“Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained - inexpressibly! - in the expressed.” So begins the second paragraph of Nelson’s latest book, The Argonauts. Time and again Nelson yanks her readers from the crisply-articulated, rarified air of the text and thrusts them eye-level with scenes of bodyfail, bodywaste, or bodies mid-fuck, deploying these animal immediacies as a jolting memento mori. The precarious nature of life isn’t merely Nelson’s most common subject matter as she balances poetry with theory with observation with disclosure - transforming an absence into a presence - the moment of “becoming object” also represents the author’s most striking literary technique. “So that a long shaft of pale light cast out from the center of her forehead, and another shaft streamed behind her.” “Sunlight shot around each black rind,” Nelson writes in Jane, imagining the twin bullet holes tunneled through her aunt’s head. The thud of that eventuality is far from the gradient transformation implied by the phrase ‘ one day turning,’ and in the chapter “A Situation Of Meat,” Nelson reels from the crucifixions of Francis Bacon to the ruminations of Simone Weil to Kafka’s “In The Penal Colony,” staring flush at the brutal instantaneity wherein a sentient, subjective being becomes unminded, a penetrable sack of tissue flesh and flab. “The spectre of our eventual ‘becoming object’ - of our (live) flesh one day turning into (dead) meat - is a shadow that accompanies us throughout our lives,” Nelson writes in her ranging critical study, The Art of Cruelty (2011).
Written largely in unrhymed verse, Jane: A Murder juxtaposes its couplets and tercets amid a plotting of journal entries, personal letters, conversational snippets, news reports, and philosophical quotes, conjuring a vivid image of Nelson’s maternal aunt, Jane, a kindred spirit murdered by a serial killer four years before the author was born. Jane: shot, strangled, and left shoeless in a backroad cemetery. Jane: a wildly intelligent, fiercely independent grad school student. ” Within that book - Jane: A Murder (2005) - the subject (she) and object (the gunshot head) set the coordinates. Maggie Nelson’s first book of nonfiction begins with a perfectly balanced sentence: “She had been shot once in the front and once in the back of the head.
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