A votary and a voluptuary of the archaeology of self: on Christina Tudor-Sideri's Under the Sign of the Labyrinth
Under the Sign of the Labyrinth
Christina Tudor-Sideri
Sublunary Editions, 2020
“The most beautiful statuette in the Council of Goddesses is also the one that plays the role of the primary figure, for it is the only one that is depicted with a hand above her mouth, in a pensive position” (Tudor-Sideri, 45)
Pre Cucuteni Around 4900-4750BC Isaiia-Balta Popii FCM III
1 October 2009
Author: CristianChirita
CucuteniRitualStatues.jpg
Under the Sign of the Labyrinth is one of the first three books I received as a part of my recent subscription to Sublunary Editions. Of the three, it is the one I felt most immediately drawn to, perhaps from its size and shape (akin to Nathanaël’s The Sorrow and the Fast of It), or perhaps from its cover image: “Ariadne” by Jackson/Singer, taken from La Grèce pittoresque et historique by Christopher Wordsworth, Paris, L. Curmer, 1841, as I learn from the title page. In the system of book magic I practice, everything in the world is under some kind of sign, or is a sign itself—and there are few symbols more suggestive than the labyrinth, and the presence of Ariadne on the cover fixes the labyrinth as the one in which King Minos imprisoned the Minotaur. These features, and this sentence in Tudor-Sideri’s bio, “Her work deals with the absent body and its anonymous rhythms, myth, memory, narrative deferral, and the imprisonment of the mind within the time and space of its corporeal vessel,” in particular the gnostic heat coming off of its last clause. I joked in my newsletter, “Yes, yes, I know: we are supposed to love our bodies, which we 'are,' but don't you ever feel imprisoned within the time and space of your corporeal vessel?” because there is something pleasurable about the promise of going athwart the tiresome rectitude of the anti-Cartesian imperative (a similar pleasure is operative in Sara Ahmed’s critique of the happiness industry).
What does it mean to write something under the sign of the labyrinth? I can’t think of the word without thinking of the ur-labyrinth of Greek myth: the one in which King Minos imprisoned the Minotaur, to whom he periodically sacrificed fourteen of the shiniest youths of Athens until Theseus, with the assistance of Ariadne… Perhaps you know the story? It’s a powerful myth, retold many times in many forms and genres, like Christopher Nolan’s 2010 movie Inception (which launched a thousand undergrad essays in which they use the word inception to mean a nesting structure), perhaps because it lends itself to allegory.
There’s something in it about the pettiness of Minos, the craft of Daedelus who built it, the monstrosity of the Minotaur. There’s certainly something in it about gender: in the detail that it is seven young men and seven young women who are sent to their deaths, the way that Ariadne, via her thread (the red thread of menstruation?), is a master of memory, and the way that Theseus succeeds by means of her and yet spurns her later (what a douche!). There’s something in it, too, about the accounts in which Ariadne ends up with Dionysus, which might be abstracted or psychologized into a narrative of ritual rebirth through Dionysian ecstasis.
The Minotaur is supposed to be the monster, but from my current perspective, King Minos is the monster and the Minotaur is one of his victims: driven to violence by circumstance. And as a queer and trans reader, and a long-time reader of Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, I am conditioned to identify with the monster. No, more than that: I am a monster and so I read as a monster. Returning to this entry, I think that maybe it is not so simple. Maybe I am reading from a position between monster and maiden or, more complicated still: between monster and maiden but with a spectral trace of the memories of Theseus.
Although in the above I feared losing sight of the shore of the text, myth is a lighthouse that guides me back. I love what Tudor-Sideri says about mythology, that it:
…succeeds in an endeavor that both science and religion have not been able to accomplish: it brings together the body and soul and creates an entity that comes closer to portraying the reality of humankind. Whilst religion focuses only on the soul and science deals with the body—with matter—mythology and folklore acknowledge that we are not just our bodies, and we are not just our souls. (75)
This last bit feels important to me, both in itself and in respect to the fact that one of the main themes of Under the Sign of the Labyrinth is trauma. In fact, it begins under the sign of trauma:
Trauma lives in the body. It lives in the body of all things—past, present, and future. Yet to write of trauma is to write of the nature of an eternal and interiorized present. To write of trauma is to crawl back into the wilderness of your soul like an animal wounded by humans crawls back into the forest. To write of trauma is to walk a path that requires a certain setting provided by your memory as it struggles to preserve the self—your memory, positioning itself at the intersection of ruin and allegory. To write of trauma is to throw yourself against the wall with the strength of waves clashing against one another during the most tempestuous of nights. (7)
And as she goes on, Tudor-Sideri acknowledges the seeming paradox of having to appeal to untruth and indirection to tell the story of trauma:
In Remedia Amoris, Ovid writes of learning to heal from the one who has taught us how to love—“one hand alike will wound and succor.” Modifying the body and organs of memory, archiving the past, recording and sometimes rearranging your history; all become necessary to the writing act. (7)
I don’t know enough about contemporary literary writing about trauma to make any overarching claims, but I will record the (approving!) arch of my eyebrow as I encountered Tudor-Sideri’s book, her insistence on taking the physical (and by extension the factual and the literal) with the spiritual, but I think that ultimately, it’s not my place to set up a hierarchy between other contemporary trauma writing and Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, except within myself, regarding the circumstances under and into which I am writing, and in how they have guided my own decided preference for telling the painful truths of my own experience obliquely.
Thanatocoenosis is the word for a death assemblage, the title of Under the Sign of the Labyrinth’s last section. The gathering of objects and memories piled at the psychospiritual location where the author’s swerve avoided fatality delivered her into the condition of being posthumous. “Posthumous, yet bound to keep on speaking of mental spaces, diagnoses, shapes, and answers” (108). Time and again Tudor-Sideri reveals herself as not simply a captive, but a votary and a voluptuary of the archaeology of self: “Nothing is more beautiful than the mental space disguising itself as paintings, manuscripts, and sculptures from ancient times; speaking of symbiosis between the life of mortals and the life of mythical creatures, angels, idols, monsters” (108). In this sense, Tudor-Sideri’s labyrinth bears a family resemblance to the memory palace, the spatialized memory system popularized contemporarily by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory, with the key distinction that the memory palace is built in order to remember, whereas the labyrinth is a place where, “I do not stumble upon the gentle things, the light things that travel the body in a tender manner…” (124)
I have more things to say about Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, but I’ve been having some insecurity about my writing in this blog, and I froze. I need to unfreeze, so I’m posting this first chunk as a way to break the silence! I hope to add more later, including parts about Tudor-Sideri’s constellation of references, about Wild Men and preventoriums and her choice to write in English (having recently enjoyed Aleksandra Lun’s Los palimpsestos—a stirring defense of L2, 3, etc. writing in the form of a novella). But this will have to be a start!