“Being then nothing” Physicality, abjection and creation in Janice Galloway’s short fiction

© Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 19(1), 2019, pp. 133–150 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 doi: 10.6018/ijes.348531 “Being then nothing”: Physicality, abjection and creation in Janice Galloway’s short fiction JORGE SACIDO ROMERO Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (Spain) Received: 05/11/2018. Accepted: 30/04/2019. ABSTRACT This article explores the prominence of the body in Janice Galloway‟s short fiction. Drawing mainly on Kristeva‟s notions of the semiotic and the abject, the argument initially establishes the central place of physicality in Galloway‟s poetics. Her creative project is inspired by a desire to transmit in writing the experience of being alive, of how being is intrinsically fragile, inexorably bound to extinction. In a particularly sharp manner that engages the reader more actively than her novels, her short stories exhibit both formally and thematically an interaction of the symbolic and the semiotic. As being attentive to life entails an awareness of death if one is to write realistically, the ensuing discussion of stories from her three collections –Blood (1991), Where you find it (1996) and Jellyfish (2015)– reveals that abjection, the extreme version of the semiotic that threatens to cancel out the symbolic, is paramount in her creative universe. KEYWORDS: Janice Galloway, short fiction, the body, abjection, being, death, Kristeva, Blanchot. 1. THE LETTER KILLETH AND GIVETH LIFE: GALLOWAY’S BODY POETICS According to Alexander Kojève, the word was for Hegel the murder of the thing.1 Thus, for instance, “the word „dog‟”, Kojève explains, “does not run, drink, and eat; in it the Meaning (Essence) ceases to live –that is, it dies” (1969: 140). Strongly influenced –like Jacques Lacan and other French intellectuals of the time– by Kojève‟s seminal _____________________ *Address for correspondence:Facultade de Filoloxía, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Avda./Castelao s/n, 15782 A Coruña, Spain; e-mail: jo[email protected] International Journal of English Studies IJES UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA http://revistas.um.es/ijes 134 Jorge Sacido Romero © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 19(1), 2019, pp. 133–150 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 reading of Hegel, Maurice Blanchot states that “the word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness” (1995: 322). For Blanchot literature is precisely the attempt to bring back to life through language that which language itself had murdered: In speech what dies is what gives life to speech; […] something was there and is no longer there. Something has disappeared. How can I recover it, how can I turn around and look at what exists before, if all my power consists of making it into what exists after? The language of literature is a search for this moment which precedes literature. Literature usually calls it existence; it wants the cat as it exists, the pebble taking the side of things, not man but the pebble […] I say a flower! But in the absence where I mention it, […] I passionately summon the darkness of this flower, I summon this perfume that passes through me though I do not breathe it, this dust that impregnates me though I do not see it, this color which is a trace and not light. (1995: 327) The conviction that the task of literature is to rescue things (cats, flowers, pebbles…) from the deadly net of conceptual abstractions through the sensual evocation of their physicality is very strong in the case of the Scottish writer Janice Galloway. To Georgina Brown, who famously described Galloway as “a literary endoscopist” and defined her writing as “visceral”, she declared on occasion of the publication of her second collection of stories (Where you find it) that she was engaged in the “very complex and very ambiguous” task “‟to write realistically about what it feels to be alive‟” (1996). In so doing, the most important of all the “‟essentials‟” (as she called them) of her writing was “to make the reader feel” (Brown, 1996). For Galloway, corporeality, physicality, sensuality, in sum, the body is to be rescued from extinction through writing and shared with the reader in what constitutes a truly universal experience: “I want people to know[,] to remember that I am a body, not some kind of great brain schlumping about being an abstract truth. I hate the kind of writing that inflates the intellect into the only thing that matters –there is a horrible elitist game going on there– a „let‟s escape from the body‟. We are our bodies and no matter what your background […] We all feel the same when we touch things, that‟s the real universal” (Galloway in Brown, 1996). Three years later, in an interview with Cristie Leigh March for the Edinburgh review, Galloway admitted that she was “obviously fascinated by physicality –sometimes repulsed, sometimes wildly attracted. […] Physicality is always a focus” (1999: 97, emphasis added). Both Galloway‟s fascination with physicality and its thematic recurrence in her work have directly to do with, she