Dorothy Molloy's Gurlesque Poetics

1 Contemporary Women’s Writing. doi:10.1093/cwwrit/vpu002© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Dorothy Molloy’s Gurlesque Poetics

AILBHE DARCY

AbstractThis article locates the critically-acclaimed Irish poet Dorothy Molloy within the field of the “Gurlesque.” The poetry of the Gurlesque – a camped-up performance of femininity, lush with verbal music and kitsch imagery that mixes the carnival atmosphere of early burlesque with a disturbingly violent sexuality – has sparked debate since Arielle Greenburg and Lara Glenum coined the term in their 2010 anthology of American poets. Molloy produces a version specific to contemporary Ireland, a society disentangling itself from the structures and institutions of the Catholic Church. She deploys the double vision of the Gurlesque to create spectacular, moving, and darkly funny evocations of the complexity of individuals’ relationships to religion in this changing society.

In Dorothy Molloy’s poem “Infant of Prague” (Hare Soup 7), a chatty little girl tells us about playing with a doll-like replica of the wood and wax icon that is carried through the streets of Prague every year and crowned. Though placed in the mouth of a child, the poem’s lines are sonically taut and spiky, foregrounding their own skillful artificiality, and the poet works hard to nail a precise description of the doll’s material glamour, affording us sensuous pleasure in it:

I push him around in his pram. He is chalkywith lace, starched to his underskirts, tautin his tunic and cloak.

He is ruffed at the neck, his heart hangs on his breastlike a plum; a crown holds his skull in its cinctureof gold. Flat

A. DarcyDorothy Molloy’s Gurlesque Poetics

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2 Contemporary Women’s WritingA. Darcy • Dorothy Molloy’s Gurlesque Poetics

on his back in his princely layette, he clutcheshis toy orb and cross.

Molloy’s poem parodies the Catholic ritual procession – “I push him around in his pram” – but it is inadequate to describe “Infant of Prague” as a parody of Catholicism. Its attention to its flamboyant little subject comprehends a significant measure of tenderness. Our little girl takes on Catholic Ireland’s ideal of motherhood, the Virgin Mary, and offers her own endearing interpretation of that role. She manhandles the Infant of Prague with the brisk fondness she would bestow on a doll mass-produced for child’s play. As well as pushing him around in his pram, she lays him on his back to look at the sky and gathers him up to be fondled and kissed:

He lets out a cry. I gather him upin his ermine and scarlet. I lull him in Spanishand Czech, brush the pale

of his cheek with my lips.

This tender scene blossoms into grotesque melodrama. The grotesque – characterized by the blurring of boundaries between inside and outside, self and other – emerges with the blood and water that suddenly seeps from the doll’s body, in part an allusion to the potentially grotesque sacrament of Communion:

An ooze of vermilion

darkens the flax of his curls. Water flowsfrom the gash in his side. He is stiff as a statue,his feet are stone cold.

But he glows like a little red lamp when he’s backon his plinth at the top of the stairs. He reviveslike a Jericho rose.

The Rose of Jericho upon which the poem ends is not the beautiful flower it sounds like, but a rather ugly plant that appears dead for most of the year. Revived with water at Christmas time, it is supposed to symbolize the Virgin Mary’s opening and closing womb. By including the Jericho rose in this kitschy collage of a poem, Molloy brilliantly evokes the moment at which Christianity most dangerously relies on the grotesque female body: the all-important moment of Christ’s conception.

Blood, too, suddenly appears on the hands of the little girl. With its colloquial implication of murder, this red-handedness is an overreaction – a hysterical or melodramatic reaction – to the girl’s actual crime, her theft of a few pence: “He looks into my soul, sees the sixpence I stole / from my grandmother’s purse.” I use the words “melodramatic” and “hysterical” here to suggest that this shrill reaction by an angry god pulls Catholicism into the realm of the over-emotional, the debased feminine – the realm of kitsch, in other words. Parody, tenderness,

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the grotesque, the artful embrace of excess, the deployment of kitsch: all of these elements in Molloy’s “Infant of Prague” add up to a poetic vision– I argue – that should be described as “Gurlesque.”1

A Gurlesque poem is a camped-up performance of hyper-femme feminism, lush with verbal music and kitsch imagery, which combines the carnival atmosphere of early burlesque with a disturbingly violent sexuality. Arielle Greenburg and Lara Glenum coin the term in their 2010 anthology Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics, bringing together eighteen American poets who deploy this set of tactics.

Although Glenum and Greenburg limit the Gurlesque anthology to poets based in the United States, they are careful to say that they are not documenting a school but indicating a phenomenon, and their framework has already lent itself to transnational readings. Aylin Bloch Boynukisa reads the Swedish poet Eva-Stina Byggmästar as Gurlesque, and another writer on Swedish literature, Maria Margareta Österholm, comments that she has been writing about the phenomenon for a decade without knowing what to call it.2 Transnational readings of the Gurlesque challenge the lineage laid out by Glenum and Greenburg, in which, as we shall see, the trappings of post-punk American teen consumerism feature large. They show how the shorthand of Hello Kitty, glitter, and anorexia can be exchanged for alternative sets of cultural referents. In poems such as “Infant of Prague,” Molloy takes on the material, domesticated elements of Catholic tradition – the figurines, relics, and devotional practices that exist beyond the ecclesiastical space – for her Gurlesque vision. In addition to this different range of imagery, Molloy’s interest in formalism, her use of the refrain and of traditional forms such as the villanelle, makes her poetry look formally different from the Gurlesque anthologized by Greenburg and Glenum, which appears more “experimental” on the page. In other words, reading Molloy as Gurlesque can broaden our understanding of this emerging poetics as well as our understanding of Molloy.

