Monique
Wittig:
from "One Is Not
Born a Woman." The Straight Mind and
Other Essays. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1992. 9-20.
A materialist feminist approach to women's oppression destroys
the idea that women are a "natural group": "a racial group of a special
kind, a group perceived as natural,
a group of men considered as materially specific in their bodies. What
the analysis accomplishes on the level of ideas, practice makes actual
at the level of facts: by its very existence, lesbian society destroys
the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a "natural group." A
lesbian society pragmatically reveals that the division from men of
which women have been the object is a political one and shows that we
have been ideologically rebuilt into a "natural group." In the case of
women, ideology goes far since our bodies as well as our minds are the
product of this manipulation. We have been compelled in our bodies and
in our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been
established for us. Distorted to such an extent that our deformed body
is what they call "natural," what is supposed to exist as such before
oppression. Distorted to such an extent that in the end oppression
seems to be a consequence of this "nature" within ourselves (a nature
which is only an idea). (9-10)
A materialist feminist approach shows that what we take for
the cause or origin of oppression is in fact only the mark imposed by the oppressor: the
"myth of woman," plus its material effects and manifestations in the
appropriated consciousness and bodies of women. Thus, the mark does not
predate oppression: Colette Guillaumin has shown that before the
socioeconomic reality of black slavery, the concept of race did not
exist, at least not in its modern meaning, since it was applied to the
lineage of families. However, now, race, exactly like sex, is taken as
an "immediate given," a "sensible given," "physical features"
belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be a physical and
direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an
"imaginary formation," which reinterprets physical features (in
themselves as neutral as any others but marked by the social system)
through the network of relationships in which they are perceived. (They
are seen as black, therefore
they are black; they are
seen as women, therefore they
are women. But before
being seen that way, they
first had to made that way.)
(10-11)
It is we who historically must undertake the task of defining
the individual subject in materialist terms. This certainly seems to be
an impossibility since materialism and subjectivity have always been
mutually exclusive. nevertheless, and rather than despairing of ever
understanding, we must recognize the need
to reach subjectivity in the abandonment by many of us of the myth
"woman" (the myth of woman being only a snare that holds us up). This
real necessity for everyone to exist as an individual, as well as
member of a class, is perhaps the first condition for the
accomplishment of a revolution, without which there can be no real
fight or transformation. But the opposite is also true; without class
and class consciousness there are no real subjects, only alienated
individuals. For women to answer the question of the individual subject
in materialist terms is first to show, as the lesbians and feminists
did, that supposedly "subjective," "individual," "private" problems are
in fact social problems, class problems; that sexuality is not for
women an individual and subjective expression, but a social institution
of violence. But once we have shown that all so-called personal
problems are in fact class problems, we will still be left with the
question of the subject of each singular woman--not the myth, but each
one of us. At this point, let us say that a new personal and subjective
definition for all humankind can only be found beyond the categories of
sex (woman and man) and that the advent of individual subject demands
first destroying the categories of sex, ending the use of them, and
rejecting all sciences which still use these categories as their
fundamentals (practically all social sciences).
To destroy "woman" does not mean that we aim, short of
physical destruction, to destroy lesbianism simultaneously with the
categories of sex, because lesbianism provides for the moment the only
social form in which we an live freely. Lesbian is the only concept I
know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because
the designated subject (lesbian) is not
a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For
what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a relation
that we have previously called servitude, a relation which implies
personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation
("forced residence," domestic corvée, conjugal duties, unlimited
production of children, etc.), a relation which lesbians escape by
refusing to become to to stay heterosexual. We are escapees from our
class in the same way as the American runaway slaves were when
escaping slavery and becoming free. For us this is an absolute
necessity; our survival demands that we contribute all our strength to
the destruction of the class of women within which men appropriate
women. This can be accomplished only by the destruction of
heterosexuality as a social system which is based on the oppression of
women by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference between
the sexes to justify this oppression. (19-20)
Marianne De Koven
from
"Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Criticism." Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein,
ed. Michael J. Hoffman. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co, 1986. 171-182.
