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Owls and rebirth in the parallel worlds of the Kur underworld and the subway 9
WORKS CITED 15
1
Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
Notley’s poetic praxis starts from the deconstruction of the very notion of words.
Words are powerful; they form the boundaries around ideas. For Notley, the “doors in [her]
mind” separating ephemera and chimera are made of words. This is seen in a study conducted
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
by Jules Davidoff on the Himba tribe of Namibia, which showed that humans are only able to
recognise the differences between perceived objects (in this case the idea of colour) when
specific categories for those different objects exist in their language. The Himbas were able
to distinguish between shades of green too close together for English speakers to recognise,
while the converse was true for the same shade of green as before when contrasted with the
colour blue (Roberson et al.) (Fig. 1).
Despite all human eyes having the same basic functionality, capable of perceiving
every colour in the visible spectrum impartially, differences arose when the two groups were
asked to communicate these colours, an act which required the subjects to categorise them.
Framing this phenomenon using linguistic terminology, we can see that it proves Notley’s
observation that words are inefficacious in expressing reality. The full spectrum of hues and
shades (the “referent”) is arbitrarily encoded into the distinct categories “buru/dambu” and
“green/blue” (“signifiers”), which delimits the ways in which one is able to communicate
what is perceived with others. Since “everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by
men as subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world” (Berger and Luckmann),
language is the mode of this interpretation.
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
At first glance, this may seem like not at all a problem for Notley, who commonly
“disobeys her readership” and whose work even “denies their existence” at times (“The
Poetics of Disobedience”). However, the problem arises because words not only regulate
external communication, but also have great bearing on the process of internal ideation. Even
when a thought is never externally expressed, in order for it to develop and take root it must
first be encoded into words, which allows the thinker to in turn decode it and form a picture
of reality (Fig. 2). To Notley, this act of letting linguistic structures reconfigure one’s own
internal perception of reality is a cardinal sin, calling it a “veil over clear thinking”.
(loss of
decodes ↑ ↓ encodes
information)
READER ← SIGN
or the SELF received by or word
Fig. 2: Semiotic chronology of reference, showing how communication and ideation can become
constrained by linguistic structures in everyday life
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
But what does this mean for her poems? Avant garde though they may be, throughout
Notley’s myriad works over the course of her career there is a common theme — that of her
‘voice’, an idea that encompasses more than just the physical act of speaking. Rather, it is an
instrument by which the poet “establishes or continues no tradition except one that literally
can’t exist—the celebration of the singular thought sung at a particular instant in a unique
voice” (Brouwer), which in structuralist linguistics would be considered the purest form of an
illocutionary act (Ogden and Richards), or “parole” by Saussure, the manifestation of the
speaker’s individual will. Appropriately, The Descent of Alette, the text I have chosen to
analyse for this essay, has been described as a “spoken text” (Penguin Books). Approaching it
from this angle, I aim to explore how Notley uses her “singular voice”, or parole, to redefine
the socio-linguistic construction of reality, or langue.
In The Descent of Alette (referred to as Alette from hereon), Notley’s voice can be
seen to exist outside of the category systems of the english language by violating its linguistic
rules. The epic begins with these lines:
"One day, I awoke" "& found myself on" "a subway, endlessly"
The pious repetition of quotation marks seen in these lines reveals Notley’s skepticism
of dominant forms. Enclosing each clause and isolating it as a separate unit on the page,
distinct from the overarching whole, the quotation marks cause the speaker’s narrative to
undergo fragmentation, which effects a staccato-like cadence that causes the poem to divorce
from traditional conceptions about poetry being meditative and refined to become raw and
direct. This syntagmatic disruption, although undermining the superficial coherence of the
work, gives the impression that “each phrase is a thing said by a voice” (Notley, The Descent
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
of Alette). The poetic metric is a facet of linguistic structures which Alette seeks to undo;
more than just suggest a vocalised modality, the transposing of the entire poem into quotation
marks serves to “measure” it - mentioned within her notes - in isocolic variable foot (ibid).
