Women’s Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique 9781474226400, 9781474226394, 9781474226424

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Women’s Experimental Writing

Also Available from Bloomsbury Jeanette Winterson: A contemporary critical guide, edited by Sonya Andermahr I Shot Andy Warhol: Includes Valerie Solanas’s ‘SCUM Manifesto’, Mary Harron

Women’s Experimental Writing Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique Ellen E. Berry

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Ellen E. Berry, 2016 Ellen E. Berry has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

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Contents Introduction:  Situating Negative Aesthetics

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1 Apocalyptic Feminism: Negative Aesthetics in Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto 2 Kathy Acker’s Fatal Strategies 3 “The Remnant Is the Whole”: History, Trauma, and the Politics of Absence in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee 4 Horrors of Power: Abjection and the “Monstrous-Masculine” in Chantal Chawaf’s Redemption 5 Suspending Gender: The Politics of Indeterminacy in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body 6 Becoming-Girl/Becoming-Fly/Becoming-Imperceptible: Gothic Posthumanism in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel

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Conclusion: From SCUM to Cruddy and Beyond

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Bibliography Index

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19 39 61 83 105

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Introduction: Situating Negative Aesthetics

Freedom is nothing if it is not the freedom to live at the edge of limits where all comprehension breaks down. George Batille, The Impossible, 40 Women’s Experimental Writing:  Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique analyzes work by six contemporary authors who use experimental methods and negative modes of critique to innovate in the forms of fiction and of feminism: Valerie Solanas, Kathy Acker, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Chantel Chawaf, Jeanette Winterson, and Lynda Barry. The works I consider span the period 1967–1999, roughly the era during which contemporary Western feminisms emerged as a diverse set of political aspirations and practices, new knowledges and approaches to knowledge production, legal accomplishments, alternative institutions, oppositional discourses and other activist practices, critical theories, and complex cultural forms. The book traces one neglected tributary of this emergence by focusing on the nature of and rationales for these writers’ strategies of literary negation in order to assess their feminist consequences and argue for the importance of negative literary, political, and philosophical critiques to the ongoing projects of feminist/gender studies. Although they differ in many ways, the writers I analyze share a commitment to combining extreme content with formally radical techniques in order to enact varieties of gender, sex, race, class, and nation-based experience that, these writers suggest, may only be “represented” accurately through the experimental unmaking of dominant structures of rationality. Positioned as they are at the limits of traditional models of literariness, these works offer not a poetics of liberation but an aesthetics of negation in which style supports antisocial forms of radical refusal. Among other things, a careful

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examination of these writers enables us to understand contemporary feminisms as carrying forward avant-garde agendas as they attempt to join radical social and radical aesthetic critiques—one hallmark of all avant-gardes. Collectively, these works allow us to historicize an ongoing tradition of radical literary expression within contemporary feminist cultural forms more generally. While two of the authors I  consider—Kathy Acker and Jeanette Winterson—have received considerable attention in studies of contemporary fiction, there is no study that contextualizes their work in relation to other contemporary women who write in negative aesthetic modes. The contextualization provided by this book not only discloses an ongoing legacy of radical critique within contemporary women’s writing, it also opens new perspectives on the work of these more well-known writers. For example, the radical voice that Acker constructs in Blood and Guts in High School, seems less sui generis when read in relation to the persona Valerie Solanas creates in her SCUM Manifesto. And both help to illuminate the “cruddy” affect disclosed in Lynda Barry’s work. Throughout this study I use the term negative aesthetics to refer to a varied set of thematic concerns (e.g., an emphasis on extreme, bizarre, or violent situations especially involving the female body; the traumatic and pathological nature of human relations within contemporary capitalist heteropatriarchy; anarchistic and apocalyptic visions); formal strategies (e.g., techniques for producing indeterminacy and lack of closure; strategies emphasizing silence, absence, loss, blankness, incompleteness, fragmentation; an antiliterary emphasis on crudeness, stupidity, irrationality, inarticulateness, unbecoming; thoroughgoing deconstructions of conventional genre forms such as the Bildungsroman); highly self-conscious and theoretically aware texts that emphasize varieties of feminist postmodernism such as the instabilities of the gendered subject in discourse or viral critiques and fatal strategies; self-consciously avant-garde or outsider angles of vision pushed to the limits of traditional genres, norms, and strategies for sense making. Taken as a whole, these textual features and political commitments constitute a radical critique of all structures of domination and inequality and thus produce a kind of extreme or limit feminism not easily assimilated within conventional rationalist frameworks. The term postmodern—which I  use throughout this study—refers to a diverse range of histories, theories, discourses, cultural, and artistic forms.

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First, postmodernity describes a historical period stretching roughly from the 1960s to the present and distinguished by a number of significant changes from former eras. These include globalization, a multidimensional set of social, political, economic, cultural, environmental processes that create, multiply, stretch, and intensify worldwide social interdependencies and exchanges, creating a decentered, disjunctive, deterritorialized world of global flows, whose complexity makes them nearly impossible to map. Postmodernism refers to a set of ideas, stylistic traits, aesthetic features and thematic preoccupations in contemporary art and culture. In literature this includes a radical suspicion of narrative form, including a narrative account of history. Emphasis falls on disruption of narrative hierarchy, causal structures, clear teleology, and realist characters. In their place are techniques that stress fragmentation, indeterminacy, dispersion, randomness, contradiction, ambiguity, irony, extremity; an emphasis on performative modes and reflexive structures; a valuing of hybridity and multiplicity as in hybrid genres, subjects, worlds. Thematic emphases on radical difference, heterogeneity, multimodality, instabilities of identity—suggest a breakdown in “the official story” as formerly repressed voices (of women, minorities, queers, outlaws of all kinds) emerge into the mainstream. The various developments in philosophy and critical theory commonly grouped under the term poststructuralism also share a cultural ethos with postmodernism and they raise many of the same ideas. Features include antifoundationalism, a critique of all claims to universality or absolute truth. Such claims are disrupted through exposure of the unacknowledged assumptions and contradictions upon which they rest. Deconstruction emphasizes the instability and inexhaustability of meaning-making systems and it disrupts the pretense that language unproblematically reflects the real world. Language and other sign-systems instead construct meaning, truth, the subject, and history, and these meanings are themselves unstable, partial, changing, and situated. Any truth-claim or master-narrative therefore is partial, interested, and incomplete. An antifoundational emphasis also stresses the complexities and instabilities of identity leading to a deconstruction of the centered rational humanist subject. This marks a big departure from Enlightenment views of the self, which conceived of the subject as stable, unified, freely acting. The postmodernist subject is less a “self” than a site where

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a series of languages, cultures, social structures interact. These structures are themselves shifting and mutable and always implicated within power relations. Deconstruction also fits into a more general postmodernism since it is part of that vast bringing forward of subjects and experiences that have been erased in the past or that existed on the margins of culture, as the texts in this study do. Because even the most radical forms of postmodern stylistics have, arguably, become hegemonic, commodified to sell everything from breakfast cereal to hedge funds in a carnival of consumer multiculturalism, a number of contemporary critics have taken care to distinguish between postmodernism and various practices of a neo-avant garde during a postmodern moment. For example, in his history of the manifesto as a genre, Martin Puchner distinguishes between the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century, the resurgence of avant-garde energies in the 1960s and 1970s countercultures, and what he calls a “perennial avant-garde” impulse that may surface in any historical moment. Robert Siegle’s Suburban Ambush analyzes what he calls “the fiction of insurgency” developed in the 1970s and 1980s in New  York City among groups of artists and writers—including Acker and Cha. This “downtown writing” joins innovations in fictional form, an acute awareness of high poststructuralist theory, including, especially, issues of language and representation, and, crucially, a sophisticated critique of normative representations and dominant political structures. Because postmodern critiques of the humanist subject arose at the moment when women, minorities, and other Others were coming into new social visibility, the contemporary literatures produced by gender, sexual, racial and other minorities often has been positioned in opposition to formally experimental work of the kind I examine in this study. The latter is frequently charged with being coldly formalist, willfully obscure, alienating and elitist—at best apolitical at worst actively oppressive. Identity based realist writing, on the other hand, frequently is directly autobiographical and confessional or couched in the genre of the Bildungsroman. These developmental forms of the minority experience encourage functional and content-based reading strategies, rely on reader identification with authorial selves or well-motivated characters interacting in recognizable social patterns, and promote narratives of emancipation or identity reclamation, the emergence of group solidarities and the

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like. This pattern has been identified and discussed in recent studies of contemporary feminist fiction by Rita Felski, Lisa Hoagland, and Marie Lauret among others. In her study of feminist fiction in America, for example, Lauret identifies practices of a “radically other,” “counter-hegemonic” feminist realism and cautions that we should not “assume that realism is always already reactionary, modernism and postmodernism always progressive” (Lauret, 44). However, because writing emerging from the new social movements has tended to be confined to a poetics of identity politics and a preference for realist forms (even if realist aesthetics are turned to counter-hegemonic critical ends), it has acted to render inaudible and invisible formally innovative works that also challenge dominant paradigms of power and privilege but do not embody their political content in conventional forms. Unlike traditional realist genres, which have predominated in feminist literary histories of this period, what I’m calling negative aesthetic texts do not easily lend themselves to thematic summary or propositional content. Nor do they promote reader identification by, for example, proposing new images of minoritized subjects or the quest for liberation. Neither do they offer logical critiques of structures of domination, nor do they narrate fullfledged counter-histories, or elaborate agendas for the future. Rather, these texts propose a different kind of critique, one in which negative textual strategies are deployed in such a way that normative structures of perception and representation are rendered unstable, in the process revealing their limits or crisis points. This negative critique also applies to the narratives within which recent histories of contemporary Western feminisms have been couched, as I discuss below. The texts I consider also make extreme demands on readers not only by denying us the familiar pleasures offered by realist texts and absorbtive reading practices but also by frequently asking that we invent new reading protocols capable of meeting their demands. Moreover, because these texts often are intensely intimate in their mode of address—from Jeanette Winterson’s first-person narrator awash in a sea of multiple indeterminacies to Theresa Cha’s traumatized and stuttering “diseuse” to Chantel Chawaf’s terrifying “close-up” method—they depend for their effect on the reader’s willingness to submit to their complex and demanding intimacies. That is, these texts not only encode extreme affects thematically, but they also mobilize a range

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of often-discomforting affects on the reader’s part and insistently remind us that pleasure and a sense of redemption are not the only outcomes of feminist readings. In this regard, Lynne Pearce’s insights about a feminist practice of “implicated reading” have been influential. Pearce uses this term to refer to a dynamic, self-reflexive, interactive, and noninstrumental relationship between text and reader that foregrounds “the chaos and the confusion, the thrill and the anxiety, of all that it might mean to read as a feminist,” the affective as well as the cognitive aspects of this relationship (Pearce, 1997, 3). In particular, Pearce figures the feminist reader as a lover “whose object is not to understand the text but to engage with it” (6). This means focusing on the emotional construction of reading, on “a whole range of emotional affects . . . including many negative ones” (Pearce, 11). To clarify here, I’m not positing the existence of a female aesthetic as such—negative or otherwise—a position that claims a necessary or privileged relationship between gender identity and particular modes of expression. I agree with Rita Felski’s fully materialist assertion that “it is impossible to deduce masculine or feminine, subversive or reactionary forms in isolation from the social conditions of their production and reception” (Felski, 31). But while no necessary relation exists between aesthetic innovation and feminist political critique, the texts in my study actively engage ideological questions by posing these questions at the level of the most fundamental assumptions of a patriarchal society as embedded in its codes of representation and structures of discourse. Throughout the book I attempt to develop a politics of the negative aesthetic forms that emerge from these works especially as they embody previously unrecognized aspects of feminist cultural politics. While poststructuralist methods and assumptions are common in the realm of feminist theories, they have rarely been analyzed in feminist theory-fictions. I use this term to refer to texts that use fictional methods to elaborate the consequences of theoretical perspectives that would be difficult to represent in other than antirealist terms such as the extreme gender polarity found in the works of Solanas, Acker, and Chawaf. I also analyze how understanding the specific practices of negation deployed in these fictional texts helps to problematize in unique ways many of the more abstract and speculative claims made within feminist theory itself. Because these texts—extreme in form, content, and

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mode of address to the reader—frustrate full comprehensibility and critical mastery, they also pose challenges to some of the underlying assumptions of politicized reading practices, including feminist ones. Approached in this way the texts become sites to witness, among other things, the display of political investments, projected desires, and unconscious affects on the part of critics—including those appearing in my own reading practices, which I reflect on throughout. The book also means to help rectify a more general critical neglect of contemporary experimental writing by women—especially in its politicized forms—within the still-emerging postmodernist canon. I am indebted to previous feminist work in the area of experimental poetics and feminist avantgardes including, Marienne DeKoven’s A Different Language, Susan Rubin Suileman’s Subversive Intent, Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs’s Breaking the Sequence Women’s Experimental Fiction, and Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue’s We Who Love to Be Astonished, Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics. These works have helped to establish the historical misogyny of male avant-gardes—“the exclusion of women from the centers of male avant-garde activity and their exclusion from the historical and critical accounts of that activity”—and have begun to map a history and a poetics of women’s writing in experimental modes (Suleiman, 18). For example, the emphasis of Friedman and Fuchs’s important 1989 collection—one of the first of its kind—is “archaeological and compensatory” as they reconstruct an eighty-year history of women who write in experimental modes, from Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Dorothy Richardson to Christine Brooke-Rose and Kathy Acker, in the process overturning a common critical assumption that women have not written in experimental modes (xiii). Marianne deKoven’s definition of experimental writing in A Different Language has been especially influential. DeKoven defines experimental writing as that which prevents “normal” (and normative) reading practices as it violates and reshapes not just the conventions of literature, but also the conventions of language itself. Radically experimental texts propose an encounter between text and reader for which there is no ready formula of interpretation. The mission of this vanguard writing is to challenge outmoded and restrictive aesthetic conventions and traditions (including outmoded ways of interpreting and evaluating literary works) and to open new possibilities of expression

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and vision that are both aesthetic and ideological. However, I  know of no work that focuses on negative strategies of critique in contemporary women’s experimental writing in relation to the emergence of contemporary feminist discourses more generally. Recovering a history of this form of critique seems especially important in our current moment as accounts of contemporary feminism’s forty-year legacy become increasingly consolidated into what Clare Hemmings calls “consensus narratives of progress, loss, and return” that limit the ways in which the past, present, and future of feminism may be thought. Such narratives, as Robyn Wiegman notes, consolidate, order, and fi x feminism’s “at times chaotic diversity of critical and political activities into set pieces,” that flatten and distort its “various and incommensurable deployments” (2012, 55, 116). The texts I consider allow us to recover some of this “chaotic diversity” by acting as one counterweight to these dominant consensus narratives not by positing full-fledged alternatives but by using radical expressive forms to show the limits of the storytelling function itself. Similarly, collections such as Novels of the Contemporary Extreme have emphasized extremity as an international literary phenomenon, describing works that “do not merely reflect on violence, they seek it out, engage it, and, in a variety of imaginative ways, perform it . . . [enacting] an aesthetic that does not strive for harmony or unity but, instead, forces the confrontation between irreconcilable differences, most notably the difference between reality and art” (Durand and Mandel, 1–2) Extremity also has been discussed as a salient feature of contemporary culture more generally. For example, David Boothroyd analyzes features of the extreme as they emerge as a prevalent theme within “the contemporary nexus of popular, media, and consumer cultures,” leading him to conclude that “[e]xtremity is . . . both our origin and our destiny” (274). The works considered in this study could easily be situated as examples of the contemporary extreme, adding to this tendency an analysis of the ways in which aesthetic extremity, thematic extremity, and political extremity interact and condition one another. Politically and philosophically, this study has also been influenced by the recent negative or antisocial turn in queer studies beginning with Lee Edelman’s radical critique of heteronormative common sense and reproductive futurity in No Future and continuing in the work of Heather Love

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and, especially, J. Jack Halberstam. While Halberstam agrees with Edelman’s proposal of a “relentless form of negativity” in place of a “forward-looking, reproductive, and heteronormative politics of hope,” and while she finds in his work “one of the most powerful statements of queer studies’ contribution to an anti-imperialist, queer, counter-hegemonic imaginary,” she nonetheless faults Edelman’s work for its excessively small archive of canonical writers, its limited range of affective responses, and its methodological commitment to an apolitical formalism (Halberstam, 2006, 823–4). In contrast to Edelman’s focus on canonical texts, in The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam analyzes a “silly archive” of popular animated films— from Sponge Bob to Chicken Run—along with “darker territories of failure,” futility, sterility, emptiness, loss and modes of unbecoming found in contemporary visual and performance art. She does so in order to explore the possibility that “cultural alternatives dwell in the murky waters of a counterintuitive, often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal” and, in so doing, to provide counter-narratives and counter-epistemologies to feminism’s emphases on “positivity, reform, and accommodation” (2, 4). Particularly important is her discussion of “shadow feminisms,” alternative, forgotten, or subjugated knowledges that emerge outside more mainstream feminist histories. These anti-accomodationist, subjugated feminisms act to critique dominant logics of redemption, reconstruction, and restoration, to “poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life and stall the business of the dominant” (3). As the works in my study are, Halberstam’s shadow feminist texts are preoccupied with negativity and negation and they often privilege counter-rational modes such as failure, stupidity, sterility, loss and negative affects. These antisocial, anti-Oedipal, antihumanist forms of negativity constitute an antipolitics in Halberstam’s view that nonetheless “should not register as apolitical” (108). Halberstam’s analysis resonates with the features of many of the texts I  discuss including Solanas’s homicidal feminism, Acker’s fatal strategies, Chawaf’s dark and chilling analysis of contemporary gender relations, and Barry’s radical posthumanist critique. My analysis differs from Halberstam’s work in the archive it analyzes and the genealogy of feminist radical practices it constructs; in its emphasis on the consequences of joining an antisocial critique—including those critiques emerging from the various alternative

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or outsider communities in which many of these writers participated—with radical innovations in literary and cultural forms. Edelman’s rejoinder to Halberstam’s critique—“Halberstam strikes the pose of negativity while evacuating its force”—positions him on the side of a more comprehensive understanding of the operations of the negative: as a fundamental, inescapable otherness inherent to all totalizing systems whether they be psychic, philosophical, linguistic, social, or aesthetic, that which must be excluded in order for any system to establish its legitimacy. For Edelman, the negative names the absent remainder that never can be made familiar, the limit point of knowledge or an uncompromisingly radical dissent from all positive knowledge of the world as given. While queer forms of antisociality have been a privileged locus of a negative critique in recent years, in considering negativity in this expansive way, Edelman moves beyond a specifically queer negativity and into the literary and philosophical forms of negation associated with poststructuralism and postmodernism more generally. For example, in his introduction to the 1989 collection Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, Sanford Budick notes the remarkable prevalence of those negative gestures that “seem to be implicit in virtually all poetic, philosophical, and even historiographical language” (xi) in a contemporary moment. Budick and Iser’s collection traces the play of negativity in the inevitable closures of any system and, more specifically, in the rhetorical operations via which the “unsayable” is disclosed through its movement within literary texts:  as a “carrier of absence,” that which “disperses what it undercuts and turns into a proliferating offshoot of what has been negated” (xv). Similarly, Daniel Fischlin claims the operations of negativity as “significant elements in the emergent revaluation of the Western intellectual tradition that is postmodernity” (1). He dubs these operations “the critical ‘negatron,’ ” which “posits a resistance to affirmative critical modes and a contrary engagement with the negative elements that define textual experience—the denials, erasures, contradictions, preteritions, negative rhetorical schemes, apophases, insubstantial presences and the unspoken supplements, to mention only a few, that violate the signifying fi xities of any text” (1). Both Budick and Fischlin approach their studies of negativity via a generalized set of poststructuralist assumptions. Negativity names the always inexpressible otherness or difference at the heart of all affirmative language,

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of the subject as an effect of language, and marks an “extreme limit” that conditions all critical expression. As a term to describe an important aspect of contemporary reading and writing practices as well as specific theoretical understandings, the negative emerges as a (if not the) central preoccupation of contemporary modes of analysis and expression. As such, it has conditioned my approach to many of the texts in this study including the multiple destabilizing indeterminacies enacted in Winterson’s Written on the Body or Cha’s foregrounding of the unspeakable absences at the heart of Korean history. Yet, as I  hope to show, this emphasis on negation as a general feature of postmodern textuality and critique fails to capture the larger political intentions involved in specific practices of negation, the multiple reasons why the authors studied here engage the negative in their experimental writing practices. Another contemporary manifestation of this focus on the negative or the unknowable appears in works such as Drucilla Cornell’s The Philosophy of the Limit and Isobel Armstrong’s The Radical Aesthetic. Drawing on theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas, among others, these works seek to theorize and expand the possibilities of a nonexploitive ethical relation to all Others. As Cornell puts it summarizing Adorno, “the unalleviated consciousness of negativity holds fast to the possibility of a different future . . . and gives us a glimpse of what things in their interrelatedness might become if they were allowed to rest in their affinity rather than stuffed into new systems of identification” (34). Here, the ethical is defined as “the aspiration to a non-violent relation to the Other and to otherness more generally that assumes responsibility to guard the Other against the appropriation that would deny her difference and singularity” (62). This ethical model of care for and responsibility to the Other figures in a number of works discussed in this book. This includes Cha’s insistence on speaking from the position of those othered and silenced by the violence of history and her use of techniques of negation to disclose the irrecoverable losses that have resulted from this history; Chawaf’s cautionary anatomy of the gruesome violence involved in attempts to incorporate and annihilate the female other; and Barry’s radical openness to and care for many others, including nonhuman others. Moreover, because of their extreme demands on readers, the texts discussed here also offer the possibility of an ethical

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nonappropriative model of reading, premised on a responsibility to the otherness of the text that is “paradoxically created by an assault, a breaking in upon the self” (Armstrong, 94). The work of feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti also has been important to my thinking about feminist ethical relations and figures most centrally in the chapter on Lynda Barry. In her important trilogy of books (Nomadic Subjects, Metamorphoses, and Transpositions), Braidotti outlines a feminist ethics for our times, beginning with a thoroughgoing critique of the rational humanist subject of moral philosophy. In particular, Braidotti critiques its arrogant belief that only this view of the subject “can guarantee basic elements of human decency, moral and political agency and ethical probity” (2006, 11). In contrast to this view, she proposes a nomadic, non-unitary, and posthumanist vision of the subject as a vital part of her project to construct “an alternative foundation for ethical and political subjectivity” (2006, 11). This alternative ethics is contingently grounded and politically infused, based on human affectivity and passions, valuing alterity, otherness, and difference, and propelled by a desire for transformation. In a way that mainstream ethics is not (“classical humanism is of hindrance rather than of assistance in this process”), this new nomadic ethics is better able to deal with the ethical complexities of our global postmodern condition. As Braidotti puts it, “We need to adopt non-linearity as a major principle and to develop cartographies of power that account for the paradoxes and contradictions of the era of globalization . . . we need schemes of thought and figurations that enable us to account in empowering and positive terms for the changes and transformations currently on the way . . . The unitary vision of the subject cannot provide an effective antidote to the processes of fragmentation, flows, and mutations which mark our era” (2006, 31). In describing the features of this global postmodern condition—and as this book tries to do—Braidotti centers the experiences of those structural others excluded by modernity (women, racialized others, the natural world, etc.) as one key to more hopeful becomings and in order to advance as situated, sustainable, accountable ethics that takes as its point of departure both bios (human life) and zoe (the vitality of nonhuman life). In contrast to other models of contemporary biopower that remain rooted in anthropocentrism, Braidotti focuses instead on the “prehuman or even nonhuman elements that compose the web of forces, intensities,

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and encounters that contribute to the making of nomadic subjectivity . . . an embodied affective and intelligent entity that captures, processes and transforms energies and forces and is immersed in fields of constant flows and transformations” (2006, 41). Braidotti’s work on feminist posthuman ethics above all operates in affirmative modes, in contrast to the emphasis on negativity in this book. Nonetheless, her vision of a fragmented, minoritized, mutant subject resonates strongly with the texts under consideration here. The aesthetic negativity and social antagonism evident in the texts addressed in this book may also be considered part of a long twentiethcentury emergence of anti-art agendas practiced initially by the historical avant-gardes, especially Dada. In The Triumph of Anti-Art, his excellent history of the term’s evolution from Tristan Tzara and Marcel Duchamp in the early years of the twentieth century to contemporary neo-avant-gardes in visual, conceptual, and performance art, Thomas McEvilley demonstrates that anti-art variously and consistently registers a desire to negate received aesthetic forms and values and, via this negation, to generate alternatives to them. Similarly, Hal Foster’s influential edited collection, The Anti-Aesthetic, uses the prefi x to suggest a widespread and fundamental break with the forms and values of modernism—considered as “dominant but dead” in Jurgen Habermas’s memorable phrase—and the emergence of new postmodern expressive possibilities in a range of cultural forms, including radical new modes of theoretical discourse. For example, in her feminist history of avant-garde movements in France, Susan Sueliman traces the emergence of those writers and philosophers— Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig among them—who constituted a distinct French feminist avant-garde in the late 1960s and 1970s. Along with various other post-1968 avant-garde groups including those associated with the journal Tel Quel, the French feminists wished to link “artistic experimentation and a critique of outmoded artistic practices with an ideological critique of bourgeois thought and a desire for social change, so that the activity of writing could also be seen as a genuine intervention in the social, cultural, and political arena” (Sueliman, 12). However, they did so by theorizing the exclusion of women from both traditional and avant-garde discourses, by positively valuing the negation and lack with which women have been associated within these discourses, and by promoting through their writing new

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structures and styles—l’ecriture feminine—meant to disrupt and transform old modes by putting woman’s difference into discourse and speaking an alternative language. This feminist theory avant-garde had a profound effect both in France and in the Anglo-American academy, arriving with a promise to sweep away the old world and instantiate the new. In her 2006 article reflecting on this heady moment when the theory avant-garde erupted in the US academy, Marianne DeKoven writes: “In the late seventies and early eighties . . . utopia still seemed at hand . . . Through the work of continental poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theorists . . . we (academic feminists . . .) assembled an arsenal of ideas and analyses that we thought would change the world . . . The liberated language of experimental writing and other avant-garde practices in the arts would both model and inspire the rupture of the chains of all oppressions” (2006, 1690–1). Somewhat ruefully, she goes on to conclude that “[E]xperimentalism as a mode of being or writing, as a political, existential, or aesthetic idea, seems to me almost archaic now . . . The current moment of academic feminism, as well as of literary writing by women, has run as far away as it can from the experimentalism of French feminism’s heyday” (1693). Perhaps DeKoven is correct to conclude that in our current moment academic feminist writing has come to be dominated by “social-scienceinflected, tightly reasoned, archivally and/or statistically documented, social, cultural, political, historical analysis” as well as by a focus on popular culture. However, I think her emphasis on a particular kind of theoretically inflected experimental writing, which she links most often with Julia Kristeva’s theory of a pre-symbolic, pre-Oedipal ecstatic union with the mother’s body, limits our understanding of the scope and diversity of women’s experimental practices, not all of which are lyrical, utopian, or celebratory. In fact, one of the writers considered here, Chantel Chawaf, directly contests the revolutionary potential implied by Kristeva’s theory of the maternal semiotic and by other writers such as Roland Barthes who take the mother’s body as a site of transgression, an aspect of the process Alice Jardine calls, “gynesis,” the putting into discourse of “woman” as a symbol of the radicality of their own antirealist practices. In this famous passage from Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, he imagines the avant-garde writer as “someone who plays with his mother’s body . . . in order to glorify it, to embellish it, or in

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order to dismember it, to take it to the limits of what can be known about the body” (qtd in Sueliman, 39). In Chawaf’s Redemption, the mother’s body (and those of other maternal stand-ins) literally, horrifically, and repeatedly is dismembered, turning an avant-garde trope into a scathing gendered critique of post-1968 avant-garde practices, especially those associated with the journal Tel Quel. Too exclusive a focus on particular avant-garde practices, groups, and theories also may prevent broader, more contextualized understandings of differences among contemporary avant-gardes. For instance, in his brilliant cultural history, Suburban Ambush:  Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency, Robert Siegle details the tightly knit networks that formed beginning in the mid-1970s in New York City among groups of visual, performance, conceptual, mixed-media, and graffiti artists; musicians (the beginnings of the punk rock and hip-hop scenes); alternative magazine editors; small publishing houses (including Reese Williams’s Tanam Press that first published Cha’s Dictee), and writers including Lynn Tillman, Catherine Texier, and, most notably, Kathy Acker. Siegel makes a convincing case for the generational and geographical specificity of these groups, whose work, taken as a whole, represents “a striking renaissance” in cultural innovation, “that our traditional critical institutions have had enormous difficulty recognizing” (xiii). Among the writers in particular, Siegel notes a common commitment to literary experimentation “that all but sublates theory and practice” (46), as well as “stylistic outrageousness, political and moral responsibility, and deliberate rudeness” (xiii). Here, then, is writing that shares features with the avant-garde that DeKoven describes—a sophisticated understanding and use of poststructuralist theory (especially the work of Foucault, Baudrillard, and Barthes), a commitment to radical critique of dominant cultural, social, political, and economic structures; a self-consciousness about norms of representation— including narrative structures—and an imperative to disrupt them—but that also departs from French avant-garde practices in significant ways. The voice and style in Blood and Guts in High School and in Acker’s first novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula, published in the same year as Helene Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa,” captures some of this difference. Acker’s voice is blunt, naïve, crude as a punk rock song, “full of

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pain, rage, and lacerating social commentary,” a site of negative affects and a deliberate lack of sophistication—features that illustrate an important crosshatching in the New York scene of avant-gardism with low genres including porn, pulp, schlock, as Peter Wollen has pointed out. This contrasts sharply with Cixous’s lyrical and sensuous ecriture, written in mother’s milk. It also suggests a different, perhaps more critical, relation to the male avant-garde. Cixous refers to Jean Genet as her “precursor,” the emblematic criminal who exists outside the law “of the great white masters” in a state of affirmative bisexuality, a “maternal father . . . a man of that kind of good and transparent femininity” (qtd in Sueliman, 130). In Acker’s hands Genet still functions as a transgressive figure, a partner in Janey’s abjection, and selections from A Thief ’s Journal appear verbatim in Blood and Guts in High School. However, Acker also bluntly criticizes Genet for his French ethnocentrism (“Genet has to explain the nature of the social world to her because she’s American: Rich men, poor men, mothers, beautiful women, whores, poor female and neofemale slut-scum, Janey”) and his gendered blindness: “Genet doesn’t know how to be a woman. He thinks all he has to do to be a woman is slobber, He has to do more. He has to get down on his knees and crawl mentally every minute of the day” (130–1). Acknowledging differences among multiple feminist avant-gardes also highlights distinctions between the emergence of a theory avant-garde in the academy—where select works of theory are interpreted as having transgressive potential, as deKoven notes—at the same time as radical writing from outside the academy with few exceptions tends to be confined to small presses and little magazines and is rarely reviewed or taught. And, as Robyn Wiegman details in her most recent book, Object Lessons, new theoretical assumptions continue to influence and limit the way texts—experimental or not—are read in the academy. In her tracing of the ways in which gender as an object of study has been deployed by different critical projects in the academy, Wiegman notes that “gender is most decisively made and remade according to the political desire that finds it valuable in the first place . . . The gap . . . between what we critically seek and the object that may fail to deliver it, renders the pursuit of gender perpetually incomplete” and a site “to register the projections, transferences, anxieties, and aspirations that comprise it” (Wiegman, 2012, 336–7). As I show in my chapter on Jeanette Winterson’s

Introduction

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Written on the Body, in the early 1990s a queer theory uprising in response to the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (among other texts) promised to fatally destabilize, if not completely undo, rigid gender and sexual categories. Critical responses to Winterson’s radically indeterminate text, in which the narrator’s gender and sexual identity are undecideable, both invoke gender and sexual fluidity on a theoretical level and undercut this instability via an insistence that the narrator’s identity cohere under the sign of lesbian, thereby illustrating the gap between “what we critically seek,” here the visibility of lesbian writers whose texts encode a lesbian identity, and “the object that may fail to deliver it.” Unacknowledged anxieties, aspirations, desires, and other critical projections undoubtedly accompany all acts of interpretation, as Wiegman suggests. Such critical projections may be even more likely to occur in the case of experimental works that deliberately elude mastery of their resolute opacities and totalization of their multiplicities, and in relation to the contemporary critical trends that DeKoven identifies, which mitigate against the close reading and attention to form that experimental works demand. I locate my analysis in the context of recent arguments for a return to consideration of the aesthetic in contemporary studies of culture, including projects to rethink the democratic and radical potential of aesthetic discourse such as those advanced by Isobel Armstrong. In The Radical Aesthetic, Armstrong calls for a redescription of the aesthetic rather than its abandonment as an obsolete category of the bourgeois individual self (79). In making her case, she distinguishes between understanding aesthetics as a discourse of value (cultural capital), a privileged and transcendent realm uncoupled from history and ideology, and viewing aesthetics as a unique experiential, cognitive, affective, and ethical domain of experience that as such may lead to transformations in the structure of thought itself (41). While Armstrong stresses that the aesthetic is not the same as the political, she suggests that it may make the political possible since aesthetic texts may generate new unique affective patterns through their struggle for form, as I argue the texts in this study do. In fact, Armstrong argues that those texts most estranged from everyday propositional discourses—experimental works—are those nearest to “genuine critique” (41). Armstrong’s analysis draws on Theodor Adorno’s comments on the autonomous artwork that “offers a salutary negation of the

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empirical reality it wants to contest” (Levinson, 22). That is, the autonomous artwork expresses its commitment not by appealing to an agenda—a set of propositions about how things are or should be—but by seeking to radically reorganize the categories of perception propaedutic to social change. For Adorno, a successful negative work “is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structures.” Armstrong’s efforts to redefine the aesthetic in radical terms chimes with some recent attempts to arrive at a more politically engaged approach to formalism—which is most often associated with an apolitical focus on the text itself to the exclusion of its embeddedness in material culture. In her very useful overview essay “What Is New Formalism?” Marjorie Levinson details a recent activist approach to formalism that stresses “the revision and reanimation of form in the age of interdisciplinarity and the centrality of form to contextualist and materialist critique” (Levinson, 25). New formalist literary and cultural critics seek to develop a historically informed and informing formalist criticism by insisting on the mutually constitutive relation between ideology and the aesthetic, by attending to the symbolic means that establish the conditions of possibility for all experience—whether it be aesthetic, affective, political, or historical—and by positing form as an interlocutor to theory, ideology, and history rather than simply an example of these things (Levinson, 11; Rooney, 29). My intention in this book is to trace the consequences for our contemporary moment of Hannah Arendt’s still-prescient observation that the sign of the political is not invested in the character of our stories, but rather in the mode or form in which they come into existence. I argue that carefully examining the negative aesthetic modes and forms employed by these writers might shape in unique ways understandings of what political expression is and could be in a contemporary moment. They do so by illuminating experiences, desires, and strategies of refusal that are inexpressible/incomprehensible in the terms offered by traditional realist modes or in standard forms of oppositional critique.

1

Apocalyptic Feminism: Negative Aesthetics in Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto

The male has a negative Midas touch—everything he touches turns to shit SCUM Manifesto, 45 But if, by exploits of her hand, woman were to reopen paths into . . . a/ one logos that connotes her as castrated, especially as castrated of words, excluded from the work force except as prostitute to the interests of the dominant ideology . . . then a certain sense, which still constitutes the sense of history also, will undergo unparalleled interrogation, revolution. But how is this to be done? . . . Turn everything upside down, inside out, back to front. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 142 In most recent histories of US second-wave feminism, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto is either ignored or mentioned only briefly as part of the short-lived period of radical feminism (1967–75, according to Alice Echols). On one level, this neglect is unsurprising given the Manifesto’s uncompromising extremity and explosive negativity:  in the first sentence alone, with remarkable conciseness and supreme self-confidence, Solonas’s narrator matter-of-factly advocates eradicating the government, the economy, and the entire male gender. “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex” (Solanas, 1). Aggressive, incendiary, and laced with profanity, suff used with

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sardonic humor and homicidal rage, riddled with logical contradictions as well as prescient analysis, Solanas’s one-woman Society for Cutting Up Men (S.C.U.M) has been easy to dismiss as the invention of one mentally unhinged woman, historically noteworthy only for her failed attempt to assassinate Andy Warhol. As Avital Ronell notes in her introduction to a recent reissue of SCUM, as a historical figure, Solanas is “barely representable or representative”; a “speck” or a “specter,” she occupies a “nonspace” within contemporary histories of feminism (Ronell, 2). The Manifesto’s reception within histories of radical writing more generally has been equally paradoxical and unstable. As Brenna Fahs notes of attempts to characterize SCUM, “Sometimes it’s a feminist classic, sometimes a marginal tract, a cult classic, a rant, man-hating, anti-feminist, surrealist, anarcho-socialist, utopian, apocalyptic” (Fahs, 2014, 4). Solanas herself has been compared to Nietzsche and Jean Genet, Jacques Derrida and Lenny Bruce, Malcolm X and the Unabomber. Several scholars of the manifesto genre do discuss SCUM as part of a late 1960s–1970s neo-avant-garde explosion of revolutionary rhetoric, and they link Solanas’s work to earlier avant-garde manifestoes. For instance, Martin Puchner notes that “Solanas adopt[s] and inhabit[s] many of [the manifesto’s] features to the full, including the violence, the invocation of history, the belief in a futurist technology, and its extreme impatience” (Puchner, 215). Janet Lyon also locates Solanas’s work squarely within the historical trajectory of the avantgarde in her assessment that “SCUM is the vengeful, victorious daughter of the avant-garde manifestoes of Apollinaire, Tzara, Marinetti, Debord” (Lyon, 175). Lyon qualifies this placement, however, by also describing Solanas’s work as a document that “parodies, in outrageous caricature, the formal aspects of the political manifesto,” becoming a “hyper-manifesto” that pushes the genre to its outermost limits (Lyon, 173, 175). Even in a form that trades in extremity and negativity, Solanas takes things too far. As Lyon points out, the manifesto is, by definition, a public performative genre that presupposes and militantly claims to speak on behalf of a collectivity, a “we.” Because the manifesto aims “to represent a group to itself, its collective address both evokes an audience and tries to bring it into being” (Lyon, 7). In view of this, Lyon considers Solanas’s work to be a failure given that her “we” is in fact resolutely singular. And, as Puchner notes, with no collectively on whose behalf the manifesto speaks, “with nothing to back her up, Solanas was speaking from nowhere” (Puchner, 214). She was

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avant with no garde. Alternatively, James M. Harding reads Solanas’s shooting of Warhol as itself a carefully orchestrated piece of radical performance art in the anti-art tradition, “the most deeply provocative and profoundly subversive moment of American avant-garde performance in the 1960s,” and “the pivotal gesture in a radically subversive project aimed at recalibrating the trajectory of the American avant garde” (Harding, 146, 143). Solanas exposed the militant rhetoric of the historical avant-garde as nothing but rhetoric and “reasserted radical politics as a central priority of avant-garde practice” (155). In spite of this, in Harding’s estimation, Solanas’s Manifesto and her shooting of Warhol remain nonassimilable sites in the history of the avant-garde, registering a “fundamental disruptive incompatibility with the history from which [they] [have] been excluded” (156).

