In "The Poetics of Postmodern Subversion: The Politics of Writing in William S.
Burroughs’s ’Western Lands’," Frederick M. Dolan argues that "Burroughs…remains
decisively within the tradition" (550). Dolan’s argument is based on the postmodernist
assumption that it is not possible to step out of language in order to say/write something;
thus, any piece of writing is doomed to stay stuck in the paradigm it is trying to
overthrow, replace, redescribe, and/or deconstruct. Antiessentialist (post)philosophical
discourse - from Nietzsche, via Heidegger, de Man, to Derrida, and Rorty - evidences the
apparent impasse. Dolan parallels postmodernist imaginative writing to the practices of
the akin theoretical vocabularies, hence accounting in them for a similar
cul-de-sac. His
argument resonates with Barbara Johnson’s analysis of Nella Larsen’s novel
Quicksand
in the essay "The Quicksand of Self: Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut" in
The Feminist
Difference. Hers is a psychoanalytical reading, whereas Dolan bases his on a politicalphilosophical
approach to postmodernist strategies in literature. Although they use
different vocabularies to describe their respective subjects, their arguments are in accord,
emphasizing the ineffectiveness of subversion of the texts with countercultural
aspirations.
However, unlike Dolan, Johnson notes that the subversiveness of such endeavors
needs to be acknowledged, despite their supposed failure to prescribe a constructive
agenda or offer an effective option for change. She claims:" The literature of narcissism
does not satisfy the desire for a workable program for social change, but it does offer the
warning that any political program that ignores the ways in which the self can refuse to
satisfy need or can seek self-cancellation in place of self-validation will not understand
where certain resistances are coming from" (60). Yet, it could be argued that it is in the
seeming failure of such vocabularies that the subversive potential can be found. More
specifically, the text’s failure to escape from the ’prison-house of language’
1 at the same
time indicates the hopeful fact that absolute control is not possible. In this case it is
manifested in the author’s “failure” to control the text; otherwise, this implies the
impossibility of total political control. In other words, power is imprisoned in discourse to the same extent literature is. However, although the text remains within the boundaries
of language, there is a plane of the narrative which belongs in the realm of the unspoken,
non-verbalized, which despite its not being realized or actualized, is present and
informing both writing and reading. Typically, it is infused either in the tone, or in the
silences, breaks, empty spaces, and/or music of the text, and it is precisely this unsaid
content which comprises the uncontrollable aspect.
The tension between the imprisonment in language and the elusiveness of the
unuttered reflects the tension between the melancholy, resulting from the deprivation of
freedom on the one hand and, on the other, hope coming from the subversive potential of
the non-verbal, paradoxically present in the narrative. Traditionally understood as
mutually exclusive oppositions, these concepts are in fact participants in a troublesome
conversation, echoing an underlying tension between destruction and creation. The text
renders the opposition into a new entity, whose supposedly separate and clashing
components are not necessarily reconciled, but are rather in a constant dialogue
alternating, reflecting, conditioning, challenging, but also mitigating each other.
This makes reading an equally ambivalent experience. For instance, reading
Virginia Woolf’s novels, I feel massively frustrated, but I at the same time find them
fascinating. It is her "oscillation"
2 – embracing all the supposedly incommensurable
tensions – that makes this somewhat unsettling pleasure possible. The ambivalence in
question results from the traces of the unsaid and echoes of the half-thought, leaking
through the cracks in the text. These silent vacuum-spots at the same time break the
narrative and keep it flowing. Great part of what makes reading an enjoyable and
adventurous experience comes from the author’s “forgetting” his or her original design,
the text’s ability to speak independently of its creator – fortunate impossibility of total
control.
Virginia Woolf is one of the “mothers of invention”, bringing a sense of
uneasiness and safety at the same time. As Vivian Gornick says about her own
mother in
Fierce Attachments: "With Mama the issue was clear: I had trouble breathing but I was safe" (71). Likewise, with Woolf the issue is clear: she allows us
not to stop at each word, instead letting us hop from one verbal flash to another, flow
through and between sentences until something stops us and consumes us. And we
are safe. But we have trouble breathing too. We learn how to be lonely because she
is so aggressively elusive, oscillating between comfort and insecurity. But she also
teaches presence because when she is there, it is real. She opens up a venue for
replotting. Of course, she is not the only one providing storytelling in a different key.
Yet she is among the few whose silences, breaks, and cracks speak in the way which
turns intuition free and alive.
