by Amelia Sage Van Donsel

Dreams make you be somewhere where you apparently aren’t, render you a character in a story that isn’t yours and that you believe, in fact destroy your identity except for the most central core of the ‘I,’ since you are that self, the unnamed only I that remembers the dream.
—Alice Notley, “On Writing from Dreams”

 I first read The Descent of Alette (1996) as an undergrad and, admittedly, had no idea what was going on. A professor had recommended it to me, and it was my first experience reading Notley’s work. I left the book feeling as though I had just woken up from a dream, bewildered by what I had passed through. I was a little discouraged by my relative ineptitude, but largely astounded, in the best way possible, that a poet could “get away with” this. Returning to Alette years later after reading Notley’s work more widely, I found this book unsurprisingly easier to contextualize and parse out, including reconnecting with the myth of Persephone and learning that Notley had based her text upon the ancient Sumerian myth Descent of Inanna into the Underworld. In The Descent of Alette, Notley contemporizes this epic yet retains the narrative of a female protagonist’s journey through a disturbing subterranean realm, where she is tasked with overthrowing its ruler. Alette must depose the Tyrant, thereby freeing the souls trapped within the subway. Among Notley’s books, this one seems to best capture her radical imagination, which triumphantly rebirths the epic form. It compelled me, and continues to compel me, to play with form in a sustained way that edges the reader into surreal dislocation, a kind of dream logic. Alette is also known for an unconventional application of the quotation mark, which encloses every few words and creates a dense, leafy flurry on each page. In a prefatory (and almost begrudging) author’s note, Notley explains that the punctuation is a multifaceted tool critical to our reading of this work—it functions as a poetic foot to retain meter, a means of slowing the reader’s eye, a way to distance her authorship from the poem’s main character. Though this preamble is necessary to contextualize a formal choice that might otherwise off-put the novice reader (like it did me), these quotation marks also demand that the reader surrender to the experience of the poem. It can still be frustrating to tell who is speaking/thinking and when—the layered punctuation amplifies the sense of ricocheting echoes—and because of this cumulative labor of visual translation, I found my eye hopping among the feet and stuttering over the layers of punctuation. Yet, this is the important experience Notley deliberately asks us to engage with, which is one of constant surrender. Our reward for our brave slippage into this dark water? Immersion in the surreal immediacy of Alette’s witness, and an absorption of Notley’s musicality and breathtaking visions. Yes, with waves of quotation marks, you are perhaps like me and working to stay afloat in the poem. But the cumulative effect of this overlapping dialogue creates a ghostly polyvocality. There is always a narration—a chorus—transmitting Alette’s quest to us across permeable planes, and the poem itself is “spoken” into life. 

Beyond this aesthetic technique, the otherworldliness that Notley extracts from Alette’s confinement to the artificial light and subterranean machinery is hallucinatory. As many habitual subway riders can attest to, being packed into hurtling darkness with strangers is disorienting, intimate, and begs a reversion to the primal. The sex and violence that take place in this narrative magnify the news we catch of assaults, thefts, suicides, and other disturbing intrusions from strangers on the subway. Of course, however exaggerated these threats may be, we cannot help but graph our witness of the contemporary relentless acts of global cruelty onto the similarly violent autocracy that saturates this book, and this text feels especially prophetic. The vicious misogyny with which the Tyrant has constructed his kingdom is so omnipresent that the patriarchy has erased both individual identity and collective knowledge. Thus, the world Alette descends into is both a kingdom and an interstitial space—transitory, subterranean, and highly controlled. Perhaps this realm is more nightmare than mere dream. 

This epic poem’s compounded disorientation that I’ve addressed above is refreshing rather than opaque, and the dreamscape in Alette is diffuse and omnipresent. It is clear that Notley held a deep emotional connection to the experiences from which her poems were derived and the experiences her poems consequently ask of their readers. I think it is partially this grand reciprocity that makes her writing so valuable. Notley also understood that dreaming is inherent to deciphering memory and myth, just as translation of a dream into writing is a kind of transmission across time. In a 2022 essay, Notley characterizes dreams “as a place or function in me I’m divided from, a place or function that knows things I don’t know awake, and is often the better, more imaginative maker.” Similar to the dreamstate Notley describes, readers of Alette must trust that what the poem is communicating is important, and has greater access to a kind of truth than we do as the “non-asleep.” (After recounting her habitual recording of her dreams, Notley adds: “I don’t know what’s going to happen to my dream notebooks when I die: they aren’t very interesting in themselves, but I might not get around to destroying them”). Notley not only used dreams as materials for her poems, but she relied on them for prophecy and access to communication with the dead. This book, too, seems to ask the reader to follow her in suspending our hesitations in order to open ourselves to another level of consciousness—one between dreaming and awake—in which the dead are given voice. All moments of time are contemporaneous, recursive, and all levels of [un]consciousness are fluid in this underworld; the dreamer is awake within the dream. Thus, because everything is shifting and we have no point of reference within a formally disruptive/fragmented text, time feels stagnant; Alette, too, witnesses vivid, disturbing, and inexplicable tasks that have no clear motive or outcome. Notley has stated that she “overtly expect[s]” the reader to receive her intentions via a kind of telepathy. Referring to her 2010 collection Reason and Other Women, Notley asks that the reader “must go with the rhythms and odd usages of my mind as I present it, in order to know further things, attain a new state of consciousness with its own materials and details, coaxed from dreams and words.” 

To read The Descent of Alette is to contemporaneously experience the rarity of collapsed past, present, and future, while also transcending the notion of time entirely. We are reliant instead upon Notley’s narrative form to provide linearity, to locate us. We receive from Alette a prophetic transmission in the form of a dream, while still hoping that the transmission is not, in fact, prophecy. As readers of Notley’s work, we must trust the experience that her poems give to us, and we must return to them. Her lyric is persistent, resolute: “‘“I will change the” “forms in dreams”.../“Starting”/“from dreams,” “from dreams we” “can change,” “will change…”” (144).

Works Cited

Notley, Alice. The Descent of Alette. New York, New York, Penguin Group, 1996.

Notley, Alice. “Writing from Dreams.” Literary Hub, 7 Oct. 2022, lithub.com/alice-notley-on-writing-from-dreams/.