Viscera

As I was reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje I was struck by how one particular passage of hallucinated anatomical rendering was like the viscerally-inflected passages that one finds in Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body. The one was published in 1970 and the translation of the other appeared in 1975. There is no question of influence. Confluence, perhaps.

Ondaatje remarks in a 2008 afterward that

one day I walked into Coach House Press and found some of the printers and designers there listening to a tape that the Vancouver artist Roy Kiyooka had made of himself reading one of the prose sections in the book. As I listened I was for the first time shocked at the violence of it, almost scared of it.

Part of the impact is the use of first person pronouns — creates an identificatory mechannism. Consider the scene recounted by Billy where after days of riding chained to a horse this happens — a hand is plunged through the body:

Down the long cool hand went scratching the freckles and warts in my throat breaking through veins like pieces of long glass tubing, touched my heart with his wrist, down he went the liquid yellow from my busted brain finally vanishing as it passed through soft warm stomach like a luscious blood wet oasis, weaving in and out of the red yellow blue green nerves moving uncertainly through wrong fissures ending pausing at cul de sacs of bone then retreating slow leaving the pain of suctions then down the proper path through pyramids of bone that were there when I was born, through grooves the fingers spanning the merging paths of medians of blue matter, the long cool hand going down brushing cobwebs of nerves the horizontal pain pits, lobules gyres notches arcs tracts fissures roots' white insulation of dead seven year cells clinging things rubbing them off on the tracts of spine down the cool precise fingers went into the cistern of bladder down the last hundred miles in a jerk breaking through my sacs of sperm got my cock in the cool fingers pulled it back up and carried it pulling pulling flabby as smoke up the path his arm had rested in and widened.

And it goes on and our hero can claim, and does, to have been truly fucked.

And the Wittig, you wonder?

There are scenes of entrails wreathed around necks, devourings, flayings. But what I wanted to draw attention to here is the sections written out in all caps just like an ancient Roman inscription. These are made up of anatomical lists. Though all that they are is lists, the pilling on conveys the muchness of the body. Take this listing:

THE ARTERIAL BLOOD THE AORTIC
BLOOD THE VENULES THE
ARTERIOLES THE CAPILLARY VES-
SELS THE AORTA THE CAROTID
THE CEPHALIC THE JUGULAR THE
CORONARY THE OESOPHAGEAL
THE PULMONARY THE FACIAL THE
TEMPORAL THE SUBCLAVIAN THE
MAMMARY THE BRACHIAL THE
MESENTERIC THE RENAL THE LUM-
BAR THE ILIAC THE SACRAL THE
RADIAL THE SAPHENOUS THE
TIBIALS THE VENA CAVA THE
PORTAL VEIN THE PULMONARY
THE COAGULATION THE CLOTTING
THE CONCRETIONS THE CLOTS
THE SOLIDIFICATIONS

Anatomy becomes geography; territory conquered.

And so for day 887
18.05.2009