Gurlesque poetry investigates kitsch objects – whether the paraphernalia of an ideology or the bodies of women themselves, when considered as objects of cultural production – as objects that slip from the control of the power that produced them. Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1968) is central to understanding the American Gurlesque and Molloy’s work alike; also helpful is David Lloyd’s “Recovery of Kitsch” (1999), which translates Benjamin’s argument to the contemporary Irish context. Benjamin suggested that the masses could take advantage of new technologies for artistic production to transform the existing power structure, using kitsch as a weapon against fascism. Because hegemony requires a homogenization of affect, it inevitably involves the mass production of iconic objects, which just as inevitably devolve into kitsch and become available for reimagining. Lloyd applies Benjamin’s ideas to the kitsch objects produced by Irish cultural nationalism. He shows how these objects become beloved in the diaspora, from which context they draw into question nationalism’s drive toward purity and “authenticity.” But he also draws an

1 Molloy, who was born in County Mayo in 1942, died of cancer ten days before the publication of her first collection, Hare Soup (2004), by Faber and Faber. Her husband, Andrew Carpenter, assembled two more volumes out of her unpublished papers, Gethsemane Day (2006) and Long-Distance Swimmer (2010).

2 Österholm’s dissertation on the Swedish Gurlesque has not been translated into English, but Göransson has posted quotations from it in English on the Montevidayo website.

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analogy with religion’s dependence on kitsch artifacts for its popular acceptance, thereby implying what Elizabeth Butler Cullingford dubs, skeptically, “the radical potential of plaster statues” (189). Molloy’s poetry exploits precisely this radical potential, using the kitsch trappings of Catholicism against Catholicism’s ideological legacy in Ireland.

For Gurlesque poets in the United States, young women not only possess, but also become mechanically reproduced objects, and their own kitsch bodies are available as sites for resistance. This is true of Molloy’s poetry too. In one of her poems in the Gurlesque anthology, Brenda Coultas declares, “It’s [sic] just an old maidenhead that I painted gold and glued some sequins onto,” pithily touching on some of the ingredients that make up the popular cultural construction of the teenage girl in the United States (44). Coultas’s line burlesques the teen D.I.Y. aesthetic of the glittered and gaudy, the sexual prurience surrounding the teenage girl’s virginity, the shy modesty she is expected to combine with a generous sexual display. As Kate Durbin has described, the teenager is at once the most revered and the most vulnerable member of American society, simultaneously fed on and force-fed by American capitalist culture. An online commenter responding to Durbin’s essay on the teenage girl colorfully likens the Gurlesque poets to teenage bulimics lining up to vomit on magazine stands, reconnecting a private disorder with its public source. If Molloy’s poems are often about women engaged wholeheartedly in disturbing expressions of sexuality, they aim at analogous ends. It is well documented that the reproductive female body has been at once sacred and terrifying to Irish Catholicism, and Molloy portrays Catholicism as something fearful and controlling of women, productive of the attitudes of a culture. Yet her poems participate in that culture in a camped-up, adoring way. This very adoration becomes her means of resistance. And, as with Gurlesque poetry in the United States, Molloy’s focus on kitsch leads her to investigate her own voice speaking as a cultural production: she renders the lyric poem itself kitsch.

The notion of “Camp” helps to flesh out how the Gurlesque relates to kitsch. The relationship of camp to kitsch is of lens to object: camp offers a sophisticated mode for appreciating kitsch. Greenburg’s introduction to the Gurlesque anthology begins by laying out a camp lineage for the poetics, cataloguing some of the women whom she sees as Gurlesque avant la lettre:

Her grandmother was Alice in Wonderland and Eloise and Ramona the Pest. . . . Her mom was Anne Waldman and Anne Rice and Sylvia Plath and Barbara Guest and V.C. Andrews and Angela Carter. She had aunts, too, like Hannah Weiner and Kathy Acker and Katherine Dunn and Amy Gerstler and Annie Sprinkle. Her aunts were Angela Davis and Nan Goldin and Hello Kitty and the Guerilla Girls and Dolly Parton and Exene Cervenka and Cindy Sherman and Poly Styrene . . . (1)

The touchstones here come from or flirt with popular culture, and many of them would be dismissed by “serious” critics as superficial, silly, or shrill – that

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is, as implicitly kitsch. In Glenum’s introduction, which follows this catalogue by Greenburg, Glenum states that Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp” is “seminal” for Gurlesque thinking. The word seminal, coming after Greenburg’s focus on literary mothers, grandmothers, and aunties, makes Sontag’s contribution stand out from the many other influences the two editors cite through an appropriately gender-themed pun. It implies that Sontag’s essay on camp is the catalyst to reconsidering all these other influences. Sontag’s essay begins to reclaim the pleasure to be found in kitsch. The recent history of kitsch is akin to the recent history of the sentimental: they have both been denigrated because they have been associated with the feminine and thereby with everything silly, artificial, domestic, superficial, gaudy, and emotional. The alternative history of kitsch, the history that takes in Sontag’s essay and the newer phenomenon of the Gurlesque, is one of recuperation through the sophisticated double vision of camp. Sontag describes the camp sensibility as arch; it frames everything in quotation marks. However, the intellectual distance in camp’s perception of the kitsch co-exists, she tells us, with a genuine affection for that art usually considered “bad”: “People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label ‘camp,’ they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling” (292). Camp offers a mode for appreciating kitsch because of its extravagance, affectation, and sentimentality. Such a sensibility involves a mode of discrimination that parallels that of avant-garde intellectuals, but it does not attempt to “redeem” kitsch for the realm of “high” art.