In the time of SCUM But at the time Solanas wrote SCUM (it was self-published in mimeographed form in 1967 and sold on the street at $2 for men and $1 for women), and especially in the aftermath of the Warhol shooting, the Manifesto was widely recognized as one of the first and most extreme articulations of radical feminist principles. In fact, according to Fahs, many consider it to be the origin point, if not the impetus, for the development of radical feminism itself. Opposed to the liberal feminist agenda that sought equality with men in a system that remained unchanged, radical feminism—as epitomized in SCUM Manifesto—proposed eradicating capitalist heteropatriarchy entirely—by violent means if necessary. In her history of radical feminism, Daring to be Bad, Alice Echols notes that by the late 1960s, radical feminists had become convinced that liberal feminist programs and nonviolent approaches were not only ineffective but also thoroughly outmoded. Rather than drawing inspiration directly from earlier generations of feminists, therefore, radical feminists instead often looked to guerrilla tactics of armed rebellion in emerging postcolonies and to the spectacular terrorist actions of militant groups in the United States such as the Black Panthers and the Weathermen. In this context, Solanas had a brief moment of genuine notoriety in radical countercultural circles. In the aftermath of the Warhol shootings, Ben

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Morea, founder of the anarchist group Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers, and a life-long supporter of Solanas, held a street performance and support rally at which he approvingly referred to her as “a chick with balls,” “the true vengeance of dada,” and “the sweet assassin” (Fahs, 2014, 149). Notorious civil rights lawyer Florynce Kenney offered to represent her in court—Solanas declined, choosing to represent herself, although she kept Kennedy as a legal advisor. Meanwhile, Norman Mailer quaked in his boots, calling Solanas a feminist “Robbespierre.” Among women at the forefront of the radical women’s liberation movement, the Manifesto epitomized the cutting edge of an emerging radical feminist Zeitgeist. By giving voice to the inchoate rage circulating at the time, the Manifesto produced a genuine moment of recognition and affective resonance. Ti-Grace Atkinson recounts her reaction the morning after the Warhol shooting: “All I saw was: she had shot Warhol. I knew there was exploitation and it matched because finally some woman had done something that was appropriate to the feelings we were having. She was fighting back. That’s what it felt like” (Fahs, 163). In an interview at this time, Atkinson called SCUM “the most important feminist document to appear in the English speaking world” (Fahs, 174). The Manifesto directly inspired the formation of radical feminist groups such as WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and became required reading in others such as the group Cell 16, founded by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Fahs, 286). B. Ruby Rich claimed Solanas as feminism’s warrior saint, Joan of Arc, and to Vivian Gornick, Solanas’s Manifesto was the lightening rod that galvanized and demanded recognition of radical feminist fury. “[Solanas’s] was the voice of one who has been pushed past the limit, one whose psychological bearings are gone, who can no longer be satisfied with anything less than blood . . . [She] speaks the true feelings of the quintessential feminist heart, and those feelings are of black rage” (qtd in Third, 115). Despite Solanas’s wide notoriety and the Manifesto’s evident centrality to the evolution of radical feminism, it has proven as difficult to account for within contemporary narratives of feminism’s second-wave emergence as it has been to locate within histories of radical writing and avant-garde movements. What is it about Solanas as a figure and SCUM Manifesto as a historical document that have proven so resistant to legibility? Why, despite a

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recent resurgence of interest in her work, has Solanas remained an anomaly, a “nonspace,” and a site of unrepresentability? And why, unlike other works by radical feminists, has the Manifesto been translated into at least six languages (the German edition came out in 1969) and never been out of print? For one thing, as Fahs’s excellent biography makes clear, Solanas’s life was filled with contradictions and extremities that made her an ambiguous icon at best—even for the radical wing of feminism. Solanas herself consistently refused to be positioned as any movement’s icon; she was resolutely a loner, who never joined feminist or other movement groups, one for whom sisterhood was not powerful. This extreme and self-chosen isolation was key to her imagination of the extremity of the SCUM perspective, a unique angle of vision and non-bourgeois set of values far afield from the mainstream and difficult to absorb on its own terms. By all accounts, Solanas was emotionally and intellectually intense and exceedingly difficult to be around, both acutely insightful and given to lifelong bouts of mania and paranoia. In Fahs’s words, “Valerie famously rejected, alienated, and repeatedly threatened to kill nearly every friend she had” (Fahs, 73). She was an anarchist who declared in the Manifesto that “SCUM is against the entire system, the very idea of law and government. SCUM is out to destroy the system not attain certain rights within it” (Solanas, 76) And, she remained steadfastly unrepentant about the Warhol shooting—calling it a moral act justified by what she saw as a string of broken promises and Warhol’s theft of the only copy of her play, Up Your Ass. Unlike most second-wave feminist radicals, who were decidedly middle class (“nice genteel ladies,” as she refers to them in the Manifesto), Solanas was from a working-class family in Atlantic City whose violence and instability caused her to leave home in her mid-teens. Fahs cites evidence that she was sexually abused by her father and Solanas gave birth to two children before the age of fifteen (Fahs, 18, 26). She drifted from place to place and eventually landed in Greenwich Village in 1962 where she survived on the streets by panhandling, shoplifting, and prostitution, often working only long enough to buy herself a few days in a hotel room to write. This life was difficult, of course—Solanas was homeless and hungry many times during her adult life. However, this nomadic existence also offered her a kind of freedom and a radical outsider’s perspective—a view from the gutter that is central to the SCUM persona developed in the Manifesto. Very smart, very ambitious, and

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very driven, Solanas put herself through the University of Maryland and studied for a PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Minnesota. After the Warhol shooting, between 1968 and 1971, Solanas served time in jail and in a variety of mental institutions, both during this period and at other points in her life. Through it all, Solanas considered herself a radical intellectual, remained committed to the SCUM vision, and continued to write, although nothing remains of her output save SCUM Manifesto and her play, Up Your Ass. She died alone in 1988 in a welfare hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. It’s reputed that when the landlord found her, she was slumped over her typewriter surrounded by paper and covered in maggots—scum to the end. In this chapter, I deemphasize the presumed link between the Manifesto (the theory) and the Warhol shooting (the practice) and between Solanas’s life and her performative assault in SCUM. I do so in order to analyze closely the Manifesto’s negations and instabilities and the scum persona—“a warrior of negativity”—that is so painstakingly developed in it. Although the intensity and velocity of SCUM may make it seem dashed off in a white heat, in fact, Solanas spent years writing and revising it (Fahs, 61). She also considered the SCUM persona to be a deliberate satiric construction, less a plan of action than a fictional thought experiment, as she makes clear in a 1977 Village Voice interview with Howard Smith. “[SCUM] is just a literary device. There is no organization called SCUM . . . I thought of SCUM as a state of mind . . . a point of view . . . Women who think a certain way are in SCUM” (Heller, 183). Rather than a referent naming “civic--minded,” “thrill-seeking” females in the world Solanas actually inhabited, SCUM is both a failed performative and a prefigurative hailing of an absent collectivity-to-come. This emphasis has been overshadowed by the Warhol shooting and by her editor, Maurice Girondias’s, sensationalistic insistence immediately after the shooting that SCUM become S.C.U.M.—his acronym for Society for Cutting Up Men. Solanas rejected this title as a marketing ploy and lamented that it essentially trivialized her actual argument in the Manifesto itself. “Why did you [Girondias] not have the guts . . . to let the Manifesto stand or fall on its own? Why were you so cowardly as to try to explain it away even before it could speak for itself?” (Fahs, 213). Even years later, according to Jane Caputi, Solanas insisted that people not equate SCUM with the Society for Cutting

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Up Men. As Caputi comments, “I do think it’s an important philosophical distinction. [Solanas] really meant the lowest, most abject being that has the most power to provide knowledge. I think that’s a great philosophical claim. She talked about scum coming from the gutter, scum coming from everything objectified and thrown away. This is a brilliant philosophical position” (qtd in Fahs, 278). Conflating the SCUM agenda with the Warhol shooting “achieves the exact opposite of promoting SCUM’s ideals, as it only placed Solanas in the shadow of this single act . . . the shootings destroyed SCUM’s political potential” (Fahs, 2008, 603). Emphasizing the Warhol shooting alone or Solanas’s mental instability also deflects attention from the scope and the intersectional nature of the Manifesto’s critique; its non-bourgeois, anticapitalist, class- and gender-based argument for the elimination of “the money-work system” that defines “everyone in terms of his or her function or use” (Solanas, 47) is a vital part of the agenda outlined in the Manifesto. To position Solanas as only representing a site of blankness or an absolute unassimilable limit within all systems or histories suggests not only contemporary feminism’s inability to acknowledge its own radical past but also to learn from and incorporate it. Nearly every critic who writes about Solanas stresses her isolation and her lack of fit with the various movements and Zeitgeists circulating at the time. Mary Herron comments that “[if] Valerie Solanas had been born just a few years later, her incendiary writing might have found its audience. Even as a celebrity assassin, she was in the wrong time” (Herron and Minahan, x). Ronell suggests that Solanas was not part of the right affective landscape in 1967, not queer or deranged in the right (a recognizable) way. Reflecting on the non-space of Solanas’s place in feminist history, she notes: “[E]ven in the land of social derangement Valerie Solanas got to travel the blind alleys and sidestreets of grand feminist mappings. It is not as though language and lit show no tolerance for a girl’s derangement . . . [But] Valerie, poor Valerie refuses the prestige and license of hysteria or any of the neighboring neurotic dialects that might be understood in feminist precincts . . . Our Valerie, by contrast, was a psycho. Butch-dykey angry, poor, and fucked up . . . There is no doubt that she felt forlorn around the [Warhol] Factory girls, painfully pitting her butch androgyny against the hyper-femininity that Warhol favored. She was one lonely lady in the heady glamour days of Candy Darling and

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Viva, way before the Guerilla Girls, Lesbian Avengers, Queer Nation, and routine outings got going. So way before” (Ronell, 16–17). In addition to her extreme contrast with Warhol’s queer Factory girls, Solanas also was difficult to claim for any other sexual minority then or now. Throughout her life, she had both male and female lovers and she refused to align herself with any particular sexual subculture or identity. In fact, her sexuality did not seem at all central to her identity as an intellectual and a writer; in the Manifesto the narrator advocates celibacy, another way in which she fails to conform to prevailing narratives. “Sex . . . is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time. The female . . . can easily condition away her sex drive, leaving her completely cool and cerebral and free to pursue truly worthy relationships and activity” (Solanas, 60). The Manifesto also makes clear that this deliberate asexuality results from a lifetime of “Suck and Fuck.” SCUM females have “seen the whole show—every bit of it—the fucking scene, the dyke scene— they’ve covered the whole waterfront, been under every dock and pier—the peter pier, the pussy pier . . . you’ve got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex” (Solanas, 61–2).

Reading SCUM Manifesto Of course, Solanas’s lack of fit also arises from the uncompromising extremity of the Manifesto itself—not only on the level of the ideas it advocates but also—and especially—the voice in which it narrates them—“a voice of primal injury” as Ronell refers to it. The Manifesto famously opens with a call to destroy all of capitalist heteropatriarchy and ends with an apocalyptic vision of the demise of the human race itself; significantly, in a text obsessed with the work of unmaking, the Manifesto opens with the word “life” and ends with the word “demise.” As the Manifesto’s first sentence indicates, a profusion of negative constructions (non, nothing, not, no, un-, anti-, lack, absence) and absolute inversion of all inherited value hierarchies, social roles, dominant logics, and cultural norms—a complete revolution—are the most consistently used strategies of negation that Solanas employs in the text. Beginning with male and female gender roles, the Manifesto turns two thousand years of Western history and culture into so much pig shit. Thus, men are “defective

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non-women,” and biological accidents:  passive, emotionally parasitic, animalistic, incapable of empathy or true community, and aligned with death. Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, to become female. He attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through and fuse with the female, and by claiming as his own all female characteristics—emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc.—and projecting onto women all male traits— vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc. . . . He has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of women that men are women and women are men. The male claim that females find fulfi llment through motherhood and sexuality reflects what males think they’d find fulfi lling if they were female. Women, in other words, don’t have penis envy; men have pussy envy. (Solanas, 37–8)

Existential philosophers admit men’s “nothingness problem” but what they cannot face, according to the narrator, is that this fundamental lack exists only in men. “So they label the male condition the Human Condition, posit their nothingness problem, which horrifies them, as a philosophical dilemma . . . label their nothingness their ‘Identity Problem,’ and proceed to prattle on pompously about the ‘Crisis of the Individual,’ the ‘Essence of Being,’ ‘Existence preceding Essence,’ ‘Existential Modes of Being,’ etc, etc.” (Solanas, 53). The male compensation for not being female is controlling others, making money and making war (“proving his manhood is worth an endless amount of mutilation and suffering” [Solanas, 39]). The monumental task of negating and resituating nearly all of human history and the absoluteness of the male-female dichotomy on which these negations are based, often lead the narrator into paradoxical efforts to distinguish SCUM women—“female females”—from “male females”—including “nice genteel ladies,” “Mommies” and, especially, “Daddy’s Girls.” Many of these efforts to make distinctions are inflected with class rage at the unearned privilege of all men and of bourgeois women (“the ‘privileged’, ‘educated,’ middleclass,” the “most backward segment of society” [46]), an aspect of SCUM’s inversions that has been underemphasized. Particular scorn is heaped on the bourgeois nuclear family that produces Daddy’s Girls as male-dependent,

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insecure, approval- and security-seeking, and deferential to authority. “Daddy’s Girl, always tense and fearful, uncool, unanalytical, lacking objectivity, appraises Daddy . . . against a background of fear (‘respect’) and is not only unable to see the empty shell behind the façade, but accepts the male definition of himself as superior, as a female, and of herself, as inferior, as a male, which, thanks to Daddy she really is” (Solanas, 44). The class-based elements of SCUM’s critique—and these are insights offered from an unrecognized underclass perspective that clearly differs from a voice of working-class pride, for instance—play a central part in Solanas’s radical inversions in the Manifesto. What polite society defines as beneath contempt, as the “nasty, violent” scum of the earth, here is revalued as the hope of the future, an early example of the queer feminist technique of resignifying terms previously used in injurious ways. Unlike nice polite Daddy’s girls, SCUM females are “funky, dirty, lowdown,” “trust only their gutter instincts,” and are “unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, ‘morals’ ” (Solanas, 61). Too “arrogant to respect Daddy, the ‘Greats,’ or the deep wisdom of the ancients,” SCUM females are insistently embodied, emotionally and affectively volatile, single-minded and unrelenting in their critique (Solanas, 61). Because Daddies have primitive and easily disturbed nervous systems, they train their children, especially girls, to fear strong emotion—especially anger—and independent thought, in the process making them “passive vegetables” (Solanas, 43). The narrator’s impatience and emotional volatility are most marked in passages that might be called feminist tirades or diatribes, pejorative terms— often feminized—that connote emotional instability, loss of control, and the potential for violence. These tirades also contain many of the Manifesto’s most humorous and cutting passages as in this selection from early in the text with its build up of invective and its devastating dehumanizing punch line: “passive, rattle-headed Daddy’s Girl . . . is easily reduced to Mama, mindless ministrator of the physical needs, soother of the weary, apey brow, booster of the tiny ego, appreciator of the contemptible, a hot water bottle with tits” (45). Clearly, this narrator does not need feminist encouragement to break the silence that is socially imposed on women; she in no way is “castrated of words” as Irigaray would have it but, instead, does the castrating herself. As the Manifesto progresses, these tirades grow more voluble, intense, unstable,

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and more directly violent, as in this passage, in which, for the first time in the Manifesto, SCUM is introduced. [F]emales least embedded in the male “culture,” the least nice, those crass and simple souls who reduce fucking to fucking, who are too childish for the grown-up world of suburbs, mortgages, mops and baby shit . . . too arrogant to respect Daddy, the “Greats” or the deep wisdom of the Ancients . . . who are given to disgusting, nasty upsetting “scenes,” hateful, violent bitches given to slamming those who unduly irritate them in the teeth, who’d sink a shiv into a man’s chest or ram an ice pick up his asshole as soon as look at him, if they knew they could get away with it, in short, those who, by the standards of our “culture” are SCUM . . . these females are cool and relatively cerebral and skirting asexuality. (61)

This passage’s multiple repetitions of terms to describe SCUM females and its cascade of dependent clauses that hurtle down the page with increasing velocity, shockingly erupt into a full-blown street fight: intimate, nasty, deadly. The final few words abruptly halt the passage’s velocity and violence, and, with their calm matter-of-factness, come as an affective shock in their radical shift away from the narrator’s volatile embodiment. A  passage that appears to illustrate the narrator’s lack of control, shifts on a dime to deflate this assumption and makes the affective reversal all the more chilling. Abrupt shifts in tone and diction such as these contribute greatly to the Manifesto’s violent instabilities. The SCUM narrator’s urgency, impatience, and emotional volatility are reflected in numerous other examples of what I have called the feminist rant. Often these rants function as sites of pure excess as in this passage near the end of the Manifesto in which the narrator delineates “the most obnoxious or harmful types of men” that SCUM warriors will target (73). These include, predictably enough, “rapists, politicians and all who are in their service,” “Chairmen of Boards,” “cops,” “scientists working on death and destruction programs or for private industry,” “landlords,” “real estate men and stock brokers,” “psychiatrists and clinical psychologists,” and “all members of the armed forces” (73–4). More idiosyncratically, the list also includes “lousy singers and musicians,” “owners of greasy spoons and restaurants that play Musak,” “cheap pikers and welchers,” “litterbugs,” “men who speak when they have nothing to say,” “double dealers,” and “plagiarizers” (73–4). Here,

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the narrator swings wildly between disparate contexts and circumstances, levels of diction, and degrees of harmfulness—from public menaces to private irritants and grudges. And, in case we fear that marauding SCUM girls will mistakenly take out an undeserving “disc jockey,” a stray “flim-flam artist,” or an unjustly accused “litterbug,” the narrator assures us that, in ambiguous cases “an overall subjective evaluation of him will be made to determine if his behavior is, in the balance, good or bad” (74). In the example above, the narrator’s emphasis on the reasonable, the detached, the cerebral, and the disembodied not only functions to stop the tirade abruptly. It also introduces another contrasting aspect of the SCUM persona:  its voice of supreme self-confidence and absolute belief in the rightness—even the patent obviousness—of its claims, which are themselves hyperbolic. Unlike the tirade’s uncontrolled verbal outpouring, this voice manages to be cool, even casual, and, at the same time, radically incendiary. SCUM’s opening sentence provides an excellent example. It begins with an accretion of qualifiers and intensifiers of negation (“at best,” “an utter bore,” “no aspect of society,” “at all relevant”), pivots ironically on a term of minimization (“only”), and closes with four short imperatives that land with a staccato series of one-two punches: “overthrow the government,” “eliminate the money system,” “institute complete automation,” “destroy the male sex” (35). In addition to SCUM’s radical negations of all dominant social and political structures, traditional gender roles and received values and its discordant and abrupt tonal shifts ranging from manic rants to steely declamations, the Manifesto also elaborates negative modes for enacting SCUM’s revolutionary agenda and bringing down the system. These involve “furtive, sneaky, underhanded,” and criminal behavior, parasitic or viral ruinations of the system from below and within, what I refer to in the next chapter as “fatal strategies.” The narrator wittily calls these methods “the unwork force, the fuck-up force.” “SCUM will become members of the unwork force, the fuck-up force; they will get jobs of various kinds and unwork. For example, SCUM salesgirls will not charge for merchandise; SCUM telephone operators will not charge for calls; SCUM office and factory workers, in addition to fucking up their work, will secretly destroy equipment. SCUM will unwork at a job until fired, then get another job to unwork at” (71–2). In addition, SCUM will assume control of the media, heterosexual couple-bust, destroy private property and,

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of course, murder men (or send them to suicide centers). The narrator distinguishes SCUM’s fatal strategies from mainstream liberal civil disobedience approaches (“such tactics are for nice genteel ladies who scrupulously take only such action as is guaranteed to be ineffective”) and from dropping out in an effort to evade the system: “Dropping out is exactly what the establishment leaders want; it plays into the hands of the enemy; it strengthens the system instead of undermining it, since it is based entirely on the non-participating, passivity, apathy and non-involvement of the mass of women” (75– 6). And what of the post-SCUM utopia? Are there any affirmative visions in SCUM? Given the Manifesto’s great work of unmaking and negating all status quos, and given that Solanas considered herself to be an agent provocateur and writer of apocalyptic social satires, it’s unsurprising that the Manifesto contains very few passages positively describing the actual society that SCUM’s terrorist tactics will bring about. When these passages do occur they are often markedly different in tone: filled with wistful longing, naïve and almost childlike in their simplicity. “[T]he female function is to explore, discover, invent, solve problems, crack jokes, make music—all with love. In other words, create a magic world” (47). “A woman . . . knows instinctively that the only wrong is to hate others, and that the meaning of life is love” (53). “Love can’t flourish in a society based upon money and meaningless work: it requires complete economic as well as personal freedom, leisure time and the opportunity to engage in intensely absorbing, emotionally satisfying activities which, when shared with those you respect, lead to deep friendship. Our ‘society’ provides practically no opportunity to engage in such activities” (57). “A true community consists of individuals—not mere species members, not couples—respecting each others individuality and privacy . . . free spirits in free relation to each other—and cooperating with each other to achieve common ends. Traditionalists say the basic unit of society is the family; ‘hippies’ say the tribe; no one says the individual” (49). After a life of insistent and often painful embodiment, a life overwhelmed with explosive affects and righteous rage, these passages speak to the allure of leisure, freedom, emotional satisfaction, friendship—a life that is almost unimaginable from the SCUM perspective. The pervasive, uncompromising negativity of the narrator’s critique, the depth of her outrage and disgust, and the fact that a vision of SCUM females

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taking charge remains intangible, more theoretical than actual, mean that the Manifesto primarily remains fi xated on death and destruction rather than construction of utopia. This becomes most clear in the text’s concluding pages. After eliminating men and describing a plan to absolve women of ever having to give birth—the laboratory reproduction of babies—the narrator ponders the possibility of the end of humanity itself: “Why produce even females? Why should there be future generations? . . . Why continue to reproduce? . . . Eventually the natural course of events, of social evolution, will lead to total female control of the world and, subsequently, to the cessation of the production of males and, ultimately, to the cessation of the production of females” (Solanas, 69). Solanas’s apocalyptic millenarian vision grows out of what Vivian Gornick calls “rage of an ungiving, unstinting, unmediating nature. Rage to the death” (Third, 113).

SCUM’s feminist affects Why should contemporary feminists continue to read Solanas’s nonbourgeois, anarchistic, apocalyptic account of gender relations and how they must change? Why should we remember and try to account for SCUM Manifesto’s radical critique? What set of affects does it record and unleash and what recognitions does it continue to provoke? As a limit text in both form and style, the Manifesto may usefully function to recall feminism to its own non-knowledge, what it has forgotten, repressed or abjected as it has become institutionalized and historicized. As Dana Heller puts it, “[t]he SCUM Manifesto . . . should recall us to feminism’s unacknowledged debt to the margins of the representable and the representative” (Heller, 187). But what is this debt? What does a close encounter with the SCUM persona have to teach us? The narrator’s emotional volatility, supreme self-confidence, and sardonic humor, her intimate mode of address to the reader, and the inescapable negative affects that are transmitted through the vividness of the narrator’s voice and actions, mean that no one who engages closely with the SCUM persona emerges from the encounter unscathed. From a rational distance, we may describe our shock and outrage at SCUM’s overt and murderous

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agenda—even if we take its program to be a fictional satiric performance. We may dismiss its irrationality out of hand or feel a detached bemusement at the idea of a revolutionary SCUM “fuck-up force.” However, the Manifesto may also compel us to recognize—in immediate ways—our own capacity for gendered rage and the imagination of violence that we typically hide even from ourselves. Mary Herron refers to this shock of recognition in her introduction to the script for I Shot Andy Warhol, her film about Solanas. Having recently completed research for a television documentary about Warhol, Herron stumbles across the Manifesto by chance in a Brixton bookstore:  I bought a copy and read it on the subway, an experience that literally changed my life. Nothing I read had ever affected me so profoundly . . . First there was the tone of voice . . . deadpan, icily logical, elegantly comic; a strange juxtaposition, as if Oscar Wilde had decided to become a terrorist . . . I was stunned because in all the accounts I had read of the shooting. . .no one had said that Valerie Solanas was talented or funny. I was both attracted to and scared by her writing . . . The Manifesto has a primal kick; it reached a core of anger I didn’t know I possessed. (Herron and Minahan, viii–ix)

After encountering the Manifesto, Herron is stunned, scared, and attracted in equal measure, profoundly affected in her body; taken unawares, she is kicked, broken in upon by her encounter with SCUM. Significantly, it also recalls her to something she has disavowed, an anger that she didn’t know she felt. An affect that she thought was outside and other here is encountered in/ as herself. The strength of Herron’s own affective response to the Manifesto and the paradoxes posed by Solanas’s life drive her (and her research assistants) to unearth much of what little is known about Solanas—prior to Fahs’s recent exhaustive biography—and hers is among the most considered and compassionate accounts of Solanas’s life. Herron’s experience suggests that the Manifesto opens a vivid way to experience on a visceral level an embodiment of radical feminist rage, an affect or structure of feeling that may resonate uneasily with our ideas of feminism as they have developed over the past forty years. In her excellent analysis of the multiple contradictions in Solanas’s life and art, Fahs is much less equivocal in her response than Herron. She considers the Manifesto to be a heroic act and praises its “radical emotionality,” its brilliant combination of humor and rage.

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“Solanas demonstrates for us the radical potential of humor as it collides with anger, pain, and real gendered suffering” (Fahs, 2008, 614). A close encounter with SCUM’s voice of outrage “allows us to experience affectively the lure of living with intensity, allows us to admit the thrill some of us get from this voice. She voices something many of us have felt but could not speak” (Fahs, 2008, 213). Unlike Herron, Fahs openly acknowledges the anger that the Manifesto transmits across time and the prohibitions against its expression that continue to haunt feminist thought. She also acknowledges the allure of SCUM’s invitation to live with intensity, to become one of those “thrillseeking females” that Solanas failed to call into being in her own moment. Fahs’s biography makes clear that Solanas’s capacity to live with intensity, her refusal to compromise the integrity of her vision or her freedom to live as she chose, required courage and stamina and cost her a great deal. As TiGrace Atkinson recalls of her last meeting with Solanas, “She will live or die in the nuthouse forever before she will waver an inch from her internal freedom. She is a free being. That is the most overwhelming sense I had in her presence” (Fahs, 186). Forty years later, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz remembers Solanas’s “eyes . . . She had these piercing eyes . . . She made you look at yourself differently. It stripped me of my defenses. You couldn’t bullshit with her at all . . . You could sense a heat coming from her like dynamism. She was like a hot wire” (Fahs, 172–3). Dunbar-Ortiz’s reflections suggest that Solanas herself was also a site of what Alison M. Jaggar calls “outlaw emotions,” defined by their systematic opposition to prevailing perceptions, norms, and values and their capacity to recalibrate—even if only momentarily—our perceptions of reality (Jaggar, 386–7). Solanas’s singular and uncompromising radicality has inspired at least one play, Valerie Jean Solanas for President of America (2006), and a novel—now unfortunately out of print—by Swedish author Sara Stridsberg. In The Dream Faculty, A Postscript to the Theory of Sexuality (2007), the narrator holds vigil at the bedside of a dying Solanas in an attempt to “rescue her ideas from the shadow of her conviction for attempted murder, and engage in a conversation which Solanas’s death . . . rendered impossible” (Stridsberg, 17). Solanas becomes the symbol of feminist wisdom, the titular ideal faculty member as the narrator comments: “I have 250,000 academic points from the university and all I dream about is a Faculty like you.” Stridsberg, who also translated

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the Manifesto into Swedish in 2003, was deeply affected by Solanas’s example and understood well the paradoxes of her life and art, referring to her in Valerie Jean Solanas for President of America as “the intellectual whore, the utopian misanthropist. She is the victim who refuses to excuse herself. She is the child without childhood; she is the woman’s movement without women. She is the absolute triumph and the definitive defeat” (Stridsberg, 10). Increasingly, Solanas also has figured as a touchstone for contextualizing the work of other writers of the feminist extreme. For example, in her book Are the Lips A Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex, Lynne Huffer reads the work of French feminist novelist and filmmaker Virgine Despentes in relation to the SCUM Manifesto, demonstrating the ways in which Despentes is “a third-wave version of the bad girl of second-wave feminism, Valerie Solanas” (163). In particular, Huffer compares Solanas’s and Despentes’s distinctive points of view. Both write on behalf of the “left-overs,” “the weirdos,” the “losers in the femininity stakes;” both critique “the grinding, repetitive, systematic, never-ending thwarting of life as eros” in a patriarchal culture; and both theorize from the gutter, which “becomes the site of a creative performative violence,” “in the face of an apocalyptic future” (172, 174). Beyond its ability to transmit complex affects, SCUM Manifesto is also noteworthy as one of the earliest examples of what has come to be called an intersectional analysis and as one of the only exemplars of a revolutionary anarchist strain in second-wave feminism. Solanas’s class-based critique of capitalist heteropatriarchal privilege plays a more extensive and central part in her analysis than previous readings have acknowledged. The Manifesto repeatedly asserts that there is “no human reason for money or anyone to work,” that “the elimination of money and the complete institution of automation are basic to all other SCUM reforms” (39, 74). Class-based unequal access to education comes in for particular critique as men appropriate the appearance of worth “through money, prestige, ‘high’ social class, degrees, professional position and knowledge. The purpose of ‘higher’ education is not to educate but to exclude as many as possible from the various professions” (54). The training of scientists—Solanas’s chosen field of study—comes in for particular scorn. Not only are women actively discouraged from pursuing science by “the unfair exclusivity of our ‘higher’ education system,” scientists are trained to “show marked preference for virile, ‘manly,’ war and death

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programs” or research for corporations based on “the money system’s insatiable need for new products” as timely a critique in 2015 as it was in 1967 (65, 66). Clearly, Solanas’s (non)vision of a genderless, classless, moneyless, nonexploitive society with no government or authority figures, complete automation, and thus ample leisure time to pursue freely life, liberty, and happiness, does not function as a full-blown political analysis or theory. The SCUM narrator theorizes from what Solanas called “the garbage pail men have made of the world,” and what Ronell refers to as an excremental site of decay and death (Ronell, 11). This excremental consciousness is taken quite literally in the Manifesto; rivers of vomit, snot, and shit run throughout, and the final scenario imagines Big Daddy in a corner clinging in terror to Big Mama, and “shitting in his forceful dynamic pants” as SCUM breaks down the door (Solanas, 80). SCUM ’s narrator takes up a subject position and theorizes from within the site of all that culture deems abject and expendable and this abject subjectivity is key to the Manifesto’s radical vision. It remains an important, singular and still-marginalized vision of a feminism that is “nonliberal, nomarketable, nonbourgeois” and filled with negation (Ronell, 24). Part of this book’s larger argument is that new avenues of understanding open when radical writers are read not only in relation to the specific contexts in which they emerged, but also in relation to one another. Such a comparative approach discloses some striking similarities between Solanas’s work and that of Kathy Acker, the subject of the next chapter. As Solanas did, Acker combined deliberately crude and antiliterary strategies with high culture references and trenchant political insights. She self-consciously positioned herself as an outsider—part punk outlaw, part agent provocateur, part avant-garde intellectual (Acker studied with Herbert Marcuse and Jerome Rothenberg and was influenced by William S. Burroughs and Georges Batille, among others). And, perhaps most significantly, both Solanas and Acker critically inhabited the excremental scene of the abject female body— of scum, blood, and guts—as a site for launching radical critiques of capitalist heteropatriarchy—including the bourgeois nuclear family, the government, the education system, the canon of Western literature, and language. As we have seen, Solanas engages in a frontal assault on the system; the SCUM narrator is a subject to be

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reckoned with who recommends terrorist tactics of unmaking all systems without being confi ned to any of them—an impossible position that leaves her nowhere. Acker also uses fatal strategies but her narrator speaks from within the system as its abject objectified other who ruins the system by exacting what might be called the revenge of the object.

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An attack on institutions via language would demand the use of a language or languages which aren’t acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a set of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn’t break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes. Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless May we write, not in order to judge, but for and in (I quote Georges Batille), “The community of those who do not have a community.” Kathy Acker, “Critical Languages, 1990” I don’t know how to talk about a utopian world. We live in this world and there’s a lot of suffering. Kathy Acker, interview with A. Juno in Angry Women “This revolution, obscure and ironic, won’t be dialectical, it will be fatal . . . There is no liberation but this one . . . in the deepening of negative conditions. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies Kathy Acker has been called the harbinger of a new postfeminist sensibility, the queen of literary punk, a foremost practitioner of Deleuzian nomad writing, or simply the exemplary postmodern writer of today. And, indeed, enumeration of the features characteristically found in her texts produces a fairly complete description of those qualities now commonly associated with

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literary postmodernism. These include shattered subjects speaking in emotional ground tones ranging from flatness and stupidity to murderous rage; strategies that promote radical narrative discontinuity, fragmentation, deliberate incoherence, and linguistic anarchy; blatant appropriations and rewritings of canonical literary works such as Don Quixote and The Scarlet Letter; acute theoretical insights and political commentary embedded within popular genres and modes from rock lyrics, soap opera, and true romance to hard core porn in a kind of “irrational pastiche” (Pitchford, 9). Nearly twenty years after her death, there appears to be some consensus regarding Acker’s centrality to a (still-emerging) postmodern literary canon. Yet the political valence of her radical experimental strategies is still a subject of intense discussion—part of larger debates about the nature and efficacy of a postmodern feminism and tactics of negative critique (rather than liberation) within it. Acker consistently rejects traditional models of revolutionary transformation in her fiction—whether they be Marxist or feminist—and she does not propose alternative programs for social change. Rather, her methods are de-creative—deliberately crude, violent, irrational, anarchic, antiliterary— expressing a vision that can only be called apocalyptic, especially so in her earlier texts. As Larry McCaffery puts it, “the . . . resolution in her works is like that produced in the aftermath of an explosion” (218). Acker’s extreme methods are matched by a radically uncompromising political vision that Robert Siegle simply calls “the most devastating narrative critique of Western culture to appear in American literature” (48). It is a stylized vision in which Acker thoroughly indicts the oppressions occasioned by capitalist heteropatriarchy as they play themselves out institutionally, interpersonally, linguistically, and, especially, across the female body. Because of the radicality of her critique, any solution or cultural affirmation that Acker offers are provisional at best. As Douglas Dix concludes in his reading of Acker’s Don Quixote as a Deluzian nomad text, “Don Quixote explores the danger of any line of flight—on one side rests the danger of being overcome by the state apparatus, on the other, death” (60). Because the novel breaks down old orders without replacing them, it can only end by asserting the possibility of new social spaces or new modes of subjectivity. While Acker’s characters may try to affirm “a continuing will to connect, to find a viable form of love” (Walsh, 162), such quests typically lead to “silence,

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death, nothingness or reentry into the sadomasochism of patriarchal culture” (Friedman, 44). The fragmentation, narrative anarchy, and lack of closure found in Acker’s works are further emphasized because she often writes within familiar genres such as the Bildungsroman that depend on expectations of clear narrative progress, characters with whom the reader identifies and closure via reconciliation with normative society. In contrast, as Solanas did, Acker self-consciously identified with and wrote from the position of those most thoroughly marginalized by normative culture:  the outlawed/delegitimated perspectives of artists, criminals, women, children, the insane. Throughout her life, Acker herself actively participated in a range of subcultural communities, including sex workers, bikers, tattooists, and extreme body modifiers. Acker’s fiction is distinctive in many ways, not least in its merging of these outsider and irrational perspectives with references from high art and critical theory. Acker’s early influences include Herbert Marcuse, with whom she studied at Brandeis University, and David Antin, who introduced her to works of the European avant-garde—including Dada, French surrealism, and German expressionism—to practices of improvisation, and to theories of conceptualism, including the work of William S. Burroughs, who remained a life-long influence. As Acker puts it, “Burroughs was the only prose writer I could find who was a conceptualist and who was dealing with how politics and language came together” (Wollen, 4). Peter Wollen notes that Acker remained deeply committed to this avant-garde tradition throughout her career: “She used not only cut-up but also incorporated calligraphy, self-drawn dream maps, and Persian and Arabic scripts into her books,” as well as and in parallel with artists such as Barbara Kruger, practices of appropriation (5). That Acker also was extremely well-versed in the mainstream Western literary canon is suggested by the broad range of references found in her works from Bronte, Baudelaire, and Batille to Cattulus and Cervantes, to Dickins and deSade, among many others. Finally, Acker read and was heavily influenced by the radical critiques of Western culture found in French poststructuralist writers including Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; a mixing of high theory with low genres and discourses remained a hallmark of all of her work. As Peter Wollen notes, “Acker was speaking from a clear historical and theoretical position—in the background, there lurked Mallarme’s throw of the dice, Roussel’s compositional

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procedures, Oulipo’s generated texts, Picasso’s collages, Duchamp’s objets trouves, Rauschenberg’s combines, Sade’s endlessly rotating tableaux, Olson’s distaste for the Romantic ego, Burrough’s cut-ups, Breton’s mediumistic ventriloquy, LeWitt’s plans and modules, Kosuth’s art as idea as idea, Foucault’s death of the author” (10). Although there is no evidence that Acker and Solanas ever crossed paths, they did inhabit many of the same New York avant-garde terrains beginning in the 1970s. Robert Siegle’s cultural history of this moment vividly describes the intense concentration of radical artists, writers, performers, musicians, and small publishers in close dialogue with one another and allied in their commitment to experimental aesthetic practices and an equally radical theoretical critique of dominant social, political, economic, and cultural structures. As Siegle comments about this group of insurgent artists, “the best work gives voice to a lost Other—one shaped by race, or class, or gender, or belief, or some combination of these—and articulates the experience of power from the perspective of a non-beneficiary” (Siegle, 7–8). Their geographical proximity and shared commitment to radical critique led to a great cross fertilization of art forms, discourses, genres, and media among this group of artists and, in Acker’s case, to the emergence of practices of radical intertextuality and collage aesthetics. As was true of Solanas’s practice in SCUM Manifesto, Acker’s selfconsuming, de-creative fiction emphasizes “negation of the subject rather than her formation, the disruption of lineage rather than its continuation, undoing of self rather than its activation” (Halberstam, 2011, 126). In her fiction, Acker conducts a system-immanent viral critique in which abject perspectives and experiences are foregrounded; those who are fatally poisoned by the systems of power within which they are forced to endure in turn poison these systems from within by overwhelming them with what they most struggle to repress and deny.