In
Image, Music, Text, Roland Barthes presents the Text as by definition
paradoxical, since it "goes to the limit of enunciation (rationality, readability, etc. )
…plac[ing] itself very exactly
behind the limit of
doxa" (157-158). Resonating with
Derrida’s key concepts of
differance and
dissemination, Barthes further refers to the
creation of meaning as a "
deferred action" (158). In that ongoing playful explosion
both sounds and silences are heard, and the conversation between them is what Jeff
Noon calls "the text’s unconscious”.
3 He uses this expression in a not strictly
psychoanalytical sense, but rather for the lack of a better word, to refer to the
narrative’s unexpectedness located in the cracks of intentionality, cleavages between
intentional, unintentional, or semi-intentional fallacy. Hence, the enjoyment in
analyzing Derrida’s
argumentation of the absence of the signifier in his concept of
representation, or in motivational imperfection manifested in Tolstoy’s "unfired
guns" in
War and Peace, or in the charm of the travesty of Ian McEwan’s narrative
conventionalism, the disparity between the lyricism in the sentence "
To be lonely in
the world, it seemed to me,
is to be solely with my mother" (93) and the brutality and
violence in the major part of the novel
Pussy King of the Pirates by Kathy Acker.
The same can be said about the inspiration one gets from ironizing Stewart Home’s
irony - in exposing the inappropriate, or perhaps unexpected, unpredictable intimacy in
his typically affectionless characters: “He touched the back of my knees. Put my toes in
his mouth and sucked them. He crawled all over me. Moved my limbs around and licked under my armpits.” (
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess) Characters in Home’s novels
are often described as two-dimensional and stripped down to stereotypes. Although this is
partly true - meaning that there are no depictions of their inner psychological conflicts –
such a claim requires a comment, parallel to Matthew Collin’s observation in his book
Altered State (1998). He criticizes common understanding of the lack of social
engagement in Ecstasy culture, while exposing the specificities of the subculture
The idea that Ecstasy culture has no politics because it has no manifesto or
slogans, it isn’t saying something or actively opposing the social order,
misunderstands its nature. The very lack of dogma is a comment on
contemporary society itself, yet at the same time its constantly changing
manifestations – ravers fighting police to gain access to a warehouse party,
criminals shooting each other in feuds over the dance-drug trade, teenage
girls baring flesh in baby-doll dresses, black-market entrepreneurs selling
records from the backs of vans – serve to dramatize the times we live in
(5).
Similarly, characterization in Home’s novels constitutes an implied social message.
For that reason, one can claim that emotionality of the characters
is rudimentary, but in
that one reads the uncomfort with which one experiences oneself – one's own alienation
from himself or herself. Besides, it also suggests isolation and superficiality of the
encounters with others. It is small wonder that recurring themes in his novels are
detachment, awkward communication, spasmatic emotionality, alienated bodies, brutal
physicality, compulsive patterns in everyday experiences, one’s absence from their own
experiences, zombified individuality, lost in the process of commodification. Hence, the
characterization is different - not lacking or ignored – and it constitutes the unuttered
social content. Rather than being explicitly verbalized, it is communicated more on the
level of affect, showing how one feels living in the world today. Far from claiming that
there is no overt political message – quite the opposite – this is more to suggest that in the
content infused in the subtext one reads how the human condition is
experienced, rather
than
theorized, which carries different kind of weight.
Other literary elements are also used to challenge certain social issues. For instance,
in his novel
Tainted Love, a ghost-written autobiography of his mother, Home uses genre
devices for multiple purposes, including the critique of bourgeois subjectivity as an
exponent of a broader social problematics. Elsewhere, freely combining literary features
pertinent to anything ranging from traditional narration, through stylistic crossovers,
switching from the pulp journalistic style, surrealist tradition, via diary-like prose,
pornography , political pamphlets, manifestos, theoretical discourse, social chronicle,
formal experimentation, juvenile fiction, travelogue, and autobiography, his novels tell
tales of intertextual exchange, playing with plagiarism in order to emphasize dismissal of
the notions such as ownership, possession, subject, and author. This is designed to
challenge notions of the self and society as absolute, immutable, and, therefore,
omnipotent, totalizing, irreplaceable, unchangeable, and overdetermining. The following
analysis of the case of Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We
Talk About Love” shows the implications of an attempt to approach the questions of
authorship, ownership, and writing differently from the way current culture perceives
them.
To start with, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is not really the
title of the well known short story by Raymond Carver. Originally, it was entitled
“Beginners.” Besides, the story is not really his either. What we know as “What We Talk
About When We Talk About Love” is the editor’s cut, in which Carver’s original
manuscript was reduced by forty percent. So, the story is not
only Carver’s. Then, whose
story is it? It’s up to us to figure it out if we want at all to ask that kind of question. In
either case, the article “Rough Crossings” published in the December 24th 2007 issue of
New Yorker might provide inspiration for refiguring such questions.
