MURIEL RUKEYSER’S THE BOOK OF THE DEAD AND THE REPRESENTATIONAL CHALLENGES OF SLOW VIOLENCE

The events narrated in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (1938) constitute a good example of what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence,” a type of “attritional,” non-spectacular violence that seems to resist effective literary representation. This essay focuses on the strategies Rukeyser deploys in order to overcome the representational limits posed by Nixon’s “slow violence”: the patchwork of genres, the choice of a polyphonic poem-sequence structure and, last but not least, the visible process of “wastification” of the tunnel workers, who play such a central role in the poem. Read in the light of recent scholarship on waste, Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead emerges as one of the first poem sequences to explore the conjunction of material toxic waste (silica dust) and human “wastification.”