The Second Self
Manisha Anjali on Amelia Zhou
An unnamed woman chases a cloaked figure down a sunny street. The figure has a mirror for a face. The mirror never reflects the protagonist. She walks upstairs, past a knife that moves of its own will, and falls asleep on a floral velvet couch by the window. In her dream, the sequence repeats, but the second self walks into the room and sees her sleeping body on the couch. Out the window, she witnesses her original image chasing the cloaked figure. Four versions of the woman are present simultaneously. The knife changes into a key, then back to a knife. The second self raises the knife and attempts to strike the sleeping self. A knife, a flower, a key. This is Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), a short film in which the director plays the protagonist, yet does not credit herself. This appears on black and white film.
I read Amelia Zhou’s Repose (2024) as black and white happenings, as grainy scenes of the elusive, evasive self/selves. Repose is an object in which an unnamed girl cycles through epiphanies against impossibility, resistances against appearance, the unmaking and remaking of self. I have seen the unnamed girl before. If she isn’t wielding a knife towards her own sleeping body, she is eating placenta, so “to have milk to give you.” ① Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (New Directions Publishing, 2012), 33. I have witnessed her trying to sleep for one year. ② Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Penguin, 2022). I have, at times, known her to have a name. As G.H, she devoured a cockroach. ③ Clarice Lispector. The Passion According to G.H. (Penguin: 2012). As Hazel Brown, she woke up one day with the knowledge that she composed all of Baudelaire’s works. ④ Lisa Robertson. The Baudelaire Fractal (Coach House Books, 2020). She is always amid a mystical reckoning that defies language and law, because she’s the “girl who comes from nowhere and she’s also an illusion”, as Zhou writes. Composed of linguistic infractions, oneiric fragments and pirouettes, Repose is comprised of poetry, lyric essay and fiction, the contents of which leak outside the book like bodily fluids. It is intimate, detached and utterly damp from its “secret / wet ruins”. Zhou does not write toward the male canon that has made a ghost out of girlhood, but instead expands on a lineage of wayward biography, from Maya Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon to Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée and Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal—obscure, dizzying worlds where girl protagonists dismantle and re-write themselves, documenting performance and annihilation of self within crumbling, fictitious realities.
The unnamed girl nullifies the architecture of self through semantic ruptures that make room for a secret other. Zhou’s disorienting poetics move the reader beyond their place of origin. In the chapter titled ‘A whole body is complete therefore useable’, a physician says, “where do you begin.” A statement, not a question. Do you begin at birth, or before that? If we go inward, the beginnings have no end. In Repose, a mystical awakening is stitched together by immediate happenings, because “memory is a tense still written.” “If this sounds absurd, it is because I have displaced the reality of reality,” Zhou writes. Her idiosyncratic expressions invoke Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, the grimoire for unruly, unnamed girls (a passage from Lispector’s A Breath of Life appears as an epigraph). Lispector also composes in immediate, spontaneous expression: “I want to seize the is” and “I'm trying to seize the fourth dimension of this instant-now so fleeting that it's already gone.” Lispector pioneered such estrangements of language, obscuring grammar and troubling meaning, writing the self as an impossible terrain, annihilated and reincarnated. The second self is summoned by Lispector from invisible, immaterial spaces: “To interpret myself and formulate me I need new signs and new articulations in shapes found on this side and beyond my human story. I transfigure reality and then another dreaming and sleepwalking reality, creates me.” Zhou flees the scene of the fabricated human story by seeking respite in dream: “Escape is my / relentless obsession. And dreams, a form of compensation. Where / I take my leave forever.” Both Zhou and Lispector reckon with the void, a re-imaging of the second self drawn from the unseen, a condition the unnamed girl has lived for centuries. The unnamed girl re-arranges her own bones through the ruins of a house, the office, the labour of raising a baby, dream happenings and movement. For both Zhou and Lispector, the second self, who belongs to a world of secret poems, dreams and doors, demands to be released from reality.