Molloy’s “Infant of Prague” (Hare 7), the poem with which this essay opens, illustrates how the production of kitsch, intended for ideological homogenization, inadvertently enables the reinterpretation of iconography by its placement of that iconography in the domestic sphere, on the “plinth at the top of the stairs.” Catholic iconography is ubiquitous in this little girl’s everyday life; this very ubiquity allows her to play-act at being the Virgin Mary and to reinterpret her relationship to the effigy of Jesus. The relationship between girl and doll that emerges in Molloy’s “Infant of Prague” is the tender, possessive relationship of “owner to captive pet” to which Glenum draws attention in her discussion of the “cute” in the Gurlesque anthology. Glenum cites Sianne Ngai’s suggestion that violence is implicit in cuteness, an aesthetic habitually denigrated as kitsch. The aesthetic of cuteness, she suggests, speaks to “an aesthetic encounter with a socially disempowered other.” It speaks to the recognition in that other of one’s “own abjection and fear of further deformity” and of the degree to which one has been “stripped of significant social agency” (16). The abjection of the “Infant of Prague” in Molloy’s poem, its demotion from object of reverence to doll/pet thus reflects upon the abjection and deformity by culture of the girl-child speaking the poem, and by extension upon the poem’s author and even its reader. For its modernist critics, such as Clement Greenberg and Hermann Broch, kitsch is a parasite in the body of art: it has a tendency to render everything around it kitsch, too (Tiffany 329–30). In “Infant of Prague,” the disempowered and abject

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girl is able, through her very girlishness, to reduce Catholic iconography, which is intended to “raise up” the mind, to abjection.

My reading of Molloy as Gurlesque corrects existing accounts of her work. Although Molloy’s three collections, all published posthumously, received much attention in the popular media, only Pilar Villar-Argáiz has published scholarship on the poet so far. Villar-Argáiz characterizes Molloy as a second-wave feminist, writing dramatic monologues that give voice to victims of rape, sexual violence, and the more insidious violence that poisons everyday sexuality. In such a reading, the religious imagery of many of Molloy’s poems – her passion for the accouterments of European Catholicism, the icons, relics, and figurines that litter the churches of Italy, Spain, and France – is a by-product of her background in the visual arts. Villar-Argáiz notes that Molloy’s poems “are not to be read as autobiographical” (2), with the exception of those that deal with her final illness (135). But locating Molloy in the Gurlesque suggests that her poems are also not read adequately if they are read as dramatic monologues, and that their Catholic trappings are more than decorative. As “Infant of Prague” begins to illustrate, Molloy’s world unites high seriousness with wide-ranging burlesque in a way that is difficult to describe satisfactorily without recourse to the Gurlesque’s riotous, irreverent exploitation of camp as a lens with a double vision. The immediately obvious thing about her poetry is its black humor, its irreverence, its sheer nastiness. For a reader reared a Catholic in Ireland, the diminutive tone of “Infant of Prague,” its flamboyant melodrama, and the little girl’s over-the-top sense of guilt at her minor misdemeanor are all darkly funny. Yet the accounts Villar-Argaíz has offered of Molloy’s poems could give a reader unfamiliar with her poetry the impression that it is grave and earnest. Perhaps this is because Villar-Argaíz is concerned to present Molloy as speaking out against sexual violence. Such a reading fails to account for the one thing that a reader of Molloy cannot miss – that she is hilarious, often on uncomfortable subjects, such as rape and domestic abuse. This hilarity completes, rather than annuls, the core of seriousness in her work.

Molloy’s Gurlesque reveals in horrifying Technicolor a set of ideas and behaviors, particularly related to gender, with which she implies that the supposedly newly secular Ireland remains lumbered. In her poems, girl children dress up and fervently play at a motherhood infused with guilt and self-loathing. Lovers take brutality and abuse for devotion. Men enact on their lovers rituals of possession. Individuals become wind-up toys, engaged in unthinking and automatic words and actions. Molloy’s is an important poetry for contemporary Ireland, a society which, for the last three decades, has been tortuously and incompletely disengaging itself from a reliance on the structures and institutions of the Catholic Church, and a society that is still reeling from revelations about the extent of abuse and oppression in the heyday of ecclesiastical hegemony. It suggests that we should not get too comfortable with the idea that we have left that time behind. Molloy’s poetic voice is also consumed with tenderness toward the kitsch iconography she deploys, the paraphernalia of childhood Catholicism. Even when

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her work is a poetry of resistance and rage, it is also a poetry of giddy affection and carnival and glee. Through this defiant revelry, she reveals herself as a creation of Catholic culture as much as a critic of it.

Molloy’s poem “Plaint” (Hare 32) revels in the traditional communal devotion known in Ireland as the “pattern,” taking it gloriously to excess. A pattern celebrates a patron saint’s festival at a local site through a set of ritual movements and prayers. Like the mass-produced figurine of the Infant of Prague, the location of this ritual beyond the walls of the church, in the hands of parishioners rather than priests, makes it dangerously available for reimagining. The official Church has historically had an ambivalent relationship with the practice in any case, reflecting the difficulty the clergy have had in taking control of it: many of the pattern days, falling as they do in July and August, seem to have originated in an attempt by the Christian Church to replace the already-extant harvest festival of Lúnasa (Ó Giolláin16). The harvest celebrations that carried over into the pattern days were wild and carnivalesque, until the Catholic clergy gradually suppressed the patterns in the 18th century – only for individual local clergymen to play a part in reviving them, in much tamer guise, at the end of the 19th century in the spirit of romantic nationalism (Ó Giolláin 29).