To
clarify this notion of incoherence, we might look at Noam Chomsky's
idea of "degrees of grammaticalness." Chomsky establishes three
"degrees of grammaticalness" by differentiating among utterances which
are strictly or conventionally grammatical (first degree),
"semi-grammatical" (second degree), and totally ungrammatical (third
degree). Chomsky's explanation of his distinctions is relevant to the
argument here: "In short, it seems to e no more justifiable to ignore
the distinctions of subcategory that give the series "John plays golf,"
"golf plays John," "John plays and," than to ignore the rather similar
distinctions between seeing a man in the flesh, in an abstract
painting, and in an inkblot" (p. 385).
Chomsky
makes his most powerful case for these degrees of grammaticalness by
listing examples.:
First
Degree: a year ago; perform the task; John plays golf;
revolutionary new ideas appear infrequently; John loves company;
sincerity frightens John; what did you do to the book, bite it?
Second
Degree: a grief ago; perform leisure; golf plays John;
colorless green ideas sleep furiously; misery loves company; John
frightens sincerity; what did you do to the book, understand it?
Third
Degree: a the ago; perform compel; golf plays aggressive;
furiously sleep ideas green colorless; abundant loves company; John
sincerity frightens; what did you do to the book, justice it? (p. 386)
Phrases
of the second degree such as "a grief ago," "colorless green ideas,"
and "John frightens sincerity" are strikingly similar to Stein's
successful experimental writing, particularly in the 1911-1914 style of
Tender Buttons, "Susie
Asado," "Preciosilla," and "Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa
Curonia." Moreover, phrases of the third degree such as "a the ago,"
"perform compel," and "golf plays aggressive" are very similar to the
unsuccessful writing that resulted from Stein's experiments in the late
twenties and early thirties with unrelated successions of single words
(see particularly How to Write).
As Chomsky shows, the difference between the second and third degrees
is precisely their relative accessibility... (73)
Rachel Blau DuPlessis on
Susan Howe
From "'Whowe': On
Susan Howe." The Pink Guitar:
Writing as Feminist Practice. New York & London: Routledge,
1990. 123-139. Reprinted at The Electronic Poetry Center. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/howe/howe_duplessis.html
A Drawing
The
meaning of this is entirely and best to say the
mark, best to say it best to shown sudden places
best to make bitter, best to make the length tall and
nothing broader, anything between the half.
Gertrude
Stein, Tender Buttons
Susan Howe takes the experimentalist desire for
interrogation of the mark and combines it with the populist mysteries
of such oblique and marginalized materials as folk tales and early
American autobiography and fuses these under the complex and resonant
sign of human femaleness. Her work with its minimalist elegance and
economy of gesture is also charged with social density, in her critical
allusions to our common culture (Swift, Yeats, Shakespeare), and in her
austere judgments of the shared political and ethical destructions of
our experience - the liquidation of Native Americans, of Jews in the
Holocaust, the rack of Ireland. She has felt the inflection of victor
by loser, of other by winner, and these subtle dialectics of power
create her subtle political diction. Her words, sometimes broken even
into a magical "zaum" tactic, can draw upon lost words or non-dominant
languages (Gaelic, Native American languages): her poems are
repositories of the language shards left in a battlefield over cultural
power. (1)
Like much of Susan Howe's poetry, the early Secret
History of the Dividing Line (1979) is set at an intersection, as
the title suggests, of time and space in a particular emotional
territory. It is formed by probing uses of the meaning of Mark. Both N.
and vb.
Mark — a written or printed symbol
— a sign or visible trace
— an inscription signifying ownership or origin
— a sign of depth
— a brand imposed
— a grade
— an aim or target
— a boundary
— a tract of land held in common
— a kind of money
— to notice
— to make visible impressions
— to set off or separate
— to consider, study, observe
Howe chooses to have her making a mark bounded by two
Marks to whom this book is dedicated: her father and her son.
