Affective Needs
Sophie Robinson, Rabbit
Boiler House Press, 80pp, £10.00, ISBN 9781911343455
reviewed by Luke McMullan
Sophie Robinson’s Rabbit is like hearing your neighbour cry through the walls. It’s distressing to hear, you feel like a voyeur, and you can’t help, because going round there would be another violation. But what if the neighbour was really playing a recording of that crying through your wall? That’s what the book is about. Over-egged, paratactic, coy about its own artifice, yet keen to explore the limits of personal fragility, Rabbit whips us through snatches of animal abuse, internet pornography and meetings with friends from continental Europe to the United States.
In the opening poem ‘Sweet Sweet Agency’, the speaker declares that her life’s work is to delay the spoliation of her own cuteness. Because of that, or perhaps despite that, she wants to gain control of her own affect:
The rule for inclusion in the list of desired love-objects is only half clear. Are these things the speaker must love and happens not to know, or must she love these things precisely because she cannot know them? And is the imperative born of her own volition, or is it imposed on her? I must learn to list what I cannot know.
The poem’s list, a form now de rigueur in contemporary literature, is the right form in which to express the sinister provenance of our felt affective needs. The list is the literary manifestation of the logic of the deconstructed, found across contemporary culture. Whether the deconstructed pieces of a burger on your plate, the exploded tracks of Billy Eilish, or the lists in Camilla Grudova’s short stories, aesthetic enjoyment of the deconstructed is found in working out the rule that assembled the things in the sequence. That rule might be ‘these burger ingredients are the ingredients of a burger’ or ‘the irresolvability of the connections between these desired love-objects stands for the unattributable origins of our affects as we experience them’. The underlying aesthetic logic is the same. 'Congeries' is an anagram of 'recognise'. And I would venture that the ‘higher' the artwork, the harder the rule is to work out. Impoverished of any relation greater than mere adjacency, Robinson’s list mocks any expression of the will to love differently.
Rabbit is enviably smart on how we produce affect in each other. Look, for example, at this tableau in ‘Eurotrash’: ‘and when you say voilà what you really mean is don’t look at this, i have already looked for you, i am telling you to look in order that you do not’. Sometimes our affects are imposed on and produced in us by another person without our consent. We can’t help but love the ending of 2019’s Oscar Best Picture The Green Book, whereas Spike Lee’s Black KKKlansman shows us we can’t have the ending we are trained to want. The italicised sentences in ‘Eurotrash’ are the reported speech of somebody else; they might also be Rabbit’s dare to its readers. Look at this, but don’t look, I have already done the looking for you.
Animals – the rabbit of the title and dogs and rats too – also have a role to play in Robinson’s exploration of the dynamics of interpersonal affect-production. They mostly get fucked up by people. They are neglected, trapped, and mutilated – to name a few of the tamer verbs. But they get fucked up a bit less as the book goes on. The intensity of violence done to animals is an indicator of the book’s overall affective transition. The speaker goes from frenetic and insistent displays of affect in the first half of Rabbit, towards a place where, finally, she can reflect with some balance on her past experience. The book’s last poem, ‘Art in America’, ends
Unlike the other animals, the white rat in ‘Art in America’ is still alive. It has come out of an egg surgically excised from the arm of a woman in a dream, who turns out to be a vision of the speaker’s past self. In the dream, the speaker takes the rat home to look after – a strange fate for the rat, but not a bad one. The knife is used not to destroy the rat, but to save it.
At one point, in a meta-pathetic fallacy, the speaker wants to damn the world into a reflection of her inner state: ‘i want everything looking / like a shitty picture / of what it used to be’. Or does this describe the book itself? Affected verse, a contemporary poetic genre (which also includes CA Conrad, who blurbs Rabbit), collides big feelings with hyper-awareness of artifice – two categories which appear antithetical at first glance. We want to have a genuine response to the seemingly-real feelings on display, but we know they are formally mediated. The real of affect is pitted against the affectedness of poetry and its conventions. They form a ‘shitty picture’, the position and authenticity of whose affective elements are always in question.
This makes the book hard to read and makes me perennially paranoid about the appropriateness of the affects it produces in me. There are social rules for our emotional responses; knowing those rules is how Rabbit fucks with its reader. Who has the power, and the permission, to produce affect in other people, and when and where? Who is allowed to exploit it? The trigger warning, the epigraph of our time, is a gesture towards regulating that exploitation – the exploitation the ‘Sweet Sweet Agency’ of Rabbit operates in. How does Robinson’s book transform the affects it recounts into its reader’s experience?
As it says in ‘Party’, ‘at this party . . . a banner in the sky: it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter that you feel this way’. Is this the liberation that comes from the removal of oversight of our feelings, or the deprivation that results from everyone else’s ceasing to care? Rabbit is not checking in on me, but it loves to fuck me up.
