Norman Fischer
Alice Notley’s Reason and Other Women (Chax 2010).
Originally prepared for presentation at “Alette in Oakland,” Oakland, California, 2014
Alice Notley’s 2010 book Reason and Other Women was published by Chax Press in Tucson. Charles Alexander runs Chax, which has just moved to Texas, and I want to thank him for publishing this difficult text — it was a labor of love. The book follows on from “Descent of Alette" and was written soon after I believe — a good decade before its publication. Its themes and intentions are similar to those of Alette, but this is a more radical, chaotic, uninhibited, and intense work. Parts of “Reason and Other Women” appeared, before publication, in Notley’s new and selected, which was published under the title “Grave of Light”— which is also the title of one of the long poems in “Reason and Other Women.”
Reason and Other Women is a series of poems that begins more or less quietly and grows in intensity as the book progresses. This version, at a very dense 191 pages, is an excerpt from a longer version, according to Notley’s preface.
Because, as Notley mentions, Byzantine art figures into the plan for the book, we have the metaphor of the mosaic, glinting parts glued together to make shimmering images, and we have Christian themes, Jesus, Mary, Moses, nativity, saints, and so on, all mixed with important dreams, daily events, the myth of daily life. I’m imagining the actual churches of Paris, the art therein, and their feeling.
Christine de Pizan was an extraordinary writer. A fourteenth century Italian/French woman of noble birth, she was, unusually, fully educated — one account says she was a graduate of the University of Bologne. Married at 15, she lost her husband when she was 25; there was a dispute about the estate, and, without funds, she set about supporting herself, a few of her female relatives, and her children, by writing. She wrote poems and other texts for members of the court. Her most famous book is the one Notley cites, La Cite des Dames (“The Ladies’ City”). Excerpts can be found in Google Books. Christine writes with an easy grace, in fact the effortlessness and elegance of her style, and the crystal clarity of her voice, reminds me of Notley. The conceit of the book is that Christine is building a city of ladies as a strong defense against male attacks on women. She builds it with the literal bodies and thoughts of virtuous women of the past. In Part I of the book she describes how she was reading a work by Matheolus called Lamentations, which is about the lamentable state of marriage, a condition in which women make men’s lives miserable. Wikipedia says:
Christine becomes upset and feels ashamed to be a woman: “This thought inspired such a great sense of disgust and sadness
in me that I began to despise myself and the whole of my sex as an aberration in nature.” The three Virtues [Reason, Rectitude,
and Justice] then appear to Christine as ladies, and each lady tells Christine what her role will be in helping her build the City
of Ladies. Lady Reason, a virtue developed by Christine for the purpose of her book, is the first to join Christine. She helps
her build the external walls of the city. She answers Christine's questions about why some men slander women, [refuting
with calm reason each specific instance of criticism of women from literary sources that Christine brings up] and this helps
Christine to prepare the ground on which the city will be built. She tells Christine to “take the spade of [her] intelligence and
dig deep to make a trench all around [the city] … [and Reason will] help to carry away the hods of earth on [her] shoulders.”
These “hods of earth” are the past beliefs Christine has held. Christine, in the beginning of the text, believed that women must
truly be bad because she “could scarcely find a moral work by any author which didn't devote some chapter or paragraph
to attacking the female sex. [Therefore she] had to accept [these authors] unfavourable opinion[s] of women since it
was unlikely that so many learned men, who seemed to be endowed with such great intelligence and insight into all things,
could possibly have lied on so many different occasions.
[But as she builds the city, guided by Ladies Reason, Rectitude and Justice, she talks herself and her readers out of this view, and establishes that women are virtuous and intelligent. Christine writes as a faithful Christian, a defender of the right and the good, and for the rest of her life an eloquent champion of women — having engaged in public debates on this topic — using her good humor, irony, and powers of rhetoric to make her case].
Although Notley is not following Christine’s book closely — she has her own mythology and plan — which as she says she often loses track of — because clearly the book is constantly getting the best of her, taking her places she might not have intended to go, and as you read you also are taken places you might not have wanted to go, that can be by turns dazzling, bewildering, and disturbing — although Notley is not tracking Christine she actually might be Christine, re-writing Christine the way Pierre Renard re-writes Don Quixote in the story by Borges. Of course her text is a different text, and yet it might also be the same.
