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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