Speaking Bodies, Kinesthetic Awareness, and Lacanian Performativity in Eudora Welty's "Shower of Gold"

Abstract

Speaking Bodies, Kinesthetic Awareness, and Lacanian Performativity in Eudora Welty's "Shower of Gold" Stephen M. Fuller The rich panorama of Eudora Welty's literary and photographic output reveals a lifelong interrogation of forms of consciousness that arise from the experience of embodied beings shaped by networks of cultural discourse. By embodied, I assume body theorist Carrie Noland's 2009 definition in Agency and Embodiment when she identifies the "process whereby collective behaviors and beliefs, acquired through acculturation, are rendered individual and 'lived' at the level of the body" (9). To date, the most far-reaching examination of this notion of the body in Welty studies comes from Harriet Pollack who in Eudora Welty's Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman (2016) theorizes an emancipatory project of solidarity at work in the presence of the body of the other woman in Welty. The bodies of "self-confident black women in her photographs and the audacious working-class white woman in her stories," she writes, demonstrate a "woman artist who creates through her identification with a community of 'other women'" (12). While Jay Watson's Reading for the Body had in 2012 generally called for southern studies to carry out more of this kind of work, for a "more careful, thoroughgoing consideration of the body's complex and prominent role(s) in southern writing has been slow to emerge in southern studies" (10), none before Pollack had so completely recognized the significance of the women's bodies of all sorts that proliferate in Welty or underlined the call for a reassessment of cultural programming that the representations of the bodies instigate. Here too, I adopt Pollack's vision of Welty as cultural and political reformist, but focus my analyses almost exclusively on acts of speech which I recognize as inherently embodied and as central to understanding the trajectory of Welty's career in its second half. While some body [End Page 251] theorists like Noland argue corporeal signifying as largely restricted to speechless gestures (17), others like music scholar Michelle Duncan allow that voices of "singers are no less gestural, no less material than their bodies" (305), and the latter critic I follow here because the voice of speech like the voice of song, from the lungs to the vocal cords, from the glottis to the nasal tract, from the alveolar ridge to the soft palate, from the hard palate to the tongue, and from the teeth to the lips, demands the body's cooperation in its production. Furthermore, neuroscientist Matthew H. Rouse notes recent inquiry in the areas of neuroanatomy, speech, and audiology that confirms the idea that kinesthetic awareness or bodily awareness functions along with auditory awareness in order to regulate speech. Citing a 2006 study by Nasir and Ostry published in Biology, Rouse goes on to observe that the "brain also uses somatosensory information to achieve the precision needed in speech," and that "kinesthesia, which is the brain's awareness of the position and movement of the articulators through sense organs imbedded in muscles called proprioceptors," generates information that the brain processes in order to give speech coherence and intelligibility (181). In short, evidence indicates that speech is also an embodied activity and may be defined as a vocal kind of gesturing that produces a kinesthetic experience. Intersubjective speech of the body or speech heard out loud, then, plays a central role in what follows here and evolves out of my Eudora Welty and Surrealism, a book that unequivocally claimed the space of the decentered subjectivity as a space traversed by Welty in her acknowledgment of difficult anti-humanistic realities. That book claims the fundamental influence of surrealism as informing Welty's artistic production from the 1930s through the 1950s, while the following analysis adds to the contention that in her work from the fifties to its end in the eighties a new focus emerges, strengthens, and solidifies into a major feature in her writing. Put simply and reductively, Welty incrementally substitutes the dreamy and often quiet interior language of political rebellion as projected through the revolutionary aesthetic of surrealism for a language of embodied social protest as projected through a...