| Narrative, it seems
banal to observe, opens a space. This space is not so much a place of
play for unlimited possibilities (although in the best of possible worlds
it might yet be) as somewhere determined, always, in advance, by the future
anterior: what will have happened and how it will already have taken place
lure us through stories to their ends, become the end that shines through
from the very start. Reading for the ending: in narrative, the end justifies
the means; the end is the means.
That is why the distinction so frequently drawn between plot and story,
fabula and sjuzhet, while handy, turns most provocative
precisely when it cannot be made, when the temptation is there for us
to make it as readers, when the way to do it seems at hand, but we are
stopped ultimately from completing it. Too many Cliffs Notes to The
Sound and the Fury have made modernist plot-story scramblings
predictable, easy-to-read. But still we watch out for when the story turns
out to be such that its arrangement prevents us from decrypting, excavating
it. The end (the story) stymies the means (the plot) and vice versa.
At the end of “Leopoldina’s Dream” by Silvina Ocampo,
we find out that the story has been told, not by a human narrator as we
may have assumed in our anthropomorphic self-satisfaction, but by a little
dog who, along with his mistress, Leopoldina, has--Virgin Mary-like--been
assumed into Heaven. We are left with the puzzle of where this story,
this plot, this narrative enunciation, could have come from. Heaven? A
dream of Heaven? The end crosses the means; the story undoes the plot.
More, since the first part of the story concerns Leopoldina’s miraculous
ability to bring back objects from her dreams, the tale, narrative itself
here, resembles one of these objects, brought back, mysteriously, from
some other place, dream world or Heaven. Leopoldina’s dream-objects,
much to the frustration of the little girls she looks after, are poor
things, stones, grass. The narrative, likewise, is a poor object, a mundane
miracle, produced by the simple yet frustratingly seductive crossing of
narrative options.
Christopher Priest’s novel of the everyday miraculous, The
Glamour, deals with invisibility so as to intertwine plot and
story in a way that seems relatively straightforward at the beginning,
only to turn into a tangle, a conundrum, at the end, much more so than
the flashier (hence, more reassuring) experiments of the nouveau roman
or overtly experimental fiction. Especially intriguing is that the marvelously
banal object in this novel is nothing more than a holiday postcard with
the most cliché of messages, “Wish you were here,”
inscribed on it. At the end of The Glamour, we do not
know, will never know, who “you” could be or where even “here”
is. It is a perfect emblem of the entanglements of the future anterior
in narrativity, in which every story told seduces us with the ordinary
magic, the wish that “you” (but who?) be “here”
(but where?). Indeed, every narrative, at least for me, seems a charm
to produce the effect that you are always, have always been, here in advance.
Perhaps that is why narrativity depends on the déjà vu of
intertextuality.
In transgender narratives, specifically, the end exculpates the means:
this is how I became what I am at the end of the story. What I will have
become forms the narrative I am telling. What I will already have been
justifies what I will have told. They've "always-already" (surprise)
been the sex of their determination, announce the new theory-heads of
transgender studies. Much like the coming-out narrative or the Bildungsroman,
transgender narratives depend on the unification of what is told with
the site from which it is told, enounced closed onto enunciation. As such,
the distinction that is sometimes drawn between “traditional”
transsexual autobiography (Christine Jorgensen, Mario Martino, Jan Morris)
and “postmodern” transsexual autobiography (Kate Bornstein,
Loren Cameron, perhaps Leslie Feinberg) seems untenable. But rock ‘n’
roll, punk and glam, tore down that distinction, got there first, so the
two autobiographies that really matter are Jayne County’s Man
Enough to be a Woman and Bambi Lake’s The Unsinkable
Bambi Lake. And also Holly Woodlawn’s irresistible
A Low Life in High Heels. The transsexual narrative that seduces,
that persuades, is the one that can place transsexuality not as personal
anomaly but as socially determined narrative, simultaneously constructed
and inevitable. It’s a “conundrum,” to cite the title
of Jan Morris’ somewhat humdrum transsexual autobiography.
