chris at 8:05 AM |

 

From Joan Retallack** : A Few More Twists on Gendered Twists, Othering and/or Mothering*:

The following is one of the most significant statements about recent quandaries of feminism that I have read in a very long time--as a theoretical object feminism [literary-philosophical forms of] may even break out of its solipsistic pill-ball somewhat, given this reformulating infusion from Retallack.

"Think--as Wittgenstein did--of a chess game in which 'to move' (active voice), to calculate and imagine, is to collaboratively develop the future configuration in/with which one lives. Here, to understand is to invent, not merely to get to the point.

"The didactic implication embedded in the sort of literature that the current pantheon (the new old-girls canon) of received feminist writers represents directs the reader toward the subjectivity of empathic identification and away from autonomous, critical production. The prompt for female reader as writer (from [Alicia] Ostriker and [Judith] Butler, as well as [Adrienne] Rich et al.) is, after all, toward repetition with a difference (replication of a value structure that valorizes heroics, as well as lyrical forms that mimic logical proofs--where epiphany = conclusion) rather than radical experiments that generate a proliferation of formal possibilities; possibilities that have, incidentally, much less to do with territory, ownership, and rights (all important issues in extraliterary arenas such as courts of law) than with the invention of new, poethical forms of life. Repetition with a difference may just not be different enough."
(357)**

And Retallack goes on to discuss how Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's DICTEE admirably moves outside the boundaries described above as "repetition with a difference," or that which is just not enough--to my way of thinking, of "different." It does not say enough about differences if we want to think in the larger ways and means Retallack alludes to earlier in this passage. I guess I want to hear not any old engine on this issue, but a kind of sonic boom. Because differences are sizeable between groups and individuals (though I am not throwing out the significance of commonality, either). I'm not sure yet why I want a louder statement but I can guess: there are major problems of short-sightedness in any theorizing endeavor. Retallack is far from disadvantageous short sightedness. But I am made wary by what I sense as perhaps an over caution in her framing. I want to say then, yeah, well, what exactly can we say to the 14-year-old female or male factory worker sewing our nice blouses, or to the everyday sex worker, who might think with a lot of "difference" about all our slow rhetorical tip-toeing around the term, "difference"? Surely we can do better (or: maybe not?). That is, unless the only one we think we are talking to happens (infinite regress!) to be that, um... 'good old girl network'--which, true, may need some persuading. But then what?--more of the same? So we end up right back at the first piston in the problematic: that troublesome "repetition" Ugh. Or sigh.

I do particularly like how this calls for moving beyond the "new good old girls canon," thus presumably, beyond some of the stulltifying Foucaudian-type disciplinarity of said-same "girls," though I would not use the diminutive, "girls" which is a little confusing--either not at all apt or way too: confusing, of course, not only because a literal impossibility (save the impossibles for Hollywood?) (these figures are grown and aged now), but also because too easily associated with that ultimate insult men use to one another when calling each other out for the grossest of weakness: "stop acting like a girl." These are women poets and/or theorists of the greatest magnitude in our time, certainly. They have my respect.

My point is that unaccountably or with some nameless restlessness, I have always felt uneasy about their approaches to both poetics and theoretical endeavors. In short, they are too short, as in short sighted, myopic. At the same time, they have opened doors for many significant and necessary perspectives. Unfortunately they also, along with Gilbert and Gubar as well as no few others in a feeding frenzy kind of way, variously overlook or obscure or are arrogant about many kinds and senses of othering, which is always based on "difference" and to some degree is necessary. No one being perfect, it is difficult to level this kind of criticism, which of course is the rhetorical equivalent of, yes, a similar othering. Nonetheless, something has to be said and worked out about what until now felt, looked, or was only intuited as unaccountable in these forms. Retallack begins to adequate it: to say it adequately, but only--still it is a major threshold, I think.

Something more concrete needs to be formulated though, to make this useful (and has elsewhere, I am sure but not ready at this moment to leave this threshold, just yet). For now I want instead to get very specifiic. So I am thinking here, in much humbler hypotheses, of the recent postings about what I will here term a certain unhandy mildness (rather than perhaps a handier, wilder kind of experimental abandon?--though these terms are not fixed; they are open in my present thinking) seemingly evident in the poetry of Linda Pastan.

But let me return to this in just a little while, I hope later this evening...
[I have family to tend to and errands to the stores to run right now, which is to say, my everyday life apart from theories, though not from theorizing...]


**Joan Retallack, ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM: (three essays onto shaky grounds)," in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, eds. Ann Arbor: U of Mich Press, 1994. (344-377)

*Thanks!--Steve Vincent--for this title-idea.