Louise Glück Nobel Prize Winner in Literature 2020:
Poetry as Revenge
by Carmine Giordano
In her essay, “The Culture of Healing,” 2020 Nobel Prize winner, Louise Glück, labels memoirs, poems and novels which make an exhibition of suffering as the “pornography of scars.” She rejects as restorative for the artist any art that undermines or denies the power of loss by substituting for it a narrative of personal triumph.
In an interview concerning suffering and loss, she states “It is less a matter of who I am than the idea that nothing should be wasted. Something must come of it … writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance…bad luck, loss, pain…if you make something out of it then you no longer have been bested by these events.” Applying this perspective to her work as a poet, she asserts in the former essay that “the only possible advantage of suffering is that it may afford insight…the poem is a revenge on loss, which has been forced to yield to a new form, a thing that hadn’t existed in the world before.” The ”absolute” of loss is transformed through the creative act: the art of thinking through and composing the poem. The mutilator becomes the benefactor.
In her writing and interviews, Glück shares freely and generously the particular kind of painful loss she experienced early in her life and the agency that rescued her and gave her the perspective to think, create and transform her suffering into the art that has made her an “unmistakable poetic voice,” as the Nobel award states, “that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” In her adolescence, she suffered from anorexia, withdrew from school, and spent seven years in psychoanalysis where she was “awfully lucky that (she) had an analyst gifted enough to talk (her) down off the tree branch,” and with whom she learned how to think and eventually recover “a self that could be in the world.”
Among the general dynamics of Anorexia Nervosa reviewed in his classic study, “The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia,” Dr. Wilson lists the effect of the domineering and controlling personality of the mother, excessive drive repression and a split in the ego, with areas of relatively intact ego functioning and a capacity for a transference relationship. In their over-conscientiousness, the parents of anorexics over-control their child. Additionally, families showed over conscientious compulsive perfectionism resulting in infantilizing decision-making. Symptoms observed by other researchers in the field include: fears and terrors around body image; control and rejection of the body with its concomitant sexual drives, gender concerns, and mortality. A general unconscious solution postulated to operate among anorectics is the attempt to rid oneself of a separate sense of body, deindividuate and return to primal and symbiotic states with the mother.
While many of the dynamics of anorexia that fit Gluck’s pathology profile necessarily remain inferential or speculative, she has shared some of its particulars in various interviews. When, in one, inquiry was made of the nature of her growing pains, she revealed that through her analysis she learned that her anorectic pathology was a repudiation of her mother “whose will was overpowering and whose sense of ownership of her young was very intense,” and went on to say, “I needed a way of pushing her away.”
Further in the interview, Glück shared some conflicts and disturbances she had with her body image:
I also found unnerving the idea of beginning to have a body that was differentiated from other bodies. I wanted to be a pure soul, and I thought this is the most amazing strategy. I will become a pure soul. I will liberate myself from the constrictions and earthliness of the flesh. It was a great plan; the problem was that you die from it, and I realized that there was nothing in myself that was self-destructive. I was trying to create a self, but the problem was I chose badly.
It was a very, very, very important event for me which got me into psychoanalysis which became important to my thoughts. I feel as though I learned how to think in psychoanalysis, and I recovered a self that could be in the world.
Through her psychoanalysis, Glück was able to transform the suffering and loss she endured. She learned a way of being in the world and a method of perceiving and thinking which enabled her “to revenge” the old suffering by forcing many of the dynamics and elements of its pain and cure to yield a new form: her art and her poetry.
Observing the analytic process, Glück writes in an essay that “The task of the psychoanalyst is to listen closely enough to narrate the gaps, the unsaid, the center around which the said whirls from and to which it departs and returns.”
If we translate her understanding into psychoanalytic terminology using Ernst Kris’s study of the artistic process, we could state that aided by her analyst, Glück learned during her sessions how to regress in the service of those parts of her ego that retained intact functioning, and, through the process of free association, experience her conscious mind in the presence of the unconscious. In doing so she acquired, or had reinforced for her, “negative capability,” the essential poetic ability defined by John Keats as “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
As she was able to regress and free associate in her analytic sessions, her observing intact ego holding its own, and with the help of her therapist, abstracting and discover meaning and sense to the effluvia of conscious and unconscious data she brought to the sessions, so, too, in her poems, she creates observing personae who are able to wander intact in and out of fantasy, whether they be in the person of flowers troubled by an awareness that survives their dying, or the mythological Persephone eternally escaping from and returning to her body. In one poem, “Vespers,” she clearly asserts her capacity to use and control the regression: “I was not a child; I could take advantage of illusions.”
In her writing, Glück deals the most directly with her anorexia in the poem “Dedication to Hunger.” In it, she expresses her plan to liberate herself from the mortality of her body, become “a pure soul” perfectly by sacrificing “the interfering flesh” through a “dedication to hunger”:
It begins quietly
in certain female children:
the fear of death, taking as its form
dedication to hunger,
because a woman’s body
is a grave; it will accept
anything. I remember
lying in a bed at night
touching the soft, digressive breasts,
touching, at fifteen,
the interfering flesh
that I would sacrifice
until the limbs were free
of blossom and subterfuge: I felt
what I feel now, aligning these words–
it is the same need to perfect,
of which death is the mere byproduct.
