Writing I find exciting
often gets called experimental. In America this is another word for marginal.
It's patronizing. Other countries distribute legitimacy in literary culture
differently. For example, when in the U.K., Kathy Acker wrote for the
Times Literary Supplement. Can you imagine Acker writing for the New York
Times Book Review!? Just the experience of reviewing her work in the NYT
Book Review caused several reviewers to spontaneously combust. On the
other side of the Atlantic, debates on literary aesthetics are part of
public — not just academic — life. Not so here, which means
the conventions of representation that underlie mainstream fiction in
this country can't be effectually critiqued. (I don't consider academic
debates to be part of public life.)
So what conventions of representation am I talking about? Consider identity.
Mainstream fiction tends to assume separate and coherent individuals,
each with a single body and character which is built, rather than destroyed,
by conflict.
I believe it is possible to have one identity in your thumb and another
in your neck. I think identities can travel between persons who have an
unusual mutual sympathy. Let's not even mention multiple personality.
But what I want to talk about today is the manipulation and construction
of social distance. Mainstream fiction assumes a position not too close,
not too far away. A situation is implied, an entire social horizon, which
is speckled with white individuals who maintain distance from one another
and from social “problems".
Containment. Segregation. A narrative structure which covertly mirrors
the growth of white suburbs since WWII, where there is no discomfort around
racism because only white people are present. Breaking this long chain
of social convention at any link can easily result in personal and literary
deformity, which is another term for experimentation.
My
sister was older, and kept her drugs and screwing in the basement the
same way she kept her jewelry there. Her lovers were thin white men
whose trouble was drug-related. When Paul got out of Cook County Jail
he carried an odor of rape and had large nerve spots in his eyes. Fear
moving like a breeze in a prison yard, I could feel that in my stomach
when he was around; otherwise I didn't care. I thought about Monica.
Her sharp teeth and brown cheeks. The way her greed slid across my hips
could be scary but her palms were narrow as slots, that made it okay
to have sex with her.
Monica was black in a segregated city; so the closer we got the more
transparent I became, my longing vicious as wavering lights of association.
Relation — that's the spot where we're the same, or at least rolling
downhill on a boulevard lined with palm trees and novelty shops.
(My
X Story)
The well-modulated
distance of mainstream fiction not only distances social conflict, it
also doesn't represent lesbian relationships very well. Mainstream literary
forms reflect conventions of identity that are dominated by the masculine
and the heterosexual. I am not arguing for femininity in literature here.
I don't find those essentialist positions very interesting. But I think
relations between women have the potential to strain conventions of representation.
HOW exactly. Consider the characteristics associated with women: weak
boundaries between self and other, heightened capacity for intimacy, identification
of self with other, and a more fluid sense of self. In mainstream contexts,
these capacities are exploited until you reach, at the limit, erotic positions
which have been emptied of subjectivity, e.g. BIMBO/CUNT. I think it's
quite difficult, perhaps impossible, to represent a dyke as empty in that
way. The corollary in the lesbian world to the empty sexual object is
an erotic position I think of as invaded subjectivity.
I
was her idea, the fix for a wife with lesbian dreams. She never told
me the details but I could feel them pushing out at night, in the way
that there's a ghost town inside every city. It made her ferocious but
not personal. Once she wanted me to tell her my sexual fantasies. Confession
is good information, she said, stroking my clit with her finger.
I shuddered, then recoiled. What could I say? My mouth was unconscious.
I should have whispered, It feels like your nostalgia.
(Sex
Life)
I take it as a given
that the well-modulated distance of mainstream fiction is a system that
contains and represses social conflict, and that one purpose of experimental
work is to break open this system. But experimental work can require a
context of aesthetic ideas which many people who might otherwise be interested
in it don't have. In this context, intimacy, autobiography, and direct
address don't function just as content but are strategies for pursuing
a reluctant audience. So are genre narrative forms, such as sex writing
or horror.
There are many roads into the succulent interior. How can the mechanisms
of genre fiction get us (the cabal of experimental writers) there?
Consider porn narratives. Usually people do not appreciate being taken
apart. They rely upon having an ego, enjoy feeling integrated and in control,
and experimental work that questions this can arouse distaste. What is
so interesting about pornography is that loosing it is the point. People
want to be taken apart so that ego control (resistance to pleasure) is
subverted. Where there was distaste, there is now desire mixed with dread.
Pleasures of the rupture, rack and screw. The audience becomes
an unwitting collaborator in its own disintegration, in the interest of
pleasure, or just feeling, period.
Genre fiction is not about representing experience but producing and organizing
feeling — sexual excitement, horror, mystery, fear. The aim is to
invade the reader's subjectivity. To control, and then to release. The
desire of the reader to be aroused or to otherwise escape is the key hole
through which all the mechanisms of the narrative operate (note this turns
the writer into a kind of spy!).
Because genre writing deals in something as low as feeling, these forms
are relatively easy to use in other contexts and for other purposes. They
are already degraded, so their resistance is weak. Experimental writers
using genre forms are like drag artists. Let us acknowledge the camp
aspect to our more extreme performances.
My
mistress cuts & tucks one silicone 38D into my chest and then another,
while I'm bound to our massive brass bed. Her kinky breath is soft as
suede.
When
I cry she tells me,
The
best titties are raised on the farm.
When
I scream she says,
Pain
shreds & relaxes. You'll stumble over the real thing.
Think of scrub brushes and the perfect ending.
When
I sob in agony she comforts me,
Later
we'll take a tour of the castle.
My
mistress is cruel. She's bright as breath. She whispers to me as she
cuts,
I'm
a fan of the flesh — tits, stuffing, sweetmeats.
I suck the juice from the roast, I'm a pig with a straw.
(Fetish)
How to pass suffering,
eroticism ... from one person to another? Where
does coherence fly apart? The answer to these questions does not lie in
one or another particular strategy, but in the sensual devotion of the
writer, taken to formal extremes. We explore our narrative tools, discovering
exactly how they manipulate or release the horribly contorted social body
— because it’s the one we live in, the one which feeds off
us, the one which has swallowed the visible horizon.
Works
Cited
1
The excerpts in this essay are all from The Rosy Medallions
by Camille Roy, published by Kelsey St Press, 1995.
See www.camilleroy.com for more
information.
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