states, “my own obsession with […] death. Death is the most bizarre idea. Being then nothing” (March, 1999: 97). Moreover, it is this fascination with being and with its inevitable annihilation that makes her a writer, that should make anyone a writer: “If Physicality, abjection and creation in Janice Galloway’s short fiction 135 © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 18(2), 2018, pp. 133–150 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 you‟re not fascinated with the simple fact of being”, Galloway states, “you‟ve not got a lot to write about” (March, 1999: 97). Galloway‟s impulse towards literary creativity derives, therefore, from her effort to convey to the reader in writing the sense of being‟s fragile physicality which (as Julia Kristeva calls it following Jacques Lacan “the symbolic”, as one modality of significance) has emptied out of substance in its abstract, discrete organisation of reality (1984: 24). It is in literary, poetic language that, according to Kristeva, the dialectic of “the symbolic” and the other modality at work in the signifying process, “the semiotic”, becomes particularly intense. In ways akin to Blanchot‟s idea that “[t]he language of literature is a search for [..]what exists before” the word murders the thing, Kristeva points out that (what she calls) “the semiotic chora” is “a modality of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of the object and as the distinction between the real and the symbolic” (1984: 26, emphasis added). The semiotic disrupts the stability and coherence of the symbolic, blurs its presumably mimetic transparency (hence its transformative, revolutionary creative power)2 and evokes in the subject the moment in which he/she was not yet separated from the object, primordially, from the mother (Kristeva, 1984: 27), from the mother as the other that must be repressed, expelled, “ab-jected” in order for us to constitute our identity as subjects (1982: 13). In speaking and writing the corporeal, the semiotic and its extreme manifestation, the abject3 are linked by Kristeva to Lacan‟s notions of the “real”, “jouissance”, and “drive”, three terms that are interrelated in their destabilising effects on the symbolic order as that instituted by the paternal law (for Lacan the real is the unsymbolisable), regulated by the normalising pleasure principle (for Lacan jouissance is beyond the pleasure principle and has orgasmic connotations) and as the place where the subject‟s desire is articulated (in stark contrast with the drive, which is “what a biological instinct becomes once it is subject to the signifier [… and so is connected] to the real of the foreclosed biological body” [Kay, 2003: 162]). Hence Kristeva‟s affirmation in Powers of horror that “it [the Other, the symbolic order] jettisons the object into the abominable real, inaccessible except through jouissance. It follows that jouissance alone causes the abject to exist as such. One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion” (Kristeva, 1982: 9). Kristeva‟s dialectic interweaving of the semiotic and the symbolic, like Blanchot‟s literary search for what precedes literature, is in line with Galloway‟s attempt to make the reader feel and with her “hope [that] what is picked up is transmitted in more entirety –by suggestion, perhaps– than the words alone can do. I deal a lot in bodily sensation too” (Sacido-Romero, 2018). Indeed, depictions of the physical, material, scatological, carnal, sensual, fleshy, visceral, bodily run like a thread in Galloway‟s fiction, yet, because of their condensation, limited frame, elisions, and concentration, those depictions impact the reader 136 Jorge Sacido Romero © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 19(1), 2019, pp. 133–150 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 more vividly and affect him/her more intensely than is the case with longer narratives.4 The fact that short fiction engages readers more actively has been frequently singled out as a defining feature of the genre (Korte, 2003: 5; Brosch, 2015: 93). Galloway herself states that she “like[s] the intensity and airy space they [short narratives] offer for the head to roam” (Sacido-Romero, 2018). Short stories, hence, become apt vehicles to achieve another of the major aims (or “essentials”) of her writing: namely, “hauling the reader in […] to make them [readers] do part of the work and bring the experiences that they have” (Brown, 1996). If this works for longer narratives like her second novel Foreign parts (1994), where (in her own words) “[t]he are rhapsodies about Rona‟s [one of the two main characters‟] face, plum membrane on her lips, the body‟s resistance to exercise” (March, 1999: 97), such details would leave a more sharp, focused, unified impression on readers of short stories where there is little space to bury them under a heap of narrative detail. Galloway‟s short fiction abounds in examples of the semiotic and the abject as a way to link writing to the body and the material, to resuscitate the being that language in its symbolic modality has murdered, imposing the view that words as bearers of ideal concepts are actually transparent representations of the world, of