Acker’s anti-narratives Acker’s great project of unmaking, her decomposition of logical structures, political hierarchies, social relations, dominant ideologies, and literary forms

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most obviously manifests itself in her sustained refusal of realist narrative forms and the ideologies supported by them. In place of progressive forward momentum, logical causality, continuity of time, place, character, or resolution in the form of closure, Acker substitutes a practice of constant, frequently abrupt disruptions of narrative progress, dispersions of stable identities, displacements of consistent settings. As Leslie Dick puts it in describing Acker’s anti-narrative tendencies, “Kathy’s writing cancels itself out all the time, as one thing supersedes another, in a sequence that refuses to build. Whatever scenario is proposed is almost immediately dismantled” (Dick, 115). By refusing to build suspense, employ thematic, spatial, temporal, and characterological continuity, or provide definitive resolutions, Acker fatally derails narrative logics. This practice of constant disruption of narrative modes for producing continuity is certainly one of the reasons why readers find Acker’s work so disturbing, quite apart from its extreme content. In encountering Acker’s work, the reader must willingly suspend a desire for mastery and her own interpretive coherence to become simply “a further anarchic layer of the text” (Harryman, 36). Rather than allowing the reader to form conclusions, identifications, or thematic continuities, Acker creates a reader who is permanently “lost in strangeness” (Gluck, 46). The reader’s constant displacement in the nomadic spaces of Acker’s texts combined with the radical discontinuities of her plots are further compounded by Acker’s frequent invocations of common genre and plots types, which create the expectation of familiarity and coherence. For example, Acker’s 1978 Bildungsroman, Blood and Guts in High School, is divided into three sections that suggest a movement from innocence to experience, a familiar trajectory of education, development through life experiences, and social integration: “Inside High School,” “Outside High School,” and “A Journey to the End of the Night.” Part one features the protagonist Janey Smith’s alienation from her family, confessions from her thwarted love life, escapades with her gang, experiences at a boarding school, after-school job as a “lousy mindless salesgirl,” short-lived relationship with Tommy, “an intellectual criminal,” and an ill-fated car crash that kills everyone but Janey. Part two describes Janey’s experiences after she is abducted and sold to the mysterious Mr. Linker, a lobotomist, resort owner, and white slaver, who provides Janey with a profession by teaching her “to be a whore” and with whom she falls in love. As Janey

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comments, “These most important men in the world decide it’s their duty to tear the mother away from her child so they can train the child to suck their cocks. That’s what’s known as education” (Acker, 1978, 94). Also included in this section are Persian translation exercises, Janey’s poems and other writings, including a series of elaborate dream maps, and her book report on The Scarlet Letter. The section ends with Mr. Linker abandoning Janey because she has cancer, “the outward condition of the condition of being screwed up” (123). Part three recounts Janey’s escape to Tangiers, an affair with “Jimmy Carter,” her travels with “Jean Genet,” who, despite being abject himself, comes to despise Janey, and Janey’s death. Blood and Guts opens by describing the death of her mother when Janey is one, and, despite being only ten years old, her “love affair” with her father who is all things to Janey: “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father” (8). The first pages of the novel include multiple realistic line drawings of Janey’s and her father’s genitalia and detail the father’s abandonment of Janey as well as her desperate attempts to prevent him from doing so. Beyond the graphic images and the fact of an incestuous relationship with a ten-year old, these first pages are especially disquieting because the language reflects both the sensibility of a child and the sophisticated diction of an adult break up, suggesting that Janey is and always will be abused, trapped, and abandoned by those in power. And, indeed, Janey’s futile quest for love is repeated in every other relationship in Blood and Guts, suggesting that society as a whole functions as a kind of macro family of powerful men whose psychotic values suff use the entire landscape of social relations. The novel’s many repetitions—including Acker’s literal inclusion of the exact same passage numerous times—generate a sense of stasis and paralysis and reinforce the absoluteness of dominant power relations in every aspect of Janey’s life. “In our materialistic society,” she observes, “the acquisition of money is the main goal ‘cause money gives the power to make change stop, to make the universe die; so everything in the materialist society is the opposite of what it really is. Good is bad. Crime is the only possible behavior” (67). Blood and Guts describes a nightmare scenario of women’s arrested development, featuring not Janey’s becoming but her unbecoming, not her progression toward adulthood but her continual regression. If, in the opening pages, Janey is a child who behaves as an

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adult, as the novel continues her diction regresses to what might be called an infantile state of a-subjectivity. For instance, this selection from part two of the novel features the following outburst of self abasement in block letters splayed across the page:  “PUKE GOOGOO ME YUMN SHIT SHIT SHIT FACE ME SHIT SMEARS ON MY HANDS I STINK I GOO GOO I STINK REAL GOOD I STINK WHEN I SMEAR SHIT ACROSS MY FACE LOTS I’M A OFFENDER END OF me who is this?” (106–7). The novel’s final pages are composed almost entirely of pictographs, suggesting that language itself has become impossible. Janey’s perpetual entrapment in radically unequal power relations negates the possibility of her education, development, or social integration thereby also rendering the Bildungsroman itself impossible. Appropriately, then, the novel ends by circling back to where it began; it includes two small drawings of male and female genitalia, a rock lyric, and a naked expression of female desire, suggesting—perhaps even hopefully—that desire survives even the most brutal attempts to eradicate it. “Blood and guts in high school/This is all I know/Parents teachers boyfriends/All have got to go./Some folks like trains,/ some folks like ships,/I like the way you move your hips/All I want is a taste of your lips,/boy,/All I want is a taste of your lips” (165). The potentially radical force of female desire is suggested earlier in Blood and Guts via Acker’s inclusion of a direct quotation from Deleuze:  “EVERY POSITION OF DESIRE, NO MATTER HOW SMALL, IS CAPABLE OF PUTTING TO QUESTION THE ESTABLISHED ORDER OF A  SOCIETY; NOT THAT DESIRE IS ASOCIAL; ON THE CONTRARY. BUT IT IS EXPLOSIVE; THERE IS NO DESIREING-MACHINE CAPABLE OF BEING ASSEMBLED WITHOUT DEMOLISHING ENTIRE SOCIAL SECTIONS” (125). Among the most consistently remarked features of Acker’s postmodern literary technique is her radical inhabitation of official discourses—including, especially, well-know canonical literary works—in the form of appropriation. At times, appropriation allows Acker to reflect critically on and update the host text, as in the case of The Scarlet Letter in Blood and Guts. Acker uses Hawthorne’s text to critique the materialism of contemporary culture (“Long ago when Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, he was living in a society that was more socially repressive and less materialistic than ours . . . All anyone cares about today is money. The woman who lives her life according to

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non-materialistic ideals is the wild anti-social monster” [66]), the hypocrisy and corruption of those in power (“Hester’s husband’s a scholar. A scholar is a top cop ‘cause he defines the roads by which people live so they won’t get in trouble and so society will survive. A scholar is a teacher. Teacher’s replace living dangerous creatings with dead ideas and teach these ideas as the history and meaning of the world. Teachers torture kids. Teachers teach you intricate ways of saying one thing and doing something else” [68]), and their hatred of genuine feeling (“She shivers before this example of the divorcement of body and mind. She’s seeing terror and hatred and hypocrisy beginning to spread over the earth” [70]). Acker’s appropriation of well-known texts is not primarily a conventional revisionary reworking of the source material. Rather, and consistent with her other strategies of unmaking, Acker typically twists the source to her own ends and, by overwhelming it with the preoccupations she imposes on it, opens within it glimpses of the extreme outside. Acker’s appropriative practice is multiple, varied, and highly subjective. Frequently her unsettling of an appropriated source involves injecting within it a voice least like the one being appropriated as in Janey’s description of Hester Prynne:  “A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, were assembled in front of a gaol. They were waiting for a woman named Hester Prynne. All of them even the hippies hated Hester Prynne because she was a freak and because she couldn’t be anything else and because she wouldn’t be quiet and hide her freakiness like a bloody Kotex and because she was as wild and insane as they come” (65). In other instances, Acker’s frequent and abrupt shifts in register contribute to her ongoing practice of “profaning, desecrating, shattering the source” as in Janey’s extensive descriptions of President Carter’s anatomy: “President Carter is the pillar of American society. He’s almost fift y-three years old. WORN OUT by DECAying practices, he looks like a SKELETON. He’s HAIRY as a RAT, flat-backed, his ASS looks like TWO DIRTY RAGS FLAPPING OVER A  PISS-STAINED WALL . . . And below his BELLY, WRINKLED as it is LIVID and GUMMY, he has a shrivelled little thing, a dried apricot pit that Richard Nixon VOMITED up, a COCK” (119–20). The nature and consequences of Acker’s feminist negative critique are perhaps nowhere more evident—or more troublesome—than in the realm of pornography. Porn conventions figure heavily in all of Acker’s work including

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sexually graphic language (cunts, cocks, sucking, and fucking), realistic drawings of male and female genitals, and elaborate scenarios featuring bondage, torture, rape. In his long chapter on Acker in Suburban Ambush, Robert Siegle argues that she uses porn both to expose “the quintessential pornographic script . . . which defines pleasure in contemporary society” and to uncover a cultural void out of which might emerge alternatives to this script (Siegle, 108). Colleen Kennedy acknowledges Siegle’s recognition that “to speak or act even in the most ironically positioned intervention is to risk being used outright by precisely what one opposes” (Siegle, 4). But, unlike Siegle, she concludes that the risk is not worth taking since, in her estimation, “pornography written by women ultimately renders them victims of it” (Kennedy, 175). In contesting Kennedy’s conclusion, Nicola Pitchford focuses on the ways in which Acker’s sexual scenes may be interpreted differently by different readers, situated within differing contexts of reception: stereotypical implied readers of porn (“male masturbators” as she puts it); mainstream readers (including antiporn feminists such as Kennedy); and a desiring female freak reader “whose present is negative and imaginary because her desire is impermissible” within hegemonic culture (Pitchford, 7). In line with other assessments of Acker’s politics, Pitchford concludes that through her invocation of this freak subject, Acker gestures toward the future existence of new and more positive cultural spaces in which such readers may come to legitimation. The crux of Pitchford’s critique of Kennedy (as exemplar of antiporn feminism) is that she remains trapped within an older oppositional model of politics and representation unsuited to the political realities of postmodernity. Thus, “while anti-porn feminism recognizes the importance of contestation over images as the key location of postmodern politics, its strategy to counter the threat of political paralysis posed by the postmodern dispersal and proliferation of otherness . . . is to reaffirm a clear division [opposition] between patriarchy and its feminist opponents—those who stand at a distance from representation [here, representations of women in pornography] and refuse to consume it” (Pitchford, 15–16). Moreover, Kennedy, in line with other antiporn feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon, asserts that because Acker’s simulations of pornographic scenes cannot be contained—as is true of all representations—they are automatically dangerous to women. As Pitchford puts it, to Kennedy, “reading this

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simulation of porn equals reading porn equals standing by while real violence [against women] takes place” (15). While it is undeniably true that simulations of porn may still produce negative material effects, Pitchford is right in rejecting the causal slide that Kennedy assumes is inevitable. And she rightly situates Acker’s politics as specifically feminist interventions within a given historical moment, within which distinctive structures of representation and social logics operate in definable ways. In order to further clarify the nature and interrogate the political efficacy of Acker’s postmodern feminist tactics of negation, I want to focus on several additional ways in which Acker conducts a system-immanent critique of postmodern systems of representation, one that consciously exploits those processes of unrestricted simulation that Kennedy identifies as so dangerous to feminism. In particular, I want to continue reading Blood and Guts in High School not to uncover its futural gestures toward potentially positive social spaces and transformative visions of the female subject. Rather, I want to illustrate more precisely the nature and value of a postmodern feminist negative critique within which symbolic systems are turned against themselves, made to expose their limits, and so made vulnerable. In this text, Acker’s goal is not to prefigure a new order, but rather to imaginatively ruin the old one and so to hasten its disappearance.

Acker’s abject female bodies In a particularly lucid moment, Janey Smith, the “protagonist” in Blood and Guts in High School, comments: “Politics don’t disappear but take place inside my body” (97), thus neatly summarizing a basic feminist insight: that the female body is a central site through which relations of power and resistance are played out in a contemporary moment. As Elizabeth Gross puts it, “The [gendered] subject is produced by social and institutional practices and techniques, by the inscription of social meanings, and by the attribution of psychical significance to body parts and organs. The interlocking of bodies and signifying systems is the precondition both of an ordered, relatively stable identity for the subject and for stable meanings” as well as for the possibility of their disruption (81–2). Beyond her critique of narrative logics, in

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Blood and Guts, Acker enacts a particular kind of feminist embodied critique, one that locates the abjected female body not as existing outside sociality but firmly within processes of representation thereby disrupting and rendering these processes radically unstable. In her study of abjection, Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva argues that “normal” sociality and a stable ego depend on the subject’s disavowal of the improper, the disorderly, and the unclean elements of its bodily existence (feces, urine, and other bodily fluids). Social coding as such depends on the expulsion of these elements, for only then can the clean and proper social and civilized body inscribe and reorder the chaotic disorganization of the presocial body. It is only through the coding and demarcation of the clean and proper that the symbolic order and the acquisition of a sexual and psychic identity within it becomes possible at all. But, of course, the body’s corporeal functioning and its pre-social state of existence can never be obliterated fully and its unclean elements can never be permanently expelled. They hover at the borders of the subject’s identity, threatening its unity and stability with disruption. The abject “entices and attracts the subject ever closer to its edge” (89). Abjection is the subject’s recognition of this threat. It is both a necessary condition of the subject’s existence as embodied and that which must be forcefully disavowed, repressed, and contained in order for the subject to attain a stable place within the symbolic order. Among the categories of abjects that Kristeva describes are the signs of sexual difference. Consigned to the body side of the mind-body binary and signifying sexual difference itself, woman is doubly abject. Acker exploits this double abjection in Blood and Guts, which features Janey Smith as a kind of half subject, an impossible abject subject (whose generic name suggests that she stands in for all women) who howls her pain and signifies with her body. The novel’s events or scenarios shift continually and are not rendered in realistic detail. Instead, they are presented from within this perspective of abjection and fantastic desire, in a kind of imaginary zone or perhaps the landscape of psychosis. Neither does Janey cohere as a fully formed or stable ego but as what Richard Walsh calls a pre-social stage of development elevated into a state of being (Walsh, 154). Janey Smith exists in a constant state of desire, and men—including her father, her friends, a Persian slave trader, “President Carter”—abuse and

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abandon her from first page to last, as I have suggested. But Acker also graphically represents the effects of this abuse on Janey’s body, which becomes infected with pelvic inflammatory disease, open sores, and, eventually, cancer. And Janey speaks the pain of her diseased body obsessively. Janey describes herself as “tough, rotted, putrid beef” and states that “I knew I was hideous. I had a picture in my head that I was a horse like the horse in Crime and Punishment, skin partly ripped off and red muscle exposed. Men with huge sticks keep beating the horse” (18, 20). It is also clear from the beginning that Acker explicitly genders Janey’s abjection when she comments: “Genet doesn’t know how to be a woman. He thinks all he has to do to be a woman is to slobber. He has to do more. He has to get down on his knees and crawl mentally every minute of the day . . . women aren’t just slaves. They are whatever their men want them to be. They are made, created by men. They are nothing without men” (130). If, within a patriarchal symbolic, all women are abject, if all we can do is signify with our bodies within male discourse, then Janey signifies with a vengeance. She signifies too much, allowing the blood and guts of her existence to overwhelm any narrative momentum, just as abjection itself, the “excessive residue left untapped by symbolic functioning,” threatens the stability of the symbolic order, attesting to its perilousness and provisionality. The critical potential of this threat—Janey’s endless process of (un)becoming abject—is made clearer when posed in relation to Acker’s use of the conventions of heterosexual pornography. Pornography is typically judged as operating in the realm of social taboo. But what is the tabooed of porn itself; what can’t it admit or acknowledge as a condition of its functioning? Blood and Guts suggests that one of porn’s excluded others may well be the fully abjectified (rather than the objectified and eroticized) female body. Within patriarchal capitalist culture—especially the stylized exaggerated version that Acker presents—the female body is figured as an object of abuse, commodification, and exchange. As products used and exchanged by men, as objects and not subjects of a transaction, women’s status is that of merchandise. Conventional heterosexual pornography functions as a particularly direct representation of these larger social processes of objectification and violation, a connection that Acker herself makes explicit in the text. As Ellen Friedman puts it, in Acker’s work, “sadistic men victimizing slavish, masochistic women represents

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conventional sexual transactions in society, the underlying paradigm for normal relationships in patriarchy” (41). In essence, mainstream pornography operates by controlling, in particularly rigid ways, processes of interpretation and representations of the female body. It needs to be read univocally in order to produce the desired effect (despite the fact that it may be read in other ways, as Pitchford makes clear). Yet the hallmark and the threat of the abject body is its uncontrollability, its tendency to exceed all attempts to contain it. It therefore demonstrates that power centers are defined much more by what escapes them or by their impotence than by their zones of power. Janey’s thoroughly abjectified and uncontainable female body is essentially ruined as an object of exchange within the narrative trajectory of conventional pornography, disrupting its forward momentum, pushing it toward impotence. Through this strategy, Acker displays both the power of a patriarchal symbolic and throws its authority into crisis by exposing its inability to contain, to control, to predict the movements of all its abjectified others. Acker’s use of pornographic conventions in Blood and Guts implies neither the possibility of women’s complete liberation from them on a broader social level nor simply our inevitable victimization by or reduction to them, as Kennedy would have it. Neither does Acker offer a feminist version of pornography that would allow for the inscription of specifically female forms of desire. Instead, Acker operates directly upon the conventional codes of porn as well as within them and, in so doing, renders them less powerful or complete as representations of female objectification. In the novel, Janey Smith is “used outright”; she is used with a vengeance. But as she submits herself to pornographic representation, to the pornography of representation, these codes also get used against themselves. Through this strategy Acker fatally compromises the power of pornography by disrupting the processes through which it functions. Acker’s deconstruction of porn conventions from within recalls Luce Irigaray’s comments about the necessity of disrupting the logical operations of master discourses. “The issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and a meaning” (78). This strategy of speaking between the lines of inherited discourse in an act of what Irigaray calls mimicry figures heavily

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in Acker’s appropriation/plagiarism of canonical texts and official discourses. She carves out a void within them, using affect as a weapon of negation, in a radical and fatal inhabitation of the very logic of truth and completeness by which these discourses operate. As Janey comments near the end of Blood and Guts, “Let us pray to madness and suffering and horror . . . the writing is terrible plagiarism because all culture stinks and there’s no reason to make new culture-stink” (137).

Acker’s fatal strategies Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of the fatal signifying strategies of postmodern capitalist culture provides a useful way to further clarify the nature of Acker’s feminist negative critique in Blood and Guts. According to Baudrillard, postmodern power, politics, and signifying systems operate in a fundamentally different manner than those of previous eras, signaling a social transformation of unparalleled magnitude, according to him. For Baudrillard, modernism was distinguished by production, expansion, movement; structured by a logic of binary oppositions and economic exchange values, and predicated on “the ineluctability of presence, of increase, on the inalienability of existence in the positive” (Grace, 142). Postmodern systems, on the other hand, function through a logic of simulation, hypermimicry, and sign exchange and work in the realm of the negative, the absent. Simulation refers to a duplication of models or signs that have ceased to refer to any original referents and come to refer only to themselves. From this process of simulation and self-reference emerges a culture of pure images, codes, and spectacles—a hyperreality more real than real—in which material reality as such is fundamentally irrecoverable so radically has it been subordinated to processes of technological reproduction. This absolute implosion of sign and referent, and of truth and illusion, produces a collapse of the real into a dense, seductive, and nihilistic society of spectacles. The result is a radical rupture in the social symbolic that definitely and permanently alters previous conceptions of individual subjectivity, political agency, and sociocultural relations, according to Baudrillard. Subjects in postmodern hyperreality are neither explosive in a revolutionary sense nor critical in a traditional sense but remain implosive and blind.

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They proceed by pure sensation-seeking, a desire for absolute spectacle, or they lapse into a fatal inertia rather than being motivated by any stance of social agency or informed consent. The system of capitalist production attempts to fight this fatal indifference, this catastrophic spiral of simulation, by “secreting through the media one last glimmer of reality in which to found one last glimmer of power” (Baudrillard, 15). But in so doing, capitalism only multiplies and accelerates the fatal play of simulations and the disappearance of the real. Power in a postmodern moment no longer relies on an ideological masking of the truth of social relations—as in the Marxist model—but on concealing this disappearance of the real. It is the unrestricted replication, the hypervitality in one direction, of simulations that characterizes the postmodern mode of production, which ultimately becomes a mode of disappearance. That is, the effect of this logic of hypervitality, of unceasing simulations, is the implosion of the sign system itself, what Baudrillard calls the “hemorrhage of objective causality” brought about by a system’s saturation with itself, a “deformity through an excess of conformity” that brings the system to a point of inertia and collapse (29). This deformity operates according to a logic of inverse effects in which one form, taken to its limit, becomes transposed into another, into its inverse, a process that Baudrillard calls reversion. In illustrating the workings of this logic, Baudrillard recounts the story of a woman to whom a man has written a passionate love letter and who in turn asks “what part of me seduced you the most?” He replies “your eyes” and receives, by return mail wrapped in a package, the eye which had seduced him. Baudrillard comments, “she loses an eye but he loses face for how will he be able from now on to ‘cast an eye’ on a single woman without being afraid of getting one in return?”(120–1). The man is caught in a trap by the objectified other that surrenders to him with “obscene obviousness” as a literal object and so with murderous efficacy changes seduction into horror. He is “ravished by this cruel break in the order of things, by this unexpected revolution, by this turnabout of energy and the inversion of the poles of power” (120–1). By sending back to the system an extreme version of its own logic, by precipitating the collapse of the sign into brute senseless matter, the objectified other pushes the system toward a logical implosion, an inversion in the poles of power, and thus a catastrophic collapse. As Baudrillard comments, “a strategy

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of intelligent subversion” in a postmodern moment, “would be to avoid aiming directly at power but rather to force it into occupying an obscene position of absolute obviousness” (79). That is, for Baudrillard, postmodern systems “can only be challenged at the level of the logic of the system itself; any other model will only be recuperated by the system. Structures can adapt to being subverted because subversion occurs within the terms of the structure but [they] cannot survive a reversion of their terms” (23). It seems to me that Acker operates on the conventions of pornography in a similar fatal manner in Blood and Guts. Through signifying to excess the materiality of Janey’s body—in particular those abjectified parts and processes usually excluded from representation—Acker conforms excessively to the pornographic desire to know, represent, and control the female body—it is displayed throughout the novel with obscene obviousness. But this hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, this conformity to excess, this representation beyond all necessity and all resemblance, ultimately deforms the erotic potential and the narrative logic of porn. Displaying the female body in its grotesque and horrific form leads to “the conjuring away of [patriarchal] desire through the overkill of its staging” (Grace, 132). In an interview with Andrea Juno, Acker explains the subversive power involved in the surrender of the object: “There’s a story about James Chance—he did a gig at a Mafia club in New York. Afterwards he asked to get paid and they said, ‘Fuck you—we’re the Mafia and we’re not going to pay you!’ So he took out a razor blade, and they took out their guns (‘Is this guy going to go for us?’) and he just held it to his wrist and started cutting . . . They were so freaked out that they just threw the money at him and yelled, ‘Get outta here!’ ” (Vale and Juno, 185). The Mafia can understand and account for fear in the face of brute power; what they can’t tolerate or assimilate is radical masochistic passivity in the form of absolute surrender. As I  have suggested, in Blood and Guts, explicit drawings of male and female genitalia, as well as graphic descriptions of Janey’s sexual encounters dominate, especially in the first part of the novel. These include father/daughter incest, accounts of bondage, and acts of violent intercourse including rape, which leave Janey feeling as if “her cunt is a men’s toilet” (18). More general scenes of Janey’s absolute humiliation and abasement at the hands of men also predominate, including this scene with Genet:  “Genet enters and tells

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Janey she’s totally ugly . . . She’s vulgar and unrestrained and that is what Europeans especially Frenchmen hate most about Americans. The hierarchy is . . . Rich men, poor men, Mothers, Beautiful women, Whores, Poor females and neo-female slut scum. Janey. Then he kicks Janey around and tells her to be worse than she is . . . She has to be drained of everything. She has to be disembowelled” (130–1). Acker juxtaposes these descriptions of Janey’s sexual encounters with other scenes describing the fate of women’s bodies in patriarchy such as the extended account of Janey’s visit to an abortion clinic. I walked into this large white room. There must have been fift y other girls. A few teenagers and two or three women in their forties. Women lined up. Women in chairs nodding out. A  few women had their boyfriends with them. They were lucky I thought. Most of us were alone. The women in my line were handed long business forms: at the end of each form was a paragraph that stated she gave the doctor the right to do whatever he wanted and if she ended up dead, it wasn’t his fault. We had given ourselves up to men before. That’s why we were here. All of us signed everything. Then they took our money . . . The orange walls were thick enough to stifle the screams pouring out of the operating room. Having an abortion was obviously just like getting fucked. If we closed our eyes and spread our legs we’d be taken care of. They stripped us of our clothes. Gave us white sheets to cover our nakedness. Led us back to the pale green room. I love it when men take care of me. I  remember a tiny blonde even younger than me. I guess it must have been the first time she had ever been fucked . . . She was the believing kind. She believed them when they said a local wouldn’t hurt. I’ll never forget her face when she came out. She couldn’t have come out of her Mommy’s cunt any more stunned. Her face was dead white and her eyes were fish-wide open. I made a mistake. Don’t do it. Dont do anything they tell you to.” (32–3)

This long scene in the abortion clinic is followed by the story of a girl in Janey’s high school who gives birth to a baby and stuffs it in the school garbage can and of a woman who tries to induce abortion by chaining flatirons to her arms and legs and hurling herself downstairs. “Even though almost every bone in her body broke,” Janey explains, “her baby didn’t die and she gave birth in traction” (34). “I’m not trying to tell you about all the rotgut weird parts of my life,” Janey assures us. “Abortions are the symbol, the outer image,

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of sexual relations in this world. Describing these abortions is the only real way I can tell you about pain and fear” (34). Of course, abortions also signal a resolute refusal to procreate and thus to reproduce the system. I have been arguing that Acker tampers with the conventions of porn using two fatal feminist strategies. First, she mimics them to an excessive degree, saturates her narrative, so that Janey’s life seems inexplicable outside her unending unsatisfied desire and/for sado-masochistic relationships with men. Through this excess of conformity, a deformity results—porn gives way to its opposite—a feminist indictment of the heterosexual contract in postmodern capitalist America. Secondly, Acker centers the tabooed other of porn, what it typically excludes—the abject female body, ruined as an object of desire, commodification, and exchange. And the novel ends with a spreading of this ruin: Janey dies—of cancer—but we are told that “soon many other Janeys were born and these Janeys covered the earth” (165). It is as if Janey becomes her cancer, which proliferates after her death. This image of unrestricted replication, of a world overrun by the female body in its abject, diseased form, suggests a final defeat of patriarchal efforts to represent and control it. Cancer, as Baudrillard reminds us, is a genetic revolt, an uncontrolled vitality, and an undisciplined proliferation by which systems consume themselves. Baudrillard’s notion of seduction—which has been especially problematic for feminist critics—becomes relevant here. As abjection threatens but may also seduce the subject, so Baudrillardian seduction functions as a negative or inverse power. As Grace explains it, “Seduction does not oppose production but rather transforms it, annuls its singular and transcendent positivity, and reverses its assumption of unilinear accumulation . . . It is a process whereby absence eclipses presence; its power is to annul the power of production through reversion” (142). Seduction reverses the power of production—on the side of meaning, truth, law, heteropatriarchy, and the power to produce the truth of the female as the object of male desire—through its capacity to deny things their truth. One reason that Baudrillard rejects conventional discourses of liberation is that he views them as playing into a system whose very functioning depends on an overproduction of speech, on a continuous demand to produce meaning. Postmodern systems become bloated, as information and data are endlessly produced and disseminated in a simulation of rational communication. “All the movements which only bet on liberation, emancipation, the resurrection of

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the subject of history, of the group, of speech as a raising of consciousness . . . do not see that they are acting in accordance with the system, whose imperative today is the over-production and regeneration of meaning and speech” (Grace, 77). According to Baudrillard, in the face of such a system—which seeks above all to promote participation and responsiveness—the only effective strategy is a resolute refusal to participate, a fatal nonresponsiveness. Janey’s ultimate revenge as an objectified other, as an object, involves such a postmodern fatal strategy of noncompliance, a refusal of meaning and the word. This is a refusal that suffuses Blood and Guts at a number of levels and becomes another way that Acker jams the system of which she is forced, inevitably, to be a part. Most obviously, as I suggested earlier, at the level of literary structure and theme, Acker refuses to unify and stabilize the meanings inhering in the textual fragments strewn throughout the text, although Janey provides an anchoring point of sorts for this textual drift. Any forward narrative momentum the text accumulates lasts only briefly; unmotivated repetition of passages and radical shifts of scene, character, discourse, and tonal register predominate. Janey sends back to the system that controls her, a kind of literary noise “language disintegrated, scattered, annihilated, put to death and not reinforced in its signification” (Grace, 177). As Larry McCaffery puts it in his groundbreaking article linking Acker to punk aesthetics, “Punk artists of the seventies shared with Rimbaud, Artaud, Burroughs, and the Dadaists a confidence that the creation of ‘noise’—i.e., any disruption in the usual orderly sequence that leads from ‘real events’ and phenomena to their representation—has a genuinely revolutionary potential to disorient (and hence disturb) the consensual social order . . . Not interested in merely creating metaphors for potential anarchy and chaos, Acker and punk musicians directly dramatize and express disorder by producing a kind of antidiscourse of madness and sensual delirium” (227). Sometimes this impulse to produce an anti-discourse of “noise” is motivated by direct statements that we clearly are meant to take exception to as in this exchange from late in the novel featuring the capitalists Mr. Fuckface, Mr. Blowjob, and Mr. Knockwurst: Mr Fuckface: You see, we own the language. Language must be used clearly and precisely to reveal our universe. Mr Blowjob: Those rebels are never clear. What they say doesn’t make sense.

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Mr. Fuckface: It even goes against all the religions to tamper with the sacred languages. Mr. Blowjob: Without language the only people the rebels can kill are themselves . . . Mr. Knockwurst: They’re all Janeys. They’re all perverts, transsexuals, criminals, and women. We’ll have to think of a plan to exterminate them and get a new breed of workers. (136)

More frequently, however, Acker represents the disintegration of language directly, in order to dramatize and expresses disorder—as when Janey scrawls obscenities and baby talk in her diary or a paragraph consisting solely of the word “no” repeated 156 times. Often she signals its complete failure as when Janey describes life for poor people: “it’s not horrible its just . . .” (57). This refusal of rational communication—which increases as the novel progresses—often is expressed by reliance on pictograms, elaborate maps of dreamscapes, or simply pure emoting as “DEFIES DEFIES DEFIES NOT THOUGHT, BUT DEFIES every howl of pain is a howl of defiance . . . A TOTAL FLAME BURNING ITSELF UP BLOOD AND FEAR AND GUTS MY VISION” (112–3) or (from Great Expectations) “I feel, I  feel, I  feel.” In these ways, Acker gestures toward the limits of language and, via the explosion of affect, invokes a form of radical inexpressibility that marks the site where signification ends and the corporeal begins. It’s important to reiterate that Acker’s tactics in Blood and Guts do not involve a reasoned semantic critique of the operations of patriarchal logic or a realistic representation of it. Instead, hers is a critique appropriate to and offered from the perspective of patriarchy’s excluded others, those who stand outside of representation or at its margins. But, as Janey tells us, in these places of abjection, extremity, pain, and inarticulateness, places in which “all reality turns into a howl and makes itself go away, something happens” (113). Th is “something” does not mean that Acker offers an alternative to the ongoing condition of the heterosexual problematic in its abjected form that she depicts in the novel, for she clearly does not. Hers is not an aesthetics of liberation but of negation, postmodernism as a style of radical refusal. As Acker herself has said, “you can’t get to a place, to a society, that isn’t constructed according to the phallus. The path to an alternative site of

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enunciation is blocked by the very forces this path is meant to escape” (Vale and Juno, 180). Among other things, the deadlock that Acker points to raises larger questions concerning the limitations inherent in a postmodern anti-aesthetic in general and of strategies of negation in particular as sites from which to launch feminist critiques. Judith Butler’s analysis of the discursive limits of sex in Bodies that Matter suggests several promising angles from which to begin thinking through these limitations. Butler’s study attempts to suggest how a sense of political agency might be derived from gender as a set of productive constraints that must be forcibly and continually cited and reiterated. The embodying of gender norms is a compulsory practice but not a fully determining one. That is, the materiality of the body as gendered is never quite complete but contains fissures and gaps that open spaces for critical rearticulations of gender and sexual norms. Borrowing from Kristeva, Butler shows that the exclusionary matrix of heterosexuality requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings and uninhabitable zones of social life that are necessary to circumscribe the domain of the normal subject. As the constitutive outside of hegemonic positions, “the threat and disruption of abjection is a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility”(Butler, 1993, 8). Agency, for Butler, is a reiterative and a rearticulatory practice and not a relation of external opposition to power. No term, as she points out, can fully perform its referent—it always gestures toward a referent it cannot capture. Implicated in but not reducible to the very relations of power it seeks to oppose, it uses practices of disidentification and rearticulation to produce a citational politics, one capable in Butler’s assessment of radically reworking current symbolic horizons. Butler calls for a politicization of abjection in an effort to rewrite the history of the term and to force it into a demanding resignification. Such a resignification would “mobilize the power of injury, of an interpellation one never chose and open the possibility of resignifying the terms of violation against their violating aims” (Butler, 1993, 228). Ultimately, the goal of such a process for Butler is to bring into symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility those previously abjected identities, to make them bodies that matter. Through her emphasis on the materially and psychically damaged female body, Acker does mobilize the power of injury and puts it into scenes of

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fractured representation, a mobilization that, in gendering Kristeva’s model, becomes part of a rewriting of the history of abjection that Butler calls for. From within this space of abjection, Acker (over)exposes the “violating aims” of dominant gender regimes by repeating them to excess and in the process disrupting their seamless functioning. But Janey’s inarticulate howls suggest that Acker’s fatal strategies do not allow for a resignifcation or reworking of the terms of this symbolic. Instead, hers is a great work of unmaking: of realist narrative, genres such as the Bildungsroman, structures of rationality, language, reproductive futurity and children as the hope of the future. Acker’s works are “jaws steadily devouring . . . the mindset . . . of Western culture” (Friedman, 48). This raises the question: what is the significance, the political utility, of a feminist negative critique, one that does not return to meaning or the production of identities? As part of a panoply of strategies for critiquing and helping to undo systems of oppression, might feminist projects legitimately consist not only of the production of new desiring subjects, the imagination of future landscapes of liberation, or the description of new implied readers? What modes of political critique are most appropriate to our dizzying postmodern moment? It is not necessary to commit to Baudrillard’s system in order to turn his analysis of postmodern fatal strategies to feminist ends. Th is could be seen as part of an ongoing project to gender the politics of postmodern signifying systems. Acker’s uncompromising feminist negative critique of Enlightenment ideals of rationality—a critique that she shares with the other writers discussed in this book—also helps to gender the history of twentieth-century avant-gardes and traditions of negation within them.

3

“The Remnant Is the Whole”: History, Trauma, and the Politics of Absence in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee

We are a nation at ease with grievance but not with grief . . . [If] grievance is understood to be the social and legal articulation of grief, then it has also been incapable of addressing those aspects of grief that speak in a different language—a language that may seem inchoate because it is not fully reconcilable to the vocabulary of social formulation of ideology but that nonetheless cuts a formative pattern. Anne Anline Cheng, X Nothing could be more normative, more logical, and more authoritarian than, for example, the (politically) revolutionary poetry or prose that speaks of revolution in the form of commands or in the well-behaved, steeped-inconvention language of “clarity.” . . . Clarity as a purely rhetorical attribute serves the purpose of a classical feature in language, namely, its instrumentality. To write is to communicate, express, witness, impose, instruct, redeem, or save—at any rate to mean and to send out an unambiguous message . . . Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing: together they flow, together they flower vertically, to impose an order. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native Other, 120 The present form face to face reveals the missing, the absent. Would-be-said remnant, memory. But the Remnant is the whole. Dictee, 38

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In her attempt to describe the “unspeakable” consequences subtending a certain kind of catastrophic loss, Judith Butler repeatedly invokes radical paradoxes, logical contradictions, and other figures of negation: [L]oss must be marked and it cannot be represented; loss fractures representation itself and loss precipitates it own modes of expression . . . [S]omewhere, sometime, something was lost, but no story can be told about it; no memory can retrieve it; a fractured horizon looms in which to make one’s way as a spectral agency, one for whom a full “recovery” is impossible. . . . [T]here is something that one cannot “get over,” one cannot “work through,” which is the deliberate act of violence against a collectivity, humans who have been rendered anonymous for violence and whose death recapitulates an anonymity for memory. Such violence cannot be “thought,” constitutes an assault on thinking, negates thinking in the mode of recollection and recovery . . . It is not as if thinking ceases, but that after such an internal break, it continues, and that continuation is founded and structured by that break, carries the break with it as the signature of its history . . . What results is a melancholic agency, who cannot know its history as the past, cannot capture its history through chronology, and does not know who it is except as the survival, the persistence of a certain unavowability, that haunts the present . . . The past is not actually past in the sense of “over,” since it continues as an animating absence in the present. (Butler, 2003, 467–8)

In Butler’s description, the world-shattering acts of violence interred at the heart of experiences of traumatic loss are not disavowed, to be later worked through and gotten over, as in therapeutic models of mourning. Rather, such losses remain unavowable, haunting the present as “animating absences,” producing spectral melancholic agencies and fractured horizons in their wake. Losses of this kind disrupt normal chronology and disconnect the subject’s ability to narrate (and thus comprehend) the experience—to represent, recollect or recover (from) it. But since these losses somehow must be “marked,” even as they fracture representation and subjectivity itself, they find other channels, alternative modes of expression whose formative patterns we must learn to decipher. Recent scholarship in trauma and affect studies—including work by Butler, Anne Anline Cheng, and David Eng among many others—has begun to map the distinctive affective registers, modes of being, and strategies of expression

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through which catastrophic losses manifest themselves. Indeed, Eng claims that at the dawn of the twenty-first century, loss and its melancholic remains have emerged as “crucial touchstone[s] for social and subjective formations” (Eng and Kazanjian, 23). These include the losses of genocide—most especially the Holocaust—but also “the loss of ‘humanness’ under slavery; the loss that is undergone with exile; the loss that is effaced through colonization; the loss of culture that is performed by the mandatory production of a colonized subject; the loss defrayed through mania; disavowed loss and its visual and textual effects; the redemption that animates loss; the longing to which loss gives rise” (Butler, 2003, 467). This body of work, broadly speaking, aims to explore how the remains of loss are “produced, read, and sustained,” “how bodily, spatial, ideological remains” are entwined and materialized “in the social and cultural realms and in the political and aesthetic realms” (Eng and Kazanjian, 2). In these revised understandings of melancholic loss, damage functions as what David Lloyd calls “a nontherapeutic relation to the past, structured around the notion of survival or living on rather than recovery” (Lloyd, 217). The refusal to relinquish the remains of loss becomes a mode of survival, an ethical stance, and a form of psychic citizenship. But, as Cheng’s epigraph reminds us, we are more adept at recognizing—more at ease with— the social, cultural, and political languages of grievance than the complex poetics of grief, which speaks a different language, one not “fully reconcilable to the vocabulary of social formulation of ideology” but whose “formative patterns” nonetheless have something important to convey. Above all, this involves rejecting conventional historiographic approaches that, as Walter Benjamin observes, fi x and totalize the past, “encrypt it from a singular empathetic point of view:  that of the victor,” thereby “prempting history’s other possible accounts” (Benjamin, qtd. in Eng and Kazanjian, 1–2). Benjamin advocates a creative and open dialogue with lost histories and histories of loss that would guard against the political and ethical misappropriations that mark conventional historiography and realist narrative modes. These evocative analyses of the many forms through which catastrophic losses are materialized and memorialized provide a suggestive framework for examining the radical poetics of absence, incompleteness, and loss in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s melancholic elegiac text, Dictee. In addition to being a writer, Cha was a filmmaker, video and performance artist, and mixed-media

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visual artist. Born in Pusan, South Korea, in 1951 at the height of the Korean War, Cha’s family immigrated to the Bay Area in California in 1963 when she was twelve. Cha came of age as an artist during the 1970s, an era of enormous and varied cultural experimentation and political ferment. As Constance Lewallen describes this moment in the Bay Area, “In this explosive and heady atmosphere, everything was up for grabs:  experimentation was the norm . . . In art, traditional ways of making, exhibiting, and marketing work were rejected by many young artists. They invented new forms, such as performance, video, installation, and earthworks, which, with their emphasis on idea and process rather than product, were often outside the traditional gallery and museum system” (Lewallen, 1). Cha received degrees in art and comparative literature from the University of California-Berkeley, where she was particularly influenced by European modernist writers including Stephane Mallarme, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett; by the French feminist writings of Margarite Duras and Monique Wittig; by works of the historical avant-garde including Dada, by French and American new-wave film (Godard, Renais, Warhol, Stan Brakhage), and by French film theory including, especially, the work of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz, with whom Cha studied (Lewallen, 2–3). In 1980, Cha edited an influential collection of film theory, Apparatus—Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings, which included work by Metz, Baudry, Raymond Bellour, Thierry Kuntzel, Roland Barthes, Dziga Vertov, and Maya Deren and insights from this theory influenced Cha’s performance work as well as her own films and other writing. In 1980, Cha moved to New York City to pursue her art career. Dictee, Cha’s only extended prose work, was published in 1982 by Reese Williams’ Tanum Press. Tragically, a few days after receiving advanced copies of the book, Cha was brutally raped and murdered. Put off by its inaccessibility and its refusal to represent a clear model of ethnic identity, for the most part readers and critics ignored Dictee at the time of its publication and it quickly went out of print. As Elaine Kim puts it, “Its seemingly incongruous juxtapositions, its references to Greek mythology, and its French grammar exercises seemed far afield from the identity they [the Asian American community] were after” (Kim, 21). It was reissued by Third Woman Press in 1995 thanks to the efforts of a group of Asian American feminist critics, Elaine Kim among them, and Cha’s family.