Inscriptions and depths. Perhaps the secret history of the dividing
line is its situational quality, a boundary explored between groups
whose differences seem marked, but whose fusions and mutual yearnings
the poetry seems to enact: tribe to tribe; generation to generation
(adult to child, father to daughter); male to female; dead to living.
Howe plays on a basic myth of the hero, or the father—something from
which the searching daughter feels alien, something for which the
searching daughter feels desire. Thus the air-grasping syllables,
encoding the word hero in anguished slow motion:
O
where ere
he He A
ere I were
wher
father father
(SHDL,
p. 6)
Later, Howe proposes the debate between the woman as
hero (subject) and as heroine (that O or object).
Who
whitewashed epoch
her hand
knocking her 0
hero
(SHDL,
p. 32) (DuPlessis 123-124)
An important,
underutilized essay of Gertrude Stein argues implicitly that
experimentalist writing occurs in opposition to "forensics," and in
temptation by it. The mastery and the power. (7) That loaded word is also the title of her essay; it
alludes to discourses of dominance. Forensics (defined conventionally
as public argumentation, formal debate, presentations of law courts) is
understood as the dialect, ideolect, or rhetorical mode of a specific
group which holds and practices power ("they made all walk"), social
replication ("forensics is a taught paragraph") and definition. For
Stein, forensics is a system of normative definition, which, in the
imposition of authoritative norms, trains one to patterns of
assumptions (including those of gender). "Forensics establishes which
is that they will rather than linger and so they establish" (p. 391).
The writer of "Forensics," the she seems to be debating the value, if
any, of forensics to her—forensics as disputation, as power, as
definition, as "eloquence and reduction" (p. 386). Among other
functions, this essay, therefore, is a debate between authority and the
anti-authoritarian. (8) It is clear enough that complicity, obedience,
agreement, and renunciation of one's own bent are part of the system of
forensics. The question is "how to write" (to borrow the title of the
whole book which this essay completes) when the writing space is
colonized by forensics. How to gather authority without authoritarian
power; how to indicate clarities without the limitation of certainties;
how to give and receive pleasure without rhetorical or generic
proscriptions; how to indicate one's volume without squatting
hibernations of mass. How to Write. This, Gertrude Stein
indicates, is her problem; this, Virginia Woolf indicates, is her
problem; this, Marianne Moore indicates, is her problem; this, Susan
Howe indicates, is her problem. (DuPlessis 133)
"Whowe." Sometimes the characters seem to be whole, but their
integrated knowledge, unstable, alternates with explosive silences,
blackouts staged by Howe. They panic. They are self-possessed. The
dangerous dialectic of claiming made from mad/e is a
brilliant dramatic and intellectually compelling site in this work.
"Surely [says Beverly Dahlen] she cannot simply enter the tradition,
identifying with it as if she were male; she is, I think, in grave risk
to do so. But what other identity is there? Surely, to ask that is to
bring us to the heart of the matter: woman as absence and the
consequent risks involved in the invention of our own traditions." (15) A female writer. A female writer faced with a
complex (the tradition) more often inimical than welcoming, and filled
to brim, with multiplex inscriptions of women and the female and the
feminine. A female writer looking for a way to write. How, indeed, to
write. Whowe to write. The path Howe chooses here, this examination of
a fictional character, and a semi-fictionally available historically
attested person, bridges a way to the definition of "our own
traditions" to treat the palimpsested absence, filling it with our
(with whower) annotations and firm marks. Yet they are already filled
with what they establish; filled with taught paragraphs. Who we? Who?
How? Who howe (who is any of us) to attempt this? And whooo-wee— the
cheer, the whoop, the enormous, outrageous pleasure, the pride, of
making this attempt. The pride in Howe occurs not so much in overt
exclamations of joy, but in gestures towards election.