things, of being. In Galloway‟s stories, the semiotic is conveyed through both formal strategies –like an unconventional use of typography, fragmented syntactical periods and ungrammatical language (which confer on her narratives a poetic quality)5– and recurrent motifs that underline the sensual, frequently abject dimension that her work explores. Norquay (2000) reads Galloway‟s typographical experimentation in her first two novels (The trick is to keep breathing and Foreign parts) as an instance of Hélène Cixous‟ écriture feminine, particularly her use of the upper-case as a vector or conductor of intense energy currents (135). McGlynn (2008) interprets the particular layout design, typesetting and visuality of The trick is to keep breathing (1989) as the book‟s way to “assert the physicality of the text” so that it “demand[s] the reader to approach it as object” (229). Precisely, for Blanchot, the hope of the retrieval of being through/in language lay on “the fact that words are things, too, are a kind of nature” (1995: 327). Words, from this new perspective, become solid, concrete, material, while before they were seen as ephemeral, abstract, ideal. Somewhat prefiguring Kristeva‟s cogitations on the semiotic obfuscation of meaningful symbolic transparency, Blanchot concludes by highlighting the materiality of the literary work: “language, abandoning the sense, the meaning which was all it wanted to be, tries [not fully achieves] to become senseless. Everything physical takes precedence: rhythm, weight, mass, shape, and the paper on which one writes, the trace of ink, the book. Yes, happily language is a thing: it is a written thing” (1995: 327, emphasis added). Without neglecting this formal, material dimension of literary language when deemed most relevant, I will concentrate in what follows on the conspicuous thematic presence of the physical, the sensual and the abject in a bunch of short stories by Janice Galloway that illustrate her poetics of the body. Physicality, abjection and creation in Janice Galloway’s short fiction 137 © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 18(2), 2018, pp. 133–150 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 2. GOING TO THE BUTCHER’S Galloway‟s one-page story “The meat” (Blood 1991) opens with a striking image of rotting meat hanging from a hook in a state of abject isolation which is typographically reinforced by the double space that separates this one-sentence paragraph off from the following one as if cut out from the rest of the text in which life goes on: “The carcass hung in the shop for nine days till the edges congested and turned brown in the air” (2009: 108). This piece of unsaleable meat, we are told, had something in it that “was infecting” and “[b]y the tenth day, the fat on its surface turned leathery and translucent like the rind of an old cheese” (Galloway, 2009: 108). Tactile and olfactive stimuli follow (“The ribs were sticky and the smell had begun to repulse him [the butcher]” [Galloway, 2009: 109]) so much so that the shop owner ends up throwing “it into the back close parallel to the street” to immediately “hear the scuffling of small animals and strays” presumably gnawing on it (Galloway, 2009: 109). Recalling the sharp, epigrammatic turning point of an English sonnet‟s closing couplet, readers find out only at the very end that the carcass on sale was the corpse of the butcher‟s wife, a climatic conclusion reached after a narrative progression permeated by a sensual in crescendo: “In the morning, all that remained was the hair and a strip of tartan ribbon. These he salvaged and sealed in a plain wooden box beneath the marital bed. A wee minding” (Galloway, 2009: 109). Based on a classroom experiment she conducted, Martín Alegre reads her students‟ reactions of uncomfortable surprise at the story‟s conclusion as Galloway‟s “incisive criticism of a patriarchy so dominant that we don‟t see women‟s ill-treated bodies, not even when their sad remains are fully displayed” (2009: 462). To Martin Alegre‟s sagacious conclusion it could be added that Galloway‟s indictment of patriarchal murderous violence in “The meat” is even more incisive and cruder if one takes into account not just the readers‟ but also the customers‟ reaction to the carcass whose identity they do not ignore, but, on the contrary, may know all too well: “no one wanted the meat. It dropped overhead from a claw hook, flayed and split down the spinal column: familiar enough in its way” (2009: 108, emphasis added). Even if the carcass were in a state that made it difficult to identify it as the wife‟s body, customers could not have missed “the hair and the strip of tartan ribbon” as the butcher keeps a sort of macabre trophy. The community of unnamed/ungendered shoppers, thus, tolerate homicidal domestic violence and at once react with utter disgust in the presence of what is really a corpse. The corpse was precisely for Kristeva the epitome of the abject, the remainder and reminder of the body‟s fragility before death: “The corpse, seen without God and outside science, is the utmost abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part” (1982: 4). Flesh, unsuccessfully commodified woman‟s flesh (that is, “meat”), in a state of decomposition, becomes refuse for living fellow human beings and food for animals and parasites who (like Keats‟ nightingale) have no conscience of death. 