Today, at Croagh Patrick, the most famous of the pattern sites, religious pilgrimage shades into commercial tourism. The vision of thousands scaling the mountainside, attended by buzzing rescue helicopters and the national media, provides great entertainment to Westport’s locals. Molloy’s poem is clearly aware of the pattern’s potential for kitsch, given the international tour of religious devotion her pilgrim enjoys in “Plaint.” Traditionally, the pattern often involves stone and a holy well, as does the pattern in Molloy’s poem; but hers is a sort of meta-pattern the speaker has constructed out of some of the most prestigious European pilgrimages available – “I’ve prayed with others of my ilk at Canterbury, / Compostela, Montserrat” – and which ends at the Virgin birth in Bethlehem itself. Molloy’s pattern sets itself up as a quasi-epic journey, complete with tasks that must be completed to reach the goal – one’s soul must be weighed, ninety doors must be counted, a secret set of steps must be found – but it reads as a catalogue for those in the know, as a well-travelled individual might boastfully tick off all the exotic “off the beaten path” places he’d seen. The poem declares with pride, “I’ve prayed with others of my ilk,” an expression that suggests that not everyone would be capable of these things (my italics.)

The physical acts and sensual experiences that make up Molloy’s pattern – fasting, kneeling, lighting a candle, donning a symbolic conch shell, beating one’s breast, crossing oneself, and walking in bare feet – culminate less in spiritual than in physical ecstasy. Our pilgrim tells us:

In WalsinghamI’ve kissed the vial of Virgin’s milk, the silky bonesof Madeleine in Vézelay, the Baby Jesus’swaddling clothes in La Chapelle. And now in ChartresI fast, and try my luck.

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The word “silky” here emphasizes the sensuality of kissing the artifacts of Catholicism. Sensuality is again emphasized by Molloy’s attention to the different parts of the foot hitting the ground when pilgrims walk without shoes:

Women heel and toe it roundthe labyrinth. I follow in bare feet.My blind soles catch the rhythm as they touch the blackon white.

Sentimentality, too, is part of the kitsch mix. Along the way to Bethlehem, there are unabashed outpourings of emotion to accompany the various tasks:

I beat my breast,betake myself to Martyrs’ Well, sink through the liquidcore of Holy Mountain, full eighteen fathomsdeep . . . . . . I read the starsand weep.

Molloy’s pattern culminates in the ecstatic touching of one of the most startlingly physical of Catholic relics, Jesus Christ’s discarded foreskin. The experience is downright orgasmic: “The marble bleeds. / I sing the great Amen.” The pattern, as Christian ritual, should theoretically bulwark Catholic ideology promoting the spiritual over the physical. Molloy exploits it for the instant gratifications of consumer culture, for material indulgence and emotional self-indulgence, and for gratuitous female sexual pleasure.

It is hard to overstate the degree to which Irish cultural ideology has been affected by Catholic teaching and iconography since the inception of the Irish state, and its influence has been felt by no one more than by Irish women. As Mary Kenny recounts, Irish women were actively involved in the Church, more than any other sector of society, but women’s place in the new Irish Republic was also delineated with reference to the Church. Lia Mills provides the term “iconic feminine” to refer to three apparently disparate figures – the poetic muse, the Virgin mother, and Mother Ireland – who together demarcated the culture’s notion of ideal womanhood, an asexual, maternal ideal enshrined in the Irish state’s laws and policies. In her 1996 survey of contemporary Irish women poets, Patricia Haberstroh’s description of the iconic feminine gives special mention to the Virgin Mary:

Asexual, comforting, and protective, Mary embodies concepts of domesticity and submissiveness, with motherhood her primary trait. . . . The message that everything must be subordinated to a woman’s primary vocation as mother, echoes through many of the pronouncements and laws of the Irish Republic and the Irish Catholic Church (14–15).

Increasingly infused after the foundation of the Irish state with the Catholic ideals of chastity and asexual maternity Haberstroh identifies here, the female

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personification of Ireland as “Erin” has its roots in violence. Transnational studies of the relationship between war and gender implicate political struggle in the construction of femininity as innocent, helpless, and chaste: an abject iconic feminine is instrumental in constructing masculinity in such a way that young men will fight and die for their country (Goldstein). As Julia Wright describes, the female representation of Ireland during the struggle for independence employed, and sometimes conflated, two figures to this end: “the suffering maiden-in-distress, requiring chivalric men to rise to her defense” and “the proudly defiant spirit, maintaining dignity and virtue in the face of powerful oppression” as rallying points for heroic male violence (56). Molloy uses each of these tropes in her poetry and reveals various ways women are punished for not living up to the iconic feminine – and for living up to it. In “Fool’s Gold” an artist renders a chaste woman his muse. The artist desires the woman because he cannot have her; she is left lonely, curating a museum of beautiful useless things: “First Communion snaps / and rosaries with pearly beads, / and baby teeth the fairy-folk / forgot” (Hare 28–29). In “Was it Like This?” a woman describes her rape to her boyfriend. Instead of offering sympathy her boyfriend repeats the act of rape, excited to violence by her helplessness (Hare 13).

As Kenny reminds us, women – including women poets – were active in the creation of the iconic feminine. Women poets have also struggled to resist or subvert it. In an article published in 1995, Mills rounds up a group of Irish poets who were at that time “actively engaged in destabilizing the very notion of feminine icons” (69). The strategy Mills invokes with reference to these activist poets is “ventriloquism” (73), which is what it sounds like: taking on different personae in dramatic monologues that subvert or complicate notions of ideal womanhood. In a later article in 1999, Kimberly Myers fine-tunes this idea of ventriloquism as subversion, noting, “to claim that women embody none of the characteristics traditionally ascribed to them would be as simplistic as perpetuating those inaccurate stereotypes” (51). Poets such as Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, she suggests instead, resist simplicity and stridency through the use of “playfulness,” the witty modification of the iconic feminine, rather than its simple rejection (52).

Myers cites a poem by Eavan Boland to illustrate her notion of “playfulness.” In Boland’s gorgeous poem “Solitary,” she describes masturbation using religious vocabulary:

Night:An oratory of dark,a chapel of unreason.

