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FTIIRRARY
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‘ ’W I I University

 

This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

GENDERED MOVES: MOBILE SUBJECTS IN ATLANTIC
RIM LITERATURE AND FILM

presented by

KRISTINA BANISTER QUYNN

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
of the requirements for the

DOCTORAL degree in ENGLISH

 

 

 

 

 

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GENDERED MOVES: MOBILE SUBJECTS IN ATLANTIC RIM LITERATURE
AND FILM

By

Kristina Banister Quynn

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
English

2009

ABSTRACT

GENDERED MOVES: MOBILE SUBJECTS IN ATLANTIC RIM LITERATURE
AND FILM

By

Kristina Banister Quynn

Gendered Moves examines ﬁgures of mobility and gendered subjectivity in
women’s writing and ﬁlm from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Iceland and the
Anglophone-Caribbean. Focusing on literary productions of women who relocate
themselves and situate their work in multiple national sites throughout the Atlantic Rim,
this study begins with the observation that the crisis of representation affecting nation-
oriented literatures and models of identity is a product of a proliferation of differences
that becomes an aesthetic strategy in mobile women’s ﬁction and theory. This project
draws on an equally wide-range of critical discourses—including Postcolonial, Irish, and
Sex/Gender Studies—to account for the various ways Atlantic Rim women artists use
mobility to challenge narrative conventions and socio-political orders. Alongside the rise
of transnational and transatlantic studies, analyses of travel ﬁgures have gained critical
currency. Feminist scholars interested in mobility and transnationalism have generally
attended to the socio-historical conditions informing notions of migrancy and exile as
well as to the gendering of transnational experience in literature. My project, rather than
charting a subject’s movement across historical and material landscapes, investigates the
gendered and politicized landscapes of narrative. Broadly, this study incorporates theories
of narrativity, psychoanalytic feminism, and postcolonialism to examine the ﬁguration

and enactment of mobility as it redeﬁnes what it means to write and locate the self

simultaneously. Expanding upon (post)modernist experimentations with form to enact
new kinds of subjectivities and narratives of self, mobile women writers and ﬁlmmakers
utilize formal experimentation to perform feminine subjectivity as mobile and elsewhere

to a masculine social imaginary.

Copyright by
KRISTINA BANISTER QUYNN
2009

For Spencer and Sydney, the most inspiring mobile subjects

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing this dissertation has been a remarkable process, one that began long
before I put ﬁngers to keyboard for that ﬁrst daunting chapter and one that reﬂects the
intellectual, emotional, and ﬁnancial support of more friends, family, and colleagues than
can be recognized here. Ultimately, my gratitude exceeds the page and the recognitions
of these few. My initial expressions of gratitude go to my friends/my other family who
offered support in the best and, occasionally, the most unexpected ways: David Otten
through acts of “mutual appreciation” gave me the strength and means to apply to
graduate school in the ﬁrst place. Royden Marsh and Richard West remain my
companions-in-process and my touchstones for the balancing act that is life. Nicole Hurt,
through late-night conversations, thoughts on my writing, and acts of friendship,
unstintingly offered smart perspectives on my understandings of postcolonialism,
sex/gender theory, and social justice. Melissa Fore gave me and my own a place to
belong, sharing her family and working with me to create a shelter within the maelstrom
that is graduate school. The Adhikari family were the best of neighbors and babysitters
and continue to be the best of friends. Tommy O’Neill (my Batman) provided the
comforts of home on my multiple stays in Ireland and an entertaining, automatic
friendship while there and abroad. To those colleagues whose support and commentary
was always appreciated, I thank: Brian Holcomb and Lance Norman for their rich
conversation as well as writing and teaching support; Shel Veenstra for sharing her
problem-solving focus and her home for dinner meetings; Sunniva O’Flynn and Manus

McManus of the Irish Film Archive for giving of their extensive knowledge of Irish

ﬁlmmaking and cinema. No dissertation is possible, however, without the guidance and
encouragement of a good committee, and I thank: William Johnsen for his kindness and
thoughts on Irish literature; Sheila Teahan for her insights into narrative theory and her
selﬂess approach to teaching; Stephen Watt for unstintingly applying his editorial skills
to my chapters as well as for sharing both his vast knowledge of Irish literature and his
savvy with academe; Robin Silbergleid for sharing not only meals, coffee, and days
away with kids but also her insights into and talents for women-writing-women. My
ultimate, but ultimately inadequate, gratitude goes to Judith Roof not only for teaching
with energetic brilliance, unsolicited encouragement, and open dedication but also for
mentoring via the practical supports of candid and heart-felt conversation, fantastic
dinners, community gatherings, and much more. She is the uncompromising and
compassionate intellectual who models my own becoming-scholar. And for the support
that feeds the soul, if not the nemesis of the psyche, I thank my family: My Mom and
Bob for bigheartedly ensuring that I remained connected with family and that the kids
and I made it back to Colorado for much needed holidays and summer visits (the value of
family fun and relaxation they provided is beyond measure); My father who generously
kept his distance. But by far, my biggest and unquestioning supporters who participated
in the daily grind of this dissertation are Spencer and Sydney. They continually teach me
new ways to understand family and love. For the pleasures of their companionship,

conversation, and love, I am most grateful.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY MOVES ........................................................................ 1
CHAPTER I

LIKE MOVES: NEO-DOUBLING AND PROLIFERATION ................................ 13
CHAPTER 1, AGAIN OR DEUCE:

LIKE MOVES: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH MAPS, LISTS AND MIRRORS ........ 55
CHAPTER 3

DIASPORIC MOVES: ELSEWHERE IN ANOTHER PLACE ............................. l 12
CHAPTER 4

EXILIC MOVES: LIVING AT HOME IN LANGUAGE .................................... 143
CHAPTER 5

STRANGE MOVES: FOREIGN DESIRES AND DISPLACEMENTS .................. 179
CHAPTER 6

NOMADIC MOVES: TOO MANY PASSPORTS ............................................ 240
ANYWHERE

IN LIEU OF A CONCL ........................................................................... 293
WORKS CITED ................................................................................... 297

vii

INTRODUCTORY MOVES

This dissertation is an exercise in perversity in so far as the seemingly descriptive,
linchpin terms that signal what this study is “about” may be considered a misdirection,
may be bones for contention, or may be—as Ash in Ali Smith’s novel Like labels her
own writing—simply a “lie.” For, this is not a dissertation about Women or female
authors who travel; and yet, it provides analyses of literary and ﬁlmic texts by women
who often live outside of the nation of their birth and who are invested in (re)conﬁguring
and/or self-reﬂexively (re)presenting woman. In taking its direction from the work of
such mobile writers and theorists as Emma Donoghue, Kristjana Gunnars, Helene Cixous,
and Rosi Braidotti, this study questions the representational terrains that supply the ﬁgure
and category woman with any meaning at all. Yet, it is very much a study of the literary
methods and self-reﬂexive narrative strategies that write woman as a subject-in—process,
as a self negotiation through gendered language, and as a disruption or perversion of a
masculine social imaginary, an imaginary that realizes itself through the binaries of
sexual difference and essential notions of woman.

Similarly, what follows in these chapters is not a sustained argument to establish a
new metaphor or cultural category for postrnodemity or postmodern subjectivity out of
the transatlantic migrations of women from postcolonial sites. In this way, the Atlantic
Rim does not function like Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic,” which is a complex metaphor
for and thick description of raced identity and cultural exchange in modernity. And, yet,
this is an analysis that recognizes key (post)colonial sites and literary histories—Ireland,
Scotland, Wales, Iceland, the Caribbean—to mark the anti-patriarchal, anti-national, and

anti-imperialist, gestures within literary productions that, like their authors, move through

these sites. Perhaps an alternate imposition of historical and literary era signaling the
later-twentieth and early-twenty-ﬁrst century publication dates for the texts analyzed
could direct a reader’s attention to a reliable terrain of historicity or to what this
dissertation is “about.” And, yet, the broad literary categories for contemporary
literature—post—I 945 or, more aptly, post-1968—signals instead that this study picks up
on the era of proliferating “posts” in literary studies, wherein poststructuralism,
postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism, postgender (the list goes on) call into
question the structures and politics of representation so that “master narratives” have
become suspect and linguistic meaning uncertain, including the very stories and
categories of “post.” I

With all of its perversity and categorical uncertainty, this is a critical project that
takes as its subject matter the ﬁgures of travel commonly used in (post)modern literature
and psychoanalysis as metaphors for self and/or the dynamic processes relevant to
subjectivity: doubles; exile; stranger/foreigner; and nomad. If, as many scholars of
mobility and gender note that symbolic and social conventions dictate that men travel but
women stay home, the representation of woman as a mobile subject is already a
transgressive act and reconﬁguration of woman. Reading literary and ﬁlmic texts of
women whose work question the function of sexual difference in self-representation and
narrative structures, this project asks: In what ways do ﬁgurations of mobile women
transgress, resist, and/or alter conventional narratives of nation and social belonging?
How do representations of mobile subjects reconﬁgure the binary notions of sex/gender
difference upon which the narratives of patriarchy and nation rely? In what ways do

metaphors for self as a traveler rely on a repression of the feminine to produce a mobile

male subject? And, to what extent does feminine mobility alter or ﬁt all too well the
primary characteristics of literary doubles, exiles, strangers and foreigners, and nomads?
This study contributes to current discussions of gendered subjectivity and
sexual/racial/national identities in “contemporary” literary and cultural studies. Instead
of attending to socio-historical and material conditions that effect women in narratives
about international migration and travel, I analyze the representational matrices and
literary stylistics that imagine women as mobile subjects, regardless of whether such
subjects—author or character—literally leave their home/home-country or not. Cturent
transnational and/or global approaches to gender and subjectivity often reinforce literal
representations of both woman and a nationally or culturally dislocated subject, even as
the operations of representation may be read as politically suspect and/or resistant to
unifying narratives of nation and identity. For instance, Inderpal Grewal and Caren
Kaplan in the introduction to their edited collection Scattered Hegemonies:
Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practice, respond to what might be described
as the new and improved patriarchy and imperialist capitalism of Western globalization
with an image of feminist resistance(s) grounded in diverse and localized networks of
women who work to counter the “scattered hegemonies” of postmodemity. As with their
other writings on “global identities,” transnational women play a crucial role in Grewal
and Kaplan’s feminist vision, which promotes “a more interdisciplinary and transnational
approach [to] address [socio-economic and political] inequalities as well as...the nature of
sexual identities” (“Global” 663). Such sex/ual/ized identity, including that of the new
transnational feminist, is, however, understood to be as much a product of her social and

material conditions as it is grounded in a seductively authentic image of woman. I should

also note that by engaging travel as a ﬁgure rather than pretext for mobility, this is not a
study of women’s post-1 968 “travel literature,” a genre that also tends to make
representational assumptions about the literalness or authenticity of such categories of
difference as sex/gender, race and culture. Rather this is a study of a writing practice that
engages mobility as a method and gendered conﬁguration to offer alternative reﬂections
and conﬁgurations of woman.

The multiple dis(re)locations of mobile feminine subjects calls into question
nation as interlocutor, with all of its masculinist imperatives to claim, locate, identify, and
speak for women. If the migrant as seen in Salman Rushdie’s imaginary homelands is
“gripped by the conviction that [he], too, had a city and a history to reclaim” (10), the
transgressive and perversely mobile woman has too many cities or too many histories to
which she may claim—if she can “claim” at all. Through this multiplication of the
homelands, any investment in a single nation’s story, a single narrative of a collective
past, becomes “scattered,” to usurp Grewal and Kaplan’s term. Charting a kind of
(post)national travel of a feminine subject becomes not simply a question of which nation
she was born in or writes/speaks from, but a question of which nations are in-relationship.
For the she under discussion here is more a nomadic ﬁgure who, in resisting patriarchal
and national (b)orders, has either no passport or too many of them, as Rosi Braidotti
notes. Therefore, when discussing “nation,” I have preferred to engage the locations
provided in the narrative rather than the author’s multiple national afﬁliations: Ireland-
United States-England in Anne Enright’s novel What Are You Like ?, Unnamed Caribbean

Island-Canada in Dionne Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here, Iceland-Denmark-

America in Kristjana Gunnar’s novel The Prowler, and so forth.1 However, the (b)order
transgressing mobile subject may just as likely not travel from “home” at all as in Svava
Jakobsdottir’s novella The Lodger and Marina Carr’s play Low in the Dark. In these
latter instances, the “nation” remains unaccounted for or tangentially necessary to setting,
character, and theme so that any search for nation becomes the resistant reading as the
nation is already unhinged from its grounding in the fantasy of sexual difference.

To mark the distance in feminine conﬁgurations of historically masculine tropes
for the subject, the chapter titles and analyses within work to approach the traveling
ﬁgure as a method, a process, and, therefore, a modiﬁer for the movements of “subject-
in-process,” to use Julia Kristeva’s term. In this same vein, the authorial biographies are
minimal, if discussed at all. (I initially attempted to use an author’s name exclusively in
its possessive form as a modiﬁer for her texts. But given that one can only write versions
of “So-And-So’s novel” or worse “So-And-So’s narrative” so many times and in so many
ways before the possessive form reads as bizarre or conceptually problematic, I
eventually gave up rigidly marking the distance between author and text in many
instances.) My attempt to engage author as textual modiﬁer evokes a poststructuralist
pronouncement (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault) that the author is dead while still offering
traces of the “scriptor’s” self— or author-narratives that may have gendered resonations
within her writing or theoretical practice. Thus, in the chapters that follow, authorial
biography when included is presumed to be as much a narrative for analysis as the work
these mobile authors and ﬁlmmakers produce. It may well be that a woman writer who

relocates across national borders will incorporate such experiences in her writing, but to

 

l I should note that there may be, and often is, a correspondence between the author’s biography and
nan’ative settings.

use biography as ballast to stabilize my analyses of narratives that work explicitly to
interrogate discourses and notions of essential difference, as well as its more subtle
companion “authenticity,” would seem to me to have missed the point of much of their
work.

In contrast to charting a subject’s movement across physical and material
landscapes, Continental Feminism with its emphasis on linguistic experimentation
critiques and alters masculinist literary, linguistic and/or symbolic structures to conﬁgure
woman elsewhere and has contributed signiﬁcantly to my study.2 If the shifts and
movements of a subject are bound to language and the interior space of subjectivity,
Helene Cixous’ assertion that “writing is the very possibility of change” speaks then of
the politicized and personal experience of the gendered subject as it moves through and is
constructed by language. Theoretical projects such as Cixous’ shaping of a feminine
imaginary, Julia Kristeva’s interrogation of the Semiotic and cultural systems of meaning,
and Rosi Braidotti’s philosophy of nomadic subjectivity adopt complex literary
ﬁgurations of gendered subjects capable of subverting and destabilizing patriarchal codes
and structures while simultaneously resisting the re-essentializing of the subject based on
binary structures. The theoretical operations of Continental Feminist literary practices
resonate particularly and often singularly with the myriad and varied ﬁgures presented in
the own work of mobile women writers and ﬁlmmakers. Cixous’ exile without arrival,

Kristeva’s undocumented and exorbitant stranger, Braidotti’s politically active nomad,

 

2 “Continental Feminism” is not only a term/title that broadens the category of “French Feminism” as
ﬁ'equently used in the American academy to refer to a speciﬁcally linguistic and psychoanalytic approach
to gender politics and a reconﬁguring of the masculine social imaginary to include the theoretical work of
Rosi Braidotti but also a term/title that suits the text’s (emphasis) on British or (post)colonial Anglophone
perspectives.

each resonates not entirely but sporadically and signiﬁcantly with women’s post-1968
Atlantic Rim literary and ﬁlmic projects.

