Textual Confessions: Narcissism in Anne Sexton's early poetry

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2004 by Jo Gill

That the poem is "a code" and that writing "signals" confirm its interest in the hermeneutic process by which words emerge and are deciphered. The metaphor of the "code" indicates that the confessional text might obscure (as we will see in a moment, I use the verb advisedly) rather than, as is commonly thought, lay bare its secrets. The line break after "write" suggests, and the rest of the poem confirms, that the "signals" are autonomous; the poet writes, yet in what seems to be a distinct movement, it is the "signals" that hurry across the page. Language in this poem, as elsewhere in Sexton, pre-exists and dominates the subject, constructs rather than reflects experience. As Hutcheon argues: "in literature, words create worlds; they are not necessarily counters, however adequate, to any extraliterary reality. In that very fact lies their aesthetic validity and their ontological status" (Narcissistic 102-03).

"An Obsessive Combination" examines this complex and--as it transpires--amazing process:

       [...] I write
       signals hurrying from left to right,
       or right to left, by obscure routes,
       for my own reasons; taking a word like "writes"
       down tiers of tries until its secret rites
       make sense.

The image of the physical and orderly progression of language across the page ("left to right") offers a metaphor for the way the act of confession is, typically, thought to put things "right" in the therapeutic sense. However, as this poem demonstrates, it is not the simple act of release or the tapping of the wellspring of inner compulsion that makes things right but rather the textualization, the act of writing. Moreover, as the addendum in the next line ("or right to left") indicates, the act of confession may compound rather than resolve problems. It may not offer the "expressive-purgative release" that Alicia Ostriker (Stealing 126), for example, expects of the mode but may instead complicate, confuse, and ultimately make sinister.

The recourse to the "obscure routes" suggests that understanding may emerge from the dark (from the private, the unseemly, the sinister), which is thereby recuperated as a viable source for poetry. In this respect, the poem anticipates "For John," where the inauspicious "narrow diary of my mind" (34) produces and refracts something of dazzling and broad significance ("something outside of myself"). It also paves the way for a number of later poems, including "With Mercy for the Greedy" and "Hurry Up Please It's Time," in which equally abject or occluded experience is "amazingly"--to speaker and reader alike--transformed into radiant meaning.

In "An Obsessive Combination" language, perception, and meaning are constantly in flux, multiplying ceaselessly:

       [...] taking a word like "writes"
       down tiers of tries until its secret rites
       make sense; or until, suddenly, RATS
       can amazingly and funnily become STAR
       and right to left that small star
       is mine, for my own liking, to stare
       its five lucky pins inside out [...]