Here in the shrubberythe shrine.I am its votary,its season.

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Flamessingleto my fingers

expertto pick outtheir heart,the sacred heat

none may violate.

This is the same conflation – of taboo sex and official religion – found in Molloy’s work. Molloy’s approach to it differs significantly from that of Boland. “Solitary” uses religious vocabulary to give dignity and beauty to the female body and to masturbation; it attempts to “raise up” that which Catholic Irish ideology has deemed “low.” Molloy’s poetry, with its keen interest in bringing everything – sex and religion alike – into burlesque, has no truck with such high/low distinctions. Moreover, although Boland’s speaker in “Solitary” dubs herself a “votary,” we are not led to read that epithet as anything more than a metaphor, just as the images of “shrubbery” and “bush” operate in the poem as colorful descriptions for the body, not as designating actual foliage. In contrast, Molloy’s nuns and other religious objects and figures may be fictional, but they are not simply figurative. The “novice,” with a crush on the priest she dresses cannot be mistaken for mere metaphor; nor can the “strawberry blood” of stigmata hidden in a clenched fist (“Postulant” Hare 42; “Stigmata” Hare 8.)

Setting Molloy apart from the contemporary Irish women poets who use ventriloquism as a feminist tactic is her approach to concerns about linguistic determinism and, relatedly, the mechanical and kitsch aspects of lyric. In their commentary on Irish women poets, neither Mills nor Myers mention Alicia Ostriker’s work on female revisionary mythopoesis in the 1980’s, but the subversive ventriloquism they describe bears a distinct family resemblance to the broader transnational project of “stealing the language” identified by Ostriker. Ostriker addresses the problem encountered by feminists who wish to resist a patriarchal culture from within that culture: like Shakespeare’s Caliban, or the natives of a colonized country, they must voice their resistance in what Adrienne Rich calls the “oppressor’s language.” (The English language in which these Irish women write is, of course, doubly the “oppressor’s language,” given Ireland’s colonial history.) Depending on one’s philosophy of language, this can seem more or less of a challenge: if the language we speak is deeply encoded with the ideology within which it has come into being, can we ever talk our way out of its bind?

Molloy’s poem “Ventriloquist’s Dummy” (Hare 39) reveals a poet engaged in thinking through this problem of the “oppressor’s language.” From its opening lines, the poem makes mincemeat of the assumed sincerity that ordinarily gives

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authority to the lyric “I,” even in dramatic monologue: “You lever my jaws, make your claptrap / shoot from my mouth.” The poem has dirty fun with the paradox of a voice that can be at once under the control of patriarchy and able to contemplate its own resistance to that control. It vividly expresses shame at having to speak with the “oppressor’s language”:

I burn, turn my face from the crowdwhen I feel your thumb press on my gusset,your falsetto rise in my throat.

The substitution of “gusset” for “gullet” here introduces a subtext of sexual violation to the shame implied by blushing and turning away. Meanwhile, in the line “your falsetto rise[s] in my throat,” there is the suggestion not only of insincerity but also of nausea at the act of speaking. The physicality of this mode of expression is typical of Molloy. Shame in her poem is not an abstract idea but a bodily experience, the heat of an involuntary blush and the misery of a rising gorge.

But for all its shame at its own secondhand voice, “Ventriloquist’s Dummy” ends with defiance – mixed with an unexpected third element, acknowledgment that the speaker is a collaborator, with gusto, in her own oppression:

Offstage, I gag when you comeon the stump of my tongue. You projectnot a sound through my lips til I action

my jaws, spit your codpiece back intoyour lap. Then the roaring begins.Between us we bring the house down.

The tack Molloy takes here is different from that of the poets catalogued by Mills, Myers, and Ostriker, engaged in “ventriloquism” or female revisionary mythopoesis. The difference is her defiant embrace of the trap that is a language and a culture.

This defiant gusto gives Gurlesque poetry its potency – and makes it uncomfortable, even shocking, for some readers. In his essay on “Gurlesque trash and the poetics of excess,” Johannes Göransson praises the Gurlesque as a poetry that takes over the helm, as though the artist is too intoxicated by the art to control it. The Gurlesque voice is possessed, hypnotized, compulsive. For some critics, this performance of intoxication can read as self-indulgence: in a review of Molloy’s Gethsemane Day, the critic Katy Evans-Bush levels this criticism: “[Molloy] annoys me with a slight histrionic edge, almost adolescent, as if she were the only person who had ever had a hard time.” Despite her softening her remarks with “slight” and “almost,” Evans-Bush implies that the problem with Molloy’s poetry is that she lacks self-control and allows herself to go too far.

As with the Gurlesque poets in the United States, however, Molloy’s excess is calculated. Many of her poems self-consciously explore the condition of being

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possessed or hypnotized by rhythmic language or repetitive sound. Actions toward women in these poems become mechanical and apparently inexorable. Pascual the shepherd orders his drinks “in the singsong voice / he uses with sheep,” a state of mind associated with his compulsive treatment of women as objects for comfort (Hare 10). In “Was it like this?” Beatrix’s story of rape makes her boyfriend’s voice go “strange”: he is rendered into an automated replica of her first assailant and compulsively rapes her himself (13). In “Lady of Sorrows,” the little tin soldier who bangs on his drum can’t be detained by a kiss or anything else – there is always violent work to be done (35).

In many of her poems about women’s own behaviors, we find Molloy engaged in a systematic investigation of those culturally-valued feminine affects that are deemed pathologies when carried too far, such as the “ice maiden,” the “globus hystericus,” and the stigmata (“Ice Maiden,” Hare 10; “Family Circus,” Hare 11; “Stigmata,” Hare 8). The ice maiden is a lady who has taken self-control to extremes; and, while emotional warmth is considered a virtue in a woman, the globus hystericus is the condition of being rendered unable to consume by overpowering sentiment. The disfigurement of the stigmata, portrayed in Molloy’s poem “Stigmata” (Hare 8), is about sympathy, another quality long associated with women. Ivan Illich suggests that the phenomenon results from an exceptional poignancy of religious faith and the desire to associate oneself with the suffering Messiah. Sympathy is nice, but too much sympathy is considered excessive and self-indulgent.