Who is the second self, and why, as visualised in Deren’s film, does she want to kill the original image? If we trust Deren’s symbols, the key is the knife and the knife is the key to liberation. This is echoed by Hélène Cixous in The Laugh of the Medusa, where she declares, “We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.” ⑤ Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 880. In the first chapter of Repose, the real estate agent and the speaker “organise ourselves in twos” in a house of ruins. Zhou conceptualises the second self through dissociation—“Early in the years, I learn to regard my body and what happens to it / as something that happens to someone else. / In return, I am granted a second body.” The second body is “applied to the / outside of my first body” and “defined by not having a pleasant feeling / for a long duration of time.” The second body haunts, but it does not feel right to call her a ‘doppelgänger’. She is not of the world of gothic repression, but of existential nausea. She is always in breach of symbolic order. Perhaps the second body is a soul, what Lisa Robertson calls “the organ of imagination, which includes the work of memory as well as invention.” ⑥ Louis Klee and Lisa Robertson, “Reading is Like Dreaming’: An Interview with Lisa Robertson,” Sydney Review of Books, published March 20, 2022. Keri Hulme describes Māori wairua as “an unseen double, a soul-shadow, your own spirit,” ⑦ Keri Hulme, “Myth, Omen, Ghost and Dream” Māori Literature Blog, published August 18, 2024. that can wander away from the body when asleep to visit the dead. We could say the second body is more true than the first body, as it is rendered from immediacy—the is.
Perhaps the unnamed girl, or the second body, is a lost archetype who has somehow evaded cataloguing by psychanalysts and mythologists––a ubiquitous figure who haunts literature but is a mystery, even to herself. Perhaps, at one point, her name was Hysteria. Because even her organs evade her: “Her mouth now wandering away. Her mouth enters into model / kitchen.” The medieval wandering uterus once travelled around the overseen body, hungry for semen. But now, the mouth wanders away from the body and voice. Girls have two mouths, after all. ⑧ Anne Carson, "The Gender of Sound," in Glass, Irony and God (New Directions, 1995), 119-142. According to Anne Carson, there is an upper mouth and lower mouth, connected by flesh and blood, capable of unspeakable and troubled things, only able to be silenced by conception. Carson writes that “it is confusing and embarrassing to have two mouths.” ⑨ Carson, "The Gender of Sound," 135. The mouth receives as much as it projects, and historically, was unpleasant to the ear of the patriarch. The body whom this mouth belongs to is inhabited by multiple occupants—“rightfully owned / by those who step into my occupancy.” Displaced ownership, displaced mouth. Zhou writes, “Can she weep her lost mouth back from ruins? / Do all lost things live in ruins?” The phenomena of being lost, the collapse of voice and mouth, is a violent but necessary initiation for a freedom so ferociously sought. In the following chapter, Zhou writes, “I don’t know how far I can continue to run with my vital organs / leaking out of my coat pockets.” Organs threaten to live a life of their own. This leakage, wandering, spilling is charged with the spirit of the uncontainable, the imaginary and the monstrous, forms of abjection and resistance within an occupied body.
Epiphany and transgression discharge the second self from its wandering and leaking. In the chapter titled ‘Forms of a career (fundamental life)’,the second self aligns mouth with voice. This means going off-script. We meet Myrtle Gordon, the star of the Cassavetes film Opening Night (1977), who is starring in a theatre production titled The Second Woman. She who confuses dreams with reality and changes the course of the performance:
On the opening night of The Second Woman, Myrtle decides to
abandon the playscript to portray her character as she wants. She
changes her lines. She improvises an arch-identity striptease. Breaks
character, returns to her. Transgresses the written-in boundaries
of her character’s fate.
Speaking outside the character written for her, Myrtle becomes an author, thus “shattering her entry into history” ⑩ Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," 880. which has been based on her subjugation and confinement. And so, the second self is an urgent, insurgent figure, hidden under centuries of pre-written fates and in secret dreams, becoming tangible in moments of “instantaneous resistance.” Preceding Myrtle’s awakening, the speaker declares “complete control” of her performance which is in “the place of the girl who has already gone away. To where, I don’t know. It is worth trying to counterfeit yourself to find yourself.” Throughout Repose, the speaker is conscious of their ‘deceit’, of always participating in and perfecting a performance. The speaker turns to movement—the dancer’s pirouettes, turns, spins—repetitions in the rhythm of an unknown pulse. For Zhou, the believable performance is ‘unremarkable’. The spectacle is within Myrtle’s public transgression, her rebellion against waged labour, a refusal to play the role she has been paid to play. “Is it possible to be noticed and free?” In considering the afterlives of a performance, Zhou quotes Fanny Howe. Being witnessed is political. A perceived image is never the complete image.
