Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette
*Because the poem is so long, I’ve summarized and highlighted passages I think are important—there’s so very much going on in this book that I’ll trust all of you to do more close reading and interpretation than I do here. Hopefully my post will at least start everybody off. I'm so sorry for the length of this!
Book I
Notley’s epic poem—compared on the back cover to Dante’s Inferno, although it is essentially a subversion of so many aspects of the traditional epic—begins on the subway, on which a “world of souls” rides endlessly below ground, never surfacing, forced beneath the earth by a Tyrant who will let you off only if you sell your soul to him. In this nightmare world, Alette encounters wounded and tortured souls, all in some way enslaved by the Tyrant and his mind: shattered, drug-addled soldiers who killed for him, women and children on fire (clear references to the Vietnam War), strippers (suggestive of male ownership of women’s bodies), lunatics, businessmen and women, etc. There are cars of garbage and of blood, of disembodied voices crying for help, of ghostly office-workers. Not too far into the poem, it becomes clear that the Tyrant is a kind of metaphysical being, embodied in various avatars throughout history but never completely reducible to them: he is capitalist, Pope, Caesar, bureaucrat (6), even (at times) revolutionaries with guns who want to change things (implying the exchange of one form of the Tyrant for another) (39); he owns form (25), (spiritual) enlightenment, and light itself (37). He is Reason as well, wresting order out of chaos (20). He’s also a mild-mannered, appealing guy. His maleness could be read either as essentialist or as conditional, I think. The feminine principal of the poem is chthonic, creative, timeless, and the “ground of being” so to speak, and the Tyrant’s maleness is order-driven, authoritarian, hierarchical, rational, power-obsessed, and removed from the creative life-force of the earth itself. These qualities could be said to inhere in every person regardless of sex, and later on in the poem, Alette discovers that everyone has a piece of the Tyrant inside (81). More on this later. Nevertheless, beneath the Tyrant’s rule, true life itself is forced underground and the psyche is stunted, allowed not to unfurl of its own accord but borne against its will, mechanistically, back and forth along a pre-established pattern, without meaning, in the darkness of oppression / repression.
And yet there seems to be hope, if only a tentative kind at first. A woman in one car recalls a dream in which she becomes a snake and strikes at the Tyrant, albeit unsuccessfully. (The snake will return again and again throughout the poem as a symbol of chthonic, feminine / creative resistance to the Tyrant’s rule—a kind of earth mother.) Another woman—a painter—is trying to invent a form that the Tyrant doesn’t own. There is even a car made of living flesh in which Alette has an intimation that there is “someone else” in all of us who escapes the Tyrant’s rule. Alette encounters an owl—symbol of dark wisdom—in one car, who tells her that her duty is to kill the Tyrant, and when she does, she must remember that she is an animal and do it cleanly. (The animal ‘way’ of killing is significant to me: animals kill not out of malice but out of necessity, in harmony with natural impulses.) Interestingly, Alette feels the owl to be the spirit of her dead father, adding an element of male resistance to the Tyrant in an otherwise female-dominated paradigm. Alette later witnesses a death, and a counsel of spirit-beings that urge the dead man’s spirit not to rise but to descend, because to rise would be to enter the Tyrant’s world: “We can only go” “down” “farther down—“ / “Down” “is now the only way” “to rise” (26). Descendence rather than ascendence / transcendence, darkness rather than light, the depths of the earth and of the psyche rather than the heights of heaven / reason, is what Notely’s epic ultimately privileges as a path towards reclaiming all that has been lost to the Tyrant. In this spirit, Alette boards a black train at the end of Part I, headed downwards towards “true night”, “endless darkness”, and the “unknown.”