The term “Atlantic Rim” as previously mentioned is not a metaphor for a new
kind of feminine identity or marker of uniﬁed transatlantic culture, but, rather, it is a
gesture toward a ﬂuid space of representation and continuous, perhaps repeated and
circuitous, movements of mobile female subjects. There are then currents of
psychoanalysis (or even anti-psychoanalysis as in the case of Deleuze and Guattari) that
move through this dissertation, contributing to a kind of cresting and wave-effect through
which the thinking of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan might be glimpsed—most often
through Continental Feminist resistances to and reworkings of Freudian and Lacanian
theories of language and narrative in relation to the development of the psyche/subject.
Luce Irigrary’s essay “The Mechanics of Fluids” models and argues for a similar kind of
ﬂuidity. Taking issue with Lacan’s distancing of the Phallus—the master signiﬁer of
Symbolic order—from the penis (a solid), Irigaray both relegates Lacan to the footnotes
in a kind of theoretical nod or wave and asserts the necessity of a new kind of stylistic
and feminine theoretical study based on ﬂuidity. If in a Lacanian model selfhood begins
in mirror-stage with an imaginary body and the self is solidiﬁed as it enters the Symbolic
order (system of language that must be entered to create subject and coherent social
identity), sexual difference is both produced by a fantasy relationship to the phallus (not
determined by genitalia/biology) and seemingly ﬁxed within an unchanging Symbolic
(phallic signifying order). Reading a repressed feminine out of Lacan’s model (a kind of
oil in a masculine psycho-linguistic machinery), Irigaray argues that language is also

ﬂexible and ﬂuid, and, thus, may be torqued to recognize “awoman” (note that Irigaray’s

language play is not to represent “a woman” i.e., the solid or mirror against which the
masculine sights itself) according to metonymic ﬂows of desire, pleasure, and proximity
instead of phallic/masculine/male metaphors of visibility (114).

I have brought together literary and ﬁlmic productions by mobile women that may
be classiﬁed as “experimen ” in the self-reﬂexive approaches to characterizing and
writing woman and (re)negotiating sexual difference. In many ways the mobile feminine
of these works appears to extend the imperatives of l ’e'criturefe'minine (feminine writing
or literally writing gendered feminine) that is most often associated with the feminism
and writings of Luce Irigaray and He'lene Cixous emerging in the 19705. While not
synonymous, Irigaray’s and Cixous’ promotion of l ’écritureféminine broadly called for
experimentations with language and narrative to write woman otherwise to a masculine
imaginary or the phallologocentric (privileging of the phallus/masculine to make
meaning). This writing otherwise in its various forms is a common strategy to the texts
analyzed in this dissertation, and it also what makes the work of Anne Enright, Ali Smith,
Emma Donoghue, Dionne Brand, Kristjana Gunnars, Shani Mootoo, Menna Gallie,
Svava Jakobsdottir, Vivienne Dick, and even Marina Carr ﬁt uneasily within the more
common nation and diaspora oriented categories of literary study. This is not to say that
the literary and ﬁlmic productions of such artists are models or strict expressions of
l’écritureféminine, but, rather, to suggest that the transgressive imperatives of such a
gendered writing practice are what make such texts resistant to broader disciplinary
orders of classiﬁcation. For instance, if Anne Enright’s novel What Are You Like? is

evocative of Irigaray’s broader theoretical concerns in Speculum of the Other Woman and

This Sex Which is Not One, it also gestures toward the impossibilities and psychic risks
for women if they pursue feminine, ﬂuid strategies of/for feminine signiﬁcation.

With the exception of the discussion of elsewhere and diaspora in Dionne Brand’s
novel In Another Place, Not Here, the chapters of this dissertation analyze at least two
and up to four literary/theoretical texts, generally placed alongside one another to address
the particular gendered moves of each text in relation to tropings of travel and
subjectivity. In Chapter 1, “Like Moves: Neo-Doubling and Proliferation,” Anne
Enright’s What Are You Like? (2000) story of twins and Ali Smith’s bifurcated novel of
two friends, Like (1997), serve to introduce the kinds of resistant representational moves
and tensions that will crest throughout the dissertation. While in a psychoanalytic
tradition the “double” suggests an internal, psychic splitting or multiplication, this
chapter exposes the textual shift that takes place when women reject masculinist
mirroring and oedipal formations for recognizing their self as multiple, double, split. If
both novels extend psychoanalytic notions woman as double—double voiced, doubly
othered—into contemporary, transnational settings, neither text clariﬁes or essentializes
the nature of woman. Enright’s style is similar to ﬂipping through channels on a
television never quite sticking to one signal, and Smith’s two-part novel eccentrically
disperses images of woman via a lesbian desire rather than locating her according to
normative orders of sexual and national difference. Chapterl , Again or Deuce, “Like
Moves: How to Do Things With Maps, Lists, and Mirrors” moves further into the
resistant summaries provided in the ﬁrst chapter on Enright’s and Smith’s novels to take
up common tropes and methods for locating self and linguistic meaning—maps, lists, and

mirrors. By shifting the conventional representational work of the Father’s cartography

and masculine mirroring of (him)se1f, these novels produce reﬂections of woman that do
not quite track or reﬂect a coherent feminine subject and, therefore, require that we read
them eccentrically and as elsewhere.

Chapter 3, “Diasporic Moves: Elsewhere In Another Place” extends the notion of
the representation of woman as elsewhere through a masculine imaginary. It also
continues to read the effects of woman—oriented or lesbian desire as a kind of
representational mobility through Dionne Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here
(I 996). Engaging speciﬁc discursive and disciplinary categories of diasporic identity and
the politics of exile, this chapter highlights the ways that Brand’s novel reshapes an anti-
patriarchy, anti-nation, anti-racist politic through the erotic relationships between women.

Addressing speciﬁcally the ways in which “exile,” whether framed as diasporic or
not, is a precondition for representing woman in a masculine imaginary, Chapter 4,
“Exilic Moves: Living at Home in Language,” includes readings of Emma Donoghue’s
short story “Going Home” (1993), Edna O’Brien’s Mother Ireland (1976) and Helene
Cixous’ Stigmata: Escaping Texts (1998). In each of these texts, the ﬁgure of woman is
already marked as a ﬁgure of exile within the home/motherland; therefore, a woman’s
travel away from “home” suggests either a doubling or literalizing of her symbolic exile.
Thus exile does not carry the same innervating experience for self-reﬂective, writing
women as it did for James Joyce. And yet, Joyce’s literary exile and stylistics suggest a
method for feminine writing as traveling elsewhere to the [m]otherland.

The ﬁnal two chapters of this dissertation focus more speciﬁcally on perverse and
transgressive ﬁgurations of female subjects. Chapter 5, “Strange Moves: Foreign Desires

and Displacements” arranges Menna Gallie’s novel In These Promiscuous Parts (1986)

10

with Svava Jakobsdottir’s “The Lodger” (1969), Shani Mootoo’s poetry and a short story
from her collection (1993) and Julia Kristeva’s remunerations on the “foreigner within.”
This chapter notes the ways in which “woman” might be a politically charged ﬁgure of
transgressive and erotic/pleasurable foreignness. This is a chapter that explores
speciﬁcally oedipal and psychoanalytic framings of transgressive desires while the ﬁnal
chapter of this dissertation will analyze spaces of transgression as an expression of
feminist nomadism. Chapter 6, “Nomadic Moves: Too Many Passports” takes up notions
of nomadism and migrancy in Kristjana Gunnars’ novel The Prowler (1989), Vivienne
Dick’s experimental ﬁlms Visibility Moderate: A Tourist Film (1981) and Marina Carr’s
play Low in the Dark (1990). This chapter places the work of literary and ﬁlm artists
alongside Rosi Braidotti’s theorization of nomadic subjectivity as a reenergized feminism
attuned to contemporary manifestations and operations of patriarchy. The aesthetic
practices and a politics of the “anti” in Gunnars’ and Carr’s writing as well as Dick’s
ﬁlmmaking produce a multiple rather than binary process of literary construction capable
of affecting local as well as global modes of resistance and subversion. Approaching the
nomad as process and method rather than ﬁguration, this chapter works to deconstruct the
more common metaphorization of the nomad in current academic debates concerning the
vestiges of Western imperialist discourse in literary studies of migrancy and mobility.
None of the words analyzed in each chapter are exclusive to the ﬁgurative moes
discussed in that chapter. In this way, there is an underlying resistance and potential
nomadism attendant with the organization of this dissertation overall. Neither are the
ﬁgures of double, exile, stranger/foreigner, or nomad discrete categories of typographies,

for each often overﬂows into the descriptions and ﬁgurative moves of another. Thus, the

11

ﬁnal piece of this dissertation, more an afterward than a chapter, “Anywhere: In Lieu of
Concl ..... ” playfully arranges the ﬂuidness of each of the prior chapters’ textual moves.
Reminiscent of Nicole Brossard’s Picture Theory and a ﬂuid imagining of woman as
hologram, this piece takes up the possibility of ﬁguring the feminine not only as

elsewhere, but perhaps also more threateningly, anywhere to a masculine socio-linguistic

imaginary.

12

CHAPTER I

LIKE MOVES: NEO-DOUBLING AND PROLIFERATION

Anne Enright’s What Are You Like? (2000) and Ali Smith’s Like (1997) are
contemporary novels that double main plots and female protagonists. Enright’s Irish
twins and Smith’s British (English and Scottish) obsessive friends search for self-
reﬂection through narratives that parody established literary conventions of the
psychological double, and through which the protagonists’ encounters with mirrors, maps,
and lists consistently call into question the efﬁcacy of such objects and tropes for self-
reﬂection. Mirrors fail to reﬂect the “woman” who seeks reﬂection; maps do not reveal
the entirety of her location—geographic or socio-cultural; and lists do not adequately
itemize her essential characteristics or personality. In as much as Enright’s novel draws
on motifs of the Irish family and Smith’s novel on the double as the epitome character of
Scottish literature, 3 these texts work to transgress familial and doubling conventions and
instead conﬁgure intermittent images of mobile postnational feminine subjects. Rather
than reclaiming family, nation or culture to render a woman’s voice, experience and
perspective, these texts make use of the rhetorical strategies that constitute sexual and
cultural identity categories to ﬁgure woman as slipping and evading such signiﬁcation.
Like the shoreline of Ireland described in What Are You Like? where tides and dock

projects continually alter Ireland’s landscape by obscuring the edges between land and

 

3 Working from Hugh MacDiarmid’s turn-of-the-twentieth formulation of Scotland’s contribution to
British literature as a kind of doubled-literature, Gregory Smith claims that the deﬁning “characteristic of
Scottish writing was its bipolarity—its tendency to swing, sometimes manically between realism and
fantasy.” According to MacDiarmid, Scottish literature’s “single most important identifying feature was
its doubleness—the ‘two moods’ or ‘polar twins.” See: Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for Twentieth-
Century Scottish Literature, 2004: 15.

13

sea, the female protagonists of both works are simultaneously dynamic and obscure, and
they tend to disappear at the moment of their apprehension.

This doubled chapter (Chapter 1 and Chapter 1, Again or Deuce) analyzes the
representational terrains and gendered politics of Enright’s and Smith’s novels in which
the literary double as well as tropes of self-recognition and knowledge are (re)conﬁgured
to speak of a generative and profuse subject. 4 This ﬁrst chapter is an extensive
(re)visiting of each novels’ structures and motifs of mobility that produce what I call
“postnational mobile feminine subjects.” The second chapter, “Deuce,” provides an
analysis of how Maps, Lists and Mirrors, when used to trope self-apprehension and
location, can produce a gendered self adjusted to a politic of non-recognition and not-
knowing to counter a masculine discourse of knowledge or a masculine social imaginary.
In both novels, geo-cultural maps are associated with the father’s knowledge systems—a
Cartesian formulation of cognition that might read “1 map; therefore, I think.” The
daughter-protagonists, however, explicitly reject their fathers’ methods of cartographic
reason, and as an alternative, the novels endorse proliﬁc, non-binary listing as a kind of
self-articulation practice that resists phallocentric self-location, “circumnavigating,”
although perhaps not entirely, the essentializing binary-return that has troubled feminist

' discourses of the “post.” 5 Consequently, the literary doublings evoked in these novels

 

4 The use of the term “terrain” in my discussion plays upon both the spatializing of knowledge and the
gendering of such modes of knowing. Much of the work on the psychological double is premised on a
mapping of double motifs and themes as an expression of an already mapped psyche and/or vise versa.
This underlying impetus to mark scholarly discussion, debate and conversation via ﬁgurations of “terrain”
is not unlike the impetus to associate landscape and what is conceptually unsettled/unknown as feminine.
The “feminine” or yet-to-be-known, claimed, settled and so forth via imperial and masculine projects
resonates through notions of subjectivity, wholeness and authorized knowledge.

I must acknowledge the fraught debates over the terminologies of the “post,” which includes postnational.
In this context, I am using the term to allude to a political position/characterization of a gendered subject,
not to a speciﬁc historical or social context demarcating a collective move beyond or elimination of
“nation.” In this sense, I ﬁnd Arjun Appadurai’s evocations of “postnational” useful, if not his

14

are complex, producing a new kind of double attuned to the rhetorical moves and
(re)structuring(s) of poststructuralist feminism.

Literary doubling according to Robert Rogers in his taxonomic study, A
Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (1970), is produced as either a splitting
of identity or a multiplication of ﬁguration. Implicit fragmentation, splitting or multiple
personalities such as Dr. Jekyll suggest a mathematical division into duality or multiple
selves. Whereas decomposition (composite characterization) produces multiple ﬁgures
as part of a whole, such as Hamlet’s multiple father ﬁgures. While Roger’s taxonomy is
extensive, none of the doubles or doubling processes he describes suits the ﬁgurations in
Enright and Smith’s novels. Something else is going on, which can be accounted for, if
not mathematically, by the literary and symbolic mechanisms that produce notions of
wholeness and a dominant, conscious and authentic self. Since Enright’s and Smith’s
double ﬁgurations are produced both by dividing and multiplying self, they suggests a
logic of “both/and, and, and..,” a proliferation of likenesses that dissipates the
conventional double’s signaling of an underlying whole and uniﬁed self-characterization

thrown into conﬂict.

 

anthropological approach: “[N]o idiom has yet emerged to capture the collective interests of many groups
in translocal solidarities, cross-border mobilizations, and postnational identities. Such interests are many
and vocal, but they are still entrapped in the linguistic imaginary of the territorial state. This incapacity of
many deterritorialized groups to think their way out the imaginary of the nation-state is itself the cause of
much global violence because many movements of emancipation and identity are forced, in their struggles
against existing nation-states, to embrace the very imaginary they seek to escape. Postnational or
nonnational movements are forced by the very logic of actually existing nation—state to become antinational
or antistate and thus to inspire the very state power that forces them to respond in the language of
countemationalism. This vicious circle can only be escaped when a language is found to capture complex,
nonterritorial, postnational forms of allegiance” (166).

IS

LIKE/LIKE Resisting Summary

Even as What Are You Like ?( WA YL?) revels in complexity of character and the
confusions of self, the plot is simple enough. Anna Delahunty dies from brain cancer
shortly before her twin daughters are surgically removed from her body. Her husband,
Berts, unable to cope with raising two daughters without a wife, puts one up for adoption.
Maria is raised in Dublin by Berts and his hastily acquired new wife, Evelyn; and Rose
(christened Marie) is raised in London by the Cotters (a medical doctor and his wife).
After a period of self-searching as young adults—Rose while at university studying
music and Maria during a brief emigratory jaunt in New York—the sisters are reunited
when Rose travels to Dublin to track down her birth mother. A simpler book teaser
might read something like: “Twins! Separated at birth and reunited twenty-two years
later!” And yet, in tracking major characters, familial orders and major events, this
summary of events remaps the story and underrates the interior lives of characters and the
novel’s raucous sequencing of events. The plot as recounted here appears to be
inevitably driven by conventional double themes of reuniﬁcation or a return pro-birth
wholeness—when twins might have been as one—a remarkable misdirection of the
novel’s insistence on partial knowledge and the comforts of self-misrecognition.

The narrative structure of WA YL? works productively against the unfolding of this
neat plot-line or story ‘map. Spanning two decades, 1965-1987, WA YL? zigzags through
time, intersperses six character perspectives, and alternates between metropolitan settings
in Ireland, England and the United States. The novel opens in 1965 with Berts grieving
and unable to comprehend single-fatherhood, and it closes in 1987 with Dr. Cotter’s

pleasure in discovering that his adopted daughter has a twin. The events and voices

16

between these father-oriented bookends, however, are so varied and seemingly haphazard
that the reader must work hard not to succumb to the conﬁrsion that continually assails
Berts. Even with what might appear to be an aid for locating characters, for instance, the
city names and years that accompany most of the 36 chapter titles, these locators seem
more a juggling act than a logical ordering of events—“Dublin, 1965,” “New York,
1985,” “Dublin, 1971,” New York, 1985,” “Dublin-Donegal, 1976” (subheadings of the
ﬁrst ﬁve chapters). For as these geo-chronological points of the novel’s opening
chapters suggest, each subheading serves to as much to “locate” the characters of a given
chapter as to assert the novel’s non-linearity, enacting something akin to the temporal
disorientations typical of Berts, Anna, Maria and Rose.

