ABSTRACT
More than a decade after its publication, we have only begun the task of reading Marion Woodman’s cancer narrative, Bone: Dying into Life (2000). The fact that a fuller understanding of the journal selections collected under that vivid title is still in its infancy should perhaps come as no surprise, since Woodman herself opens the book by warning against reading it too quickly. What risk is evoked here? When time is of the essence, as it surely is amid the experience of the mortal illness that the book chronicles, why is “speed” necessarily the enemy of consciousness (xii)? Among many other things, Bone is a labour of love—both an account of Woodman’s profound love for her husband, Ross, whose Afterword graces the book, and a memory of her struggle to “surrender” to the amorous embrace of Sophia, the demanding but finally benevolent goddess of consciousness who forms “the still point” (ix) of her life and work. But the book is a labour, the first-hand record of an agonistic subject-in-process, the outcome of which is unknown and unknowable—even if there are voices in Bone, as I want to argue, that suggest otherwise and that clamour for a punctual form of knowledge where none may be had. All that is certain is that today, happily, in the shadow of her cancer, Marion Woodman thrives—not in spite but because of the travail of soul and body that she describes in Bone. She often characterizes this labour as a form of parturition or giving birth to herself, although these metaphors of reproduction vie uneasily in the text with figures of disavowal, loss, and emaciation. This ambivalently executed work includes the creation of Bone itself, whose pangs of remembrance and imagination are enacted on every page. Like its author, the text is a case of dying into a life that is marked in advance by the violence and conflict of its origins.
