In Writing Beyond the Ending, Du Plessis concerns herself almost entirely with women's writing per se. Her term "beyond the ending" feeds on poststructural associations of ending with fixity and idee fixe. But she does not go into any of this, preferring instead to chat about social aspects of the writing using modes remniscient of Frederic Jameson.
She describes the project of 19th and 20th century women writers (and, by extension, one presumes, her own very interesting, though not always very accessible, verse) as a re-mythologizing. So, very coarsely, in this particular myth, Patriarchal Society has some very binding, closed, limiting set of myths for women. There are few roles, few viable options for female life. These are Marriage, Spinsterhood, Whoredom-and-Death.
To describe how these are re-mythologized and/or broken down -- and she seems to take these two activities for one and the same -- she gives several chapter headings that suggest formal analysis, but does not follow through with said analysis.
Chapters :
1. Endings and contradictions -- she really means disagreements, not contradictions; some would disagree with the way others would define their ends or stories. It's not a matter of aporia.
2. The Rupture of Story and The Story of an African Farm. Again, all she means is that the author attempts to recast women in a different light.
And so on.
She spends two chapters analyzing Woolf and says some interesting things. She sees Woolf as decentering first the romantic couple, and finally atomized-western-individual consciousness, and she does look at the weaving of POV's that make up much of W's narrative style to do that. W's handling does happen to be formally inventive, and formally inventive in ways that do seem to support what Du P does here: W really does re-shape the story to recontextualize actions, roles, and so forth to recenter or redefine femininity and humanity.
These are probably the best chapters of Du Plessis' book.
The analysis of HD's Trilogy bears some interest; HD's re-mantling of the Magdalene story makes for a pretty direct example of what Du Plessis is talking about, and the theory seems to work pretty directly on a key figure of what can really be seen as contemporary mythology in a literal sense -- though in part the comparison may be aided by HD's lifelong comfort with hellenic image and reference.
Showing posts with label Woolf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Woolf. Show all posts
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Framing the Margins, Blow-by-Blow
Harper, Phillip Brian. Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture. NY: Oxford, 1994.
"My aim with this book is to substantiate such claims as [Bell] Hooks makes about socially marginalized groups' anticipatory experience of postmodern 'uncertainty,' but also -- and more importantly -- to suggest that marginalized groups' experience of decenteredness is itself a largely unacknowledged factor in the 'general' postmodern condition" (4).
So, one might hope here for a position that will unite formal and social interests, but Harper's aims appear otherwise.
We we have a quick binary opposition of "formal" modernism "restraining" by "aestheticism" a response to "meaningless." Further, "contingency" is somehow related to "chaos." The resulting field of categorization neatly cuts anything of formal interest from anything involving full and appropriate response to the human needs that Harper treats as "fragmentation" or "alienation," as opposed to, say, poverty, oppression, disempowerment, or social dysfunction.
Since art or thought can no more be "formless" than "pure," such divisions must be intended loosely. Does Harper fight the ghosts of Eliot's minions, actual experimentalists like the NY, Objectivist, or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school and fellow travellers, or is he even crass enough to try to mix them?
He gives Woof's Dalloway as immediate example, describing a "subjective dispersal" that "greatly resembles postmodern alienation" (22), finally concluding that Woolf's is a modern, not postmodern novel for its lack of "emphasis" on the fragmentation. But there's more. It's VW's "aestheticist hedge against experiential fragmentation that I have identified as a key component" (23). This is apparently so because Clarissa "resolves herself" in time for her party (23-24).
This really does not explain how Harper would deal with Dada, Khlebnikov, Marinetti, Breton, Artaud. It doesn't even describe what he might do with Pound, whose Cantos might reasonably considered fragmented. Is Oppen modern and Pound postmodern? Let's see if a suitably postmodern example is given.
Before this is resolved, I find another issue: "Nin and Barnes depict a psychic fragmentation that is unique to women and actually constituted in femininity" (25). So, women are PoMo, men modern? Let's keep Yin and Yang apart, they'll have little dialectics. But no, no explanation is forthcoming. Harper gives a quick catalog of following chapters, and jumps into individual studies.
WEST
So the next chapter deals with Nate West, author of Day of the Locust. H cites some dialog from Snell, two characters considering something vaguely like Zeno or Parmenides. Apparently we are to deduce from this that West's characters' quite coherent discussion is fragmented, whereas, say, Faulkner's Benjy is not.
Oh! He's on to Apollonaire! But he associates GA with "concrete poetry," something that the de Campos brothers or Pignatari would deny, since GA's shapes don't relate to syntax, whereas those in true concrete poetry do. He is onto something here, though, since he appears to be trying to describe a single sign, symbol, or icon (it's not clear which or whether the distinction is part of his appraisal) that means in two ways. So, yes, GA's calligrammes fit roughly if one doesn't want to really examine the mechanism (36-37).
