An “Unthought Known” of Her Own: The Aesthetics of Interruption

Abstract

Although Baraitser (2009) investigates interruption as a condition of maternal subjectivity, this essay concerns itself with how maternal presence itself can interrupt aesthetic practice. Reading Baraitser with and through the work of the Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian, I interweave the aesthetic with the philosophical and psychoanalytical possibilities of taking “maternity as the norm” that Baraitser so suggestively explores (p. 10). McGuckian's poetry, I argue, answers Baraitser's question when she asks what kind of subjectivity emerges “when we live in close proximity” to a child and “are somehow responsible for them, too” (p. 11). Also calling upon the careful and enabling work of Christopher Bollas, this essay explores through the poetry how the “unthought known” or the “maternal aesthetic” described by Bollas as “the first if not the earliest human aesthetic” (Bollas, 1987, p. 32 can also be supplemented in light of Baraitser's evocative thesis.

Notes

¹For a more elaborate treatment of maternal, aesthetic, and psychoanalytical registers in the work of McGuckain, see also M. Sullivan, “Medbh McGuckian's ‘On Her Second Birthday'” (2009), IUR, 39(2), 320–333; “‘Dreamin’ My Dreams with You': Medbh McGuckian and the Theatre of Dreams”(2005), Metre, 17, 100–112; “Medbh McGuckian's In-Formal Poetics”(2004), Nordic Irish Studies, 2(1), 75–92.

²Jacqueline Rose's (2003) beautiful essay “Of Knowledge and Mothers: On the Work of Christopher Bollas” works with and yet also gently challenges and complicates the trope and figure of the mother in the work of Bollas. In: On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 149–167.

³In a review of Selected Poems Elizabeth Lowry writes that “disturbingly and rather irritatingly, McGuckian's poems often create a parallel world, in which the signifiers have mutated and no longer correspond to their workaday meanings, so one has to guess what even the most ordinary words are supposed to denote … of course poetry can bend the rules of syntax, but even poetry can only bend them so far.” Elizabeth Lowry (1998), “Dream On: Review of McGuckian's Selected Poems, Metre, 4 (Spring/Summer), 46–53.51.