I confess myself to being shocked by the condition of what we call the world, not only the political world of violence and stupidity, but the brutal stupidity of everyday life — still almost entirely a creation of males. It is shocking to think that, as Christine says, before the 14th century virtually every male author expressed contempt for women — and shocking the extent to which this is still the case, not only in print but, worse, also that rape, trafficing, domestic violence, sexual harassment, fear and loathing in many forms in regard to women is still pervasive, that it is still dangerous to be a woman. There are, as there should be, various protests and complaints about this but none more thoroughgoing or devastating than in Notley’s works. Her works, like Reason and Other Women, are not dismissive of or embittered about men. She has had after all remarkable husbands, and two sons. But her works do express her utter rejection of, and her fully empowered revision of, a flat dull violent male universe— a revision that involves the creation of convincing alternative worlds that striate this apparent world, hollowing it out from the inside, until it collapse.
Grave of Light — the nature and the force of these alternative worlds comes from death, which isn’t death, but rather a crack in time, that opens, floods time with light, that shimmers out from crystals — and dreams — which also destroy or massage time. A crux: caring for others. There are infinite tiny humans in our blood stream. I want an always which burns up from this depth — but I am losing everything if I continue in this voice — no memory. there is no better than frayedness than suffering what makes you think there is better than better than fear there is no better than fear or fragility being crushed there is no better than, those who are strong are inferior…
Reason and Other Women is indeed a very difficult book to read — I think ten or twelve pages at a sitting is too much. It took me more than a year to read it, and I had to stop and start again several times. It is a difficult experience, a confrontation with consciousness in all its lurid confusion; it may not actually be a book. Still, it is a pleasure to read, to be in such hands, buoyed up by such a mind — resourceful, witty, and tough.
Much as The Descent of Alette included the much remarked on technique of quotation marks, this book uses the technique of words falling apart. Written on a computer, the language includes what seem to be typos, words written at the speed of thought in flight so sometimes sloughing off parts of themselves, which makes the writing more immediate than reading can track. Also there is a convention of often but not always not using apostrophes for contractions, so "i’ll" becomes "ill," "won’t" becomes "wont," "can’t" becomes "cant, " "i’d" becomes "id," and so on. The book is written from a standpoint outside this terrible world, this wooden, repetitive, and impossibly crude world that we are living in, this world in which we appear to be at a weekend conference (poetry conferences are several times referred to in the book) on the work of Alice Notley but that is not what is going on.
Originally prepared for presentation at “Alette in Oakland,” Oakland, California, 2014
Alice Notley’s 2010 book Reason and Other Women was published by Chax Press in Tucson. Charles Alexander runs Chax, which has just moved to Texas, and I want to thank him for publishing this difficult text — it was a labor of love. The book follows on from “Descent of Alette" and was written soon after I believe — a good decade before its publication. Its themes and intentions are similar to those of Alette, but this is a more radical, chaotic, uninhibited, and intense work. Parts of “Reason and Other Women” appeared, before publication, in Notley’s new and selected, which was published under the title “Grave of Light”— which is also the title of one of the long poems in “Reason and Other Women.”
Reason and Other Women is a series of poems that begins more or less quietly and grows in intensity as the book progresses. This version, at a very dense 191 pages, is an excerpt from a longer version, according to Notley’s preface.
Because, as Notley mentions, Byzantine art figures into the plan for the book, we have the metaphor of the mosaic, glinting parts glued together to make shimmering images, and we have Christian themes, Jesus, Mary, Moses, nativity, saints, and so on, all mixed with important dreams, daily events, the myth of daily life. I’m imagining the actual churches of Paris, the art therein, and their feeling.
Christine de Pizan was an extraordinary writer. A fourteenth century Italian/French woman of noble birth, she was, unusually, fully educated — one account says she was a graduate of the University of Bologne. Married at 15, she lost her husband when she was 25; there was a dispute about the estate, and, without funds, she set about supporting herself, a few of her female relatives, and her children, by writing. She wrote poems and other texts for members of the court. Her most famous book is the one Notley cites, La Cite des Dames (“The Ladies’ City”). Excerpts can be found in Google Books. Christine writes with an easy grace, in fact the effortlessness and elegance of her style, and the crystal clarity of her voice, reminds me of Notley. The conceit of the book is that Christine is building a city of ladies as a strong defense against male attacks on women. She builds it with the literal bodies and thoughts of virtuous women of the past. In Part I of the book she describes how she was reading a work by Matheolus called Lamentations, which is about the lamentable state of marriage, a condition in which women make men’s lives miserable. Wikipedia says:
Christine becomes upset and feels ashamed to be a woman: “This thought inspired such a great sense of disgust and sadness
in me that I began to despise myself and the whole of my sex as an aberration in nature.” The three Virtues [Reason, Rectitude,
and Justice] then appear to Christine as ladies, and each lady tells Christine what her role will be in helping her build the City
of Ladies. Lady Reason, a virtue developed by Christine for the purpose of her book, is the first to join Christine. She helps
her build the external walls of the city. She answers Christine's questions about why some men slander women, [refuting
with calm reason each specific instance of criticism of women from literary sources that Christine brings up] and this helps
Christine to prepare the ground on which the city will be built. She tells Christine to “take the spade of [her] intelligence and
dig deep to make a trench all around [the city] … [and Reason will] help to carry away the hods of earth on [her] shoulders.”