To extract a chronological plotting from this temporal juggle, the reader must
continually mark and remark the rhetorical territory traveled, drawing and redrawing a
mental map of the novel. The novel often complicates what has come before so that
effects often precede causes, if causes are acknowledged at all, and events often repeat
with alternating and conﬂicting expressions. For instance, Maria’s brief affair with
Anton in New York appears numerous times with slightly altered but equally valid
conclusions. She fell in love. She was never in love. She was obsessed. In addition,
Berts and Maria pose as the primary characters in the ﬁrst third of the novel, only to have
their story interrupted by the musings of a hospital nun, Sr Misericordm, who discloses
Anna’s birthing of twins. These revelations tend to retroactively resignify Berts’ guilt
and complicate Maria’s interest in her own reﬂection and search for her likeness by

introducing another protagonist, Rose.

17

In this way, the nonlinear, fragmented and multi-perspective structure of WA YL?
sets up a complex exploration of how meaning and sense are made through the maps, lists,
mirrors and the “like” against which and through which characters are drawn. Maria is
never the same woman who looks back from mirrors, shop-windows or photographs. Her
reﬂection returns to her from someplace mobile and often unrecognizable. Similarly, the
reader’s remapping of the text to track character and event reﬂects a story no longer
recognizable as its parts and instead reﬂects a story, from someplace else, from the
conventions of linear order and how readers attempt to ‘make sense.’ Thus, remapping
the storyline risks reconﬁguring character and story according to realist and masculinist
conventions of linearity, imposing false causality (the main protagonists search for self
because they somehow know they are twins) as well as presuming and reasserting the
very binary gender classiﬁcations the novel disrupts (that twins must see and identify
each other through a masculinist ordering of the gaze, knowledge).

With its non-linear and multiple, competing perspectives, the story makes
thematic sense through the repetitions and variations accorded the modern literary double
such as the duality or conﬂict of self as well as the recognition of the other as self. While
conventional double themes tend to resolve subject instability through familiar devises of
death, reunion, a return to singularity, wholeness and/or sanity, WA YL? instead plays with
convention and makes familiar the processes of irresolution, of not-knowing, and
proximity without reunion. For example, at the very moment that Maria and Rose cross
paths, their mother’s autobiographical musings from beyond the grave interrupt the
expected depiction of sibling reunion, displacing the return wholeness as family reunited.

This interruption, which defers the climactic moment of twins reuniting, proffers instead

18

a kind of outburst of re-connections and re-conﬁgurations that suggests a different logic
of representation at work with the Delahunty daughters. Through Anna’s chapter,
Maria’s preference for maps and Rose’s predilection for list-making merge as Anna’s
ghost speaks of her spatial lists or memory maps and her desire to grow words. Since
Anna has been dead from the novel’s opening and brain cancer has rendered her insane in
her husband’s memory, her voice at this point in the novel forestalls a trustworthy return
to the past or to her body that might constitute a kind of “return to wholeness.” An
alternative mode of thinking and narrative is at work here.

The only chapter with a ﬁrst-person narrator in the novel, Anna’s chapter is
jarring not only for its location and spectral voice but also for its redeﬁnition of her
character, which was previously described via Berts’ memories. According to Berts,
Anna’s oddities could initially be explained by assertions of sexual difference: “Women
have their own rules. Why not turn the world inside out—bake a chicken in stufﬁng,
wrap a sheet around the washing machine?...” and so forth (5). Yet from her grave, Anna
speaks of literal misunderstandings, of her failures to make “meaning grow” and of being
imprisoned by her gendered roles—daughter, sister, wife. “I am not dead,” she claims, “I
am in hell. And I blame the feet that walk over me” (248). She states that as a school-girl
she could record in her journal only “the things she did not notice” and as an adult she
began burying words in the yard as if these linguistic seeds might ﬁnally yield meanings
commensurate to her life. Babies grow in Anna’s belly, tumors grow in her head, but her
words fail to grow in soil. What she tells is by design suspect, an undoing narrative, and
perhaps capturing only that which is, as she points out, not really important or not really

worth noticing after all.

19

Anna’s chapter also suggests the importance of spatial listing as it was passed
down matrilineally in a place and time (19505 Irish countryside) where and when paper
was dear. “My mother’s lists,” Anna says, “were things that she shifted around the
kitchen. . .the cat’s saucer upside down beside the door when we needed polish for our
Sunday shoes” (234). This manipulation of domestic space to create a spatial list
provocatively pulls together images of illiteracy and woman/mother. The mother’s lists
spoke of keeping family order and of duties beﬁtting a woman absorbed in her roles of
wife and mother even as they suggest that that woman cannot “read” and must signify the
household’s “needs” differently than the husband who can read and write. Anna,
however, does read and write and her lists are a combination of written and spatial
methods. Her lists, rather than ordering the household, tend to take over the house, often
refuse explanation—turnips in the wardrobe, salt in tea cups—and depict a woman whose
“needs” exceed her systems of listing and household duties.

The husband/father, Berts, seeks order, clarity, and a stable family-image—
dreams that at least seem achievable before Anna’s brain tumor. As a surveyor for
Dublin City, Berts works with street markings and mapping customs belonging to the
discourse of cartography, nation, and aligned with a masculine social imaginary. The
discourses of cartography and nation supply him with the metaphors to imagine his
relationship to others and his purpose. For example, after impregnating Anna, he
imagines his excess sperm as “his map on the sheet” in which he can see “a whole
country congealing in the cold” (5). It is a strange description of the post-coital moment,
suggesting a self-satisﬁed coherence (map and whole country) and sense of loss for

wasted sperm, the excess (in the cold). Excess is suggestive of that which is outside of

20

 

order—woman, death, absence—and excess consistently disturbs Berts. When Anna is
diagnosed with brain cancer shortly after becoming pregnant, her excess-iveness signiﬁes
something may not be working in his fantasies of order. It is the diagnosis and not her
death that shakes Berts’ world-view and sends him reeling in confusion. For if his
perception of womanly logic and rules of family order are not a manifestation of a natural
order guaranteed as sexual difference but are another kind of order deﬁned by and
manifesting as cancer, what exactly is the order that nature secures? Unable to sort
through the complexity of “Anna”—Is she cancer or is she woman?—Berts relegates
“her” to a conceptual and unthinkable terrain reserved for death. If Berts’ map of his life
as well as the contours of Ireland, “the whole country,” had once been traceable and
trustworthy, after Anna’s death the order is all “wrong” and Berts’ footholds less sure.

Following his wife’s death, Berts becomes a man incapable of addressing his own
“need to understand,” never mind the needs of an infant daughter who appears to him an
inquisitive “monster” (3). Maria’s “gravity of look, pulling everything into her,” her
ability to eat everything with her eyes, seems to Berts unfathomable and foreign.
Returning to the comforts of nation and cartography, Berts compartmentalizes her as
“another country that was all” (4). While Maria’s genitalia automatically locate her on
the other side of the sexual divide where “women” used to have “their own rules,” her
monstrosity is tangled with Berts’ anxiety about his wife’s simultaneous death and
birthing. “What kind of child comes out of a dead mother?” he looks upon Maria and
muses (15).

Berts is a fairly static and highly perplexed (but not perplexing) character. He is

“the father” who has lost his masculine/patriarchal footing. In an effort to (re)ground

21

himself after Anna’s death, Berts acts on a “need to go away.” He travels nightly in his
imagination around the edge of Ireland: “It would be important, he thought, to keep to the
very rim of the land, his journey shorter when the tide came in, the sea hungering for him,
then slipping away, over and over...” (10). His compulsive nightly walk marks the edges
of the island, a coastline for which he has some experiential knowledge and for the rest
he relies on his imaginary map, calculating the distance of his journey and the details of
geography with a red string. If his length of red wool marks geographic contours and
gauges distances, it fails to report the exactness of his path. It may mark the generalities
of his road traveled, so to speak, but it fails to track his exact movements or to guarantee
his future steps. For instance, Berts becomes “worried about piers. Should he travel the
length of them, going up the near side and coming back by the far?” or “When does the
coast become a river bank? At the change of water, from fresh to sea salt. It was a
shining line of salt then, that he was tracing around the country, he saw it glittering and
lacy in his mind” (10-11).

Berts’ nightly journey is riddled with his anxieties concerning keeping order and
distancing himself from death. As a man whose profession relies on maps of Dublin to
locate potholes and cracks for repair, Berts clings to the value of the map as reproduction
of a known territory. In the same way, his imaginary map of Ireland is a true
reproduction of the coast Berts travels, keeping him to the land, and securing the island
for the living. The sea is dangerous, and it is not surprising that Berts associates the sea
with Anna and death, excessive and feminine in its moribund ﬂuidity and unpredictability.

To avoid danger, Berts deliberates on which direction he should turn ﬁrst, north or south,

22

to walk the coast; he decides south would be the safest as his wife slept “to the left” and
she should be kept on the side of the sea (1 1).

While Berts remains in Dublin stagnating and repeating his fantasy of wholeness
and safety, his daughters are mobile characters, seeking new and alternative
understandings of their place and self. Each has her own preferred method for making
sense of who she is—Maria maps, Rose lists. These strategies work as markers of
character difference between the twins and as a meta-narrative technique to structure the
story according to the very systems Berts, Anna, Maria and Rose employ to locate
themselves and make sense of their circumstances. For each twin, conventional notions
of maps and lists become suspect when their maps and lists cannot reﬂect and represent
their strange, lost, or broken sense of self. In recognizing that their sense of self exceeds
and misaligns with their own maps and lists, Maria and Rose work to escape and
eventually to reconﬁgure the ways they account for and chart themselves.

Maria, the monstrous infant, who repeatedly perceives herself as a “wrong
person,” ﬁnds comfort in her reﬂection most often when it reveals a stranger or a
foreigner. A highly educated woman, she nonetheless drops out of an engineering
program at university and immigrates to New York to work as a housecleaner—a
relocation that makes her literally the foreigner. There in what she calls the “Country of
the Lost,” Maria has multiple casual sexual encounters with other immigrants, Irish and
non-Irish, as well as with her Manhattan employers. Most of these career and love
relationships serve to conﬁrm her sense of wrongness. Her most intense and longest
lasting relationship (three weeks) with a Czechoslovakian from England, Anton, sparks

her rebellion against “wrongness,” and she begins looking for the stranger who more

23

aptly reﬂects her sense of self. Part of Anton’s appeal was his knack for describing her,
for telling her “what she is like.” In addition, he carries in his wallet a decade-old photo
of himself with a girl who looks exactly as Maria did at the same age. The girl (Rose)
wears Maria’s smile and the clothes Maria never had but wished her family could have
afforded. This image that is both her and not her makes a kind of strange but
inexplicable sense to Maria. The not-her image soothes her and offers her kind of an
escape from Anton’s descriptions of her personality and “Buster Keaton eyes” that had
gradually provided only imprisoning images. Perhaps, she is not really the woman he is
sleeping with and describing. If she is not the woman whom Anton describes, however,
who might Maria be? And what is that woman like?

The “country of the lost” initially suits Maria who, like Berts, tends to think in
terms of the cartographic. New York ‘Vvas a parallel world. It was just over the other
side” (57). But in operating by the same logics that ordered the world in Ireland, Maria
ﬁnds herself increasingly anxious that she will fail to ﬁnd a “way out” (57). It is not
clear whether Maria desires a means for leaving New York, or a “way out” of her
relationship with Anton and others, or something else, or perhaps all require escaping.
Her method for coping with this lack of clarity and ambiguously directed desire for
escape is initially a kind of parallel cartographic method to Berts’. During the day, she
prefers to walk to her destinations, exploring the city and observing people; but, at night,
she mind-travels the tourist and business routes of the city until she loses her way.
Reaching the limit of her memory map of New York and unable to ﬁnd a “way out,” she

dislodges herself from the fantasy, turns on the lamp and picks up the metro-area map

24

 

from the bedside table. On the map, she notes her imaginative location and then plots her
route back to the apartment, each night expanding her knowledge of New York’s streets.

These night-time wanderings, a version of her father’s nightly walk through
Dublin and around the coastline of Ireland, signal a key philosophical and psychic
difference between Maria and her New York friends (other immigrants) and work
colleagues. “No one in this town lived straight. Outside were the streets of Manhattan,
numbered and cut, but everyone was still looking for the map. Even her boss Cassie,
who was from Galway, was getting involved in cosmic convergence and the Tibetan
Book of the Dead” (109). Maria recognizes that the maps, whether of geography, religion,
philosophy or sex and gender, are already drawn, already exist, ready to be pulled from
the nightstand and the lamp turned on. Unlike her peers, she is seldom lost, and unlike
her father, she begins to distrust maps and their capacity to “locate” people
geographically, metaphysically and socially. She begins to distrust the denotative
function of maps, which similar to Anton’s descriptions and her own reﬂections in
mirrors and shop windows, seem to imprison and contain onlyher “wrongness,”
revealing only where she has been and none of the present strangeness that seems to suit
her.

Maria will eventually “wipe herself off the map,” an act that can be likened to a
perceptual system-reboot that allows her to load an alternative operating system of sexual
difference, one that no longer positions her as the site of difference—“wrong,”
“monstrous,” and “woman”——-but one that operates according to what she understands as
a “sea of difference.” Maria’s wiping herself from the map suggests a kind of madness,

a loss of the sex/gendered order that had previously provided her with sense of self and

25

determined her place in the world. Off the map, she both attempts suicide and returns to
Dublin and begins “waiting for herself to walk through the door” (202). After a period of
hospitalization in Dublin, she takes a job in a Grafton Street shop monitoring the dressing
rooms. According to her stepmother, Evelyn, Maria has discarded a perfectly good
career and future, genuﬂecting to some sort of mental breakdown to wallow in the
meager opportunities afforded the working-class. From Maria’s perspective, class has
little to do with her decisions, for her job provides her with multiple mirrors and
reﬂections so that she might watch and wait for herself.

If Berts and Maria prefer map(ping) to imagine a self, Rose prefers list-making, as
did her birth-mother, Anna. Marie (renamed Rose by her adoptive parents) is raised in
Leatherhead, Surrey alongside a succession of children Dr. and Mrs. Cotter foster.
Privileged as their only legally adopted child, Rose knows her biological parents are
elsewhere and that she is not the same as the foster children who stay with them
temporarily, who likewise eat Mrs. Cotter’s home-cooked meals and listen to Dr. Cotter’s
sage advice. For in the Cotter family, Rose is neither biological daughter nor foster child.
She ﬁts but does not ﬁt, simultaneously discarded and claimed. She is a paradox. Rose’s
awareness of her special status in the household translates as a difference for which she
cannot fully account but which she subconsciously believes her birth mother can.

Rose knows her family is split/double, and unlike Maria, part of her search for
self includes locating her other family, speciﬁcally her birth mother. Just as Maria
wanders New York, Rose wanders the streets and shops of London ostensibly looking for

items to lift, but driven by a desire to ﬁnd what she thinks might be “the answer” to “the

26

question she asked of faces on the street, the question she had been asking all her
life. . .the simplest one of all. ‘Are you my mother?”’ (148).

Similar to Maria’s initial perception of wrongness and investments in mapping
her to locate herself: Rose’s perception of her fundamental difference insinuates a
disconnection from her adoptive family that she is compelled to understand through lists,
attempting to describe herself to herself. Her listing practices are varied, ranging from
the more common itemization of personality quirks and preferences to the more unusual
collection of shop-lifted items that signify both something and nothing about her
simultaneously. But, the lists, like many of the clothes she shoplifts, never quite ﬁt. Her
self-inventory lists, “the things she was,” are inevitably contingent, creating only “lies”
no matter how detailed and accurate her attempt (140).

She was twenty-one years old. (Probably)

She was studying music. (More or less)

She was a woman (?). ..