Book II
Beneath the subway’s subconscious world lies a universe of the unconscious, the “middle psyche” as the poem refers to it (47)—caverns within caverns, dreams within dreams. Before beginning her journey through the caves, Alette hears an old man’s voice singing of the snake / earth mother that once carried people through their lives before the Tyrant’s train took its place. She has numerous mystical experiences in the caves (some of which I find very difficult to interpret), and seems to draw closer and closer to the evasive earth mother / primal life-force. Of all the experiences, one of the most striking is the one in which Alette meets a mermaid with a hairy chest (suggestive of a primordial, hermaphroditic union of male and female) who tells her that she is a “forgotten possibility” and that Alette’s people “have / divided” “themselves in two:” “have made” “domination” “[their] principal”. She tells Alette, “You must begin again,” “create again” / “each moment” (64). For me, the mermaid signifies the primordial, creative union of the sexes in harmony, and the possibility of *creating* a path and a life beyond the Tyrant’s life-defeating dominion that exists, to a greater or lesser extent, in each person. The hermaphrodite motif shows up again and again through Part II (in the god/woman whose genitals are “blank” and who shapes “a hairless,” “sexless figure” out of clay [66], in the “divine neuter” mask [75], etc.) Although other parts of Part II might be read as essentializing masculinity and femininity, the hermaphrodite motif, for me, implies a basic union of masculine and feminine energies in each person that has been forgotten under the Tyrant’s rule, thus saving the poem from a simplistic kind of essentialism. The ending sections of Part II are significant dramatic movements: Alette puts on a cellophane half-mask and declares to a group of men and women that the old structures must be torn down and beds built for all the living. The group draws cards to decide who will kill the Tyrant, and Alette draws the Ace of Roses/Panthers (again, this pairing of symbols could be read as a union of feminine/masculine energies) and tells the group she will do it. She finds and steals a piece of the Tyrant’s heart in one of the last caves, and says: “its presence here” “meant, I knew” “that / something of him may be” “indigenous” “to any one of us” (81). (I will refrain from dwelling on the fact that I think it’s pretty impossible not to think of Blake’s Urizen, Ginsberg’s Moloch, as well as Voldemort’s Horcruxes here…) The primordial creative force inheres in every psyche, but so does the Tyrant’s death-drive. At last, Alette enters a cave and descends a stairwell that emerges—surprisingly—onto the earth again, and wades into a night river.
Book III
Alette swims across the river and enters a forest, eventually meeting with a headless woman—the true first woman / mother. Her headlessness perhaps represents the division of the body and mind that is perpetrated by the Tyrant’s energies: the first woman speaks of the ignorance of the holy men, the wise men, the poets, etc. as having caused her to suffer (90). She speaks of the beginning of the world, of how male and female were once one, but the male somehow lost the primal connection to the world of creation and became a thinker, a war-maker, a ruler, etc. (91). She can only “see” with her voice—a voice that emanates from deep within her being—but Alette helps her to reattach her head so that her voice can actually create reality once again (99). Alette and the first woman bid goodbye to each other and the owl reappears, and so begins Alette’s necessary self-transformation that will allow her to kill the Tyrant. Alette is first made to eat a mouse the owl has killed, and so realizes the unity of all creation, of death and life (104). She is then led to the black lake of death, beyond which is the “great darkness”—the dream-world before creation. Thrown into the lake by the owl, Alette is dismembered of her being so that she can be transformed into becoming, and in the great darkness she meets a light that isn’t a light, but her very self. This might be putting too much of my own spin on things, but I feel that this “true” self is not a fixed entity but the *process* of being—the endlessly self-creative self (to put it that way). A voice reminds her: “’It’s what you’ve / always” “suspected” “It’s nothing but” “what you’ve always known,” / “always been” “For you’ve always” “been being” (111). Alette reenters her body, delighting in her senses, and finds herself in the forest again, where the owl bequeaths a talon to her so that she can kill the Tyrant as an animal (once again, the dichotomy between natural killing and rationalized violence is highlighted). Alette must now find her way upwards to the Tyrant’s house.
