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9. “Uncannily in the open”: In Light of Oppen
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She turns herself into a star above the unattended foliage, He views her as she glistens, silver enters the picture. (Guest 1995, 148–49). The roles of model/painter linked by banal binary gender narratives to the terms passive and active can no longer be sustained as given. The model selfmetamorphoses and takes agency. The transformation narrated in Guest’s poem is especially marked in relation to the artwork that accompanied it in the original publication. Warren Brandt’s work plays with nudes from the history of art, for he offers his history of the depiction of the female nude as a metaphor for the history of art as a whole.18 Thus he mimics, or alludes to, the Olympia by Manet, as well as to nudes by Gauguin, Picasso, Fragonard, Rodin, and many more. He also uses various media and techniques in this history of art, including watercolor, drypoint, charcoal sketch, pencil, pen, oil, photo, and thereby makes allusions to different media and modes of production of the nude woman (such as nineteenth-century pornography). As Guest says, “The artist borrows mannerisms and technique,” and “each day there is a different voice” (Guest 1995, 146, 147). “He con¤des, / ‘Each day I de¤ne myself’”— and he does so by virtue of drawing a female nude (Guest 1995, 149). When Guest’s poem is put next to the artworks in the book to which she has contributed , the poem seems quietly critical of the power of the male gaze and offers the poetic work as a site in which the female writer’s gaze trumps the male gaze and enfolds the whole situation. Guest tries to rectify the power balance, the eroticisms and agencies in the artworks Brandt has made with her own. In Guest’s poem the model’s changes, including consciously willed changes, transform the painter’s picture and his palette. She “leads” him. He interprets her. The relationship is symbiotic. And both ¤gures are powerful. Despite the nude’s own narcissism familiar from pictorial and literary tradition and re-presented by Brandt (“She was either admiring herself or bathing”), Guest’s nude engages with aplomb the fearful, the unknown, and the threatening : “She reaches for ombre, noir / ‘It is the narrowness of time’” (Guest 1995, 148, 149). The nude is not solely or only the object of a ¤xing gaze, although the poem knows that it would be naive and untrue to the history of art to posit that she is never so. Thus, she is at one and the same time the object of a ¤xing gaze and the subject meditating herself. Both positions are discussed within the poem. So, too, the painter inside the poem has at least The Gendered Marvelous / 179 a double position; he has the power of sight, of skill, of desire, of address. But sometimes he is blind or veiled in his understanding. Both, indeed, may be surpassed by another even more philosophically inclined party to the exchange—“the [not her] body” itself: He explains he is thinking of the body. Its behavior is strange, hiding behind leaves he can never trap or bribe it. So deep is the body’s memory of self. Each day there is a different voice, today while wearing no clothes It spoke of the essentials of life which were evident, but the body took an invisible position . . . (Guest 1995, 147) With an uncanny negative capability, Guest depicts shifts between both the male painter and the female nude, as well as among “the body”depicted in the artworks and “the viewer”: “You are the viewer and without you / the picture cannot exist” (Guest 1995, 145). These bonds are (as in Wordsworth and Stevens) absolutely spousal. The viewed and viewer of art, the model and painter present a shifting but articulate symbiosis, one peculiarly formative and satisfying in their dialogue, perpetually knitted up and unraveled , between reality and the imagination. Most viewers outside the work of art (in other words, us) are usually asked by “art”to be inside the painter’s eye. So the normal institutions of viewing or reading further frame and contain the nude. Guest’s poem is critical because it gives us other places from which to see. Rather than seeing the nude only via the painter’s eye, Guest’s poem makes us see the space and symbiosis between painter and model, body and time, viewer and situation. She is working the negative spaces, the push and pull, the in-betweens...