She was in bed with William/Will/Bill.

She was too full of things.

She was born with a hole in her head, a hole in her life.

Everything fell into it

She started again.

She was Irish.

Her favourite colour was blue.

Her favourite colour was actually a deep yellow, but she couldn’t live with

it.

She was English...

She was tidy. She was polite. She hated Margaret Thatcher.

She was a mess.

She was someone who gave things up.
She was someone who tried to give things up and failed all the time. (140)

27

Each characteristic—age, interest, sex, and so on—exceeds its own description, and her
parenthetical qualiﬁers, while contributing an element of honesty or perhaps accuracy, do
not qualify so much as to throw each of her self-identiﬁers into question.

So, too, do her shoplifting and musical studies, which, like her itemized lists,
capture and undo her self-image simultaneously. Through supermarket and department
stores, Rose’s hands play upon items selecting and thieving in plain sight. She emerges
simultaneously visible and invisible to other shoppers and store security: “It was like
escaping and being locked up, both at the same time” (123). The value of her thievery
resides not in the material value or even the materiality of the collection itself, Enright
takes care to write Rose’s desire as mimicking but something other than a fetishistic
enterprise or an aspiration for erotic pleasure. Instead, the value and goal of thieving for
Rose is to suspend her self location according to seemingly ﬁxed and known categories,
particularly those emerging out of binary order.

Rose’s piano playing suggests a similar desire for self suspension, and when she
plays she longs to experience “[b]liss. Something so big, you got it and forgot it all at the
same time” (119). But the equivalent attempt at accuracy that undoes the capacity of a
list to reﬂect and contain “Rose” strangles her musical expression. She plays with
mechanical precision and often pauses so as to not falter and play the wrong note. She
may have mastered musical convention yet she fails to ﬁnd convention or rightness
pleasurable. The descriptions of Rose’s musicianship as a search for self parallel Roland
Barthes’ theorization of relationship between readerly/writerly texts and the reading
subject. He notes that the text of pleasure tends to comfort and reassure through familiar

cultural expressions and conventions; however the text of bliss “imposes a state of loss,”

28

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unsettling “historical, cultural, psychological assumptions...” (20). In her quest for bliss,
Rose ultimately desires something other than the readerly text of musical convention,
something aligned withjouissance and a suspension of self, which she will access
through improvising and imprecision.

Shortly after adoption services informs Rose of her Irish parentage and of Anna’s
death prior to birthing, Rose wanders away from the musical compositions she worked so
hard to master and into a space of momentary improvisation. Akin to Maria’s move off
the map, she begins a kind of conceptual rebooting that begins with shutting down or
shutting out her former life. She quits school and becomes a social worker, tracking at-
risk youth for the state. If Maria’s New York friends are still looking for “the map” to
explain themselves to themselves, Rose is “still looking for the key,” in part, through a
career change and breaking up with her long-time boyfriend, William (185). Overall, her
itemizations, shoplifting, musical precision, career change, and break up indicate a
complex negotiation of her environment intended to strike the perfect key, upon which
“the tumblers would roll into place, and the damaged child [would] spill out into the
room” (185). And while the conﬁrmation of her birth mother’s name and location seems
to settle her compulsions to ﬁnd what “ﬁts” so that she no longer shop-lifts, Rose’s Irish
“origins” and English upbringing provide an additional series of differences for which
she does not know how to account.

Rose’s trip to Dublin to meet her birth father and to visit her mother’s grave is her
attempt to understand how biological and cultural differences compose who she is. For
instance, did she pick at her food in restaurants because she was a woman? Or because

she was Irish? Or because she was English or a Capricorn? Her underlying driving

29

question shiﬁs from “Are you my mother?” to “What does it mean that my mother was
Irish?” Her questions are concerned with notions of self and a subject’s relationship not
only to (m)others but also to categories of identity; it is the latter that expose thematic
questions of family and Irishness that the novel poses yet refuses to answer or close down.
In the end, Rose picks at her food because. . .well, she picks at her food. The cause is
made absent and following the logic of the novel adopts a tautological return.

From the novel’s opening, Anna’s death unsettles the sacriﬁcial ﬁgurations of
Irish motherhood—the Virgin Mary, Mother Ireland and the like——that for much of the
twentieth-century conﬁgured and limited women within Ireland’s religious and national
patriarchal order. Commensurate with other claims of symbolic death that reorder
conceptions of the world—Nietzsche’s death of God, Barthes-Derrida-Foucault’s death
of the Author—Enright’s novel declares the death of the Irish Mother. It is thus
signiﬁcant that Anna dies from cancer, not childbirth, so that her death cannot be read as
a sacriﬁce of self to ensure the life of the next generation. In this manner, the dead
mother destabilizes the modes of social, cultural and subject reproduction, such as maps,
mirrors and even lists in a similar fashion. None of these locators can reﬂect a known
territory of place or self reliant on the Mother as ﬁrst object and organizer of desire. This
destabilization of subject-organizing schemes generates themes, akin to the novel’s title,
that are best approached as questions rather than as statements of gendered or cultural
topics: How do the Delahuntys track where and who they are? How do they make
“sense” of sexual and gender differences? What constitutes family? Add to these, the
persistent question of Irish literature and cultural studies: What is Irishness? Or perhaps

more aptly, Where exactly are the geo-cultural borders of Ireland?

30

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Only Like a Summary

Mirroring the representational investments and identity queries of Enright’s
novel, Ali Smith’s Like proliferates self-sightings via a discourse of association—the like:
The novel’s protagonists, Amy Shone and Ash (Aisling) McCarthy, are mobile women,
characterized both by a refusal to stay put geographically as well as a rhetorical emphasis
on association, rather than oppositions or comparisons, to generate a sense of self. If
WA YL? utilizes doubling to expose how making sense owes much to sex/gender
difference and how conventional deﬁnitions and categories fail to locate the female
subject, Like’s doubling of narrative form and character explores how woman might be
read and what a politics of liberation might look like. “Maybe it would be better to hang
on to what we don’t know, maybe there’s a better kind of power in that,” Ash in her diary,
“What we know is compared to it is like, well, 1 don’t know. A leaf, compared to a
whole forest full of unknown plants and uncharted trees ...” (321). Ash extends this
description into a comparative list, continuing with nature references, sands and
mountains, drops and oceans, known and unknown, until ﬁnally she declares that the
entirety of “what is known” is like. . .“A cliche'.”

Like is a suturing of novella and ﬁctional memoir, telling of Amy Shone and Ash
(Aisling) McCarthy, of their friendship and asynchronous desires for each other. Perhaps
the desire for a sexual relationship or greater intimacy is not mutual, although the
narrative is not clear about the mutuality of their sexual desires. Either way, their timing

is clearly off. ‘ Neither woman can ‘read’ the other, an impediment echoed in the

31

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narrative’s temporal disjunctions and disparate narrative voices, particularly in the
unaccounted for time gaps and dual-narrative structure. The ﬁrst part, titled Amy, is a
third-person—limited narration about Amy Shone and her precocious eight-year-old
daughter Kate, their life in a Scottish caravan park, and their impromptu trip to Italy. The
second part, Ash, is a ﬁrst-person exploration of Ash’s past, a joumal-like text focused
primarily on her sexual relationships with women and her obsession with Amy. Coupling
these narratives together reinforces the asynchronousity of the two women as the reader
who is acclimated to Amy and the narrative voice of Amy’s present (1994) must shift
gears partway through the novel to Ash’s writing of the past (1962-1988) in her present
(1988) which is actually in Amy’s past.

Although less of a temporal juggle than the action of Enright’s novel, Like’s
plotting is no less susceptible to synoptic revisionism, and readers must extract
chronological order by inverting the novel—pulling ﬁrst from Ash’s memoir and then
Amy’s story. According to Ash’s record, Amy Shone and Ash McCarthy meet as
teenagers while she and her parents are on holiday in Invemess, Scotland. An unusual
ﬁiendship between these young-women develops when Ash acts as the Shone family’s
impromptu tour-guide, sharing her knowledge of local entertainments, tourist sites and
historic battles against the English. And while Ash ﬁnds herself drawn to Amy’s self-
containment and wide-ranging knowledge of myth and literature, Amy appears little
affected by Ash. However, a couple of years later, when Amy mails Ash a list of
deﬁnitions and literary quotations about the meaning of “ash,” Ash interest turns to
infatuation. She quits school and travels to what is most likely Cambridge to ﬁnd Amy.

Hungry and homeless for three days before ﬁnding a map in a bookstore that directs her

32

to Amy’s door, she can think of nothing but cliche’s to announce her arrival. Preferring
absence to cliche' she slides a blank sheet of paper under Amy’s door. Over the next few
years, Ash works as a library clerk to maintain proximity to Amy. In the meantime, Amy
completes her doctorate in literary studies and becomes an engaging and sought-after
lecturer at the college. Ash obtains a series of disposable stand-by lovers, who substitute
for Amy and who can be easily replaced the moment Amy returns Ash’s desire for more
than affectionate conversation. Amy, however, never does reciprocate. And Ash in
desperation plays her role as self-proclaimed “barbaric Scot” and sets Amy’s apartment
on ﬁre, reducing to ‘ash’ Amy’s private, intellectual sanctuary.

Thematically, if WA YL? works to reset self-apprehension away from models
based on binary sexual difference, Like disallows such difference from its outset, instead
coordinating its thematic order via lesbian desire and motifs of disappearance and
absence. As Monique Wittig notes, women-oriented or lesbian desire cannot be read
through masculinist lens of binary sexuality since the lesbian appears as “not-woman.” ,
Like works to perform proliﬁc disappearance as an alternative means to articulating the
mobility of the female subject. As with Enright’s novel, there is no clear cause and effect,
but, perhaps, Ash’s burning of Amy’s apartment propels each to embrace her own
disappearance. Following the burning, Ash becomes an actress, traveling the world and
Amy becomes a mother, traveling the United Kingdom before inexplicably disappearing
from the public eye. During the time that Ash cuts a relatively well-known ﬁgure,
particularly in ﬁlm and feminist circles, Amy disappears from public radar into the
transitory service class. She works low-level and temporary jobs around England and

Scotland—hotel maid, caravan park attendant—jobs that include housing as part of the

33

pay and require no reading for her to perform her duties. For mysteriously, Dr. Amy
Shone, lecturer and author of The Pain and Pleasure of the Text, can no longer read.

Story, however, remains important to Amy. She tells her daughter rich bed-time
tales of adventurous and ﬂawed women, and she is a wealth of information, even as
books serve a crudely utilitarian purpose in their home—support for a short table leg, torn
apart for wrapping breakables when they move, starting a campﬁre, and such. Then one
night as Kate reads to Amy from a book on the wonders of the world, Amy recognizes
the word “Vesuvius,” and in response, she immediately packs their bags for Pompeii in
what transpires to be a healing quest for reading. They stop brieﬂy at Amy’s stately
childhood home in England to request money and her parents’ help in attaining a passport
for Kate; it is the ﬁrst time her parents meet Kate. Amy and Kate then spend a fortnight
in Pompeii, visiting Vesuvius’ crater and Roman archeological sites. By the time they
return to Scotland, Amy’s ability to read is restored and their whereabouts are known.
Amy receives a call from a reporter asking for information on Ash and receives packages
from or forwarded by her mother. The parcel contains Amy’s journals that Ash removed
from the apartment before setting it ablaze as well as one additional journal, Ash’s diary,
included perhaps as a gift and explanation. Amy and Kate take an apartment in town and
their story closes with mother and daughter on the beach enjoying the warmth of a
“Christmas ﬁre” built of Amy’s journal. Ash’s diary, however, remains tucked away in
their most recent home.

Similar to the summary provided for WA YL ?, this plotting performs a textual
mapping that cannot mimic or account for the dialogue between Ash’s memoir and

Amy’s story. The reader must continually return from Ash’s disclosures of what came

34

before, revisiting and revising Amy’s character and to make sense of both women’s
stories as a single novel. And yet, summary tends to give shape to “what we know” and
in the context of Like the story turns into a bit of a cliché, emphasizing unrequited love
and the bad timing of seemingly star-crossed lovers. What then stands out in this plotting
are the absences and disappearances—the mysteriousness of Amy’s illiteracy, the sudden
appearance of Kate without a father, and both women’s unaccounted for disappearance
from the limelight. Similarly, the maps alluded to in Like are lures, leading only to an
absence. Ash’s college map may lead to Amy’s door but not to the desired Amy. And in
a myth Amy reads to Kate about royal siblings ﬁghting over their father’s land, a
beautiful map of the territory is one brother’s promised gift to the other, the lure into a
cave, a trap so that one brother might kill the other for his property.‘5 The beautiful map
never existed at all. By the same logic, the reader must consider that Ash’s diary, a kind
of mapping of Amy and Ash as young adults, might lead only to the textual absence of
Amy and the disappearance of Ash.

Rather than looking for reﬂected images of her self, Amy creates tests that are
related to methods of mobility. Her portion of the novel, which also includes her
daughter Kate’s interjections and observations, is set in Scotland, England and Italy. The
novel opens with Amy standing on the local train platform “testing” her footing, her
resolve to not fall from the edge, reminding herself that what she loves most about this
industrial village on Scotland’s shoreline is its smallness. Contrary to what appears to be
a suicidal desire, Amy does not seem to desire death but, rather, to test the limits of her

will. Trains rarely stop or even slow down, often creating a “wake” capable of snatching

 

6 This ﬁguration of map as lure to property, person and/or knowledge, parallels Judith Roofs discussion of
the lesbian as a ﬁgurative “lure to knowledge.”

35

the unwary or those with unstable footing off of the platform. Much like the possible
slipping of the unwary, there is precariousness to Amy and her narrative and the reader
gradually encounters bits of Amy’s character, but never the whole picture, whole image
of a woman. We must read through discrete, impartial descriptions to create our own
understanding of Amy as a mother, former Oxford professor of women’s literature,
Professor and Mrs. Shone’s respectable daughter, and as reader herself and of her-self.
Akin to her self-testing on the platform at the novel’s opening, Amy’s story is one of a
series of tests and timings.

If in WA YL? Maria desires to wipe herself off the map with all of its social and
psychic implications, Amy ﬁgures a woman already off the map, a condition that turns
and returns though questions about the connection between reading and self apprehension.
Initially not locatable on family and professional registers of her past life, Amy is mobile
and lives with “different ambitions now” (73), which include rejecting the roles of
daughter, professor, friend and at times even mother. To refuse identity labels and
connection to family and ﬁ'iends corresponds with and is heightened by Amy’s inability
to read so that her emotions, desires and motivations remain hidden, both from the reader
and from Amy. An aphasic character, she often ﬁnds herself “doing aimless things” (11)
such as “testing” herself on the edges of train platforms and high-rise car parks or
abandoning Kate in public places, returning hours later to collect her. Each test is done
for a reason Amy cannot understand and the third-person narrator cannot supply. Her
impromptu trip to Italy, however, marks a shift in character and motive—to connect the
“word,” Vesuvius, “with the thing it means” (96). Her quest for reading clariﬁes a

desire for a secure relationship between signiﬁer and signiﬁed previously absent from

36

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much of Amy’s characterization. Along their journey south, Amy gets ﬂashes of
sentences and then whole paragraphs until eventually her ability to read has been restored.
Yet when she and Kate climb “Vesuvius,” the mountain fails to be a mountain and

instead offers Amy only a “path around a chasm” (96). As her ability to read has been
restored, it now gestures toward a (post)structural exploration of the gap between

signiﬁer and signiﬁed and the play of meaning.

Eight-year-old Kate, on the other hand, directs our attention to the play of
language and desire to make sense out of words. A young reader, Kate’s narration often
imitates her sounding out of long or difﬁcult words and accentuates her linguistic
confusions and her love of riddles and puns as an imaginative play with language. For
instance, Kate “wonders what the word liability means, if it’s anything to do with being
able to tell lies” (36) and she tells jokes, frequently about ghosts: Q: “What job did the
ghost get on the aeroplane?” A: “Airghostess” If Amy’s aphasia might be understood as
a kind of system-reboot to read texts and self anew, Kate’s reading suggests a space
where language is simultaneously full of play, pleasure, excitement (an embrace of the
chasm) and just as full of rules, borders and eventual comprehension (trying to connect
word and thing). According to the latter, she is distressed to have missed the border
between Scotland and England on their train trip, upset that she has been looking upon
England as if it were Scotland.

