "It was her very own memory, not theirs, her very own real and terrible and lonely and dark memory" (96) and then later, "Mama could only know, but they [her farther ancestors] could feel" (97). But she quickly discovers that she's wrong, that the force of the retelling takes on the traumatic feeling: "I knew she had more than her memories."
ReplyDeleteSo one of the provocations this book offers us for our theories, then, is the question of the degree to which embodiment is necessarily better or freer than the written—"What's a life always spoken, and only spoken?"" (97) If Diana Taylor's work on the archive suggests that the written has always been extant with the embodied and calls for a renewed attention to those embodied forms of knowledge transmission (the repertoire), then Jones asks us to think seriously about the ways embodied transmissions suffer through frames of stasis. If the records have burned, then the body must remember—but this memory ("rememory" to pluck Toni Morrison's word from fifteen years later) in Corregidora is strict, is rigid. Lana proposed the song as a way of conveying information with a different emotional valence, which can make us think about the blues' unconventional feminism differently ("unconventional" as a shorthand reference to Imani's in-class citation of Angela Davis' discussion of blues singers).
So a larger conversation for our class, off of this, might be a way to think about what "turning to the body" actually means, the real painful consequences shifting our medium or focus without framework might engender. Instead of thinking about the written text, Corregidora points us to a particularly static understanding of language—to stasis, more generally—as the organizing principle of archival pain. Does this help us think about our questions around close reading vs close listening, or shift our understanding of the stakes for performance studies?
As many commented in the class, Yasmine’s engaging exercise was an extremely useful way to not only think through a text like "Corregidora," but also to think about other texts that may have left us speechless, unable to clearly articulate our feelings. The only thing that we know for sure is that a certain feeling or emotion is there, somewhere in our bodies or brains, but just inexplicable at the moment. The story that violently defines the past, present, and future of Ursa and the women in her family immediately reminded me of Spiller’s explanation of the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” where the horrific markings of an often unarticulated past are carried down from generation to generation and are thus traumatically perpetuated onto bodies like Ursa’s, who, although not a direct recipient of the sexual abuse of Corregidora, still deals with the trauma of that indirectly lived experience to the point of it affecting her intimate and romantic relationships and her conception of self.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the question still remains of what the true purpose of passing down the story of Corregidora is in the end. Is it supposed to eventually act as some kind of oral evidence that may one day be used to avenge or vindicate Ursa’s ancestors? Did it function as an emotionally therapeutic release for Ursa’s mother and great-grandmother? Finally, was this story kept alive to make suffer, or in other words, to promote an environment of collective, generational suffering (here, I am thinking that suffering silently and alone must be regarded as unacceptable or not survivable)? In my opinion, it seems that the suffering that telling the family history engenders is extremely destructive, and ends up making Ursa’s life extremely dysfunctional. Furthermore, it seems that Ursa believes that she cannot remedy this suffering moving forward, since in various points in the novel she expresses the belief that the evil of Corregidora is irrevocably inside of her, and according to instructions she must make generations, simultaneously preserving the story and also preserving the evil that worked within Corregidora himself. Perhaps, in this sense, it can be considered a positive outcome that Ursa’s fate, it seems, was actually not to have children, which stops the trauma of the story form being inflicted onto future generations.
This being said, I believe that Ursa’s idea of a “New World song” whatever that might be, is the only hope of turning extreme evidence of trauma into a possible path to healing, although the ending itself, for me at least, does not help to settle the nauseating feeling that Corregidora continues to own Ursa’s family.
I find your blog post as well as your presentation super helpful in understanding a way to approach a very difficult novel. At the end of class we started thinking about the grain of voice in Corregidora, specifically the voice of Ursa, in relation to Barthes which I wanted to propose that we think about in two ways.
ReplyDeleteBarthes is clearly interested in voice which translates to Ursa. As a few people pointed out in class, there is a distinct reference to Ursa’s voice after her surgery as Cat tells her, “your voice sounds a little strained, that’s all…Before it was beautiful too, but you sound like you been through more now” (44). There is a clear gesture toward singing and the singing voice calling attention to not only the physical body but also, as Jane points to above, the evidencing of experience through body—here manifest through the singing voice. It is possible to imagine the ways in which we might hear (as I believe Imani pointed out), the tightness of muscles or the crack in a vocal chord in this moment of strain.