Left upon the stage at the end are versions of a
community of seekers, versions of the whowe: a sojourner, a lonely
bastard, and a fool. It is this kind of combination of marginals, fused
into one, who becomes the center of Articulation of Sound Forms in
Time. For that work can be read as an allegory of how the center,
how major man—white, colonist, Protestant, male, minister, armed with
God's word and courage and rectitude—how that man, entering almost
accidentally some marginal space, goes from the straight and narrow to
sheer errancy, sheer wanderings. Mr. Hope Atherton, militant new
American, wanders on the margins of the colony at which he was a
center. His oblique vision and experience of the Other ("Indian") and
himself as Other is forever defining. Following from Howe's study of
the margins as marginal (in The Liberties), Articulation of
Sound Forms in Time offers a vision of the center as marginal,
marginalized, prone to a hopeless— yet potentially saving—breakup of
its most cherished paradigms.
The deepest effect of this experience of otherness is
the dissolution of language. This work again fervently enacts Howe's
language strategies. The isolation of letter. Of syllable. Phrasal
constructions. Word squares mingling Native American words and word
parts with phonemes from "our" language ("amonoosuck" and "ythian"),
these macronics making an "uncannunc" set of nonce formations [ASFT,
[p. 16]). Words are situational, meteoric, unrepeatable, impacting the
whole history of language in one gesture. There is word "play"—the pun
as the intersection of personal revelation (condensation, distortion)
and linguistic possibility. And all these (words as if graffiti puns,
macronics, words scattered like a handful of jacks) (words effaced;
words without space, as in Roman inscriptions) the critical
appropriation of all burlesque or archaic language habits for high
critical ends. The taxing struggle to assemble and maintain a
self-questioning (who? how?) cultural position: anti-authoritarian, yet
authoritatively provoked by one's female identity: Howe. We. WHOWE.
I have taken my pun on Howe's name from herself, to
point up the rich sense of self and of community (who we?) that must be
sustained to sustain this kind of feminist critique. (16) The end of The Liberties set a proof to
herself. It consists of a series of word squares alternating S and C
(for Stella and Cordelia, but also to herself: Susan, SEE!), followed
by a series of riddles whose answer becomes How: a question, a
salutation, a hold, a hole, a depression. Offering thereby an
astonishing self-portrait of an artist, a woman, trying to inherit
herself, to work herself into her own—"patrimony"? "anarchy"? No, into
her own "liberty."
Taking liberties.
Hence a work of "howness: both concavity and depth" from
a "howdie: a midwife, origin obscure" who gave it life from the
concavity and the depth at once. "Across the Atlantic, I / inherit
myself." During the masque at the very end, a Sentry comes on stage to
say "I am afraid," as who would not be, having written, seen,
undertaken, dared and proposed such a work. A work which pursues
Shakespeare (the drama like a mix of heath scene and Beckett), Swift,
Yeats, and must do so, a compulsion (deference deranged,
damaged, exploded by feminist questions, by whowe) undertaken in fear
and desire ("dare / / tangle"). To take such liberties. To take them at
their word. To take their word. How to write. Whowe to write.
1984/1987/1989
(DuPlessis 137-139)
15. Beverly Dahlen. "[Response to Rasula]," HOW(ever) 1,4 (May 1984): 14
The '"she" is not Howe but contains a generalized portrait of the
struggle of the female cultural worker. Return
Rachel Back
from Led by Language: The Poetry and Poetics of
Susan Howe. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.
From the Introduction:
On the
‘Difficulty’ of Howe’s Poetry
The difficulty of
the poetry of avant garde American poet Susan Howe
and the demands it makes of its readers has led more than one critic to
question the purpose of these language intricacies/conundrums, and of
the (seemingly willful) concealment of meaning behind radical
linguistic and visual experimentation, labeling her techniques "arch"
or "elitist." Asked her opinion regarding the
objection to experimental writing such as hers on the grounds that it
reaches
only "a very narrow, highly educated" audience composed of readers who
have
to have "tremendous intellectual confidence even to grapple with these
texts,"
Howe names this objection a manifestation of "a really frightening
anti-intellectualism
in our culture." She continues: "Why should things please a large
audience?
