Absent in Jenny Boully's book The Body An Essay is the actual text. Her book is composed of footnotes to a missing text. Boully's work is challenging in a frustrating yet delirious way; she sees the book as an open form, a kind of living body. It's not the kind of book you can sit down and read through. You find yourself skipping around, stalling, daydreaming, flipping back to recover the fragment that keeps resurfacing in your mind. The question then that every reader asks is how do I read this book? The answer is, I have no idea. Yet, what Boully has done is force her readers (her contemporaries) to question the idea of a book, and also, considering her title, an essay.
Boully's work is missing its body, the body has gone missing, or the body was erased, the body is void. The blank space above her footnotes reminds us that something is missing each page of the book. One page in the text is blank (p.56). One footnote is left blank (p.49). Blank space varies in size depending on the length of the footnotes. So what is the blank space or why is it there and what are we to do with it each page? What does Boully mean to say about the book with all this empty space?
Reading the footnotes to the missing text, out of habit and a desire to connect, one attempts to find patterns and to link together multiple stories, or create stories. For example the “Great Poet” is referenced multiple times, enough so that we might begin to feel her as a character, if only vaguely and loosely created. The footnotes range from personal notes about the author to dense philosophical notes. Notes such as 153, “62° 17' 20”, 19° 2' 40” and 37.29 N, 79.52 W respectively” remind us that we are reading a work of art in which such coordinates can only signify something to the one who knows, much like an address only means something to the family who calls it home. At times I wonder if these notes are to be seen as a series of signifiers failing to signify, language breaking down, but then there are places when Boully offers fragments such as the quote in footnote 131, “...all women secretly desire to be sacrifices; they long to be 'the chosen one'” where I am struck, I smile, I say yes, I understand you/this. But, this is me, not everyone will respond to that footnote.
What I begin to understand about this book comes from my desire to connect with a book, to feel at home there. We do this by following the established rules set out by the book at its start. Without such rules we feel adrift, uncertain of what to expect in the story or plot of the work. Boully challenges this concept of the book as having a set form, a way to enter and a way to exit, a plot that pushes us along in a highly formulaic manner. The essay more than other forms of writing, questions this already, but Boully's “essay” pushes these questions to a place of extreme perhaps to reset the scales a little.
The form of a story, perhaps an essay as well, but more so a story, embraces and propels the idea of experience having a form, and thus we could also say of life having a story—a beginning, middle and end. Wherever there's an “end” we risk the loss of the “middle” which of course in books forms the majority. Not only that, the form of the story has for at least the last century embraced the idea of epiphany. We are now reading for an end and for the experience of epiphany. Now I'm being a bit dramatic here, but clearly contemporary trade fiction systematically attempts to hook its reader at the start, setting the hook with enticing bits about the plot, maintaining the catch with its character development and plot twists, only to dramatically release the reader with its grand finale or resolution. At the end, the reader closes the book with gusto, eager to do it all over again. But, do what? We aren't reading for language, we aren't really reading for meaning, we do gather information, and we feel a certain prescribed way. The overwhelming consensus about a good book is “I can't put it down,” because I've got to get to the end. What does this mean about the experience of books?
If writers are given the task of showing readers how to read their work, then writers are responsible for how we read. From what I have begun to gather in this semester of learning about and exploring creative nonfiction, the essay is the avantgarde literary form. The question for me is, as always, will readers (not just writers) be up for the likes of the Jenny Boully-esque bon voyage?
by Emily Casey
by Emily Casey
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