Language, Hunger, Abstinence
Last year I abstained
this year I devour
without guilt
which is also an art
—Margaret Atwood, 1974
Writing is a process of consumption and expulsion. Chew, swallow, digest, expel. For some writers, hunger induces a flow state and increases the urgency of tone. Other writers need to be fed, slept, and sexed in order just to think. Controlling the intake of the body is a form of controlling what is expelled.
My friend Libby and I speak often about our writing practice by way of routine. What time do you get up, what are you eating and when, how many coffees are you having, who are you reading, where are you walking, when was your period, are you meditating? We have, without speaking it, agreed that these aspects of our lives are just as important as the content of our writing.
A creative practice requires reigning in disorder through form, and thus reigning in the self can symptomatically follow. I think particularly of memoirists and auto-biographical writers, or any artist making work about their life: To excavate your life for art requires a certain discomfort that is easier to withstand when you control your body. There must be a limit to how much of yourself you give away. For writers who choose hunger or abstinence or hermitude, physical discipline creates that limit by abnegating some aspect of the self.
Like many women artists, Moyra Davey has fuelled her practice with unruly eating habits. In her essay Walking with Nandita (2017), Davey examines hunger as an appetite for creation, and considers writers who satiate their hunger with words. Among them, Virginia Woolf, whose anorexia was subdued with periods of forced binge eating during which she refused to read or write. Chantal Ackerman, who spoon-fed herself a bag of sugar to complete long stints of letter writing in the film Je / Tu / Il / Elle (1975). And more dangerously, women writers who equate starvation to thinness, and thinness to good writing. Alison Strayer: “to write, driven by inspiration, you have to be thin and fleet, and to be thin and fleet you have to write, driven by inspiration. A conundrum.” This, Davey notes, a more contemporary twist on Alejandra Pizarnik’s dilemma, “To not eat I must be happy. And I cannot be happy if I am fat.”
Adrian Piper’s Food for the spirit (1971), is similarly driven by deprivation of the physical body to reach a transcendental state. For the photographic performance, Piper read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and followed a strict routine of meditating and fasting. She photographed herself whenever she felt invisible. Piper exchanged food for language, receding further into the domestic sphere as she starved.
What strikes me about these works is the ambivalence towards the implication of starvation, both for women and for artists in general. Rather than question the cultural illogic that drives women to starve, or question the economy that keeps artists poor, these works instead aestheticize starvation. Can disordered eating be a ritual for creative fulfillment, or is the disorder symptomatic of anxiety and the desire to be thin? What about this: thinness is not a marker of goodness, and self-negation may not always be generative? Why are women giving up love, food, sex, or public life, in order to write?
The most turned on I’ve been while reading was last year when Annie Ernaux won the Nobel prize. I read Getting Lost (2001), a story that chronicles the French author’s adulterous encounters with a Russian diplomat during the Cold War. The story had previously been published as a work of fiction under a different name. Ernaux then published her diaries chronicling the affair, noting that the candid tone better conveys the urgency of her encounters. Urgent, yes, feverish and sadistic, Getting Lost portrays a woman relying on beautiful clothes, rough sex, and her diary, to survive.
Especially sexy were the passages in which Ernaux describes how thin she had become in her middle-age. Idle between encounters with the Russian, Ernaux bought herself lingerie, pencil skirts, silk slips, a sartorial closet waiting to be torn off. She devoured her image in the mirror, seeming to seduce herself with her own fantasies. It is Ernaux’s ability to witness her eroticism that is so seductive; her fascination with herself—her vanity—is moving.
Guilty of my own ambivalence, here I am, unable to forgo my own stake in the intoxicating qualities of womanhood. This much I know: Language always comes back to the body. The tongue presses on the lips, the fingers, stained with ink, grip onto consciousness, which wrestles the angel of meaning. The body writes a whole letter in this way. Words, hunger, flesh, are inextricably linked.