Years ago, when I was still a neurotic child and not, as I am now, a neurotic adult, I asked my mother whether I would have to swallow for the rest of my life. I remember where I was standing: at the top of the stairs, just outside the bathroom, the door open behind me. And I remember that when my mother said yes, I was overwhelmed by a sense of existential dread. There was something frightening to me about the idea of needing to repeat something, of that repetition being a precondition for—a defining factor of—life.
Later, in middle school, I was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome. Though I have had many tics—new ones introduce themselves every so often, then are replaced and forgotten, like colleagues or classmates—swallowing has never been one of them. I squeeze my eyes shut; I hold them open; I tense my neck; I sniff; I hum two-note patterns (usually major sixths). But I have never felt an abnormal urge to swallow, perhaps because swallowing is already a tic, a tic intrinsic to humanness, a tic we share.
Freud writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of a “compulsion to repeat,” a perpetual drive to re-experience the past. Recently, I have found myself unusually conscious of this re-ness. I take a sip of water or gulp down a Kalamata olive and am transported, for an instant, to the top of the stairs, where I once again feel the freshness of that fear, the sting of my mother’s well-meaning “yes.” It is as if with each swallow I am being reminded that another will come, only to forget and be reminded again. I went to get my teeth cleaned last week, and for the first time I wondered whether we are afraid of dentists’ offices not because of the sharp utensils or the whining machinery or the threat of rebuke, but because they are some of the only places where we are not afforded the freedom to swallow. With hands in our mouths, we are temporarily stripped of our capacity to repeat, to re-experience.
Long before I asked my mother about swallowing, I listened to my father as he read “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” in a peculiar monotone. We were in a coffee shop, and I assume I was laughing, because this was exactly the sort of thing that used to set me off. The song builds on itself cumulatively, each subsequent stanza introducing an additional animal that the old lady has swallowed. This poor, misguided woman ingests a fly, a spider, a bird, a cat, a dog, a cow, and, at last, a horse. As a child, I liked to think that the bird was itself a swallow: a swallowed swallow.
Each stanza ends with a morbid exclamation: “I don’t know why she swallowed a fly—perhaps she’ll die!” Yet the woman keeps living, keeps swallowing. Until she is dead, she is swallowing, and her “compulsion to repeat” is maintained. When I asked my mother whether I would have to swallow for the rest of my life, she could just as well have recited this song to me, right there at the top of the stairs, and the message would have been just as clear.
After the woman swallows a horse, the structure is interrupted, and the rhyme ends with a triumphant assertion: “She’s dead, of course!” What is a child meant to do upon hearing this final line? Cry? Giggle? Perhaps one lets out a sigh of relief, as if to say, “The swallowing is over at last.”
We’re fascinated by swallowing. We watch sword swallowers on talent shows and hot-dog swallowers at eating contests. We describe facts that are difficult to accept as hard to swallow. When something is particularly hard to swallow, we wish the ground would swallow us up. Eventually, we swallow our pride instead and keep swallowing for another day. In Ulysses, Armstrong picks up some fig rolls and “swallow[s] them softly”; Mr. Deasy, “breathing hard,” swallows “his breath”; the Alaki swallows “several knives and forks.” When at last we meet a character—Mary Shortall’s child—who cannot swallow, he is “smothered with the convulsions in the mattress” and dies. To swallow, Joyce seems to suggest, is to live.
In my own writing, I find myself drawn to using swallow as a verb. When I search those seven letters on my laptop, at least twenty Word documents appear. I’m not sure why. If I had to guess, I would say that swallowing is useful from a literary perspective because it is both general and particular, universal and individual. We are all swallowers, but how and when we swallow can tell a friend, or a reader, a lot about what we’re thinking. A character can swallow hard. A character can swallow imperceptibly. A character can swallow often, or rarely, or unpredictably. A character can swallow wrong and cough or hiccup. A character can stop speaking to swallow, or stop swallowing to speak. Fundamentally, I think what the character is telling us when she swallows is that she is alive—that we are alive, and will be swallowing for a lifetime.
Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind studies comparative literature at Yale and serves as managing editor for the Yale Literary Magazine. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Five Points, and West Branch.