In the opening poem ‘Sweet Sweet Agency’, the speaker declares that her life’s work is to delay the spoliation of her own cuteness. Because of that, or perhaps despite that, she wants to gain control of her own affect:
‘i must learn to love what i cannot know: the wide bleached anus / on a porn blog, the insane demands of toddlers, the desire for moderation or / slimness of affection, the reason lovers leave, the trash my cat brings back, / the crack of footsteps in the woods at night, why the killer kills.’
The rule for inclusion in the list of desired love-objects is only half clear. Are these things the speaker must love and happens not to know, or must she love these things precisely because she cannot know them? And is the imperative born of her own volition, or is it imposed on her? I must learn to list what I cannot know.
The poem’s list, a form now de rigueur in contemporary literature, is the right form in which to express the sinister provenance of our felt affective needs. The list is the literary manifestation of the logic of the deconstructed, found across contemporary culture. Whether the deconstructed pieces of a burger on your plate, the exploded tracks of Billy Eilish, or the lists in Camilla Grudova’s short stories, aesthetic enjoyment of the deconstructed is found in working out the rule that assembled the things in the sequence. That rule might be ‘these burger ingredients are the ingredients of a burger’ or ‘the irresolvability of the connections between these desired love-objects stands for the unattributable origins of our affects as we experience them’. The underlying aesthetic logic is the same. 'Congeries' is an anagram of 'recognise'. And I would venture that the ‘higher' the artwork, the harder the rule is to work out. Impoverished of any relation greater than mere adjacency, Robinson’s list mocks any expression of the will to love differently.
Rabbit is enviably smart on how we produce affect in each other. Look, for example, at this tableau in ‘Eurotrash’: ‘and when you say voilà what you really mean is don’t look at this, i have already looked for you, i am telling you to look in order that you do not’. Sometimes our affects are imposed on and produced in us by another person without our consent. We can’t help but love the ending of 2019’s Oscar Best Picture The Green Book, whereas Spike Lee’s Black KKKlansman shows us we can’t have the ending we are trained to want. The italicised sentences in ‘Eurotrash’ are the reported speech of somebody else; they might also be Rabbit’s dare to its readers. Look at this, but don’t look, I have already done the looking for you.
Animals – the rabbit of the title and dogs and rats too – also have a role to play in Robinson’s exploration of the dynamics of interpersonal affect-production. They mostly get fucked up by people. They are neglected, trapped, and mutilated – to name a few of the tamer verbs. But they get fucked up a bit less as the book goes on. The intensity of violence done to animals is an indicator of the book’s overall affective transition. The speaker goes from frenetic and insistent displays of affect in the first half of Rabbit, towards a place where, finally, she can reflect with some balance on her past experience. The book’s last poem, ‘Art in America’, ends
‘o! i am glad
to have known you
my devastating weakness
my white rat
& my old
wild
american
heart’
Unlike the other animals, the white rat in ‘Art in America’ is still alive. It has come out of an egg surgically excised from the arm of a woman in a dream, who turns out to be a vision of the speaker’s past self. In the dream, the speaker takes the rat home to look after – a strange fate for the rat, but not a bad one. The knife is used not to destroy the rat, but to save it.
At one point, in a meta-pathetic fallacy, the speaker wants to damn the world into a reflection of her inner state: ‘i want everything looking / like a shitty picture / of what it used to be’. Or does this describe the book itself? Affected verse, a contemporary poetic genre (which also includes CA Conrad, who blurbs Rabbit), collides big feelings with hyper-awareness of artifice – two categories which appear antithetical at first glance. We want to have a genuine response to the seemingly-real feelings on display, but we know they are formally mediated. The real of affect is pitted against the affectedness of poetry and its conventions. They form a ‘shitty picture’, the position and authenticity of whose affective elements are always in question.
This makes the book hard to read and makes me perennially paranoid about the appropriateness of the affects it produces in me. There are social rules for our emotional responses; knowing those rules is how Rabbit fucks with its reader. Who has the power, and the permission, to produce affect in other people, and when and where? Who is allowed to exploit it? The trigger warning, the epigraph of our time, is a gesture towards regulating that exploitation – the exploitation the ‘Sweet Sweet Agency’ of Rabbit operates in. How does Robinson’s book transform the affects it recounts into its reader’s experience?
As it says in ‘Party’, ‘at this party . . . a banner in the sky: it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter that you feel this way’. Is this the liberation that comes from the removal of oversight of our feelings, or the deprivation that results from everyone else’s ceasing to care? Rabbit is not checking in on me, but it loves to fuck me up.