In that sense Karlsson, in approaching the poet's
self-reflexive solitude, is delineating what is still presumably strong in the Icelandic voice.
They air objections to being stepped on in overcrowded male corridors, or protests against casting women "in the literate circus." Among them are neatly drawn vignettes ("Leper Girl," "Female Line"),
self-reflexive notes and fragments ("Five Uneasy Pieces"), dream analyses/explications ("To Sleep," "Perchance to Dream"), and a few brilliantly recast icons for future gaze ("Kali," "Miniature Paintings," "Conversation").
Theater improves when it's at least
self-reflexive, when it heightens its sense of theatricality so that it is about the experience of itself (very much a modernist preoccupation), and that accounts for some of the appeal of Castellucci's work.
And perhaps the creative act is never singular--we are told--but always dual, especially in the kind of poetry Brathwaite has written over the years: hardly
self-reflexive but representative of the community, often Afrocentric, as is his overriding metaphor in the context of the colonized-imperialistic experience and the struggle or wrestle to salvage the self from the sense of the community's loss or permanent void.
So we all sat for what felt like a long time, on pause, occupying space,
self-reflexive and aware of our own choices to speak or to stay quiet, to stretch out or to scrunch up.
The
self-reflexive gesture, another element of recent Chinese fiction (Ma Yuan is a notable exponent) is also used but is ornamental in its effect.
This suddenly changed the idea of what it means to see and to be
self-reflexive or introspective while doing so.
Certainly, if Guillevic's work evokes the problematics of perception, conception, and expression, it is not to wallow in a resultant anguish or to indulge in the barely readable ellipses of some
self-reflexive discourse.