The Body: An Essay
by Jenny Boully

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Book Reviews of The Body: An Essay

Book Review: "Everything That Is Said Is Said Underneath"
Summary: 5 Stars

In "The Body," Boully does no more than any curious person does in internally debating the nature of existence, the purpose of literature, the meaning of love - but the way she does it is no less than calling to a memorable reckoning the history of human thought and writing. From the Bible to Laurence Sterne to Lacan, and much of what comes in between (and before/after), the scope and breadth of Boully's exposure and knowledge of what has been written on the subjects she treats is obvious in her engagements with and struggles to mine those sources and adapt them to her own purposes. What seems to result is a statement that these revered authorities have never been able to provide an answer to the questions that plague our attempts at epistemological clarity - and she is humble enough not to try offering her own work itself as an answer, but instead as a reevaluation of the questions.

Footnotes as footnotes are meant to illuminate or clarify the text to which they are appended. Giving us a series of footnotes to a text that's not there complicates things - it forces us to look "underneath," to the silences - to what we don't say, the letters we don't send, the truths we can't admit even to ourselves about ourselves. What revelations lay behind the paste-board masks that we present to the world as our selves? The oceans of blank space in this deceptively small (78 page) book tease us with a body that is still undefined, unexplored, unnameable as it were.

The dreams and fragments, scenarios of plays unacted, nondescript, and yet lush depictions of people without names, words we can't read, and conversations between people who don't hear each other - the footnotes themselves disorient our ideas of the world we arrange in order to make sense of. What appears at first glance to be a loose amalgamation of unrelated comments, reveals itself, in the course of reading, to be a carefully arranged, highly patterned series of musings, often simultaneously wary and celebratory of uncertainty. To read "The Body," at least for me, has been to lose, at least temporarily, the need to have everything make sense; to hear, see, and read answers to questions that I don't know how to ask.

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