A Bad Year for Écriture Féminine?

"And it's damned what a sensitive man is brought to," he said, talking to the swinging body, "when he's racked with women, and with beasts."

--Djuna Barnes

The fallout from the Harvey Weinstein revelations has so far been that rarest of things: a revolution with no particular downside, the presidential aspirations of Al Franken notwithstanding. But if nothing has been lost, something in feminist theory may have been settled.  

The style and structure of this revolution (or, at least of its first three months) have left no place for the kind of writing that was once in the vanguard of academic and artistic feminism: the style or mode (or experiment) called écriture féminine. Rather, this revolution has been written in a journalistic, objective mode more constrained by institutional and ideological limits than almost any other form of writing. If feminism might finally triumph in this historical moment, it looks to do so without its house style. 

Two examples might suffice to make the point. 

First, take Djuna Barne's Ryder, an experimental novel originally published in 1928. Chapter 5 of the novel is written in the mode of a sermon decrying the moral "damage" done to victims of rape and strongly implying that women too often bring sexual violence upon themselves: "A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother's Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled!" (21).  The 8-page chapter is written entirely in this fashion without any explanation of how this chapter relates to the previous one or who this sermonising narrator might be: "Who told you, Hussy, to go ramping at the Bit, and laying about you for Trouble? What thing taken from your Father's Table turned you Belly up?" (23).

Chapter 6, switches gears entirely and with devastating satirical effect: "In the small British country seat of Tittencote (described in the last chapter) in the year 1869, John Johannes de Grier lay dying" (30). To be clear, the town of Tittencote has not been described at all in the previous chapter. Or, at least, it has not been described in any way that would usually be labelled "description." Instead, the entire previous chapter is given over to the sermonising excerpted above. What Barnes does here is use the structure of the novel and her abrupt shifts in style to make a polemical point: All one needs to know about the village of Tittencote is that it is the kind of place that treats women as they are treated by the previous chapter's sermon; everything else about its existence can be inferred from the attitudes on display there. 

This, I think, is an example of what poststructuralist feminism means by "écriture féminine." On the level of style and structure, Barnes here displays all of the openness to interpretation, subversion of narrative conventions, humour, and raw difficulty of a writer out to subvert the phallogocentrism of, at least, the realist novel. And on the level of politics, that stylistic experiment is yoked to an expressly feminist position: the satirising of sexist stereotypes and their relationship to sexual violence.  Barnes here (and throughout Ryder) creates what many forms of feminism once imagined to be the future of anti-patriarchal writing. It is a riotous, polyglot, carnivalesque prose that uses more staid genres against themselves. This is writing aimed squarely at the heart of an Apollonian order.  

If Barnes is as good an example as any of what feminist writing was once thought to look like, the Oct. 5 New York Times story by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey that began the Harvey Weinstein era reads like its polar opposite.  

Admittedly, the article begins with a double narrative lead, one story about the actor Ashley Judd and a second about a former Weinstein Company employee named Emily Nestor. By the standards of daily reporting, this is a fairly significant departure from the "inverted pyramid" structure in that the lead does not directly summarise the key events. In the context of prose in general, however, this lead is still written in the terse, objective tone of mainstream American journalism.  

And following the lead, the story returns to the precise tone and structure expected of formal news writing: "An investigation by The New York Times found previously undisclosed allegations against Mr. Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Company." Here are the hallmarks of what in some quarters was once derided as logocentric, patriarchal prose: the grammatical accuracy, the cautious and precise claims, the careful compiling of evidence to support those claims, and, of course, the reference to the institutional authority of The New York Times itself. There is not a hint here of Barnes' Bacchanal.  

But it is, obviously, the The New York Times' version of feminist writing that has created a revolution (to the extent that we are really living through a revolution). The precise, methodical collection of data and the recording of that data in blank, declarative sentences seems utterly foreign to the French feminism that once heralded a revolution in personal expression. At that level, the level of pure style, an argument may not have been won, exactly, but a question seems to have been settled: As it turns out, one need not overthrow the patriarchy's style; one need only overthrow the patriarchy itself.  