"Linguistic signification can in no way be divorced from human physiology" (42).
'Nice.
Nin, Barnes, Critical Feminist Unconscious
"For women is man's creation, in the view of Nin's characters. . . "
It's been a while, but I don't recall anything special about that in Nin. Perhaps it's just that I do not share certain conventions about men and women being independent of each other. One survives; one is blue. How much suffering constitutes dependency? Nin's characters do produce several believable images of being "split" over love. But frankly, I don't see why one shouldn't react to Nin as a late Romantic humanist working in forms that date from Baudelaire or Rimbaud's old Foolish Virgin, What's-His-Name.
H does engage N's persistant freudian (we're really talking about Otto Rank here, N's analyst). The awkwardness of Freud's boys-only terminology runs through the discussion, but not in any way that Nin herself would find overwhelmingly strange. Nin's romantic personae are fruity and abundant, but why I should think the remove or discontinuity of the post-symboliste imagery and Freud-via-Rank-and-Artaud reflexive gestures constitute a more complete response to anything, I have no idea.
Barnes may be more interesting. Her women are, of course, incomplete (74). Of course, the paunchy guy she roasts in the opening pages can hardly be complete without his Hedwig, hein? Hedwig who thrusts her baby from her, hands it some ridiculous name, and dies. Who's complete? Female desire, or "incompleteness," if we must, occupies Barnes more than any corresponding male anything. All of which is fine, but doth not an ideology make. Harper's take:
All this seems pretty arbitrary. Social and sexual desires have always been as political as they have been anything else, since at least Simone de Beauvoir explicitly so. If all we mean is that the authors have unresolved desires that relate to politics, point granted. What is or is not "conscious" or "repressed" remains unclear. Nin certainly seems somewhat occulted behind the veils of symbol, and I for one would be more willing to call this "aesthetization" than I would use the term for a modernist, which Nin is not. Yet surely, Barnes' evocative, biting text should not be subject to the same criticism just because Nora and Robin don't ride off into the sunset.
Gwendolyn Brooks.
Here we're establishing black female subjectivity. So in the poem "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon," we're to understand that the parallel sentences are not parallel. If I understand the intention, the personae are not in symmetrical situations, and H finds the latter sentence priviledged grammatically. The semiotics used to further describe this are strange.
"One reason for this lies in what Saussure has identified as the linear nature of linguistic signification" -- if indeed it is the signification that can be considered linear. Signification requires comparison of earlier and later grammatical elements, which requires recursion. A Saussurian system must involve a comparison of said elements with the entire system, so the recursion might be rather involved. H considers that ". . . what is under our consideration at any given moment must necessarily predominate . . ." (100). The reader may judge whether that is always so.
"My aim with this book is to substantiate such claims as [Bell] Hooks makes about socially marginalized groups' anticipatory experience of postmodern 'uncertainty,' but also -- and more importantly -- to suggest that marginalized groups' experience of decenteredness is itself a largely unacknowledged factor in the 'general' postmodern condition" (4).
So, one might hope here for a position that will unite formal and social interests, but Harper's aims appear otherwise.
. . . if formalist aestheticism appears to us as the dominant tendency of 'high modernism,' as it is currently apphrehended, then it must be acknowledged as well that this aestheticism derives its significance from the its status as a reaction against the apparent meaninglessness and absurdity of contemporary life, which was seen as reflected in the modernist works that thematized chaos and contingency. In other words, the dis-integrated, fragmentary nature of modern human existence is always a subtext of high modernist aestheticism, which is also precisely a defensive hedge against the former. Conversely, modernist explorations of discontinuity and disorder always funciton in the context of aesthetist endeavors that counterbalance them and keep them in cjeck.
Given this view of the matter, it becomes possible to see how postmodernism can constitute both a break from and a continuation of the modernist undertaking. Postmodernism breaks with the formalist aestheticism that functioned to suppress modernism's full playing out of the ramifications of experiential disjunctutre, and, this unrestrained exploration that postmodernism accedes to what I have identified as one of its prime characteristices, the thematization of subjective fragmentation, over the more modernist concern of subjective alientation, a distinction invoked by Jameson that we would do well to clarify a bit here (21).
We we have a quick binary opposition of "formal" modernism "restraining" by "aestheticism" a response to "meaningless." Further, "contingency" is somehow related to "chaos." The resulting field of categorization neatly cuts anything of formal interest from anything involving full and appropriate response to the human needs that Harper treats as "fragmentation" or "alienation," as opposed to, say, poverty, oppression, disempowerment, or social dysfunction.
Since art or thought can no more be "formless" than "pure," such divisions must be intended loosely. Does Harper fight the ghosts of Eliot's minions, actual experimentalists like the NY, Objectivist, or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school and fellow travellers, or is he even crass enough to try to mix them?