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Given the multiple directions and modes of expression that Cha’s talent took during her short life, it is unsurprising that her one extended literary work is similarly multiple. As anyone who has encountered Dictee knows, it defies easy classification or summary. One might call it a multimedia, multigenre assemblage, composed as it is of narrative fragments, photographs, multiple voices, and remnants of history; it is “a collage of stranded objects, half-buried, half revived,” in Anne Cheng’s resonant phrasing (Cheng, 147). Dictee is also a highly performative text whose “meaning” is not reducible to a thematic or a propositional content. Instead, meaning arises from the reader’s willingness to encounter without hope of full mastery the text’s radical incompleteness and to inhabit its multiple affects, dislocations, and voices in very intimate ways. In Dictee, Cha bears witness to and traces the effects of Korea’s multiple traumatic fracturings through a brutal period of Japanese colonialism (1910– 45), French Catholic missionary presence (beginning in 1830), US imperialism, and a literal division of the country into North and South. But how does one accurately represent such dramatic experiences of violence, loss, and displacement? How does one relate a history recoverable only as shattered remains, a series of “stray ejections . . . misplaced,” “shrouded in layers of forgetting”? (Cha, 20). Cha suggests that it is only by displaying as radically fractured and incomplete the account of Korea’s “perpetual exile”—on national and personal levels—that one may invoke and honor the spaces of absence that never can be completely filled with all the history that’s been lost, all the lives that have been shattered. Saturated with these absences, with voices silenced and lives erased, Dictee enacts both the unspeakable traumas and the radical negations at the heart of individual and national histories, as well as the distinctive modes of expression through which such traumas live on, fester inside, and press to be spoken. Cha’s most apparent strategy of evoking incompleteness in Dictee is consistently to refuse traditional modes for producing representative identities (such as the postcolonial subject), or narrative progression, continuity, and closure. Instead Dictee is a book of narrative fragments, historical remains, abrupt unexplained juxtapositions, and multiple voices—most of them unattributed and unattributable—that never coalesce into full-fledged subjects of history. It assembles a dizzying range of languages (French, Latin, Chinese, English), multiple genres, discourses, and symbolic modes that invoke but

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never accumulate to form coherent counter-histories. These include passages from F. A. MacKenzie’s The Tragedy of Korea; photographs of a student demonstration and of unnamed Koreans being executed by a Japanese firing squad; untranslated Chinese characters (significantly, only one page of hangual, the official language of Korea, appears in the text); letters (such as a 1905 letter from Korean exiles in Hawaii asking President Roosevelt to intervene in the Japanese occupation of Korea, which we know he never did); rituals such as excerpts from the Catholic catechism and a US citizenship oath; translation exercises from a language textbook; an Asian acupuncture chart and Western medical illustrations of the vocal and breathing systems; fi lm stills; descriptions of a fi lm script featuring an abusive arranged marriage, and invocations to the nine classical Muses—among many others. Brief more conventional stories do surface throughout the text. These include the journals of Cha’s mother as a young Korean teacher exiled in Manchuria and the story of Yu Guan Soon, a sixteen-year-old female revolutionary—and martyr—who led the March 1, 1919, movement against the Japanese occupation of Korea and was later killed. It also is possible to trace recurring preoccupations running throughout the text; these include the patriarchal nature of religion, the family, and the state; an emphasis on mothers, daughters, and foremothers from Sappho to Joan of Arc; physical violence and the effects of power on vulnerable bodies; the difficulty of speaking a nonnative tongue and the pain of being forcibly silenced; female self-sacrifice, and, above all, loss—of home, family, nation, identity. Overall, however, Cha tends to juxtapose these fragments in a form of radical collage rather than connecting them logically or causally, and she fails to complete the many stories introduced throughout the text, part of a larger poetics of incompleteness in Dictee. Letters are sent and never answered; photographs are uncaptioned; foreign languages remain untranslated or are translated incorrectly. The text is permeated with instances where the immediate cause of trauma—the referent for the loss—remains enigmatic or is never disclosed instead remaining as “an animating absence” that suff uses the text. Appropriately, Dictee ends in a freeze-frame effect, a suspended moment in time or perhaps an intake of breath before speaking. Cha’s use of repetition without progression, dissolution of sequential temporality and other temporal confusions, spatial dislocations, radical condensations whereby multiple losses are condensed in a single

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image, and her refusal of narrative coherence and closure in Dictee resonate strongly with Eng’s analysis of the dynamics of melancholy, as a mourning that cannot be completed but instead involves an ongoing and continuous engagement with loss and its remains. Such an engagement is reinforced by the predominance in Cha’s text of the present tense, a series of multiple and ongoing “nows,” that can’t progress and develop, and by the circularity of the text. Indeed, Shelly Wong notes that because the Korean characters in the text’s frontispiece read from right to left, the reader actually is led out of the text rather than into it; Dictee “stops before starting” as the narrator comments elsewhere. In the radicality of its form, Dictee differs markedly from many other contemporary accounts of ethnic experience, one reason for the relative lack of critical attention given to Cha’s text until quite recently. The contemporary literatures produced by gender, sexual, racial and other minorities often are positioned in opposition to formally experimental writing such as Cha’s. The latter is charged with being coldly formalist, wilfully obscure, alienating and elitist—at best apolitical at worst actively oppressive. As Elaine Kim remarks, “The first time I glanced at Dictee, I was put off by the book. I thought that Theresa Cha was talking not to me but rather to someone so remote from myself that I could not recognize ‘him’ ” (Kim, 3). L. Hyun Yi Kang writes “It angered me that [Dictee] was not always accessible, that it seemed to speak to a highly literate, theoretically sophisticated audience that I did not identify with . . . I believed that I, as a Korean-American woman, should be able to immediately understand and identify with the work of another Korean-American woman, and since that instant mirroring/attraction did not happen, either there must be something ‘wrong’ with me or with [Cha]” (Kang, 76). Identity-based writing, on the other hand, is frequently directly autobiographical or couched in the genre of the Bildungsroman— both developmental narrative forms of the minority experience that rely on reader identification with authorial selves, narratives of emancipation, redemption and identity reclamation, the emergence of groups solidarities, and the like. As Shelley Wong explains with reference to 1970s and 1980s Asian American writers, “Their choice of realist forms . . . was determined in part by the demand for such narratives . . . but also by the need to provide a corrective to what many viewed as disabling misrepresentations of Asian

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Americans in mainstream culture . . . These realist forms allowed writers to compose positive fictions grounded in the development of an authentic Asian American identity that could serve as a prelude to the minority subject’s achievement of political representation” (Wong, 129–30). As Wong reminds us, the writing produced by minoritized identity groups frequently is intentionally and directly oppositional, emerging as it does from cultural positions that motivate these groups to resist and question through their writing dominant structures of power and privilege. But the fact that minority writing has tended to be confi ned to a poetics of identity politics and realist narrative forms has had several unintended consequences. First, it has foreclosed directly questioning the politics inherent in dominant genres and modes of thought, with their privileging of accessibility, hierarchy, rationality, and completeness— qualities that may have the unintended effect of legitimating the power structures these writers mean their work to critique (as Trinh T. Minh-ha’s epigraph reminds us). Such texts tend to promote absorbtive and attached reading practices, to deliver the narrative assurance that we can know the other and her submerged history, and to encourage the “complacency of spectatorship and the consolation that bearing witness effects change” (Cheng, 150). An emphasis on realist narratives also has led critics to focus on the sociocultural and political aspects of minority experience rather than the psychic or affective dynamics of loss—the grievance rather than the grief— thereby impoverishing our understanding of other facets of minority experience. Most directly, it has acted to silence or render illegitimate formally innovative works that also challenge dominant paradigms of power and privilege but do not embody their political content in conventional formal models, and it has obscured the fact that formally difficult works innovate out of necessity and not out of a politically naïve identification with a white male avant-garde or a perverse desire to irritate the reader.

The longing in the faces of the lost In her important chapter on Cha in The Melancholy of Race, Anne Anlin Cheng argues that Dictee, in its very form, challenges the documentary impulse

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underlying much ethnic and postcolonial writing by expressing an “antidocumentary” desire. According to Cheng, Cha’s text enacts a partial historical reconstruction of personal and national events in Korean history, as many ethnic texts do. But it does so in such a way as also to implicitly critique the totalizing project of history with its dream of assembling a true and complete historical record that will act to redeem the traumatic losses of the past (142, 145). In contrast, Dictee’s shattered archive suspends the reader among decontextualized “melancholic objects” and “after-images of history” that resist cohering to become talismans of revelation and instead circulate throughout the text without achieving resolution. Cheng concludes that in Dictee Cha offers us not historical truth but “melancholic evidences—the kind of evidence that registers loss, even as it recognizes the unrecognizability of the content of loss . . . [leaving] a trace of something lost that cannot be named,” a cultural trauma that recurs as a profoundly unlocatable event (Cheng, 147, emphasis in original). As Cheng suggests, Dictee does not so much name and narrate a series of personal and historical traumas as it registers in its ground tone the melancholic aftermath of those events as “a signature of its history,” an aftermath that is ongoing, consisting of “countless separate struggles with loss.” Again, these struggles are made more immediate by the predominance of the present tense and by the intimacy of the text as a whole, including its emphasis on the body, especially the mouth, tongue, and vocal apparatus. Dictee is suff used by a melancholic structure of feeling rather than a more conventional narrative structure, and it immerses the reader intimately within this melancholic relation to the world. Beyond what I have called its poetics of incompleteness, the text performs this relation of encounter with loss on many levels. Most directly is Dictee’s sustained emphasis on absence, silence, blankness, and other figures of negation that accumulate to form a generalized poetics of the melancholic relation and its frequent use of apostrophe, a type of performative utterance that tries to call something absent into being. For example, Cha frequently employs rhetorical figures of negation such as double negative locutions and self-cancelling statements that verge on logical paradox. Rather than saying that the process of mourning Korea’s many losses goes on in the present, she writes that it “does not cease to continue,” infusing a positive assertion with a cumbersome negative phrasing. Or she refers to the missing history of Korea as “the plenitude of this void,” indicating that what

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appears by definition to signify absence—a void—must be reconfigured as a plenitude, a vast collection of palpable losses. In other instances, Cha refers directly to themes of absence or silence. For instance, in trying to suggest all the lives missing from the historical record, Cha calls them “Still born. Aborted. Barely. Infant. Seed, germ, sprout, less even. Dormant. Stagnant. Missing” (Cha, 38). As these signifiers of absence and nonviable life repeat and accumulate, absence takes on weight, becomes palpable, a heaviness made more powerful by the full stops after each word. Cha also attempts to signify absence itself through copious use of white spaces, pauses, and blanks as the following passage illustrates: Phrases silent Paragraphs silent Pages and pages a little nearer to movement line after line void to the left to the right. Void the words. Void the silence. (Cha, 73) Cracked tongue. Broken tongue Pidgin Semblance of speech. Swallows. Inhales. Stutter. Starts. Stops before starts. (Cha, 75)

Here, the speaker is poised between meaninglessness and meaningfulness, between silence and a semblance of speech that paradoxically ceases before it can begin and therefore can leave no residue, suspended in a “void” that doubly emphasizes absence. The immense effort and the painful physical effects of attempting to speak a lost history in an alien tongue also are emphasized here and throughout Dictee as this passage from later in the text demonstrates. “Maimed. Accident. Stutters. Almost a name. Half a name. Almost a place. Starts. About to. Then stops. Exhale swallowed to a sudden arrest. Pauses. How vast this page” (Cha, 159). The futility registered in these passages also appears in Cha’s frequent use of repetition without progression to suggest the passage of time, which seems

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like stasis for those who wait in exile. In the section “Calliope, Epic History,” which describes Cha’s mother’s exile in Manchuria, duration is conveyed through repetition of the word “wait” and through an emphasis on each single day in the phrase, “Three hundred sixty five days multiplied thirty six years” (Cha, 47). The following passage also accumulates to form a critique of Catholicism, which demands unquestioning faith in the efficacy of its endless and elaborate rituals, but can provide no response to thirty-six years of sincere prayers. Significantly, this passage is completely circular, ending as it begins in a further expression of futility:  You wait. You know how. You know how to wait . . . From the Misere to Gloria to Magnificat and Sanctus. To the Antiphonal song. Because surely. Soon. The answer would come. The Response. Like echo. After the oblations. The offering. The sacrifice, the votive, the devotions, the novenas, the matins, the lauds, the vespers, the vigils, the evensong, the nightsong, the attendance, the adoration, the veneration, the honor, the invocations, the supplications, the petitions, the recitations, the vows, the immolations. Surely, all these and more. Ceaseless. Again. Over and over. You know how to wait. Wait in the Misere. Wait in the Gloria. Wait in the Magnificat. Wait in the Sanctus. (46–7)

Beyond this generalized poetics of incompleteness, absence, silence, and repetition-as-stasis that suffuses the text, Dictee also details specific kinds of loss, depicts a range of responses to these losses, and performs particular aspects of the complex melancholic relation to the lost object. On one level is the kind of monumental loss that defies rational explanation and unmakes subjects: the genocidal will to extermination of a people, those deliberate acts of violence against a collectivity of “humans who have been rendered anonymous for violence” (Butler, 2003, 467). Cha explores the complex dynamics of this sort of loss most forcefully in the chapter, “Clio, History,” which references several significant moments in early-twentieth-century Korean history. Featured most prominently is the life story of Yu Guan Soon, martyred at the age of seventeen for leading her people in opposition to oppressive Japanese rule. By referring to Soon as a “child revolutionary, child patriot, woman soldier, deliverer of nation” Cha clearly means to sanctify her life (she is also compared to another child soldier and martyr, St. Joan of Arc) and locate her in a mythic “eternal time” not “given to deterioration” (37), away from the erasures and violence of history.

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This section of Dictee also includes detailed descriptions of the many Japanese apparatuses of colonization, with their endless ordinances for regulating Korean bodies, including language, dress, and hair styles:  “Nothing was too small, nothing too great, and nothing too contradictory for these constitution mongers” (29). Actual historical documents also feature prominently including a memo dated 1907 describing the brutal slaughter of Korean protesters by Japanese soldiers (echoed in the section’s final photograph of a firing squad) and a heartbreaking 1905 letter from “the Koreans of Hawaii” to President Roosevelt begging him to intervene to stop the Japanese subjugation of Korea. Especially palpable in the section are the narrator’s bitterness and anger over the international “no-response” to the plight of the Korean people across time. While Korean blood “rests as record, as document” to the Japanese atrocities, in the eyes of the world Korea is simply not large or important enough on the global stage: “not physical enough. Not to the very flesh and bone, to the core, to the mark, to the point where it is necessary to intervene . . . To the others, these accounts are about (one more) distant land, like (any other) distant land, without any discernable features in the narrative, (all the same) distant like any other” (32–3). Most deplorable of all is the American government’s calculated mismanagement of public information about Korea, which is presented “to appeal to the masses to congeal the information, to make bland, mundane . . . the response is precoded to make perform predictably . . . neutralized to achieve the no-response” (33). By making the bodies and pain of others—so vividly evoked in the section—bland, abstract, and therefore discountable, Cha also suggests that what makes a loss traumatic and unmournable, is not simply the loss itself but the fact that it is not publically acknowledged even as a footnote to official history. Frequently, Cha immerses readers within the structure of a melancholic logic that emphasizes spatial dislocation, simultaneity of time, and condensation of meaning. For example, the section “Melpome, Tragedy” references multiple events: the partition of Korea in 1950, the Cha family’s departure from Korea in 1962, and Cha’s return visit in 1980. Yet these separate moments in time are commingled in and difficult to distinguish from one another. As the narrator comments, “Eighteen years later. Nothing has changed, we are at a standstill . . . All this time we have been away. But nothing has changed . . . We

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fight the same war” (80–1). At one point during her 1980 visit, Cha describes being trapped in a tear gas attack during a street demonstration. This vividly recalls for her a time eighteen years earlier when her older brother is killed in a similar demonstration. Through shifting and ambiguous use of the second person “you,” Cha conveys the immediacy and intimacy of this memory, suggests the interconnection of everyone involved and stresses the unnaturalness of a soldier who is charged with defending the nation against its own people: “You are all the rest, all the others are you.” “You” refers equally to Cha’s mother “holding my older brother you plead with him not to go out to the demonstration”; a tutor also trying to dissuade the brother; the brother himself (“you say you are willing to die”), and the soldiers who shoot the brother: “You sit you wait for the false move that will conduct you to mobility. You work your post you are your nation defending your country from subversive infiltration from your own countrymen” (86). Finally, throughout the section, Cha employs the image of blood-soaked stones, which refuse to fade over time to suggest the equivalency of all these deaths and their ongoing effects. In these ways, Cha suggests the accumulation, weight, and continuous copresence of these multiple losses that are experienced as occurring simultaneously and continuously. Among Cha’s other strategies of dislocation and displacement are her frequent use of extremely close-up and overly detailed descriptions, as in the book’s early section, “Diseuse.” It consists of eleven paragraphs describing in minute physical detail the speaker’s repeated efforts to express what “murmurs” inside her: “From the back of her neck she releases her shoulders free. She swallows once more. (Once more. One more time would do). In preparation . . . Now the weight begins from the uppermost back of her head, pressing downward. It stretches evenly, the entire skull, expanding tightly all sides toward the front of her head . . . turning her inside out in the same motion” (3–5). These slow repetitive descriptions that ultimately fail to progress are at once very abstract—it remains difficult to discern exactly what is being described so numerous are the details—and at the same time, extremely concrete and intimate, as the reader is positioned within the narrator’s skull and throat. A later section, “Erato Love Poetry,” features these destabilizing, slow, and deliberate over-descriptions while also suggesting the vital role that

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cinematic strategies play in Dictee. As Lawrence Rinder points out, Cha’s exposure to the Athena projector, which allows for a frame-by-frame viewing of a film, particularly influenced her technique. The section opens with a precise objective description of a woman buying a ticket at a theater, entering the auditorium, and taking “the fourth seat from the left. The utmost center of the room” (94). There, she notices in the audience a woman she has seen the day before, and she is drawn to the flickering black and white of the screen. Next, these same actions are radically abstracted and condensed into colors, shapes, textures: “Drawn to the white, then the black. The shadows moving across the whiteness, dark shapes and dark light” (95). Following this is yet another iteration of the same scenario, this time translated into a shooting script complete with detailed camera angles and positions and descriptions of various types of shots. “Extreme Close-Up shot of her face. Medium Long shot of two out of five white columns from the street . . . Camera is stationary, tilts upward and remains stationary. Pans to the right, while zooming out, the entire theatre in view” (96). The last sentence in this long description—“The screen fades to white”—is followed in the text by an almost completely blank page, which has the effect of catapulting the reader into a wholly different plane of description. Finally, the point of view shifts to the original woman in the audience, who begins a description—in the intimate second person—of the film she is viewing. “Then you, as a viewer and guest, enter the house. It is you [the viewer] who are entering to see her [the woman in the film]” (98). The film tells the story of an abusive arranged marriage and especially emphasizes the viewer’s feminist critique of the institution in which women are “non-entit[ies]” and the inevitability of this institution (“it is a given”). “She is married to her husband who is unfaithful to her. No reason is given. No reason is necessary except that he is a man. It is a given . . . Stands the distance between the husband and wife the distance of heaven and hell . . . The husband is seen . . . taunting and humiliating her . . . She was his wife his possession she belonged to her husband the man who claimed her and she could not refuse. Perhaps that was how it was then. Perhaps now . . . It is the husband who touches her with his rank. By the claim of his rank. Her non-body her non-entity” (102, 112). Among the most striking aspects of “Love Poetry” are the complex and intertwining levels/types of technological mediation employed within it

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which act to emphasize the framing imposed by and the translations involved in all modes and mediums of representation. Additionally, the section emphasizes a blurring of ontological levels that further destabilize the reader’s ability to locate herself in a stable point of view. These include an actual still from the film, the narrator’s description of the woman entering the theater, the camera’s “point of view,” the woman watching and describing the film action, the actors playing the characters in the fi lm, and the real world situation—“it is given”—to which the film might also be said to point. Cha’s emphasis on temporality as stasis and her various strategies of dislocation also suggests the movement of much of the text: it proceeds by stammering halting starts and frequent stops, advancing and retreating, stopping before starting, a rhythm that emerges most directly through the actions of the text’s most frequently recurring figure (not a full-fledged character): the diseuse, a female translator and professional reciter. Cha employs this figure in part to suggest the trauma of living out and through a fractured identity (personal and national) as expressed in the physical pain of learning to translate an alien language, a process made doubly difficult for a female speaker trained to be silent and compliant. As in previous passages, the following one suggests the bodily effort involved in speaking as well as the physical pain of holding back the memories that press to be spoken, a psychic and physical paradox that “festers” painfully inside the speaker. It murmurs inside. It murmurs. Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater than is the pain not to say. to not say. Says nothing against the pain to speak. It festers inside. The wound, liquid, dust. Must break. Must void. (Cha, 3)

Dictee does not contain what would normally be called characters, but it does emphasize multiple instances of processes of subject formation within various disciplinary apparatuses including colonial power, religion, the family, and the state, among other cultural and ideological systems that transform— often forcibly—individuals into subjects. For example, Cha foregrounds the direct and intimate physical impact of disciplinary authority through references to a Korean teacher who is forcibly forbidden “by [Japanese] law tongue tied forbidden of [the Korean] tongue” and who whispers her native language only alone in the dark, and through the many references to the mutilation of

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the physical organ, the tongue, as in this passage describing the tongue being bitten between the teeth and swallowed, “Deeper. Deeper. Swallow. Until there would be no more organ.” Yet just as the speaker uses “void” as both noun and verb in the example above, suggesting both absence (a void) and active presence (to void or empty as in draining an abscess), in many cases the speaker recites poorly or improperly these disciplinary models, waiting “inside the pause” to insert a different message. In the catechism lesson, for example, the speaker inserts ironic commentary between the lines, mimicking the original in order to dislodge its authority through use of terms such as “counterfeit” and “conspire” that suggest a willful falsification of the original rather than a desired equivalence with it. Q:  Who made Thee?A:  God made me. To conspire in God’s Tongue. Q: Where is God? A: God is everywhere. Accomplice in His Texts, the fabrication in His own image, the pleasure the desire of giving image to the word in the mind of the confessor. Q: God who has made you in His own likeness A: God who has made me in His own likeness. In His Own Image in His Own Resemblance, in His Own Copy, in His Own Counterfeit Presentment, in His Duplicate, in His Own Reproduction, in His Cast, in His carbon, His Image and His Mirror. Pleasure in the image pleasure in the copy pleasure in the projection of likeness pleasure in the repetition. (17)

Here, the speaker over-repeats the many synonyms for image (itself a copy), hypermimics the correct response, and, significantly, takes a writer’s pleasure in this counterfeit repetition. These demonstrations of nonequivalence discredit repeatability as proof of allegiance and dislodge the meaning of fidelity to God that the recitation is seeking to inspire; they are “unfaithful to the original” in Lisa Lowe’s words. Through this strategy, Cha suggests that each instance of subject formation, no matter how authoritarian or brutally physical, is itself unfinished, leaving a surplus unaccounted for within and therefore uncontained by these larger structures of regulation. Each instance demonstrates how one may resist—even in small ways—being fully and seamlessly interpellated as a good subject. However, I’m not claiming that Cha’s text celebrates such instances of disidentification as acts of full-fledged political resistance. This is true even if we understand resistance within the terms of a citational politics such as Judith Butler advocates in her discussion of the rearticulation of the term “queer.”

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(Queer is a defiant taking back or reappropriation of a term that has been used previously to cause injury.) Rather I think they represent small creative acts of psychic survival that enable the speaker to live on and to suggest— haltingly, incompletely, painfully—other desires, other lost stories hovering between the lines.

She speaks her My reading thus far has emphasized the many ways in which those holding absolute sovereignty dictate to female minority subjects across times and places. As we have seen, Dictee is a text fi lled with references to official oaths, codes of appropriate behavior, language lessons, and other disciplinary rituals. But Cha also explores another resonance of the term to dictate, again, through use of the figure of the diseuse (who some critics call the tenth muse of the book). In this second use, the reciter functions as a host body or medium who attempts to excavate and transmit the other voices and traces of those silenced by history, a connection that Cha makes explicit in her 1978 MFA thesis: “the artist’s path is close to that of an alchemist in that his/her path is that of a medium” (Rinder, 29). “She [the diseuse] allows others in place of her . . . She relays the others. You are she . . . you speak her, she cannot speak . . . Let the one who is diseuse . . . Let her call forth. Break open the spell cast upon time upon time again and again” (123). This invocation from the section “Lyric Poetry” also suggests that the ritualistic repetitions of the diseuse are meant to be performative; they intend to make something happen, to call an absent history into being and, through this process, perhaps to alter the response of the audience? Again, in her MFA statement, Cha comments that the artist’s “vision belongs to an altering, of material, and of perception. Through this attempt, the perception of the audience has the potential of being altered, of being presented a constant change. Re volution” (Rinder, 29). Unlike the mother’s futile repetitions of various Catholic prayers and rituals cited earlier or the repetitions in the language lessons and catechism class, the diseuse’s is a newly invented ritual outside of History. This recalls Cha’s revisions of the classic invocation to the muse appearing in the first pages of Dictee. The first invocation to the Muse is immediately

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preceded by a section titled “Diseuse” (the first mention of this figure in the text), which, as I’ve shown, contains long repetitive physical descriptions of the narrator’s painful attempts to speak the voices that rise within her. Rising from the empty below, pebble lumps of gas. Moisture. Begin to flood her. Dissolving her. Slow, slowed to deliberation. Slow and thick . . . Begins imperceptibly, near perceptible. (Just once. Just one time and it will take.) She takes. She takes the pause. Slowly. From the thick. The thickness. From weighted motion upwards. Slowed. To deliberation even when it passed upward through her mouth again. The delivery. She takes it. Slow. The invoking. All the time now. All the time there is. Always. And all times. The pause. Uttering. Hers now. Hers bare. The utter. (5) 

The repetitive, ritualistic, and incantatory language in these passages (and in many others throughout Cha’s text) recall descriptions of Cha’s performance pieces, which unfolded at a slow, deliberate, trance-like pace, and descriptions of her voice in performance. As Lewallen puts it, “Perhaps the most distinctive element of Cha’s performance was sound—the sound of her voice, live and recorded. Her voice was at once soft and penetrating— hypnotic. Augst said, ‘There was something about her voice. She always spoke very soft ly but whenever she did these performances, she had this almost incantational way of speaking’ ” (Lewallen, 9). The first invocation to the Muse already rewrites early exemplars of the tradition such as Hesiod’s: “Relate these things to me, Muse, whose home is Olympus, tell me which of them first came into being.” “O Muse, tell me the story/Of all these things, O Goddess, daughter of Zeus/Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us” (Cha, 7). Here, Cha disrupts the linear sequence and order of priority requested in the original invocation and dismantles the position of authority of the original speaker by voicing a request from the position of those excluded by official History (“tell even us”). The second iteration omits all reference to classical Western traditions—the Muse, Goddess, the Olympian perspective found in the original. “Tell me the story/Of all these things./Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us” (Cha, 11), suggesting the speaker’s dismissal of origins and sources of authority—both patriarchal and Western—and her performative self-construction as inventor of lost and alternative stories. Although it is difficult to reconstruct a coherent chain of referents in the section “Lyric Poetry” (as it is in most others), the speaker’s frequent

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repetition of synonyms for concealment—including shade, shield, shadow, screen, opaque, gauze, covering, draping, mask, cloud—accumulate to suggest the difficult psychic labor involved in penetrating these veils and finding plenitude in the absences of history. This laborious process is compounded by the speaker’s felt imperative “to account one at a time one by one and missing none. Forgetting nothing. Leaving out nothing,” an imperative of all rituals (129). The section culminates not with a suggestion of the past fully recovered and redeemed or with the speaker’s provisional triumph on an individual level. Instead, it ends with the diseuse’s final invocation: to the mother, (a Demeter figure) who is asked to “Restore memory,” and to the daughter (Persephone) who is asked to “restore spring” (133), to create life itself, one of the many mother-daughter pairings in the text. Also appearing is a third figure, the writer-daughter, who signals the precariousness of her project and her own exhaustion with it: “the ink spills thickest before it runs dry, before it stops writing at all” (133). Cha’s many references to female martyrs and saints throughout Dictee culminate in this figure of the writer-daughter and reinforce the sacrificial nature of her rituals. The final page in “Lyric Poetry”—what remains once one runs out of ink—consists of a faint handprint on a large boulder, a human trace fading into stone. As many other image-traces do throughout Dictee, this one carries an enormous affective charge, a residue that resists absorption into narrative or expository discourse. Instead affect sticks to these nonlinguistic traces, which reverberate off one another and accumulate as a series of affective encounters and a condensation of multiple losses experienced in a single image. For example, the handprint here resonates with the characters in han gul scratched on a rock appearing on the first page of Dictee, and echoes the traces of blood on paving stones in the “Melpome” section. I have stressed throughout that Dictee is not a triumphalist narrative of historical recovery and personal redemption. But it also does not only record melancholic traces of repeated losses nor, despite its failure to progress, does it simply end in repetition and stasis. As I  have suggested, the frontispiece of Dictee contain the only words in hang gul in the entire text and are taken from the wall of a coal mine in Japan and read: “Mother I miss you, I’m hungry, I want to go home to my native place.” In contrast, the final pages of the text describe a moment of muted light and stillness—is it dusk or dawn?—and

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open with a child’s request “Lift me up, mom, to the window” (179). The child’s desire to see further becomes later in the passage a desire also to “break stillness,” and lift “the immobile silence” (179), imperatives that have haunted the speaker throughout Dictee. Significantly, the text’s final words— “bells fall a peal to sky”—describe one sound that echoes outward and upward in a “series of concentric circles,” Cha’s book going into the world? In Dictee’s fi rst section “Clio/History,” Cha offers what might be considered her rationale for writing the book and a blueprint for how to read it. “Why resurrect it all now. From the Past. History, the old wound. The past emotions all over again. To confess to relive the same folly. To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. To extract each fragment by each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion” (33). In order to read Dictee we must carefully examine each fragment in the shattered archive that Cha assembles from within the interstices of colonial, patriarchal, nationalist systems of power. We must learn to see and hear beyond the surface words to imagine another word, another image, another outcome. We must learn to hear and distinguish among the many types of silence alluded to throughout the text. These include “Absolute silence. Reduced silence. Guarded silence. Bound to silence. To pass over something in silence.” In Dictee Cha discloses silence, names its many distinct forms and reasons for being, evokes its palpability and its visceral effects. Th rough its aesthetics of negation, its multiple confl icting discourses, and shift ing modes of address, Dictee discursively positions the reader not as outside witnesses to a particular set of traumatic events as a conventional narrative would do. It does not redeem the many losses described within it, nor does it offer readers the comforting illusion that bearing witness somehow effects genuine change. Rather it asks us to inhabit the interior—the fractured body— of what might be called a traumatized text. In Dictee, Cha’s speaker functions as a medium for the transmission of impossible affects, lost histories, and histories of loss. By allowing others in place of her, she enacts a relation of what Sara Ahmed calls “withness,” a nonappropriative ethical response to the pain and grief of the other. As Ahmed explains it, in a relation of “withness,” “others exist within me and apart from me at the same time. Taking you in will not necessarily

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be becoming like you, or making you like me, as other others have also impressed upon me, shaping my surfaces in this way and that” (Ahmed, 160). Withness demands a position of intersubjective openness and vulnerability, a willingness to be marked and changed by the pain and grief of others. Dictee withholds narratives of redemption, reprieve, catharsis, which is also to say forms of closure. Instead, we remain stranded amid loss and its many affects, which live on within us, shaping and marking us with their effects.

4

Horrors of Power: Abjection and the “Monstrous-Masculine” in Chantal Chawaf’s Redemption

Does the son who has loved her too much ever kill his mother? She reappears in all women. Redemption, 53 [D]evotees of the abject . . . do not cease looking, within what flows from the other’s “innermost being,” for the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body. Kristeva, 54 We need to teach men to love us—that is the literary motivation of the 21st century. Chawaf in Jardine, 24 In her 1989 novel, Redemption, Chantal Chawaf presents a harrowingly intimate portrait of a murderer poised to become a serial killer, a “murderer who seeks to kill, kill, and kill again for all eternity” (64). Charles de Roquemont, a self-proclaimed avant-gardist whose art consists of dissecting dictionaries (“immolating language, making a cemetery of words” [64]), obsessively recounts/reexperiences in vivid detail his brutal murder five years earlier of Esther, his married American lover. Charles’s mental stability is never in doubt; he is, simply put, “a madman who has killed his mistress thinking it is his mother” (53). The novel anatomizes in excruciating detail the

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throes of his descent into a full-blown gender psychosis that strongly recalls Klaus Theleweit’s descriptions of fascist freicorpsmen with their pathological hatred of the female body and Julia Kristeva’s analysis of abject borderline subjects unable to escape “the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of their being” (Kristeva, 5). Redemption also recounts the intimate dynamics of pathological sexual obsession from a female point of view in the figure of Olga Vassilieff, a screenwriter, who encounters Charles in a Paris park one summer evening and, over the course of their relationship, is “brought to the limit of her need and dependence,” brought to feel “as though she is dying like an animal,” a fate that seems quite likely given the person with whom she is in love (66). As its title suggests, Chawaf’s novel enacts a devastating critique of one of Western culture’s most persistent, deeply embodied, and gendered ideologies:  that of redemption through romantic love. It is a dark portrait that suggests not only women’s implication in this specific mode of reality production—rather than their pure victimization by it—but perhaps the utter impossibility of healthy male-female relationships if these extreme characters are taken as exemplary. Thus, Redemption is not simply a study of two cases of abnormal psychology or a gothic thriller in the Bluebeard tradition. Rather, the novel also functions as a generalized feminist indictment of the nature and deadly consequences of heterosexual romantic love as it is currently configured:  as a pathology of self-other relations and mutual misrecognitions, and as a deadly cultural pathology. Evidence that Chawaf has this larger aim in mind, that she considers herself to be a diagnostician of sorts performing through her fiction a kind of cultural psychotherapy, is reinforced by her statements in an interview with Alice Jardine: The biological is a word that has made people terribly afraid and . . . it will continue to be frightening if nothing comes to take it out of its own frightening physical-chemical realm, because from that perspective it seems very inhuman and very dehumanized . . . If the biological isn’t backed up by much thought and work on sensitivity, affectivity, and the human it will be more separated than ever. Then the body may well dominate . . . And that will be terrible . . . Men and women together need to envisage the word “fusion,” which frightens everyone even though it underlies all desire . . . And [if] this desire for fusion can be symbolized . . . it will continue to respond to desire and generate life to avert misfortune. (31)

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The plot of Redemption illustrates the “misfortune” arising from the terrible triumph of the body as it overtakes the limits of the human. Through the fact of writing it, Chawaf contributes to the cultural work needed to help embodied male-female relationships evolve. Appropriately, Chawaf enacts her critique by attempting to forge a radically embodied writing practice both stylistically and thematically. As she puts it in the Jardine interview, “literature has not tried to verbalize certain spaces that are without words, without a grammar—those spaces one could call the preverbal, the archaic. The verbalized representation of these spaces through literary languages should increase our consciousness as well as our knowledge of women, the feminine, life, and men. It should open up communication between women and men and among women” (17–18). In this regard, Chawaf’s attempt to verbalize those archaic experiences that predate language resonates with Kristeva’s observation about the value of abject literature. Far from being inessential, in a contemporary moment, “the literature of the abject represents the ultimate coding of our crises, of our most intimate and most serious apocalypses” (Kristeva, 208). Chawaf’s unflinching examination of what she considers to be a contemporary crisis in male-female relations arguably goes a good deal beyond Kristeva’s ungendered and universalized descriptions of the abject in Powers of Horror. This is one of Barbara Creed’s objections to Kristeva’s analysis. In her widely influential article, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” Creed draws out the gendered implications of Kristeva’s theory in developing her idea of the “monstrous feminine” as a ubiquitous figure of dread within contemporary horror films that, through mechanisms of narrative closure, is safely purified and destroyed. The ideological project of the horror film is “an attempt to shore up the symbolic order by constructing the feminine as an imaginary other that must be repressed and controlled in order to secure and protect the social order” (Creed, 263). Creed asks whether the abjection of women is a necessary precondition for the continuation of sociality itself as, Kristeva suggests, or whether Kristeva’s account should be considered only a description of the maternal figure as she is perceived within patriarchal culture. Is it possible, Creed asks, to intervene in the social construction of women as abject? Chawaf’s novel might be considered as one form of intervention in its laying bare of a “monstrous-masculine” that constructs

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all women as abject, a construction at the very heart of a patriarchal imaginary. In bringing the literature of the abject into a contemporary moment (vs. Kristeva’s almost exclusive focus on modernist writers) and overtly politicizing it, Chawaf illustrates the value of situating specific examples of literary abjection within a precise sociocultural analysis of contemporary power relations. Author of twenty-nine novels (only two translated into English), Chawaf published her first novel, Retabulum/Dreaming, in 1974 with Editions des Femmes, a woman-only publishing house founded by Antoinette Fouque and other members of the group Psych et Po. This group rejected a liberal feminist program of seeking equality with men in favor of a feminism that explored the female sexual difference repressed and misrepresented by patriarchal culture (Holmes, 209). This emphasis on difference was taken up by the writers now associated with l’ecriture feminine or embodied women’s writing, including Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Chawaf, and devoted to the project of radically reworking language and literary form while dismantling patriarchal logics in order to liberate new meanings while positively revaluing female otherness. With her goal of attempting “to bring language closer to our earliest and deepest affective experiences,” her sweeping poetic style, her disruption of traditional narrative structures, and her celebration of “generous maternal bodies and revolutionary jouissance,” Chawaf is widely acknowledged to be one of the foremost practitioners of embodied writing (Holmes, 230). However, Redemption also differs markedly from other more celebratory examples of this genre of writing in that it draws readers into a painfully direct confrontation with another aspect of the imaginary, a deadly jouissance that suggests, among other things, the limits of taking pre-oedipal dynamics as models for social change. Chawaf agrees that giving voice to the body “is the very possibility of thinking about the conditions of living;” the body is “immense, infinite, living, and imaginary;” “it’s a responsibility in itself, an entire ethics, an entire consciousness” (20). However, in Redemption, she clearly also wishes to highlight the dangers of idealizing hysteria or psychosis, of viewing madness as a symbol of liberation, or ignoring the dangerous and pathological aspects of these states. “We . . . have to articulate the excess, desire, the uncensored body and life—not an idealized life but life just as it is with its problems, anxieties,

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and frightening aspects . . . [It] is precisely this fear of life that has kept [the body] outside culture—on the side of madness, jouissance, love quickly made and just as quickly forgotten and eroticism . . . This misplacement of life has authorized all [of culture’s] hatred of the body . . . and it has led to . . . what Robert Stoller calls ‘the eroticization of hatred’ ” (Jardine, 21–2). It is the deadly consequences of all these hatreds, all these abominable refusals and misplacements of life, that Chawaf anatomizes in such chilling detail in Redemption. She does so, first, by attempting to symbolize the eruption of primitive psychological drives that culture must repress and those borderline psychic states that literature often considers unrepresentable. “These realms haven’t been expressed yet,” according to Chawaf. “They cannot be, for they don’t yet have the means to be symbolized because they are missing a tongue, a language . . . the return to the original [the maternal, the Real] and which only verbal language, by giving it words with which to speak, can help evolve . . . [T]he work to be done is to tolerate what has been classified as unrepresentable, unnameable . . . those things that belong to the category of wildness, regression, sickness, symptoms, etc” (29–30). In attempting to bring these unrepresentable realms to cultural awareness in order to help them evolve, Chawaf explicitly follows an avant-garde tradition that seeks to join experimental writing practices and radical social critique. In terms of genre, Redemption is a hybrid work. It could be described as a postmodern horror fable, complete with references to vampires, werewolves, beastiality, grisly scenes of disembowelment, and cannibalism that evoke the explicit methods of what has come to be called torture porn. The novel may also be classed as a feminist theory-fiction, by which I mean a text that uses fictional methods to elaborate the consequences of particular theoretical propositions that, as such, would be impossible to represent in other than fictional terms—in this case Chawaf’s serious cultural diagnosis of the pathologies of current gender relations. Chawaf explicitly distinguishes her practice from realist techniques since “traditional narrative style summarizes, it is a yardstick for measuring distance. But when I write, on the contrary, I move in close and what I see is enormous” (Marks and Courtivron, XX). “I seek to visualize the inside, what escapes the look” (Fallaize, 52). In Redemption the reader does not learn about the cultural pathologies of abject states from a safe narrative distance and the comfort of closure—as is the case in most

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literature and films of the abject. Rather, he/she is immersed inside them and so positioned to experience them directly. This fact accounts for a great deal of the uniqueness and effectiveness of the novel as well as its chilling intensity.