138 Jorge Sacido Romero © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 19(1), 2019, pp. 133–150 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 Galloway‟s opposite reactions of attraction and repulsion towards physicality show in the relatively recurrent reference to butchers, butchers‟ shops and meat in her short stories.6 Because, indeed, the tension between physicality‟s appeal and disgust in Galloway is intensely manifested in eating, more precisely, in responses to food.7 Thus, at the climatic point in the novel in which she became or decided to become an anorexic (“I didn’t need to eat”), Galloway‟s central character in The trick is to keep breathing, Joy Stone, looks at the contents of a can of vegetable soup and says that the stuff “was sickening but pleasantly so” (1999: 38, last emphases added). Yet, among the different types of food, meat is the one that provokes the most ambiguous reactions in humans. As Holm points out in her Kristevan reading of Claude Chabrol‟s film Le boucher (The butcher, 1969), “meat is perhaps the ultimate abject object as it necessitates the death of a body to feed another body, bringing together life and death in the most direct of manners” (2017: 160). The butcher is likewise an ambiguous social figure as meat dealer, as a merchant of the abject. Holm expands her analysis of Chabrol‟s central character, a serial killer of beautiful women, to propose a general description of the abject status of the butcher and of meat that is relevant for my discussion of the recurrence of these related motifs in Galloway‟s stories. “Even butchers who do not turn their knives on fellow humans”, Holm writes, “straddle the divide between life and death, rendering them liminal figures intimately involved in the sourcing of one of the most anxiety-ridden foods. It is this quotidian crossing of the boundary between living and death that render both the butcher and meat as conflicted symbols and highly ambivalent. [… The butcher‟s] position [is that of] an intermediary between society and the abject” (2017: 159). By choosing to title her story “The meat” instead of “The carcass” or “The butcher”, Galloway puts the accent on the abject status of this type of food while, of course, misleading the reader and adding to his/her final surprise when the truth of a horrid parricidal act is revealed. “after the rains” (Where you find it) is a more openly urban Gothic fantasy than “The meat”. The story is located in Glasgow and is punctuated with broken sentences in italics inserted as variable unpunctuated and uncapitalised poetic refrains that add to the sense of utter disruption of the normal order of things that the text provokes in readers. This is the story of how nine months of unremitting rainfall and an ensuing heatwave breed monsters. Like loose refrain-like fragments scattered in the text, subjects and objects lose their demarcations, boundaries are erased in the most bizarre ways, miraculous transformations occur (sprouts and leaves grow in a florist‟s body till she becomes a garden, for instance) till external reality is invaded by an amorphous worm-like being (“An enormous white grub spread the length of the pavement, bulbous tips waving in what looked horribly like appeal” [Galloway, 2009: 236, emphasis added]) and by a featureless ghost whose physicality is nevertheless highlighted: “Beyond this nerveless thing, a three-headed phantom groped forward on its hands and knees. Where features should have been was only tight, smooth Physicality, abjection and creation in Janice Galloway’s short fiction 139 © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 18(2), 2018, pp. 133–150 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 skin, blanket-grey and eyeless” (Galloway, 2009: 236). The I-narrator escapes from the touch of another such phantom (“I drew back, repulsed, fearing the thing it might touch would be me” [Galloway, 2009: 236. My emphasis]) and finds him/herself “facing the butchers‟”, where bloody sacrificial rituals appear to be taking place as the shop seems to mutate into a church: “a pitiful screeching forced me to turn. I was facing the butchers‟. The howling and the bloody trail at their doorway. The awful death stench and low weeping of children, childish voices seeping under the door of the church” (Galloway, 2009: 236). This nightmarish blurring of boundaries that is at once appealing and repulsive is a fictional example of the abject as defined by Kristeva in the very first paragraph of her book-length study on the topic: “a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself” (1982: 1). The I-narrator cannot but look back while she/he runs faster and faster seemingly across the line that separates life from death as he/she finally finds him/herself mutating into a corpse. Typographical fragmentation reinforces the protagonist‟s feeling of being beside him/herself in the story‟s concluding passage: My hands were very pale and whitening still. Thinning. They were stark white. I kept on