Abstract
When asked to write a review of Jean O’Malley Halley’s book, I jumped at the opportunity. I had presented on a conference panel with Jean Halley, and as she read her paper I realized that I was listening to some of the most finely crafted prose, I had ever come across in the academic world. Not only did the prose sing but the density of the message, in this fleeting, less than 7-min reading of prose, was thick and polished, and had the feel of the way the memory of experience, or the initial enacting of experience is, often, and most of the time, full of the many ways things can go. In cracking open Halley’s book and reading the first section, “A Brief History Told in Carpets,” again I am moved by the ability that Jean’s writing has to evoke so much about the qualities of living, about the complex way in which these things of human living happen, and about the way that one knows, presents themselves, and feels in knowing, and how this is all part and parcel of the whole way that things work in the real that we collectively understand as a reality.
As I read on, I silently bless Jean for bothering to write a prose that tells so complexly stories of such difficulty, for indeed, these stories, as all stories of our human reality do, have a level of complexity to them that if not well explained from time to time, will leave us feeling wrong or feeling longing. Our light diminishes and threatens to go out if, at some point, we are not in touch with stories that can reflect to us, with some accuracy, the poignant complexity of these lives that we live. We can find these reflections in many ways, in the countless colors available to us in the everyday visual landscape, in the hold that someone who has known you for a very long time can have when they are present with you, in the reflections on turning points of the more important moments of our lives. Jean Halley’s book, The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows, provides a space such as this, as her prose weaves the multiple layers of meaning provided by the passage of certain moments into a thoughtful compendium of insight and hope.
The early vignette in Halley’s book, “A Brief History Told in Carpets,” tells me that that this book, as it is penned, is one of relationships, as relationship forms who we are and how meaning is made. Here, she carefully names her relationships alongside her mother and her father, and her relationship to what is often thought of as an object, carpet. This naming is significant, what she brings to life, is inanimate, no longer. In the way in which this beginning story is told, through relationship, the rest of the story is told. The strength of this book is that it tells the power of relationships, and the kind of presencings they come from and enable, and how from them each of us emerges.
Much of The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows tells of the way life is and is not at any given moment. So often, while reading the text, one gets the sense that what the author tells is set strongly against the negative space of what is not told, what is not to be, or of what is missing. One of the powers of this work is that it can evoke a myriad of combinations of what is not there, or of what might or might not be. It reads like the telling of many moments of birth, one stacked upon the other, it tells by setting the stage, and leaving the rest to the visceral imagination of the reader. In its opening pages, it describes trauma as “the tiny cracks in a glass that surrounds the small hole made by a bullet, the hole itself is empty, clear open space. The cracks simply, gently, mark the glass, remaining in it, of and distant, all at once” (p. 5). The form of this storytelling in this book works metaphorically to represent, or to be a piece of knowing through trauma. At least, this is what Halley claims (p. 5), but I believe, also, that this is the way bits of knowledge are joined in so many cases. Halley’s working of the metaphor as a trope in knowing is prevalent throughout the book, showcasing how metaphor is primary in the action of the body that has been effected by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and once again, I believe in so many other cases, and generally, that this is one of the ways that meaning is understood as consciousness is formed.
The book uses several expository styles or voices to apprehend the occurrence of violence in the U.S. postcolonial, violence to cows, violence to women, violence to women in families. Violence in the U.S. image practice, in acts, in action, enacted. The way that this book tells is essential to what it tells. What it tells could not be said in any other way. The way it tells allows for a multidimensional knowing, a connecting, the production of sociological knowledge of depth, which understands from many perspectives, and with the generosity to allow readers to enter from many vantage points, and with a myriad of interpretations. It also allows the human to be portrayed as human, fallible, sometimes corrupt, humble in the face of sociological phenomenon, humbled by the forces of history, our everyday lives caught in the webs of character formation of place and experience, yet, still able to move through and be transformed by it. Halley tells the story of the violence of the “wild west” that she encounters in her family, as a child, as she tells the violence of the “wild west” in the killing of cows. As she talks of the biopolitic of the postcolonial west, the themes of violence, domesticity, and docility are interwoven with notions of gender production and representation of the animals, against a notion of the duality of the wild and the taming of it. Halley provides us with theoretical exposition, historical background, and an ethnographic gathering of experience, which shows us how the mythology of the west, the creation of gender roles as colonial subjectivity, and practices of violence are built into the often occluded but prevalent phenomenon of violence in parts of the United States, sometimes misplaced and never forgotten.
Halley’s approach to this biopolitic is an embodied one, as the telling of memory provides a visceral sensibility to the work. The evoking of affect in this manner combined with historical exposition and theoretical explanation produces a sociological masterwork that is possible because of the use of autoethnography as method. Halley’s use of autoethnography provides the work with layers of felt information, connected to narrative, about a phenomenon which is intricately tied to the production of the kinds of subjectivity and habitus which is explored in the text. It is a slice of life text that explores the biopolitics of bodies that become violent, and bodies that are touched or effected by the actions of this violence. Halley’s use of autoethnography in this sociological work is masterful in the sense that it provides information to the piece that would not otherwise be provided, and is key and essential in explaining the human process which she describes. Namely, this work that places selves here and there, with feel, allows for probes and explanations that provide support for Halley’s statement about “the way that life pushes on,” this process by which we become, as the world around us tugs and pulls on us through its seemingly invisible interventions. “As life pushes on,” as the process of becoming and meaning making and practice is part and parcel of the way bodies of humans and other animal live together as material, practice, and myth. As Halley weaves a narrative which reflects the formation of certain kinds of subjectivities and sensibilities, the use of autoethnography supports this by providing viewpoint locations, intersections, and anchors, which would not be available otherwise. The formation of subjectivity is an intimate process of a seeming relationship between the inner and the outer. Halley embraces autoethnography, to show the intricacies of this process, through it she also points at new ways of approaching subjectivity, work which is well done, through the use of autoethnography.
Halley’s narrative provides a commentary on the culture and identity formations evoked through the cultural process of whiteness in the Western United States. She examines the use of violence as a “technic of power,” in a multitude of locations, as she explains the production of dominance in the guises of Whiteness and gender hierarchy. An alternative historical background of the Irish in the United States and cows as domesticated animals serves as a platform for truth-telling as she produces the backstory for a moment where persons, myth, and practices form human patterns for being, woven into action, woven into knowing, into being once more. Her exposition of the way the actions of history produce selves, which are individuals in social formation is fresh, clear, innovative, and precise. The sociohistorical moment she speaks of is so essential to the understanding of the U.S. ethos, that it is as if Jean Halley has taken an occluded moment that belongs to all of the U.S. population, and has peeled back its layers, to examine the phenomenon of violence, in a bright and gentle light. She is forgiving in her assessment, as those who truly want to understand might be. This work takes the phenomenon of violence out of its inexplicable darkness, and speaks to the questions of its why’s and how’s. This kind of work takes a great deal of labor, depth, and care. Its accuracy may be determined by how it leaves the reader feeling at the end. Myself, I felt as if issues that had been personally troubling me had been plummeted and, with no harm done to this reader, explained. And for a subject as difficult as the confluence of family violence, animal cruelty, and settler colonization, this is quite an amazing feat. This work of Jean Halley’s is elegant, hopeful, and humane, and this in itself serves as an intervention toward the subjects she speaks about. As we live, so it becomes, just “as life pushes on.”