“Stigmata” treads the line that separates religious sensibility from pathology. The poem contains a proud litany taking ownership of the stigmata, even while its speaker is open about her own disorder (it ends “on the analyst’s couch”). The insistent pride in the pathologized stigmata reaches full force by the final lines of the poem, in which the speaker clutches the wounds in her fists and refuses to give them away. “Stigmata” also treads the fault lines of lyric authority. The authority of the lyric voice in modern poetry has conventionally been derived from the use of inherited poetic forms; but, as Peter Middleton describes, forces in popular culture have gradually worn away the authority derived from performing one’s literary genealogy. In response, lyric poets have increasingly turned to the performance of familial genealogy as a guarantee of sincerity to shore up their lyric authority. “Stigmata” performs both kinds of genealogy. Its speaker affirms a family background for her disfigurement:

On mammy’s sidewe were punsters and pugilists,pillagers, prophets,eaters of raw potatoesand gazers at stars.

On daddy’s sidethey played roulette and Black Jack;

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the one-armed bandit;strip-poker, gin rummy,cribbage and craps.They went to the dogs.

Here the poem’s familial lineage, the guarantor of a sincere and authoritative lyric voice, depends on a line-up of characters that are anything but dependable. We are asked to give credence to a voice born of thieves, jokers, gamblers, and dabblers in the superstitious arts. Moreover, because the link between these familial tendencies and the stigmata is inexplicable, the reader experiences this lineage as excessive, a catalogue given added too-muchness by puns and alliteration. The “I” that emerges from it claims an excessive diversity of mystical experiences:

As for me, I had visionsas soon as my breasts were in bud.The Sacred Heart bledon the mantel. A luminouslady crushed snakeswith her feet. The Infantof Prague came to call.

After each stanza of “Stigmata,” there is a prayer-like refrain, calling for still more authority on saints who themselves had visions or experienced the stigmata: “Mechtild and Hildegard, pray for me, / Francis, Theresa and John.” Even as this act of calling on a community of fellow stigmatics performs the attempt to shore up the speaker’s authority, the singsong, mechanical nature of the refrain is designed to undermine it. Refrain, insofar as it is a device used in traditional poetic forms, is conventionally understood to indicate control and mastery of the craft of poetry. Form in poetry is supposed to be a way of mastering experience, of turning it into art. Molloy’s use of the refrain, however, paradoxically renders her poetry excessive, making it seem out of control. Because they are associated with hysterical, out-of-control, or hypnotized voices, Molloy’s refrains give away all lyric’s tendency to the mechanical and the out of control.

Molloy’s interest in the refrain, and in other repetitive poetic forms such as the villanelle, is tied to her interest in the question of cultural determinism, which we can observe her thinking through with specific reference to the lyric form. Her poem “Lady of Sorrows” (Hare 35) implicitly compares its own form, the form of the lyric poem, to the wind-up dolls that populate it. With protagonists transformed into toy-like objects – an effigy of the Virgin Mary, a toy soldier –, the poem explores the potential of mass-produced objects to slip from the control of the power that produced them. Through a dizzying series of replacements – a crotch for a holy statue’s niche, a dildo for a doll, a gun for a crotch for a gun – “Lady of Sorrows” leads us through all the attraction and fear associated with the

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woman as fetish, an object at once desirable and castrating, and celebrates the power given women by this attraction and fear:

Knives in her chest,the lady of Sorrowsglows in her niche.

He has marched off again,the little toy soldier,banging his drum. Ratatat.

At the same time, the endless exchangeability of the poem’s objects points to a leveling commodification that undoes the power of the phallus/woman’s body central to the notion of fetish:

He comes goose-stepping back,a gun in his pocket.Work to be done. Ratatat.

In the outhouse he plugs her– love-bites on earlobeand nape – shoots himself

in the crotch.The Lady of Sorrowsglows in her niche.

For an Irish reader, the repeated “ratatat” of “Lady of Sorrows” is irresistibly reminiscent of Louis MacNeice’s “tra-la” in his late, dark poem “The Taxis” (530). This burst of onomatopoeic nonsense appears to cover something up as much as it moves the poem along: “In the first taxi he was alone tra-la, / No extras on the clock.” In MacNeice’s poem, the poem’s own refrain becomes the pooh-poohing of the taxi driver dismissing the poem’s speaker, even unto oblivion. In Molloy’s poem, the “ratatat” of the toy soldier’s drum morphs into the soundtrack for a violent rape and shooting. But “tra-la” or “ratatat” is also the sound of the poem’s own inexorable mechanics at work: Molloy’s poem is what Yeats called a “little mechanical song” (MacNeice 141).

W. B. Yeats’s exploration of the ballad form inspired MacNeice’s use of the refrain in later works like “The Taxis.” Yeats is, almost without argument, the most influential figure in Irish poetry.3 Despite his own experimentation with forms of poetic writing involving the relinquishment of control – such as the “automatic writing” he undertook in collaboration with his wife George Hyde-Lees – his legacy to contemporary Irish poetry has been primarily one of an overwhelming emphasis on control, on what Peter Sirr calls “the ordering intellect, the formalizing imagination.”4

In the chapter on “Crazy Jane” in his critical work on Yeats, MacNeice observed that Modernist Art suspects devices such as the refrain because they

3 See Ronald Schuchard’s essay, “The Legacy of Yeats in Contemporary Irish Poetry” (2004), for an account of the breadth and depth of the poet’s influence.