Variable feet is a notable post-metric technique first developed by William Carlos Williams,
where each line corresponds to one breath unit. In the context of Alette, the technique creates
a literal “breathing”-like rhythm of the poem that, while staccato, forms a stream of
consciousness-like style in which every unit reflects a singular thought. For example, in the
opening line, each “unit” is consistent in neither clause nor syntax, lending a state of
disjointed confusion, in response to “awaking” in the “subway”, to the text impossible with
formalistic conventions. The line seems to be coming unfiltered from its speaker’s mind,
reflecting her psyche, instead of a rehearsed meditation. As stated by the poet and critic
Harold Bloom, “a poetic text… is a psychic battlefield upon which authentic forces struggle
for the only victory worth winning” (Bloom). It is no mere coincidence, then, that the word
“psyche” itself is ultimately derived from the Indo-European root “bhes”, meaning “to
breathe”, and was possibly onomatopoeic in its origins (ibid). Through this, the speaker is
literally “breathing” the most authentic version of her psyche into the text, allowing Notley to
“blow away the gauze” from her authorial intent by exposing its unadulterated nature.
Quotation marks are also a sign that usually denote verbatim citation, often used
formally to lend credibility to a piece of original work by invoking the authority of others,
especially in nonfiction and academic writing. In a literary tradition where quotation
produces integrity and allusion is a prerequisite for credibility, Notley dismantles the custom
of “standing on the shoulders of giants” and instead stands on her own two feet. This ties
back in to her disavowal from Disobedience: “NO doctrines.” Given Notley’s cartesian belief
that truth originates from the self, her use of quotation marks throughout the entire length of
Alette is satirical, parodying ethos as a direct riposte to poetic canon in which “a poem is not
a [self-contained] thing but only words that refer to other words… A poem is not writing, but
rewriting” (ibid).
This is precisely the force which Notley’s entire body of work exists to resist; later in Alette,
the speaker encounters a crying woman who laments:
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
The painter symbolises Notley and her contemporaries who faced the dilemma of
writing feminist poetry in a language saturated with masculine influence, akin to a “painter”
attempting to free herself through art but realising that all “forms” and “shapes” are
ultimately “owned” by her oppressor. Therefore, her art can never truly be her own. Notley’s
style of postmodern poetry rebels against the trope of essentialism that governs category
systems in language and social life, envisioned by her as an invisible but pervasive dogmatic
force, and embodied by the tyrant, infusing everything with the essence of the masculine
within the domain of the “endless subway”. Moreover, the overarching imagery of a world
consisting of trains travelling through tunnels is a subtle invocation of Freudian symbolism,
hinting at the phallogocentric structure of language and how the world of the subway is
incorporated with forms of the tyrant’s body (Ebert; McCabe). The lines “we rode the trains”
“Got on, got off” “Sat & / watched, sat” “& slept” “Walked from car to car” “Stood in
stations” / “We were caught up” “in movement” “in ongoingness” present a liminal industrial
space. Mechanical, soulless, suffocating, the pointlessly “ongoing” “movement” of the
passengers, and Bloom’s “writing” and “rewriting” with words that are “just positions” are
the same; a vain navigation of a world made of forms owned by others. “Sitting”, “watching”,
“sleeping”, “walking”, and “standing” all are reduced to meaningless positions. To dwell in
such a place is ephemeral in nature, the constant shriek and clagour of metal grinding against
metal making respite impossible. The ephemeral architecture of this phantasmagoric subway
mirrors that of language, echoing Notley’s own beliefs that words are simply “positions”
sequentially locked together by convention, but in constant aimless motion.