running. (Galloway, 2009: 236) In presence of the abject, whose epitome is the corpse, Kristeva argues, “I am at the border of my condition as a living being” (1982: 3). The bizarre transformations people undergo in “after the rains” have rightly been interpreted as the citizens‟ transmutation into their social functions which undermines human closeness and the sense of community (March, 2002: 127). But this is not the whole message of the story as, from another perspective, it is not only that these marvellous metamorphoses actually upset rather than maintain the abstract order of symbolic positions and functions rendering it ineffective, but also that, as the final transformation of the I-narrator epitomises, human life is pushed onto and, apparently, across the threshold that separates it from death at the story‟s inconclusive conclusion. As readers reach the end of the story the protagonist seems to reach the end of his/her life. However, this final moment is rendered as an uncompleted, transitional process by means of material, textual disarray, of images of growing paleness and the reference to an ongoing action in the very last word of the story, “running”. In sum, to the character‟s being, then nothing (death), there corresponds the reader‟s reading, then blank space beneath on the final page of the story. A striking scene of abjection affecting the I-narrator‟s own body closes thus the narrative in “after the rains”, putting the accent on the inescapable fact of the precariousness of life, of being. Galloway‟s recurrent explorations of abject physicality, I maintain, are in tune with her attempt “to write realistically about what it feels to be alive” (Brown, 1996), to 140 Jorge Sacido Romero © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 19(1), 2019, pp. 133–150 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 show the fragility of our lives, of our efforts to stay alive, to keep breathing (March, 1999: 96), opposing therefore the abstract rendition of human existence found in the intellectualist kind of writing that obviates the body. Kristeva writes: “A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death –a flat encephalograph, for instance– I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theatre, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live” (1982: 3). In the realistic and less experimental long short story “A week with Uncle Felix” (Blood), eleven-year-old Scottish girl Senga, on a visit to his dead father‟s brother in England, is exposed to the abject several times in a traumatic context of unpleasant family secrets and growing sexual awareness. It begins with her visit to the butcher‟s in her aunt‟s company. They buy some meat there and when they reach home, we are told, “she saw the blood oozing down her arm in a twisted line and shouted. The meat was dripping on the lino as well. Senga went upstairs without waiting for the tea” (Galloway, 2009: 139). This disgusting experience of (literal) carnality as manifested in her refusal to eat (the meat) gives way to Senga‟s more traumatic confrontation with the abject in otherwise harmless natural objects which the text elaborates on: namely, plums fallen from a plum tree whose imposing, full vitality she admires and wants to take a closer look at. Firstly, the abject is experienced by her as an indefinable tactile impression (“She staggered backwards as her foot slipped on something soft” [Galloway, 2009: 145]), then as a strong olfactory impression (“Windfalls: that thick sweet smell like metal” [Galloway, 2009: 146]) and finally as visual cum tactile confrontation with the fully-formed fruit in the process of losing its definable contours and rotting into a growingly shapeless mass of stuff on which ants feed: She opened her hand and picked up the whole fruit; thumb and first fingertip, end to end, lifting it nearer. Then it became something else. Grey blue fungus furred one side of a gash underneath, a running sore oozing brown pulp and something else. Something moving. Thin black feelers twitching towards her hand. Dropping it was immediate. Even then it wasn‟t far enough away and she drew back from under the shade of trees, staring, wiping her hands against the jean seams to get rid of the feel from her fingers. Black movements flickered at the corners of her eyes, everywhere now she looked. Ants. (Galloway, 2009: 146) The story‟s length, its less experimental nature and the greater amount of details and themes it contains make instances of abjection less unified and striking in the reader‟s mind. However, in terms of the reader‟s response, the formal and technical features that the long passage just quoted exhibits make it a sharply effective instance of impressionist “delayed decoding” (Watt, 1981: 175). In it, a bunch of raw sense impressions perceived by a character are rendered directly by the narrator so that the whole event acquires full meaning later on, when some interpretative key is provided by the text (“Ants”, in this case). This is a Physicality, abjection and creation in Janice Galloway’s short fiction 141 © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 18(2), 2018, pp. 133–150 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 