The Brexit Map

The main train station in Krakow, Poland exits directly into the Galeria Krakow, a large, relatively high-end shopping mall. On the second floor, there are two enormous maps of Europe, one above the entrance to a Carrefour grocery store and one on the facing wall. Below each is written the repeating slogan "Find your place in Europe."

Political maps generally reinforce the idea of nation states. By drawing borders, they create the visual impression that any two points within the same border, no matter how disparate in real space, are connected more to each other than they are to the outside world. (Russia might be the exception that proves the rule here; at the same time the map insists that Moscow and Vladivostok are both "Russian," the enormous distance between them on the paper quietly questions the notion of Russia as a unified country.) Political maps clarify borders, creating clean and fixed boundaries between states.  As Ken Alder points out in The Measure of All Things, his history of the creation of the metric system, the very act of measuring and charting space is tied up in the creation of nation states as unified, centrally governed blocks of space; the act of creating a national map undermines older traditions of local autonomy.

The map in Galeria Krakow works in the opposite direction, undermining nation states in favour of a purely cosmopolitan and pan-European sense of space. In so doing, it nicely clarifies a vision of European union with which so many populist and localist voters have recently expressed distain.

First, and most obviously, the Krakow map eliminates any overt reference to nations. National names and national borders are removed, and are present only implicitly in the names of national capital cities. That implication, though, is thin. Given the immediate context (a shopping mall), the sense is that these cities have been selected more for their commercial importance than for their political ones. The elimination of nations is reinforced by the slogan underneath: One's place is in Europe, not in France or Croatia. 

Second, the map establishes the city as the sole physical presence in a map of Europe. In a traditional map, the closed shape of national borders implies a kind of presence to the empty space within them, in the same way that by drawing a circle on a blank sheet of paper, you give a kind of mass to the space within the circle. Thus the empty space between, say, Paris and Lyon looks "French" because it is enclosed in the border of France, even if that space is literally blank on the map. 

Here, the effect is much different. The non-city space is rendered as pure absence. There is no difference between the space of rural France and the space of the North Sea; both are equally absent and irrelevant to this vision of Europe. Thus rural Europe is not just de-emphasized (a perhaps justifiable decision in a map of economic or population centres), but erased. One must find one's place in this transnational Europe in a city; nowhere else exists. 

Third, the language of this borderless, rural-less Europe is English. The city names on the map are in Polish (Praga is Prague, Warszawa is Warsaw, etc.). However, the imperative slogan is in English: Find Your Place in Europe. Just as, spatially, everything about the nation except its cosmopolitan cities is erased, so too are its national languages. The very command to find yourself within this transnational capitalist space is rendered in the default language of transnational capitalism. 

Here, then, is encapsulated something of the worldview Brexit and its populist cousins reject, a Europe in which the rural and the national are erased in favour of a network of interchangeable commercial nodes.

S-Town and the Comforts of Aesthetic Hierarchy

There was a moment there when podcasts threatened to do something different.

It is early days yet for this medium and, as in the early days of cinema and radio, genre lines and corresponding prestige seemed, at least for a few years, to be shifting rapidly beneath our feet. There have of course been, almost since the podcast's inception, the longform magazine-y shows that have perfected a fairly familiar form of narrative journalism: This American Life, Radiolab, and, more recently, Invisibilia. Brilliant though these often are, they mostly produce work familiar in its structure and subject matter and, generally speaking, work of the kinds already suited to Pulitzer Prizes and other such forms of institutional acclaim. That is to say, these magazine-y podcasts win the kind of praise granted to excellent magazine journalism.

