ABSTRACT
A Village Life (2009) by Louise Glück features polyphonic prose verses whose speakers are inhabitants of an unnamed village—ranging from an omniscient speaker, a husband, a wife to non-human agents like the earthworm and the bat, to name a few. Glück includes the species of alterity i.e. the non-human other alongside the humans in her construction of a village life which renders the idea of place, and thereby home-uncanny. Here, firm distinctions between person and place, human and animal, self and landscape are dissolved in a flux of movements, relations and becomings. So where humanist geographers like Yi Fu Tuan emphasise the agency of the coherent human subject in perceiving place as a pre-existing object, recent work in cultural geography (Nigel Thrift et al) tends to foreground the “multisensual engagements” through which both subject and object are constituted. Thus, in this chapter, I shall examine how the presence of the non-human agents as speakers in the collection demystifies the idea of place and the sense of belonging that comes with it, creating an affectual circuit in the poems where the human and the non-humans are equal participants. Further I shall look at how the concept of nostalgia does not provide a safe passage to an imagined idyllic village life but rather evokes a yearning that complicates the speakers’ relationship to place. Thus, finally I shall analyse how Glück re-visions the traditional genre of pastoral poetry by creating a sense of a place where, amidst the utterances of multiple perspectives, no one view can claim complete authority of the narrative.