He gives Woof's Dalloway as immediate example, describing a "subjective dispersal" that "greatly resembles postmodern alienation" (22), finally concluding that Woolf's is a modern, not postmodern novel for its lack of "emphasis" on the fragmentation. But there's more. It's VW's "aestheticist hedge against experiential fragmentation that I have identified as a key component" (23). This is apparently so because Clarissa "resolves herself" in time for her party (23-24).
This really does not explain how Harper would deal with Dada, Khlebnikov, Marinetti, Breton, Artaud. It doesn't even describe what he might do with Pound, whose Cantos might reasonably considered fragmented. Is Oppen modern and Pound postmodern? Let's see if a suitably postmodern example is given.
Before this is resolved, I find another issue: "Nin and Barnes depict a psychic fragmentation that is unique to women and actually constituted in femininity" (25). So, women are PoMo, men modern? Let's keep Yin and Yang apart, they'll have little dialectics. But no, no explanation is forthcoming. Harper gives a quick catalog of following chapters, and jumps into individual studies.
WEST
So the next chapter deals with Nate West, author of Day of the Locust. H cites some dialog from Snell, two characters considering something vaguely like Zeno or Parmenides. Apparently we are to deduce from this that West's characters' quite coherent discussion is fragmented, whereas, say, Faulkner's Benjy is not.
Oh! He's on to Apollonaire! But he associates GA with "concrete poetry," something that the de Campos brothers or Pignatari would deny, since GA's shapes don't relate to syntax, whereas those in true concrete poetry do. He is onto something here, though, since he appears to be trying to describe a single sign, symbol, or icon (it's not clear which or whether the distinction is part of his appraisal) that means in two ways. So, yes, GA's calligrammes fit roughly if one doesn't want to really examine the mechanism (36-37).
"Linguistic signification can in no way be divorced from human physiology" (42).
'Nice.
Nin, Barnes, Critical Feminist Unconscious
"For women is man's creation, in the view of Nin's characters. . . "
It's been a while, but I don't recall anything special about that in Nin. Perhaps it's just that I do not share certain conventions about men and women being independent of each other. One survives; one is blue. How much suffering constitutes dependency? Nin's characters do produce several believable images of being "split" over love. But frankly, I don't see why one shouldn't react to Nin as a late Romantic humanist working in forms that date from Baudelaire or Rimbaud's old Foolish Virgin, What's-His-Name.
H does engage N's persistant freudian (we're really talking about Otto Rank here, N's analyst). The awkwardness of Freud's boys-only terminology runs through the discussion, but not in any way that Nin herself would find overwhelmingly strange. Nin's romantic personae are fruity and abundant, but why I should think the remove or discontinuity of the post-symboliste imagery and Freud-via-Rank-and-Artaud reflexive gestures constitute a more complete response to anything, I have no idea.
Barnes may be more interesting. Her women are, of course, incomplete (74). Of course, the paunchy guy she roasts in the opening pages can hardly be complete without his Hedwig, hein? Hedwig who thrusts her baby from her, hands it some ridiculous name, and dies. Who's complete? Female desire, or "incompleteness," if we must, occupies Barnes more than any corresponding male anything. All of which is fine, but doth not an ideology make. Harper's take:
. . . Barnes's work, along with Nin's, is informed by a feminist political unconscious that actually provides the narrative tension necessary to bind the work in a choherent whole. The suppression of that feminist content beneath the depiction of a generalized existential malaise reproduces the very disenfranchisement of women that the text simultaneously represents, in the form of psychic fragmentation (89).
All this seems pretty arbitrary. Social and sexual desires have always been as political as they have been anything else, since at least Simone de Beauvoir explicitly so. If all we mean is that the authors have unresolved desires that relate to politics, point granted. What is or is not "conscious" or "repressed" remains unclear. Nin certainly seems somewhat occulted behind the veils of symbol, and I for one would be more willing to call this "aesthetization" than I would use the term for a modernist, which Nin is not. Yet surely, Barnes' evocative, biting text should not be subject to the same criticism just because Nora and Robin don't ride off into the sunset.
A politically conscous criticism will entail the excavation of that feminist content through a reading designed to illuminate the various specific conditions that will become inscribed in the postmodern moment of the late twentieth century (89).
Gwendolyn Brooks.
Here we're establishing black female subjectivity. So in the poem "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon," we're to understand that the parallel sentences are not parallel. If I understand the intention, the personae are not in symmetrical situations, and H finds the latter sentence priviledged grammatically. The semiotics used to further describe this are strange.
"One reason for this lies in what Saussure has identified as the linear nature of linguistic signification" -- if indeed it is the signification that can be considered linear. Signification requires comparison of earlier and later grammatical elements, which requires recursion. A Saussurian system must involve a comparison of said elements with the entire system, so the recursion might be rather involved. H considers that ". . . what is under our consideration at any given moment must necessarily predominate . . ." (100). The reader may judge whether that is always so.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)