“Unbroken Fall”: The Unmaking of the Feminine Self in Mina Loy’s Songs to Joannes

Abstract

This essay argues that Mina Loy’s Songs to Joannes (1917) rejects both solipsistic interiority and dialogic or dialectical resolution in favor of a poetics of unmaking. Although the poem is framed as an address to Joannes, it withholds mutual recognition, staging the feminine self as perpetually approaching but never arriving at “NOTHING,” a charged absence that terminates the promise of synthesis. Through its reworking of the Psyche and Cupid myth with parody and abjection, the poem adopts opacity and illegibility as strategies against recognition and legibility, suspending the feminine self in an endless fall that avoids both absorption into the other and enclosure within the self. Building on and against Laura Scuriatti’s dialogic reading of Songs to Joannes and Yasna Bozhkova’s reading of the poem as a constellation of Adornian “dialectical knots,” the essay contends that the poem withdraws the promise of synthesis or completion because recognition may fix the feminine self in another’s gaze, and because seemingly productive contradictions often serve exterior agendas. In place of reciprocity or resolution, Loy offers a sustained practice beyond the conventions of romantic narrative: the feminine self persisting in unmaking, suspended in the motion of an “unbroken fall.” This trajectory manifests as a whiteness that refuses legibility, resonating with yet also diverging from Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine and “white ink.” While Cixous celebrates liberatory flight, Loy’s feminine writing resolutely unmakes itself through falling, whitening, and withdrawing into illegibility, rendering itself structurally unavailable to narratives of romance or teleological completion.