But with the advent in 2014 of Serial, the This American Life offshoot, a kind of anarchy threatened to reign alongside these more staid versions of nonfiction podcasting. Season 1 of Serial resurrected the most exceedingly fun form of lowbrow crime reporting, granted it a kind of Paul Auster reflexive gloss, and won plaudits from every sector of cultural criticism in the process. Suddenly it seemed critical praise was due not just to the standard magazine fair, but to a genre usually the province of grocery store paperbacks. Serial Season 2 may have missed the mark in many respects, but it continued to upend aesthetic hierarchies in its willingness to make the true crime cliffhanger the dominant plot structure of critically-praised podcasting.

2017, however, has witnessed two events that have quickly put the usual aesthetic hierarchies back in place. First came the release of the widely panned Missing Richard Simmons. If true crime always threatens to veer into tabloid invention, Missing Richard Simmons made clear that podcast true crime was no exception to the rule. The once-a-week release schedule meant a series of breathy cliffhangers, each more disappointing than the next, and the narrative payoff was about as poor as could be: an emotional appeal to the show's titular missing person that hoped to hide behind pathos the fact that the show's investigate reporting revealed, more or less, nothing.

Second came S-Town, a story that returned longform podcasting to realist terrain, narrativised the abandonment of true crime, and was praised far and wide for doing just those two things. S-Town begins with the overt promise of true crime in its soapiest form: a murder and police coverup set in the gothic environs of a poor, racist, southern town. But, by the end of episode 2, the true crime genre is entirely abandoned. The murder turns out not to have happened, and the remaining 5 episodes turn to an exploration of the ersatz tipster's character. The remaining hours are essentially a form of realism: a careful study of the interaction between setting and character, replete with symbolism and nicely embedded in the larger cultural history of America. If a podcast can be Henry Jamesian, then this is a Jamesian podcast.

The confluence of Missing Richard Simmons' failure and S-Town's triumph have quickly restored true crime and realism to their usual aesthetic relationship: the former degraded, the latter exulted. This is in some ways disappointing. One of the exciting possibilities of Serial was that, through the new medium of podcasting, the lowbrow genre of true crime might be reinvented in highbrow terms in a way not really attempted since the era of New Journalism (beginning with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and ending with Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song). But the historical accident of Missing Richard Simmons and S-Town being released in rapid succession has meant that the critical appraisals of both genres have been returned to their comfortable norm. Missing Richard Simmons, though a single text, stands in for the failures of the entire true crime genre; S-Town, a particularly fine example of realism, proves the case that realism has always been a more important artistic mode.

Donald Trump: A Tyrant, but Whose Kind of Tyrant?

One reasonable criterion for the worth of nonfiction is longevity. How long is a book worth continuing to read? This has rarely been truer than at the end of a year in which so many political events have been declared "unprecedented." If recent events are truly unique in history, then surely books published prior to those events can have little to tell us about our current predicament, yes?

But, in fact, the opposite seems true, and both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency have created cottage industries searching for theorists and philosophers who speak to contemporary problems. Of this year's attempts to prove the prescience of older texts, few are more brilliant than Andrew Sullivan's argument that Plato accounts nicely for the rise of Donald Trump. I would like to take on a less ambitious task and hearken back only to Hannah Arendt's 1963 book, On Revolution.

In particular, I want to point to one of the many careful distinctions she makes in characterising the modes of power that emerged from the American Revolution. Arendt argues that the American Revolution (and, to a lesser extent, the French Revolution) bequeathed to us a definition of tyranny that is less precise than the one that preceded it. Prior to the American Revolution, Arendt claims, "tyranny" referred not to all types of one-person rule, but to one-person rule in which the ruler chose, of his own accord, not to rule in the public interest: "Since the end of antiquity, it had been common in political theory to distinguish between government according to law and tyranny, whereby tyranny was understood to be the form of government in which the ruler ruled out of his own will and in pursuit of his own interests, thus offending the private welfare and the lawful, civil rights of the governed." (Arendt 121).