4 Sirr does not mention Yeats in his 1995 article diagnosing the primacy of poetic control as the cause of Irish poetry’s conservatism, but Yeats’s role in this primacy can be traced in the frequent rewritings of his poems by contemporary Irish poets. In “A Prayer for my Daughter,” for example, faced with the bloody “storm” of 20th century history unfolding outside his tower, Yeats imaginatively solves his infant daughter’s future through a controlled and controlling rhyme scheme. Contemporary poets such as Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, and Justin Quinn have produced versions of the poem that employ formal and thematic strategies to undermine Yeats’s vision of lyric as affording the poet control over the world.

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are mechanical, and therefore the antithesis of controlled and controlling rigorous individual thought:

The twentieth century suspected most poetic repetition-devices on the ground that repetition saves thinking or excuses the lack of thought, that by sheer hypnotic force it can persuade the reader to buy his mass-produced coloured when he would certainly reject the penny plain. (145)

MacNeice’s use of commercial language here suggests that the suspicion of repetition is related to the suspicion of kitsch. It is a suspicion of the commercial, of the mass produced, of that which makes itself easily available. It is also a suspicion that “we know not what we do because it is not we who do it” in MacNeice’s words: that it is possible for language to possess the individual voice and render it mechanical, the same state of intoxication that Göransson sees the Gurlesque poem as performing (144). MacNeice locates the desire for such hypnosis in Yeats’s own attitude toward the lyric poem. He writes about Yeats’s love of the Leda myth in this context as a union between man and god, “but the god, it must be noticed, disguised as a creature with less than human intelligence” (143–44). In this telling it is precisely the replacement of thought with “sheer hypnotic force” that might give a lyric poem potency. MacNeice attempts in the rest of his chapter to redeem Yeats’s refrains for Modernist Art by demonstrating that they are more verbally sophisticated, and therefore more legitimately literary, than the refrain of a folk song or nursery rhyme, perhaps attempting to redeem lyric itself in the wake of his acknowledgment earlier in the chapter that “we must admit that all poetry involves this danger of hypnosis” (145).

In the fear of hypnosis, we might begin to understand how Molloy’s poems and the poems of the Gurlesque can be at once so funny and so horrifying. As Henri Bergson explains in “Laughter,” the mechanical in life, the human caught up in mindless repetition, is funny. We expect people to observe what is happening around them and to adapt their behavior accordingly. When someone is unable to do this, whether a jack-in-the-box or a slapstick comedian, we laugh. This laughter acts as a corrective: “Its function,” Bergson tells us, “is to intimidate by humiliating” (188). What Bergson does not mention is that the mechanical is also terrifying: all those zombies in all those movies cannot be reasoned with or stopped in their tracks. In “Infant of Prague,” when the doll-like Jesus “looks into my soul, sees the sixpence I stole / from my grandmother’s purse,” there is no explaining the theft to him, justifying one’s actions, asking for mercy. The blood that ensues – darkening the speaker’s hands, the flax of the infant Jesus’s curls – cannot be staunched. As with zombies, the entrance of the mechanical into life makes Molloy’s poems at once funny and frightening. If Molloy’s women are hardly empowered by their association with dolls, by the endless opportunity for dress up and play, her men are rendered hardly human because they become the not-quite-human creatures of the uncanny valley.

By taking on automatic and possessed voices in poems that camp up traditional refrain and rhyme schemes, Molloy brings the Gurlesque’s double vision to

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bear on poetic form itself, burlesquing it alongside other authoritative cultural discourses such as Catholicism or – as in “Stigmata” – the pathologizing discourse of psychoanalysis. She implicates, and revels in, a national literary legacy as productive of her own dangerously out-of-control lyric voice, the same voice from which “claptrap / shoot[s]” in “Ventriloquist’s Dummy” (HS 39). In “Floating with Mr. Swan” (HS 17), Molloy takes on the father-figure of the national literature to this end, treating Yeats’s famous sonnet “Leda and the Swan” as just one more kitsch object, available for her to play-act with and fondly manhandle.

Yeats’s sonnet is a remarkably controlled piece of work. Its hybrid form raises the low act of rape into a heightened discourse; its short lines encompass all manner of horror and glory: “A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower /And Agamemnon dead.”

In her chapter on “Leda and the Swan,” Elizabeth Butler Cullingford shows its author making umpteen minute-yet-potent revisions to intensify the poem’s “sexual and kinetic power,” an account that, if anything, makes Yeats’s mastery of his craft seem only the more impressive (155). But Cullingford’s chapter also provides a suggestive back history to Yeats’s erotic sonnet. In her telling, “Leda and the Swan” is an act of rebellion against the Catholic Church, intended for maximum transgression, maximum shock value. Cullingford shows how “Leda” even meets Catherine McKinnon’s definition of pornography, as portraying the “sexually explicit subordination,” “pain,” “humiliation,” and “dehumanization of women” (152). It is tempting, given all this, to compare Yeats’s sonnet to the poetry of the Gurlesque: the performance of hyper-femme femininity is there in Leda’s “terrified vague fingers” and “loosening thighs”; the poem is undeniably lush with verbal music; and it clearly portrays a disturbingly violent sexuality. As for the Gurlesque’s kitsch imagery, “Leda and the Swan” is the representation of a mechanical reproduction, the image of a Hellenistic bas-relief in Yeats’s copy of The History of Art; and, as Cullingford notes, such representations of the woman’s mythical rape by a swan have always existed rather on the risqué edge of Western art (152–54). Yeats’s rebellion, Cullingford argues, comes at the expense of women. It not only reinscribes cultural constructions of women as submissive and available for possession, but it also invites us to enjoy forcibly possessing a woman.