And isn't claiming that the work is too intellectually demanding also
saying
a majority of people are stupid? Different poets will have different
audiences
Howe ends this exchange by emphasizing that what has been termed the
difficulty
of her work is not a chosen attribute but rather where she is led by
language,
where the process of poetry writing takes her (Keller 1995: 23 24). In
an
earlier interview, Howe's response to the charge that her poetry is
"inaccessible"
is that "it's accessible to whoever really wants access to it" (Falon
1989:
4 1), rerouting attention from the difficulty of her work to the reader
and
his or her efforts and desires vis à vis her work. (4-5)
The insistence on
multiple possibilities intrinsic to Howe's work does
not translate into a poetic field open to random and wholly individual
associations on the part of the reader. In terms borrowed from
psychoanalytic literary criticism, Howe's work, "like the analytic
patient, provides the terms of its interpretation and the reader has to
learn to wrestle with this idiom rather than replace it with prepacked
theories"; indeed, the reader must cultivate
“the art of listening [in place of] the seizure of meaning" (Hellmann
1994:
10-11 my italics)." The linguistic and visual choices that Howe makes
are
not arbitrary, just as their meaning(s) is not open ended: her poetry
is
propelled by an inner logic that is determined, first and foremost, by
sound
associations, and then by the visual form of the unfolding text, its
emotional
dynamic and thematic concerns. The sometimes elusive and elliptical
nature
Howe's work may also be read as resulting from its poetic and political
commitment to sustaining and incorporating "rival possibilities"
(Perloff 1981:
137), from its attention to and emphasis on language as itself dynamic,
volatile,
and protean, and from the very real difficulty -- experienced in the
texts
by writer and reader both of tracking (forgotten voices, lost
footsteps)
through overgrown and obliterating literary and historical landscapes.
The difficulty of
Howe's poetry is also intricately connected to her
vision of the role of the reader in the writer reader complex. "Reader
I do not wish
to hide / in you to hide from you," states Howe in The Nonconformist's
Memorial
(30), and in her most recent collection Pierce Arrow she writes:
"Please
indifferent reader you / into whose hands this book / may fall" (119),
leaving
the appeal open ended. These addresses to the reader foreground the
centrality
of the reader in the making of meaning - a centrality of which
Howe
is not only aware but also wholly embraces. Rather than a poetry of
elitism,
as some have maintained, I read Howe's work as a type of
democratization of
poetry, with the reader a full citizen of the textual terrain, with
equal rights and obligations in the making of meaning. In fact, rather
than intending to block entry and leave the reader without, Howe's work
is at all times engaged
in bringing the reader more deeply into the text, toward effectuating
greater
participation on the part of the reader in the process of making
meaning
from a poetic text. "I wouldn't want the reader to be just a passive
consumer,"
states Howe in the Keller interview. "I would want my readers to play,
to
enter the mystery of language, and to follow words where they lead, to
let
language lead them" (1995: 3 1). Howe's imagery here suggests that the
reader's
role is a paradoxical one that involves both active engagement ("To
follow
words where they lead") and a type of surrender ("to let language lead
them");
what unifies these two positions is their close and intimate
relationship
with the text. (5-6)
Howe's radical
linguistic and visual strategies invite the reader to
employ a "reading" process that is multifaceted and more varied than
what is conventionally thought of as reading functions. The reader,
first of all, listens to words and their musical patterns, which may,
in fact, have no ready translation or interpretation. The reader then
looks at the page's design, as one would I look at a painting,
foregoing – momentarily - entanglement in the semantic level of a
word in order to consider its visual features, its placement, and its
function on the white canvas. Thirdly, the reader sometimes becomes
tactually engaged with the physicality of the book - turning it
upside down and around - as the conventions of top-to-bottom or
left margin to right margin line arrangements are abandoned, replaced
by the sense of the page as a three dimensional entity whose depth has
yet to be understood and of words as semiphysical (mythical) creatures
liberated from the stagnancy and strictures of standard poetic usage.