While the reader has access to Amy’s life “off the map,” Ash’s disappearance
from family, profession, and fan magazines is a mystery, which serves both to absentee
answers and woman in a narrative that is, nonetheless, imbued with possibility and to

heighten Amy’s excitement at the thought that Ash “could be anywhere” (136). The

37

 

most self-reﬂexive narrator in the novel, Ash remains an elusive character to the reader.
Her diary, affectionately nicknamed her “liary,” is a loose chronology of her coming of
age, coming out, and coming to accept that her own ﬁxation on Amy was a
Frankensteinesque ﬁxation on herself, an attempt to make her-self present, real, and alive.
Ash’s attempt to capture and ﬁx Amy manifests not only as a “hoovering of memory”
through writing but also in a structure common to Rose as listmaking. Ash makes lists of
the things Amy once told her, lists of descriptors that made Amy compelling. Each list is
incomplete and exceeds what Ash’s head can contain, similar to the lists she, as a
Catholic teenager, compiled of the dead in need of prayer—each list eventually becomes
too long and overwhelming to remember.

Like is a text sutured but not split, a ﬁne-line distinction, but one worth making.
Splitting suggests a wholeness broken as if either Amy-Ash were once united or they are
presently incomplete or damaged and at some future time might be reunited into a whole.
Such is the underlying fantasy and thematic organization of most heteronormative and
romance narratives, which read something like Jerry McGuire’s “you complete me.” It is
also the same logic underpinning the conventional double—a splitting or fracturing that
when pieces are brought together makes an entirety. On the other hand, the suturing of
Like, allows for two parts—Amy and Ash (narrative structure and character)——to interact
dynamically, requiring that neither be whole or broken, but simply interactive, associative.
It is as though the text of Amy and the text of Ash are akin to mirrors set parallel to one
another—offering an inﬁnite series of reﬂections without either woman functioning as
the object in the center. This textual suturing or paralleling of mirrors shapes a

compulsion driven by each woman’s unconscious desire to understand her-self as

38

something other than “object.” This non-object desire manifests as their disappearance
ﬁom the public-eye, Amy’s illiteracy and interest in the edges of thing as well as Ash’s
dreams in which she has no reﬂection.

Like produces a series of questions similar to those found in WA YL?: How do
Amy and Ash make sense of their geo-cultural locations, their desires and selves? How

661’,

does see and speak self? What are the potential manifestations of family and
ﬁ'iendship? And what might it mean to be Scottish, English and/or British at the tum-of-
the—twenty-ﬁrst-century? The novel plays upon these questions through a complex and
asymmetrical doubling of narratives and characters as well as through Amy and Ash’s
attentiveness to reading and to knowledge-making strategies. For instance, Ash’s
memoir provides a personalized history and background to Amy’s story, but it does not
ﬁll in signiﬁcant gaps in conventional plotting and characterization: Kate’s paternity and
perhaps even maternity remain unconﬁrmed. The events leading to Amy’s illiteracy and
to both women’s disappearance from the public-eye remain uncertain. The sexual
orientation of both women remains undetermined, and so on. This emphasis on what will
remain unconﬁrmed, unexplained, undescribed as origins, absolutes and orientations
revels in the proliﬁc manifestations of the unknowable.

Generated through themes of a new kind of doubling and alternative modes of
reﬂection, the novel’s self-reﬂexive qualities call attention to the social and political
terrains of female sexuality and representation. But Smith’s novel speciﬁcally evokes the
symbolic otherness of “woman” and then simultaneously undercuts the categorical

imperative of feminine representation. This is in part because desire and sexuality are not

oriented through the masculine. Ash’s descriptions of her ﬁrst sexual experiences with a

39

schoolmate, Donna, and her subsequent relationships with women indicate a same-sex
orientation and a version of lesbian subjectivity. And while Amy remains the constant
object of Ash’s desire, Ash does participate in romantic and sexual relationships with
men, which precludes an exclusively woman-oriented desire. Although part of her non-
exclusivity comes from a carnouﬂaging of desire in the late-19705 “small-town”
Invemess, which is not yet ready for homosexual revolution, Ash’s rise to movie fame in
the late 19803 was advanced by her sexual ambiguity and her ability to portray characters
who could seduce both men and women.

While framed differently, Amy’s sexual-orientation is also uncertain. Introduced
as an atypical mother whose daughter calls her by her given name (i.e., Amy is not-
mother), Amy’s sexuality is contingently heterosexual. Yet the absence of references to
previous lovers or fantasies about future romance with men or women marks Amy as
seemingly sexually indifferent. Only a news reporter’s questions posed to Amy about
Ash seem to elicit a kind of excitement and internal euphoria aligned with sexual desire.
Each woman’s sexuality thus slips and exceeds easy classiﬁcation, and additional identity
categories such as ethnicity or nationality—where Amy might be English and Ash might
be Scottish—emerge equally slippery and complex.

If read narrowly as representations of socio-cultural or national difference, the
narratives, Amy and Ash, proffer a series of contrasts seemingly built for comparative
analysis: Amy was born in England to a well-known historian father and a celebrity chef
mother. She is highly educated, a former lecturer of literature and literary theory at
Cambridge. She is an only child and is a single mother. She is intriguingly disinterested

in sex and is fascinated with the edges of things and concepts. She eventually quits her

40

job, loses the ability to read, and lives a quiet, unrecognizable life for nearly a decade
while raising Kate. On the other hand, Ash was born in Scotland to an Irish-American
mother (who died when Ash was a toddler) and a cabinet salesman father. She has an
active fantasy and sex life and is/was infatuated with Amy. An avid reader and highly
intelligent, although not highly educated, Ash often works low-level jobs and eventually
becomes an actress and famous as a ﬁlm icon of uncertain sexual orientation. She
apparently disappears from the public-eye shortly after writing her diary. In a
comparative frame, each seems the other of the other—with the exception of their sex.
While the novel’s dual parts Amy/Ash might superﬁcially encourage comparative
readings as if national origin, socio-cultural difference and sexual orientation might
account for their disparate stories. Such comparisons and contrasts, however, take us
only so far in understanding Like. They do not account for each woman’s refusal to be
ﬁxed in place, a refusal manifested in part through their predilection for moving and
disappearing. By emphasizing narrative and character difference, a comparative
approach imposes a loose set of binaries inevitably misaligned with their story since
those categories of what we do know consistently fail to account for either the novel’s
conﬂict or the orientation of their desires: Amy/Ash, novella/memoir, English/Scottish,
upper-middle-class/working-class, theoretically-sexual/physically-sexual, presumed-
heterosexual/lesbian. Overall, the narrative undermines each of these binaries, which
become fantasies of duality, of seemingly containable identity characteristics. Those who
attempt to impose their fantasy of oppositional difference on either Amy or Ash ﬁnd their
preconceptions do not ﬁt. For instance, Amy’s caravan boss, Angus, fantasizes that his

beautiful, single-mother employee is on the run from a suave but abusive English

41

husband from whom only Angus might protect her. Rebufﬁng his advances, Amy
ﬁnally tells Angus, “You’ve got it all wrong. I was never going to seduce you, or fuck
you, or even touch you. I’m just not like that” (149-50).

What Amy is “like” sexually remains unqualiﬁed and undecided, as it is the
rhetorical force of “like” that organizes the structure and themes of the novel.
Classiﬁable in seven of the eight parts of speech categories, “like” cannot, however,
function as a pronoun. It cannot be gendered, and yet its conveyance of preference,
pleasure, desire, commonality and so on make it a formidable and productive term for
organizing and describing two women, their desires, and relationship. It is thus ﬁtting
that the novel ends following a ﬁve-page listing of extended similes through which Ash
attempts simply to describe the feeling of reclining on a nineteenth-century Invemess
woman’s grave. Approximating stream-of-consciousness, the listing of what her
experience is “like” ranges from imagined stories and places to Ash’s memories and
childhood relationships—pro]iferating and expanding but never capturing. In the end,
her listing embraces cryptic blankness, a return to her inability to describe the sound of
Amy’s beating heart as they lie together on a grassy bank:

It’s like, like—I said, and I stopped, I couldn’t think what it was

like, it was Amy’s heart, it wasn’t like anything else. But she

misunderstood me; that’s good, she said, like, that’s a good word, and she

looked so pleased I didn’t want to spoil it so I didn’t. . .(342).

“Like, like” marks a cognitive gap, the limit of knowledge as well as the pleasure and
beauty in misunderstanding. It is also the narrative strategy and perhaps self-dislocation
strategy that Ash pursues at the close of her ”liary” and, thus, the novel. This

multiplication of similes that serves as the novel’s closure gestures to a feminine

subjectivity that cannot be contained by a single “like,” a single metaphor, a single

42

category. In this manner, Like is a novel of asymmetry and false othering, challenging
heteronormative narrative structures that attempt to resolve conﬂict via marriage, birth,

death, victory or the recognition of a new knowledge or understanding.7

Proliﬁc Feminine: Mobile Feminine Subjects

Enright’s and Smith’s novels expand upon a feminist literary practice of
interrogating and reconﬁguring the representations of women and their familial
relationships. In WA YL?, the Irish family opens up to include an upper-middle class
English couple, and Like redraws the lines of home and family so as to privilege the
fatherless child and “single-mother.” Staid domestic roles for women and reproductive
imperatives for family and nation belong to a mythology already critiqued by the
previous generation of British writers and critics. For instance, in such second-wave
feminist polemics as Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Germaine
Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), the economic, social and sexual oppressions of
“women” were shown to be inextricably bound to the representations of ideal
womanhood which had supported patriarchal order. Yet, freeing “women” from the
economic and spatial conﬁnes of the domestic corresponds with social liberation projects
that also historically rely on a reassertion of binary sexual difference to maintain,
however contentiously, woman as a relative stable, universal notion. The feminism at
stake in these novels is marked by a shift at the site of sexual difference between a
generation of mothers and daughters who are equally invested in notions of escape and

“liberation.” Enright’s and Smith’s novels pick up on the imagery of the liberated

 

7 See: Judith Roof’s Come as You Are (6).

43

woman and take as their subject matter the various discourses of reﬂection and
knowledge by which the images of woman, family and nation have been imagined,
charted and deﬁned in a masculine imaginary. Accordingly, the female protagonists of
these narratives desire to escape from the very site of “woman” or from the still dominant
heteronormative and patriarchal structures that manufacture woman’s image of self.

The liberation of woman from economic and psychic dependence on a dominant
male ﬁgure (ﬁrst/second-wave feminist models) often takes for granted sexual difference
and retains biological or natural imperatives, effectively restricting demythologizing
feminist strategies to a binary playing ﬁeld. Of the female characters in the novels,
Patricia Shone, Amy’s mother, best depicts the limitations of the socially liberated
woman upon which the characters of Amy and Ash unfurl. Celebrity chef and author of
numerous easy-step, quick-meal cookbooks, Patricia is career-minded, prosperous, and to
her viewing and reading audience, the epitome of the independent woman’s version of
domestic perfection and culinary know-how. Symbolic of her independence from her
husband, Patricia has divided their expansive eighteenth-century home equally into “his”
and “hers” sections, walling up corridors and doorways to secure this division and
assuring others that she and her husband “prefer it this way” (69). Dr. Shone’s half of the
house, however, is falling into disrepair. Lined ﬂoor to ceiling with books—tomes of
knowledge—no longer read, his half shelters a broken patriarch who paces anxiously
throughout the night and remains sleepless during the day.

Patricia’s half, however, is no less anxious for all of its order, fresh ﬂowers and
television respectability. Repeatedly she fantasizes of methodically and cheerfully

blending a blood-hued concoction of fruit and vegetables, then with a ﬂourish and a smile

44

she lifts the blender’s top to spray her kitchen and camera crew, sparing none from her
faux blood. This transgressive fantasy recalls an event from her childhood in which
Patricia’s favorite of her grandfather’s farmhands splattered his brains across the inside of
the barn with a single gun shot after having been caught having sex with another man.
Maturity, career success and marital independence aside, Patricia is still very much “a
small girl standing by a door behind which the world has changed, beyond which there is
something she is not supposed to know, something she is never going to be allowed to
understand” (67). She may have sequestered her husband, but the ﬁgures of her father
and grandfather still bar her entry to the barn. According to this formulation, the
transformed heteronorrnativity in which the potentially economically and socially
liberated woman lives remains limited in its sight and understanding and repeats the
prized representational structures of patriarchy.

Of a generation, Enright’s and Smith’s paired protagonists are born in the early-
to mid-19603 and seek alternatives to feminist visions of the socially liberated woman
and reassertions of sexual difference to reﬂect a feminine self. Yet while these novels
are working a similar generational terrain of gender and its relation to subjectivity, their
disruptions of the site of woman differ. Maria and Rose’s desire to lose sight of
themselves by seeking new representational systems retains a connection to the
feminine/other since their self-sighting in the novel is associated with and extends the
mother’s desires. However, Amy’s and Ash’s desires take on terminology of
disappearance, a rhetoric aligned with their love of literature as well as Amy’s
poststructuralist studies and embrace of signiﬁcation as a “ghostly” process. Amy’s

excitation at the thought that “She [Ash] could be anywhere” and Ash’s inability to

45

contact Amy to give her a box of journals gesture to a fundamental evacuation of
self/other signiﬁcation, which is shaped in part by the direction of their sexual desires.
Aligned with Monique Wittig’s articulation of the lesbian as a ﬁguration of “non-
woman,” neither Amy nor Ash register as “economically, politically or ideologically” in
relation to a man (20). Theirs is a privileging of the absence of woman rather than of her
material or essential presence that reﬂects back from a masculine counter-part, and their
stories are often less about the seeing of themselves as women anew and more about the
representation and reading of a desirous self that races ahead, just out of vision. In these
ways, both texts produce parodic binary gender expressions that misalign with a
masculine imaginary.

Kate, born in 1989, ﬁgures a subsequent generation of female subjects, a
generation one-step removed from paternity (the law of the father) as well as from
maternal certainty. Kate’s patemal-line is a non—issue; however, in contrast to
patriarchal social order and Lacanian symbolic, Kate’s matemal-line is uncertain. In the
same manner that the events “causing” Amy’s illiteracy remain tenuous and unconﬁrmed,
the story of Kate’s birth and parentage remain in play: Kate was not “born” claims Amy.
She found Kate under a “bush” or “under a bed.” Just as likely Kate was “ﬁshed out of a
loch” or brought by a “big white bird” (53) or more likely, Kate was stolen—“Let’s say
you took a child” (95). But from her biological father or mother, stolen away from a
relationship with her grandparents or metaphorically from a conventional childhood and
notions of heteronormative stability, the text is not clear. Given the volatility of Amy and
Ash’s relationship and that Ash describes having sex with multiple men, it is even

plausible that Kate is Ash’s biological child and that stealing Kate is Amy’s revenge for

46

her burnt apartment. Regardless, the security of maternity and symbolic of knowing are
made suspect. What does become apparent is that Kate’s origins, like the causes of
Amy’s inability to read are an unrecoverable site, unnecessary to either Kate or Amy’s
travels and lives. “Whose child are you?” asks Amy at bedtime. “’Yours,’ Kate replies”
(136-7).

There is something joyfully improper about Kate. New to a small, coastal
community, living in a caravan, and being raised by a single-mother, Kate does not seem
to recognize or care that she and Amy do not quite ﬁt in with the rest of the residents.
Smart, an avid reader, and able to build and maintain most friendships, Kate seems
socially well-adjusted. However, her attempt to comfort a classmate who denies his
father’s recent death in a boating accident with a casual, “It doesn’t matter about not
having a father,” disturbs the boy and his mother so deeply they bar her from their home
(24). Their attachment to “father” ensures that the dead father is the one who matters
most. Kate cannot understand her punishment or the value of the father in a
heteronormative economy, and it is her difference from the community that exposes the
novel’s critique of a subjectivity located in the apparatuses of patriarchy and Western
logocentrism with the dual insistence on “origin” and documentation.