These “hods of earth” are the past beliefs Christine has held. Christine, in the beginning of the text, believed that women must
truly be bad because she “could scarcely find a moral work by any author which didn't devote some chapter or paragraph
to attacking the female sex. [Therefore she] had to accept [these authors] unfavourable opinion[s] of women since it
was unlikely that so many learned men, who seemed to be endowed with such great intelligence and insight into all things,
could possibly have lied on so many different occasions.
[But as she builds the city, guided by Ladies Reason, Rectitude and Justice, she talks herself and her readers out of this view, and establishes that women are virtuous and intelligent. Christine writes as a faithful Christian, a defender of the right and the good, and for the rest of her life an eloquent champion of women — having engaged in public debates on this topic — using her good humor, irony, and powers of rhetoric to make her case].
Although Notley is not following Christine’s book closely — she has her own mythology and plan — which as she says she often loses track of — because clearly the book is constantly getting the best of her, taking her places she might not have intended to go, and as you read you also are taken places you might not have wanted to go, that can be by turns dazzling, bewildering, and disturbing — although Notley is not tracking Christine she actually might be Christine, re-writing Christine the way Pierre Renard re-writes Don Quixote in the story by Borges. Of course her text is a different text, and yet it might also be the same.
I confess myself to being shocked by the condition of what we call the world, not only the political world of violence and stupidity, but the brutal stupidity of everyday life — still almost entirely a creation of males. It is shocking to think that, as Christine says, before the 14th century virtually every male author expressed contempt for women — and shocking the extent to which this is still the case, not only in print but, worse, also that rape, trafficing, domestic violence, sexual harassment, fear and loathing in many forms in regard to women is still pervasive, that it is still dangerous to be a woman. There are, as there should be, various protests and complaints about this but none more thoroughgoing or devastating than in Notley’s works. Her works, like Reason and Other Women, are not dismissive of or embittered about men. She has had after all remarkable husbands, and two sons. But her works do express her utter rejection of, and her fully empowered revision of, a flat dull violent male universe— a revision that involves the creation of convincing alternative worlds that striate this apparent world, hollowing it out from the inside, until it collapse.
Grave of Light — the nature and the force of these alternative worlds comes from death, which isn’t death, but rather a crack in time, that opens, floods time with light, that shimmers out from crystals — and dreams — which also destroy or massage time. A crux: caring for others. There are infinite tiny humans in our blood stream. I want an always which burns up from this depth — but I am losing everything if I continue in this voice — no memory. there is no better than frayedness than suffering what makes you think there is better than better than fear there is no better than fear or fragility being crushed there is no better than, those who are strong are inferior…
Reason and Other Women is indeed a very difficult book to read — I think ten or twelve pages at a sitting is too much. It took me more than a year to read it, and I had to stop and start again several times. It is a difficult experience, a confrontation with consciousness in all its lurid confusion; it may not actually be a book. Still, it is a pleasure to read, to be in such hands, buoyed up by such a mind — resourceful, witty, and tough.
Much as The Descent of Alette included the much remarked on technique of quotation marks, this book uses the technique of words falling apart. Written on a computer, the language includes what seem to be typos, words written at the speed of thought in flight so sometimes sloughing off parts of themselves, which makes the writing more immediate than reading can track. Also there is a convention of often but not always not using apostrophes for contractions, so "i’ll" becomes "ill," "won’t" becomes "wont," "can’t" becomes "cant, " "i’d" becomes "id," and so on. The book is written from a standpoint outside this terrible world, this wooden, repetitive, and impossibly crude world that we are living in, this world in which we appear to be at a weekend conference (poetry conferences are several times referred to in the book) on the work of Alice Notley but that is not what is going on.