"The rhythm that laughs you"

Helene Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa" had a lot of imagery and ideas in it that reminded me of Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, the epic poem that I wrote about for my literature seminar paper. In her essay, Cixous writes,

"If woman has always functioned 'within' the discourse of man . . . it is time for her to dislocate this 'within,' to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of." (2050)

This central idea to Cixous' essay seems similar to Notley's premise for writing The Descent of Alette. Notley wrote it as a feminist epic, and the story involves a woman hero, Alette, traveling into deeper levels of the physical world in order to reclaim her own body as a woman from the Tyrant, an abstract creature who seems to own and control everything she knows. Cixous claims that "women must write through their bodies," and this seems very much what Alice Notley attempted to do by subverting conventional ideas about the epic poem (2049). Notley created her own meter for the poem because she wanted to use language in a way that gave her a new kind of voice outside of traditional and patriarchal forms. In her essay "Epic and Women Poets," Notley writes, “I didn’t want a ‘male’ line—& that category seemed to include every line I knew about, those used by women as well. I wanted, as I always do, to try to begin as if at the beginning of the world, before things were male & female in the ways they are now." I think this idea of the way that things are male and female now has to do with the binary oppositions that have been created. Neither Cixous nor Notley seem interested in inverting the binary in such a way that privileges the female half. Instead, they question the very logic of the binary mentality and want to find some way to escape it. Cixous makes this very clear in her writing: "She will do more than modify power relations or toss the ball in the other camp; she will bring about a mutation in human relations, in thought, in all praxis" (2046).

To give an idea of how Alice Notley uses language and images to develop her feminine voice in The Descent of Alette, here's a section from it:

"I walked" "into a car where" "everything was membrane- like" "thin-membrane petal-like" "& veined" "Fetus-like" "fetus-flesh-like" "In shades of pink" "purple black &" "brown" "Thin" "reddish veins" "Fetal flower" "soaked in

subway light" "The car walls were translucent" "orchid- flesh" "The seats were & the floor--" "All was naked flesh" "We were naked" "A fetus" "delicate" "tiny-faced," "eyes closed, concentrating" "curled" "almost spiraling," "floated high" "in the

air." "We sat naked on our" " membrane-like" "tan benches" "All of us" "smooth & wrinkled" "brownish, or" "darker," "or paler," "palest" "were as if" "within a flower" "as if" "within us" "This" "This is" "simultaneous," "I understood"

"Uncontrolled by" "the tyrant" "Someone else" "in all of us" "is this lovely" "fetal flesh," "flower skin" "We are being this" "this flower" "And then" "the flower vanished" "I was clothed, there was" "no fetus" "Gray subway car

of people" "riding quietly some sleeping" "Someone's earphones" "turned up too loud" "buzzing wire" "vaguely song"

The Tyrant of the poem loosely represents patriarchal socitey, and now that I think of it in terms of man/woman binaries, it could represent the binary structure that Notley and Cixous view as dictating so much of the world's structure. Alette's epic quest is to destroy the Tyrant with the view that “from dreams,” “from dreams we” “can change, “will change” (144). At the end of the poem, Alette succeeds in killing the Tyrant, but Notley ends it by presenting the question of how to possibly create a new world out of the Tyrant's corpse. It's interesting to think about, because in destroying such a binary, what does the world look like without it when developed in new ways? I think Notley's poem presents a good picture of what issues and questions we must examine that relate to the man/woman structures of our culture.