If paternity or maternity do not secure Kate’s origins, neither does the nation-state.
Having no birth certiﬁcate since Amy claims she “didn’t feel like recording” Kate’s birth,
they have somehow “always gotten around it” and “lived quite happily” without ofﬁcial
records (74). The trip to Italy poses a problem, however, in that Kate will need a passport
for international travel. In a narrative adamantly throwing Kate’s origins into question, a

passport would suggest a bottom-line, a sovereign claim and determination of England as

47

national progenitor, the seeming ubiquity of nation to organize and stamp an ofﬁcial
identity on its citizenry.

Kate’s passport, however, functions as but the embrace of lie, of a transgression
as a means to an end, which recalls Helene Cixous’ association of her French passport
with a lie that produces both fear and anxiety in Stigmata: Escaping Texts: “I cannot
look at it without trembling for fear of being unmasked, because it is a fake, always has
been. Lie, forgery, use of forgery, in spite of myself and with my consent” (206). For
Cixous, to accept the “legal ﬁction” and claim “I am French” is at once a denial of her
Jewish background and Algerian birth. While to claim otherwise, “I am not French”
seems a “breach of courtesy” in particular to the “inﬁnite hospitality of the [French]
language” in which she has found herself “home” (207). Signiﬁcantly, the English
language has yet to afford Amy a semblance of home—her literary acumen was more a
“power tool” to identify her as somehow different and superior to others as well as a
means to gain the attention of a father who loved his books but only tolerated his
daughter. Kate’s passport ﬁnagled via illicit contacts is not only a “legal ﬁction” of a
national claim but also an illegal document, manufactured to serve a woman’s desire to
travel abroad with her child. In this way, Like sidesteps the pitfall of sovereign claims
and the end-point of national identity and instead offers a lie to the executors of state
power (border ofﬁcers). Revealing passports to be a prosthetic of state apparatus, Kate’s
illegitimate passport is a transgression a doubled-substitution, exposing the artiﬁciality
and porosity of national borders.

The protagonists of both Enright’s and Smith’s novels disassociate instances of

international travel from notions of national belonging so that belonging emerges from

48

the personal relationships between sisters, mothers and daughters, and female friends.
This emphasis on the particularity of a female experience makes it is difﬁcult to sight a
larger politic or model for a feminist or woman-ordered community. If we read the
traveling ﬁgures of these novels as feminine, we must recognize that such femininity
emanates largely through the resistance to patriarchy (father-ﬁgures) and the perversion
of conventional gender roles that associate women with a domestic space. These
undeclared “feminine” or, perhaps, “feminist” characters cross national borders while
male characters, particularly fathers, remain within the homeland and often within the
domestic space of “home.” For instance, Berts preserves his Dublin home exactly as his
dead wife had decorated, spending much of his time sitting in his armchair and staring
confusedly out the window. Amy’s father, Dr. Shore, remains housebound in England, a
retired academic trapped in his library, chain smoking and surrounded by the debris of his
career. Ash’s father is similarly tied to Scotland and his life as a widower. Inverting the
equation of home with domestic space for the woman, this generation of men, these
fathers, ﬁgure a version of masculinity that is incapable of exploring and ordering the
world, trapped in the very locations they relied on their wives to arrange. In contrast,
their daughters travel—Rose from England to Ireland and back; Maria from Ireland to the
United States and back; Ash from Scotland to England and then across the Atlantic to the
States and Canada; and Amy zigzagging between England to Scotland and, ﬁnally, Italy
and back. Even when they return to the country of their birth, they do not claim “home.”
For example, “Maria said she wasn’t actually home. She wanted to work in an airport,
she said, and this was the next best thing [working in dress shop with mirrors]” (63).

These women do not seek to know or to order the world but, rather, to transgress, to

49

escape conventional, patriarchal orders and knowledge. Through their mobility they test
borders and edges, ﬁnding, as Ash puts it that “she did not exist” (253).

These are not stories of collective movements or mass dislocations as recognized
in narratives and studies of female migrants, refugees. They are in many ways a
continuation of modernist writing projects—for instance those of Joyce and Conrad—
where dislocation appears to happen in what Caren Kaplan calls the “singular.” In
Questions of Travel (1996) Kaplan notes that High Modemism’s subject “dislocations are
expressed in singular rather than collective terms, as purely psychological or aesthetic
situations rather than as a result of historical circumstances” (4). And, yet, “singular” as
a moniker of the modernist auteur works only if we assume Amy, Ash, Maria, Rose
express a locatable, albeit alienated, self akin to Leopold Bloom and Marlow whose
psychic terrains remain concomitant with Dublin’s and Africa’s geography respectively.
Accordingly, singularity forcefully delimits Bloom and Marlow marking their locational
point, as if on a map, upon which socio-historical forces act and might be easily read
though their effects.

To read the movements of these female characters away from homelands and their
eventual return as a locating of identity is to exclude their resistance to the denotative
processes of sexual difference that play out in such recognizable locales as London, New
York, and Invemess but that have little cartographic detail to mark a relationship to
“home.” In particular, each character returns “home” but the depiction refuses
incorporation within prevailing imaginings of nation of birth as either “fatherland” or
“motherland,” the place where a subject manifests into a symbolic order via a particular

cultural and mode of national exceptionalism. Images of the protagonists’ fathers as

50

broken men easily detour readings of homeland as commensurate with locational prowess
of “fatherland,” and yet, images of mothers are trickier to read and their proliﬁc qualities
risk being simply recuperated into a symbolic “mother” to orient each character’s
relationship to the place of her birth. In so far as Maria and Rose “reunite” in Dublin and
their meeting circumnavigates through the mother—Anna interrupts for a reason—she
seeks self-articulation not national nurturing. She does not speak for Ireland nor do her
desires to “represent” reinforce a broader cultural desire for self-representation prior to
English rule. The twins’ reunion , however, might easily be (mis)read as a return to
Ireland, to the Irish family with the valences of “motherland.” As Robert Karron in his
review states, “one is led to believe, [they are] becoming whole again, the way they were
before their mother died, when they knew who they were, what they were ‘like."' This
certainly appears to be the impulse behind Irish modemism’s excavation of Gaelic
folklore and interest in the west of Ireland as an “authentic” reservoir of Irishness. There
is, however, no returning to the mother before death in Enright’s novel. Anna is dead at
the twins’ birth and speaks either as a ghost or through Berts’ recollections, and while
cancer offers a particular model of proliferation (uncontrollable cellular growth) in Berts’
masculine imaginary, Anna’s cancer prefaces the composite doubling of mother ﬁgures
throughout the narrative. Rather than an idealized or contained image of a mother
supporting a patriarchal, national order, “mother” becomes diffuse, proliferating the
novel as Anna, Evelyn, Mrs. Cotter, Sister Maura Misericordia/Misericordiae—the
Magniﬁcat who split her a and an e to name twin girls after the Virgin Mother

(Maria/Marie).

51

Twinning and textual iteration in WA YL? produces a symmetrical proliferation of
the feminine, which at ﬁrst glance seems to align broadly with a post-19703 (third-wave
feminism) insistence on the multiplicity within the category of woman, the irreducible
differences among women, and the proliferation of feminism into feminisms. Certainly,
Maria’s and Rose’s experiences as gendered subjects manifest within opposing national
and cultural frameworks, Irish/English, so that even two women sharing of the same
womb can be reduced to a homogenous female experience. While engaging some of the
central themes and debates within feminism in the era of the “post,” the novel sidesteps
the reiteration of culturally determined womanly experience and masculinist knowledge
structures by employing travel to dislocate each sister’s search for self from a particular
socio-cultural locale. Likewise, their parallel search for self-reﬂection cannot be
explained as a production of identical genitalia—as if their genes or nature predisposed
them to a kind of obsessive self-searching. Their self-searching brings to the reader what
she expects—a reunion of sorts—but not of characters who, by the time of their
encounter, have lost sight of the symbolic order organizing their respective searches.
Maria is “off the map” and Rose cannot play music, and in the end, we understand their
femininity according to their resistance to patriarchal Irish family, but the articulation of
their femininity and its relation to self-recognition remains a closing gesture rather than
deﬁnition or articulation.

Neither Enright’s nor Smith’s novel offers a clear prescription or utopian vision
for a collective socio-political movement rooted in an image of some new kind of
essential woman who escapes social and symbolic terms of a “woman’s place” or her

location in a masculine imaginary. Rather, both novels give play to “like,” with its

52

associative and pleasurable connotations of incongruity and proximity. “Like” is an
emphasis on the inevitable gaps in meaning, making explicit the moves of language—
metaphor and metonymy—that in bringing signs together creates a dynamic where the
meaning and, consequently, gender is not ﬁxed, rather glimpsed as associative and
generative. Commensurate with these profuse, associative projects, each novel doubles
back, repeating events and (re)associating character experiences without ﬁlling in
chronological or narrative holes for the reader. In WA YL? narrative perspectives shift
rapidly from character to character—father, sister(s), nun, stepmother, dead mother—
keeping only the barest hint of a chronology. As the title indicates, the novel explores
reﬂections and terrains of the internal other, as stranger or the you that splits the “I,”
through nominally proliﬁc female characters, An/na, Misericorda/e—Maria/Marie, who
are each differently intrigued with reﬂective and locational surfaces such as mirrors,
photographs, maps and lists. By the close of the novel, Maria has returned to Ireland
from a brief work excursion in New York and Rose has traveled from London to Dublin
where they unintentionally encounter one another in a dress shop changing room.
Standing before the ﬂoor to ceiling mirror, Maria observerves, “there were four of them”
(253). With this image, the novel works both with the proliferating capacity of the
literary double while reshaping it to something more akin to Luce Irigaray’s description
of the feminine as a site of curved and multiplying reﬂections and proximity in The
Speculum of the Other Woman (1974/ 1985). If offering a version of reunion, Maria and
Rose’s stories evade the narrative resolution and image of unity that tends to close tales
based on conventional literary doubles (Dostoevksy’s The Double; Poe’s “William

Wilson;” Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde; and the list goes on); for,

53

“the" ;

reset t
Brash.

1m.

death, madness, and/or both have already occurred and still the sister’s story continues—
“One” plus “One” equals more than two.

The list of modiﬁers “postnational,” “mobile,” and “female” here are intended to
resist delimiting or effectively categorizing an emergent subjectivity, but rather like Rosi
Braidotti’s nomadism, this hyper-qualifying carries an excess of descriptive and
locational modiﬁers to align with contemporary poststructuralist feminisms. In
particular, the preﬁx of the “post,” fraught as it is with the connotations of its sufﬁx,
allows for a deﬁnitional ambivalence that I think suits the protagonists’ ambivalences
about the country of their birth and childhood. In this way, the site of the national is not
expunged from their stories, but as it is inevitably entangled with the representational
orders and practices of fathers and the heteronormative, it is another site of rejection.
Theirs is not a desire for inclusion within or strictly an opposition to the patriarchal and
phallocentrism, but rather Enright’s and Smith’s protagonists negotiate multiple
reﬂections and/or signiﬁcations of self within the terrains of an already ﬂuid and dynamic

feminist discursive scene.

54

CHAPTER 1, AGAIN or DEUCE
LIKE MOVES: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH MAPS, LISTS, AND

MIRRORS

First, Wipe Yourself from the Map

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or
the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being
or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or
reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it
survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—
precession of Simulacra—that engenders the territory.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices; ‘objects’ do not pre-exist as
such. Objects are boundary projects. But boundaries shift/ram within;
boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain
remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies. Siting (sighting)
boundaries is a risky practice. 8

Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”
The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map,
not a tracing... What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is
entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Maps and mapping practices—as Jean Baudrillard, Donna Haraway, and Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari demonstrate—stand in for a plethora of conceptual

approaches and projects that may “sight boundaries,” that may undermine or assert

versions/territories of the “real,” and/or may generate radical relationships between ideas,

 

8 Often included in and sited in anthologies on feminist geography or spatial studies, Haraway’s “Situated
Knowledge” argues for a way of thinking that includes both science and feminism so that “science,”
broadly scientiﬁc discourse and study, does not have to be conceived as the domain of the masculine, either
excluding or assimilating feminist thought. To get past the impasse of oppositional feminism, what
Haraway terms the “polarity” that reinforces the exclusion of woman from both the sciences and notions of
objectivity and knowledge, she proposes a necessary recuperation of “objectivity” as an intersection
between “biological research and writing.” The world or “real” in this intersection becomes a coyote or
trickster ﬁgure, suggestive of a shifting and impartial “knowledge” that is always situated within a socio-
historical context.

55

depending on the map(ing)’s context. In WA YL? maps and a cartographic practice,
however, occur initially as part of the self-obsession(s) and rituals of the father, more
aligned with a Cartesian knowledge and subject formulation, which does not work for the
daughter, Maria (and which Baurdrillard, Haraway, and Deleuze and Guattari critique).
Maps and cartographic representation, as Baudrillard and Haraway speciﬁcally remind us,
canies with it the weight of Western scientiﬁc knowledge and a privileging of the visual;9
maps actually produce the very object or territory of study that they portend to represent.
The driving desire of Enright’s and Smith’s protagonists for alternative modes for self-
recognition tends to reject Cartesian imbued “maps” outright as part of knowledge system
that fails to generate their self image. While Maria, in particular, overtly rejects the
mapping practices of her father, the narrative structure in both novels recalls Deleuze and
Guattari’s rhizomatic map, working as a dynamic break with convention via artistic
experimentation. The proliﬁc femininity and the dislocation of protagonists from a
national/cultural identity to supply the base terms of/for self-articulation suggests, if
nothing else, a cautionary engagement of discourses and tropes of the cartographic when
mapping female subjectivity and mobility so that we do not simply retrace the masculine
to produce the fantasy of a “real,” localized “woman.”

In so far as Enright’s narrative affects feminine mobility as dislocation from
essentializing representations of “woman,” it does so in large part by rejecting the
representational heft of visual cognition and a masculine imaginary that mapping carries.

This critical gesture could be read as a precursor to Smith’s Like wherein we encounter

 

9 John Pickles in History of Spaces asserts that Western “Reason,” with its emphasis on visual cognition, is
highly or principally cartographic in its structure and operation. Signiﬁcantly, Pickles tracks multiple
crises of representation associated with Cartographic (Cartesian) Reason from the seventeenth century
onward. The return to cartographic discourse as a means to securing knowledge and representation,
according to Pickles, occurs at moments when representation is questioned and destabilized.

56

protagonists who are already “off the map” of social, familial and professional registers
and who resist the expectations of gender, such as conventional sex roles, no matter
where their story is set. Unlike Maria and Rose(Marie) whose geographic location
epigraphically opens each chapter, Amy and Ash’s geographic movements in relation to
each other are often not provided—but geography has little bearing on who they are or
what they desire. Maps, which suggest a negotiation of a territory, fail in Like to pin-
point the object of desire. And in this way, in Smith’s novel maps are lures, promising to
lead one woman to the other, but instead lead her and even the reader to her absence, the
place we know either Amy or Ash could be but is not. Enright’s novel allots the map and
mapping practices considerable textual space, enacting a “crisis of representation” to
gesture to a kind of “elsewhere” of representation that is featured in Smith’s writing.
This is not to suggest a chronological advancement or progressive evolution of feminist
practice from Enright’s to Smith’s ﬁgurations of female subjects and mapping practices,
for neither novel delimits or essentializes the elsewhere (off the map) but, rather, to
suggest that the crisis of representation each novel takes up plays up on a speciﬁc socio-
political representational terrain of gender and self. For, Enright’s narrative picks up on
questions of representing Ireland and Irishness; and Smith’s story, the reading of lesbian

or woman-oriented subjectivity and desire.

Sometimes a Map is Just a Cigar

But perhaps it [the circle] didn’t stop at Dublin Bay. Shouldn’t he walk
back on the other side of the street, so the circle would close at his own
front door? Or would it close inside the house?... Or would he cross it [his
wife’s side] ﬁrst, as he set out? But as he rolled over the hollow she had
left in the mattress, he might catch the edge of her absence like an elastic

57

Biz-xi

in:

band on his foot, he might drag it with him around the entire country, until
his wife ’s death had ﬁlled the map, emptied the map. (11)

Berts, the father, models the fantasy of self-location against which we can glimpse
Maria’s rebellion and the undoing of the formulaic woman and, even, Irishman. The
novel opens with descriptions of Berts’ attempts to represent himself to himself as
complete with “the circle around his life” that protects him from the incomprehensible—
woman and death (11). Berts is a bit of a caricature of the patriarchal, nation-oriented
expressions of Irishness that have dominated modern Irish literature but which by the
close of the twentieth century have become less sturdy, absorbed into anxiety and
confusion about representational (im)potence. A husband without a wife and father to
half of his daughters, he turns to his beloved Ireland and its borders to repair his position
as the patriarch of a broken Irish family. Berts’ fantasy mapping gestures to what appears
to be a stable representational structure capable of mirroring Ireland, and consequently
his place in it, as something natural, solid and real at a time when little about his life
makes sense.

