A Study in Upholstery

This essay is a highly concentrated inquiry into one weird poetic trope, wherein the sexualized body of a woman is described in terms of upholstered furniture. I'll introduce and discuss two instances of this trope and then talk a little bit at the end about what it might mean for our thinking about metonymy.

The first instance comes from the Russian-American poet laureate Joseph Brodsky's 1988 lyric cycle "Centaurs." This cycle was originally written in Russian, translated into English the same year by Brodsky himself.1 The cycle takes as its central themes two philosophical problems: temporal continuity and spatial contiguity. The furniture-for-femme trope dominates the second poem in the English-language cycle. This poem imagines a romantic date between two centaurs who are not the conventional mythic part human / part horse kind but instead part human / part domestic object.2

Centaurs II

Part ravishing beauty, part sofa, in the vernacular — Sophie,
after hours filling the street whose windows are partly faces
with the clatter of her six heels (after all, a catastrophe
is something that always ogles the guises a lull refuses),
is rushing to a rendezvous. Love consists of tulle, horsehair,
blood, bolsters, cushions, springs, happiness, births galore.
Two-thirds a caring male, one-third a race car — Cary
for short — greets her joyfully with his idling roar
and whisks her off to a theater. Every thigh, from the age of swaddles,
shows the craving of muscles for furniture, for the antics
of mahogany armoires whose panels, in turn, show a subtle
yen for two-thirds, full-face, profiles anxious
for a slap. Whisks her off to a theater in whose murkiness — perspiring, panting,
running each other over, kneading veneer with tire —
they enjoy off and on a drama about the life of puppets

which is what we were, frankly, in our era.

A lot of the scholarship on this poem understands it as a literalization of how metaphor works. In this conception, the human part and the other part (horse, or couch, or car), taken together, represent the vehicle and tenor of a traditional metaphor, fitted together more or less successfully. In multiple essays on the cognitive workings of metaphor, Brodsky himself describes a metaphor's two halves in visual terms, making it clear that he understood these concepts of signification as things with spatial dimensions, which must be synthesized and work in tandem in order to achieve their potential.3 In his critical biography of Brodsky, the poet Lev Loseff hoped to elucidate the role of this particular kind of metaphor in Brodsky's poetics, and looked to his "Centaurs" cycle as an example of it. Loseff writes,

Transferring the quality of one thing to another thing — that is, creating a metaphor, thinking by analogy — is something formal logic will not risk. But it is the very foundation of art. In his late works Brodsky almost grotesquely bares this basic artistic device, this thinking by analogy and association: some couches are called sofas; some women are named [Sophie]; the couches have legs; the women have legs — therefore sofa and [Sophie] merge into a kind of centaur.4

Loseff calls it the creation of a metaphor, but the "merging" that happens here is in fact the emergence of a metonym, constructed by forcing two things together. As he tells it, we start with a conceptual analogy between two entities — yes, that's metaphor — but crucially, we end up with one body, the relation of whose parts is not analogy but contiguity. That's metonymy.

It isn't natural contiguity, however; there's a force holding the parts together. Consider that bodies are often clothed, so clothes may indicate a body; that is standard metonymy. The relationship is one of physical contiguity rather than conceptual resemblance (that is standard metaphor). But the relationship does not depend on physical contiguity alone. It depends on the fact that bodies are often clothed. "Oftenness" here means standards, normativity, chance, the natural. And if centaurs existed in standard or normative reality, we might say that the horse part could stand for the human-horse whole — much the way a wrist can stand for a whole body. But centaurs do not exist in normative reality, and so, I think, a horse part does not metonymically stand for a human part, nor is it quite right to say that the sofa stands for the ravishing beauty. And so, in order to evoke a meaningful contiguous relation between them, Brodsky takes recourse to force: the force of sexual attraction on the level of the plot of the poem; the force of conceptual will on the level of its figures.

The name of this force varies in the poem. At one-point Brodsky calls it "love": "Love consists of tulle, horsehair, / blood, bolsters, cushions, springs, happiness, births galore. . . ." Later he calls it "craving": "Every thigh . . . / shows the craving of muscles for furniture, for . . . / . . . mahogany armoires. . . ." Later still he uses the orientalizing word "yen" for this desire: "mahogany armoires whose panels . . . show a subtle / yen for . . . full-face profiles" who are themselves "anxious / for a slap." And finally, Brodsky doesn't name, but merely describes, the effects of attraction: "perspiring, panting, / running each other over, kneading veneer with tire. . . ." We can't be sure which parts belong to which bodies, and this is not just due to the baroque quality of Brodsky's English verse. In this poem the sexual desire of one body for another is figured as the same kind of erotic-centripetal force of attraction that holds individual fragmented-whole bodies together.

