[disclaimer: ik schreef dit in 2016 (het is nu maart 2020) & was niet op de hoogte van.... veel dingen.
meer informatie:
- Sylvia Plath and the Communion of Women Who Know What She Went Through
- Why Are We So Unwilling To Take Sylvia Plath at Her Word?]
*
Vanwaar toch die enorme belangstelling voor Sylvia Plath en Ted Hughes? — ik wilde schrijven dat ik ook die interesse heb, maar ik weet niet of ik nieuwsgierig ben naar dezelfde dingen. Er wordt veel geschreven over het huwelijk van de twee schrijvers, omdat het een groot deel uitmaakt van Sylvia Plaths verhaal. Begrijpelijk. Wat ik minder begrijpelijk vind is de neiging van velen (want Hermione Lee heeft gelijk: I'm intrigued by the sense [..] of Plath's life having left a sort of blight, a strange force-field which affects everyone who gets sucked into it. Dat geldt ook voor lezers, vermoed ik.) om iemand de schuld te moeten geven — van het einde van de relatie; van Plaths dood.
Ik ben niet zo geïnteresseerd in die schuldvraag, vraag me af of die wel gesteld moet worden; mijn interesse gaat vooral uit naar de kunstenaars zelf; de poëzie van zowel Sylvia Plath als Ted Hughes spreekt me aan. En als een schrijver me aanspreekt, wil ik meer over haar/hem lezen. In het geval Plath/Hughes is het nogal een taak een boek te vinden dat zich voornamelijk met feiten bezig lijkt te houden, er is veel over het stel gepubliceerd (het werk wordt gretig gelezen en becommentarieerd) en meningen zijn zeer uiteenlopend. Bij een poging een alom geprezen werk over Plaths leven te vinden, verdwaalde ik.
The Silent Woman (1994) van Janet Malcolm stond toevallig al enige tijd op mijn wenslijst en lijkt aan mijn eisen te voldoen. Het boek is in principe de reactie van een journalist op het verschijnen van Bitter Fame: a Life of Sylvia Plath van Anne Stevenson: het verscheen in 1989 en werd negatief onthaald, Malcolm vroeg zich af waarom. Janet Malcolm maakt ook gebruik van eerder gepubliceerde boeken van/over Sylvia Plath, om te kunnen vergelijken, maar ook om uitspraken en verschijnselen te kunnen vergelijken en beoordelen. Ik heb The Silent Woman nog niet uit, maar het lijkt vooral een onderzoek naar het genre ‘biografie’, wat het (ver)mag, doet en/of moet, met het verschijnsel Plath/Hughes als onderwerp.
The Silent Woman is eigenzinnig, gecompliceerd, nieuwsgierig, analytisch, objectief. Malcolm stelt vragen die meestal niet gesteld worden; ze onderzoekt onder andere de neiging iemand de schuld te moeten geven van tragische gebeurtenissen, mogelijke gevolgen van Olwyn Hughes' (Ted Hughes' zus, ze was lang verantwoordelijk voor Plaths nalatenschap hoewel ze (zacht gezegd) niet Plaths grootste fan was) invloed op biografieën voor het (fictieve) beeld dat het publiek nu heeft van zowel Plaths als Hughes, en wat het betekent dat het mysterie (Plath, want dood) overwegend het voordeel van de twijfel krijgt.
Over de overheersende sympathie voor Plath in de 'zaak' Plath/Hughes schreef Janet Malcolm het volgende:
‘As I write the word “ghostly”, I feel closer to the center of the mystery of why the weight of public opinion has fallen so squarely on the Plath side and against the Hugheses—why the dead have been chosen over the living. We choose the dead because of our tie to them, our identification with them. Their helplessness, passvity, vulnerability is our own. We all yearn toward the state of inanition, the condition of harmlessness, where we are perforce lovable and fragile. It is only by great effort that we rouse ourselves to act, to fight, to struggle, to be heard above the wind, to crush flowers as we walk. To behave like live people. The conest between Plath and Hughes invokes the contest between the two principles that hedge human existence. In his poem “Sheep” Ted Hughes writes of a lamb that inexplicably died soon after birth:
It was not
That he could not thrive, he was born
With everything but the will—
That can be deformed, just like a limb.
Death was more interesting to him.
Life could not get his attention.
Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our phisiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well ass opposes it. The two principles work in covert concert; though in most of us Eros dominates, in none of us is Thanatos completely subdued. However—and this is the paradox of suicide—to take one's life is to behave in a more active, assertive, “erotic” way than to helplessly watch as one's life is taken away from one by inevitable mortality. Suicide thus engages with both the death-hating and the death-loving parts of us: on some level, perhaps, we may envy the suicide even as we pity him. It has frequently been asked whether the poetry of Plath would have so aroused the attention of the world if Plath had not killed herself. I would agree with those who say no. The death-ridden poems move us and electrify us because of our knowledge of what happened. [A.] Alvarez has observed that the late poems read as if they were written posthumously, but they do so only because a death actually took place. (..) When Plath is talking about the death wish, she knows what she is talking about. In 1966, Anne Sexton, who committed suicide eleven years after Plath, wrote a poem entitled “Wanting to Die”, in which these startlingly informative lines appear:
But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
When, in the opening lines of “Lady Lazarus”, Plath triumphantly exclaims, “I have done it again”, and, later in the poem, writes,
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call,
we can only share her elation. We know we are in the presence of a master builder.’ (p. 57-59)
Over de overheersende sympathie voor Plath in de 'zaak' Plath/Hughes schreef Janet Malcolm het volgende:
‘As I write the word “ghostly”, I feel closer to the center of the mystery of why the weight of public opinion has fallen so squarely on the Plath side and against the Hugheses—why the dead have been chosen over the living. We choose the dead because of our tie to them, our identification with them. Their helplessness, passvity, vulnerability is our own. We all yearn toward the state of inanition, the condition of harmlessness, where we are perforce lovable and fragile. It is only by great effort that we rouse ourselves to act, to fight, to struggle, to be heard above the wind, to crush flowers as we walk. To behave like live people. The conest between Plath and Hughes invokes the contest between the two principles that hedge human existence. In his poem “Sheep” Ted Hughes writes of a lamb that inexplicably died soon after birth:
It was not
That he could not thrive, he was born
With everything but the will—
That can be deformed, just like a limb.
Death was more interesting to him.
Life could not get his attention.
Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our phisiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well ass opposes it. The two principles work in covert concert; though in most of us Eros dominates, in none of us is Thanatos completely subdued. However—and this is the paradox of suicide—to take one's life is to behave in a more active, assertive, “erotic” way than to helplessly watch as one's life is taken away from one by inevitable mortality. Suicide thus engages with both the death-hating and the death-loving parts of us: on some level, perhaps, we may envy the suicide even as we pity him. It has frequently been asked whether the poetry of Plath would have so aroused the attention of the world if Plath had not killed herself. I would agree with those who say no. The death-ridden poems move us and electrify us because of our knowledge of what happened. [A.] Alvarez has observed that the late poems read as if they were written posthumously, but they do so only because a death actually took place. (..) When Plath is talking about the death wish, she knows what she is talking about. In 1966, Anne Sexton, who committed suicide eleven years after Plath, wrote a poem entitled “Wanting to Die”, in which these startlingly informative lines appear:
But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
When, in the opening lines of “Lady Lazarus”, Plath triumphantly exclaims, “I have done it again”, and, later in the poem, writes,
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call,
we can only share her elation. We know we are in the presence of a master builder.’ (p. 57-59)
