I Used to Be Smart.

There is a part in Wuthering Heights where Catherine Linton is preparing to tell a story to Nelly Dean. As she begins the story, she warns Nelly that she must “take care not to smile at any part of it.”

I read Anne Sexton’s Transformations yesterday. As great as Kurt Vonnegut’s introduction to the story was, I couldn’t help but think that if I was an editor, I would only preface Transformations with a single sentence — Catherine Linton’s admonition from Wuthering Heights.

It’s been years since I’ve read any substantial amount of poetry that was written by Shel Silverstein (who doesn’t love hearing about Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout who would not take the garbage out?), so when I had to read Sexton for class, I can’t say that I was overjoyed.

What I found when I got inside Sexton’s work was something I had not expected. Upon learning that I was reading a reimagined collection of the Grimm borthers’ Fairy Tales, I was simply curious. When I saw what Sexton had done with those Fairy Tales, I was floored.

There is a very real way in which Fairy Tales are the formative narratives for our childhood. While perhaps not Grimm’s alone, there are any number of morality tales that are used to shape our values and consciousness, to a degree that the stories are told and retold, imagined and reimagined. They have such a high rate of cultural absorption that finding people who cannot recite these tales from memory alone is a difficult task.

What is unique about Sexton is that she takes these formative narratives, and really does transform them. From the formative narratives of innocent childhood, they become the formative narratives of a messy adulthood. Like any successful artist, Sexton’s poems leave her readers staring themselves right in the face. Whether she’s reimagining “Snow White” as a tale of what happens when an institutionalized pursuit of an unattainable standard of beauty drives people to madness, or transforming the tale of the twelve dancing princesses into a story of innocence stolen, Sexton has an uncanny ability to be true.

As stunning and important as all of that was, what I will keep from this book is something completely different. What it seems like Sexton is really engaging is the reality of being weird. It is abundantly clear that Sexton has realized that there are certain people who exist outside of the realms of cultural norms. For whatever reasons they will not (or cannot) buy into the established cultural assumptions. This seems to be the case for nearly all of Sexton’s characters, and she seems to be intensely concerned with what happens with these characters attempt to exist in a framework whose conventions and assumptions they won’t accept.

On my first reading, I felt like that was where the real power of Sexton’s work was, in the way that she was able to explore those places. In lots of ways, Sexton uses Transformation to name what is unnamable, to explore the places of human experiences that are either too painful, too unacceptable, or simply too outside of convention to name with anything other than the language she uses. She faces what is unsayable, and finds a way to name it. It’s rarely attractive, often awkward, and sometimes terrifying, but it is utterly true, and beautiful, and valuable.

And I dared not smile at any part of it.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 9:21 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.