Brooklyn, April 28, 2008 -- part three of six

The news has come out today about a woman imprisoned in a cellar in Austria for twenty-four years by her father, who sexually abused her so often that she gave birth to seven of his children (one of whom he threw in an incinerator). I couldn’t help it, I thought immediately of Cassandra in her wicker basket, married off to her father’s allies, and succumbing patiently to the sexual attention of a priest she seems to despise. I’m sure this Austrian story will be all over the news, and according to the BBC, this is the third case in recent years of ‘people’ being locked in cellars in Austria. Of course, I did a little digging and discovered that almost all of these ‘people’ were women – this most recent case, as well as a girl who was held for eight years by her captor until she was discovered in 2006, and finally a trio of girls held in a basement for seven years by their mother. Why not just acknowledge that the victims of these kinds of crimes are almost always women? The media has been strangely silent on the gendered nature of these atrocities, almost as if it is something profane to speak about.

According to the news reports, these victims were isolated for so long that they began to develop their own language. Of course we’ll never learn that secret language – it will be recorded only as marginalia in the notes of psychiatrists. It seems to me that the language they created is the most profound and amazing part of the whole story, since it is an attempt to transcend the prison of their circumstances and forge a way to still connect and relate to one another, however imperfect. No doubt this horrifies and embarrasses the rest of the media-consuming public, however: the idea of this language growing in the airless dark like a mushroom. But it seems to me that the very way to resist the circumstances that make it possible to lock girls in a cellar is to honor the attempts they make to recapture their subjectivity, in whatever language they use. Perhaps in extremity those girls stumbled onto a very powerful idea: that nothing short of a new language will do to express some experiences.

I’ve started work on a creative project called blight. It began from the writing assignment I did for the week we read Dictee, and Wolf’s essays have expanded my thoughts about it. There are many narratives of loss woven through it – everything from accounts of miscarriage to a Welsh sheep farmer explaining matter-of-factly how hungry ravens pluck out the eyes of his lambs – but I have learned from Wolf and allowed the fragments of each “story” to weave backwards and forwards in time, as if timid about the inevitable. By ‘inevitable,’ I mean precisely: after dealing with the death of loved ones, the narrator must stop speaking and symbolically ‘die.’ This introduces deliberate failure into the text – not just the ending, but also failure within, since there is no way to capture the complexity and horror of loss in mere words.

Manhattan, April 20, 2008 -- part two of six

Woman As Myserious, Impenetrable Object: that theme has cropped up in our reading before. Schulz provides glimpses of silent yet enigmatically powerful women (the figure of Undula in his art, Adele in his stories), and Lem has his vast, unknowable colloidal ocean in Solaris, an ocean which seems to symbolize (among other things) the dichotomy between (male) rationalism and (female) nature. Theresa Cha connects powerful, raw emotional experiences to the lives of her female characters, but can only render them through the arrangements of fragments, interwoven with profound gaps and silences. Wolf seems to agree, echoing her by suggesting that there is no way to render the experience of women in the forms associated with male writing – the linear narrative, which from its origin courses relentlessly towards an inexorable end. This linearity, this forward throttle towards the end must be resisted even as we resist the political forces coursing towards our own destruction. That traditional form of story will only end in failure for women, even as the relentless pursuit of total control over our world (in science and politics) will only end in our annihilation.

I was raised in a patriarchal, Christian millenarian culture, with a heavy emphasis on hierarchy and the duty of every Christian to push herself towards an ethical ideal. When I left that environment, I spent over a decade doing almost everything I could think of to challenge and undermine that structure, but Wolf’s book left me with the feeling that even the way that I construct narrative can insidiously support this system of domination. My sense of how I write has begun to collapse, to fail me. As I revise older drafts, I have begun to pull apart the structure, teasing out fragments, creating a sort of intentional mess. Perhaps this mess reflects more naked truth than anything else I’ve written in the last ten years. Was this how Wolf felt as she began to rebel against Marxist social realism?

Brooklyn, April 14, 2008 -- part one of six

Note: The first six posts of this blog are also part of a paper I'm doing for my literature seminar with Shelley Jackson, "The Unnameable, The Unsayable," at the New School, spring 2008. The diary entries are a response/amplification of the novel Cassandra and the accompanying essays by Christa Wolf.

5/ A Reader’s Diary,

Wherein the Idea of Failure Is Embraced

At both the end of the novel Cassandra and the end of Wolf’s accompanying essays, the reader is left with a sense of failure, of doom. In the novel, despite weaving the story in a shape that seems labyrinthine rather than linear, Cassandra cannot escape the fact that she must come to an end at last: her death, as well as the death of the narrative. In the essay, Wolf concludes with the example of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Franza fragment, and the breakdown of the character into complete despair: “No revolution and no resolution and no foreign currency statute will help[1].” It is as if the reader traverses all the possible permutations of the twin webs (novel and essays) only to find that the threads connecting these webs to the outside world are scorched off at the ends.

But is that necessarily true? Perhaps Wolf intends for the reader to rebuild those threads, by interacting with the two halves of the book and then creating a third refraction of the text, the reader-as-writer, interacting both with Wolf’s words and with the present historical moment. And although failures are inevitable – fragmentation, dead-ends, moments of terror, confusion, irrationality, and loss – the continued multiplication of reader-texts perhaps can prevent the full death of the text (and by extension, Cassandra). Or can it only further delay this last, final failure?

Aieee, Apollo, indeed. As I read this book, zig-zagging backwards and forwards in the text, out of order and frequently repeating pages, the full extent of woman as object in both history and literature jumps out at me in every day life. We have a woman running for president – admittedly as flawed as any other human being – who cannot escape her status as an object, as men stand on the sidelines and shout “Iron my shirt!” at her[2]. I consider Wolf’s essays, the delicate path she picks among devastating ideas, and realize just how difficult it is to succinctly identify just what, exactly, produces this necessary result of failure, of doom and loss. For Wolf, this question of what is less than interesting than how – this is the story of how Cassandra experienced the collapse of her alternatives, even as she attempted to restore herself to some subjectivity, and it is the story of how Wolf attempts to resuscitate her, and by extension, herself.

But what does this mean for any woman writing? Does a sense of failure and doom suffuse the writing of any woman attempting to escape her status as an object – should she simply be writing about how that happens, or should she pursue the what, and perhaps also the why?

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[1] Cassandra, quote from the work of Ingeborg Bachmann, page 305.

[2] From an incident reported in the New York Times political blog on January 7, 2008.