the destroyer > reviews > Literary Vomit / Megan Burbank

LITERARY VOMIT: A POST-THIRD-WAVE, GENRE-QUEER MANIFESTO

A week before my 25th birthday, I elbowed a boy in a face. I didn’t really elbow a boy in the face, but I would have. I was at a concert with my roommate, and we were seeing Wild Flag, a supergroup made up of members of bands that grew out of the feminist-minded, punk-informed riot grrrl movement of the mid-to-late nineties. We had made a commitment to spend the evening in a way that our sixteen-year-old selves would’ve approved of. We dressed in all black and boots, chugged an inch of whiskey out of coffee mugs before we left our apartment, and stuffed our tote bags with a sleeve of Oreos and tubes of red lipstick. We almost didn’t make the bus, and we wouldn’t even have been able to get in when we got to the venue but for a miraculous last-minute Craigslist posting from a couple on the South Side who had suddenly fallen ill.

We were squeezing our way into the venue when a man standing behind us started asking us questions about the band, in a way that sounded a lot like, “Can I buy you ladies a drink?” Normally, when people approach me in situations like this, I try to be polite, but in this case, I put on my feminist face and launched into a jargon-heavy authoritative history of riot grrrl as response to the lack of women in the punk scene, citing subgenres like queercore, listing band names that likely meant nothing to this man in his smug argyle sweater. He didn’t leave. Finally, I resorted to my classic women’s college alumna defense.

When he asked, inevitably, “What, are you lesbians or something?” I replied “Yes.”

Perhaps predictably, this lie backfired. “Oh,” he said. “I love lesbians.”

I should have known better. “Not in the hot way, dude,” I said.

“I’m okay with gay people,” he said.

“That’s really big of you.”

“Hey now, I’m trying to be friendly.”

Normally I am not rude to strangers. But I had spent 24 years being polite, walking away, rolling my eyes when men hit on me aggressively, and this was my dream. No frat boy asshole in argyle was going to fuck it up.

“Fuck off,” I said, smiling to myself as I heard my expletive fly into the air of things that were really happening. He looked bewildered, then poked my arm, like we were buddies.

“Come on,” he said. “I just wanna hang out with you girls.”

That was it. I turned around and looked him square in the eye, put on my bitch face, and in the most Women’s Studies 150 way possible, shouted, “Don’t. Fucking. Touch. Me. Fuck off. Really. I am ready to throw an elbow, dude.” This was somehow more effective. As I turned towards the stage, I was shaky from the confrontation, and somehow completely blindsided with glee I had not felt since childhood.

“I don’t normally do that,” I said to Rosie, by way of explanation.

“It feels really good though, right?” she said.

*

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about women, and writing, and aggression, about social change and a piece’s emotional center. I have significant concerns about being a woman writer in a literary world that seems to primarily reward the work of white male writers, and VIDA’s yearly breakdown of gender bias in publications by the numbers is typically appalling. I am interested in finding ways of responding to sexism, and approaching work as a feminist in the wake of the Third Wave and the feminist art movement. I don’t think that it is useful to limit content to politics in response to this, but instead to use marginalization itself to challenge genre boundaries, push form to reflect content, and create a poetics that moves beyond the narrow lens of mainstream literature and publishing.

I think that the idea of vomit gives us a good place to begin. My word-vomit reaction to that belligerent stranger was involuntary, messy, and inappropriate in a way I don’t regret. It was bad behavior I’m proud of. I think that this attitude—embracing the messy business of emotion without apology, being casually subversive—holds tremendous potential for women writers if it can be applied to our work, both in terms of fighting the silencing we face in a field that for all its appearance of intellectual inquiry, continues to be overwhelmingly sexist, and in creating new work that can flourish outside of these limiting parameters and add something of value to the future of literature.

Eileen Myles and Dodie Bellamy are two writers currently grappling with this idea of aggressive spontaneity informing women’s writing, in both form and content. In Myles’ “Everyday Barf” and Bellamy’s Barf Manifesto, both writers use vomit as an embodiment of emotional honesty and formal innovation. Their work suggests that maybe Adrienne Rich’s dream of a common language has come true, but that the common language isn’t any one moment of connection, but rather the acknowledgment of many different languages, of the untidiness and purging that making good, innovative art requires, with the underlying, heartening message that messiness and process are not some stepping stones to polish and publication, but the goal in themselves.

