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?
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