Book IV
Alette and the Tyrant finally meet, and the Tyrant finally reveals that he is reality itself (though Alette doubts this), and has no need for the heart she has brought with her. He leads her through his house, past displays of various kinds showing various human societies, the subway, and his “government.” He also shows her masks of “principals,” “essences”—including vegetation, sexuality, religious leaders, and the first woman herself. It becomes clear the Tyrant is abstraction itself—he lays claim to and attempts to possess realities but cannot fully own them, although he thinks he does, in the same way that he owns museums, art galleries, and greenhouses. He thinks he owns Nature as well, but only as a scientist can, “From the outside” (128). Alette and the Tyrant travel to the subway, where the Tyrant reveals that the subway is actually his heart, and that its darkness scares him, but also empowers him (132). This is poignant to me: the Tyrant’s power comes from the very act of repression-- his darkness is transmuted to violence, to mental agility, etc. Later on, the Tyrant reveals that it is from this darkness that all inspiration, poetry, etc. comes from as well. (Do we buy this?) At last the pair emerges at a stop called “River Street”, which is a river of blood that flows off into separate rivulets throughout the subway. Alette reclaims a lost memory in this river—the memory of her brother who died in battle. This is also the only moment in the poem when we hear Alette speak her own name, and thus voice her feminine, individual identity against the Tyrant. Alette becomes an owl and flies over the river of blood, looking for a place where the Tyrant is vulnerable. She comes to a flesh grotto, where a strange bush grows: its three arms are vegetable, animal, and human, and in the human hand is a dead black rose (symbolizing, perhaps, male ownership of the female principal of life). Alette invokes the owl-spirit and pulls the bush out at the roots, and the Tyrant’s is mortally wounded. He pleads with her, says that she is killing herself, her own culture, her own soul. But all of these, Alette knows, are simply unreal constructions, dreams. “’Starting” / “from dreams we” “can change,” “will change” “In / dreams,” “in dreams, now,” “you will die” (144). The Tyrant is ultimately a dream solidified into reality, and with the Tyrant’s death Alette returns the world to the primordial openness of existence: “What we can have now,”…”is infinity” “in our lives”. (147). The Tyrant’s repressive “reality” is revealed as only a constructed reality, reified by the millions of souls unable to dream or create anything else. The sky is clear again, the light is new, and the people emerge from the subway determined to remake the world. All the lost and forgotten beings from the depths of being emerge from the depths of the earth, and with this the poem closes. Notely’s epic has come full-circle: to revitalize existence, Alette does not travel upwards to heaven, but downwards through the darkness of being to reclaim the lost power of creation that can re-imagine and re-create the world.
Some questions to consider (if you want to, of course):
What are we to make of the fact that Alette must use the power of the owl—who was formerly a man—in order to kill the Tyrant? Can this be read as a channeling of male violence against itself, or as reclaiming a sort of power that was / is always inherent in the female psyche?
Going off that, what do you all think of the essentialist aspects of this poem? As I’ve said, I definitely think there are moments of true essentialism, but also many moments that seem to undermine the male/female dichotomy. Which wins out for you, in the end?
Finally, the question of voice. Notely’s uses quotations to make sure that her text is experienced as a spoken voice, not simply a text, and the figure of the voice shows up over and over throughout the poem. Is voice synonymous with creation itself, a bringing into being of something that never was before? What other valences could there be to this?
Finally, the last question: the poem privileges descent into the depths of being over transcendence. Is the inherent, messy chaos of being the solution to tyrannical order imposed by the mind? What are the political implications of this? The psychic implications? The implications for sexual politics?
Thade, great post. You broke the poem down into its themes and concerns really well. I appreciate that; it helps me make sense of the terrain better.
ReplyDeleteYou brought up the owl in your questions. I too was really interested in/bothered by the owl. There are several times where the owl is linked to Alette's father, but then she becomes the owl too. If this is a world where patriarchy is deeply problematic, why does Alette turn to the symbol of a father figure in order to win her eventual freedom and defeat the tyrant, who himself is a kind of omnipotent father figure? I don't think it's the turning of masculine violence against itself that you suggest, Thade. Instead I think it is more the reclamation of a kind of wisdom that one associates with the idea of a "father." Or maybe it's that in some ways, Alette becomes her own father. Her narrative is now self-perpetuating when she becomes the owl. She becomes her mother and her father, which seems like the kind of unisexual ideal set forth by the mermaid figure.
The gender politics of this poem are a little hard to wade through at times. I've always found second-wave feminism to be the easiest type of feminism to make fun of, even if I am a kind of post-generational beneficiary of it. Admittedly, the sections where the subway cars look like offices and women play the secretaries kind of made me giggle. They read like an artsy version of "9 to 5." And yet, there's a lot of really interesting stuff here too about the way the male and female worlds have become separate spheres. I think Notley oversimplifies gender at times in this book (men so often reading like cliches), but when she presents characters like the mermaid or when we encounter a problem like the owl, as I've mentioned above, it forces me to think about whether or not it's possible for us to separate gender as cleanly as we would like. That's why Alette has to kill the tyrant in that fleshy room. It's a womb and she has to basically go inside the tyrant's "mother" to destroy him. In some ways, she has to tear down the distinctions of mother and child, woman healer and man tyrant. In some ways, Notley almost seems to be asking for a world where language becomes almost detached from meaning. It's a world where symbols have to be broken down in order to get at the real truth.
