Chapter 4

“There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects.” —Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

* * *

“I know you all spent the last two days wracking your brains about what is neither a subject nor an object.” 

He scanned the room to see if anyone was laughing.  No.  Kayla was smiling at least, a small indulgent smile.  Good sign.  He didn’t need her to think he was funny; her wanting to indulge him was enough to work with.  She was wearing a tight brown sweater that matched her eyes and some kind of serious pushup bra.

Off to the side of the room was Rona Gomez, not smiling, not even looking up, just scribbling furiously.  Crap.  She really had been wracking her brains, and now his joke, which he made every semester, wasn’t a joke anymore, more like a personal insult.  That’s okay.  With her forehead cradled in her right hand, her face hovering a few inches above her notebook, she didn’t look like she was taking it personally.  Anyway, he wasn’t supposed to be worrying about her. And see, he hadn’t been.

“To answer that question, please take out your coursepack, which you were all supposed to purchase for today.”

The room grew loud and shuffly with the sounds of students rifling through their bags, pulling out their packets of illegally reproduced articles, still wrapped in plastic from the copier’s.  The black guy looked from the Ashley next to him to the Brandon next to her, then up at Gavin.

 “Um, hey. Teacher. What if we don’t got it?”

Gavin wasn’t surprised. And seriously, it wasn’t because the guy was black.  Gavin wasn’t racist like that.  It’s because he was a football player—Gavin had been notified yesterday by the college’s athletic department—and they never knew what the hell was going on.  He was small, probably a running back or something. In fact, Gavin felt sorry for him, thinking about how scrambled up his brains must be from the concussions.  He vowed to be nice—encouraging—no matter how bad his writing was.

“Share,” Gavin told him.  The football player turned to the Ashley sitting next to him, a fragile blonde  who studied him with narrowed eyes before pushing her coursepack an inch towards him, to the very edge of her tiny desk. Three other students didn’t have theirs either.  One of the nerdy kids, even.  And that Brandon…Braden.  He had moved his seat next to Kayla’s so that their two little desks pressed into one reasonably sized desk, upon which they shared Kayla’s coursepack.  Bad sign.  

Gavin took a deep inhale and puffed himself up.  Look at that kid: he was wearing a muscle-tee in twenty degree weather.   Sitting next to him, Kayla could probably see his nipples. And his hair was weird and frizzy like he’d permed it or something.  Kayla looked like she’d go for a classier guy, someone better groomed, someone with a promising career, someone who was going places.

 “Good. Turn to the first article, first page.  It should say, ‘Approaching Abjection.’ Everyone see it?  This is the first essay in Julia Kristeva’s seminal book—that’s a pun, you’ll come to find out—Powers of Horror.”

There was more shuffling as the students ripped off the plastic wrappers and flipped open their packets. Gavin used the opportunity to check his reflection in the window.  He had worn his favorite teaching shirt, a crisp blue button-up that made his dark hair look darker and his pale skin look paler: Chinese but not too Chinese.  He was tall like his mother’s side of the family, and the shirt was well-tailored to emphasize his broad shoulders and make him look more barrel-chested than chubby.

“Take a look at the first paragraph.   She says that within the abject lies a ‘dark revolt of being.’  That this revolt is ‘ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.’  Based on this description, what do you think Kristeva means by the abject?”

The shuffling stopped.  Gavin could hear a single tumbleweed bumping its way down a dirt road outside Toledo.  Gazes were averted, eyes shaded, heads tilted downward and away. 

It didn’t bother Gavin.  He could wait all day.  Or at least ten full seconds. One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus.  Don’t rush it.  No matter how much students hated speaking, they hated awkward silence even more.  Five hippopotamus, six hippopotamus.  One of them would crack.  Their answer would be wrong—Kristeva was like Latin, impossible to understand on a first reading—but it was Socratic to let them take a few guesses. 

Kayla raised her hand, shyly, using her left hand to push up on her right elbow. Good girl, so accommodating, wanting to help out.  Her gaze was receptive, her sweater unsettled by her lifted arm.  He was almost sad to call on her. He would love to watch her raise her hand all day.

“Maybe it could be something like a fantasy novel?” she said.

Huh, that was a new one.  It was okay; Socrates’ students never got the answers right, either.

“What made you think of that?”

Kayla’s eyes were like melted chocolate rolling down to look at her coursepack.

“The part about how it’s outside the realm of the possible and the thinkable?”

“What about the tolerable?” Gavin coached.   “Do you know what tolerable means?”

“It means something is okay.”

“So what does that have to do with fantasy novels?”

She looked over at Braden, as though he would be any help.  He was using two fingers to pull long blond hairs out of his forearm.

“She doesn’t like them?” Kayla said.

Off the to side of the room, a hand shot up high.  It was Rona Gomez.  She had finally lifted her head and was aiming a laser stare at Gavin.