Dedication to Hunger
In the poetry collection, The Wild Iris, Glück seems to revisit, work out and resolve transformatively some of the key elements of her former anorexia. In the collection she reconnects to her wish to become a pure soul and liberate herself from the constrictions and earthliness of matter by creatively leaving her mortal body and through an imaginative metempsychosis enter, exit, and reenter the stems bulbs and roots of conscious and self-reflecting flowers while experiencing the terrors both of their liberation and material reification:
Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
What despair is; then
Winter should have meaning for you.
I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring –
afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy
in the raw wind of the new world.
Snowdrops
It is terrible to survive
As consciousness
Buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
A soul and unable
To speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
Bending a little.
The Wild Iris
The great thing
Is not having
A mind. Feelings:
Oh, I have those; they
Govern me.
The Red Poppy
And finally in one poem, in seven of the most exquisite lines in modern literature, she states the epiphany that is her cure:
are you saying I can
flourish, having
no hope
of enduring? Blaze of the red cheek, glory
of the open throat, white,
spotted with crimson.
Vespers
She can reconnect with her body, fulfill herself –blaze—and, nevertheless, accept her mortality!
Other elements of the anorexia make their transformed appearance, their struggle for insight, throughout her poetry. In the poem “Mock Orange,” the speaker is nauseated by the overpowering sensuality and smell of flowers:
It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.
I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body –
Mock Orange
In several other poems, Glück assumes the persona of the mythological Persephone who was abducted, removed from the earth, rescued and returned again, replaying the anorectic’s defenselessness and complicity in her pathology:
She stands by the pool saying, from time to time,
I was abducted, but it sounds
wrong to her, nothing like what she felt.
Then she says, I was not abducted
Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted
to escape my body. Even sometimes,
I willed this. But ignorance
cannot will knowledge. Ignorance
wills something imagined, which it believes exists.
The Myth of Innocence
Concerns with deindividuation and return to primal maternal states appear throughout her poems:
Never forget you are my children.
You are not suffering because you touched each other
but because you were born,
because you required life
separate from me.
Early Darkness
I make
another case— being depressed, yes, but in a sense passionately
attached to the living tree, my body
actually curled in the split trunk, almost at peace, in the evening rain
almost able to feel
sap frothing and rising:
Matins
You can close your eyes now.
I have heard your cries, and cries before yours,
And the demand behind them.
I have shown you what you want:
Not belief, but capitulation
To authority, which depends on violence.
Spring Snow
You wanted to be born; I let you be born.
When has my grief ever gotten
in the way of your pleasure?
End of Winter
In the previously mentioned interview, Glück asserts another lesson from the psychoanalytic experience: “The artist like the analyst cultivates a disciplined refusal of self-deception.” That determined scrutiny appears in the relentless confrontations and hard questions scattered throughout her poems.
Her poetic style and reading demands seem also to have been shaped by the analytic process.
Commenting on her work, one reviewer states that while her writing “consists of a relatively simple vocabulary, it does not shy away from a complete break in coherence and creative use of cohesion (that) can make a second and third read of any given poem necessary before the general concepts are understood.” Of her own style preferences, Glück writes:
I am, myself, drawn to the unfinished, to sentences that falter. I dislike poems that feel too complete, the seal too tight; I dislike being herded into certainty. And I have sought and admired (and tried to write) poems in which questions outnumber answers. My preference (is) for the not-perfectly-coherent…
She admires a poet “who is willing to disappear, to dissolve in the void –or more accurately, to exist in particles, piecemeal: not “voice” as we know it, but strands of consciousness woven through the densely incomprehensible.”
All these assessments and reactions may reflect the influence of free association as the underlying method of communication in the poems. What seem to be unfinished, incoherent sentences, non-sequiturs, thought ellipses, may be like the superficially disparate data and objects of the unconscious that nevertheless have underlying and vital connection, but need a quasi-analytic listening that is only possible “with the third ear.” In her words, one has “to listen closely enough to narrate the gaps, the unsaid, the center around which the said whirls from and to which it departs and returns.” It’s what makes Glück both easy and demanding reading, a revenge she continues to exact!
Works referred to:
Louise Glück: American Originality
Essays On Poetry
American Academy of Achievement
Full Interview October 2012
Best Poems Encyclopedia (Online)
The Wild Iris
Danielle Knafo Revisiting Ernst Kris’s Concept of
Regression in the Service of the Ego in Art
Rudolph Pretzler: Louise Glück: Poem Analysis
Diana Voller: Negative Capability
- Philip Wilson: The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia
The Untrustworthy Speaker
By Louise Glück, 2020 Nobel Prize Winner in Literature
Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken.
I don’t see anything objectively.
I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
That’s when I’m least to be trusted.
It’s very sad, really: all my life I’ve been praised
For my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight-
In the end they’re wasted-
I never see myself.
Standing on the front steps. Holding my sisters hand.
That’s why I can’t account
For the bruises on her arm where the sleeve ends . . .
In my own mind, I’m invisible: that’s why I’m dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless.
We’re the cripples, the liars:
We’re the ones who should be factored out
In the interest of truth.
When I’m quiet, that’s when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house. The azaleas
Red and bright pink.
If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
To the older sister, block her out:
When a living thing is hurt like that
In its deepest workings,
All function is altered.
That’s why I’m not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
Is also a wound to the mind.