Transsexual subjects, like everyone else, find that our stories are hopelessly
entangled with every other story, so there can never be “a”
transsexual narrative, only narratives braided with, placed inside, other
narratives. To discover this is to see that transsexuality is never the
out-of-place, but there, already, always. By offering narrative implicitly
as etiology, autobiography runs the risk of sliding into explanation:
“this is how I became who I am” turns into “that is
why I became who I am”; by accounting for what purportedly causes
transsexuality, narrative implies that those causes are avoidable, preventable.
Etiology and explanation serve then, in the last analysis, to explain
transsexuality away, out of existence. Narrative as the neat co-ordination
of plot and story resembles a rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick: here I turn
up where I hid myself in the first place. Better than that old trick to
make transsexual self-writing a disappearing act. A genuine trick--the
lady (or gentleman) vanishes; the magician and his assistant are genuinely
puzzled.
“Hormones, Germs, and Cancer (This Is Not An Autobiography)”
was written in reaction to the now seemingly inescapable demand for autobiographical
narrative (“anecdote” used to be the term) in “queer
theory,” the way that criticism has been overtaken by self-writing
of a particularly dull, and un-self-critical sort. (The kind of coy self-disclosure
one finds in the pages of Eve Sedgwick or D. A. Miller.) It was also written
in response to demands to provide authentification for my own work by
accounting for my “own” gender, my “self.” After
one such request—after I had taught a course on film and transsexuality—a
student asked me what my interest in the subject could be. The demand
for some narrative production of the self was palpable, if veiled in talk
of academic “interest,” as it often is. I was tempted to reply
that I was a college professor by day but a transvestite hooker at night,
a tenure-track version of that eighties exploitation film series called
Angel. Angel, as I recall, was an honors student by day
and a new-wave Hollywood streetwalker by night. Angel, I imagined, saved
up her money, went to college, then on to graduate school some time during
the heyday of “theory,” before accepting the inevitable tenure-track
position only to find that she still wasn’t quite making ends meet.
Oh well, Angel soon was back on the streets, forgetting to mention that
she was different down there... if only Angel had realized at the start
that college, graduate school, and a tenure-track position would bring
her back, all these years later, to where she began!
Perhaps one way of making readily packaged and reassuring narratives (how
I got to be what I already was) a little bit stranger, of giving back
to them the everyday oddness they should possess, is to render them not
so much as I am (will be) where I wished to be (already have been), but
as the more enigmatically familiar, “Wish you were here.”
In lieu of a narrative of arrival and appearance (coming out or becoming)
what appeals to me is the tale of disappearance: the glamour of invisibility,
of rising skywards.
Dream-objects, postcards addressed to no one from nowhere, narrative loops,
models of nothing: we search to find what has been written, which may
be what we have never read before.
Works
Cited
Bornstein, Kate. Gender
Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York: Routledge,
1994.
Cameron, Loren. Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits.
Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1996.
County, Jayne. With Rupert Smith. Man Enough to be a Woman.
London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995.
De Simone, Tom, dir. Angel 3: The Final Chapter. 1988.
Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues: A Novel. Ithaca:
Firebrand Books, 1993.
Lake, Bambi. The Unisinkable Bambi Lake: A Fairy Tale Containing
the Dish on Cockettes, Punks, and Angels. San Francisco: Manic
D Press, 1996.
Martino, Mario. With Harriet. Emergence: A Transsexual Autobiography.
New York: Crown, 1977.
Miller, D.A. Bringing Out Roland Barthes. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992.
Morris, Jan. Conundrum: An Extraordinary Narrative of Transsexualism.
New York: Holt, 1986.
Ocampo, Silvina. “Leopoldina’s Dream.” Leopoldina’s
Dream. By Occampo. Trans. Daniel Balderstam. Penguin: London,
1988. 199-204.
O’Neil, Robert Vincent, dir. Angel. 1984.
O’Neil, Robert Vincent, dir. Avenging Angel. 1985.
Priest, Christopher. The Glamour. New York: Doubleday,
1985.
Sedgwick, Eve. Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press,
1993.
Woodlawn, Holly. With Jeff Copeland. A Low Life in High Heels:
The Holly Woodlawn Story: A Walk on the Wild Side with Warhol’s
Last Superstar. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.
|