Which brings me to the quotation marks. If this is in fact a world where symbols have become dangerous (in which words like "male" or "female" cause strife and punishment), then what are we to make of all the symbols of this poem. I'm talking about the actual typographic symbology of the quotation marks, but I'm also talking about the fact that all language is essentially symbolic. How is it that this can be a poem at all? Let alone a 150-page poem? This book made me question Notley's motives a lot. I don't mean that as a bad thing, though. I'm intersted in what other people think about this book. Was it problematic for anyone else? Or can anyone clear up my messy reading of it?
Right on, Beth...I'm totally with you, and I especially like the idea that in becoming the owl, Alette becomes her own father. Self-generation / creation seems to be at the heart of Alette's transformative 'death' in Book III, so that makes total sense.
DeleteThanks, Thade! Great insight. I was especially enchanted by Book 1 of Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette: the dark tunnel-imagery, the subway stations, and the colors— greens and purples and everything “dark”. The trains that moved from Alette’s world; the curiosity of not knowing which was train and which was station, what actually “pulled away” from what (41).
ReplyDeleteI also adored the ever-changing tyrant, who is chaos and, strangely enough, order; in the sense that he creates/destroys/maintains this station. I was interested in you interpreting the tyrant as male either “essentialist or conditional”— I got the feeling he was male [partly] because Alette was female, and this was another contrast (like you said, the “male-ness” is slightly removed from what Alette embodies), and also because it was a counter of Alette (what is in one is also in another).
I would like to take this time to discuss the quotations, even though it may not be as exciting to do so, and/or we discussed a bit in class, and the author did explain in her author’s note why she did such a thing. In all honesty, you do forget about them, and they’re not as annoying as I’d originally thought they’d be. But they’re there, and they’re there for a reason, and I don’t think they are simply there for a metrical purpose (in the sense they are meant to slow the reader down). They do, in a way, mimic the movement of subways at a station: so many of them going on a line, and yet they all serve their purpose and have their own motive (and still follow the same line). As unorthodox as these quotations are, they oddly satisfy the visual aesthetic of Alette’s world and interpretations. They are mirrors:
“amethysts” “among them” “small purple lights—” “‘What you make”
“is nothing” “unless it’s dark” “Darker than this” “And in the dark”
“the great dark’” “‘What do you mean?’” “ ‘In the dark” “Made”
“in the dark” “Reflecting darkness” “Only darkness’” (40)
I do like the idea of darkness piling on top of darkness (and Notley continues with this image/piling up throughout), which, in essence, is something that cannot be visually deconstructed, as it’s registered to the eye as “Dark”— and yet, there is always a piling-up, isn’t there? It was the idea of dark reflecting dark that struck me, however: to reflect, by definition, is to either reveal or to throw an image/object back to the viewer without digesting it for itself. This is usually done with light, and while there are pockets of light (otherwise Alette could not see the colors/stations/people etc), I get the feeling there is a great absence. I feel the non-absorption of light and dark is something important, like the underground is a hungry world in which certain things cannot be digested. Everything in the dark is there as it would be with more light, it’s just that the dark seems to mask what cannot be interpreted (and, oddly enough, slightly revealing). Therefore there are shadows and hunger. And I think a lot of this is about starving for something that may not always be readily available or registered...
Thanks for the great post, Thade! Here are some of my thoughts that initially wrote down. There will be more post later today (I need to catch the bus to get back home at this moment)
ReplyDeleteThe Descent of Alette is an epic poetry that that takes place in the space that seems to be bordering in the mythic and urban story telling. Populated with various voices rather than heroic, male singular voice/narrative like usual epic is, the Descent of Alette becomes the space where the voices are continuously dividing itself in order to move on to tell the story. To describe what I mean by that is I have to talk of the various effects of quotation marks cause in this book.
