Another muse for Joyce was his daughter Lucia, the flapper who studied modern dance, who shared Zelda’s teacher, Madame Egorova. Lucia who was madly in love with Samuel Beckett. (Beckett was another master, who her father mentored, she could only be in his eyeline as a flitting, ephemeral, pretty girl quickly turned nuisance, he only eyes his ancestral line.) Her father who drew on her polyglottism from their nomadic life, for his work Finnegans Wake. She in the room with him, translating, helping him invent clever puns. Lucia who was later put away for throwing a chair, then diagnosed as schizophrenic. Lucia who cut the phone cords when the calls came in to congratulate her father for Ulysses’ court victory. (I am the artist! she cried. Yet she is not. She and her texts spoken or written are illegitimate.)
I look at John’s copy of “The Waste Land,” his pencilled marginalia, Eliot’s fishy senator face staring back at me from the cover. The feminine voices flitting through “The Waste Land” are incantations. Repetitive, rhythmic. Fragmented. “‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me./ Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.’” Writing as a nervous system, as Deleuze writes in his chapter “Hysteria” in his book on the painter Francis Bacon. To me the most glorious lines of the entire poem, the female voices that Eliot quotes from, vampirizes, is possessed by, then possesses. All excess of emotions that he both fetishizes on paper and disciplines and punishes in real life. She is his actress: “similar to certain hysterical types who also, upon any suggestion, enter into any role,” as Nietzsche writes. Vivien(ne) was wonderful with voices, the rhythm of feminine speech. She who ventriloquized the Cockney for him, the actresses who lived across the street. She notated lines in the margins of the manuscript, yet her hands were cut off like Lavinia. Later like Philomela in the poem with her tongue cut off, muted yet screaming.
The chattering woman is the muse of modernism. Her talk that is represented as unconscious and intuitive and associative. He always accompanies her with a notepad. He copies down her “disordered” speech, and later he will use it to convict her.
Yesterday’s hysteric becomes the modern period’s schizophrenic girl. Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady, her feminist Foucauldian reading of women in the English asylum: “While the name of the symbolic female disorder may change from one historical period to the next, the gender asymmetry of the representational tradition remains constant.” Even if it’s a madman, Showalter theorizes, his madness is still read as feminine.
Surrealism’s red-lipped Ophelias, consumptive and reckless. Nadja chattering in the back of a cab in Breton’s novel bearing her name: “You know, that’s how I talk to myself when I’m alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories.” In her journals Anaïs Nin writes of the speech of June Miller, Henry’s wife, her feverish talk with its “nervous flow.” A spinner of tales like the hysteric. “June was always telling stories; June with drugged eyes and a breathless voice.” She and Henry both colonize June, used June for their fictions. In Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller changes her name to Mona: “I sit down beside her and she talks — a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy.” In the novel the women he meets tell him their sob stories, he records their “neurasthenic” talk. He writes what Anaïs called his “Cunt Portraits,” channeling their hysteria as his chosen aesthetic: “I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul.”
Tropic of Cancer reads as an incantation, especially the ecstatic manifesto on writing in the rush of the last pages, all destructive, yes Dionysian, like the god Bataille worshipped in his Acéphale society. Henry Miller as an American Surrealist engaging in glorious, glittering, automatic, associative writing, an overwrought, excessive aesthetic that explicitly fetishizes the woman’s body as metaphor. HE is bulimic, a purging prophet. Privileged by VOICE — a voice that refuses to be medicated, disciplined, suppressed.
The fever dream passages of Bataille’s Blue of Noon—the name of the anti-hero, Troppmann, a sort of joke — for he is not too much man, he is too feminine. He pathologizes all the female characters — Xenie, Dirty, Lazare — as out of their minds but he is the one who is a total fucking mess.
They worship Dionysus but play Apollo (the rational god) in real life. They channel the cunt yet are phobic of the cunt, of the woman’s body, the real material life she lived, both in their texts as well as in the way they treated their muses.
For HE was the hysteric too. Eliot’s visions, his fits, his sanitorium stays, it was maladie à deux his physical and nervous collapses, but she was put away, he collected the fragments. He who wrote in French to get over his block, his aphonia, like Anna O., yet when he spoke in foreign tongues he was understood. Flaubert also the hysteric with his “trances,” “attacks,” “fits” stuck within the bourgeois family, but he was considered the artist whom society favored, fancied, made allowances for. She was ruined. She went mad or was seen as mad and was put away.
The obsession with the female hysteric in the fin de siècle which carries over into modernism: Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Baudelaire’s hookers, Emma Bovary. The model of the process of the (male) modernist writer is that of CHANNELING, like with Yeats’ Georgie-girl. The Great Men fetishized the hysteric, they channeled hysteria, both in style (automatic writing), as well as in their writing of these female characters, yet in their material lives these men were not objects, but authors, subjects. I see this as a slumming. They fetishized the actress-hysteric, the spastic flapper-girl, the witty mystic, the lovely mental patient, they sucked her bone-dry.
An alchemy: burning down the raw material. A possession narrative, dictated by the male authority figure. He possessed, she possession. They can channel the feminine, her emotional and bodily excesses, they can channel voodoo-madness, but instead of being pathologized and disciplined they are feted as geniuses for their spirit-possession. Their automatic writing does not render them illegitimate.
These men mythologize themselves as being possessed by their uncontrollable spirits, these uncontrollable women. The bodily process of writing Madame Bovary—Flaubert bellowing about his girl. “At six o’clock this evening, as I was writing the word ‘hysterics,’ I was so swept away, was bellowing so loudly and feeling so deeply what my little Bovary was going through, that I was afraid of having hysterics myself,” he writes Louise Colet. He channeled their tormented epistolary exchange into Emma’s intensity in Bovary. Her work is her love; his is his novel. He is tortured by the novel and he conveys this “fretting,” this “scratching” to her — she is tortured by him. “I had to lash myself till I bled, before my heroine could sigh with love.” His nervousness, his terrors, his eruptions while working. And then, tears down his face, his exquisite joy.
These masters wrote the emotional, the hysterical, they were also overwrought, but then they punished and disciplined their muse’s emotions in real life. Flaubert would advise Louise Colet to douse herself in chamomile and hot baths. She would write him so furiously. “My child, your infatuation is carrying you away. Calm, calm. You are putting yourself into a state — into a rage against yourself, against life. I told you I was more reasonable than you.” Flaubert’s love for Louise Colet was all things excessive, but he fed off of and transferred his emotions to his work, he backed away from the intensity and rupture and destruction of their mad love, and preserved himself as a writer. “If I were in Paris…how I would love you! I would sicken, die, stupefy myself, from loving you; I would become nothing but a kind of sensitive plant which only your kisses would bring to life.” He (vampirically) drew from how Louise Colet acted as a woman in love — obsessive, petulant, demanding, etc. She was the adulterous woman as well. He drew from their affair (the cigar-holder with the inscription Amor nel cor she gave to him, like Emma gives her callous lover Rodolphe).