Text: One Grain of Rice
Rosie Clare Shorter
Abstract
In assessing the links that exist between both language and identity formation, genre and gender, the following text will use a variety of foods as a metaphor for the vast and ultimately unknowable types of characters and personalities that exist both in fiction and reality, seeking to illustrate a latent gap that exists between language and cognition, suggesting that just as genre definitions can be inadequate in the reading and valuation of a text, so language is inadequate in the reading and valuation of identity.
One Grain of Rice
It makes you feel good. But only for the short term, so you wouldn’t want to indulge too often. You know how it is, the way you just really, really want it. Like how you’d really, really want me. No, not want, but need, or desire. And you’ll be some place inconvenient, snowed in at the office, or waiting for the train, and suddenly, out of nowhere you are overwhelmed by desire. You know you should just head straight home. Take no detours. No distractions. But, you can’t, not now, not now that you’ve had the thought. Not now that you’ve realised there is something missing in your life. You simply feel empty, you can’t resist. And then afterwards, you start to question your actions you think…
Is this about sex? Everything always is. But the first paragraph? unlikely. What if it is? What if…
I tell you about myself. [1]
I tell you I’m writing an essay, a prose piece, an experiment. At least trying to. Its only ideas at the moment.
I tell you, Hi I’m Annabelle, I have this crazy idea. I want to know what you’d be if you were a food, and why. You’d say, I’m nothing special. I’m boiled rice. Simple, plain, accommodating, forgotten.
Forgotten. Yes, that is exactly how Lucianne feels. Once she thought of herself as interesting and attractive. Then her friends got married young, and she didn’t, and now she felt old, but she was only twenty-four. No-one notices her. She is invisible. Of course she is not invisible, but she feels it. In the dictionary it says: invisible / in’VIZƏbƏl/ adj. 1. not visible to the eye, either characteristically or because hidden (invisible guardian angels; the stick insect was invisible on the twig). 2. artfully concealed (invisible mending)[2] . Perhaps she was invisible like the stick insect. She was nothing special or different, positively or negatively. Like everyone else, she blended in to an undifferentiated background of Luciannes and Annabelles, after all no one pays attention to any one grain of rice, but rather it exists as part of a greater whole, a base, something that fills you but doesn’t excite you.
Which is curious because, when Annabelle asked their friend Ben Doherty what kind of food he would be, he answered, potato, because it was something that filled but didn’t excite. Also because potatoes are small, irregular and often overlooked. But he didn’t say that. That would have been too much. And he was never the type of person who told you everything at once. If he did it would sound something like: my name is Ben university like theatre I wonder Lucianne writing an essay viola would she go out with me movies not really yes.
It wouldn’t work. You could never hear everything. Having everything told to you at once would probably be just as confusing as withholding a vital piece of information. Like how in the opening paragraph the object wasn’t named. Like how later and Lucianne is now twenty five and she has been going out with Ben for a while but he doesn’t tell her about this other girl. Doesn’t tell her that he doesn’t want to see her anymore, because telling her might hurt her, but invisible Lucianne knows he isn’t actually looking at her, can’t see her, even though he is seeing her. Lucianne says, Ben this isn’t going to work. He never has to tell her about the other girl.
The other, other girl, Annabelle, is not going out with anyone because she wants to prove she is self-sufficient. She is still asking people what they would be if they were a food and collecting their answers to put together a collection about how we reduce people into small bite sizes so that we can understand them better, but hasn’t written it yet. She is not at all Ben’s other girl, but merely another girl, who, tonight, is meeting up with her ex-boyfriend. She is potentially his other girl but they both assume they are no longer attracted to each other, and that the threat will remain immaterialized. They are both wrong.
In the morning Annabelle wonders if it is somehow two years ago. It is not. She shudders and sends him home. He will let his feelings of guilt, remorse and confusion simmer on low heat for approximately six weeks before he breaks the heart of a wonderful woman when he relates this event to her. Annabelle doesn’t want to think about it, instead she reads about women and the writing of women, but the words scream at her like the angry accusations of a bitter old aunt:
Why don’t you write…
(I don’t have anything to say!)
Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, its reserved for “great men”… Besides you’ve written a little, but in secret; and it wasn’t good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn’t go all the way…[3]
She feels ill and shuts the book.
At home Lucianne, now twenty-five, is still not married, not going out with Ben, not yet working in a real job, not a mother, not finished her uni degree, and not going to clean the bathroom today. She is reading an article by Irigaray:
Her lot is that of “lack”… and “penis envy,” the penis being the only sexual organ of recognized value. Thus she attempts by every means available to appropriate that organ for herself: through her somewhat servile love of the father-husband capable of giving her one, through her desire for a child-penis, preferably a boy, through access to the cultural values still reserved by right to males alone and therefore always masculine, and so on.[4]
She is not entirely sure what it all means. She isn’t even sure, yet, if that is Irigaray’s position on the matter or if it is her summary of the accepted reading of life and that perhaps in a page or two she will turn it all on its head. The only appropriate thing to do in this situation is make a cup of tea.
Tea is a wonderful thing. Lucianne meets Annabelle for tea and cake one afternoon and says do you know it was a year ago we were sitting here, in this café and you asked me to compare myself to a food? Annabelle mumbles something incoherent. You never told me what you would be. Annabelle is taken aback because that’s where this whole conversation started.
Lucianne if I were a food I would be the most decadent piece of chocolate cake you can imagine. Rich, dark, creamy, bad for you. The type of chocolate cake that solves all your problems and makes you feel emotionally balanced. Cake that makes you feel good, but of course, only for the short term, so you wouldn’t want to indulge in it too often.
[1] Writing the self is merely one of many ways an individual comes to understand and express their unique identity, and is itself the realisation of the desire to be valued and considered significant. Shari Benstock says “This coming-to-knowledge of the self constitutes both the desire that initiates the autobiographical act and the goal to which autobiography directs itself”. Similarly, Kavita Hayton suggests that the practice of life writing “encapsulates both the desire of the writer to express an identity and the understanding that s/he is pursuing a deliberate, self-conscious textual reconstruction of that identity”
· Benstock, S (1988) ‘Authorizing The Autobiographical’ in Warhol and Herndl (eds) (1997), Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, Rutgers University Press:
· Hayton, K (2009)New Expressions of the Self: Autobiographical opportunities on the internet, Journal of Media Practice Volume 10 Numbers 2&3 © Intellect Ltd 2009)
[2] Moore, B (ed) (1993), The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press:
[3] Cixous, H (1975), ‘The Laugh of The Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in Signs Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer 1976), pp875 – 893, The University of Chicago Press, accessed at http://jstor.org/stable/3173239
[4] Irigaray, L (1977), The Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Cornell University (1985), Cornell University Press: New York, pp 23-24
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