Berts repeatedly imagines walking the shoreline of Ireland, a border he knows
intimately not from experience but from a map he keeps safe from the elements, rolled
and stowed in his pants pocket. Though this imaginative journey of wandering and map-
checking he attempts to “inscribe his life,” stabilizing the identity from which his “life”
emanates. His repetitive self-rendering suggests an inscriptive failure. Each night, over
and over, he imagines how he might move from his bed, through the streets of Dublin,
along the docks, and by keeping to “the very rim of the land” how he might replicate the
map’s neat boundaries of Ireland for/as himself. “He took an imaginary piece of red

wool and wove it around an imaginary map, curling into coves and wriggling round

58

headlands, then stretching it out along a ruler for miles per inch” (10). Berts’ attempt to
measure and authenticate Ireland in his imagination parallel characteristics of the
wandering Irishman, such as Yeats’ Oisin or Synge’s Christy Mahon, whose journeys led
to a conﬁrmation of Irish community and Ireland as “home,” fraught as that home may be.
More aptly, Enright’s imaginative and psychological approach to the wandering ﬁgure
recalls Joyce’s Leopold Bloom whose journey through the streets of Dublin constitutes a
restorative measure against his grief over his dead son and wife’s inﬁdelities.lo However,
unlike Joyce’s Ulysses, which excessively renders Dublin as a kind of alienated terrain
commensurate, perhaps thus soothing, to the alienated modern subject, WA YL? renders
city and landscape strictly through imagination. In the context of Berts’ fantasy-joumey,
Ireland, not just Dublin, becomes quite small—walkable in a night—and vague, a series
of names without characterizing details. If for Bloom, an examination of a world map
elicits ﬂights of imagination beyond Ireland’s geographic, cultural and political borders,
Berts’ map organizes a literal setting, deﬁning the general shape of the land as well as his
place within its borders.

Mistaking the map for the territory, the word for the thing, Berts is very much the
ﬁgure of a man in crisis, paralleling what Shaun Richards and Luke Gibbons note is a
“crisis of representation” that affects the contemporary thematologies Irish literature,

drama and criticism. Berts mistook the signs of Anna’s brain tumor to be the

 

'0 Possibly the pinnacle modernist cartographic literature, Ulysses, remains in critical and popular lore a
narrative map of Dublin. As Jon Hegglund notes, Joyce himself is in part responsible for the interest
Joyceans have in plotting the novels geographies, in debating the postcolonial and nationalist implications
of rendering Dublin pre-revolution, and just perhaps in desiring to pick up a map from the Irish Tourist
Center and retrace the steps of Leopold Bloom. Not only did Joyce rely on extensive and detailed maps of
Dublin to write Ulysses, but he is also quoted as saying “I want...to give a picture of Dublin so complete
that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” For
Hegglund’s reading of Joycean cartography and what he links to Deluezean lines of ﬂight. See: Jon
Hegglund. “Ulysses and the Rhetoric of Cartography,” (2003).

59

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idiosyncratic signs belonging to “women,” and he cannot solve the paradoxes associated
with his wife’s cancer and her birthing of twins post-death. “He hardly knew what it
[Anna’s cancer] was—a place with no proper map and no way home” (7). For Berts, the
natural divisions creating social order no longer stand. Cancer manifests as woman, and
the dead reproduce. Berts’ response is simply to transfer his professional cartographic
methods as a ﬁx for his personal crisis. His maps represent deﬁnitive city and
nationscapes, known to be true through a correlation between sign and thing, a
correlation that also depends on underlying oppositions between whole/broken,
stable/instable, present/absent, live/dead. Berts’ palliative fantasy of the map then
requires he set his feet down in the space of the privileged sign of difference, which
brings forth additional oppositions: land/sea, home/foreign, south/north, Republic/Ulster,
right/left, man/woman. Each oppositional pair, each neat division, however, is a
geometric impossibility as soon as he returns to his bed, which forces him to cross over
Anna’s absence to complete his circle. Adjusting his course, he repeats his journey,
trying to accomplish the impossible—to deﬁne an Irish-man purged of woman and death.
Berts’ cartography of Ireland and the Irishman is a story that works in ways other
than Berts intends, illustrating the failure of the map to guarantee self-representation
when sexual difference has been destabilized. Recalling Cixous’ assertion that “man” in
a masculine imaginary suggests stability precisely because “death and the feminine sex”
are “unrepresentable things,” Anna’s absence functions simultaneously as the image of
woman as the “other to man” and something other than the other—a cancer read as
woman, complicating the binaries of sexual difference Berts relied on for his sense of

self-presence and meaning (“Laugh” 885). The map upon which he traces Ireland

60

a] ti mately fails to resolve his narrative-fantasy of redeﬁnition and self-actualization.
Thus his character corresponds with a failed imagination that, while invested in

wholeness, fails to guarantee a universal male subject or uniﬁed Ireland because “he”

cannot maintain binary orders of difference.

Berts’ faith in the map consonant with the Republic of Ireland’s and nationalist
socio—political projects agendas to create “one island—one nation,” is an overt rejection
of Ire land’s political partitioning. Berts’ nearly pathological insistence on marking an
entire ly insular, pure location for the man himself likewise calls to mind the most
stringent expressions of patriarchy which exclude women from political rule and
economic power. In this way, his project of self-location resembles the 1937 Irish
Constitution’s enclosure of women in a domestic space, making explicit the order of
sexual difference sustaining Ireland’s governance. For example, Article 41.2 of the
Constitution, the “State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the
State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved” and that “mothers
Shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their
duties in the home.”ll In addition, Berts’ conceptual crisis resonates with the
Constitlrtion’s implicit mapping of Ireland, which until the 1998 Peace Agreement,
inch-lded Ulster’s six counties as contained within and subject to the Republic. The

r epubl ican fantasy of a united Ireland, a whole island jurisdictionally sovereign and,

\
n

Artie 1e 41.2 of the Irish Constitution states:
1° In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the
State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.

2° The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by
economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.

(http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/attached_ﬁles/Pdf’/020ﬁles/Constitution%200f%201relandN
ov2004.pdf)

61

therefore, liberated from English rule, suggests an extended historicity for a particularly
Irish representational crisis.

Published in 1999, WA YL? tilts Berts’ crisis of self-representation into discussions
of the “crisis of representation” in later-twentieth—century Irish literature and studies.
Attri buted largely to the remythologizing and revisionary work of such Irish women
writers of the 19705 and 19805 as Eavan Boland, Anne Devlin, Edna O’Brien, and Julia
0’ Faolain, the “The New Territory,” to use Boland’s language, became an Irish literature
revised to include images of woman as immigrants, laborers, imperfect mothers and
rancorous political activists. In a counter-oedipal move, their feminist revision of
Irelarnd’ 5 cultural self-deﬁnition called for the death of the iconic mother ﬁgure whose
womb secured Ireland’s cultural and political reproduction. From this perspective, the
“crisi s of representation” is a misnomer and a diversion from the more apt phraseology of
Irish literature’s “crisis of masculinity.” Anna is quite literally the dead mother whose
act of reproduction produces neither son nor nation but rather two daughters. Resonating
feminist iconography, the dead mother in Enright’s novel nourishes a feminine
reco gnition of self rather than the revision and new mythmaking of earlier Irish feminism.
In doing so Maria’s desire to “wipe herself from the map” curves into the ways a
representational crisis may affect articulations and recognitions of self. Maria’s desires
for SElf-recognition do not parallel her father’s desire for ﬁxity and deﬁnition of location
but I‘-':lther are incongruent, moving toward 1055 of reﬂection, producing lines of desire

that may intersect with but do not reproduce her father’s footsteps.

62

 

Incongruence and the Fantasy of Location
Maria pushed herself up of the sidewalk and went on. She passed a sad-

Iooking woman who ignored her, and recognised, too late, her own

reflection. Even she did not know what she looked like any more.
Finally.

She had wiped herself off the map.
Enright, What Are You Like?

While Berts traces edges and encircles, Maria crisscrosses New York City via
streets, subways, trains and ferries. Always pushing to the limit of what she knows,
Maria ’5 nightly fantasy mimics her father’s but is fueled by a very different desire—to be
lost, to be somewhere unrecognizable, to be what she likes best...“nothing” (83, 111, 202).
She pushes the limits of self-location just past the cityscape of memory until her
geographic location is not-secure and she is spatially disoriented and dislocated. Her
reliance on the metro map for re-orientation and the safe return home, however, recalls
Berts ’ own map-checking along route. Maria’s haphazard routes twisting through the
city and inscribing multiple, misshapen circles make a decidedly different and more
rhizomatic path compared to Bert’s neat border-tracing, to return to Deleuze and
Guattari’s terminology. However, each night as Maria checks her map to locate herself,
She 1'eturns to the very system of her father where a map is presumed to represent a whole
t“Ta-in of sexual difference, and Maria returns to the site of the “monstrous,” of the
forei gnness of “another country” (4, 9). She returns to a symbolic space of
(in)difference where, as Irigaray and Teresa de Lauretis note, “woman” can be sighted in

her relation to or as the object of masculine desire.12

\
\2

See de Lauretis’ reading of lrigaray’s This Sex... suggestion of female sexuality as sexual indifference

Female desire cannot be recognized) to move Irigaray’s formulation into ﬁguration on of lesbian desire as
Km)difference: “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation” (I988).

63

 

I should note that maps are common features in travel literature, wherein the

anthropologics construct a traveling subject and mark the traveler’s growth through
descriptions of cultural difference. The “I” narrator/traveler sights who s/he is in relation
to others encountered in-route with differences geographically and culturally measured
and charted. In addition to the structural reliance on binary difference, travel narratives
calibrate the subject according to “home” (country/culture/family), the site of departure
and return that signal growth and change of character. Akin to travel narratives, the
characters’ nightly wanderings chronicle a journey guided by desire, mounting conﬂict
and re solved with the suggestion of quiescence (the return home). Their night-time
fantasies then counter the novel’s overt (dis)ordering of chronology, cause/effect and
narrative perspective to convey history and self-knowledge as a fragmented and
disorderly experience. Any notion of what is “real” and what is known according to
conventions of realist representation in travel writing is upended and rendered as fantasy.
While Maria’s ability to return home safely, Berts’ return is laden with anxiety and
cOnﬁ-lsion about crossing the space of the dead wife, suggesting that Maria “knows her
place” all too well. Map reading in their fantasy travels is less about their respective
mastery of geographic space but actually about their mastery over their own narratives,
the StOries that make up their sense of self.

Berts’ fatal ﬂaw lies in his mistaking the map as a mirrored image of a geographic

telTritory, mistaking the simulacrum as real. To Berts, Ireland appears to be something
real 3 reﬂected purely and immune to the slipperiness of representation. What Berts cannot

understand is how it might be that Ireland appears “real” because Ireland is a map.

T1‘Elpped by a representational logic through which he believes he holds a true and

64

accurate map of his home and country, Berts struggles to maintain the congruency of the

map to the land so that Ireland might be real, natural, life-securing.

Just as the dead Anna refused (if a brain tumor can be a sort of refusal) to stay in

her maternal place, Maria often unwittingly escapes the ideal daughter and young woman.

“Sometimes [Evelyn] thought the child was unnatural. Sometimes just the sight of her,
half in the country and half out of it, put Evelyn in a rage” (68). Even without knowledge
of Rose, Evelyn doubles Marie, splits her, places her between geo-political and psychic
borders, and, thus, Marie becomes in this ﬁguration something “unnatural,” and
something other than her father’s image of “monstrous” feminine. Maria’s tomboy antics,
unladyl ike bruised knees, pissing out of Christ upon her conﬁrmation, and general lack of
direction/location elicits the repeated query of “What are you like?” (an idiomatic,
rhetorical question for “what is your problem” or “what is wrong with you”) from both
her falnily and Anton. Maria, however, approaches their question of likeness quite
literally, a further indication of her having missed the point and of her consistent
misali gnment with family expectations and conventions. While Berts’ cartographic
imagination, similar to his wife’s, calls forth notions of representational congruency and
natural order, Maria’s desire to be lost and strange marks her incongruency to her father’s
desiI'es.

Maria’s maps, like her routes, are multiple and varied, and they expand to include
Socio-cultural topographies such as myth, religion, philosophy, and even psychoanalysis,
which she quips are not “much good if you don’t have a dick” (116). Such textual

921110 graphics, as Maria understands them, reﬂect a real or authentic territory, traced and

in‘el‘preted by expert mapmakers and passed down via her father and his fantasy of order.

65

In transferring her father’s comparatively simplistic perception of the map and its
mirroring function, she observes the blatant search for religious, national and sexual
identity among her ﬁ'iends in New York and cannot understand their desire to locate

themselves via the edges of the mapped and known. “In those days, everyone had a
fantasy on their skin, a way of showing what they knew” (143). Eion’s tattooed right
nipple, August’s dogless dog chain, Leanne’s bulging belly ﬁlled with a baby suggested a
fantasy performance of their identity as something authentic, as some kind of indelible
ethnic and gendered, albeit counter-cultural, bodies marked to express a sense of self and
belonging. Similar to Berts’ map, their ornamented bodies smack of all too recognizable
Signs meaningful within a racially and nationally diverse immigrant New York
community, reﬂecting their desire to be “real” and “authentic.” Similar to the strangers
Maria passes on the street, she cannot tell if they “are they lying or telling the truth about
themselves,” and their bodies read to Maria like the Statue of Liberty as symbol of
Alnerica—“a postcard hallucination in the sea of haze” (142). Within this Baudrillardian
haZe 0f hyperreal, her friends’ opposition to mainstream expressions positions them
Simply as “other,” a space of supplementarity. In this way, supplementary space and
Siml-Ilacra (re)production work in conjunction to ﬁgure Maria’s fundamental difference

di ffel‘ently—according to her desire to escape “maps”—and recognize her self is neither
already traced nor likely to be. Rather her desires suggest a consistent incongruency with
her both her family and peers. Hers is, of course, an ironic inconruency, generated
through a motif of repetition and the fantasy of the sameness of twins, who evoke “the

copy” but like the Simulacra have no original image or single map as their source.

66

While Berts’ fantasy of a life encircled reveals an anxiety about masculinity and
the (in)stability of patriarchal order, Maria’s fantasy reveals an anxiety equal to her
father’s but incongruent with the geographic and cultural maps locating her father and her
New York companions. Maria’s repetitive wanderings suggest an anxiety related to
“home” and a life too contained. Her journey is too neat, too predictable and easy. She
knows all too well her place in relation to her father and male lovers—She is strange,
monstrous, other, Irish, and immigrant. Her bedside map actually works, reconﬁrming
her 1 ocation so that she might return safely to her side of the bed each night. Maria’s
“problem” is she can locate her self and, therefore she appears too ﬁxed, trapped in a
representational dynamic that cannot reﬂect her desires even as she has yet to produce or
articulate them. And while a desire to respond to the question, “What are you like,” fuels
the aetions of not only Maria but of all of the novel’s primary characters, the narrative
l'ﬁfuses to clarify Maria’s desires or provide a deﬁnitive answer—for in as much as she
may be “like” Rose, she is equally not-like. What we do know is that her nighttime
fantasies reveal desires to be “lost” and “nothing” and that during her daytime wandering
Of New York City she realizes that she longs “to see herself, her old self, or a different
Self, passing her by and escaping down the street” (144).
The narrative externalizes the other of Maria as Other, doubling the stranger
VVitl'lin as Maria repeatedly glimpses her strangeness in other women. Maria’s move
to"Valid being simultaneously the viewing subject and the viewed object is to escape
reflective topographies that identify and locate her according to binary orders of the
0ther-——whether woman or Irish. Rather than expanding the maps, the narratives that

01"ganize her gender, ethnic, and national difference as a representative story—a

67

 

conceptual move similar to social justice models of gender, class and racial/ethnic
inclusivity—Maria “wipes herself from the map,” an act of liberation that obliterates her
interrlal sense of location in relation to others. In doing so, she must modify the
representational systems that produce her sense of self and her relationship to place. The
novel then shifts from terrains of “identity” and the father to notions of “self” and an as
yet—to-be-deﬁned Maria.