Finally, the reader engages the semantics
and the narrative(s) (often in nonnarrative form) of the work, though
always
with the recognition that interpretive opportunities are
multiple…
(7)
From the Introduction:
Howe’s Historical
Project
Howe's poetic
recuperation "from the dark side of history. .. [of]
voices that are anonymous, slighted inarticulate" (Europe of Trusts 14)
differs from
that of many other mainstream contemporary poets committed to giving
voice
to the silenced. A formal distinction of great import is that in Howe's
poetry
- like that of other avant garde writers - the
investigation into
history's erased figures and the resulting critique of contemporary
culture
"takes places as and in language," through "various transgressions of
form"
(Naylor 1999: 9 11). Avant garde writer Nathaniel Mackey's incisive
critique
of other marginalized writers who place "far too much emphasis on
accessibility"
is relevant here (qtd. in Naylor 1999: 13). Like Mackey, Howe refuses
to
simplify the complex issues involved in history's silencing tactics or
to
obliterate or undervalue the great effort of retrieving lost voices.
Thus,
Howe's poetry - dense, difficult, resistant to easy
penetration - formally enacts the arduous process of tracking
back through thick and overgrown
landscapes in search of history's missing. In addition, the radical
language
experiments of Howe's work present "a formal as well as thematic
challenge
to the structure of authority under which history has been written"
(Naylor
1999: 14).
A second factor
that sets Howe's revisionist historiography apart –
this time from other avant garde writers engaged in historical
retellings - is … the highly autobiographical nature of her work.
The charting of her own childhood and, ancestral geographies, the
uncovering of the points of convergence between biography and history,
and the frank foregrounding of the intensely personal are foundational
to Howe's poetry and poetics. The uncovering of each historical tale is
propelled also by the wholly individual and idiosyncratic historical
details of the poet's own life… And yet, Howe's poetry is fundamentally
different from the personally charged work of mainstream contemporary
poets whose lyric "I" dominates the poems' focus, obliterating all
else. The speaking voice in Howe's work -- particular, personal, self
revealing - is not authoritative or unified: as Parrott frames
it, the
perspective "is always shifting and ... the subject, far from being at
the
center of the discourse ... is located at its interstices" (1999: 432
2).
(11-12)
Finally, history as
Howe reads and renders it is often characterized by
scenes of violence, portrayed through visual and aural violence on the
page:
battles, beheadings, scalpings, banishment, abandonment to starvation,
cold,
and madness, crucifixions, and conquering forces are
all
abundantly present in her poetry. The violence, of course, is
perpetrated
in the justifying name of a god, a ruling ideology, or a religious
framework,
and Howe's poetry is committed not only to uncovering lost voices and
tales
but also, through those lost voices and tales, to
investigating
the roots of that violence in her society. Behind the most
decorous
and civil facades, she argues, lies "an in for murder, erasure and
authoritarianism" (Talisman 1994:64). Howe's poetics
of historical revision
is propelled by a desire and a need to know “Why are we such a violent
nation?
Why do we have such contempt for powerlessness? I feel compelled in my
work
to go back, not to the Hittites, but to the invasion or settling ... of
this
place. I am trying to understand what went wrong” (Talisman 1994: 55)
(13)
From the Introduction:
Howe and Her
Contemporaries
The violence that
permeates Howe's work may be read as a consequence of
the specific historical consciousness formed, in part, by her being
born
into the destruction and chaos of World War II and coming into first
cognition with pictures of the Holocaust and the war's devastation
imprinting violence on her mind and in her heart . Similarly, her
father's sudden disappearance in 1941 into that war and his five year
absence (in addition to her mother's consequent going off to work at
that time [Falon 1989: 31]) certainly established radical instability,
the insecurity of structures, and the ever-present threat of loss as
constitutive elements in Howe's emotional and, hence, poetic identity.
I begin this brief consideration of Howe's position among her
contemporaries in experimental American writing with this biographical
information as it is, in part, Howe’s year of birth and her resulting
preoccupation with issues of history and violence that set her apart
from many of the language-centered poets with whom she has
traditionally been grouped. (13-14)
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