Alette, throughout its 136 pages, contains a rich tapestry weaved with symbols which
belie a deep linguistic and cultural heritage. However, instead of paying tribute, Notley paints
this collection of semiotics as a massive and unnavigable amalgamation of both corporeal and
incorporeal relics:
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
“ ‘As the old man lies dying” “in his bishop’s robe & gown”
“surrounded” “by museum cases full of jewels” “& gold”
“shards of Venuses” “oldest potteries”
If the world and iconography of Alette embody the dark and stifling social reality of
modern life as constructed by the occidental and masculine langue, then its form and its
content embody Notley’s efforts to transcend its limitations. Alette as a whole borrows
heavily from the tropes of epic poetry, and its depiction of the hero’s journey acculturated for
the twentieth century draws continual and striking parallels to the Gnostic Sumerian epic The
Descent of Inanna, the first ever recorded poem in human history, which Notley has cited as a
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
major source of inspiration for Alette (Cline). Alette is at once industrial and dystopic but also
hellish and spiritual, littered with direct references to the “underworld” (105). “Caves” and
“caverns” are mentioned 102 times, while “demon-saints” are also a recurring theme. This is
reminiscent of Mesopotamian mythology, which describes the underworld as an underground
cavern populated by deities and a “shadowy version of life on earth” (“Mesopotamian Beliefs
in the Afterlife”). Alette’s odyssey deep into the subway, culminating in her final encounter
with the tyrant, also parallels Inanna’s confrontation with the Anuna (seven judges) in the
original Sumerian manuscript (Black and Cunningham).
Revitalising an archaic form of the epic, Notley enacts another act of disobedience
against literary hegemony. A genre canonised by Dante’s Inferno, Homer’s the Odyssey, The
Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, and other grand myths inspired by Greco-Roman and Christian culture,
epics have been “in every culture, [the story of] a man who changes everything by entering
into combat” (Notley, “Between the Living and the Dead”). As such, they have become
another male-dominated literary territory. However, by alluding to ancient Shamanistic
writings in the form of Inanna, Notley recalls a primordial time preceding the formation of
familiar conventions and language structures; before the formation of poetic doctrines, before
the constraints of eurocentric masculine hegemony had been erected, and before the “veil”
had been put over “clear thinking”. By playing the role of literary archaeologist, uncovering
lost literature buried by Western tradition, she undermines normative linguistic paradigms.
Notley thus offers a possible means of escape from literary hegemony, by going back in time
to apprehend the possibility of a woman embarking upon the classical masculine hero’s
journey, reclaiming her feminine agency.
5. Owls and rebirth in the parallel worlds of the Kur underworld and the
subway
In Alette, Notley traces Alette’s emancipation from the shackles of the tyrant’s forms
through rebirth, a theme also significant in Inanna: “The afflicted [Inanna] was turned into a
corpse. And the corpse was hung on a hook (Black and Cunningham verse 172). …“[The
gala-tura] sprinkled on [the corpse] the life-giving plant and [the kur-jara] the life-giving
water. And thus Inanna arose (verse 281).” This process of rebirth is quintessential for the
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
rebellious Alette as it represents the shedding of her old body, which is constituted of the “old
forms” owned by the tyrant. However, in its place a new form must take root, something to
allow her to materialise her new feminine heroism. It is no coincidence, therefore, that in
Alette’s push originward down through the ever spiralling subway tunnels to discover
alternative ways of “being”, her journey is fated to converge with Inanna’s journey almost six
millenia prior. While Inanna is never explicitly mentioned in Alette, her presence pervades
the text, in which her symbol, the owl (“The Burney Relief”), is mentioned 71 times. The owl
is one of the only organic forms in the mechanical subway other than the passengers
themselves, and its foreignness hints that it may have originated elsewhere:
“A huge owl”
…“‘How are you here?’ I asked him” “He said, ‘I am” “a projection”
“from another place”
…“‘when you meet [the tyrant],” “I will help you”
Alette’s first encounter with the owl is a clue towards the answer to the painter’s
tragic quest — “I have been trying to find a form the tyrant doesn’t own” — as he claims to
be from “another place”. In reality, he is a “projection” of Inanna herself, who acts as the
unseen mentor to Alette. Later, Alette is reborn into an owl:
Her new body is a gift from Inanna, whose pantheistic influence is starting to infuse
the subway as the epic progresses, toppling the tyrant’s monopoly over form. Alette grows
“wings” and “talons”, and the bodily marker for her gender, her “vagina”, is transmogrified,
signifying a transcendence beyond the conceptions of traditional femininity. It is also a
somatic embodiment of Notley’s reformation of linguistic structures. As Notley parses the
narratives of Alette into fragments, and eschews masculine poetic convention in favour of the
archaic (see sections 2 and 4), Alette herself has gained “owl’s eyes”, “wings” and “talons”,
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
transforming into a wholly new mode of womanhood. Through Inanna’s guidance, Alette has
been reborn, and can begin to inhabit a body that is no longer owned by the tyrant.