Immersed in abjection Chawaf accomplishes her close-up method in multiple ways: through manipulation of reader identification so as to promote extreme intimacy with these disturbing characters; through her refusal to provide clear and stable temporal and physical locations or consistent points of view; through her emphasis on a preverbal realm that emphasizes the tactile, auditory, thermal aspects of affective states, and through her rejection of the reassurance of narrative continuity and closure. In this respect Redemption departs from other postmodern horror stories that are also cultural critiques such as Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho—whose Patrick Bateman, for all his personal instability and fantastic narrative unreliability, is still presented from a more-or-less consistent and stable point of view and in a realist mode. Given Chawaf’s commitment to writing literature that will help us “tolerate what has been classed as unrepresentable,” her use of nonrealist techniques seems necessary and these techniques are nowhere more striking than in her approach to character. We come to know Charles and Olga from the inside and in such a way that they become exemplars of specific psychological states and pathologies, particular interior landscapes, and temporalities. Chawaf also skillfully draws the reader into the deadly tango between Charles and Olga/Esther through constantly shifting levels of enunciation and points of view that have the effect of constantly dislocating the reader in narrative space; through incantatory repetitions of key phrases and scenes combined with long sinuous sentences that rush headlong down the page; and through jarring temporal shifts. Most frequent are Charles’s flashbacks to his murder of Esther, which he experiences as always already happening in the present; brief scenarios with little direct dialogue between Charles and Olga; Charles and Olga’s interior monologues from various substrata of consciousness; theoretical statements often delivered by one of the characters but not necessarily expressive of him/her; and representations of archaic, preverbal, even prehuman, states that map

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Chawaf’s attempt to symbolize “the hybrid adventure of the union of the body with the imaginary” (55). The opening chapter of the novel—largely from Charles’s point of view— establishes many of the psychic and textual dynamics that Chawaf develops and unfolds throughout Redemption. It appears to recount the period immediately after Charles has murdered Esther. However, both the temporality and locality remain vague precisely since the vivid memory of the murder recurs obsessively throughout the novel as does Charles’s conjunction of sex-birthdeath and his disordered mental and physical boundaries. He is one who mentally, linguistically, and physically “strays instead of getting his bearings,” as Kristeva notes about the abject subject (Kristeva, 8). As night fell, Charles became a vampire. He stared at the full moon. His figure was outlined like a black shrub against the high walls, and the shadows formed by his limbs and his trunk were moving over the rocky path that snaked its way toward hell. He has given up on the idea of kissing Esther, of holding her in his arms; he has given up on the idea of mingling his warm marrow with the shivering plant offering itself up to his mouth. Once again he tightly clenched his jaws on the resentment, on the bitterness. He is now ready to spit it back out, to throw it up . . . May he no longer be the animal that she fastened to herself with their spittle, with their maceration, sticky, gluey, sickening like milk and yet so sweet, and he is enamoured of the saltiness of her breasts, the warmth inside her skin. Oh! If only she would disintegrate in him today and forever . . . If only there was nothing left in him of the one he loves, nothing left of this fusion and its heaven. Henceforth he would know nothing but the devil, evil, hate—all that prolong indefinitely the torture of no longer being together, being bound, by lips and breath, one to the other, by the flesh . . . I  triumphed over this beloved, hated woman; I ripped her open like a dog that gets run over on the road at night. I am finished . . . He did not think that he would ever feel alive again, that he would ever again meet someone he would desire as madly as this divinity. He had a harsh radiance. He was powerful, virile, muscular in his will to tear himself away from any trace of sensual pleasure. He was finally separated from her. He was man and no longer woman.” (3–5)

I quote at length these excerpts from the novel’s first chapter in order to convey the immediacy and extremity of Charles’s mental state—his radical vacillation between love and hate, attraction and repulsion, male and

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female—along with its shifting instability and obsessive character. Throughout the novel, Chawaf plays on various meanings of the word redemption, which here has a double sense:  both to recover (to return, to incorporate) and to set free (to disgorge or expel). Charles longs to recover the intense intimacy of lovemaking with Esther, in which he is reduced to “the animal that she fastened to herself with their spittle” (3), a scenario that recalls a child (or any mammal) breastfeeding, and the mother-child fusion of the pre-oedipal stage, those primal scenes of separation and engulfment to which Kristevan abjection always refers. This longing clashes with his desire to annihilate the intimacy, which he experiences as a deadly threat to the integrity of his selfhood, his autonomy, his masculinity. Not only is he “ready to spit it [her] back out, to throw it up,” but in his mind he must also kill or be extinguished himself, so he—the effete European artist—savagely “ripped her open like a dog that gets run over on the road at night” (4). Charles’s fear of dissolving in the other is so intense that there is no possibility of the other existing at all let alone existing for itself as a separate subject. Charles’s vacillations between longing for and a pathological fear of fusion with the beloved (the mother, the other) strongly recall Kristeva’s descriptions of the borderline abject personality, who, above all, suffers from an inability to construct stable boundaries between self and other and inside and outside. However, the violent consequences of this boundary disorder are conveyed most strongly in Klaus Theweliet’s portraits of damaged male “subjects” in Male Fantasies. Because Theweleit’s analysis of the causes and characteristics of the pathologies of fascism resonates so strikingly with Charles’s behavior and mental state, it is worth summarizing in some detail. First, Theweleit makes clear that fascistic behavior is not caused by disturbances within Freudian oedipal dynamics, which are the result of relations between “whole persons with clearly defined boundaries” (205). Instead, the fear of/desire for fusion, ideas of dismemberment, the dissolution of boundaries between self and other, hallucinatory perceptions, a coupling of defense and attack mechanisms, which characterize the behavior of the proto-fascists result from damage at the pre-oedipal stage. This causes “situations in which bodies, parents, blood relations, and any other human beings cease to exist as objects with boundaries” (206), suggesting “severe disturbances in the functions of the ego, preventing it from ever developing correctly, as well as severe

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disturbances of the capacity to form object relations” (207). These disturbances express themselves not in the form of (oedipal) conflict, but, instead “assum[e] . . . the form of a mistake in the basic structure, a fault, a lack that demands to be compensated for” (208) but that is insatiable. According to Theweleit, these men without egos were not psychotics as conventionally understood; they were not unadapted to reality but were in many ways spectacularly successful. Instead, their characteristic way of thinking is explainable only through a basic structural fault that forces them “to perceive even an unthreatening reality as threatening” (208). Although Charles announces in this first chapter that he is “finally quit of her,” (Esther, the maternal, all women) and has re-established his secure sense of self (“He was man and no longer woman”), the scenario of lovemaking and/as murder haunts Charles throughout the novel, recalling the characteristics of narcissistic trauma that is reexperienced but not remembered as such, because it was never really experienced in the first place, never symbolized and made present to the subject. While in this early chapter, Charles appears to have some self-awareness of his actions and their potential consequences, as the novel unfolds, he becomes less and less self-aware and more and more disoriented as he descends into full-blown madness, what Chawaf calls a process of “progressive extinction” (of his humanity) and “progressive regression” (to a permanent state of pre-oedipal psychosis). Charles’s temporal movement forward from the moment of the murder— described in increasingly grisly detail and with progressively more intensity as the novel unfolds—conjoins with his simultaneous devolutionary movement backward. This mimes the trajectory of the novel itself, which assumes a curious kind of narrative stasis: five years separate Charles’s killing of Esther and his meeting with Olga in the park, yet no time has elapsed at all for him. The novel ends virtually where it begins. Chawaf’s descriptions of Charles’s progressive downward spiral—his becoming a serial killer—are masterful, consistent with her efforts to embody linguistically the psychic landscape of the imaginary, to anatomize the pathologies of the borderline/abject male subject, and to detail their deadly consequences. Chawaf’s narrator also frequently summarizes the deadly complementarity at play in the relationship between Charles and Olga as in the following passage that powerfully illustrates the use of gothic tropes to convey Olga’s

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enthrallment and Charles’s emotional vampirism, the velocity of her poetic technique, and the visceral level at which the close-up method operates. It is dangerous to meet a werewolf. To spark life only to answer it with death. To create a presence the better to endure an absence, is that sadism? Is that impotence? . . . Manipulation of her being makes a woman aware of her incompleteness, of her dependence. Therefore a woman no longer exists without a man; a woman cannot be sufficient unto herself; therefore a woman no longer has a body without the body of a man . . . therefore without him she is only the living dead . . . And a woman, defeated, intoxicated . . . will no longer believe in anything but him, as though, were he absent, she would have no more blood in her veins, no more oxygen, no more air to breathe, as though she were suffocating . . . That is how bewitchment is born . . . Charles was bewitching Olga. Charles was slowly putting Olga to death . . . After a long period of abstinence, he would rush toward them but only when they were sexually desperate, when their nerves were almost sick with feeling empty, gaping, too vibrant . . . at the last minute, when the shattered victim was exhausted from sensuality, from agony and from shame . . . Charles would dole out love, that drug which can reduce the frustrated to animals. And Charles would remark with surprise, “They are certainly bestial! What happened to their minds, to their dignity? No wonder we call them hysterics . . .” Charles is a maniac who, after a passionate encounter, leaves behind a devastated and dying woman. (51–3)

Another effective instance of the narrator’s commentary on the plot again employs the technique of posing rhetorical questions and stresses in the form of the commentary the futility, negative consequences, and destructiveness of love in a contemporary moment. What is sadism? What is impotence? It’s the man a woman desires and who will never answer her because he cannot be a man. It’s the loss of otherness between beings, the reign of a dull hatred which levels and wrecks everything, and means there can be no woman, no man, no child, no love, it’s the sterile world of those who hate their own skin, their own heart and will not reproduce, it’s the man who, after splitting open the skull of the woman he would not allow himself to love, gouged his eyes out like Oedipus. (32)

Here, negative constructions proliferate (never, cannot, loss, no) to convey the violence and sterility of all love relationships based on an inability to conceive of the other and a dedication to death.

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The first extended account of Esther’s murder itself, rather than its aftermath, occurs several chapters later. In this account, Charles’s desire to incorporate (rather than brutally expel) the beloved is paramount (“She will be me. Thus I won’t have to love her, to desire her, to risk being abandoned by her”) (25). Here, Chawaf also elaborates more fully conjunctions between sex, birth, and death as well as metaphors of Charles as a vampire and a cannibal who preys on female vitality, themes she reinforces through subtle point of view shifts that are suggestive of Charles’s disordered perceptual boundaries between subject/object and self/other. Within a single paragraph, Charles describes himself from outside as “the vampire,” from a first-person point of view (“I’m a maniac, a fanatic. I don’t want to pause,”), from a second-person point of view (“You have succeeded in loving without being answerable . . . You had to make this woman impotent in your place . . . you had to kill her”), and from a third person collective point of view, that, in its animality, can no longer even be called a point of view. “We chew noisily, gluttonously. Not that there is much fondness for the sporting side of this, for the marathon of breaking bones, ripping skin” (26). After the murder, “he had a morbid desire to linger, to continue rummaging through these viscera, to eat the raw flesh, to hide in these feminine organs, to prowl furtively around in them . . . [W]ith his massive jaws of an anthropoid, he was trying to reach the cervix, trying to come out of this woman using his prominent front teeth . . . Inside her he had regained energy, he had renewed himself; he was a primitive, a simian predator, a brute” (41–2). Several chapters intervene between the first extended account of the murder and the second, during which the relationship between Charles and Olga progresses (and regresses). As Chawaf has presented major aspects of Charles’s character from the preoedipal realm of primal drives, oceanic fusion with the (m)other and her violent rejection, so many of the interactions between Charles and Olga occur in an in-between territory—as if their innermost drives and desires are communicating with each other directly rather than their characters being revealed through dialogue, narrative commentary, or other traditional means of development. In the following “interchange,” the point of view shifts dramatically and without warning from Olga’s report of her own state of mind, to Charles’s memory of Esther’s murder, to an unidentified point of view “on the other side of walls.” He stares at her intensely with the crazed eyes of a maniac. Olga Vasselieff is afraid. For this man, words are no longer words; they are reduced to

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sounds that can be seen. Touched, but whose meaning has been lost, has been stifled. He will silence their meaning. Always. We will never know. We will never know if it is alive or has stopped living. He will keep quiet. He will have rendered the French tongue mute. The American tongue too . . . He would like to hear Esther speak. On the other side of walls, summer forms deposits, like green sand, on the tree limbs drenched by the rain shower.” (63)

Such abrupt and confusing shifts in point of view and locus of enunciation radically destabilize the reading experience as we move without warning from Olga’s dark forebodings to Charles’s tormented flashback to Esther’s murder. In this way we experience very intimately Charles’s violently disordered thinking, his lack of clear ego boundaries, and his tendency to merge with (incorporate) and violently separate from (disgorge) the other. Almost before we realize it we are caught in the middle of Charles’s bloody orgy, in our very own vortex of summons and repulsion at the heart of the abject as in Charles’s final chilling remembrance of the murder (“840 times, stab the softness . . . impose silence on all this bodily softness . . . By the handful he extracts the insides; he pulls out the intestines, the glands . . . seventeen hours of total happiness” [73]). Chawaf also stresses the insatiability of Charles’s drive to know, fuse with, and obliterate the female (“to see her invisible parts, her viscera, all that is visible only when she is dead” [72]), its tendency to recur obsessively, and the impossibility of its fulfillment. In this final horrific account, Chawaf suggests not just Charles’s location in a preoedipal state of perception and desire but something like an archaic pre-birth, even prehuman experience at the cellular level—another extreme example of her closeup method: He is always coming back to this aquatic and blood-soaked environment, this natal tonality, as though he had never become used to being out in the air, as though he were still in an embryonic state, fetal amid this unobstructed flow, in these women, this woman from whom he could not extricate himself . . . All he knew now was to split up, to bore into himself to infinity in this metamorphosis where, larvalike, he could reach the anterior regions . . . he could no longer tell the difference between himself and the blood vessels of any woman . . . he had only the beginnings of a muscle structure; his features were longitudinal, oblique, lateral. (74)

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Later in the chapter he regresses to what can only be called an archaic species memory, a time when the bestial dominates: “The red color of the clay from the great depths disappears as the night of the spirit increases, when along the way, like fat marine mammals, the monsters assemble in pale herds, when he still has the yearning to kill, when he is not yet free of the remorse that stifles his breath” (78). Theleweit’s comments about the friescorpsmen again are illuminating here. According to him the protofacists “want a contact with the opposite sex—which cannot be named a contact—in which they can dissolve themselves while forcibly dissolving in the other sex. They want to penetrate into its life, its warmth, its blood. It seems that they aren’t just more intemperate, dangerous, and cruel than Freud’s harmless ‘motherfucker’ Oedipus; they are of an entirely other order. And if, in spite of everything they have a desire for incest, it is at the very least with the earth itself” (205). Although connections between the female body and nature appear throughout Redemption, Chawaf emphasizes them most forcefully in the novel’s penultimate chapter, in which her up-close “fusional” style also reaches its apotheosis. As the novel’s opening has, this chapter begins with Charles’s memory of Esther, in this instance a particularly vibrant evening out. However, claustrophobic images of enclosure break through this memory to torment him—a prison cell, a room in a psychiatric hospital, the space between a woman’s thighs, the very bones of his own skull—and he wonders “what can be done to live again when we have killed as though we had committed suicide.” But Chawaf makes clear that for Charles there will be no redemption since he is trying to destroy life itself, figured in the chapter as a natural, archaic, powerful, female force, while what Charles seeks is “a winter which will never end.” Charles does not know “how to love with human feelings, but with animal feelings, with the pain of a baby brutally expelled from the gravid female” (95), and so he “made holes in women until he heard welling up from them this intensity of the tireless and daring female, a direct descendant of the reign of wind currents rustling among the high branches of the fir trees where the storm was incarnated in a female god with a man’s head” (89). Times, places, persons fuse in this chapter with particular intensity— there are references to ancient Celtic and Germanic queens, Charles’s mother, Esther, Olga—as in the following passage in which all women and natural

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forces condense into Esther who herself expands enormously and threateningly to fill the world: Esther, virgin of the hills and the mountains, black Esther, Esther the Sphinx, Esther the color of islands, capes, lagoons, coves, archipelagos, Esther . . . a tender pink coast of flesh and mucous membranes . . . Esther the animal-mother to whom Charles devotes worship because this goddess was the placenta back in the memory of remote ages when she became united with the ancestral mountain to give birth to man, to Charles, the son of red sandstone, of sand black and of pebbles, the son of coagulated blood, the son of desire petrified before insatiable Esther who is never appeased, always thirsty for sperm, saliva, rapture, Esther the nymphomaniac, the carnivorous androphagist . . . the enormous mass of menstrual blood pouring straight down for a height of three hundred feet into these visceral landscapes where Charles’s nerves were tied in knots, his muscles tetanized by the void, by this void never filled, this need of his, this inability to reach her. (92–3)

If, in characterizing Charles, Chawaf gruesomely literalizes the romantic cliché, “I love you to death,” in characterizing Olga she elaborates the romantic concept of the soul mate (“He is the one,” Olga says shortly after meeting Charles, “he is really the one” [49]). However, as I’ve suggested, in Redemption Charles and Olga do not share perfectly complementary hearts and souls as in the conventional romantic script, but perfectly complementary pathologies. While Charles “only thinks of blotting out all women” of feeding on another’s life like a vampire, Olga “feels a desire to nurture, to give and keep on giving life’s spirit” (23). Olga, a single woman who lives and works alone, is a fi lm screenwriter with a “literary gift for verbally re-creating life.” Rather than write another bloodless screenplay as an employee “of a word/image factory,” she, (like Chawaf) wishes to write “what is hiding in her flesh, under her skin, her bloodstream . . . what will she bring forth? A script that will not be fit for filming? Sexuality, sensuality, viscera [the novel we are reading?] . . . the intimate center of all this physical excitement . . . She is headed beyond the possibility of representation . . . Olga verbalizes the pre-verbal, the regressive . . . She murmurs the moan of love and it becomes a language, a theater for the senses, verbal matter of the body, rhetoric of the mucous membranes, of mucus, of orgasm” (8–9). In sharp contrast to Charles’s destructive artistic project, Olga wishes to give voice to “the story of a return to the most sensitive

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most sensual in us, to an orgasm, a poetics of the body” (10). But “the round full words” Olga wishes to compose are “engulfed by the void of [her] life” (8) and, unable to concentrate, she finds herself “carried away by the impatient desire to meet someone” (8) and by the recognition that “I do not dare live” (12). The first extended account of the murder itself, rather than its aftermath, occurs immediately following a chapter in which Charles explains to Olga his artistic project, which contrasts markedly with her own writing: “a massive funereal dictionary.” I tear pages out of a dictionary and with scalple and awl I perforate: I cut the letters away from the words. I gash the syllables, I split up citations into twos, threes. I  slash meaning . . . Nothing circulates through the words anymore. They’re dead . . . Th is damned language, this bitch, this damned slut who always refuses to put out. She’ll give herself only to take herself back. We have to slit her throat, drink her blood, eat her guts. (17, 19)

As he eviscerates Esther’s body, so Charles tries to put language to death— to stop its teeming generativity—a connection that Chawaf makes explicit. Charles “lacerate[s] a dictionary with a knife the way a matricide would the face, the breasts . . . There will be no more words, no more speech, no more writing, only that part of the body, the uterus, the vagina, the hole fi lled by the penis carving into the flesh, into organic life” (18–19). As Theweleit puts it, “The linguistic process is inherently a process of production, one that appropriates and transforms reality. What is striking about [the male writers he analyzes] is that the particles of reality taken up in their language lose any life of their own. They are deanimated and turned into dying matter. They are forced to relinquish their life to a parasitic, linguistic onslaught, which seems to find ‘pleasure’ in the annihilation of reality” (215). Her body “twisted with privation” (19), Olga is thus primed to seek redemption, ready to see in Charles the solution to her problems. Appropriately, Chawaf haloes their first meeting in the park with romantic clichés of the love-at-first-sight variety. Olga is “dumbstruck” at the sight of Charles. A force of nature like the wind, he takes her out of herself and it is immediately “too late for contrary winds to prevent [her] from holding back the current which is throwing her against pan” (13). Chawaf also makes explicit

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that the attraction Olga feels arises from her own projection of this romantic script on to the other:  Suddenly she is becoming unraveled, distorted, transfigured into the alchemy of a fantasy text where desire, instead of the mind, invents muscles, bones, larynx, the feverishness of a real human being. A two-headed bisexual androgyne conceived out of he and another, a chimera, enlarged, increased tenfold by the unlived life that this woman represses, abruptly sprung out of a chance meeting, on an evening of this beginning of the world when Olga, out for a walk in the park, projects suddenly onto this stranger too many dreams, too many impossible . . . What is his name? (14–15)

Chawaf stresses that Olga leaves herself vulnerable to the appeal of a man such as Charles, and, as in any good horror story, dark forebodings accompany this first meeting. While Charles pontificates about his artistic philosophy, Olga hears a message that “comes from another place which she is ready to visit without needing to name it, because, if we were to define our inner confusion, we would never be able to give into it, we would be aghast, we would not, of our own free will, step across some zones which will make us come face-to-face with the irrational, the passion which uses our appetite for life to justify the lure of death” (31–2). Despite these premonitions, Olga “goes ahead” and “meets him, just as he wants her, outside of the social world, outside of herself, outside of the law, as though already she were giving up life and as though she were letting herself fall under the drug of an imaginary salvation [redemption] . . . Everything in her is clogged with desire; she is a scrap of physiological body disfigured, congested with insatiability, by sexual obsession” (66). Charles’s spirit penetrates Olga “slowly, very slowly, with greed,” while Olga feels as though “she is dying like an animal” (66). As Olga moves deeper into the deadly tango with Charles, she is literally being drained of life as she grows more and more isolated and fearful of the power of her own desire. She avoids the sensuousness of the lush summer and instead shuts herself away, “no longer venturing out for air and light” in order to “expel the sap that summer was breathing into her limbs” and in “fear of her own body . . . that was on the verge of toppling into the ravine . . . this abyss which is, for a woman, her own feverish, gaping sexuality” (72). Olga begins to feel “as if she is going mad,” and—in a perfect metaphor for

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her enthrallment—feels that within “itself her body was spying on its veins, arteries, lymph glands, capillaries, grooved, smooth muscles, the anatomy of its heartbeat, prisoners of her fear to love Charles . . . to love him enough to suffer, to die” (72). Soon, Olga no longer ventures out at all but waits “for the moment when she would meet Charles.” Her writing—whether film script or novel—begins to “seem pointless,” and, under Charles’s tutelage, reality itself begins to seem “pathetic” (76). Eventually, she regresses “to some primitive state” until “no longer able to disentangle madness from despair,” and in a desperate effort to secure Charles’s love, “[she] felt ready to plunge . . . into the cruelty, into the pain of this prehistory of our body where she was being led back by a retarded man, a sick man, a survivor of this barbarism that is hidden from us by our conscience and, suicidal, Olga [begins to let] her guard down with Charles in a muted violence” (76). Despite her keen awareness of the danger that she knows herself to be in, she shows no sign of leaving the “relationship.” In the final chapter, which deliberately echoes her first meeting with Charles, Olga has “no more words for thinking, for writing,” and, in a haunting image that foreshadows her probable fate, she feels that her obsession with Charles “is like a hemmorage draining you of your blood” (95). She has become Charles’s “funereal dictionary,” and the last words of the novel are hers: “She repeats to herself, closing her eyes so she will not see him anymore, ‘I love him, I love him’ ” (97). The final chapter of Redemption provides no resolution to the deadly stalemate between Olga and Charles: While she longs to redeem him through her “reverence for triumphant life,” he “was picturing himself strangling Olga Vassilieff ” (96). And, significantly, the narrator offers only questions, a grim diagnosis, and heartfelt lamentations over what seems to be the inevitable course of our human history:  What torment . . . seizes the body, prevents it from being able to tell the difference between life and death, hate and love, a being, any being, from the first one . . . Oh! This subconscious and unforgettable impression that the dark viscera, which held us, has imprinted on all feelings, on all the emotions of our backward sexuality left lingering in instinct. Oh! The violence of human history, these generations that nothing will enlighten, that nothing will civilize, our remorseless savagery! This intermingling of the animal and the human in our species, beyond any light, beyond any conscience . . . And this drive, oh! Nothing but this drive to create and to destroy. (96)

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Why approach abjection? In a preliminary summary of his findings in Volume I  of Male Fantasies, Theweleit directly addresses his rationale for studying fascism: “We need to understand and combat fascism not because so many fell victim to it, not because it stands in the way of the triumph of socialism, not even because it might ‘return again,’ but primarily because as a form of reality production that is constantly present and possible under determinate conditions, it can, and does, become our production. . . . [I]t becomes apparent that fascism is a current reality whenever we try to establish what kinds of reality present-day malefemale relations produce” (220–1). Theweleit rejects psychoanalytic models of a universal biological basis for aggression, the oedipal complex, or the absolute difference between male and female sexuality in favor of a socially based relational theory that brings his analysis of fascism very close to home. According to Theweleit, “A man doesn’t have ‘this’ sexuality and a woman ‘that’ one. If it seems possible today to make empirical distinctions between male and female sexuality, that only proves that male-female relations of production in our culture have experienced so little real change for such a long time that structures have arisen whose all-pervasiveness tempts us into regarding them as specific to sex” (221). Under current conditions, Theweleit argues, “it is appropriate to understand the sexuality created by, and active within, [patriarchal social] relations as a sexuality of the oppressor and the oppressed . . . The sexuality of the patriarch is less ‘male’ than it is deadly, just as that of the subjected woman is not so much ‘female’ as suppressed, devivified” (221–2). Chawaf almost certainly would agree with Theweleit’s assessment of the dangers arising from our current mode of reality-production, as she dramatizes it in Redemption. Through the figure of Charles, she demonstrates how the pathological fear of and desire for fusion with the (m)other generates lifedestroying realities that, in their extremity, are indistinguishable from those modes operating under fascism. As Chawaf makes clear in her interview with Alice Jardine, she writes in the hope that symbolizing and working through these life-destroying modes will help them to evolve and “generate life to avert misfortune.” Theweleit also stresses the importance of conceiving of fascism not as “something alien and opposed to the individual self,” and he quotes Walter

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Benjamin’s advice in this matter. “It is not enough,” Benjamin cautions, “simply to know the thing you wish to destroy; to complete the test you have to have felt it” (226). In her foreword to Male Fantasies, Barbara Ehrenreich comments on just this aspect of Theweleit’s unflinchingly direct approach to the subject of fascism and distinguishes it from other “less disconcerting” approaches to the subject. We set out to read about fascism in a hardheaded, instrumental frame of mind . . . [W]e approach the subject of fascist men with the mind-set of a public health official: We want to get near to (the toxin or the protofascists) in order to get as far away as possible. And that, unfortunately for the composure of the reader, is exactly what Klaus Theweleit will not let us do. He looks too close and consequently draws us in too far . . . There are other, far less disconcerting, ways to approach the study of fascism. There are liberal sociological theories of totalitarianism; there are Marxist theories of fascism as the inevitable outcome . . . of the course of capital accumulation . . . [T]here are psychoanalytic theories . . . in which fascism tends to become representational, symbolic of the displacement of something else. (x–xi)

All of these theories allow readers a way to distance themselves from the unthinkable and to cast the protofascists Theweleit studies into the realm of the “inhuman” other. Erenreich is unnerved because Theweleit forces us to acknowledge “the jarring—and ultimately horrifying—proposition that the fascist . . . is doing what he wants to do,” that “acts of fascist terror spring from irreducible human desire for the production of death” (xi–xii), a conclusion that echoes Chawaf’s statements concerning the patriarchal culture in which we are living. The kind of discomfort that Erenreich describes in reading Male Fantasies is even more extreme and unrelenting in Redemption. Chawaf’s use of poetic incantatory language, shifting and radically unstable points of view that interpenetrate, radical temporal, and spatial dislocations, and other aspects of her close-up method position the reader in excruciatingly close proximity to horrifying and previously unrepresentable realms. For all his primary source material, Theweleit tells about the freiscorpsmen from the distance of a historian—much as he tries to collapse this distance through his extensive use of photographs, letters, diaries, and other archival sources. While both see as pathological the power relations implicit in contemporary modes of

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hetero-patriarchy, Chawaf’s use of innovative nonrealist narrative techniques and an extremely intimate close-up method force the reader not simply to contemplate Charles’s life-destroying behavior but also to inhabit the state of abjection it so relentlessly explores, to “feel it,” in Benjamin’s words. Of course, Kristeva privileges the psychoanalyst as the person best prepared to “unmask the buried logic of our anguish without evasion or repression” (208). By demystifying the religious, political, and moral authority through which abjection has been traditionally contained, a psychoanalytic approach, according to Kristeva, comes closest to the goal of “x-raying horror without making capital out of its power” (210). While Kristeva contends that all literature is “abjection’s privileged signifier,” certain types of avantgarde writing practices most directly engage abjection through their emphasis on a rhetoric of the pure signifier and the expression of bodily drives that challenge dominant orders as they probe the limits of identity and meaning. Drawing on the work of Joyce, Mallarme, and especially Celene, Kristeva celebrates these writers who are daring enough to situate themselves “on the fragile border where identities do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, alerted, abject” (207). And she calls for all dissident intellectuals to follow in this tradition by engaging in “a ruthless and irreverent dismantling of the workings of discourse, thought, and existence” (Becker-Leckrone, 113). However Kristeva’s avant-garde call to psycho-, socio-, and textual revolution resonates quite differently when considered in relation to Charles’s “ruthless and irreverent [not to mention literal] dismantling of the workings of [Esther’s] discourse, thought, and existence.” Th is represents a fundamental difference between Kristeva’s attempt to approach abjection through a kind of poetic psychoanalysis and Chawaf ’s embodied feminist theory fiction in which the reader is immersed intimately in relation to abjection. In fact, in many ways Chawaf ’s depiction of Charles’s revolutionary artistic project to unmake language, “to write a manuscript that can be seen but can’t be read,” a “massive funereal dictionary,” could be considered an ironic commentary on the intellectual avant-garde in 1970s France, in particular the group surrounding the journal Tel Quel, which included both Kristeva and her husband, Phillpe Sollers. As Leslie Hill notes in her history of the French avant-garde during these years, throughout

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the 1970s, Tel Quel remained a major focus for the elaboration of a theoretical, political, and literary avant-garde project whose “imperative was to challenge and transgress all existing philosophical, political, social, literary, and sexual taboos” (150). Chawaf ’s refusal simply to celebrate avant-garde transgressions and her emphasis on the deadly consequences arising from specific abject revolutionary states rewrites the universalist focus of Kristeva’s theory of abjection and insistently politicizes it. Chawaf accomplishes this not just by refusing to aestheticize violence and horror, as Kristeva also admonishes, but by insistently symbolizing a historically specific type of violence and elaborating the pathology of self-other relations at the heart of certain contemporary heterosexual relations so that our culture might evolve beyond them.

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Suspending Gender: The Politics of Indeterminacy in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body

Written on the Body is an almost painfully intimate first-person account of a grand passion, of love won and lost. It is related by an ungendered, unnamed, sexually plural, spatially dislocated, temporally unmoored, and—for a novel called Written on the Body—curiously disembodied narrator. Despite its unusual unlocateable narrator trapped and floating in language, the story told in the novel is a simple, even stereotypical, one. The narrator falls in love with a beautiful married woman, Louise, who, five months into the relationship, is revealed to have cancer. The narrator strikes a bargain with Louise’s husband, Elgin, a doctor, who agrees to treat Louise only if the narrator abandons her. The narrator decamps for Yorkshire, without telling Louise, returns to London after several months in a futile search for her, and, defeated, returns north to face an uncertain future. Sections of the novel are meant to suggest that the narrative action unfolds in a present moment—most notably the book’s last few paragraphs. However, the bulk of the novel’s events are retrospectively narrated, with an often-confusing relationship between chronological and narrated time, distant and more recent recollections. They also are fi ltered through the narrator’s memory of such things as his/her previous (failed) relationships and colored by his/her efforts to convince the reader that the relationship inspiring this story is a singular one, is not like all the many others. The text is thus motivated by a logically impossible effort to positively demonstrate a negative, and the narrator’s ardent professions about this singular love occur

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most dramatically in the absence of the beloved (“Why is the measure of love loss”). The simultaneously present and curiously absent position of the narrator is only one of the many paradoxes that pervade this text, and the (il)logic of negation conditions and radically destabilizes the text as a whole. These include its extremes of narrative, linguistic, and generic self-consciousness, undercut by the narrator’s frequent lack of self-awareness or its paradoxical stance that rigorously critiques and mocks the clichés and conventions of romantic love while remaining in complicity with them. “I don’t want to reproduce, [the conventions of romance] but to make something completely new,” the narrator tells us, itself a futile task in this postmodern moment of the already-said (108). As is the case with Kathy Acker’s work, Winterson is often cited as exemplifying features associated with literary postmodernism, including, in her case, highly self-conscious metafictions that foreground the constructed nature of reality and history, the instabilities of language, the fluidity of identity, including gender identity; citational practices of intertextuality, parody, irony, pastiche; deconstructions of entrenched cultural binaries and hierarchies; techniques that problematize narrative coherence and closure in favor of circularity, fragmentation, and indeterminacy. Her fift h novel, Written on the Body, appears to be largely a realist text set in a contemporary moment— a striking departure from the two fantastic historiographic metafictions that immediately precede it in Winterson’s oeuvre, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. But it also is an experimental novel of the most literal sort. In it, Winterson poses the questions as to what would be the effects of a love story narrated by an ungendered, sexually polymorphous persona, and what would be the consequences of such a narrative stance for this most ideologically freighted of genres? Does Winterson’s experiment succeed in liberating the love story from the constraints of gendered and heterosexualized scripts? Does the text effectively deconstruct clichés about love, gender, and specific male or female codes of behavior? Does rendering gender indeterminate and proliferating sexual categories—as the novel so painstakingly tries to do— necessarily prove transgressive in a more general sense? What is the critical force of a radically indeterminate text as it intersects with politicized reading practices and expectations and the identity categories they inevitably mobilize and foreclose?

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Because the narrator’s sexual and gender identity are so consistently rendered undecideable, and because he/she comes to us through a series of masks, roles, performances, and quotations, Written on the Body, among its other effects, dislocates readers from easy or consistent identification or disidentification with the gendered positions held out by conventional romance plots—whether heterosexual or lesbian. At the same time, the extreme intimacy created by the novel’s first-person point of view combined with the intimate confessional nature of the narrator’s descriptions, invite, even demand, our sympathy—if not always our identification or approval. As is true of the narrator, we are positioned within a pastiche of narrative styles, points of view, temporal and bodily dislocations, and continuous deferrals of coherent identifications and asked to hold them all as virtual possibilities rather than as logical contradictions. Still, it is difficult not to be seduced and dazzled by the narrator’s heartfelt lyricism, arch self-mockery, and sheer linguistic inventiveness, as difficult as it is to disbelieve in Louise’s physical reembodiment at the end of the novel (as I am always reminded when I teach the text). In fact, though, the novel ends at a moment of perfect undecideability, confounding our ability to close it—to know how the love story ends. Having returned from the unsuccessful trip to London to locate Louise, a trip in which he/she hallucinates Louise’s phantom around every corner, the narrator reenters the Yorkshire cottage in defeat to find his/her friend, Gail Right, as at home as an old sofa (as the narrator might say). After recounting his/her failure and deep regret, the narrator presents a two-paragraph description of Louise standing in the kitchen door—which may or may not be materially true—and one paragraph describing the emotional impact of her supposed reembodiment: “The walls are exploding . . . I stretch out my hand and reach the corner of the world . . . I don’t know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields” (190). The novel’s expansive explosive final paragraph gives the illusion that we are experiencing directly the precise moment to which the entire novel has been leading, a reunion with Louise. In fact, Written on the Body ends suspended between presence and absence, reality and fantasy projection, at a point of what Brian McHale calls ontological flickering. The novel’s final pages reflect negation, loss, distance, and disembodiment and, simultaneously, reunion, affirmation, and presence. Perhaps this is a moment of perfect

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desire—whether it describes a fantasy projection on the narrator’s part or not—and thus a fitting end for a postmodern love story as well as a fitting “resolution” to the narrator’s central dilemma: how to reconcile the passion of new love (the “holiday”) with the comfort of a long-term relationship (the “homecoming”). While the novel may be impossible to close definitively, the ending nonetheless does act as a “culmination” of sorts for the many kinds of indeterminacy, undecideability, ambiguity, and contradiction (strategies of the negative) that pervade it, of which the narrator’s undecideable gender is only the most notorious. In this way, Winterson, paradoxically, both proves the remarkable tenacity of inherited scripts and, at the same time, remakes the love story as a site of paradox, as a virtual experience of limits.

