«But Fire thought she’d really rather be Water instead»: Tori Amos and her natural narration

Abstract

This study closely examines Tori Amos’s practice of narration, and especially her lyrics, in the context of the integral organic co-agency / co-operation of the layers of American singer-songwriter’s musical-lyrical-performative language. The interpretation that this practice receives in the current research is that it is conceptually (and poetically) natural and containing the efficient (political) tool of natural introspection. As the analysis of Amos’s lyrics demonstrates the natural introspection in her oeuvre expands throughout spontaneously intuitive to considerately determinate gesture, as well as from self-observation to (com)prehension of the world. Such a non-hierarchical oscillation debases the deeply rooted understanding (at least what concerns the western tradition) of a (co)existence (at best) of a subject and a so-called environment; it actualizes, alternatively, the natural work (or, the work with the natural) outside the binary limitations, such as «internal-external». The subversive character of this work is guaranteed, as this study aims to show, through its instrumental and topological features. A poetically informed ecological labor (namely, the critically important practice of attending and of relationship-building) that is fully definitive of the singer-songwriter’s creative fact directs her to simultaneously address the natural topologically – as a result, Amos unpacks the natural introspection’s emancipatory potential. Following Elizabeth Grosz’s line of thinking on the entwining interaction of materiality and ideality the study offers a reading of the natural introspection as embodying the natural logic of becoming that continuously emancipates. The praxis of narration – as it is present in Tori Amos, a teller / singer of stories – appears as one on the plane of continuation and recreation of life.