Louise Erdrich, Julia Kristeva, Dorothy Dunnett, music and the inside outside

This week's four novels include The Plague of Doves by Canada's UPDATE: North Dakota's Louise Erdrich, a French-German-Canadian-Ojibwe writer with a string of prizes and a tragic history behind her. Here's a paragraph I've just this minute read; the notion invoked there of the 'inside becoming the outside' immediately made me think of Julia Kristeva's writing in Powers of Horror on what she calls abjection, signified among other things by the involuntary spilling-over of what properly belongs inside the 'clean and proper body' to its outside: tears, vomit, urine, semen, shit and blood, substances that signify the breakdown of the boundary between self and not-self.

Kristeva's writing on this subject is quite beyond simplification or explication, largely metaphorical but wandering back and forth across the boundary between the literal and the figurative the way so much psychoanalytic discourse seems, shamelessly, to do, but for me one of the useful things about her work on this particular subject is the light it sheds on the the way this kind of bodily disorder can create a sometimes terrible shame, partly to do with the potential disintegration of the self once its bodily boundaries are breached. And that has reminded me that Erdrich has reminded me of the single best sentence I've ever read about music in my whole life, in Dorothy Dunnett's Checkmate: 'Music, the knife without a hilt.'

Here's Erdrich:

Here I come to some trouble with words. The inside became the outside when Shamawenga played music. ... The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprising pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.

Thought for the day

Alexander McCall Smith, in his new book The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, throws down the gauntlet to Sigmund Freud:

In the background, she could hear the sound of Puso slamming the door of the bathroom.

'He cannot shut doors quietly,' said Motholeli, putting her hands to her ears.

'He is a boy,' said Mma Ramotswe. 'That is how boys behave.'

'Then I am glad that I am not a boy,' said Motholeli.

Mma Ramotswe smiled. 'Men and boys think that we would like to be them,' she said. 'I don't think they know how pleased we are to be women.'