Reading indeterminacy While many critics of Written on the Body have focused on the consequences of the narrator’s indeterminate gender and plural sexuality, Winterson takes pains to render the text indeterminate in many other ways. These strategies include—most overtly—self-conscious statements on the narrator’s part about the unreliability of memory as well as his/her recognition of his/ her own emotional unreliability. How can the narrator (not to mention the reader) be assured of his/her own long-term fidelity to Louise when the physical relationship has ended at five months and the narrator has never had a relationship lasting longer than six (“I’m addicted to the first 6 months,” he/ she tell us [79])? Of course, first-person narration always raises the possibility of the narrator’s unreliability. In Written on the Body, this fact is compounded by direct statements of self-doubt on the narrator’s part along with contradictory statements that suggest his/her unreliability, or, at the very least, lack of selfawareness. For example, early on in his/her account of the relationship with Louise, the narrator wonders, “Have I got it wrong, this hesitant chronology” (15), and shortly thereafter directly addresses the reader: “You’re wondering if I can be trusted as a narrator” (24). Directly accused of fabrication by Inge, a former lover (“You’re making it up”), the narrator wonders, “Am I,” and later asks him/herself, “Did I invent Louise? Is memory the more real place?” In a

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lengthy description of Louise’s husband, Elgin, the narrator states, “I can’t be relied upon to describe Elgin properly,” a statement perhaps meant to reassure the audience of his/her veracity in all other matters but one that has the opposite effect (92). That the narrator lacks self-awareness—is even emotionally obtuse—is reinforced by discrepancies between his/her accounts of previous relationships and the reported reactions of other characters in the text. He/she may resist being “read” and known by Louise and others (“never unfold too much, tell the whole story”), but, in fact, the novel suggests that he/she is something of an open book. For instance, early in the novel when the narrator is ending the relationship with Jacqueline (to take up with Louise), she asks “What are you going to do?” to which the narrator responds, “It’s for us to decide that. It’s a joint decision.” Astutely, Jacqueline responds, “You mean we’ll talk about it and you’ll do what you want anyway” (58). Later in the text, a friend, trying to console the narrator over the loss of Louise, remarks insightfully “At least your relationship with Louise didn’t fail—it was the perfect romance,” because it was unfinished and therefore capable of the narrator’s infinite idealization of it (187). Most obviously, the narrator’s relationship with the appropriately named Gail Right is focused around her truth-telling, her kindness to the narrator, and her insights into his/her relationship with Louise. Unlike the narrator, Gail is aware of her own flaws; she is the essence of comfort and as insistently embodied as Louise is ethereal. “I know,” she tells the narrator, “that you think I’m a fat old slag who just wants a piece of something firm and juicy. Well, you’re right. But I’d do my share of the work. I’d care for you and be a good friend to you and see you right. I’m not a sponger, I’m not a tart. I’m a good-time girl whose body has blown” (149). Gail also becomes the agent of the narrator’s dawning awareness that perhaps she/he has been wrong in his/ her actions toward Louise. “You made a mistake,” Gail tells the narrator. “You shouldn’t have run out on her . . . She wasn’t a child . . . You didn’t give her a chance to say what she wanted. You left . . . The trouble with you is that you want to live in a novel” (158–9). Later, near the end of the novel, as the narrator confesses his/her failure to find Louise, he/she wonders, “Did I invent her?” Gail replies, “ ‘No, but you tried to . . . She wasn’t yours for the making,” an assessment that also calls into question the ethics of the narrator’s relationship with Louise (189).

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The gap between the narrator’s self-presentation and others’ assessments of him/her is responsible for a good deal of the humor and pathos (sometimes bathos) in the novel. Winterson further emphasizes the narrator’s complex unreliability and instability through the text’s restless associative structure, motivated as it is by a futile desire to recapture the absence at its core: the body of Louise. This mimics the structure of memory itself, which is notoriously unreliable as it selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies people and events from the past. At times, it is simply a visual or aural association that triggers the narrator’s memory. For instance, the narrator glances at a sea shell and this reminds him/her of Louise’s “shell of a marriage” to Elgin (59), which, several pages later transforms into shell as a metaphor for the physical intimacy of lovemaking. At other times the narrator’s musings—typically about past lovers— become long digressions, which have the effect of delaying the story we most want to hear: the account of the narrator’s relationship with Louise, suggesting that the narrator is resisting turning Louise into a memory, a story to recount like all the many others. For example, early in the text the narrator recalls renting a room with Louise, “to try to be together for more than dinner or a night or a cup of tea behind the library” (13). This memory leads to an elaborate digression on the nature of marriage and fidelity (complete with an imagined dramatic scenario) and the relationship with Bathsheba (who has cheated on the narrator) (14–17). After returning briefly to the story of Louise in the rented room, the narrator again spins away to the stories of former girlfriends, one who liked to make love in unusual places, and, one, Inge, an anarcha-feminist who draws the narrator into her extreme plans to blow up a men’s bathroom. These abrupt shifts in time and place also make it difficult to know where we are in the recounting, hard to separate Louise from all the others, even though this difference is precisely what the narrator is so insistent that we see. The unstable, imprecise—even duplicitous—nature of language itself compounds the narrator’s difficult and painful self-assessment (and ours of him/ her) as the narrator tries to build up positions of authority in language, which language itself calls into question. In one of the novel’s most significant scenes (and, interestingly, one of the longest uninterrupted reported interchanges with Louise in the whole book), the narrator declares after their first night

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making love, “Louise, I Iove you,” to which she replies, “Don’t say that now. Don’t say it yet. You might not mean it” (52). The narrator remembers him/ herself “protesting with a stream of superlatives, beginning to sound like an advertising hack. Naturally this model had to be the best the most important, the wonderful even the incomparable . . . The more I underlined it the hollower it sounded” (52). After confessing to feeling emotionally out of control (again), Louise replies, “So you try and gain control by telling me you love me. That’s a territory you know, isn’t it? That’s romance and courtship and whirlwind. I don’t believe you [don’t want control].” The narrator, looking back on it from the present (from the physical absence of Louise), has to admit that Louise was right to mistrust him/her at the time—that he/she had been lying [to him/herself, to us as readers, to Louise]. “If in doubt be sincere. That’s a pretty little trick of mine . . . I regretted telling her those stories about my girlfriends. I had wanted to make her laugh and she had laughed at the time [of the early friendship]. Now I had strewn our path with barbs. She didn’t trust me. As a friend I had been amusing. As a lover I was lethal” (53). The narrator, a proper modernist, knows that “a precise emotion,” his/her singular love for Louise, “demands a precise expression [le mot juste].” Yet he/she is frequently forced to admit that linguistically he/she is “trapped in a cliché every bit as redundant as my parent’s roses round the door” and to wonder “why . . . I  collude in this misuse of language” (15). The more this clever wordsmith and translator, this linguist of love, struggles to be truthful and precise, the more he/she is forced to admit that “I love you” is always a quotation, always filled with the history and intentions of others. And if every utterance—even the most heartfelt and authentic—always arises from the already said, one can never be new or original, and the narrator will never be able to recover in language the singularity of (his/her love for) Louise. The narrator’s modernist desire also suggests a properly postmodern performance anxiety, a sense of inadequacy and belatedness in the face of the weight of inherited literary tradition. Of course, the singular ineffability of love combined with the overwhelming need to express it in language has been a literary trope for centuries. As Carol Siegel astutely puts it, this paradox suggests that love, to the degree that it remarks the failure of representation, is perhaps one of the earliest manifestations of our own modernity (Siegel, email exchange, April 12, 2007).

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The narrator’s extreme self-consciousness and lack of faith in his/her ability to use language with precision—how can I know that I mean what I say— mirrors the reader’s confusion over the narrator’s veracity, which, combined with our frequent spatial and temporal displacement, causes the narrative itself to become epistemologically unstuck in textual space—the infinite regress of the negative. This pervasive sense of instability is reinforced again by the narrator’s thematic tacking between that which is deemed real, authentic, sincere, present, and singular on the one hand and that which is considered a sham, inauthentic, reproduced, translated, simulated, and virtual on the other hand. For instance, shortly after leaving London and arriving in Yorkshire, the grief-stricken narrator ruminates on the fundamental characteristics of living things and wonders about the difference between love and reproduction. After stating that he/she “has no desire to reproduce,” an activity associated with Queen Anne style furniture and the model nuclear family, the narrator declares “I don’t want a model, I  want the full-scale original. I don’t want to reproduce I want to make something entirely new” (108). Yet the more these seemingly secure oppositions are asserted, the more they blur into one another. For example, in one of the several accounts of his/ her relationship with Bathsheba, the narrator recounts, “Telling the truth, she said, was a luxury we could not afford and so lying became a virtue . . . Telling the truth was hurtful and so lying became a good deed” (17). In the early days of the relationship with Louise, the narrator recalls that he/she and Louise “were in a virtual world where the only taboo was real life. But in a true virtual world [an oxymoron?] I  could have gently picked up Elgin and dropped him forever from the frame” (98). This comment directly follows the narrator’s lengthy speculation on the future of love in an age of virtual technology in which As far as your sense can tell you are in a real world . . . of your own choosing . . . You will be able to try out a Virtual life with a Virtual lover. You can go into your Virtual house and do Virtual housework, add a baby or two, and even find out if you’d rather be gay. Or single. Or straight . . . And sex? . . . Courtesy of the fibreoptic network the virtual epidermis will be as sensitive as our own outer layer of skin. (97)

Although the narrator strenuously rejects this vision, in fact isn’t virtuality more real than representation via language because it more convincingly

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creates the fiction of true embodiment—what the narrator most longs for? Wouldn’t virtuality as a mode of representation and experience convey more of the illusion of presence, be closer to the real thing the narrator so desires (here Louise’s body)? Where and what is the real thing in love? This commentary may also reflect the narrator’s postmodern anxiety over the waning of print culture in an age of new media as well as the belatedness of the very genre in which he/she is writing. Whatever else it is, Written on the Body is a virtuoso performance of gendered indeterminacies at the level of behaviors/roles, the literary conventions of romance—both heterosexual and homosexual—and the metaphoric level of language. Most obviously, the narrator relates his/her relationships with both women and men (although the former outnumber the latter). Although unnamed he/she is referred to variously as Lothario (a character from Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent who seduces and betrays the female lead) but also Alice (in Wonderland, B.  Toklas?), a boy scout, Lauren Bacall, and Christopher Robin from Winnie the Pooh. Analogously, in some of the relationships the narrator recounts, he/she occupies a more passive traditionally female role (e.g., “I was Judith’s bottom”; Bathsheba gives the narrator an emotional clap). In others the narrator occupies more conventionally male ones—the lover as a backdoor man or a “tweedy biggame hunter.” In fact, these romantic relationships seem determined less by sexual object choice, the conventions of gendered behavior, or an alignment between gender and sexual behavior than by the narrator’s ongoing vacillation between the desire for sexual excitement and risk (“a voluptuous exile freely chosen” in search of “the never-sleep non-stop almighty orgasm”) and the desire for the comfort and emotional safety of a secure relationship. For instance, after relating the story of intense lovemaking with a married woman—and her return to her husband—the narrator concludes, “such things lead the heart-sore to the Jacqueline’s of this world but the Jacqueline’s of this world lead to such things. Is there no other way? Is happiness always a compromise?” (74). In the relationship with Louise the narrator believes he/she has found both holiday and homecoming. And while some critics deplore the apparently stereotypical nature of the relationship (the allure of the beautiful dying woman, the power imbalance suggested in the narrator’s metaphors

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of exploration and conquest) in fact, Louise is also insistently bi-gendered in her behaviors (if not in her physicality). She is the aggressor in initiating the relationship with the narrator (who states “I wanted you to possess me” [51]) and the narrator refers to her using masculine metaphors as often as feminine ones. She is a knight in shining armor (123), cocked and ready to fire (136), a Roman Cardinal (to the narrator’s choir boy) (136). In relation to Louise, the narrator is a child (80), an anchorite, and, in an amazingly gender indeterminate description, “Lover and child, virgin and roué . . . I was as shy as an unbroken colt. I had Mercutio’s swagger . . . I quivered like a schoolgirl” (81–2). As a man of science, Louise’s husband, Elgin, is both powerful and authoritative— enough to make the narrator abandon Louise—and feminized (his small stature, his passivity, his penchant for masochism) and we are told that Louise marries him because she knows she can control him (34). The narrator’s relationship with Elgin—which is extensively described—might be read as a power struggle (complete with a physical fight) between men for Louise’s own good. Or, in leaving Louise, the narrator could be put in a feminized position of selfless renunciation. Or his/ her leaving Louise could be read as a failure of commitment and an act of cowardice—perhaps more stereotypically male. The novel contains multiple references to mirroring and twinship between the narrator and Louise—suggesting an image of perfect mutuality from a lesbian romance. But the narrator also has what can only be described as a fear of castration dream the night before he/she first makes love to the powerful Louise, suggesting a Freudian fear of the devouring woman (40). As I  hope these descriptions begin to suggest, Winterson takes great pains simultaneously to mobilize and prevent stereotypical identifications or disidentifications on the reader’s part, to suspend gender as determinate. The various permutations of gendered behaviors and sexual desires that circulate throughout the text force the reader to remain flexible as we are asked to position and reposition ourselves in relation to the narrator’s desire and our own. These positions foreground the radically unstable nature of gender, the multiplicity of ways that sexual desire may be mobilized and expressed, and the fact that desire itself always exceeds the categories we have to express it.

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Reading indeterminately? In her article on Winterson’s version of what she calls the “lesbian postmodern,” Laura Doan suggests that in her fiction Winterson politicizes the postmodern cultural domain and postmodern textual strategies “by collapsing binaries and boundaries, demanding the reconfiguration of gender constructions and deregulating heteronormativity through the genesis of pluralistic sexual identities” (Doan, 1994a, 141). In so doing, Doan argues, Winterson “mobilizes and animates a feminist political strategy of resistance, forcing and enforcing new mappings of the social and cultural order and providing alternatives to the weary boundaries and binaries of heterosexual patriarchal capitalist culture” (154). Thus, she concludes, Winterson enacts in fiction Judith Butler’s theoretical call for “a thoroughgoing appropriation and redeployment of the categories of identity themselves, not merely to contest ‘sex’ but to articulate the convergence of multiple sexual discourses at the site of identity in order to render that category permanently problematic” (Butler, 1993, 128). While Doan does not include Written on the Body in her analysis of Winterson’s sexing of the postmodern, the above quotations suggest an even more precise description of the strategies at play in this novel, if not the spectacular consequences that Doan sees arising from such strategies. In Doan’s account, the lesbian postmodern functions theoretically-as a site of radical disruption of all attempts to fi x its meaning definitively. In practice, when confronted by the novel’s radical indeterminacies many feminist critics of the novel work to close down rather than leave circulating the indeterminacies of the text, a move that effectively reinstalls boundaries and binaries in the act of calling for and celebrating their dissolution. If identity is rendered “permanently problematic,” are politicized reading practices—especially those that depend on varieties of identification, naming, and closure—still possible? More specifically, why do critics who acknowledge Winterson’s radical questioning of the stability of gender and sexuality in Written on the Body so consistently compel these identities to cohere under the name “lesbian”? Because Winterson has always been an out lesbian author, and because the award-winning Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was self-consciously autobiographical, there has been a strong critical investment in foregrounding both autobiographical and lesbian approaches to her subsequent texts. This is not

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withstanding Winterson’s own later rejection of the term lesbian writer and her insistence that she is a writer who happens to be a lesbian. In “The Erupting Lesbian Body,” written just two years after the publication of Written on the Body, Cath Stowers aims to reclaim a consistent lesbian aesthetic that she finds running throughout Winterson’s work, thereby counteracting approaches that, according to her, have bracketed consideration of Winterson’s lesbianism. While Stowers is careful to stress that her approach constitutes only one possible reading of this text, she moves quickly from an acknowledgment of the narrator’s gender ambiguity and polysexuality to an assertion that this narrator fulfills “distinctly lesbian aims” (Stowers, 91). Stowers charts a trajectory in the narrative, in which the narrator moves from “masculinist” models of conquest, possession, and penetration to “radical relations of reciprocity” with Louise (93). The ending of the novel (and the reembodiment of Louise) in particular portrays the “erupting of lesbian desire” as the excess in patriarchal heterosexual narratives, a desire that “detonates male paradigms, rupturing male models of travel, gender, desire, and fracturing patriarchal systems of signification” (98). In establishing her reading, Stowers focuses on the rejection of a particular set of behaviors on the narrator’s part—desires for conquest and possession— and the advancement of others (equality in the relationship with Louise) in order to establish the narrator as lesbian. Similarly, in her careful narratological reading of the novel, Ute Kauer argues that Winterson’s goal in Written on the Body is to “deconstruct clichés about love, gender, and specific male or female behavior” (Kauer, 45). Yet, while she notes the narrator’s embrace of such roles as the cool male hero, she feels it necessary to “prove” that the narrator actually is female. In making this case, she cites as evidence the facts that “male” myths are more frequently satirized, ironized, and deconstructed in the text and that the narrator demonstrates more sympathy with women than with men in scenes such as the one in the clap clinic (Kauer, 46–8). Lisa Moore invokes the image of what she dubs the “virtual lesbian” to refer to Winterson’s imagination in her fiction of “a lesbian body without a liberatory political agenda” (Moore, 104). As other critics have done, Moore notes the ways that the text “insists upon a deferral of fi xed sexual identities” through its careful structuring of the narrator’s gender ambiguity (Moore, 105). Yet she insists that the text’s indeterminacy is “accomplished in and through linguistic and representational conventions drawn

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from lesbian culture” (Moore, 109). For instance, in citing the virtual reality passage—which I  argued earlier is meant to suggest an imagination of all sexual and gender possibilities in a future virtual world—Moore nonetheless reduces these possibilities to the lesbian fetish object: the dildo. In a careful reading of an early scene recounting the narrator’s relationship with Inge, the anarcha-feminist, Moore demonstrates the ways in which Winterson codes the narrator as lesbian even as she acknowledges the ways in which Winterson “appropriates the experiences and investments of a wide range of behaviors and identifications, variously gendered and sexualized beings in a structural enactment of Virtual Reality” (Moore, 110). Yet she concludes that this “postmodern pastiche . . . nonetheless allows for the grand romantic obsession of lesbian fiction” (Moore, 110). With her conception of the virtual lesbian, Moore tries to reconcile Winterson’s postmodern experimentalism and her lesbianism. Nonetheless, she also tends to reinstall the lesbian as a stable identity category even as she acknowledges the bodily moments in Winterson’s work “that don’t add up to recognizable identities,” moments “we [critics] have been trained not to acknowledge” (Moore, 123). Leigh Gilmore directly confronts the ways in which Written on the Body mobilizes and frustrates readerly expectations about how and whether a lesbian author writes a lesbian text. She does so in order to explore what notnaming reveals about gender, sexuality, and the modes of signifying them in fiction. Among other things, Gilmore claims that the novel “provokes anxiety” precisely because what is absent from it is “the signifying chain of identity that presumably corresponds to a material reality in which identity coheres through the progressive, motivated, and linked signification of sex, gender, sexuality” (Gilmore, 123). According to Gilmore, autobiographical readings of the text reduce this dissonance and anxiety by compelling the narrator’s identity to cohere under the name lesbian—a “grid of intelligibility already in place” (128).

What’s indeterminacy got to do with it? In her important article on the “emotional politics” of reading Written on the Body, Lynne Pearce helps to explain some of the critical dissonance and political anxiety generated by the radical indeterminacy of Winterson’s text. She

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notes that “what presents itself as critical and political judgment and discrimination [on the part of critics of the text] is often concealing a far more messy and desperate struggle between text and reader,” a struggle involving “emotional engagements of a quite different order to the readings of texts made out of particular theoretical frameworks and interpretive communities” (Pearce, 1998, 29). Pearce’s article details her own movement from being an enchanted fan in love with Winterson’s writing to being a frustrated and disillusioned one, conveying through her own example “the lengths the reader is prepared to go to protect her relationship with a special text or author” (37). Processes of projection, disavowal, or misreading, while arguably always part of critical practices, are more likely to occur when, as Pearce puts it, “there is something more at stake than simple accuracy or inventiveness of interpretation” (33), the advancement of and personal identification with a particular set of political values for instance. And such processes are even more likely to become evident when a radically indeterminate text is involved that consistently manipulates, frustrates, and accommodates multiple readerly desires and that continually undercuts the grounds for stabilizing any single interpretive stance. In the end, Pearce argues in favor of an interactive process of interpretation between text and critic/reader that allows us to understand the “emotional residue,” which escapes interpretive frameworks found in “the gap between what the reader/critic thinks she is doing and what she actually does” (31). One gap manifested in the above readings is that between a theoretical call for undermining “the sanctity and security of the lesbian as a category of being” (Wiegman, 1994, 5), as Robyn Wiegman puts it, and the continuing political needs for visibility and recognition within lesbian feminist communities. Because Winterson has achieved international acclaim as a writer, critical insistence on naming the lesbian in her texts undoubtedly stands in for larger desires for recognition, among them a desire not to relinquish the public naming of lesbian identities. These practices suggest that part of the emotional residue Pearce describes is the desire called feminism, a desire that causes us to read with an investment in identifying signs of a more liberatory political future and expanding the sites where representations of such a future might be glimpsed. Gilmore suggests that Winterson’s refusal to name and stabilize the signifier lesbian means that the narrator’s identity “persists [only] through and as the

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absence of Louise” (133). The novel is about reading this and other absences generated through its complex resistance to conventions of autobiographical, gendered, and sexual representation, a resistance that pushes the text to the limits of representation itself. This suggests another critical anxiety arising from an encounter with Written on the Body, an anxiety provoked by all limit texts: their refusal of critical mastery. Much of our critical sophistication is undone by such texts. In part, this explains a preference within politicized reading communities for realist works that most easily support practices of identification, clear critique, closure, and particular allegories of reading. Deconstructions of novelistic form and stable identity—including critical identity—can be exhilarating in theory, but psychologically unsettling in practice. Limit texts stand as a reminder of this fact and help to guard against too easy a conflation of theory and its enactment in any single text and too easy an assumption that deconstructions of stable identities always produce utopian outcomes. It’s been said that one of the most important functions of art is its power to make manifest the complexity of our desires in front of works. Pearce’s reading of Written on the Body highlights the emotional residue—her feelings of anger, frustration, and loss—that escapes critical categories, and Moore alludes to moments in the text that don’t cohere into recognizable identities, moments that “we [critics] have been trained not to acknowledge” (123). This suggests that encounters with the novel also leave behind something like a textual residue. While the narrator, in my opinion, fails to capture the singularity of Louise, what Winterson brilliantly captures in the novel is the narrator’s singularity and complexity, a particularity that exceeds the critical categories— including my own—that seek to name and so stabilize and render it typical. I suppose in the end this essay is, in part, a plea for recognition of the value of paradox, indeterminacy, and other strategies of a negative aesthetic. Such a recognition might well be a means of confronting our own feminist nonknowledge, of facing our (not always feminist) desires in the face of limit texts.

What’s loss got to do with it? As I argued in the previous chapter, in Redemption Chawaf enacts a radical critique of the heterosexual romance plot, including its emphasis on love as a personal salvation and redemption, as ideal complementarity between lovers

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(the soul mate), and as a life-affirming pinnacle of one’s existence. Via her efforts to symbolize primal preverbal states, bodily drives, and unconscious affects, Chawaf exposes a chilling gothic anti-romance in which heterosexual relations are figured as sites of deadly pathology, of violent male dominance, and of female erotic submission. In her cautionary tale, Chawaf aims to lay bare these previously unsymbolized abject realms, to bring them to consciousness, and to help them evolve so as to “avert misfortune.” In her deconstruction of the multiple conventions of romance in Written on the Body—whether lesbian, bisexual, or heterosexual—via strategies of parody, intertextuality, contradiction, and modes of radical indeterminacy, Winterson might also be said to have written an anti-romance. This is so despite critical claims that over the course of her career she resuscitates the love plot from postmodern exhaustion and that “love . . . assumes mythopoetic power in her work, functioning as both metaphysical summons and moral imperative” (Keulks, 147–8). Winterson’s anti-romance emphasis perhaps emerges most directly in the narrator’s hipper-than-though condescension toward all long-term relationships (a “saggy armchair of cliches,” “a plate glass window just begging for a brick”), and his/her sustained critique of “the slop-bucket of romance” (21) again, whether these are figured as heterosexual or lesbian. Sonya Andermahr locates Winterson’s critique in Written on the Body in relation to the emergence in the mid-1980s of the subgenre of lesbian anti-romance, “which consciously eschews both the wish-fulfilment fantasies and romantic cliches of the [lesbian romance genre]” and “treats themes largely absent from lesbian feminist discourses including promiscuity and objectification of the love object” (92–3). Winterson’s critique of romance is also strongly evident in the narrator’s ironic, exaggerated, even cartoonish depictions of many of his/her previous relationships. For instance, there is Crazy Frank “who had been brought up by midgets . . . He loved his adopted parents and used to carry them one on each shoulder . . . Frank had the body of the bull, an image he intensified by wearing great gold hoops through his nipples. Unfortunately, he had joined the hoops with a chain of heavy gold links. The effect should have been deeply butch but in fact it looked rather like the handle of a Chanel shopping bag” (92–3). Or, the previously mentioned Inge, the anarcha-feminist, who, being a committed romantic, could not bring herself

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to “blow up beautiful buildings,” drags the narrator into detonating men’s urinals, and for secrecy insists on communicating by carrier pigeon” (21), a farcical send-up of radical feminism. Humorous set-pieces such as these, which occur frequently in the novel, do a good deal to deflect attention away from the fact that Written on the Body is also a sustained meditation on the subject of loss and the process of grieving a lost relation. As such, it displays some of the same strategies for approaching loss that Cha uses in Dictee, such as circular structures and repetition without progression, although of course there are vast differences between the two texts. Not the least of these is that Cha’s is an intergenerational work of mourning a series of collective catastrophes, the multiple dehumanizing losses and traumas at the center of subordinated histories. In comparison, the narrator’s work of mourning Louise’s absence seems somewhat trivial, indulgent, and stereotypical (and this has certainly been one of the critiques of Written on the Body). But, as much as the text’s many types and layers of indeterminacy destabilize narrative and critical certainties, so the narrator’s strategies for relating to absence and the complex poetics of grieving may be seen as part of the negative aesthetic project of Written on the Body. This is, of course, evident from the beginning with the novel’s opening line, “Why is the measure of love, loss?” The narrator attempts to take the measure of his/her life from the perspective of the loss of Louise, to trace the contours of negative space, to limn absence. As the narrator puts it late in the text, “To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it” (155). As I suggested earlier, particularly in the first half of the novel, the narrator persistently uses tactics of digression, deferral, and displacement to delay— even to disavow—a direct confrontation with Louise’s absence. Sometimes these deflections take the form of generic scenarios that critique aspects of the romance plot, such as an excerpt from an imaginary playscript about adultery, complete with detailed stage directions (14–15), or mocking scenarios featuring hapless suburban couples making do with their “sane sensible lives,” or even inclusion of seemingly unrelated topics such as information on

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the biochemistry of molecular docking (61–2). In this last example, we must read a paragraph-long description of a union between a synthetic chemical structure and a protein on a tumor cell before realizing that this elaborate digression is meant to refer metaphorically to the narrator’s physical “docking” with Louise. More frequently, these delaying tactics take the form of detailed accounts of previously failed relationships—from Bathsheba, Jacqueline, Inge, Amy, and Catherine to various unnamed lovers (“I had a girlfriend once”)—that persistently disrupt the narrative’s forward momentum. To take just one of many examples, the night before the narrator first sleeps with Louise, he/she dreams of a former girlfriend, Amy, who leaves “poking out of the letter-box just at crotch level . . . the head of a yellow and green serpent” made of papier-mache with a rat trap in its mouth. Although Amy reassures the narrator that it is meant for her postman who had been “bothering” her, the narrator refuses to enter the house until Amy defangs the trap with a fat leek. Th is fear of castration nightmare leaves the narrator sweating and chilled. It is followed almost immediately by an elaborate fivepage account of the narrator’s relationship with Bathsheba, another strong married woman, who steals the narrator’s self-respect and whose departure emotionally devastates him/her—another expression of the narrator’s fear of loss. Louise’s husband, Elgin, is among the most extravagant sites of deferral via the inclusion of excessive or irrelevant information. He looms large in Written on the Body, perhaps because the narrator depicts Elgin as his/her chief rival. This is reinforced by numerous references to romantic clichés whereby (usually male) rivals compete for and fight over the body of an absent woman, in this case including a spectacular final physical showdown between Elgin and the narrator. I grabbed him by the tie and jammed him against the door. I’ve never had any boxing lessons so I had to fight on instinct and cram his windpipe into his larynx . . . Elgin punched me in the stomach . . . and I slipped on the floor honking like a seal . . . I saw Elgin’s look of complete astonishment as my fists . . . came up in a line of offering under his jaw. Impact. Head snapped back, sick crunch like a meat grinder. Elgin at my feet in foetus position bleeding. He’s making noises like a pig at a trough. (170–1)

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Although this surely is the most spectacular scene concerning Elgin and the narrator, in fact, we learn a great deal of information about Elgin over the course of the novel. For example, we learn that he is raised an Orthodox Jew by immigrant parents, Esau and Sarah, so religiously conservative that they refuse to sell merchandise to Reformed Jews; we are given details about his personality and physical appearance (“small, narrow chested, short-sighted and ferociously clever” [32]); we hear the story of Elgin’s birth and naming, accounts of his courtship and marriage to Louise, the story of Sarah’s death from cancer, and the trajectory of his medical career. The unnecessarily detailed information about a seemingly minor player strikes the reader as even more excessive because it stands in stark contrast to the almost complete lack of information about Louise beyond the fact that she is from Australia, has a degree in Art History, and teaches art part time. Written on the Body unfolds haltingly in a process of constant narrative interruption, temporal delay, affective and symbolic displacement, and other diversionary tactics. In addition, the accumulation of jokey asides, extravagant metaphors, ironic self-lacerations, and amusing stories—who can forget the vivid image of the snake in a mailbox, the detonation of a men’s bathroom, the carrier pigeons, or Frank’s Chanel-bag accessories—threatens to overwhelm the novel. These details function as a kind of protective padding stuffed around and therefore highlighting the absence of Louise. The effects of the narrator’s loss of Louise are also constructed via a sustained emphasis on the discourses, practices, and rituals of mourning—many of them conventionalized. For instance, the novel opens with the ancient trope of nature seeming to reflect and sympathize with the narrator’s grief: “It hasn’t rained for three months. The trees are prospecting underground, sending reserves of roots into the dry ground . . . The grapes have withered on the vine. What should be plump and firm, resisting the touch to give itself in the mouth, is spongy and blistered” (9). On a less elevated plane—and consistent with the novel’s frequent refrain, “It’s the cliché’s that cause the trouble,” are numerous references to greeting-card platitudes (“You’ll get over it,” “Nobody ever died of a broken heart”) and discourses of popular advice books about bereavement (“sleep with a pillow pulled down beside you . . . the pillow will comfort you in the long unbroken hours” [110]; “make sure your house is not a mausoleum, only keep those things that bring you happy positive memories” [154]).

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The narrator also displays a range of negative affects associated with mourning, including self-recrimination, guilt, and self-pity (“wallowing in it; wallowing is sex for depressives” [26]), and naked expressions of loss. Misery is a vacuum. A space without air, a suffocated dead place, the abode of the miserable. Misery is a tenement block, rooms like battery cages, sit over your own droppings, lie on your own fi lth . . . Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you’ll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone’s nightmares come true . . . The miserable millions moving in time without hope. There are no clocks in Misery, just an endless ticking. (183)

These conventionalized discourses and rituals of mourning contrast sharply with what might be thought of as melancholic practices—extreme and obsessional—of incorporating and interring the remains of the lost object of desire as the melancholic subject refuses to acknowledge loss and attempts to preserve its lost object as psychic effects. Melancholic incorporation appears most evident in the much-analyzed “love poem to Louise” that the narrator composes out of the obsessive study of human anatomy he/she undertakes during Louise’s absence. The poem consists of nine sections devoted to systems and parts of the body; each begins with a text book medical description and is followed by the narrator’s sensuous poetic translation, “an imaginative revival of the dead,” a re-membering via a dis-membering of Louise’s body. As is true of other aspects of Winterson’s experiment with representations of gender and sexuality in Written on the Body, this section of the novel has generated conflicting critical reactions. Among those critics who admire Winterson’s attempt to compose a counter-discourse of love and loss, M. Daphne Kutzer favorably compares this section of the novel to Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body in its attempt to “rescue and recreate, re-map the masculinist scientific language of the body” (141), while Heather Nunn reads it as an attempt to revalue the “rituals of defilement that associate women with the abject” (25). In contrast, Susan Onega considers the narrator’s descriptions “as overtly literary and derivative as the earlier sections of her/ his memoirs . . . built on an accumulation of metaphors as dead and patriarchal as the metaphors of science” (17–28), while Antje Lindenmeyer focuses her critique on the narrator’s imaginative exploration of Louise’s body as a “trite metaphor of Woman’s body as a dark continent, passively waiting for

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the male conqueror to penetrate, explore and exploit it” (55– 6). Despite this broad range of contradictory opinions, the love poem to Louise is capable of supporting all of these readings and none of them definitively. Louise’s body is figured as a dark continent to explore—as well as the narrator’s landing strip, clavichord, kitchen, and a juicy olive. The narrator is an explorer, a guard standing sentry, a squire, but also “a creature that feeds at [Louise’s] hand” like a small animal. Among the most problematic descriptions and the one most reflective of a process of melancholic incorporation is the narrator’s self-described “necrophiliac obsession” with the interior of Louise’s body. In the section devoted to the cavities of the human body, the narrator imagines himself/herself as “an archeologist of tombs” excavating and “marking your passageways, the entrances and exists of that impressive mausoleum, your body” (119) and ends with an image of the narrator trapped inside Louise’s body, the Jonah to her whale. The narrator’s desire to re-member Louise, to “embalm you in my memory,” moves into a bizarre extended image of an autopsy in which “the first thing I shall do is to hook out your brain through your accommodating orifices . . . You must be rid of life as I am rid of life. We shall sink together you and I, down into the dark voids where once the vital organs were” (119). This image is followed by one of the completed vivisection: “If I come to you with a torch and a notebook, a medical diagram and a cloth to mop up the mess, I’ll have you bagged neat and tidy. I’ll store you in plastic like chicken livers. Womb, gut, brain, neatly labelled and returned” (120). As I suggested earlier, in her attempt to account for her changing responses to Winterson’s work, Lynne Pearce emphasizes and revalues the “residue” that remains in excess of and supplementary to any particular interpretive paradigm. The pathological process of melancholic incorporation described in the passage above, in which the narrator both dismembers and inters himself/herself within Louise’s body, functions as just such a site of interpretive excess for me. It comes uncomfortably close to the pathology described in Chawaf’s Redemption, including Charles dismemberment of Esther’s body, his desire to rummage in and eat her bloody viscera, and his overwhelming hatred of and desire for all women. This suggests that the context in which we read and interpret experimental works is at least as important as the critical frameworks we bring to bear on them.

