Abstract
The word ‘convulsive’, which I use to describe the only beauty which should concern us, would lose any meaning in my eyes were it to be conceived in motion and not at the exact expiration of this motion. There can be no beauty at all, as far as I am concerned — convulsive beauty — except at the cost of affirming the reciprocal relations linking the object seen in its motion and in its repose.1
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Notes
André Breton, Mad Love (L’Amour Fou), trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) 10. See also Nadja, in Oeuvres Completes, I, ed. M. Bonnet et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1988) 753: ‘La Beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas.’
See Hermione Lee’s comments on Eva Trout’s ‘preposterously haphazard plot’ (208), and Eva Trout as ‘an unfocused and bizarre conclusion to [Bowen’s] opus’ in her Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation (London: Vision, 1981) 206; and see John Hildebiddle’s unfortunate remarks on this as ‘the last (and, sadly, by far the worst) of her ten novels’, in his Five Irish Writers: The Errand of Keeping Alive (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989) 5.
See Benjamin B. Wolman, ed., International Encyclopedia of Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Neurology (New York: Aesculapius, 1977) III, 373: ‘Patients with catatonic syndrome of motor inhibition, muteness, negativism, posturing, mannerisms, and stereotypy will often respond rapidly to convulsive therapy’; and compare James
B. Lohr and Alexander A. Wisniewski, Movement Disorders: A Neuropsychiatric Approach (Chichester: Wiley, 1987) 227: ‘Severe catatonia is probably best treated with ECT.’
Convulsions — coughing, sneezing, even breathing — are included in Charles Darwin’s consideration of ‘reflex actions’, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, in The Works of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman, vol. 23 (London: William Pickering, 1989) 26–31. What is interesting about Darwin’s discussion of these ‘actions’ is his very clear uncertainty over the extent to which they are ‘voluntary’: coughing, sneezing, etc., constitute liminal ‘actions’ which can, to some extent, be controlled. And, as Darwin suggests, the voluntary or ‘conscious’ attempt to produce such mouth-events may actually interfere with the actions: ‘The conscious wish to perform a reflex action sometimes stops or interrupts its performance, though the proper sensory nerves may be stimulated’ (28) (as when we cannot swallow because we are thinking about swallowing). In his discussion of patients in the acute phase of encephalitis, Oliver Sacks relates convulsive movements to catatonia, when he notes ‘a wide spectrum of tics and compulsive movements at every functional level — yawning, coughing, sniffing, gasping, panting, breathholding, staring, glancing, bellowing, yelling, cursing, etc.’ (Awakenings, rev. edn. [London: Pan, 1982] 17).
Pierre Fontanier, quoted by Bernard Dupriez in A Dictionary of Literary Devices, trans. Albert W. Halsall (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) 357.
See also Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); and see Dupriez, A Dictionary of Literary Devices, 358, on the hallucinatory nature of the figure.
See de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, 75–6: prosopopoeia is ‘the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poein, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon)’. ‘Giving a Face to a Name’ is the title of Cynthia Chase’s essay on prosopopoeia in the work of de Man, in her Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1986) 82–112.
As Patrizia Magli, glossing Jacques Lacan, puts it, ‘The roles of its individual actors, such as the nose, eyes, eyebrows, mouth, all belong to the indefinite time of their action, to a fluctuating and unstructured logic, one based on the genesis and the relationship between movement, stasis and variations in speed.’ See ‘The Face and the Soul’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher et al., vol. 2 (New York: Zone, 1989) 87.
See Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) for an account of the importance and inevitability of a silent voicing at work in reading. At one point in his impressive and valuable book, Stewart comes close to articulating this notion of the prosopopoeia of reading: ‘The self-“disfiguring” inscription analyzed in de Man’s deconstructed rhetoric may therefore be further isolated and unstrung … within the dyslocutionary force of phonemic reading’ (156).
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© 1995 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle
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Bennett, A., Royle, N. (1995). Convulsions. In: Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374355_8
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