Again, when we think of bodies naturally as wholes, parts can represent other parts without the whole really being threatened conceptually. But when we think of bodies naturally as parts (as in a centaur), the parts cannot represent the other parts; it is already an act of intellectual will to think of them as a whole.5 Thatis the figure at play: multiple disparate parts making, perhaps unstably, a strange whole new body, or several. Whose parts touch via force.

I've been describing this near-metonymic figure in terms of naturalness versus forcedness: if the whole comes, "naturally," prior to partition, then standard metonymy is possible; if parts come first and then comprise a whole, it is not; it seems "forced." And because there are not only multiple contiguous parts but also multiple contiguous bodies at play in the poem, there is also a more violent "force" running as an undercurrent throughout — the force of explicit sexual violence. The "blood" partially constituting Sophie's experience of "love" lends the accompanying springs and horsehair the suggestion of pain. Sophie and Cary's lovemaking in the theater is described in terms of him literally running her over with his tires. More subtly, the parenthetical "catastrophe" rhyming with Sophie's name gives the poem an atmosphere of violence. Less subtly, the armoires wish to be hit full in the face.

To help us work through the role of violence in the construction of the forced-metonymic body I'd like to turn now to another example of a ravishing beauty whose body parts are made of fabric and of blood. This is from a very different corpus: the American rapper Kanye West's 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The moment in question takes place on the song "Blame Game," the 11^th track on the album. "Blame Game" is possibly the least popular song on the album, largely due to the obscene and humorous skit, featuring comedian Chris Rock and vocalist Salma Kenas, that takes up several of the track's 8 minutes. The conceit of the skit is that the song's speaker, vocalized by Kanye West, has just gotten into a fight with his girlfriend. Angry, they part ways and each finds another partner for the night. While she's with another man (vocalized by Chris Rock), she accidentally dials Kanye's phone, unwittingly granting him listening access to her evening with Chris Rock. So, we are put in Kanye's position, eavesdropping on this sexualized conversation that takes place between his unfaithful girlfriend and another man.

It seems like Chris Rock and Kanye's girlfriend have been involved before, because he spends the entire skit amazed and complimenting her on her newly virtuosic lovemaking skills. The opening lines of the skit are "oh my god / baby you done took this shit to the nother mother fucking level," and it continues in that vein of hyperbolic obscenity. He asks her, again and again, in increasingly bizarre and specific tropes, how it came to be that she's gotten so good in bed. Five times she answers that Kanye West has taught her, five times with the exact same formulation: "Yeezy taught me." These are her only lines in the skit: 95% of the lines are his. Finally, near the end of the skit, the "Yeezy taught me" pattern is broken. In a kind of frenzy as he reaches for language extreme enough to convey his pleasure and his awe, Chris Rock exclaims, "It's like you got this shit reupholstered or some shit. What the fuck happened? / Who, who the fuck got your pussy all reupholstered?" and Salma Kenas replies, "Yeezy reupholstered my pussy."

This is a really strange exchange. Hyperbole and humor may account for other strange things that Chris Rock says (i.e. when he compares having sex with her to the Cirque du Soleil), but I think not this. It verges on catachresis.

It's like you got this shit reupholstered or some shit. What the fuck happened?
Who, who the fuck got your pussy all reupholstered?

Yeezy reupholstered my pussy.

Part of what makes this exchange possible is the fact that the word "pussy" has two slightly different meanings. One, concretely, it simply names female genitalia. (An example of this usage comes earlier in the skit, when Chris Rock says "I was fucking parts of your pussy I'd never fucked before!") In this concrete sense, one could substitute in the word "vagina" without serious semantic difference. The second meaning of the word "pussy," however, is abstract: it functions as synecdochal shorthand for "having sex with women" more generally. (An example of this is in the track immediately preceding this song, when Kanye says "pussy and religion is all I need.") In the first, concrete sense, the word names a part of a whole. And the whole is a female body. In the second, abstract sense, the word names a part of an experience. And the experience is a sexual interaction.

It seems to me that, meant in the second, abstract way, one's experience of sex-with-women might be conceived of as improved or even upgraded in some sense. And this is what Chris Rock means. But since a pussy is also a specific thing, a tangible noun, he doesn't say "improved"; he uses a word we generally reserve for material items.6

We can see this slippage in the progression of verb usage. First he says "you got this shit reupholstered" (could still mean "improved your sex game"), then he says "got your pussy reupholstered" (probably could not mean that anymore), and then she concretizes further, doing away with the passive "got" construction and stating it simply, so that "reupholstered" is the main verb: "Yeezy reupholstered my pussy" (definitely something someone did to her vagina, no other reading available).