For Hélène Cixous, Lispector’s work contains the “little girl in the big girl,” ⑪ Hélène Cisoux, "Sunday, before falling asleep: A Primal Scene," in Reading with Clarice Lispector (University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 3. where the second self is the wounded inner child. In the segment titled ‘Dreamphase’, Zhou writes, “sun on this / day rose upon a woman’s / delayed return to the land / of her childhood inside the / time a girl first leaves her / home know this greeting / cannot spring back it / cannot be repeated” so we could be tempted to infer the same, but such a reading of a dream would be too reductive. The wildness of the dreamphase allows for girlhood to be read as an abyss, the spectral child is one of many selves leaking out from pre-existing frameworks.
The chapter titled ‘I have only one occupation left: to remake myself’ opens with three pages of text arranged in columns in a large font, structural pillars that flank an entrance. These architectural passages are uneasy, placed upon existing ruins where fragments are building blocks. On the other side of the columns, as if looking down at her own sleeping body like Maya Deren and her film double, the speaker awakens: “Look at my body in bed. Is it more comfortable to be a dreamer or / remain asleep?” Situated in an office in a skyscraper where “on ground floor,/ baby is born” and “documents” are routinely printed which are devoid of clairvoyance of the “crystal ball” or the truth of a dream. Against a backdrop of mundane office labour, baby raising, and burning buildings, the “way out / only happens in the secrecy of my dream”. Secrets have appeared before, such as in the transcript between the physician and the speaker—“I thought of my excreted / scraps, naked and patient on the / waiting room floor, giving birth to / their own secret poem.” Even objects have the ability to dream and create their own art, hidden from where they may be perceived and claimed by language.
Beyond the occupation of the body, and occupation itself as waged labour, the second self is birthed into a surreal, fragmented space in which distinctions between categories can no longer be made. Dialectical arrangements of the capitalist universe are rendered obsolete. The poetry of the unconscious leaks into the labours of the present, the border between dream and reality tousled, because “this place probably isn’t real.” Reality, occupation, waged labour, and documents exist as disenchanted facets of a confined, exploitative system. The other self is a fugitive not in the material or symbolic, but in the primordial: “Do you know when this dream ends? Please. I was / here before my whole body was proof.” The space is one of arcane, original memory which precedes language, as outlined by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. It resists occupation, because occupation is a violence born of borders. The dream emerges from abyssal chaos, before systems like capitalism could be negated, perceived or defined. The ‘way out’ is to attend to what leaks uncontrollably from the void, a space that dreams, esoteric poetry, alternate scripts and the second self can mediate. By following the logic of dream, which is a logic of distorted temporalities, beautiful and irrational images, Zhou evokes a lawless, sublime mode of imaging that parallels overtly constructed paradigms of capitalist reality. Repose illustrates multitudes of possibilities within its cutting and unforgiving departure from the known.
In a world of second bodies, wandering organs, dreams and secret poems, Zhou’s fragmentations refuse objective analysis, fleeing from scripts, set scenes and inheritances. Repose is in flux, in movement—turning, spinning like the dancer at the crux of the text. Like the strange biographers of dissolution that came before her, Zhou reconfigures girlhood against the depravity of everyday labour, a collection of gestures, collapses and happenings whose meanings evade meanings. These cyclical recitations are the poetry of immeasurable possibility in which I see my own fragmented, prolonged girlhood. Imbued with the secret knowledge of the dream realm, the second self must kill, rewrite, redream and repose the first self. The second self must ask, “What were / you doing there, getting born and born like nothing happened?”
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WORKS CITED
✷ Carson, Anne. "The Gender of Sound." In Glass, Irony and God. New Directions, 1995.
✷ Cisoux, Hélène. "Sunday, before falling asleep: A Primal Scene." In Reading with Clarice Lispector, edited and translated by Verena Andermatt Conley. University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
✷ Cixous, Hélène, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. “The Laugh of the Medusa” Signs, vol. 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93.
✷ Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. University of California Press, 2022.
✷ Hulme, Keri “Myth, Omen, Ghost and Dream” Māori Literature Blog. August 18, 2024. ✷Klee, Louis and Lisa Robertson. "‘Reading is Like Dreaming’: An Interview with Lisa Robertson" Sydney Review of Books. March 20, 2022.
✷ Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.
✷ Lispector, Clarice. Água Viva. New Directions Publishing, 2012.
✷ Meshes of the Afternoon. Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. 1943.
✷ Moshfegh, Ottessa. My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Penguin, 2022.
✷ Robertson, Lisa. The Baudelaire Fractal. Coach House Books, 2020.
Manisha Anjali is a poet, artist and researcher. Her poetry collection Naag Mountain was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, longlisted for the Stella Prize, and highly commended at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne.