(the) American (Novel of)

Eating Dogs and Women
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gious rites and now artists try to purify. 9 “It is no surprise, therefore,”
Kristeva says, “that in certain unconscious resurgences . . . we can see a
relation to violence, death, the corpse, to the fragmented body, to
decomposition and sexuality.” 10 Food loathing, vomiting, and the butchered
body are archetypal expressions of abjection. Here they are engaged
in by subjects who find the world intolerable and who attempt
to control its dangers by regulating their intake of food in ways that are
congruent with their divergent encounters with that world. Song-Hee
is trying to compensate her mother’s frequent absences in her childhood
by filling herself and others up with food. And Yoon-Hee is
attempting to exclude the violent trauma of her stepfather’s unwanted
sexual intrusion, which her mother did nothing to prevent, by erecting
a barricade between her body and the incorporation of anything other
than water and vitamin supplements.
When Barry Walters accuses the film of being “rather onedimensional”
because “the characterization is restricted to women’s
neuroses,” I am sure he doesn’t mean to dismiss all those women who
just happen to be neurotic—and there are quite a lot of us. And anyway,
as I have tried to show, I disagree. The film is neither about neuroses,
nor about obsessionals (as some critics indicate), rather it is about a
particular expression of that borderline state, somewhere in between
neuroses and psychoses: abjection. The distinctly Shermanesque images
of vomit are not the only thing to suggest this.
Subjects can be abjected through the abuse and neglect of other
subjects. If the boundaries of the others on whom they are supposed
to depend are unstable, unreliable, and permeable, if they mix up the
orders of protection with violation, the chances are that these subjects
will fail to develop their own boundaries in a coherent way. Subjects
can take up their abject positions as a way of protecting themselves
from abuse, from traumatic memories, and from the possibility of further
incursions and violations. Abjection can occur when a social group
unites against a particular subject, or group of subjects, consolidating its
boundaries by excluding those it designates as other. Because it is
essentially ambiguous, abjection cannot be said to be inherently transgressive.
But we can attempt to map the effects of abjection in particular
instances and to ask about the political landscape that informs the
abject, and how its contours both shape and are shaped by abjection.
I have focused on moments of abjection in which the logic of survival
or sacrifice for certain subjects not only differs from that of the society