6

Becoming-Girl/Becoming-Fly/BecomingImperceptible: Gothic Posthumanism in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel

A subject bent upon enduring in space and time cannot be a subject that wants to pursue power as self-aggrandizement. Braidotti, 176 Lynda Barry is a Filipino-Irish-Norwegian-American cartoonist, playwright, novelist, and teacher who refers to herself as “an image wrangler” (Kirtley, xi). Her works include Ernie Pook’s Comeek, which ran from 1979 to 2008 and enabled Barry to support herself as a cartoonist; The Good Times Are Killing Me, “a feel-bad comedy about race relations,” which appeared as an art exhibit, a novella, and an award-winning play; One Hundred Demons, a scrapbook of comics and collected artifacts from Barry’s life that she calls an “autobifictionalography”; What It Is, a visual kunstleroman/writing workbook/philosophy text; and Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, the subject of this chapter. Barry came of age as an artist during the rise of the underground and alternative comics’ movements, which developed in defiance of the censorship of the Comics Code Authority. Described as “scurrilous, wild and liberating, innovative, radical,” the movement “gave rise to the idea of comics as an acutely personal means of artistic exploration and self-expression” (Hatfield, ix). Barry describes a range of influences from artists in the movement, including R. Crumb (“What R. Crumb gave me was this feeling that you could draw anything”) and Big Daddy Rothe (“Something about

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his embrace of ugliness . . . made me feel freedom”) as well as an eclectic assortment of other writers, artists, and sources that influenced her including Dr. Seuss, Grimms Fairy Tales, hippie music, Peter Maxx, and Ripley’s Believe it or Not (Kirtley, 4). In her scholarly monograph on Barry—the first of its kind—Susan E. Kirtley suggests that “Barry’s identity as a female of Filipino descent sets her apart from many comic artists” (14). Her mixed-race heritage also separated Barry from the Filipino-American community as well as the white lower-class community in which she grew up. Barry consciously embraces this outsider perspective in all of her work and it contributes a great deal to the uniqueness of her vision. As she puts it, “I would rather hang around oddballs and losers because they’re more interesting and they’re always better in bed” (3). In whatever medium, Barry’s work is distinguished by its hilarious and heart-wrenching portrayals of childhood experiences—many of them violent and traumatic—rendered through piercingly accurate depictions of the child’s own point of view, voice, and affective landscape. Critics have especially lauded this aspect of Barry’s work, particularly in relation to Ernie Pooks Comeek. Jeanne Cooper comments, “By retrieving the every day discards of conversation and experience, and mixing in remnants of her personal life, Barry has created a found art of children’s souls, one that can veer from harrowingly poignant to wildly funny and never go off course.” Dave Eggars concurs with Cooper’s assessment. “Her ear for how kids talk . . . is flawless; and her artwork, crude as she chooses it to be, serves her agenda well” (qtd. in Kirtley, 42). The opening of her 1999 prose cartoon, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, is emblematic of Barry’s genius for rendering the child’s voice and vision. Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar system, universe. Once upon a cruddy time behind cruddy Black Cat Lumber on a very cruddy mud road which bubbles up very weird smells that evil genie themselves up through the cruddy dark rain and into the yellow lit-up window of the cruddy top bedroom of a cruddy rental house where a cruddy girl is sitting on a cruddy bed across from her cruddy sister who I WILL KILL IF YOU TOUCH THIS, JULIE, AND IF YOU DO

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I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL KILL YOU, NO MERCY, NO TAKE-BACKS PRIVATE PROPERTY, THIS MEANS YOU, JULIE, YOU! The cruddy girl named Roberta was writing the cruddy book of her cruddy life and the name of the book was called Cruddy. (3)

With its formulaic opening, stagey cinematic zoom-in, thudding cruddy repetition, and hysterical point of view break, this could be any girl’s diary entry, a typical exaggerated howl from the outer reaches of teenage wasteland. But Roberta Rohbeson’s cruddy life is no typical story; instead, she narrates a gory fantastic tale— of child abuse, attempted rape, arson, grand theft, drug-induced mayhem, and multiple grisly murders. Roberta’s life registers as cruddy by virtue of her age (eleven and sixteen at various points in the novel), her gender, her appearance (“I’m what a person might call a dog”), her class status (Roberta lives on the poor side of town near the illegal dumping ravine on a road of “trash” people), her isolation (“I’m about as detailed as a shadow”), and her general outsider status. Barry also borrows from “cruddy” debased genres and discourses in constructing Roberta’s story. These include true confession, teensgone-wild, and other sensational tabloid styles; the road trip crime spree and the quest for buried treasure; the frontier tall tale, and, above all, lowbudget horror films from “The Horror of the Blood Monsters” to “The Amazing Colossal Man.” Forty rough black and white pencil illustrations complete with elaborately drawn frames accompany the story, and four detailed maps outline its various locations and the acts that occurred there. Kirtley comments that “the loose, smudged style of the images, a considerable departure from the clear lines and jubilant, frenetic energy of much of Barry’s comic art, suggests a dark, muddled fear, the result of a warping and disfiguring of the image” in a way that is “spontaneous, gothic and raw” (82, 85). The resulting cruddy brew could be dubbed trash or hillbilly gothic (Hillbilly Girl is one of Roberta’s many names in the novel), a gritty gender- and classinflected variant of the anti-Bildungsroman—as abject and excremental in its point of view as Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School. But Cruddy is significantly more expansive and more radical than this genre nomination implies. I’ll argue that Roberta’s tale functions as a form of gothic posthumanism in which gothic themes and tropes serve to advance an extensive critique of

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anthropo- and other centrisms, all forms of domination, the values of liberal humanism and affirmative conformist culture.1 In fact, a critique of this magnitude could only emerge from a multiply marginalized cruddy perspective such as Roberta’s, one that is least likely ever to be heard or believed. Roberta narrates a hair-raising, fractured, coming-of-age story that, in its unrelenting and unrepentant cruddiness, runs markedly counter to most dominant portrayals of contemporary girlhood. Recent novels such as The Lovely Bones, for instance, figure white middle-class girls as wholly innocent, always at risk of being victimized, and thus in need of constant protection and surveillance. Others, including films such as “Juno,” celebrate “wayward” teens as witty, warm-hearted, and preternaturally insightful. Even in the violently dystopian, class-stratified world of The Hunger Games, Katniss 1

According to Cary Wolfe, posthumanism names a historically specific moment—our own—in which “the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore.” It also refers to new modes of thought that “come after the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon” (2010, p. xv–xvi). The posthuman critique proposes models for new radical thinking beyond the limitations of humanist frameworks (in, e.g., systems theory and the poststructuralist philosophy of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Donna Haraway, and Judith Butler, among others); it aims to dislodge anthropo-, species, and other centrisms/modes of dominance that form the foundation for liberal humanism. Among the causes of our posthuman condition Wolfe notes the crisis of Western liberal humanism occasioned by these poststructuralist, postcolonial, feminist, and other politically engaged critiques; the emergence of new transdisciplinary theoretical paradigms from cybernetics and systems theory; and the radical revaluation of the status of nonhuman animals occasioned by work in cognitive ethology, field ecology, and animals rights. All of this new work poses a profound and fundamental challenge “to the schema of the knowing subject and its anthropocentric underpinnings sustained and produced within the canons of liberal humanism,” whereby the human gains identity and superior status by “escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature, the biological, and the evolutionary, but more generally by transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether” (2010, xvii). Both meanings of posthumanism coalesce in the work of the Deleuzian feminist philosopher, Rosi Braidotti, whose work on posthumanist ethics informs this essay. In particular, Braidotti critiques the rational humanist subject of moral philosophy, especially its arrogant belief that only this view of the subject “can guarantee basic elements of human decency, moral and political agency, and ethical probity” (11). In contrast to this view, Braidotti proposes a nomadic, non-unitary, and posthumanist vision of the subject as a vital part of her project to construct “an alternative foundation for ethical and political subjectivity” (11). This alternative ethics is contingently grounded and politically infused, based in human affectivity and passions, valuing alterity, otherness and difference, and propelled by a desire for transformation. Braidotti deliberately centers the experiences of those structural others most excluded by modernity (women, racialized others, the natural world) as one key to more hopeful becomings and in order to advance a situated, sustainable, accountable ethics that takes as its point of departure both bios (human life) and zoe (the generative vitality of nonhuman life). Braidotti also marks herself as a posthumanist critic in her Deleuzian focus on the “prehumen or even nonhuman elements that compose the web of forces, intensities, and encounters that contribute to the making of nomadic subjectivity . . . an embodied affective and intelligent entity that captures, processes and transforms energies and forces and is immersed in fields of constant flows and transformations” (41). Work by woman-of-color feminists such as Chela Sandoval also is highly relevant. In Methodology of the Oppressed, Sandoval describes the innovative, transformative strategies used by those most disadvantaged within global power circuits as keys to new methodologies of liberation and new models of oppositional consciousness.

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Everdeen’s skill, loyalty toward her family, and resolute defiance of unjust authority is presented as wholly admirable. Popular social scientific discourses figure contemporary girlhood as a site of developmental crisis—as in Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia—or relational aggression—as in the “mean girls” phenomenon. In both cases, girls are viewed as needing to be monitored closely for all-too-possible deviation or failure—an emphasis that also figures in feminist accounts in which girls become a site of projected anxieties over the future of feminism. From these—and other—culturally sanctioned perspectives on girlhood, Roberta is an abject victim whose cruddy life offers not even a useful cautionary tale let alone a progressive or redemptive narrative of hope to inspire a younger generation. But from the perspective of the cruddy girl’s own story, a perspective that Barry portrays with such singular accuracy, Roberta’s sheer survival means that she has become profoundly worldly wise, especially about the true nature of normative institutions and structures of authority: fathers, families, religion, and the law. As Roberta sums it up near the end of her tale “I know things. About cops. About fathers. About the world” (300). This vulnerable position outside all conventional structures is evident from the first in Cruddy, and forms the entirety of Chapter 1. “When we first moved here, the mother took the blue-mirror cross that hung over her bed in our old house and nailed a nail for it in the new bedroom of me and my sister. Truthfully it is a cross I have never liked. The Jesus in it seems haunted. He’s the light-absorber kind. In the pitch-black middle of the night he will start to glow green at you with his arms up like he is doing a tragic ballet. Some nights looking at him scares me so bad I can hardly move and I start doing a prayer for protection. But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?” (1). In a comprehensive survey of all of Barry’s work, Kirtley particularly focuses on her alternative treatment of girlhood in order to demonstrate that “no other comic artist has examined the essence of girlhood through so many lenses and so many ways of seeing” (xii). Kirtley argues that by focusing on “a vision of girls marked by unattractive, street-smart young women,” Barry consistently subverts conventions of feminine “beauty, innocence, maturation” (xii). Cruddy, Barry’s only novel, is also her most extreme vision of girlhood, according to Kirtley, and something of an anomaly in Barry’s oeuvre; she refers to it uncomfortably as a grotesque, gruesome, macabre, even reckless vision of girlhood, “girlhood

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as gothic nightmare” (76–7). As she puts it, “Cruddy doesn’t simply remove the imagined ribbons and bows associated with sweet dreams of girlhood, it slices them to bits and drenches them in blood” (82). As Kirtley notes, Barry has often been criticized for the wordiness of her cartoons. By reversing the relationship and order of priority between images and words in Cruddy, Barry is able to develop a broader, messier, more lurid, violent, and extreme trajectory in her work. It is just this extremity that is key to the radicality of Barry’s critique and to the development of her innovative prose cartoon style. The “things” Roberta comes to know unfold through a series of spectacular episodes as Cruddy switches between 1971—when Roberta, sixteen, is befriended by a group of other outsiders, Vicky Talluso and her misfit posse to whom Roberta tells her tale—and 1966 when Roberta gains notoriety as the sole survivor of the Lucky Chief Motel Massacre. Found wandering alone in the desert with her dog, Cookie, nearly dead and covered in blood, with no memory of what happened, Roberta lives for several months at the Las Vegas Christian Home before being claimed by her mother to begin what she calls her “restricted life.” At age eleven, Roberta already understands things that good Christians often prefer to disavow despite ample evidence to the contrary: those charged with protecting the most vulnerable—especially children—are actually the worst abusers of them. In a cruddy world where even God is sometimes “a god that opens its loving mouth and then sucks you into the meat saw room” (285), children must learn to protect themselves. Roberta stresses this fact as she reflects back on her days in the Christian Home making “sock monkeys for disadvantaged children around the world” (140). “I wondered if any of the international disadvantaged children had discovered the hidden prize I sewed into the head of every sock monkey. Twenty dollars of the father’s money and a little square of paper written with the nine best words of his advice. Expect the Unexpected. And whenever possible, Be the Unexpected . . . If I had an extra knife to sew into each one I would have done that too. Disadvantaged children sometimes need them. They sometimes need them very badly” (142).

Becoming cruddy in the days of the father A memorable parade of grotesques populate Roberta’s world including Old Red, who lives in the garbage ravine and has “yellow skin like freezer-burned

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chicken” (5); her father’s girlfriend Pammy, who reminds Roberta of an “evil puff fungus growing on 200 pounds of irritated lard” (261); her Grandma Doris, paid by the government to run the Lucky Chief at the mouth of a uranium mine, who sports “two green W’s tattooed on her ass . . . Bends over spells WOW. Stands on her head, spells MOM” (258); her Uncle Gy-rah who guards the mine as “The Lair of the Sequined Genius”; and the butcher knives, Big Girl, Francine, Cleoma, Margy, Baby Sue, Shelia, and Little Debbie— characters in their own right—who save Roberta’s life. However, no one is more vividly drawn—or more psychopathic—than the character Roberta refers to simply as “the father.” The single visual portrait depicted in the novel shows a close-up of the father’s distorted face with dark, heavily lidded eyes, teeth clenched in a menacing grimace, and smudged streaks running down it as if he is staring directly at Roberta through a screen of grime or blood. On a crazed quest to recover a family inheritance that he believes belongs solely to him, the father discovers Roberta in the back seat of his get-away car (put there by “the mother”) and decides to bring her along on the hunt. He switches her gender and calls her Clyde, teaches her to smoke Lucky Strikes, drink Corpse Reviver liquor, drive a car, shoot a gun, use a knife, and work a con as his new partner in crime. As Roberta dryly puts it, “The father never treated me like a kid unless there was someone else around” (63). Roberta-Clyde proves to have a natural talent for the con as well as the flexible identity it demands. Th roughout her time with the father, she masquerades, variously, as a deaf mute, a poor orphan, and an “epileptic mongoloid with brain damage from Faller’s disease” (160). The following interchange provides a good example of the father’s training technique and his redneck bravado: He said, ‘Clyde, you know what you and me are? We’re just a couple of dumb-asses from Milsboro, North Dakota. So where we from, Clyde?’ I said, Milsboro. He said, “Wrong. You don’t answer questions. You can’t talk. You got Faller’s disease. Broke your brain. Never got beyond the mental age of five.” And he spun out the details, some of them quite fancy. How his wife left him without a warning. How all he had left in the world was a Mongolian idiot son who he was trying to spread a little joy to. Taking the boy on a

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hunting trip, teaching the boy how to shoot. Just drinking and shooting rifles in the woods with a retard to help ease the pain. (160)

Later, when they are stopped by a patrol car, Roberta shifts into her Clyde role seamlessly as if possessed: “The father’s hand on my shoulder gave me a squeeze and our new identities rose on this command. It was a freakish sensation to feel them come to life so naturally, to witness the father drain away and the brokenhearted barber from bum-fuck take his place” (167). The art of the con is central to the father’s philosophy of dazzle camouflage, “invented by the Navy and modified by the father. It was the Navy that figured out you could paint something with confusions so horror-bright that the eyeballs would get upset to where they refused to see” (17). The father introduces Roberta to the concept using a murder he has recently committed as illustration: “Shooting a woman’s arm off with a hunting rifle is a form of dazzle camouflage if what you were camouflaging were the slits in the jugular and the carotid . . . The father said he knew the police would concentrate on the arm and think it was an accident. It would take them a while to notice the tiny punctures all up and down her” (66). Roberta learns her lessons well, and uses dazzle camouflage and the unexpected against the father in their last encounter. As the only witness to his crime spree (including no fewer than ten murders), Roberta has known for some time that he intends to kill her too. She bides her time, waiting for the opportune moment, plans meticulously, carefully observes the father’s weaknesses, and, in self-defense, she slits his throat with Little Debbie, just as he has taught her to do. I crouched just under the ledge with my back flattened against the rock wall. A few pebbles came tumbling over when he got to the edge. And then I saw his jug eared shadow. By the time he realized what happened it was all over. His eyes saw me but his mind refused the knowledge. (288) He tried to say some gurgley last words but I couldn’t really make them out. It’s hard to enunciate with a slashed windpipe. (298)

Despite her deadpan description of this scene, even five years later, Roberta remains haunted by “the crawling bones” of the multiple murders she has witnessed (and the ones she has committed). While she admits to sometimes loving the father and has carved “I’m sorry” on her arm, she also knows that

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killing him “was a good idea,” and she is “glad she did it” (11), “His brain was corroding. At the time I thought it was the work of the Corpse Reviver. Making his talking and thinking so confident and insane. But I  think his brain would have corroded anyway because he was a naturally corroded person. There are people like this. There are people like the father everywhere deforming everything they brush up against” (213–4). In her book, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, Ann Williams contends that “the Gothic myth, the mythos or structure informing the gothic category of ‘otherness’ is the patriarchal family.” Both literally and metaphorically, “Gothic plots are always family plots; gothic romance is family romance” (18, 23). Within these plots, monsters typically figure as sites of negative identity— everything the human is not—thereby making way for the reinscription of normative humanity as, typically, white, male, able-bodied, and heterosexual. As Chawaf has done in her version of the gothic romance in Redemption, Cruddy contrasts with and critiques a normative view of the genre. Chawaf revises the gothic romance in order to indict contemporary heterosexual relations under capitalist patriarchy as pathological. In Cruddy, Barry uses Roberta’s perspective to indict patriarchal power in families as itself the source of monstrosity. Roberta kills the father not purely in self-defense, and not in order to abscond with the family inheritance by winning the deadly game he forces her to play. Neither does she wish to assume the father’s power symbolically even in a more benign form. Rather, Roberta acts in order to protect the world from fathers, to rid the world of those who must, at all costs, assert their dominance, especially over those such as children who do not have the right to have any rights. Kirtley notes that in nearly all of her works, Barry “presents society as a dark, dangerous place for girls, who must make their way alone, without help from adults, who generally appear as villains” (xiv). Cruddy does not offer much hope for the future of families and their romances, gothic or not. Roberta does form brief romantic connections with Turtle and Vicky’s brother, Stick. But the former proves to be an impotent escapee from an exclusive mental institution who drowns in a drainage ditch, and the latter a hemophiliac who bleeds to death. Significantly, all the other males in Cruddy also die either through murder or by other means. But the girl lives on. Cruddy unfolds not just as a series of twisted horrific episodes, often hilariously described, but also maps a complex set of survival strategies. Although

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she lives in extreme precariousness, Roberta survives the days of the father because of her superior capacity to observe her environment closely, to act decisively, and to adapt quickly to radical change, as her many identities in the novel suggest: Roberta, Clyde, Ee-gore, Mystery Child, Michele, and Hillbilly Girl (216). Roberta’s well-honed instincts and her skill with a knife are illustrated well by her escape from numerous molestation attempts by authority figures including a sheriff, her father, and her uncle. In the following episode, Roberta falls asleep holding Little Debbie. Holding her so tight that my fingers were cramped around her . . . I woke up with a soft velvety thing stroking against my lifted head . . . I opened my eyes and Lemuel [her uncle] was kneeling over me. Little Debbie bit him. No hesitation. Little Debbie bit and bit him and if there was shouting, if there was screaming, I didn’t hear it. What I heard was a long tone, faint and endless. And the center of my vision was punched out, gone grey, with a hot light scribbling fire at the edges, melting the world from the center outward like a movie burning up on the screen. (134)

Here, Roberta’s attribution of agency to Little Debbie, rather than to her own actions and instincts, and her detachment from her own “long tone, faint and endless,” combine vividly with the image of film melting on a movie screen to convey the affective impact of this traumatic episode which, momentarily, “melts” Roberta’s world and renders her deaf, dumb, and blind. In her wellknown graphic work, Barry is an acknowledged master at visually conveying complex affects; the above example suggests that her prose cartoon method is no less effective. The full-page illustration that accompanies this description effectively reinforces the horrors described in it. It features a close-up of Lemuel’s face against a black background with eyes illuminated and a gruesome white smile looming large. The illustration recalls the close-up of the father’s face earlier in the novel and a later description of a corpse with a “smile in the middle of the black rot of his face,” what Roberta calls “rictus” and suggesting a blurring of the line between the living and the dead (237). This near rape is no isolated incident, and it recalls an even more horrific episode later in the novel. Roberta has been locked in a room at the Knocking Hammer Bar and Slaughterhouse where, by night, “shadow cars” transport human bodies to be disappeared, “made into bone, blood meal and cat food”

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(224). “What I saw before my vision disintegrated was . . . a job someone left in the middle of. And the job’s head was severed from its body and the head didn’t have a face or a lower jaw. It had a horseshoe of human teeth, and some of the teeth had gold fillings. And that was what I stared at until something like ash began to fall inside my eyes, an obscuring gray ash, a blinding that comes. An incineration of vision” (224–5). As in the previous example, the repetition of an “obscuring gray ash,” which falls inside Roberta’s eyes, conveys both duration as endlessness and stasis as absolute immobilization. Accompanied by a black and white drawing of the gleaming “horseshoe of human teeth,” this passage effectively suggests the singular intense physical affect that accompanies trauma of this magnitude, the searing bedazzlement of the “horror-bright” before the merciful “incineration of vision.” Overwhelmingly violent experiences such as these have rewired Roberta’s circuitry and left holes in her nervous system, she tells us. “Sometimes the autonomic nervous system is called that, the involuntary. And sometimes the passageways are frayed or badly wired. I have certain bare spots and he found one” (42), as good a description of the ways in which posttraumatic affects are registered in the body as I  have ever seen. This describes a permanent residue left by the encounter with what Deleuze and Guattari call “a black hole.” Similar to some of the descriptions of melancholic loss in Dictee, a black hole refers to a situation in which the subject is undone by the intensity of a traumatic experience, reduced to what Georgio Agamben calls “bare life,” an immobilizing point beyond which lines of becoming and escape “implode or temporarily disintegrate” (Braidotti, 2006, 167).

Becoming-fly This example’s grotesque—and literal—admixture of human and animal parts represents only one of many instances in Cruddy of boundary breaks, leaky categories, and startling inversions, another aspect of the novel’s posthuman perspective. Above all, this represents an ethical inversion in which Roberta more positively values all nonhuman animals because humans so often prove themselves to be such savage beasts. From sock monkeys, jelly fish, trapdoor spiders, earthworms, and turtles to cows, dogs, and flies,

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Roberta’s affective relations with animals figure centrally in her point of view, system of values, and elaboration of her accumulated wisdom, the “things she knows about the world.” Roberta frequently visualizes people in terms of their similarity to animals, a point of view responsible for some of Cruddy’s most vivid and imaginative scenes, as in the following description of Fernst, an employee at the Knocking Hammer, who dynamically inches across the page. “He was very strange looking, earthworm looking, is the only way I can describe it. His posture was in constant motion, going from question mark to exclamation mark and back again, and all his extremities, including his head, seemed to flatten and retract and then extend and sharpen” (174). More importantly, Roberta’s talents for multiple becomings and her radical attunement to affective encounters of all kinds have functioned—as they do for animals—as necessary ways of staying alive in a cruddy world. Roberta has not only been treated like an animal and been called “a dog” pejoratively to refer to her “smashed up appearance,” but she has also literally acquired animal instincts. Early on she confesses, “I do not like people to touch me, I have a weird . . . doggish problem with it. When people touch me I want to bite them” (69), and Cruddy abounds with instances where Roberta uses this “doggish problem” to save herself (until she acquires Little Debbie to do the biting for her). Fate also curses Roberta with an acute sense of smell, refined enough to allow her to make subtle distinctions within the “complicated” smell of a sliced creature. “Complicated because sliced hide smells different from sliced fat, and sliced fat smells different from sawn bone, and internal organs each have a particular smell, and then there is the raw odor of the divided meat itself” (223). And, in an appropriately cruddy touch, Roberta often associates herself with flies and considers them “messengers and survivors” as she is. Having grown up as a butcher’s daughter and near the slaughterhouse, Roberta has made an intense study of these insects, which “have always been part of [her] life” (58). “In the days of Rohbeson’s Slaughterhouse, flies were everywhere, crawling up the walls like living designs. I used to fall asleep looking at them. Thinking about their world. Their society. I used to think that they had feelings about certain people. People who noticed them. Certain people. Me” (57–8). Roberta’s capacity/desire to move into affective relation with this most maligned of species—to notice and attribute feelings to them—arises from her multiply marginalized perspective and fundamental

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isolation. Her capacity to construct imaginative relationships with flies and even to interpret the signs they emit in “fly world,” also expresses her heightened sense of curiosity, imagination, and even wonder; her artistry, expressiveness, and finely grained perceptions. She has a radical openness to all manner of other becomings. Significantly, Roberta constructs her most powerful and meaningful affective relationships with animals, especially dogs. Her first meeting with Cookie, the dog at the Lucky Chief Motel, comes right out of a swoopy romance film. “I figured I’d seen everything there was to see here. And then I saw her . . . Like a desert mirage always in the distance, the thing most hoped for appears, like cool cool water or the ice cream man:  a very intelligent-eyed scraggly haired and dirty looking dog” (260). Roberta experiences her only genuine moments of physical and emotional comfort with Cookie, which makes it all the more heart-breaking when “the mother” throws Cookie off a bridge to rid the house of her mange. Reflecting on her past as a butcher’s daughter, Roberta says, I am someone who can look at certain things without flinching. Certain dead people. Particular dead people. But I  cannot look at the creatures. I  have tried and tried. In the days of the slaughterhouse I  had so many opportunities. I’d seen their heads take the face of the Jesus in agony. And I was whipped many times for turning them loose. Opening the holding pen gates and whispering “Run, Run.” Even though there was nowhere for them to go. No chance in this world. “Run!” I’d whisper to the cattle. Sometimes they would. Mostly they just bunched together, leaning tighter, and stared at me. But I could not stop trying. (149)

Because Roberta makes no rigid distinction between herself and animals, she attributes to them a great capacity for suffering (like “the Jesus in agony”) and understands their hopeless situation, which is so much like her own. Roberta’s perceptive understanding of, affection and profound compassion for “the creatures,” emerge from a radically posthuman identification with animality that centers on their shared vulnerability and thus their shared goal: to disappear and to survive. Roberta’s perspective emerges from an indeterminate zone of broken binaries and category inversions where living and dead, weapons and toys, human and nonhuman, monsters and fathers, horror and humor bleed together.

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This perspective strongly recalls Gilles Deleuze’s description of processes of becoming (girl, woman, animal, machine, other), which he considers a superior creative or experimental state of being in which the stability of the human is dislodged as it opens to and is traversed by the radical multiplicity of the outside. In one of many variants to be found in Deleuze’s work, here he explains the process of becoming by reflecting on relations among music, children, and animals: [M]usic is traversed by becoming-woman, becoming-child, and not only at the level of themes and motifs . . . Instrumentation and orchestration are permeated by becomings-animal . . . For their own part [children] appeal to an objective zone of indetermination or uncertainty, something shared or indiscernible, a proximity that makes it impossible to say where the boundary between the human and animal lies . . . [I]t is as though, independent of evolution carrying them toward adulthood, there were room in the child for other becomings. All children build on or feel these sorts of escapes, these acts of becoming-animal. (272–3)

Barry vividly demonstrates through Roberta’s unique perspective the varied worlds that coexist within her and how vital this capacity to embrace multiplicities is to her survival. Her multiply marginalized position also suggests a critique of Deleuze’s formulation. While all children may experience zones of indetermination and permeable boundaries marking their superior capacity for transformations and other becomings, only some children are forced into lives of precariousness and chaos—other forms of indetermination—and, out of necessity, survive them with skill and creativity. In her recent book, Transpositions, feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti situates and elaborates some of the larger political and ethical stakes involved in Deleuzian becomings within structures of contemporary power. Braidotti views our moment as posthuman (postanthropocentric) by virtue of its ever-growing commodification of life itself (which she calls zoe). Human and nonhuman others of all categories and species now circulate as so many disposable parts within global circuits of capitalist commodification and exploitation. But, Braidotti argues, contemporary others are not simply marked by their disposability within circuits of power (though they certainly are so marked, as Cruddy makes clear). In small and large ways, “by resisting and contesting the arrogance of anthropocentrism and striking

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an alliance with the productive force of zoe—or life in its inhuman aspects,” othernesses of all kinds may become sites of “powerful and alternative subject positions” (114) “for political and ethical transformation, and the actualization of [positive] potentials and values that currently remain marginal to the mainstream” (184). From this marginalized perspective, Braidotti calls for an “environmentally situated, post anthropocentric, anti-Cartesian ethics of codetermination between self and other arising from the values of non-profit, non-exploitative bio-centered egalitarianism and based on empathy, endurance, resilience, responsiveness, and responsibility. The goal of such a posthuman ‘intensive’ ethics” is to encourage sustainable forms of transformation “based on the shared capacity of humans to feel empathy for, develop affinity with and hence enter into relation with other forces, entities, beings, waves of intensity” (217), thereby creating a “micro-politics of affective becomings” (131). Above all, Braidotti argues in favor of sustainable kinds of becoming “that destabilize dominant power-relations and monolithic centralized systems, deterritorialize majority-based identities and values, and infuse a joyful sense of empowerment into the subject that is in-becoming” (271). One capacity of nomadic subjects as Braidotti describes them—especially for someone such as Roberta—is the ability to identify lines of flight and escape, creative alternative spaces of becoming, in which the girl is free to (not forced to) become-other.

Becoming-imperceptible While animals are Roberta’s most consistent site of affective transfer, trains are among her other nonhuman attractors:  objects or vehicles of affective investment “that allow for projections, interaction and encounters with a network of others” (Braidotti, 121). Trains become a conduit through which Roberta constructs intensive affective relations and experiences what she calls, “the exhilaration.” [S]ince I was very little I have been very attracted to trains stopped or moving but especially moving. I  have never been able to get close enough to them and while trying I  have done things that would make an average person scream. I have laid on my stomach flat and close to the tracks to

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let the roaring pass over and shake my molecules hard. The exhilaration. The exhilaration. Everything is always easier after the exhilaration. In my restricted life there has not been much opportunity for the exhilaration. The mother has given me a type of exhilaration by throwing sharp things at me, screaming about the various ways she is going to kill me, but it’s not the same thing at all. I never feel better afterwards. There is never any relief that comes from it except maybe to her. (76–7)

The overwhelming physical impact that gives rise to the “exhilaration,” a power immense enough to shake Roberta at a molecular level, shares features with the obliteration of self, the black hole of trauma she experiences during the meat saw room moment described earlier. While both are extreme experiences that push Roberta to the limit of her capacity to endure, she clearly distinguishes the adrenaline rush arising from violence directed against her from the voluntary and cathartic immersion in the immense power of trains and train tracks that “go where nothing else is” (75). Roberta’s attraction to positive forms of extremity resonates with what Braidotti, following Deleuze, calls becoming-imperceptible. This intense experience of the limit involves “turning the self into the threshold of gratuitous, aimless acts through which the vital energy that is bios/zoe gets expressed in all its ruthless splendor . . . Far from being superficial, moments when the self is emptied out—dissolved into rawer and more elementary sensations—mark heightened levels of awareness and receptivity” (172–3). The ability to endure the loss of self involved in becoming-imperceptible forms the very basis of a posthuman ethics, according to Braidotti. In this regard, “Ethics . . . is a question of expanding the threshold of what we can endure and hence sustain . . . the process of going to the extreme limit, without dying, but exploding the boundaries of the self to the utter-most limit” (213). Roberta has, of necessity, not only developed basic survival skills and instincts that allow her to continue living even in the most extreme circumstances. She has also developed a capacity and a desire to go to extreme limits that explode the boundaries of the self through her encounter with various forms of “the exhilaration” that allow her “to go where nothing else is.” Roberta has used the father’s wisdom with imagination and transformed it with empathy in order to survive, but the experience has also permanently rewired her synapses, making it difficult to live a constricted life. “It turns

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out that once your mind gets expanded it is very hard to shrink it back down again” (8). And, once you have roamed with the father—map number two charts their circuitous path and “the dead people we left behind”—it is very hard to remain in one place. Even after a disastrous road trip, during which Roberta had hoped to show her posse the Lair of the Sequined Genius, she continues to look for lines of escape wondering, “what could I do to keep it rolling, keep the motion going” (299). Roberta’s desire to live in intensity, to remain in permanent nomadic motion, coalesces in her description of Dreamland. In the Nevada desert near The Lucky Chief Motel and the Air Force test range “for all the interesting bombs that come after the A and the H” (268), Dreamland signifies a heterotopia, a paradoxical zone of indetermination, a purely deterritorialized and therefore unlocateable place. “Dreamland is never in the same place twice. Dreamland roves about beneath the landscape . . . nowhere and everywhere at once” (268). Arrows point the way on three of Cruddy’s maps; the final one, of Dreamland itself, proclaims in block letters: “Dreamland is all over. Every direction. Above and below and always moving” (309). As such, Dreamland forms a perfect complement to Roberta’s own “underground places,” her “many underground Dreamlands that rove” (281). Roberta is also thrilled to recognize Dreamland as what she calls the Valley of the Monsters. “There was a reason I knew this place . . . I was in the middle of the location where so many of the world’s greatest movies were fi lmed. The Horror of the Blood Monsters. It Came from Outer Space. Them! The Blob. The Mummy. The Amazing Colossal Man” (247). And Roberta contributes her own mythology to Dreamland in the story she tells Vicky: “Once upon a time in a deep cave, a dry cave, a certain spectacular cave among the thousands of caves in the area of the Moapa Indian reservation and the Valley of Fire . . . in this cave a three-headed dog sits in the blackness upon three Samsonite suitcases and the suitcases are full of money and the dog has six swirling eyes as big as saucers” (240). Cruddy opens with Roberta’s suicide note and ends with her plan to jump in front of a train—“Vicky promises she will give me the little push I need” (295). I  prefer to think of this as Roberta’s finest act of dazzle camouflage and being the unexpected; it’s also a testament to her undiminished capacity for reinvention, endurance, and hope. Braidotti argues that “The ethical subject of sustainable becoming practices a humble kind of hope, rooted

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in the ordinary micro-practices of everyday life” (278). When these ethical subjects—adaptable, non-rapacious, open to the outside—synchronize with like-minded others, genuine change becomes possible. In Roberta’s case, she has stashed the father’s money in one of Dreamland’s many caves, named herself for the first time, Junior Bizarre, and invented her own version of the father’s wisdom:  “Truth plus Magical Love Equals Freedom.” Having left detailed maps, Roberta dedicates the novel to her sister, Julie, who scrawls the novel’s last (cruddy) words: “fuck you Roberta!!! I hate you Roberta!!! where ARE you??” (305). Cruddy may not offer a vision of a sustainable and transformed world that Braidotti’s nomadic ethics hopefully projects. But it does present its own ethical vision for survival:  a tribe of cruddy girls living in the Valley of the Monsters, roving freely through Dreamland, with all of the money and all of the knives.

Conclusion: From SCUM to Cruddy and Beyond

I would have loved to have witnessed Kathy Acker terrorize the Internet. Kate Zambreno, 237 This book has analyzed some antisocial discourses, fragmented literary forms, and negative strategies of critique in selected experimental texts by women written between 1967 and 1999. Lest I be accused of imposing closure in the form of a conclusion to a study that has resisted developmental narratives, I will note that over the course of this investigation we have only “progressed” from SCUM to Cruddy. One of my arguments has been that texts operating within a feminist negative aesthetic have often functioned as important sites of disruption and critique of normative values, discourses, narratives, and genres. The disruptive potential of this form of radical writing is nowhere more evident than in texts that feature the figure of the girl such as Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School and Lynda Barry’s Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel. As Catherine Driscoll has shown in her cultural history of female adolescence in the twentieth century, girls have consistently functioned as figures of uncertainty and ambivalence, marking sites of change and crisis within dominant discourses. By virtue of her minoritarian status, the girl has been viewed as existing outside of full subjectivity and ethical agency, the antithesis of discourses of success, succession, and mature citizenship. Driscoll further notes that because girls both as distinct cultural figures and feminism as a social movement emerged concurrently in the twentieth century, a history of girlhood especially enables unique forms of critical reflection on feminist relations to dominant discourses, forms of reflection that are vital to the future

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of feminism, according to Driscoll. “As soon as feminist theory—analytic or activist—begins to look only for its own repetition, as soon as it is certain of where it comes from and what its effects are, then it begins to expect merely its own repetition. It also thus ceases to be a vital force in political life” (304). Both Blood and Guts in High School and Cruddy are failed Bildungsromans that refuse to transmit (repeat) the logic of successful progression to adulthood, the acceptance of adult values and responsibilities, or the course of reproductive futurity. Through her use of fatal strategies and her overt critiques of capitalist heteropatriarchy, Acker demolishes this logic from within by ruining the adolescent female body as an object of exchange and reproduction. As Leslie Dick comments about Acker’s work in general, “Kathy takes the Bildung out of the Bildungsroman . . . freezing the narrative momentum . . . all the growing up that is implied in that Bildung story falls apart, regresses, comes undone . . . there’s no suspense, no temporal logic, above all, no resolution” (115). If Acker ruins the forms of succession upon which this genre depends, Barry escapes them completely. Roberta’s multiple marginalizations and cruddy experiences leave her so far outside of normative culture that she becomes a site for the articulation of radically alternative values:  nomadic rovings in the heterotopia of “Dreamland” replace conventional narratives of progress; the values of the adult world are critiqued and inverted rather than embraced and accepted; hierarchies and binary oppositions between human and nonhuman life forms are dissolved and nonoppositional modes of affective encounter are promoted as ethically superior. In The Queer Art of Failure, J. Jack Halberstam also questions via the figure of the child the political utility for feminism of negative modalities. Whereas Barry has couched her critique in a mash-up of debased genres (teen romance, B-grade horror movies), Halberstam turns to mainstream children’s animated films as sites of radically alternative modes of being. As she puts it, “most animated films are antihumanist, anti normative, multigendered, and full of wild forms of sociality,” “perverse embodiments and relations,” and antiteleological desires (181, 119). Here, children are not represented as preadults figuring the future, but as “anarchic beings who partake in strange and inconsistent temporal logics” and who practice the art of failure rather than normative models of success (120). Halberstam also focuses on disruptions of the mother-daughter plot of smooth generational succession—a common

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theme in narratives of feminist history—to demonstrate the political utility of strategies for refusing generational transmission. In her reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother, for example, Halberstam demonstrates the multiple ways in which the main character, Xuela, resists being inserted into colonial models of succession including refusing to become a mother herself, and avoiding love, family, intimacy. Through these forms of evacuation, Xuela “refuses to operate as the transfer point for transgenerational colonization . . . and inhabits another kind of feminism . . . one that self destructs and in doing so brings the edifice of colonial rule down one brick at a time” (133). Through this and other examples, Halberstam outlines the contours of an anti-Oedipal feminism “grounded in negation, refusal, passivity, absence and silence . . . that unravels the essential bond of mother and daughter ensuring that the daughter inhabits the legacy of the mother and in doing so reproduces her relationship to patriarchal forms of power” (124). Halberstam dubs this “a shadow feminism” “that has nestled in more positivist accounts and unraveled their logic from within,” (124) and she wonders “can we find feminist frameworks capable of recognizing the political project articulated in the form of refusal?” (126). The readings Halberstam undertakes in The Queer Art of Failure go a long way toward providing some of these frameworks for articulating the value of what I’ve called feminist negative aesthetic projects and her insights have been central to this book. While Halberstam does analyze some formally innovative works of visual and performance art, her analyses of literary texts tend to treat non-hegemonic realist works. Works that combine experimental antirealist textual strategies and negative modes of feminist critique—as the works in this study do—offer another, perhaps more extensive, means of unraveling the logics of hegemonic feminisms. In Blood and Guts in High School, arguably the most formally radical work analyzed here, Acker demolishes the features of realist narrative as a whole—consistent characters, logical causation and progression, realist settings, forms of closure, genre conventions—as part of a fatal ruination of the logics of capitalist heteropatriarchy. Most centrally she disrupts the reader’s ability to construct a coherent story out of and so redeem Janey’s repetitive, noncumulative, nonsensical, and abject experiences. Leslie Dick speaks of Acker’s unique ability to outmaneuver literary conventions, particularly the reader’s tendency to

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“take almost anything you give to turn it into a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. But Kathy won’t allow it, which is one reason why her work is so disturbing; it’s not just the violence, the self-mutilation, the incest, the pain. It’s that her texts won’t let us read in the way we automatically like to do” (116). By refusing to reproduce the form of the Bildungsroman, its narrative trajectory and outcome, Acker and Barry interrupt readings that rely on repetitions of the past, including those narratives of progress, loss, and return that Clare Hemmings identifies as central to contemporary feminist theories. Barry’s and Acker’s radical deconstructions of the Bildungsroman are not the only genre innovations found in the texts analyzed in this book, suggesting that another value of these works is the insight they provide into how and why particular genres and mediums change at particular cultural moments. In his influential early article on hypertext, Stuart Moulthrop analyzes the new form according to Marshall McLuhan’s four-fold Laws of Media. Orthodox McLuhanite doctrine holds that “every form pushed to the limit of its potential, reverses its characteristics . . . Hot media like print tend to increase their routinization and determinism until they reach a limit (say the prose of the late nineteenth century Beyond that point the overheated medium turn paradoxical, passing almost instantly from hot to supercool. Bombarding readers with such a plethora of codings that conventional interpretation collapses. Structure and hierarchy, the distinguishing features of a hot medium, reduce to indeterminacy. The plurality of codes overwhelms hermeneutic certainty. The figure of a univocal text reverses into polysemous ground and we reach the ultima thule of Gutenburg culture, Finnegan’s Wake.” (Moulthrop, 701)

The multiple indeterminacies that pervade Winterson’s Written on the Body and that are posed most strikingly at its end, poise the genre of the love story at the point of its collapse. The novel’s pastiche of narrative styles, discourses, points of view, temporal and bodily dislocations, and continuous deferrals of coherent identifications, unmoor the reader in intertextual space and insistently problematize the gendered hierarchies and conventions upon which love stories depend, suggesting that Written on the Body occupies a unique place in the canons of postmodern, feminist, and lesbian fiction, as Lisa Moore suggests. “Winterson’s characters offer us hitherto unrepresented experiences of the body as disparately gendered, inconsistently sexualized,