way of making the reader‟s perception and awareness of what happens to and around the character simultaneous with that of the character himself, drawing the reader in to make him/her feel what the character felt. In the passage above, reality loses its consistency and threatens the subject‟s safe inscription in it, blurring the boundaries across which bodies die to give life to other bodies in an incessant process of generation, decay and annihilation from which no one is saved. “A sudden and massive emergence of uncanniness”, Kristeva writes, “which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome.” (1982: 2). This (as Kristeva calls it at one point) “abominable real” (1982: 9) is a manifestation of the Lacanian Real. The Real undermines both symbolically constructed reality and the subject‟s egoic imaginary fullness, as when Freud reached a limit in his relation of the dream of Irma‟s injection. As Lacan says in Seminar II (March 9, 1955), Freud got his patient to open her mouth so as to see her throat: “There‟s a horrendous discovery here, that of the flesh one never sees, the foundation of things […] something which provokes anxiety” (1991: 154). When Senga leaves for her home in Scotland in her uncles‟ car with a box of plums nobody had wanted to eat (Galloway, 2009: 150), the abject, though hidden from view, makes itself present through a stench that impregnates everything. This is how the story closes: “the stink of plums began rising from the boot, thickening behind sealed windows. It went on rising all the way North” (Galloway, 2009: 179). 3. GENDER TISSUES In another story from Blood, “Love in a changing environment”, the smells and sounds coming from a butcher‟s shop ruin the love life of a couple that lives in the flat above. Their imagination is assailed by abject images of “dead tissue congested with blood” and “raw muscle flenching from the blade” (Galloway, 2009: 19). These images along with the smell of “putrefaction” and “the soft sound of the scalpel” destroyed their mutual appeal as solid, fully-formed love objects: “We lost sleep and seldom touched, suspicious of the scent of each other‟s skin” (Galloway, 2009: 19). They eventually split up: “The day they unloaded the bone grinder, I packed my bags” (Galloway, 2009: 19). However, in another story from the same collection, “things he said”, it is not the abject but language (polite conversation, small talk, empty words) that works as an obstacle to the sexual intercourse of a man and a woman in a what seems to be a blind date. The story closes with a sharp “The things he did” (Galloway, 2009: 129). The wordy deferral of an action is put to an end and, with it, the narrative too, triggering the readers‟ erotic imagination to fill in the blank page, another instance of how typographical space and textual structure elicits a sensual response from the reader. 148 Jorge Sacido Romero © Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Murcia. All rights reserved. IJES, vol. 19(1), 2019, pp. 133–150 Print ISSN: 1578-7044; Online ISSN: 1989-6131 3. For an elaboration of how the abject (mother) is a radicalised version of the semiotic (mother) see D. C. Covino (2004: 21). 4. Burgess (1996) defines Galloway‟s short fiction as “very physical writing”. See also Tym (2013). 5. Two approaches to Galloway‟s short fiction highlight their poetic quality, Paccaud-Huguet (2004), who concludes that it “deserves to be called poetic prose” (78), and Jackson (2004), for whom Galloway‟s short stories are akin to “a poetry of place, where ideas and emotions can only be apprehended through the environment in which they are mediated” (7). Paccaud-Huguet also highlights the element of linguistic and bodily excess in Galloway‟s writing: “The excess of meaning in human bodies and in language is no longer covered but on the contrary exposed” (2004: 69). 6. I have found no references to butchers in her novels: Trick, Foreign parts and Clara (2002). 7. “Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection” (Kristeva, 1982: 2). 8. Andrew Hock-Soon Ng (2004) reads Galloway‟s “Blood” as an example of a monstrous text in its “inability to represent the body” (182). Furthermore, though referring to Kristeva‟s idea of menstruation as one of the manifestations of the abject, Hock-Soon Ng suggests that “Blood” could be read as a parody of feminist essentialisms such as Kristeva‟s notions of prelinguistic chora and the semiotic (2004: 185, 207n30). 9. “My concern for animal welfare and ecology has always been there, I guess it‟s finding its way into the work more now because things are getting uglier with regard to lack of human compassion and care for their fellow creatures” (Sacido-Romero, 2018). 10. Galloway‟s “he dreams of pleasing his mother” (Where you yind it) can be also read as a nightmarish fantasy of (pre-)Oedipal attachment in which the mother figures as a “beast” (Galloway, 2009: 309 and 310). REFERENCES Blanchot, M. (1995). Literature and the right to death. The work of fire. (C. Madell, Trans.) (pp. 300– 344). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (Original work published in 1949). Brosch, R. (2015). 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