“She’s talking about things that we throw out from our consciousness.   Things like feces and blood and death. And semen, like you said.  Abject means thrown away.”

“That’s right,” said Gavin, stunned. 

“We throw them away because we don’t want to be reminded that our bodies are just things and that they’re going to go rotten just like everything else in the world.”

How could she know all that?  

“I read the article,” she said, even though he was pretty sure he’d only asked the question in his head.

“In another class?”

“No.  Last night.”

“Huh,” Gavin said. “That shows a lot of motivation.  But you might have an easier time if you wait to do the reading after I’ve given you some background on it.”

“I read the whole coursepack.”

All the other students were staring at her.  The black guy—he was named DeShawn or DeWilliam or something—had his mouth hanging open in undisguised bafflement.  Even the nerds were leaning away like she was contagious.

Gavin did what he always did when he felt like he was about to lose control of the class: returned to his lecture notes.  They lay on his tiny chair-desk, freshly printed from an ancient file on his computer, a life raft to be used only in case of emergency.

“Okay, so.”  He waded through single-spaced lines, looking for something that corresponded to whatever part of the class this was supposed to be.  “This article will be your reading assignment for next week.  So let’s go over what abject means.  It means, literally, thrown away.”

“She just said that,” said that one Asian kid, the one who talked.  

“Well now I’m saying it,” Gavin said. “Write it down.”

After class, Gavin waited at the front of the room.  Kayla was packing her bag slowly, fussing with the placement of her binder, rearranging her assortment of turquoise and purple pens.  He tried to look busy, too, re-erasing a corner of the whiteboard and willing Braden to stop hovering around smacking his gum and leave already.

“I was wondering…”

Gavin turned, and there was Rona Gomez, polite and inquisitive like some kind of normal student.  He didn’t say anything, just waited for her to continue, still tracking Kayla in his peripheral vision. 

“I had a question about the article by Grover Maloney.  The one about abjection in The Divine Sharpness.”

Grover Maloney?  That was the last—the extreme, ultimate, last—thing Gavin wanted to talk about right now.  That’s all anyone ever talked to him about.  At academic conferences, everyone he met would say, Oh, you work on abjection in Liam Stump?  Doesn’t Grover Maloney write about that?  And Gavin would say, Yes, Grover Maloney is the most famous Stump critic, and yes, he does write about abjection, but my argument is totally different from his.  Everything about Maloney was so obvious: the best-known Stump scholar, writing about dripping bloody hearts in the best-known Stump play, his only truly famous play, the play that was practically synonymous with his name: The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God.

He had put Maloney’s chapter on abjection in the coursepack—how could he not, in a course about Stump and the abject?—but only as something to debunk.  The students weren’t supposed to go reading it on their own, without preparation, context, guidance.

Rona was reading aloud from her coursepack. “‘To convince themselves of their own divine unity, Bo and Mi must ultimately destroy the very heart that feeds them both, expelling the blood that signifies their grotesque, fragmented materiality.’”  She looked up at him, her eyes less vulnerable than yesterday, more polite and professional.  “So what I was wondering is: if the abject is what we cast off to create a unified sense of self, could we get refragmented by immersing ourselves in blood and vomit and stuff?”

Kayla was doing one last rummage in her bag, bending over so that Gavin could see the lacey edges of the bra that had been working so hard all through class. Braden was standing a few feet away from her, playing with his phone.  Go away, Gavin cursed him.  Dude, she wants you to leave.   But now Braden was showing her something on the phone, pointing at the screen.  She came closer, leaned in to look at it with him, shoulder to shoulder.  And she looked at him, and back at the screen, and she laughed.

“You shouldn’t take this stuff so literally,” Gavin said. “Literary theory is an intuition pump, a way to provoke us into some kind of productive interrogation.  But you can’t use it as a basis for living your life.  Hume famously said that after the skeptics debated the existence of gravity, they still left the building through the door, not the third-story window.   I always thought that example was specious, though.  If you were a true skeptic, you’d leave through the wall.”

Kayla and Braden walked behind Rona and out of the room, now with both of their phones held out in front of each other’s faces, giggling as they walked. Fuck you.  Fuck you, Rona Gomez.

“So anyway, the point is.”  Gavin watched the two of them disappear down the hall, Kayla’s lush dark hair bending in towards Braden’s frizzy nest. “You can speculate about abstract ideas all you want, but in the end, you need to leave by the door.”

Rona nodded and silently slipped her coursepack into her bag. Then she turned and, her expression was unmistakable, considered the window.  If she did jump out of it and break her leg, it would be his fault, like that kid who convinced his little brother to jump off the roof because Superman could do it.  But when she left a moment later, without saying goodbye, it was through the open door. 

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Chapter 5>