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capable of acts and emotions that don’t occur in the realm of the physical” (Moore, 125). Moulthrop also suggests that while some genres taken to their limits tend to collapse into indeterminacy and hermeneutic uncertainty, others mark the dissolution and inadequacy of outmoded forms by fragmenting and combining them, thereby generating wholly new ones as is the case with Cha’s Dictee. This work’s complex assemblage of forms, mediums, and genres— fragments of history and autobiography, incomplete stories, photos, film stills, letters, drawings, oaths, language lessons, prayers and invocations—are impossible to totalize into a coherent whole, part of Cha’s radical poetics of absence, silence, and incompleteness. New literary forms such as Cha’s also demand alternative modes of reading and interpretation and this suggests another value to writing in negative aesthetic modes: it expands our capacity to encounter radical difference. In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler movingly elaborates the ways in which we are “undone” as we encounter fields of ethical enmeshment with others that dislocate and disorient our sense of stable identity. And she wonders, “how might we encounter the difference that calls our grids of intelligibility into question without trying to foreclose the challenge that the difference delivers?” (35). Texts that radically destabilize our ability to interpret them in familiar ways and whose demanding intimacies often pose challenges to our political commitments are uniquely capable of calling into question our “grids of intelligibility” as they ask us to remain receptive to the challenge that their difference delivers. As I suggested in the introduction to this study, the works under consideration here could profitably be situated within twentieth-century traditions of anti-art, languages of the unsayable, the contemporary negatron, and those revaluations of the Western intellectual tradition often called postmodernism. Here, negativity is understood as a force of disruption and an absent remainder that haunts texts and marks the limits of all affirmative discourses. Because my texts raise overtly feminist questions via both thematic and formal expressions of negativity—as I hope I have shown—they help to condition and extend these traditions of anti-art, which often focus on formal strategies alone without attending to the larger contexts within which these negative approaches are deemed to be necessary. Feminist texts in negative aesthetic modes also should be read in relation to one another—as Halberstam’s book

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also helps us to do—and in relation to expressions in other forms and mediums such as visual, performance, and conceptual art; film; and theory. Unless a feminist genealogy of negative aesthetic modes is constructed, when new works emerge it is as if they have sprung full blown from nowhere, as if they are singular expressions that have happened for the very first time. This is especially true because genuinely radical anti-realist writing of the type considered here often is published by small non-mainstream, nonacademic presses, and may circulate primarily within alternative or avant-garde communities. Also, since these texts are not easily read and interpreted, they are not often taught and are thus excluded from ongoing processes of canon formation, even formations of an alternative canon. Innovative texts also more frequently go out of print, even disappear entirely from the feminist canon unless they are resurrected and actively promoted—as Cha’s Dictee was. A recent example is Fran Ross’s wildly inventive comic novel, Oreo, first published in 1974 and reprinted in early 2015 by New Directions. Ross was born in Philadelphia in 1935 in a working-class family. She grew up in a mixed neighborhood where she demonstrated an early fascination with the surrounding Jewish culture and the Yiddish language, which were to play such a strong role in Oreo, which features a mixed race Jewish-AfricanAmerican heroine. Ross graduated in 1956 from Temple University, which she attended on a full scholarship, with a degree in Journalism. She moved to New York City to begin work as a copy editor at McGraw-Hill and, later, Simon and Schuster. After Oreo was published she was hired to write comedy for Richard Pryor and moved to Los Angeles; when the job did not materialize, she returned to NYC where she worked in the publishing industry until her death in 1985. When Oreo was published in 1974 at the height of the Black Arts Movement, it received very little critical notice and it quickly went out of print. Ross never published another novel. Danzy Senna, who wrote the foreword to the reissued edition of the book, suggests that the novel’s “gleeful miscegenation” was too far out of step with the zeitgeist to have been successful. Oreo resists the unwritten conventions that still exist for novels written by black women today. There’s nothing redemptively uplifting about her work. The title doesn’t refer to the Bible or the blues. The work does not refer to slavery. The character is never violated sexually or otherwise. The

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characters are not from the South . . . Ross is a hard sell for February, black history month, and a hard sell for March, women’s history month. Hers is a postmodern text; it is a queer text; it is a work of black satire; it is a work of high feminist comedy; it is a post-soul text.” (xv–xvi)

Harryette Mullen, who composed the book’s afterword, agrees noting that “Ross’s Oreo languishes in the purgatory or limbo of innovative works by black writers that have been overlooked in the formation of the African American literary canon” (216). The novel tells the story of Christine Clark—nicknamed Oreo—the product of an African-American mother and a Jewish father. Oreo’s parents divorce shortly after her younger brother is born. Her father leaves, her mother—a gifted professional musician and amateur mathematician—goes on the road touring, and Oreo is raised by her grandparents, Louise, a worldclass cook, and James, who makes his fortune selling religious publications to an exclusively Jewish clientele. When Oreo is sixteen, her mother returns, gives her a list of clues left by her father, and sends her on a quest to locate him and discover the story of her origins. Modeled on the story of Theseus, the novel is a broad send-up of the hero’s journey, a meandering comic antiquest, and a “linguistically riotous feminist tall tale” (221). The father’s clues prove more idiosyncratic than revelatory and Oreo must invent the answers herself. Her constantly deferred encounter with her father is similarly anticlimactic. She meets him only once and he dies before he can reveal anything of significance. The novel’s final scene features Oreo transporting her “inheritance” home:  sixty vials of her father’s sperm, which may or may not be viable (the secret of her birth is that she was conceived via in vitro fertilization). Oreo features the girl as a feminist trickster superhero. It is an antiBildungsroman because, like any good mythic figure, Oreo arrives marked for greatness—she is “no ordinary child”—with talents fully developed and no need to progress from innocence to experience. Her bravery is established in an early scene when she attacks her uncle’s coat thinking it’s a real lion, leading him to remark, “ ‘She sure got womb, that little mother . . . I wouldn’t want to mess with her when she gets older. She is a real ball buster and a half.’ He told the entire neighborhood about the incident. So it was that the legend of Oreo began to grow before she had cut her second teeth” (53). In the myth,

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Theseus is credited with inventing the art of wrestling and so it comes as no surprise that Oreo excels at her own version of martial arts inspired by her mother’s first feminist lesson on the oppression of women. This is a subject I’ve given a lot of thought to, and I think I have the answer. I’ve tried to encompass in my theory all the sociological, mythological, religious, philosophical, muscular, economic, cultural, musical, physical, ethical, intellectual, metaphysical, anthropological, gynecological, historical, hormonal, environmental, judicial, legal, moral, ethnic, governmental, linguistic, psychological, schizophrenic, glottal, racial, poetic . . . artistic, military, and urinary considerations from prehistoric times to the present. I  have been able to synthesize these considerations into one inescapable formulation: men can knock the shit out of women. (53)

Impressed by her mother’s insight, Oreo develops her own system of selfdefense, “the Way of the Interstial Thrust, or WIT” (55), which allows her to master opponents many times her size. “Whether he was big or small, fat or thin, well-built or spavined, Oreo could, when she was in a state of extreme concentration known as hwip-as, engage any opponent up to three times her size and weight and whip his natural ass” (55). As a good feminist superhero, Oreo employs her skills almost exclusively to prevent or retaliate for crimes against girls and women. She ensnares a pedophile, outcons and beats up a pimp for publically humiliating his workers, and finishes the job when the pimp kidnaps her and tries to retaliate; in short, “Oreo was one pushy chick” (93). The pimp intends to teach Oreo a lesson by having his “instrument of torture,” Kirk, rape her. Kirk is a bestial white man (Oreo at first mistakes him for a horse) “caparisoned in a black loincloth” with a penis “of such dimensions that he could have used a zeppelin for a condom” (a send-up of the stereotype of the black male as sexual beast (156–7). But Oreo has a secret weapon that she inserts just before her encounter with Kirk: a false hymen invented by Citizens Against the Rape of Mommies (CAROM) and made of “elasticium, a newly discovered trivalent metal whose outstanding characteristic was enormous resiliency,” that catapults Kirk across the room when he tries “to pull a 401 (breaking and entering)” (160). With Kirk incapacitated, Oreo turns her repertoire of WIT on the pimp himself: “sarcastic blos from head to to, the irony of a fut in the mouth, facetious wise-kracs, kiky repartee, strik-ing satire” in a description

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that highlights the relation between Oreo’s martial and verbal arts and could serve as an overview of the novel itself. Oreo employs both WIT and wit in her arsenal, the latter as a means of aesthetic pleasure, self-expression, and self-invention that she also inherits from her mother. “She had her mother’s love of words, their nuance and cadence, their juice and pith, their variety and precision, their rock and wry” (37). Oreo—as Logos Girl—develops her superior linguistic abilities because at home she is surrounded by a range of idiosyncratic discourses that she must learn to interpret. These include her mother’s mash-up of Yiddish and English, her brother’s invented language (cha-key-key-wah), her grandmother’s nearly incomprehensible Southern dialect, and the vernaculars of street hustlers and pimps. On her quest, Oreo engages in verbal sparring (to keep her wit sharp), bilingual wisecracks, neologisms (such as turning Betty Friedan’s name into a verb), and code-switching between street wisdom and academic esoterica in a lively mixture of high-brow discourses and low-brow popular culture genres from the language of advertising and Broscht-belt sthick to howlingly bad puns (the diminished Kirk is described as suffering from “the heartbreak of satyriasis” [161]). Oreo masters the arts of interpretation, improvisation, and, in one of the funniest extended scenes in the novel, impersonation when she is asked to read advertising copy for “Tante Ruchel’s Kosher T.V. dinners” and shows perfect mastery of the speech patterns and rhythms of Yiddish. Oreo explains that despite her status as a child, “she did not consider herself a minor at or of or in anything” (112). She is a radically hybridized, brilliantly improvisational, and wholly original character as is the novel that bears her name. This is perhaps why, when Danzy Senna first encounters Ross’s novel in the early 1990s, she describes it as “a strange uncanny dream about the future that was really the past” (xii). An example that has been important to my own understanding of feminisms in negative modalities is the now out of print, Angry Women, Andrea Juno and V.  Vale’s book of interviews with feminist writers, musicians, theorists, and performance artists. Published in 1991, the book emerged in response to the AIDs crisis, varieties of antifeminist backlash, and the rise of Reganism and neoliberal forms of govermentality. The cover painting by Phoebe Glockner depicts a new version of Medusa whose serpent hair swarms with a fearsome variety of snakes swallowing missiles, grenades, fighter planes

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and other weapons of mass destruction. The book’s introduction reads like a manifesto and its apocalyptic voice conveys the urgency of the problems to be solved and the extremity of the solutions required to solve them. Angry Women is not just about women but about the future survival of our planet . . . Humanity is clearly on a suicide course—and taking the rest of the planet with it. One has to be in an insane state of denial to not acknowledge that we’re in an absolute ecological, economic, and moral crisis. Our inherited patriarchal hierarchical system is breaking apart from within . . . We can no longer do just a ‘patch up’ job on our problems; we have to totally reassess how we as human beings have been tricked into participating in systems of domination and oppression whose ultimate destination is self-annihilation . . . The feminist project of liberation for all is enormous; it involves a total rethinking and remaking of history, culture, laws, organized religion . . . psychoanalysis, and philosophy . . . This is a truly revolutionary time—new linguistics, new theories, new ways of thinking are emerging that must by necessity differ drastically from what is considered ‘traditional’ . . . And there are no shortcuts—every single assumption of our civilization must be challenged. Ultimately, everything must be rethought . . . if we are to survive. (4–5)

Among the specific objects of critique are the “ ‘logical, rational’ scientific male expert,” capitalism, materialism, and women who are “polite, compliant, helpful, and ‘nice’ ” (4–5). Although nothing suggests a direct influence, it is impossible for me not to hear a strong echo of Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto here and, especially, in the interviews that follow. For example, in the lead interview with musician and performance artist Diamanda Galas, and in a strong echo of SCUM’s terrorist agenda and Solanas’s deadpan humor, she describes her invention of the “Black Leather Beavers,” “a group of feminist diesel dykes who went around committing revenge on rapists. We had a veterinarian to perform the castrations, a tattoo artist to engrave ‘BLB’ on the rapists’ foreheads, an arsonist to burn their houses down—we’d tie ‘em to a tree and castrate ‘em. It would be immaculate . . . If you can’t get professionals for the ‘meat work,’ don’t worry about it—but the arsonist should be a professional!” (7). As Solanas did, many of the women interviewed in Angry Women see themselves as agent provocateurs or, as Lydia Lunch puts it, “instigators” with “cattle prods” (107). “At

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this point still (which is astounding to me), I don’t see the improvement in the position of women in the social, political, or economic echelons . . . I still see chronic domination by white middle-aged men in positions of power who will remain there forever, because they decide who gets to decide. Nothing short of total war between the sexes is going to eliminate that!” (105). In a startling resonance with Solanas’s idea of the SCUM “fuck-up force,” Lunch advocates that women “Just say No. Don’t pay the rent. Don’t pay the gas bills. Don’t pay any insurance. Just say, ‘No, I’m not working anymore!’ ” (115). “I’d like to see a women’s army storm into the White House with Uzis and shotguns and eliminate at least half the population who work in politics. They’re killing you slowly—what’s the alternative? Kill them quickly, kill them now, before they kill everything else, okay?” (115). A number of the artists interviewed in Angry Women directly embrace what I referred to in relation to Acker and Solanas as an excremental consciousness. As Galas puts it, “If you tell me I wear a cloak of filth, let me tell you: I wear it real good ” (20). The performance artist Karen Finley especially operates from an abject perspective in her work evident in this description of one of her performances. I put chocolate all over myself. I could use real shit, but we know that happens already—just read the news: Tawana Brawley was found covered with shit in a Heft y bag . . . There are so many occasions where you go into a job or situation and you just have to eat the shit—there’s no other way out. Then I stick little candy hearts (symbolizing “love”) all over my body—because after we’ve been treated like shit, then we’re loved. And many times that’s the only way people get love. Then I add alfalfa sprouts (symbolizing sperm) . . . because we’re just something to jerk off onto, after the “love.” Finally, I put tinsel on my body, because after going through all that, a woman still gets dressed up for dinner. (49)

Finley’s—for me—hilarious deadpan punch line to her abject love story, Galas’s bravado as she embraces with style her cloak of filth, an Uzi toting Lydia Lunch scaling the walls of the White House—all offer vivid images of the eruption of a feminist negative impulse. Existing outside of conventional circuits of transmission or histories of influence, they represent unassimilable sites of humor, shock, surprise and recognition, sites of affective transfer that often have profound effects.

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A recent example of this extreme feminist voice and embrace of abject embodiments may be found in the work of French feminist writer, filmmaker, and former sex-worker, Virginie Despentes. Born in 1969, Despentes is best known among Anglo-American feminists for her controversial rape-revenge novel (1993) and film (2000), Baise-Moi. It tells the story of Nadine (a prostitute) and Manu (a sex actress), who is violently raped on the banks of the Seine one evening. After meeting by chance, the two embark on a no-holds-barred killing spree, which ends with Manu being killed during a botched robbery at a convenience store and Nadine being arrested before she can commit suicide. Called, variously, pornographic, a rock novel, trash, underground literature, and a bloody, buddy road trip, Baise-Moi has sold over 100,000 copies and has been translated into eighteen languages (Huffer, 167). The film version, directed by Despentes and former porn star Coralie Trinh Thi, was banned in France—after a concerted effort by the extreme right—and in Canada by the Ontario Review Board following a screening at the Toronto Film Festival. Despentes comments: “So three porn actresses and an ex-hooker must be forbidden from shooting a film about rape. Even a low-budget, genre film, even a parody . . . As if we were threatening state security. There would be no gang rape film where the victims didn’t weep runny-nosed on the shoulders of men who would avenge them” (2010, 114). Despentes elaborates her version of “porno punk feminism” (the subtitle of her documentary film, Mutantes, about sex workers in the United States) in her 2010 book of theory and essays, King Kong Theory. Lynn Huffer reads Despentes’ persona in the book as a third-wave feminist updating of Solanas’s in SCUM Manifesto (“Virginie takes over where Valerie left off ”), a connection made evident in the first chapter of King Kong Theory (“A Gun for Every Girl)” in which Despentes elaborates the point of view from which she speaks and the audience for whom she is writing. I am writing as an ugly one for the ugly ones: the old hags, the dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckables, the neurotics, the psychos, for all those girls who don’t get a look in the universal market of the consumable chick . . . It’s as a member of the lower working class of womanhood that I speak, that I spoke yesterday and am speaking again today. When I was on unemployment I was not ashamed of being a social outcast. Just furious. It’s the same thing for being a woman: I am not remotely ashamed of not

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being a hot sexy number but I am livid that—as a girl who doesn’t attract men—I am constantly made to feel as if I shouldn’t be around . . . As a girl, I am more King Kong than Kate Moss . . . I am writing as a woman who is always too much of everything—too aggressive, too noisy, too fat, too rough, too hairy . . . So I am writing from here, as one of the left-overs, one of those weirdos, the ones who shave their heads, those who don’t know how to dress, those who worry that they stink . . .women who look like the back of a bus, those who can only rely on themselves for protection, who don’t know how to comfort others, who could care less about their kids, those who like to get drunk in bars and collapse on the floor, women who don’t behave. (7–10)

In the velocity of its verbal outpouring, its bravado, and its wholehearted embrace of the abject, Despentes’s King Kong feminist voice resonates strongly with Solanas’s scum female. Like Solanas, Despentes also claims the superior insight offered by this perspective (“humor and invention are to be found on our side”), and, like Solanas, Despentes defi nes the perspective in opposition to middle-class ideals of womanhood (what Solanas calls “Passive” Rattleheaded” “Daddy’s girls”) updated for the twenty-fi rst century. Th is ideal woman—always white as Despentes points out—must walk a fi ne line: attractive but not whorish, in a good marriage with a nice job “but not so successful she outshines her man,” slim but not neurotic over food, forever young without being disfigured by the surgeon’s knife, a “radiant mother not overwhelmed by diapers and homework” (11). As Despentes puts it in the last lines of the essay— calling attention to the impossibility of the ideal: “I for one have never met her, not anywhere. My hunch is that she doesn’t exist” (11). Despentes’s lower-class outsider perspective enables her to see what mainstream society in a neoliberal, post-feminist moment has rendered invisible and unspeakable. This critical perspective emerges most forcefully in the chapters on her rape (“She’s So Depraved, You Can’t Rape Her”) and her life as a sex worker (“Sleeping with the Enemy”). In “She’s so Depraved,” Despentes relates the aftermath of her own rape and unpacks the gendered logic of a culture in which rape is “a widespread act across all classes, all ages, all levels of beauty and all kinds of personalities” (33) that nonetheless is shrouded in “silence and darkness” (35) and not allowed “into the symbolic realm,” (38) a

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culture in which “rape doesn’t disturb the peace” (35) and, as Despentes puts it, “my very survival incriminates me” (37). This logic operates, first, via a process of disavowal and renaming on the part of men who rape. While [her rape] is going on, they pretend not to know exactly what’s happening. Because we’re wearing miniskirts, and one of us has green hair and the other orange, we must “fuck like rabbits” and so the rape they are carrying out is not actually a rape. As with most rapes, I suspect . . . They may have “pushed her a little” or “fucked up a bit,” maybe she was “too drunk,” or else a nympho just pretending not to like it. If it ended up happening, then the girl must have, at some level, consented . . . Because men condemn rape and despise rapists, what they do is always something else. (33– 4)

The cultural unspeakability of rape also means that Despentes herself must deny it, calling it being “assaulted,” being “mixed-up,” “in a tight corner,” “hassled,” “And so the word [rape] is avoided. On account of all it conceals. The attacked, as well as the attackers, skirt around the word. Silence on both fronts” (37). Among the things that rape culture conceals is the fact that women are actively taught not to defend themselves, “making sure we know that nothing worse could happen to us, and yet that we must neither defend nor revenge ourselves [the real reason that Baise-Moi was censored, according to Despentes] . . . women are called back in line each time they don’t respect the order. Aileen Wuornos’s death sentence was a message to all of us” 43– 4). It also conceals the fact that rape—far from being extraordinary— forms “the center, the heart, the foundation of our sexualities. It is a central sacrificial ritual” and “a well-defi ned political strategy forming the basis of capitalism—a crude and blunt representation of the exercise of power” (46). The power of Despentes’s class-based analysis is strongly displayed in “Sleeping with the Enemy,” a chapter in which she analyzes why she turned to sex work in the context of a neoliberal capitalist culture, a “free-market surveillance state” in which the only winners are “a few men up at the very top” and “the real polarization is increasingly along class lines” (25). Despentes opens the essay by pointing to a central paradox of this culture. “Prostitutes are the only workers whose alienation moves the upper

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class—to the extent that women who have never lacked for anything are also smugly convinced that prostitution should not be legalized . . . selling sex is everybody’s business and every ‘respectable’ woman has something to say on the matter” (53). At the same time, “the types of labor done by poor women and the wretched wages for which they sell their time, are of no interest to anyone” (53). Th roughout the essay, Despentes dismantles and demystifies the oppositions upon which this paradox depends, beginning with the distinction between sex work (“that kind of work”) and all other types of work available to women. Th is includes the minimum-wage job Despentes holds at the time she turns to prostitution where she discovers that “what you might earn in 40 hours of thankless slaving was yours in less than two” (57). She also learns that many women turn to occasional sex work to supplement their income; the only unusual thing “is that I talk about it. Th is work . . . is nothing more than a well-paid job for a woman with few or no skills. The worry isn’t that [sex workers] won’t survive but that they might come and say that it isn’t such a dreadful job after all” (63). Despentes also dismantles the notions that all prostitutes are the same and are uniformly being exploited, notions that thrive because of media coverage of only the most abject, spectacular cases: “Girls without work permits, without free consent, churning out clients, broken in by rape, numb on crack: portraits of lost girls” (74). And, she repeatedly and carefully contextualizes sex work in relation to the brutality of the current neoliberal climate. “I am not trying to argue that in any conditions, and for any woman, this kind of work is innocuous. But with the modern-day economic world being what it is— cold and pitiless warfare—banning the practice of prostitution within an appropriate legal framework is actively preventing the female class from making a decent living and turning a profit from its very stigmatization” (78). Despentes also demystifies sex work by stressing the similarities between prostitution and the life of a public celebrity that she experiences after BaiseMoi is published:  “the feeling of no longer quite belonging to yourself, of selling something intimate, of displaying that which is private is exactly the same; I  still don’t make a cut-and-dried distinction between prostitution and legal waged work, between prostitution and female seduction, between paid sex and exchanged sex” (70). This includes rigid distinctions between

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prostitution (an illegal sex contract) and heterosexual marriage (a legal contract) “in which for a bargain price the woman agrees to carry out a certain number of chores—notably sexual—to ensure a man’s comfort” (55). Finally, Despentes disputes the idea that sex work can only be a negative experience, fundamentally degrading despite the excellent pay. In fact, she finds that it provides a space for experimentation— “It allowed me to try out . . . just about everything that had intrigued, aroused, stimulated, or fascinated me”—and proves to be therapeutic as well— “a crucial step in rebuilding myself after the rape. A business of dollar-by-dollar compensation for what had been taken from me by brute force” (67). Among the most poignant episodes in King Kong Theory is the moment when, after the scandal of Baise-Moi and “as a means of social survival,” Despentes fi nds herself beginning to modify her behavior, which she associates with disowning her own class origins. She restrains her gestures, dyes her hair, fi xes her teeth, begins dating a rich older man, considers having a child, “did my best to fit in. Really. It wasn’t by accident. I consented to become a weaker person” (123). What should be seen as the pinnacle of success by normative standards—social integration, an investment in reproductive futurity, acceptance of a conventionally feminized appearance—becomes for Despentes an unbearable set of restrictions. She is saved by punk rock culture, Courtney Love in particular, a reassertion of working-class pride, and an embrace of what she calls “the something wild,” (and what Solanas called “thrill-seeking females freewheeling to the end of the world”). “I rebuilt my mental health in the shadow of that blonde persona. The monster in me had retained its grip . . . I am not sweet I am not lovable I am not a middle-class girl. I get hormonal highs that send me into peaks of aggression. If I didn’t come from the world of punk rock, I would be ashamed of what I am. But I do come from the world of punk rock, and I am proud of not fitting in” (124). This image of female freedom as monstrosity is picked up in Despentes’s reading of the 2005 Peter Jackson version of King Kong. Kong figures as neither male nor female; beyond all binaries it “is hooked on the link between man and beast, adult and child, good and bad, primitive and civilized, black and white” and enables the blond heroine to experience “all that is wild and powerful within herself,” a sensuous, playful relationship where physical strength

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is not linked with domination (106–7). While Despentes acknowledges that this posthuman heterotopia—as unlocateable as Barry’s “Dreamland”—will not be allowed to survive in the “civilized” world, she does link it imaginatively to the “collective adventure” of feminism, “a revolution, not a rearranged marketing strategy,” a worldview, a choice in which “It’s not a matter of contrasting women’s small advantages with men’s small assets, but of sending the whole lot flying” (137). This image of femaleness as free and fierce also figures in the recently published collection, Icon. In the final essay, for example, the writer Kate Zambreno reflects on her imaginative relationship to and desperate need for Kathy Acker. Zambreno sees in Acker a symbol of “something raw, broken, and feral,” as “someone who writes for me and girls and women like me,” and as a source of inspiration, “In the desire to push myself to radicalize, I look to Kathy” (222, 236). Zambreno’s essay, “New York City, Summer 2013,” consists of a series of letters to Acker, references to her fiction and that of other radical writers (Duras, Batille, Artaud), stories about her, and Zambreno’s confessions about her own insecurities and difficulties as a writer of radical texts. For Zambreno, Acker symbolizes a figure of uncompromised radicality beginning with her absolute refusal to write in ways that are accessible and, therefore, easily commodifiable. “Kathy antagonized the commercial mindset. And she is still so often misread, mischaracterized, her radical, ragey politics stripped away, seen as a trick or stylistic pyrotechnics that can be easily imitated . . . Her works are not easy. Because they are not meant to be easily consumed or simply titillating . . . A great artist is not meant to be consumed, but to devour. This work is terrorism against the body of white male literature” (238–9). In New  York City in 2013, “capitalism is still intensely gendered and women writers are still expected to be commodities,” focused on visibility (good grooming), brand management, and platform, a situation that Zambreno calls “gross, gross, gross” (232), and that causes her to wonder “How can a radical artist survive here? And stay feral? How can art be political in society?” (223). Acker had “a body that raged” (240) and her ability to express extreme negative affects ignites sparks of affective recognition in Zambrino. “I love that you hate. I  love that you hate and that your works derive from such hate. I  hate too” (223). She also echoes—sometimes quite directly—Acker’s

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emphasis on the blood and guts of the abject female body in order to express the alienation she feels as a writer. “Sometimes I feel skinless, raw, like I don’t have a face” (236). “I want to write about feeling dirty and sweaty and gross in public as a woman and writer, like a witch” (225). Finally, Acker succeeds as an icon for Zambreno because she exists outside the commodified circuit of damaging affects that, in particular, circulate online and outside any mother-daughter plot of generational transmission (“I’m a barren womb”, she tells us). “I’m glad I  haven’t met you. I can appreciate your texts. I can read them as sustenance, as encouragement. I don’t feel weird or crazy you won’t blurb my book, or act divalike with me, or don’t want to read with me . . . I don’t have to feel bitter or wounded or ignored. I can feel your work and influence. I can love you completely” (244). In the introduction to their recent edited collection, Working with Affect in Feminist Readings, Disturbing Differences, Marianne Liljestrom and Susanna Paasonen summarize the ways in which feminist work with affect has newly emphasized “the inseparability of affect and interpretation; rather than readerly mastery, interpretation becomes a question of contagious affects and dynamic encounters between texts and readers . . . the question of affect and feminist reading surfaces centrally as one of ethics and answerability” (1–3). Feminist works that in their form deliberately elude mastery, works that trade in and generate negative affects as central aspects of their projects, pose the relation between ethics and feminist accountability in especially direct ways. Sometimes these works offer examples of new ethical values from extremely subordinated positions that would be easy to dismiss, such as Barry’s vision of nonhierarchical, nonbinary, non-dominating relations among society’s most marginalized others. In other instances, such as Chantal Chawaf’s cautionary tale, Redemption, we are plunged directly into a violently unethical set of relations that, because of Chawaf’s “close-up method,” we experience on an extremely intimate level. The affects generated in and by Redemption suggest some of the ways in which affect is capable of bringing together vastly different psychic and social orders in the larger social field, thereby precipitating new forms of intellectual work. Finally, these texts remind us that all reading involves giving oneself over to the structures of

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another’s experience without excluding the difference of this experience or assimilating it to what we already know. They provide opportunities to test our capacity to encounter genuine difference and they ask us to invent new ways of developing an ethical relation to the multiple othernesses represented in and by difficult texts.

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Index abject, abjection 16, 22, 32, 36, 37, 42, 44, 48–51, 54, 56, 58–9, 60, 83–91, 100, 102–3, 106, 120, 124, 129, 131, 147, 155–7, 159, 162, 165 in Acker 42, 48–52 in Barry 129, 155, 156– 62 in Chawaf 83–103 excremental 36, 129, 155 female body 36–7, 49 Kristeva 49–50, 59– 60, 84, 85 Acker, Kathy 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 15–16, 36–7, 39– 60, 106, 129, 145, 146, 147–8, 155, 161–2 Adorno, Theodor 11, 17, 18 affect 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12–13, 16–18, 25, 28–35, 52, 58, 62, 65, 68, 79, 80–1, 84, 86, 88, 120, 123– 4, 128, 130, 136–8, 141, 155, 161–2 in Acker 58 negative affects 6, 15, 16, 124, 130, 161–2, 167 in SCUM Manifesto 32–5 studies 62–3 Agamben, Giorgio 137 Ahmed, Sara 80–1 anti-art 13, 19, 21, 27, 149, 155 anti-discourse 57, 63 anti-narrative 3, 42–8, 57, 65– 6 anti-social 8–10, 151 Armstrong, Isobel 11, 12, 17, 18 Atkinson, Ti-Grace 22, 34 avant-garde 2, 4, 7, 13–16, 20–2, 36, 41–2, 60, 64, 68, 87, 102–3, 150 in Acker 41–2, 60 in Barry 127–8 in Cha 64 in Chawaf 83, 87, 97, 102–3 French 13, 14, 102–3 neo avant-garde 4, 10, 13, 15, 20–2, 26, 108 Barry, Lynda 1, 2, 9, 11, 12, 127– 44, 145, 146, 148, 161–2 Barthes, Roland 14–15

Batille, George 1, 36, 39, 41, 161 Baudrillard, Jean 15, 39, 41, 52–4, 56–7, 60 Benjamin, Walter 63, 100–2 Bildungsroman 2, 4, 8, 10, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 60, 67, 73, 129, 146, 148, 151 Braidotti, Rosi 12, 13, 127, 137, 140– 4 Budick, Sanford and W. Iser 10 Burroughs, William S. 36, 41 Butler, Judith 17, 58–9, 60, 62–3, 71, 76, 115, 130, 149 Caputi, Jane 24–5 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung 1, 4, 5, 11, 15, 61–81, 121, 149, 150 Chawaf, Chantel 1, 5, 6, 9, 11, 14–15, 83– 103, 119–20, 125, 135, 162 Cheng, Anne Anlin 61, 62, 63, 65, 68 childhood 25–8, 35, 43–5, 55, 128–32, 145–7, 151–3 Cixous, Helene 13, 15, 16, 186 class 1, 23, 25, 27–8, 35– 6, 42, 128–30, 150, 156– 60 Cornell, Drucilla 11 Creed, Barbara 85– 6 deconstruction 2– 4, 51, 106, 119–20, 148 deKoven, Marianne 7, 14, 15, 17 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 41, 45, 137– 40, 142 Derrida, Jacques 11, 20, 41, 130 Despentes, Virginie 35, 156– 61 Dick, Leslie 43, 146, 147–8 Doan, Laura 115 Driscoll, Catherine 145– 6 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne 22, 34 Echols, Alice 19, 21 Edelman, Lee 8–10 Ehrenreich, Barbara 101 Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian 62 Fahs, Breanne 20– 4, 25, 33, 34 Felski, Rita 5, 6

174

Index

feminism, feminist and apocalypse 19–37, 40, 154 and avant-garde 2, 7, 13–16 consensus narratives 8 contemporary Western 1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 14, 20–1, 25, 32, 35– 6, 86, 131, 145–8, 161 and ethics 11–12, 35, 80, 86, 109, 136, 141–2, 144, 149, 162 French 13–16, 64, 86, 156 lesbian 17, 107, 114–18, 120, 148 and pornography 46–8, 50–1, 56, 156 and postmodernism 2–3, 5, 7, 10–11, 48, 56–9 radical 19, 21–3, 33, 86, 102–3, 110, 117, 120–1 reading 5, 6, 7, 11–12, 26, 47–8, 68, 94, 101, 106, 108, 117–19, 125, 148–9, 162 shadow feminisms 9, 147 Finley, Karen 155 Fischlin, Daniel 10 Friedman, Ellen G. 7, 41, 50, 60 Galas, Dimanda 154–5 Genet, Jean 16, 20, 44, 50, 54–5 Gilmore, Leigh 117–19 Gluck, Robert 43 Gornick, Vivian 22, 32 Grace, Victoria 52, 54, 56, 57 Halberstam, Judith 9–10, 42, 146–7, 149 Harding, James M. 21 Harryman, Carla 43 Heller, Dana 24, 32 Hemmings, Clare 8, 148 Herron, Mary 25, 33 history, historiography 3, 8, 11, 19, 25– 6, 61–3, 65, 68–70, 72, 77, 80, 106, 111, 149, 154 Hogeland, Lisa Marie 5 Huffer, Lynne 35, 156 Irigaray, Luce 19, 28, 51, 86 Jaggar, Alison M. 34 Jardine, Alice J. 14–15, 84 Kang, Hyun Yi 67 Kauer, Ute 116

Kennedy, Colleen 47–8 Kennedy, Florence 22 Kim, Elaine H. 64, 67 Kirtley, Susan E. 127, 128, 129, 131–2, 135 Kristeva, Julia 14, 20, 41, 47, 49, 55, 59, 65–6, 83, 85–6, 89–92, 95–6, 102–3, 108–9 Kutzer, Daphne M. 124 Lauret, Maria 5 Levinson, Marjorie 17–18 Lewallen, Constance M. 64, 78 Lindenmeyer, Antje 124–5 Lloyd, David 63 Lowe, Lisa 76 Lunch, Lydia 154–5 Lyon, Janet 20 McCaffery, Larry 40, 57 McEvilley, Thomas 13 melancholy 60, 63, 67 grief 63, 121 melancholic logic 72 melancholic practices 124–5 melancholic relation 69–70 mourning 62, 67, 69, 121– 4 Minh-ha, Trinh T. 61, 68 Moore, Lisa 116–17, 119, 148–9 Moulthrop, Stuart 148–9 Mullen, Harryette 151 narrative 4, 5, 8, 22, 26, 50–1, 54, 56, 63, 79, 87, 105 anti-narrative 3, 15, 40–3, 48, 57, 67, 80, 86, 88, 102, 112, 121, 123, 145– 6 consensus narratives 8 master narrative 3 negation aesthetics 1, 58–9, 80 and affect 52 and history 65 literary 1, 11, 13, 30, 42, 60, 107 philosophical 10, 17, 62, 106 practices 6, 11, 24, 26, 48, 69 negative aesthetics defined 1–2, 5, 9–10, 17–18 and ethics 11, 80, 138 features absence 2, 10–11, 26, 56, 62–3, 65– 6, 69–71, 76, 79, 80, 92, 106–7, 110–11, 119, 121, 123– 4, 147, 149

Index ambiguity 3, 73, 108, 113, 116 associative structure 110 broken binaries 36–7, 112, 114–15, 137– 40, 146, 160, 162 circularity 67, 71, 81, 91, 106, 108, 121 close-up style 73, 87–8, 92–3, 95, 101, 107, 162 concealment 79 contradiction 3, 10, 12, 18, 120, 125 delay 110, 121–3 digression 110, 121–3 dislocation 43, 57, 65, 72–3, 75, 88, 94, 101, 105, 107, 110, 112, 115, 121, 147–8 fatal strategies 30–1, 37, 39, 52– 60, 147 gendered indeterminacy 105–25 heterotopia 143, 146 incompleteness 63, 65, 69, 80–1, 149 infinite regress 112 inversions 26–32, 53, 137– 40, 146 logical impossibility 105 narrative unreliability 108–10 noise 57–8 paradox 27, 33, 35, 62, 69, 70, 75, 106, 108, 119, 143, 158–9 refusal 1, 9, 18, 34, 43, 56–8, 63– 4, 67, 87–8, 103, 118, 119, 147, 161 repetition 29, 44, 57, 66, 70–1, 76–7, 79, 88, 121, 129, 137, 146, 148 reversion 53– 4, 56 self-cancelling 69 silence 2, 28, 40, 65– 6, 69, 71–2, 75, 77, 80, 147, 149 stasis 44, 71–2, 75, 79, 91, 137 undecideability 107 virtuality 107, 112–13, 116–17 negativity in literature 10–11 in philosophy 11 negatron 10, 149 Nunn, Heather 124

175

as defective 26–8 and domination 2, 5, 129–30, 154–5, 161 as fascistic 84, 90, 95, 100–1 and fathers 131, 135, 139 and female body 48, 51, 55– 6, 95 and gender psychosis 84 and gothic novel 129, 135 as pathological 84, 86, 91–2, 95– 6, 100 Pearce, Lynn 6, 117–19, 125 Pitchford, Nicola 40, 47–8 posthuman, posthumanism 12, 127– 44, 140–2 postmodern 2, 4, 13, 47–8, 53, 56, 59 reversion 53– 4, 56 signifying systems 52– 4 simulation 52–3, 56 and subjectivity 3– 4, 40, 52–3 and textuality 11, 115 postmodernism 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 149 in Acker 39– 40, 45, 48 the already-said 106, 111 appropriation 45– 6 and horror story 87–8 lesbian 115, 117, 120, 148 and love story 106 and negation 10, 11, 149 in Ross 151 pre-oedipal 14, 86–8, 90– 4, 96 Puchner, Michael 4, 20 Rinder, Martin R. 74 romance plot anti-romance 106, 111, 113, 120–1 family romance 135 as gothic horror 85, 91, 93, 98–9, 120 and indeterminacy 105–25, 148 lesbian 114–17, 120 as pathological 44, 84, 89, 92–3, 96, 98, 135 postmodern 108 as virtual 107, 112–13 Ronell, Avital 20, 25– 6, 36 Ross, Fran 150–3

Onega, Susana 124 patriarchal, patriarchy anti-patriarchal critique 19–37 capitalist heteropatriarchy 1, 21, 26, 36, 40, 56, 102, 146–7, 161

Senna, Danzy 150, 153 Siegle, Robert 4, 15, 40, 42, 47 Solanas, Valerie 1, 2, 6, 9, 19–37, 41, 42, 154–5, 156–7, 160 Stowers, Cath 116

176 Stridsberg, Sara 34–5 Suleiman, Susan Rubin 7, 13, 16

Index

Theweleit, Klaus 84, 90–1, 95, 97, 100–2 trauma 62, 66, 69, 75, 80, 121, 136–7, 142

Wiegman, Robyn 8, 16–17,  118 Winterson, Jeanette 1, 2, 5, 11, 16–17, 105–25, 148 Wollen, Peter 41–2

Vale, V. and Andrea Juno 153

Zambreno, Kate 145, 161–2