These quotation marks not only make the reading clunky (in a good way), dictating the shift of speed, it constantly modifies the sentence, which usually has straightforward and linear structure (subject, verb, object- which I think Rae Armantrout wrote in one of her essay makes the object vulnerable and subject dictate the entire sentence; the sentence is “tyrant”), disrupting itself, the phallic Narrative that is set as a convention for epic writing. For example, the way the second quote that contains “maybe” interrupting the first quote, making the world more fluid and indeterminate, in “ “a pebble” “2 pebbles maybe” “(9); the second quote that elaborates the first quote in unexpected way, the hostility in the second quote’s discription giving the sense of interruption to what the first quote was originally going for in “ “Women” “vaguely whorish” “(13); a stutter in “ “I try to be, I” “am” “(14) and various other moves. Also, obviously, due to the nature of quotation marks, each quote gives the sense of multiple presences (voices directly imported in to the page) and, contradictorily, odd sense of distance, as quotation can be seen in suspicion, like a scare quote (for example, an advertisement the line of which is “ the “world’s #1” weight loss pill; ask for the “pink pill” at cashier ‘ wouldn’t give me a good vibe about the pill- and I actually saw this sign at one gas station). It makes me wonder about the genre of epic poetry; we consider epic poetry to be allegory or fairytale more than something that actually happened. Penguin’s framework of “feminist epic” seems to kinda reduce this book to be seen in that manner as well. Is that a right way to engage with the text? Can we just try to dwell in the text?; although not only in the Penguin’s description but also in the text itself there seems to be a pretty explicit agenda for feminist message… I have mixed feelings about this. (to be continued in the later post…)
Cool insight about the quotes Jiyoon. Safe home.
DeleteI too like Megan was very much interested in Notley’s use of the quotation mark. Not only do they mimic the actual movement of a train but I too think they also mimic the feeling of being stuck in an underworld of stations without beginnings or endings (it reminded me very much of that scene in the Matrix were Neo is stuck in the subway and cannot escape—and of the Indian couple that wants to release their daughter from that world).
ReplyDeleteFrom the very beginning of the collection the quotation mark seems to not only mimic the chaos and desperation of this world of darkness piling on darkness but strangely enough is sort of a channel or shamanistic instrument if you will to summon a language that refuses to bow down to the world of (for lack of a better word or image) ad men and evangelist war-makers etc (the Tyrant):
“Set fee…”
“…Like a temple” “tiny, &
nearly” “ transparent” “My mind floats” “my kind floats but”
“ever downward”
The language of the quotation mark and the different motifs of mermaids and other hermaphrodite archetypes but also of the snake and other “primal” female energies remind me very much of early human societies of the Fertile Crescent that had a strong grounding in the worship of plump earth-goddess and that were overshadowed by later horse and agriculture based societies. (This ownership of land hand goes hand in hand with conflict and maleness patriarchy and in other words the present day patriarchy which governs 99% of present human societies and which I think the language of the Descent is resisting through language).
This is an epic no doubt but it is also an epic that turns the “hero” epic/language which we are costumed to up-side down or perhaps done away with. Notley dares to summon a language that creates its own terrain and history but which is not that distant from our own. It is a true myth in that we accept the fiction of this world but we also not help but notice how much of our world is invested in that myth—in the tyrant. Alette’s epic is our own—that is the power of this language, of the quotation mark and of this myth she has constructed.
I see the Matrix reference. It also reminds me of the book the Mole People that documents the life of the people who live below ground in the former subway tunnels of New York. The deeper below ground the people live the less they go above ground..the darker it gets.
Delete“alicenotely” “thank you for confusing me and dragging me into center earth.” “thade thanks for illustrating the poem’s larger movements.”
ReplyDeleteThe main reason I found the poem difficult is the quotation marks. (Because overall I find the book all together stunning, as only alicenotely can do.) But the quotation marks are hard to get around. Reading The Descent of Alette for the second time though, I think I learned the trick of them, or appreciated them more. I began to see them, as Megan had, as a metrical tool and more. The first time I read the book, I had to force myself into pretending they weren’t there. This time I forced myself to look at them. I let them stop me; pace me and in some ways contain me. The quotations were containers within the world of the contained. I realized this when in one of the earlier poem, she ended a sentence with contained.” (I have spend the last 10 minutes trying to find the poem to reference and can’t, sorry.) This idea relates to what Megan said about the quotes being a visual aesthetic of Alette’s world. The quotes are the subways, the people, the tyrant, the speaker, and the caves. and the words within the body of quotes become nothing but decay. “More body of” “the tyrant” “It is all his body” “The world is” “his/mummy.” (21) In fact, I am liking more and more the idea that the quotes are a visual representation of earthly and unearthly bodies. Forms we are all limited by, and we cannot be who we are without these forms.