Molloy, in “Floating with Mr. Swan,” accepts the invitation; but her version of Yeats’s poem gleefully camps up its enjoyment. Molloy’s Leda, already pathologized, speaks from the operating table. She describes, cartoonishly, receiving her anesthetic from a Mr. Swan – although it is she who is figuratively made fowl: “Mr. Swan, the anaesthetist, jabs at my arm / till I’m jelly-leg, head-flop and flap-wing.” Just as we saw the relationship of “owner to captive pet” at work in “Infant of Prague,” Molloy/Leda makes herself into Mr. Swan’s toy: she chirrups “I wuv ya, I wuv ya” like Mattel’s popular pull-string “Chatty Catty” doll. If in “Leda and the Swan” there is erotic pleasure to be found in Leda’s helplessness and the swan’s powerful mastery of her, in the detail of her “terrified, vague fingers” fluttering like birds, Molloy’s poem takes no less pleasure in feminine helplessness.

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Villar-Argáiz gives a lot of attention to “Floating with Mr. Swan” in her characterization of Molloy as second-wave feminist, wielding dramatic monologue like a pointy reckoning. She reads Molloy’s poem as giving a voice to Leda, mute in Yeats’s poem, as an act of empowerment. Characterizing her words in Molloy’s version “I wuv ya, I wuv ya,” as infantilizing, and tenuously suggesting that Mr. Swan is a plastic surgeon, employed by this Leda to help her conform to society’s standards for femininity, Argaíz argues that Molloy’s poem raises the issue of complicity of women in the patriarchal ideologies that suppress them. She sees “Floating” as reflecting on the trauma inflicted on women by culture in the division of mind from body.

However, far from writing back to Yeats in a way that would make us comfortable with our own reactions to Leda’s rape in his thrilling sonnet, Molloy follows Yeats in writing poems that lure us in to enjoy the violence and abjection. “Floating with Mr. Swan” ends with a sense of disappointment that our speaker does not receive the “thrust” for which she waits. This disappointment – that the rape does not take place – is evinced in the readers when a poem full of internal rhyme and assonance ends on a bum note. Until that final, unmusical-because-too-long sentence – “All I get is a slap on the cheek / from the nurse with the upside-down watch / and the back-to-front hands” – we have been swept along by sound. All the gratuitous word-fun of lyric – the tasty compounds of “jelly-leg, head-flop and flap-wing” and the alliteration of “pucker and purse,” “paper,” and “plasticene” – have combined to make sure that we are less horrified by the scene than delighted, infantilized ourselves by the self-pleasuring babble of lyric. In this way, Molloy brings home to the reader the pleasure we take, our culture takes, in images of sexual violence toward women. We participate in her Gurlesque.

I describe the Gurlesque strategies used by Molloy as a feminist because I see these strategies as working to resist aspects of Catholic ideology that she reveals as continuing to delineate the feminine in 21st century Ireland. Not all of the critics who write about the Gurlesque in the United States agree that the upshot of their burlesque is resistance of the culture in which their poetry is saturated. Johannes Göransson, in his essay on “Gurlesque trash and the poetics of excess,” refutes the notion that the Gurlesque offers a critique of capitalism; rather, he sees in their poetics Georges Bataille’s “unproductive expenditures”:

Bataille notes that the prevailing bourgeois practice has been to develop “humiliating conceptions of restrained expenditure,” and isn’t it this kind of restraint we see admired and valorized constantly in the poetry world? Isn’t this the economy in which poets should “earn” their images and not write “too much” or be “affected”? (Göransson 14)

To deem the Gurlesque Bataillean is to see this poetics of excess as an attempt to move outside of the strictures of society, to reject any kind of “empowerment” offered by society. In this reading, the excess of the Gurlesque aesthetic goes beyond Bakhtinian carnival (which has a role in the maintenance

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of a society) to express the death drive, and has no more constructive purpose than that expression – “jouissance,” to quote Göransson quoting Lee Edelman quoting Lacan.

This reading of Gurlesque poetry as intentionally useless is an uncomfortable one, and rejecting it in favor of a more constructive feminist reading of Molloy could be to misread her poetry for the sake of comfort. It is not easy to understand how resistance is achieved by poems that wallow happily in the violence they describe. My argument is that the very excess that Göransson reads as jouissance is perhaps the most potent of the Gurlesque strategies to the end of resistance. Through excess – the joyful “camping up” of a culture – the Gurlesque poets reveal the artificiality and absurdity of that which they burlesque without, importantly, denying their own reliance on it and pleasure in it.

Molloy’s Gurlesque poetry departs from brands of feminism that afford reverence to suffering and trauma, or seek to empower women within the existing system. Her work is more like the macabre doll she cobbles together in her poem “Barbie,” which acts as an ars poetica: “I made a doll of plasticine / and spit; a witless, / empty-headed thing.” It is a poetry made of debris, like a doll fashioned of “periwinkle shoes . . . rotten eggs / for eyes, / a furred banana nose, / and rows and rows of green fluorescent / teeth” (Gethsemane 3). Although always skillfully crafted and sonically delicious, it flouts the conventional understanding of what is lyrical and what is ladylike. Possessed by a culture, it turns a cold eye on its own mechanics. Instead of being refined and concerning itself with that which art considers beautiful – or, as much art does, rendering the everyday beautiful – it takes on, and takes joy in, a culture’s horrible, spectacular mish-mash in order to reveal that culture to itself.

University of Notre Dame, [email protected]

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Briona Nic Dhiarmada, Romana Huk and Declan Kiberd for their feedback on the dissertation chapter out of which this article emerged, and to Ethan Guagliardo and John Harvey for helpful and stimulating conversation at all stages of the writing process.

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Dorothy Molloy's Gurlesque Poetics

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