In “Everyday Barf,” Myles recounts getting seasick on a ferry between Provincetown and New York City as her bodily experience calls forth observations about form. She writes, “It simply strikes me that form has a real honest engagement with content and therefore might even need to get a little sleazy with it, suggesting it stop early or go too far. How can you stop form from wanting to do that?”

Myles argues that form itself must sometimes be questioned, shifted, or done away with as dictated by its content, and her essay is evidence of this—a meandering, vomit-sloppy work comprised of three short opening paragraphs and a 2000-word final paragraph. Bellamy aptly equates this piece’s structure with “three gags followed by a tour de force rambling gush that twists and turns so violently, it’s hard to hold onto it”. In essence, an essay (ostensibly) about vomit, takes on the structure of vomit.

But it would be a misreading of “Everyday Barf” to say that its form is merely concerned with the body. To the contrary, Myles’ literal vomit is accompanied by emotional vomit. As she vomits violently and the boat pitches up and down, she begins to reflect on her relationship with her mother, who she regrets not convincing to stay with her in Provincetown. This sense of regret leads her to begin constructing a poem in her seasick state. This blurring of the physical, emotional, and analytical is expressed in Myles’ chaotic description of her writing process, interrupted by vomit:

Here, Myles draws a parallel between the act of vomiting and the act of writing, the physical objects brought up by her upset stomach, and the emotional weight that comes up with it: “Dear Mom Blah.” And though there is nothing graceful or polished about it, it reads as a completely present-in-the-moment description of Myles’ process as a writer, and gestures towards a more spontaneous way of writing, one reliant on an involuntary impulse, as natural as a bodily function.

This idea is subversive in that it shows how emotional vomit—unself-conscious, unself-censored—can provide a valid starting point into a piece that plumbs the depths of experience, aging, writing, and politics, which this one does, running the gamut from a discussion of Bill O’Reilly to Bridget Riley, Op Art, and the problems of feminism. Myles’ piece validates women’s emotion and experience, however sloppy, as being acceptable and important places to write from.

This runs directly counter to what women writers are often told about themselves. While male writers have a number of canonical, universally respected writers to choose from in building a pantheon of heroes, women are instead offered a collection of women identified as broken—or worse, as crazy bitches. Look no further than Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf, whose work is just as often attributed to mental illness as it is to genius. There must be something wrong with a woman who wants to write, we are told, and if we do pursue writing, our creative impulse will surely come at a cost to our personal lives. No wonder so few women are being published right now. According to this paradigm, publication puts men on the map and women on the road to ruin.

Myles does not explicitly suggest vomit as a solution to this problem of silencing, but I do, and so does Dodie Bellamy in her response to “Everyday Barf,” Barf Manifesto, which is a rambling exploration of Myles’ essay, Bellamy’s own ideas of what writing and art should accomplish, and different experiences which relate the body to the emotional and analytical. In fact, Bellamy takes Myles’ essay a step farther, aggressively calling into question the institutions and literary traditions that keep the vomit down. She writes, “Passion in writing or art—or in a lover—can make you overlook a lot of flaws. Passion is underrated. I think we should all produce work with the urgency of outsider artists, panting and jerking off to our kinky private obsessions. Sophistication is conformist, deadening. Let’s get rid of it.”

She introduces the character of Professor X, a former colleague who teaches based on a “structural approach to writing a short story, with lots of shoulds and should nots,” resulting, Bellamy argues, in “formulaic, dead stories—it’s like they’d memorized a series of steps but were stomping around all rigid, like the zombie dancers at the beginning of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video”. Conversely, Bellamy explains her own pedagogy this way: “I’d come in and try to get them to tune in to the beat, to flounce around and sway their hips, and not worry so much about what their feet were doing—to get some kind of visceral connection going with their writing.” That is, the problem with producing work that fits into a predetermined literary tradition and follows the rules set by canonical authors is that it merely validates what already exists, without pushing the boundaries of what writing can do.