Curiously enough, the piece is anonymous, which further complicates the issue of
authority, accountability, and trust. However, investigating that issue would be beyond
the scope of this analysis, so we’ll try to put it aside and see what the “text itself”
informs. It does present the June 1980 drama whose protagonists are Raymond Carver
and Gordon Lish, Carver’s friend and editor for Alfred A. Knopf. At that point Carver
was a newly recovered alcoholic and a rising writing star, emerging from lo-life obscurity, financial perplexities, and severe depressions. Lish’s support and editorial
collaboration on “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” and onwards spurred Carver’s
recognition in the public eye. Professors William L. Stull’s and Maureen P. Carroll’s
research in cooperation with Carver’s widow - poet Tess Gallagher - sheds light on the
correspondence between Carver and Lish. Details are further explored and exposed in
1998, ten years after Carver’s death, in an article which the journalist D.T Max wrote for
the
Times Magazine. The research shows troubling communication between Carver and
Lish after Lish’s interventions on the manuscript of the collection of short stories to be
published and later celebrated under the title
What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love. The letters show that Carver was desperate and asked that the manuscript be
withdrawn. He states that until then, he was pleased with the way Lish had read his
stories and contributed to perfecting them, strongly stressing how grateful for that he was.
But he also admits that this time, it was just too much – he had the stories read by his
friends and he could not imagine having them now reread in so severely altered form. He
states that as a consequence he might not be able to write again. Along with the ongoing
insecurity as a recovering alcoholic, it threats to throw him back to the old devils.
Two days after exposing his deepest fears and true desperation, Carver sends to
Lish another letter. This time making comments about minor editorial cuts, suggesting
where and what should be trimmed/kept. Radically different from the previous one both
in tone and content, this letter was written after the telephone conversations of which, of
course, there is no record - the gap between Carver’s darkest confession and pleading for
the text’s withdrawal on the one hand, and the following agreement cannot be
reconstructed. The correspondence shows, however, that later, while they were working
on the collection
Cathedral, Carver insisted that decision what was going to be included
as the final text was going to be
his. It is also known that their collaboration and
friendship didn’t last long after it and that now Ms. Gallagher attempts to recuperate the
original texts.
The academic debate around these issues is focused on artistic integrity and
authorship, reflecting the primacy of ownership in social terms. This means that the
critique is officially aimed at the acknowledgement of the original creation and giving
credit to the author, but the way questions are framed indicates the primacy of the concerns regarding possession. This is manifested in the prevalence of examining the
problem of
loss – the questions about who was deprived of what, who got cheated on,
who was betrayed, and who was silenced. These considerations reflect the supremacy of
the property-based issues, which turn exchange and mixing into the indicators of
inauthenticity and exponents of loss.
In a different kind of trade – where the accent is not on
whose, but rather on either
‘what, ’how,’ or ‘what it might be like’ - these (exchange and mixing) would be
understood as gain. However, in the economy prioritizing possession, gain is reduced
nearly to an extent of a sideffect, while actually, the dual voice of the story is what lends
it the specific allure. “Beginners” is richer in detailed plotting of the psychodrama, but it
lacks the edginess - Lish’s “cutting it to the bone,” as Carver complained. Cutting it to the
bone,’ Lish did eliminate perhaps superfluous sentimentalism, replacing it with specific
dryness. As a result, the story’s erotic flavor comes from the tension between latent
lyricism and apparent emotional inhibition. The story is a mashup created through
suspicious, literary sinful blending; frigid heat - the beauty of this hybrid - enables the
story to speak independently. However, the rhetoric of lament (over lost property)
oversees that authenticity lies where it is believed that it was lost. Such approach also
fails to encounter ‘the text’s unconscious’ - the text’s abject or other, enabling freeing of
the narrative and releasing its subversive potential.
The mystery of the two days during which Carver’s radical turn occurred will
remain in the realm of silence. From this silence was born the crossbreed, whose
authenticity paradoxically lies in arguable plagiarism. Such peculiarities of creation
signal the possibilities of refocusing the debate from the questions about
whose and what
is
lost to
what is
gained in the mix and remix. Accordingly, the shift of the discussion
(and practice) from the issue of legitimizing authenticity would lead to authenticity’s
taking care of itself.
1 A reference to Frederick Jameson
2 Marianne Hirsch’s term from "The Darkest Plots" in
Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis,
and Feminism. Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.
3 The expression appears in an interview he gave to Vana Goblot for the spring 2001 issue of the
Theme
Park magazine.
