HOLLY PESTER FULL

And so in the deepest possible sense I can never be alone with God. As Carson puts it, ‘I cannot go toward God in love without bringing myself along. Anne Carson, in her 2002 essay ‘Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete, And Simone Weil Tell God’, defines the titular concept of decreation as a program for ‘getting herself out of the way so as to arrive at God.’ Like Holly Pester’s I/Lucy Snowe evacuating the self into love, Weil is striving towards a solution to the paradox of presence. Weil might also plausibly be termed a neurotic revolutionary – Chris Kraus in ALIENS AND ANOREXIA(2000) calls her an ‘admirable freak’ – a communist sympathiser and dedicated anti-fascist who was suspicious of uncritical collective thinking and party politics but lived out her own inextinguishable belief in the communality of human existence through the (eventually fatal) deprivations she imposed on her own body. For Weil, it’s God for Charlotte Brontë in Villette (1853), it’s a big, gothic, passionate other for me, in this book, it’s something more like banal survival. So, it is a turn from an unpropertied subject who can’t love or have a self, to one who can only love without property as a condition of that love. O be in love is to occupy a space without ego or self.

In an interview with FRIEZE magazine Pester, talking about the final verse of ‘Villette’, invokes Simone Weil’s concept of decreation – loosely put, renouncing your autonomous self in order to fully love God and the world – as a serious influence on the whole collection: In doing so, she weaves the difficult, the boring and the abject into a poetics of pathos and defiance. Later on, Millett ascribes another quality to this neurotic revolutionary: to the many obstacles that beset her course, not least the twin poisonous blossoms of respectability and misogyny that characterise gender and class relations in the nineteenth century, ‘Lucy replies with phenomenal intellectual effort.’ In COMIC TIMING, despite the constant and sometimes beguiling presence of death – ‘Odd Kill’ declares ‘As a life dies it’s interesting because that’s when it can accommodate / existence’ – Pester, too, responds to the many patronising cruelties of existence with a phenomenal intellectual effort.

HOLLY PESTER FULL

Lucy, for Millett, is a study in the effects of a ‘male-supremacist society’ upon a woman’s psyche: ‘She is bitter and she is honest a neurotic revolutionary full of conflict, back-sliding, anger, terrible self-doubt, and an unconquerable determination to win through.’ In 1970, Kate Millett offered a radical reading of the novel in SEXUAL POLITICS that drew on earlier understandings (notably Virginia Woolf’s) of it as a proto-feminist text. VILLETTE, although well received at the time of its publication, disappeared from the mainstream literary consciousness soon after, and remained mostly ignored for the best part of a century. She instead / I instead ecstatically ritualise her poverty / my poverty, and her otherness / my otherness to ownership of objects, and evacuate the self into love. I use / Lucy uses burial as a way to disown the letter and to refuse being privately subjected by the letter. The letter passes into an earthed state of absence. She applies / I apply a fantastical value to the letter. In this gesture / in my gesture, Lucy Snowe rejects the possibility of possessing the letter. The poem ends in an ecstasy of submission: In it, the voice of the speaker and the actions of Brontë’s protagonist are unified, like two film reels playing simultaneously: ‘In the novel Villette,’ it begins, ‘either I or Lucy Snowe live and work in a girls’ school that either she or I found in a small French town.’ The poem continues, explaining that I / Lucy have recently suffered a romantic disappointment with Dr Graham, their ‘heavy and imaginative crush’, and resolve to bury his letters, which they have invested with a ‘devotional adoration’. Pester’s book is divided into four theatrical acts, and this poem closes Act 4: although, strictly speaking, the collection ends with the coda ‘Heavy ending’, ‘Villette’ is the last thing that happens before the actors make their bow. The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’ it shares its title with Charlotte Brontë’s 1853 novel about Lucy Snowe, an impoverished and extremely truculent governess. HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Holly pester