Notley’s final act in Alette is her most profound. It is the deconstruction and
reconstruction of the concept of “binary opposition” itself, and its replacement with the
self-evident identity. Drawing back to structural linguistics (see section 1), we see that Notley
holds the view of linguistic determinism — that the categories predicated in language become
naturalised in the social construction of the world. Claude Levi-Strauss outlined in
Mythologiques that in western society, all the categories within any paradigm can be reduced
to two contrasting “operators”, a phenomenon he labelled “binary opposition” (Dundes).
Notley knows her enemy, and seeks to dismantle it: in the tyrant’s domain, the existence of
one thing necessitates the destruction of another. The machine-like calculus of the subway
leaves no room for the organic (Notley, The Descent of Alette 114, 124): the tyrant’s
monopoly over forms renders artists powerless (29), death’s absence creates fear of “personal
extinction” (58), “beauty” and “soulfulness” are sacrificed in the name of control (124), and
most importantly, in a world where everything is infused with masculinity, womanhood is
“nonexistent” (46).
Notley’s remedy is the greatest and most overarching semoitic motif in not just Alette,
but in her entire body of work — the idea of the “I” and “me”. Notley has always maintained
that her work concerns itself with “realising the first person singular as nakedly as possible”
(“The Poetics of Disobedience”), like an ode to the self. Notley states in an interview, “I
wanted to find “my self” - as the only self I could investigate - in the context of my past”
(“Love, Alice”). For her, the “me” is the “real real”, the chimeric, her “naked self”
undisturbed by the “structured (language) structures predisposed to serve as structuring
structures” (Power). In fact, in Alette, the most dominant recurring icon is that of the “I” and
the “me” in the subjective and personal sense. As explored, Alette is energised with the
speaker’s unique voice, and it is this notion of the “individual voice” which shakes the
foundations of language with its proclamation of renewed womanhood:
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
…“It is all” “that there is” “that isn’t you,” “that isn’t you”
“Infinity” “isn’t you!”’
The first-person voice of Alette seen in these lines is not simply auxiliary but
intentionally violates the trope of third-person perspective in the epic genre, in order to
elevate the presence of the speaker within the text. As Notley states, her goal is to “re-centre
the “I” and situate the first person at the very centre of her poetry (“Love, Alice”). Similarly,
her “voice”, and her new feminine form, which she uses to confront and defeat the tyrant, are
both borrowed from Inanna. Just as Alette’s “me” has been redefined by Inanna, who gives
her a new body and voice, it is again to Inanna that Alette looks to replace the binary system
which structures her world. In Alette, after being freed, “those who came from below the
ground” ask, “must we continue to live in this corpse of the tyrant?” “Can we change it?”
“Can’t we make something new now…” Something must be reinstated in the place of the old
binary system, and again Notley answers with “me”. However, “me” refers to two things at
once. It is both the reinvigorated, self-sufficient Alette, and also an alternative to “binary
opposition” borrowed from The Descent of Inanna.