Which leads me into the discussion of gender and the tyrant. There are many representations of male and female as having distinct or separate traits, powers and bodies. I feel that Notely acknowledges the necessity of the singular gendered beings/bodies and that these singular bodies carry within them the traits of masculine and feminine, liberator and tyrant. I feel Alette puts forth that without our gender or sex, we are not ourselves.
In the “soft cave” “soft to the touch, like flesh”, the speaker and a male figure both detach their sex organs onto the flesh wall. Once this is done they both cry out, they both become disorganized, undone. Until Alette cries out: “I want”/ “my sex back!”…”My sex” “was then replaced” “between my/legs” “instantly back” “The man’s” “was too” “& we were then /delineated,” “formed,” “ourselves again.” (57)
So within our bodies we are divided both in terms of gender identity, but also in our desire to be both liberator and tyrant. The poem in which the tyrant appears to Alette upside down through a “glassless window”(33), illustrates a strange mirror-like quality of the tyrant, like a glass mirror would reverse the reflections, a windowless mirror provided an upside down reflection. I felt like the tyrant was in someway Alette, and because of that she felt a strange empathy for the “drooling” “just a little—” “old man who” “can’t help that” (33)
With empathy and to hide her fear, Alette patted” “his check.” I know ultimately she “vanquishes” him, but ultimately she does this by diving into his/her own darkness or diving into the extremes of a gender binary. Alette, I see as both a liberator and tyrant. It is she who is speaking, it is her form, her words, her quotes that illustrate the story, and doesn’t this in some way inhabit both spectrums of the storyteller?
sorry for my late response.
ReplyDeletethere were a few things which interested me in notley's book, but i think i didn't really have them down until i read thade's post.
so, here are my thoughts: first, i was and wasn't a fan of the quotations. they're interesting, i get what she's trying to do with them, but honestly they're really annoying. by the end of the poem i wasn't even reading them anymore. i had to say something about the quotations.
anyway, what struck me most was how insistent she was on the gender of the tyrant. the tyrant is a he, it is always a he, and the he is bad. this is obviously a little simplistic as not all men in her poem are bad; there are plenty of soldier men which aren't evil. but for the most part, if one isn't a soldier one is a part of the male tyrant. i think he had to be male, as the male is the center of power, the controller, and the tyrant is the controller. i would have been much more interested in this if the tyrant's gender were left indeterminate. there are moments where notley seems to suggest that a genderless world would be nice (where alette and the guy put their genitals into the cave's wall, but then alette freaks out and wants her vagina back, which i guess suggests we can't ever actually exist in this state). it isn't ever that alette kills the tyrant and men and women live in coexistence or something; rather, it seems to suggest that she must kill the man in order to overcome men.
i also found it strange that she kept using the snake image. the snake was constantly linked with femininity (or, more precisely, with natural/animalistic femininity) yet the snake is very much a phallic symbol. perhaps it was her way of taking the power from the phallus? i'm not sure. instead, i preferred to think of it as the ouroboros (snake eating its own tail). that way, it's more of a primal image of infinity, or, even more interestingly, of hermaphroditism. the ouroboros presumably is genderless, and even if it has gender, it doesnt matter since it simply eats and reproduces itself. thus the ultimate is an agender, a place wherein no gender is the dominant gender.
those are my two main thoughts about this. poor tyrant should have been given another chance in the end i think. i liked this book for the most part, mainly when i got past the quotation marks.
Totally forgot to mention the ourobouros--I'm glad you mentioned it, Drew, and that's definitely something I thought of each time the snake appeared. I also thought it might be Notely's way of subverting the Biblical story of the Fall (Blake does something similar)--ie God as transcendent tyrant; snake as oppressed earth-archetype. Or something.
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