Better than Text? Textuality as Sexuality in Postmodern North American Prose Poems

This lecture analyses the relationship between textuality and sexuality in two recent prose poems: Margaret Atwood's In Love with Raymond Chandler (1992; in Good Bones and Simple Murders) & Nin Andrews' Notes on the Orgasm (1993; in The Book of Orgasms (2000)). These poems use the vehicle of prose to destabilize conventions of genre and representation, but what is of particular interest here is how they also destabilize the apparently insurmountable borders between text and sex. Atwood's poem does it by playing a game of inter- and paratextuality, first by conflating the name of the author (Raymond Chandler - a meetable subject) with the body of his work (which can also be referred to as "Raymond Chandler" - a readable subject). Next Atwood blurs the line between reading and screwing the author by sexualizing his descriptions of furniture, embodying, gendering and feminizing for instance Chandler's sofas. The furniture comes to occupy an interzone between text and sex, where Atwood the reader (& writer) can have intercourse with Chandler the writer (& text).Andrews' strategy differs from Atwood's in that she uses a more conventional literary technique (that of prosopopeia) to blur the text/sex boundary. In her poem the orgasm takes on a life of its/her own and becomes an entity with agency in the world outside the text Andrews has written for it. As the text evolves, her orgasm grows in force and magnitude, ultimately taking over as author of its own text ("Often the orgasm tells a story about you") and subsuming its reader ("You are unable to tell whether you are a dream of the orgasm, or if the orgasm is a dream of you").