Thus, for pre-Revolutionary philosophers and politicians, it was not kings per se who were tyrants; it was only bad kings who were tyrants: "Under no circumstances could monarchy, one-man rule, as such be identified with tyranny; yet it was precisely this identification to which the revolutions quickly were to be driven. Tyranny, as the revolutions came to understand it, was a form of government in which the ruler, even though he ruled according to the laws of the realm, had monopolised for himself the rights of action" (Arendt 121).

As Arendt argues here, from the experience of republican government emerged the idea that any form of non-democratic government was ipso facto tyrannical. The individual in power might make good decisions or bad; either way, her failure to gain sanction from the people she governs constitutes a form of tyranny. It is in this sense that a certain kind of conservative can see President Obama's use of drones as tyrannical even while, when push comes to shove, supporting the specific decisions he has made. It is Obama's failure to consult Congress or the people directly, not the rectitude of his actions per se, that constitutes tyranny.

The pre-Revolutionary distinction between forms of one-person rule is, I want to suggest, being revived before our eyes in the phenomenon of Trumpism.

In the eyes of Trump's critics, his selection of certain companies for scorn, his decision to "save" a Carrier plant in one place while ignoring workers in another--that is to say, his decision to rule almost without policy and only by caprice--constitutes tyranny as such. We might concede that, yes, the nation or the world is better off with those few jobs saved and that Carrier plant open; but we still object to the way in which Trump "monopolise[s] for himself the rights of action." If jobs are to be kept in the United States, we insist, this ought to be done through a rational policy debated in the legislative and executive branches.

Trump's fans, however, adhere to an older, pre-Revolutionary definition of tyranny. Under this sense of tyranny, these acts are not tyrannical because, though they may stem from one-man rule, they uphold the public interest. Under this definition of tyranny, Trump may be capricious and may rule outside the bounds of republican norms. However, he only becomes a tyrant insofar as his actions advance his own interests to the exclusion of the nation's. If he saved 700 manufacturing jobs, who cares how he did it?

Trump's critics, then, have their work cut out for them. Marshalling evidence that Trump acts without the consent of Congress or without public consultation will convince few for whom such acts are not the problem. Unlike during the Nixon era, in which the question was only whether evidence of the crime could be found, in the Trump era it is a question of how to define the crime itself.

Antarctic Notes 2: Exploration, Imperialism, and Tanks

"They were the direct ancestors of the 'tanks' in France." 

--Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Why do we dislike imperialism? The obvious answer is its victims; in expanding their empires from (primarily) European bases, imperial nations subjugate other people, sometimes with genocidal consequences. Understandably enough, the effects of imperialism on these colonised people have received the lion's share of attention in postcolonial criticism.

The European (and, in one case, Japanese) exploration of Antarctica in the late 19th and early 20th centuries offers an interesting case study in this context. If it is indeed the effects on subjugated peoples that makes us object to imperialism, then attempts to "conquer" the South Pole should register differently; there being no Antarctic people to subjugate, there should be little to object to.

And, indeed, this is the case. Tales of Antarctic adventure certainly strike us as less problematic than parallel imperial tales from the "scramble for Africa" and the "settling" of the North American  plain written in roughly the same period.

That said, reading the narratives these explorers left behind suggests that there is something internal to the act of conquest itself that troubles us. Beneath the heroism, legitimate scientific curiosity, and awe at the beauty of nature in these stories there lies a sense that these men's self-assurance and fixity of purpose is itself problematic, that the lack of introspection here is, even absent concrete and immediate victims, still destined to end poorly.

This nagging sense of something wrong with the Antarctic imperial project bursts through to the narrative surface very occasionally. The most striking example of this is in Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World. The Terra Nova expedition, of which he was a part, had brought with it early versions of snow mobiles which they hoped would allow them to move supplies from their camp on the Antarctic coast to supply depots further inland. In assessing their utility after the fact, Cherry-Garrad makes this striking statement:

"Did they succeed or fail? They certainly did not help us much, the motor which travelled farthest drawing a heavy load to just beyond Corner Camp. But even so fifty statute miles is fifty miles, and that they did it at all was an enormous advance.... The general design seemed to be right, all that was now wanted was experience. As an experiment they were successful in the South, but Scott never knew their true possibilities; for they were the direct ancestors of the 'tanks' in France" (Cherry-Garrard 332).

