The Body + Defamiliarization = The Carnal Uncanny
Saltburn’s bathtub scene is now seared into the many people’s memories, including mine, and I have yet to see the film.
Why? We could get really intellectual about this but I think it’s simple: the body + defamiliarization.
What does it have to do with healing? Read on to find out!
Here’s the opening of “The Widower’s Wife Takes Him to This Year’s Death Gala” by Todd Dillard.1
“Should I go as drowned?” she says, stroking her blue skin. “Or strangled?” A necklace of bruises purples her throat. “Shot?” she says, as bullet wounds blossom on her limbs. “Or,” and her forehead sprouts a crown of broken of glass, “Car crash?”
Techniques to steal:
1. Use verbs that double as description. These make the descriptions active and alive. Bonus if the verbs are inventive or strange. It also helps you to create vivid descriptions without slowing down the narrative.
Examples:
· A necklace of bruises purples her throat.
· bullet wounds blossom - this verb is a little on the obvious side to me but does contribute to the motif of flowers
· sprouts a crown of broken of glass – this one is particularly good because it’s also defamiliarized: “sprouts” has connotations of a flower and “crown” connects to the jewelry motif of “necklace of bruises”
2. Balance words with a positive connotation and a negative connotations to create paradox. Positive words also help the reader feel less weighed down by challenging content.
Examples:
· “necklace” has a positive connotation in contrast to the negative connotation of “bruises”
· “bullet wounds” has a negative connotation in contrast to the positive connotation of “blossom”
· “sprouts” has a positive connotation as it implies the growth of a flower in contrast to the negative connotation of “broken…glass”
Use “sacred carnality” as Mary Karr calls it. In other words “show, don’t tell” with the 5 senses. Notice how this entire opening paragraph appeals to the senses. There isn’t one abstraction. Again body + defamiliarization = the carnal uncanny.
What do I mean by defamiliarization?
It means simply to “make strange.” Here, what’s strange is how embodied the ghost is, as well as how she’s trying on different deaths like costumes. So there’s defamiliarization at the level of concept: an embodied ghost, deaths as costumes.
There’s also defamiliarization on the level of the sentence. Whenever you use poetic language, you’re using defamiliarization. I’ll explain further in upcoming posts.
What makes this narrative healing?
According to researchers, one of the hallmarks of a healing narrative is a balance of positive and negative words. We get this balance here in the opening and throughout the piece.
Prompt:
Write a paragraph in which you employ the techniques listed above. It should be no longer than 100 words. Poets can feel free to write in stanzas, but the word limit still applies.