In the last pages of his piece, Barthes writes:
“The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs. If I perceive the ‘grain’ in a piece of music and accord this ‘grain’ a theoretical value (the emergence of the text in the work), I inevitably set up a new scheme of evaluation which will certainly be individual – I am determined to listen to my relation with the body of the man or woman singing or playing and that relation is erotic – but in no way ‘subjective’ (it is not the psychological ‘subject’ in me who is listening; the climactic pleasure hoped for is not going to reinforce – to express – that subject but, on the contrary, to lose it)” (188).
Barthes is clearly interested in the loss of the subject, which I would argue many of the scholars and scholar/artists this semester have been. This meditation on “grain” and its theoretical value makes me wonder how we might consider the hand of Gayle Jones as she writes Corregidora. The grain specifically (as assigning theoretical weight to the grain) allows audiences to enter into a relationality with the body of the performer even though this relation could be potentially uncomfortable as it is with Corregidora. I wanted to put this forth and hash out if we might actually consider the grain of Jones and the text itself, separate from the grain of Ursa.
Barthes is thinking through the “grain" as an embodied experience, but after our conversations last week, I've been coming back to the idea of how we can think of “grain” as a more disembodied practice. That is, how can we listen to and/or read the grain of the body in a way that also allows us to listen to and/or read the grain of text? Learning about the “blues” rhythm was especially useful in thinking through this, particularly in the places in Corregidora in which the blues rhythm was established only to be broken, reformed, and recommunicated. The rhythm of the “blues” in this novel is one that has peaks and valleys — quite literally — meaning the visuality of these conversations (the italicized call and response of “I need somebody,” “Naw,” “I said I need somebody,” “Naw,” comes to mind), reads like a play text or formal poem. It continues to transform, break apart, and put itself together again. That is throughout the novel, the sonic and visual move away from established lyrics and measured “sound,” which allows the text itself to be granular in ways that are separate from who and what is being represented on the page.
ReplyDeleteWith this, I’m left asking: as literary scholars, how can “grain” help us with our intertextual work? In thinking about how “listening” is more than just a metaphor for “close-reading,” I’m wondering if considering the disembodied elements of “grain” can be useful to read the formal qualities of the texts we’re reading. That is, can this allow us to disjoint our “listening” from “representation,” and, instead, see the ways in which the subject being represented is formally textured? Can recognizing the formal, granular qualities of a text separate us from an “embodied” close-reading? Do we even want this?
Timing (kairos perhaps) could not have been better last week, with Yasmine’s beautiful challenge that we think towards citing ourselves and the affective and personal responses to “theory” followed 36 hours after by Carrie Mae Weems’ unexpected performance at the Rankine -Weems “lecture” on Thursday. I had not been familiar with Weems’ work, but learned in the introductions that she is primarily a visual artist. However, her performance-qua-presentation (presentation-qua-performance?) explicitly referenced none of her images or prior works. Instead, hers was a beautiful embodied homage to the sonic artistry of other artists. I was struck by the sheer poetry of the tone of her voice, the syllables she drew out, her sincere gesticulations (in contrast, Rankine’s work was performed by the voice and bodies of others -- a read through of her new dialogic play). My note-taking shifted to an attempt to chronicle what her voice and body did and how and when, and what sentiments, thoughts, inspirations were inspired in me. I recognized that while this was indeed being taped, I was attempted to “archive” her performance as a live performance and as I felt it. My scrawling notes are even less legible than typical, for I refused to take my eyes off of her.
ReplyDeleteHer form and content were relatively inextricable. I see the phrase “out of the wreckage” written here in my script. She spoke of appropriate and re-appropriation as homage. She would play music and insist upon it being turned up and up; she would talk not over but alongside and even under the music, the word-by-word “content” rather insignificant. One could chart in her body, in her ecstasy and her dancing, that she was truly feeling and was inviting us in to feel with her.
She featured this [Aretha Franklin performing a "homage" of "Rolling in the Deep," etc]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k5acPIi0f8
“I’m interested in the rise” / “Always just hanging on the edge”