For Myles, for Bellamy, and for me, this is where barf comes in. It presents an alternative that most writers would be wise to take, but Bellamy suggests that it is women writers who are most likely to follow through with it. This is how she explains this new paradigm for producing work, at the conclusion to Barf Manifesto:

Writers like Bellamy are pointing towards ways that women and other marginalized artists can not only be heard within a sexist literary landscape, but can change it altogether. Our most powerful work can come from the most painful and abject places in our psyches and our lives, and through accessing these places, we can produce work that is as innovative as it is vulnerable. No one is capable of vomiting quite like a woman, and if we are true to the barf, it can push the boundaries of our work in a way that nothing within the canon will.

Just as crucial to troubling form is a sense of literary and academic irreverence that pervades these women’s work. While the subversion practiced by other vomit-oriented writers like Maggie Nelson and Carole Maso is primarily formal, Myles and Bellamy articulate their own dissent in ways that are funny. They laugh at limits that have arbitrarily been placed on writing, and their amusement makes us see the absurdity. Their writing exudes not just emotional vulnerability, but gleeful bad behavior. In Barf Manifesto, Bellamy revels in Myles’ antics during her birthday party, when she beat a pink pony-shaped piñata violently, then “surveyed the candy guts strewn across her living room, lollipops and lurid pink and white mouths called gummy fangs, and said, ‘I’m leaving this. I’m going to have coffee here in the morning. It’s going to be a great year.’ ”

Myles’ declaration that her display of crazy behavior isn’t a bad omen but a symbol of a good year ahead, suggests proud ownership of weirdness that matters. These are real women. These are the women I care about, who I want to hear more from. I think we can push their stories even further simply by acknowledging our own don’t-give-a- fucks, our own moments of guffawing rebellion, our own articulation of who we are. I think it’s time more stories of women behaving like real women were shoved down the collective throat of the male-dominated literary scene. We’re here, we’re complex weirdos whose feelings have weight, get used to our emotional vomit! Dear Mom Blah!

I would also argue that there’s something deeper happening here—an emotional release that comes when women express their anger externally through humor or violence or bodily functions. Humor is of course a response to pain. There is a difference between ignoring the man who tries to victimize you, and telling him to fuck off. There is a release that comes from making our experiences impossible to ignore. Emotional vomit is the opposite of silence, and this alone is reason for us to value it.

One crucial distinction here is that literary vomit isn’t mere swagger. Emotional debris brings up things worth saying. It forces an acknowledgment of complexity, of the limits of writing, of what these writers don’t want to be doing. One counterpoint to vomit would be a more accepted form of writing, such as literary fiction. But the content dictates the form, and Bellamy outlines the limitations of these more refined modes when she describes trying to write a newspaper article about Myles for The San Francisco Reader.

“I couldn’t bear to write about her in a way that hid or denied that complexity,” she writes. “To deny one’s lens is corrupt. Immoral even.” Earlier on, she says, “I email Eileen, ‘While I’m drawn to the whole issue of being rather than saying, I get hung up on ‘experimental fiction does not try to say anything.’ So that’s why straight guy experimental writing can be so fucking boring.’ ”

Vomit is never boring, and it is frequently insightful. As form it allows for ambiguity, for stark honesty, and for a re-acknowledgment of the body. As women, this is particularly important, since our bodies are so often treated as worthy of external scrutiny. Vomit is a solution to this, a declaration of ownership over our own guts, our internal modes of literary production. As Bellamy says in Barf Manifesto, “The last time I taught ‘Everyday Barf,’ a paralyzed woman in a wheelchair said people don’t want to think about the body because it reminds them of vulnerability, the woman breathes through a tube that she closes her lips around like a straw.” In the world of literary barf, this vulnerability is exactly the point. It’s what imbues our work with its power.

As for myself, I have begun to approach my writing with the organic, unstudied honesty of vomiting. I am not interested in writing for the canon. I am interested in making work in a way that relies on impulse and curiosity. Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, and Carole Maso lead the way. From them, I have learned that it is always possible to explore your own story while constantly looking outward at the impossible complexity of the world around you. I am interested in beginning with the barf, shaping it, and moving forward into new literary territory. I am interested in creating new work that dictates its own form, casting off generic distinctions when they’re no longer useful. I am a student of Dodie Bellamy’s school of Barf. I don’t think much of any work that doesn’t make me feel something, and I am only interested in form so much as it functions to express most effectively what I want to say. As a woman, I see it as my duty to spread my emotional vomit into the world.