Here another parallel between Alette and Inanna can be found. Alette’s quest is to
redefine herself free from the tyrant’s rule, and reclaim her “me”, while Inanna’s quest is to
take back her icons of power which were stolen from her, also referred to as her “me”. In
ancient Sumerian culture, the “me” (𒈨 in cuneiform) was a socio-cultural concept which can
be understood as the primordial equivalent to “binary oppositions”. “Mes” were believed to
form the undercurrents of human life; but where in Alette’s world, these are defined by
conflict and exclusion (nature versus machine, life versus death, creation versus destruction,
male versus female), “mes” were a multifacted system of signs. In Mesopotamia, victory was
as profound as defeat, death as unavoidable as life, and femininity as invaluable as
masculinity, hence the heroine Inanna. In contrast to the dying symbols of the tyrant’s
dystopia, “jewels”, “emeralds”, “robes”, “gold”, “mansions”, the “Vatican”, the “Parthenon”,
and “administrative offices”, in Inanna her divine powers are symbolised by the “mes” of
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
“turbans”, “wigs”, “lapis-lazuli beads”, “egg-shaped beads”, “pala dresses”, “mascara”, and
“measuring rods and lines” (Black and Cunningham verses 14-25).
Notley is a poet that possesses a deep acumen about the architecture of the world and
the current that flows through its circuits, language. As one of the first pioneering female
poets, she is painfully aware that “the whole idea of a literary movement… book
publications, magazine formats, forums for discussion.. the academy, the avant-garde are all
male forms” (Berns). Through her work like The Descent of Alette, her poetic praxis is
revealed, guided by the belief that to uncover her “voice from the depths of her unique body”,
it is not simply enough to reform the publications, magazines, forums and academies, but in
order to bring about significant change, form and language itself, the lifeblood of literary
tradition, must be reworked. As she writes in her poem, I the People (Notley, “I the People”):
I the people
to the things that are were &
come to be.
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
WORKS CITED
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/701/ancient-mesopotamian-beliefs-in-the-
Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. Anchor
Books, 1966.
Black, Jeremy, and Graham Cunningham, translators. The Electronic Text Corpus of
Bloom, Harold. ‘Poetry, Revisionism, Repression’. Critical Inquiry, vol. 2, no. 2, 2, 1975,
pp. 233–51.
Brouwer, Joel. ‘A State of Disobedience’. The New York Times, 14 Oct. 2007,
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/books/review/Brouwer-t.html.
Cline, Kurt. ‘Journey to the Land of No Return: Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette and
the Sumerian “Descent of Inanna”’. Advances in Literary Study, vol. 03, Jan.
Retrospect’. Western Folklore, vol. 56, no. 1, 1997, pp. 39–50. JSTOR,
https://doi.org/10.2307/1500385.
Ebert, Teresa L. ‘The “Difference” of Postmodern Feminism’. College English, vol. 53,
McCabe, Susan. ‘Alice Notley’s Epic Entry: “An Ecstasy of Finding Another Way of
Being”’. The Antioch Review, vol. 56, no. 3, 1998, pp. 273–80.
Notley, Alice. Between the Living and the Dead: An Interview with Alice Notley.
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/between-the-living-and-the-dead-an-interv
iew-with-alice-notley/.
---. Love, Alice: The Selected Interviews of Alice Notley. Interview by Ed Foster, 1988.
FLIPHTML5, https://fliphtml5.com/vybdj/mfbq/basic/51-100.
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Ogden, Charles Kay, and Ivor Armstrong Richards. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study
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y-alice-notley/.
Power, Elaine. ‘An Introduction to Pierre Bourdieu’s Key Theoretical Concepts’. Journal
for the Study of Food and Society, vol. 3, Mar. 1999, pp. 48–52. ResearchGate,
https://doi.org/10.2752/152897999786690753.
Roberson, Debi, et al. Colour Categories and Category Acquisition in Himba and
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Extended Essay 2022 How does Alice Notley appropriate semiotics to
G1C1 Literature reform linguistic structures in The Descent of Alette?
https://www.academia.edu/32390103/Cours_De_Linguistique_Generale_Saussu
http://analogicalplanet.com/Pages/ContentPages/Sidebars/BurneyRelief.html.
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