Student Blog Post: Reading Practices with/and Corregidora by Gabrielle Rajerison

In order to conserve space and preserve the element of suspense (if not so much surprise) for my presentation Tuesday, here are three provocations:

(1) In a Split Second of Hate and Love: The (Il)legible, the Liminal, and the Black Body

Despite the twenty-two year gap between when the lovers had last been together, the end of Corregidora finds Ursa and Mutt’s reunion plagued less by the memories of their prior relationship than by their mutual inability to risk moving toward uncharted territories. Even their physical surroundings confirm this groove: “It wasn’t the same room,” Ursa tells us of where Mutt is staying, “but the same place.” Similarly, when Ursa performs oral sex on Mutt for the first time in their entire relationship, his sole response is to repeatedly state that he never thought she would. 

Yet there is something to be said about Ursa’s gesture toward a “first” it’s unsurprising that it’s in this moment that she is finally able to reconcile herself with something that has haunted her throughout the book: 

It had to be sexual, I was thinking, it had to be something sexual that Great Gram did to Corregidora. I knew it had to be sexual: “What is it a woman can do to a man that make him hate her so bad he wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking about her and can’t get her out of his mind the next?” In a split second I knew what it was, in a split second of hate and love I knew what it was, and I think he might have known too. A moment of pleasure and excruciating pain at the same time, a moment of broken skin but not sexlessness, a moment just before sexlessness, a moment that stops just before sexlessness, a moment that stops before it breaks the skin: “I could kill you.”

Such insight is crystalizing for Ursa, and yet she reflects on her own illegibility immediately after: “It was like I didn’t know how much was me and Mutt and how much was Great Gram and Corregidora…”

This realization also provides the catalyst for the novel’s final stretch of dialogue, a call-and-response that begins with Ursa insisting upon her ability to inflict pain on Mutt and ends with him holding her after she admits she does not want to be hurt either. As Emily Lordi has argued, such an ending does not achieve the level of closure or—more importantly—“progress” readers and critics might desire or expect. Instead, it pinches at the possibilities of interpretation, daring critics to squeeze from its taut prose whatever they need in order to defend the readings they’ve already decided are true. 

However, my return to this moment is not to labor over the ending. Instead, I’d like to linger over that “split second” (which, considering the novel’s succinct style, is actually given a wide berth to linger on its own). Within this space of “hate and love,” Ursa informs us, is both the ability to achieve power against another, however slim and ephemeral, and the risk of losing one’s own legibility within others. I wonder, within the scope of our class, what other (actual, theoretical) black things might exist or be made possible within this “split second”; this black hole?

(2) The New World Artist at Work: Yona, Billie, Gayl, Ursa

Ursa spends the latter part of her life attempting to create a “New World song” and we have spent the latter part of this class attempting to delineate what, besides the obvious, differentiates the spoken/sung from the written word. Though a sharpening of vocabulary (“vernacular” vs. “dialect”) has done little to settle the debate, artists like Yona Harvey and critics like Emily Lordi allow for the nurturance of a third option, one in which the relationship between the written and the sonic is not only mutually generative but deliberately unstable.

Corregidora adds to this semester-long layering in its portrayal of a black female musician. While Harvey’s lyric reflections on being a literary artist brought us closer to a discussion of artists portraying artists—“Who’s Frieda,” she wrote, and we recognized in this cross-medium kinship a genealogy—Jones’s portrayal of a blues singer within what many critics have characterized as a “blues novel” throws us right in. Lordi’s own analysis of Corregidora provides some avenues through which to answer this call, but as her reading is craft-based (and thus focused on Jones) rather than representation-based (which would focus more on Ursa), I feel there’s still a lot of room—even within the confines of her own reading—to explore.

Obviously, any discussion of Ursa’s character revolves back to Jones but I’m curious as to how those who had not previously read the book responded to the relationship between form, content, and character prior to reading Lordi’s chapter. Are the anxieties or pressures about the written word vs. the spoken word alleviated or heightened when the written speaker is a singer? Did what Lordi called Ursa’s inaccessible interfere with your ability to “hear” her singing? What do you think a “New World song” sounds like? Do you think it’s even possible?

(3) Toward a More Curious Criticism: Corregidora, Reading, and Form/alism

Though Le’Mil will discuss Lordi’s Black Resonance in more detail in his own post and presentation, I’d like to use her chapter on Gayl Jones’s Corregidora as a starting point for this final baiting.

Central to Lordi’s reading of Corregidora is her teasing out of the novel’s “mixture of the recognizable and unpredictable”—a practice which not only aligns Jones, in Lordi’s eyes, with Billie Holiday but also sets the novel against the more common readings of its structure. These interpretations tend to fall into one of two sets: they either read Corregidora’s form as confirming its status as a “blues novel” or as confirming its psychoanalytic investment in trauma.

While neither reading is wrong (and both, in fact, can be helpful in illuminating the narrative at large), each approaches the novel as if it might be made more legible through sheer categorization; whether intentionally or not, they each seek to erase what is deliberately and profoundly “unaccountable” in Jones’s work. Just as dangerously, these approaches are typically couched in “predetermined and abstracted ideas” which, if not challenged, will not only confirm their own findings but also only ever find the same thing each time. In other words, by assuming the stability between varying categories (literature and music most prominently), many of these critics forsake the ability to be “curious” about those relationships, a trait Lordi explicitly associates with the vitality of community and implicitly associates with the vitality of criticism itself.

Much of the discomfort around Corregidora’s legibility, Lordi argues, has to do with the almost universal response it evokes in its readers as a novel which is both haunted and “haunting.” The tension between the desire to remain vulnerable to intense, even uncomfortable, responses to artworks and the desire to default to an uncritical intellectual autopilot is not itself new. Contemporary critical works like Jennifer Doyle’s Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art and Eugenie Brinkema’s The Forms of the Affects revolve around this very problematic. Like Doyle and Brinkema, Lordi asserts that “one always risks misreading, misrecognizing, getting it wrong when responding to haunting expression.” It is in “admitting” this risk that critics are able to move toward readings that not only analyze but also enhance understanding.

I rehearse this intellectual journey in order to ask how y’all perceived Lordi’s challenge. What might it mean, amid weekly theoretical readings we may or may not be desperate to apply, to remain “curious” about the texts we share (without deflecting into indecision)? Practically speaking, what differentiates a desire to understand that’s fueled by curiosity from one that’s fueled by the need to dominate a text? To speak even more practically, how might we become better at, first, reading for where texts resist rather than just where they comply and, second, preserving what is (for lack of a better term) “unreadable”?