This last sentence is shocking. Writing in England in 1922, with the consequences of World War I (including the battlefield deaths of many of survivors of Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition) all around him, Cherry-Garrad draws a direct connection between his own project and the horrors of the war.

Cherry-Garrard's memoir is otherwise notable in its lack of psychological insight; to Cherry-Garrad, every member of the Scott expedition was brave, stoic, patriotic, and good-natured to the end. That flatness of psychological insight makes this one sentence that much more striking. Here Cherry-Garrad breaks through, seemingly accidentally, to a remarkable piece of cultural insight: that British exploration, even in its most victimless and scientific mode, leads not incidentally but directly to the technology of warfare and the wreckage of the Great War.

Thus, to an Edwardian explorer maybe even more clearly than to us, the problem of imperialism is not just the victims external to its function, but the mindset and methods internal to it.

Antarctic Notes 1: Edwardian Form

One way to organise literary forms is on a spectrum from those which allow the fewest possible voices to speak to those which allow the most to speak. Thus we might see the possible range of literature running from the most monological, closed, didactic forms (propaganda of one form or another--Upton Sinclair at his worst, for example) to the most polyphonous, dialogic, and open-to-interpretation forms (the more sprawling realist novels, certain forms of experimental poetry, postmodern collage, and so forth).

It is fairly widely accepted that one end of this spectrum is less ethical, progressive, democratic, etc., than the other. That is to say, it is fairly common place to see the didacticism of Sinclair or later proletarian fiction as authoritarian and bad, and to see the openness and polyvocality of, say, Djuna Barnes or Thomas Pynchon as democratic, open-to-debate, and, therefore, good. The multiple voices in the works of these more esteemed writers encourage diversity of perspectives thereby undermining the authoritarian politics embodied in the forms at the other end of the spectrum. Or so the usual reading goes.

Reading Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World suggests a politics of form absent from the typical reading described above. Cherry-Garrard's memoir describes Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated attempt to discover the South Pole, and Charry-Gerrard's own role in it. In many ways, despite the hyper-masculine, perfectly Edwardian subject matter of exploration conquest, and the extremes of human endurance, the book's form appears more typical of later postmodern writers' collage and multiple voices. That is to say, the book's form is remarkably "democratic." Throughout the book, Charry-Gerrard includes other writers' work in the form of scientific papers, diaries, letters home, and later recollections that allow him to elaborate on topics in which he is not expert and events for which he was not present, as well as to give other people's perspectives on events he has already described first-hand. Indeed, at times these quotations almost overwhelm the writer's own voice, taking up pages at a time. His deference, in particular, to Scott's diary tends to render Cherry-Garrard's own voice almost secondary within his own text.

These citations and quotations, however, serve almost the opposite purpose to those usually lauded in polyvocal, dialogic literature. Rather than showing a great diversity of voices contesting each other or illuminating multiple perspectives, the polyphony here serves only to highlight the remarkable unanimity of the voyage's personnel. Every voice agrees as to the purpose and value of the voyage, the nature of the obstacles faced, and the heroism of the men in facing them. The controlling metaphor here is not the multicultural fabric or bustling agora, but one taken from the polar journey itself: multiple men yoked to a sledge, working together to pull in the same direction.

Thus Cherry-Garrard's book suggests a different possibility for multi-voiced literary forms: a distinctively Edwardian vision of many people all speaking to the same purpose, working toward the same goal. There is no postmodern diversity or parallax here; only solidarity and unanimity. Thus emerges from Cherry-Garrard's form something like the Edwardian postmodern or, perhaps, the Edwardian anti-postmodern. Or, perhaps, the last glimpse of a total unity of purpose before World War I would make any such thing inconceivable.