Chapter Threeeeee!

I just submitted Chapter Three to MR and am relieved that it is done. Well, kinda done, since I will have to revise and expand it once I her notes back...but you get the idea. Yay, me!

For your reading play-shur, here's the crux of my weirdest argument to date:

Obsessions with getting inside Eva in the novel provide the rather fractured scaffolding for Eva’s story, and it is this desire to get inside of her, psychologically, physically, and juridically that motivates the characters and the reader to try to decipher her motive for castrating and killing Davis. Though it is interesting and important to consider these desires and the kinds of historical, social, and politic issues they come to represent, I would argue that what the novel more crucially argues is what does it mean that we expect a narrative to reside in the body in the first place? In other words, what does it mean to bring the body to the forefront of a narrative, through the repetitive telling of a mock gynecological exam and a series of abject bodily consumptions and expulsions, only to realize that body says, “nothing?” And furthermore, what does our failure to register this “nothing” mean, as we assume the body carries an a priori narrative whose revelation constitutes not only whether or not a subject is empowered or dispossessed, but whether or not an individual is able to achieve subjectivity by the exposure or concealment of that bodily narrative?

By placing her gynecologically and abjectly constructed body at the center of the novel, Jones points to our assumptions and expectations that opening up the body through such renderings will then force it to speak, or to reveal speech acts that are a part of as much as they are in resistance to dominant narratives about Black women’s bodies. Furthermore, our expectations as readers will then locate the crux of our argument about how the body is and has been constructed historically, medically, scientifically, and juridically, and how Jones then resists these constructions. I would argue, instead, that what Jones critiques is precisely this expectation: that the body has a story to speak, that is speaks a “history that hurts,” and therefore has an a priori voice that through overdetermination becomes silenced, eradicated, or appropriated; and furthermore, whose recovery signals a resistant practice. While in many cases, this speech act is central to a narrative, I would argue that Jones is constructing a story that explicitly does not speak a specific history but instead works through a series of memories and how they collide in the moment, rather than function representatively for a set of histories. Jones seems to suggest that the body, instead, speaks “nothing.” Therefore, any attempt to address and redress such a voice and to assign meaning, whether personal, collective, or historical, to it constitutes an appropriation of that body for critical purposes and only serves to reify what Eva seeks to refuse: an explanation of her self, and the function of her body in that explanation, in any form.