The same progression is happening at the level of the pronouns. Between "you got this shit reupholstered" and "who got your pussy reupholstered" (both Chris Rock's lines), she is moved from agent to object. "This" event between them becomes her body. With "Yeezy reupholstered my pussy" she simplifies, confirms the transition, she names the agent. The movement from the first to the third line describes a movement from an experience she might have participated in actively to one where something was done to her passively.

In addition to losing her agency, with "Yeezy reupholstered my pussy," we also lose the possibility of an easy figurative reading. "You got this shit reupholstered" may mean "you participated in fun and consensual sexual experimentation which resulted in more pleasure for everyone involved," but "Yeezy reupholstered my pussy" cannot mean that. "Pussy" is no longer a synecdoche for sex with women. It's a body part. One may attempt to imagine the words literally, but this is difficult.

No longer synecdoche for sex, the pussy trope at play here hangs unfixed between his lines and hers. When she speaks, it stabilizes. We understand that it's a part of her, a synecdoche for her. "Yeezy reupholstered my pussy." This is real objectification, the making a thing of a woman, an externally imposed body modification so extreme it threatens to turn her into a chair, a car interior, a sofa. The implication is that pussy reupholstery describes a kind of teaching ("Yeezy taught me"). Sex — the matter, after all, at hand — is thus figured as transferable knowledge; the transfer itself figured as an objectifying procedure so painful and specific it is nearly impossible to visualize, much less imagine being subjected to oneself.

And if we stay with the mechanics of the figure: knowledge has indeed been transferred, and indeed via sex. But not from one person (one mind, one body) to another; rather, from one concept to another. The subtle polysemy of the word "pussy" has allowed for the transfer of its meaning in the space of three lines. What started as shorthand for "sex with women" (which may be "improved" upon, perhaps) now indexes a woman's whole body and mind — and with it her physical vulnerability, her capacity to learn new tricks in bed, her frightening proximity to being made an object by means of sexual violence.

The exchange remains uncanny. Not only because the resulting image is sexually violent, and not only because the referent of the word "pussy" is unstable. The exchange remains uncanny because the trajectory describes a forced and unnatural synecdoche, and synecdoches — like metonyms in general — rely on states of affairs usually conceived of as natural or coincident. As with the Brodsky poem, the force is erotic and somewhat violent in the plot of the song; the force is an act of conceptual will in terms of poetic mechanics.

As Paul de Man has it, metonymy is "based only on the casual encounter of two entities that could very well exist in each other's absence," and is thus

distinguished from metaphor in terms of necessity and contingency... necessity and chance being a legitimate way to distinguish between analogy and contiguity. The inference of identity and totality that is constitutive of metaphor is lacking in the purely relational metonymic contact: an element of truth is involved in taking Achilles for a lion but none in taking Mr. Ford for a motor car.7

What he means by "necessity" is that in standard metaphor the conceptual relationship between two things is stronger or realer than those things or bodies or concepts or images themselves: it comes prior to them; the signifying relationship constitutes them and makes possible their presence. Whereas metonymy and synecdoche emerge, as de Man says, as the "casual encounter of two entities that could very well exist in each other's absence."

The problem is that pussy upholstery — like Sophie's blood and bolsters — is not a casual encounter. In his example of basic metonymy de Man says there is no element of truth in taking Henry Ford for a car; the Brodsky poem and the Kanye skit force some truth into it. We have to take her for a car: her interior's been reupholstered. A chance encounter of two entities, their relationship, their closeness and touch, the transfer of knowledge or meaning between them — call this metonymy, call it sex — the idea that such an encounter could be coincidental or "casual" is revealed to be an illusion, an illusion with considerable force behind it.

To finish I'd like to suggest that thinking about metonymy this way — as something whose naturalness is an illusion, something that may be forced — may help us reconsider more broadly the relation between things, and bodies. We do not emerge in proximity to each other's parts naturally or by chance, though it seems to us that we do. To describe Henry Ford's relation to an automobile as a "chance" or "casual" encounter is, clearly, to tell a lie about production and power. "Doing something to someone's pussy" can easily be a synecdoche for "teaching someone to engage in sex in a certain kind of way." But when that "doing something" is registered as "unnatural" (i.e. upholstering it!) we begin to see that the very device is based in a normative fantasy of the natural (a fantasy, for instance, of who "naturally" has a pussy, and what "naturally" gets done to it) — which is itself a kind of force, which we might do better to rethink, which we might collectively reconstitute.

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Caroline Lemak Brickman is an academic worker and labor organizer. She teaches composition at the University of Pittsburgh, and she is writing a dissertation about lyric and myth at UC Berkeley.

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