Drawn to the spaces and people of sub-culture, Maria’s desire to inhabit her
strarlgeness, to speak and see from otherness, exceeds the self-expressions of her family
in Ireland and her immigrant community in New York. Only when Maria encounters a
Space of incongruency by way of a metal trailer outlined in neon that appears “tacked on
to the side of ﬁfties highrise” does she stop looking to men to reﬂect what she is like
(144) - Omitted from her metropolitan map, the diner appears unreal and geometrically
misaligned with the adjacent building’s clean lines and squared angles. A space of the
fen'lil'line, curvy, and specializing in—what else?—egg breakfasts, the diner is
Sin'lultaneously absent from representation (unmapped desire) and supplementary,
Secllring deﬁnition for its adjacent building. Standing outside the diner, Maria ﬁnds
herself suddenly famished but upon entering cannot remember how she likes her eggs
cooked. “An egg wasn’t just an egg, it was a state of mind,” she thinks as she watches
p as Sersby, perceiving each man and woman as an egg, cooked to his or her preference,
living and walking in “happy in a sort of senseless difference” (144). Without phallic
01‘ientation, desire and consequently thought itself, becomes senseless, slipping out of

binary clarity. Sexual difference—male/female—still seems to operate but the difference

“\at organizes the male as desiring subject, female as reﬂective object of man’s desire is

68

 

no longer sustainable. And in this context, “senseless difference” suggests both the
cataclysmic shiﬁ in Maria’s thinking away from the maps from which the world and
people make sense as well as the possibility that binary difference itself is nonsensical
and ultimately pointless in stories of self-searching.l3 The diner’s excessiveness of
Opti ons and desires in the space of the woman, however, overwhelms Maria, and she runs
out of the diner onto the streets, racing along unknown sidewalks until she overtakes
herself. Finally accessing a senseless order and becoming lost, strange to herself, the sad,
unknown woman reﬂected in shop windows is “her own reﬂection.”

In positioning Maria “off the map,” the narrative returns to familiar ﬁgurations of
women such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper and Jean Rhys’ Wide
Sargasso Sea whose female protagonists’ unconventional thinking mark them as
Perceptibly or socially mad but ultimately astute commentators on the very discursive
economy that produces their self-expressions as madness. Maria’s “off the map”
locatiOn produces a similar narrative instability, a slipping from the space of the known
and a move into the unrepresentable site of woman. Maria’s misrecognition of her own
l.eﬂection reveals a disjunction between an impossible-to-comprehend feminine self and a
ren'u'iitling woman looking for an alternative representational order to produce an
altertlative “Maria.” The lag between Maria seeing the “sad-looking woman who ignored

her” and her re-cognition of an image that is simultaneously her/not-her, becomes

Ivleu‘ia’s extended condition—a period of “waiting”——until she encounters Rose and a

13\

L There is a resemblance between Enright’s depictions of mirroring and sexual difference and those of
f e Irigaray. In the diner, Marla accesses an effusrve difference which recalls Irigaray s mapping of
lThine pleasure: “But woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She ﬁnds pleasure almost
here. Even if we refrain from invoking the hystericization of her entire body, the geography of her
aSure is far more diversiﬁed, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is
only imagined—in an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness” (This Sex 28).

Ne
CO

69

proliferation of reﬂections of self. Similar to Gilman and Rhys’ complex ﬁgurations of
Women trapped in a masculine symbolic economy, Enright’s novel resists libratory and
celebratory imaginings of a woman coming into a feminine imaginary, layering darkness
and the ambiguities of Maria’s suicide attempts, hospitalization, and rejection of her
farni l ial obligations and social roles. Not a naive celebration of “woman writing
woman,” WA YL? distills the pain, confusions, and psychic dislocations of a “woman”
striving to understand herself through the “elsewhere” of representation.

In the chapters describing her return to Ireland and hospitalization, Maria cannot
catch up with herself. She is continuously the self who escaped “down the street” no
longer able to track or account for her “different self’ since her relationship to self/other
shifts radically and “she”fMaria moves into a space of psychic dislocation. Rejecting the
refle<:ti ons returning from the masculine to track her images of self, Maria’s “1” becomes
mobi 1e and supplementary, registering from someplace else. Accordingly, during her
hospitalization in Dublin she cannot track her location in relation to her therapist who
metho dically moves from one seat to another, testing Maria’s capacity to know where she

is in relation to others. “As Maria talked, she found her eyes kept returning to the place

Where the woman should have been but was not. . .Maria talked on, but it did not matter.

Talking wasn’t the test, and she had already failed” (161-2). Within the maps of a

Ineclical/psychological praxis that privileges a patient’s ability to identify herself, to know
hers€=lf in relation to others, Maria’s inability to locate her therapist positions her as
unstable and without identity.

The novel’s emphasis on self rather than identity shifts the terrain of gender away

from the mappables of ethnic production (identity expressions) and national reproduction

7O

(cultural and population) toward the more slippery and dynamic discourse of same-sex,
no n—heteroreproductive narrativity. Woman-directed desire must be written

incongruently. For, the function of “woman” in a masculine economy is to reﬂect male
desire back to the masculine subject, relegating womanly desire to expressions of
passi vity and negation as both Luce Iriagary and Teresa de Lauretis suggest in their
sighting of “woman” as occupying a place of symbolic in-difference. As Enright’s novel
suggests, the process of woman looking to woman for a reﬂection of self, of a woman-
ordered desire that is not an inversion the masculine imagination already in play, requires
a leav ing behind of old mirrors, maps and representational modes to ﬁnd new
conﬁ gurations and ways of reﬂecting “sisterhood” and the self. Yet, Ali Smith’s Like
Opens Vvith characters already off the map. Amy has lost the ability to read and is no
longer in contact (locatable) within the personal and professional communities of her pre-
mOthel-hood life. This off the map quality is in large part given the short-circuiting that
happe ms in narratives of lesbian desire, where the phallus is displaced or in the case of
Like absented in favor of a reﬂective apparatus that suggests a subject’s movement of the
away from the reﬂective surface just at the moment of apprehension. A bit like a
photo graph’s blurred edges in which the subject quickly slipped from frame as the shutter
snapped. The map in these contexts suggests a lure in relation to the object of desire,
whether that be a woman as in Like or a stable image of self as in WA YL?. In this way
maps direct our attention to a gender politic via aesthetic practice that absentees woman

S the bodily and discurswe srte upon Wthh resrstance might be framed.'4

\
\4

d The notion of lure in conﬁguring lesbian desire comes from Roofs theorization of lesbian sexuality and
e

Sire in A Lure of Knowledge.

71

Second, Try Listing
L is t/Mirror Her
I believe that all women, but especially housewives, tend to think in lists; I

have always believed, against all opposition, that women think in logical
sequence... I realized how thoroughly the housekeeping mind falls into the

list pattern.
Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

My colleague Mary Armstrong...suggested that list making is indeed a

feminist practice. Feminism, she observed, is constantly in the process of

thinking oﬁ and consistently and repeatedly ﬁghting for recognition of its

own history and the history of women. Feminism envisions the future with

an ongoing consciousness. In short, the work of feminism is the work of

always having the master lists in mind. The millennium may help us

acknowledge the very special consciousness we try to cultivate and

maintain as feminists.

Jean F. O’Barr, “My Master List for the Millennium”

According to Shirley Jackson and Jean F. O’Barr, lists are a process of thinking
and a practice particular to women, and, therefore, list-making might be cultivated as a
“very Special consciousness” and channeled into a particularly feminist agenda/politic.
Given the prominence of lists in Enright’s and Smith’s novels, I ﬁnd Jackson’s and
O’Bal‘r’s propositions wonderfully intriguing and, yet, equally troubling, as their
fonnul ation of listing as a particularly feminine rhetorical structure relies on a strict
folT‘llllation of binary sexual difference to uphold lists as a prerogative of the woman and
seem to require female genitalia—what might be read to be under the skirt of O’Barr’s
W0""lan—for a feminist practice. In a manner similar to the function of maps in a
Cartesian formulation, lists can be construed as reﬂective structures or a kind of mirror to

t . . . . .
he Contents of a naturalized or “real” terram——-as 1n the detailed documentatrons and

Catalogues of wildlife and ﬂora found in such self-conscious writings as Henry David

72

Thoreau’s 0n Walden.15 If maps in WA YL? and Like function as tropes of a particularly
gendered representational practice as part of a masculine economy for knowledge

production, listing suggests a counter strategy and narrative order. And while the
practice of listing is necessary to the characterization of Rose and Ash, their lists
consi stently fail to produce a naturalized order or to outline these characters as “women,”
but, rather, because of this failure, produce something that does engage a gendered politic
relevant to feminism. Each novel contains a variety of lists—some are offset from prose
as rec o gnizable itemizations; some blend into and either become or are the prose.

Employing lists for self-reﬂection, Rose in WA YL? makes mental lists of the

“thin gs” that deﬁne her, which pop out of the narrative with their verticality and line-line-
bY line descriptors. Lying in bed at night Rose itemizes the things that identify her and
that when taken as a whole (a list) might reﬂect some sort of cohesive or clear self image.
She i nitially resists dispersion, compiling “a list of the things she was—things she could
not forget, even if she tried” (140). This is a common listing practice of gathering similar
Characteristics (all about Rose) to create a taxonomic category or, in Rose’s case, an
attempt to create a coherent identity based on taxonomic listing methods. The singular,
ultiIT'late “LIST,” however, consistently fails to reﬂect Rose back to Rose, and each self
descriptor or “thing” exceeds its own category—“She was too full of things.” She only
partially fits her categories—“Her favourite colour was blue/Her favourite colour was
act\lally a deep yellow, but she couldn’t live with it.” And eventually she recognizes the

faiI‘ll-e of claims to a whole self—“It was all lies” (140)-

\5\
See Robert Belknap’s The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (2004).

73

Rose’s repetition of taxonomic listing brings to mind Dennis Hall’s correlation
between the proliferation of lists in contemporary popular culture and the uncertainty of
meaxling in postrnodemity. In his essay “Listomania: The List as Popular Icon,” Hall
obs erves, “Lists. . .are a kind of intellectual comfort food. We enjoy lists because we
associate them with agents of direction and environmental control, authority, deﬁnition,
clear value. . ..Lists tend to oversimplify likeness and difference in an interesting way.
Lists emphasize likeness and overlook difference within their own boundaries, and tend
to overlook likeness and emphasize difference outside their boundaries. . . .Lists appear to
ﬁx the ﬂux. . .(56-7). In appearing to ﬁx ﬂux, lists work within a symbolic system that
maintains binary difference (on the list/ off the list; same/different), including sexual
difference. But, lists can also become, according to Hall, “fragmented and contingent,
Pointi ng less to structures of meaning. . .than to structure of possible meanings, to sets of
contingencies, to indeterminations” (58). For Rose, her list-making initially marks an
anxiety of self and a practice analogous to Berts’ repetitious mapping; her listing is a
repatition, however, that eventually gives way to the multiplicity and indeterminancy of a
self in ﬂux.
Her listing likewise parallels Maria’s nightly travels and mappings, but unlike
Mari a’ s escape from the map (tracing), the novel does not jettison listing practices. There
is no wiping oneself off of the list since the list cannot really “locate” a subject in a given
terretin nor might it determine a subject—as Ash painfully discovers. Such infamous lists
of location as Nixon’s Enemies List or Senator Joseph McCarthy’s list of Communist
S3’1‘113athizers in the State Department suggest the list’s power resides in its allusion for

containment and its ability to signify something other than its composition (it is rumored

74

that the piece of paper McCarthy waved during his Women’s Council speech was
actually blank). In so much as Rose attempts to locate herself through her lists, lists are
structurally generative rather than illustrative. Perhaps more disposed to the slides of
metonymy than the replacement of metaphor, Nixon’s, McCarthy’s, and Rose’s lists do
not contain enemies, communists or woman; rather, they stand in for an illusive, shifting
and uncertain, but political, terrain of (not)belonging.

Rose ﬂips the function of lists compiled to enhance or cue memory since she does
not 1 i st as a reminder lest she forget, but instead compiles what she “cannot forget” about
herse l f so that she might recognize, track her own composition. And given that she
searches most avidly for her birth mother, it makes sense that her lists would reveal a
desire to track her order to compile who she is. That none of her characteristics are
cert€lit1—“woman(?)” or singular “I am Irish”; “1 am English”——doubles the contingent
and di Sposable nature of memory cue lists. If reminder lists, as with shopping lists, are
by natue disposable and ultimately forgettable, they convey temporariness, changeability
and potential absence. In this way, while the form of her “unforgettable” lists with their
succe Ssion of items resemble memory lists, what she wants the list to accomplish
resel'l'lbles something aligned with the map, or more aptly the fused map and list structure
of a “family tree.” Rose’s desire to track, however, does not extend beyond tracking
Antla and serendipitously ﬁnding Maria. For, even the list of births and deaths on the
front page of Anna Kennedy’s family Bible, a sign of patriarchal naming and tracking of
progeny, has been edited with names of dead or disinherited children crossed out, a

metaphor for the impermanence and brokenness of a family that Anna’s twin daughters

will have little interest in knowing. All of which suggests the instability, temporariness

75

and changeability of the Irish family that is the Kennedy/Delahunty family, broken and
5p] i 1:, like the woman christened “Marie” in Ireland but raised as “Rose” in England.
Similar to Shirley Jackson’s claim that listing are the housewife’s (woman’s)
mode of thinking, Anna associates lists with womanly thinking, but her narrative, a
chapter enticingly titled “Lists,” refuses to universalize and essentialize either woman or
list- Instead her remembrances from beyond the grave speak of her mother’s spatial lists,
her childhood experimentation with word lists, and her composite lists (objects and words)
as 21.11 adult. Anna’s chapter is bleak and thoroughly captivating in its questioning of how
she mi ght make sense of her body, her wifely obligations and the world around her
through a language that cannot account for her experiences or for the things she
“noti ces.” However, in contrast to Jackson, the womanly logic that Jackson celebrates
become part a sex role “hell,” a grave upon which the feet of not only Anna’s father and
husband walk but her mother as well (248).

Like Jackson, Anna initially speaks of list-making within the context of the
f“en'lil'line domesticity and motherhood, yet Anna ultimately refuses to endorse either the
non_\, erbal lists of her mother or the language lists she learns at school. Of her mother’s
Spati a1 listing, she says, “The whole room [kitchen] was a reminder to her. There was no
telling, when you touched something, what it might mean. ‘Who moved the sweeping
brush? she would say. ‘When we haven’t a sausage in the house?”’ Her mother’s spatial

lists could be dangerous, making her “exits. . .full of things to trip her up.” And as a child
Anna worried about her mother “in the shop, looking at the shelves, with the kitchen
Shifiing and dancing in her mind’s eye” (234). Anxious about her mother’s safety, a

Young Anna asks to translate her mother’s lists in to words so that she might replace her

76

mother in the store and instead do the shopping with a sequence of words that could
repeat through her mind as orderly signiﬁers to match up with signiﬁeds on shelves. By
doing so, Anna simultaneously protects her mother and escapes the dangers of the
kitchen—which is her initial escape from the “location” of the mother, the primary icon
of‘ womanhood and social model of femininity for a young rural Irish girl in 19505
Ireland. Her death before birthing was her last.

Combining the spatial system of her mother with the symbolic of social order of
language, Anna attempts to describe her life by making words lists of her surroundings.
These descriptive word lists, however, reshape her experiences and observations to an
immediate and manufactured order, composing only unremarkable and perhaps false
image 3 and memories. “I did not see my life in any way you could write down,” she
asserts. “When I was a child the sky was either raining or not, and the grass was just what
it Was - ..I could list the things I did not notice and I would remember them only as the
worlds I use to describe them by: the rain, the grass, the milk in a bucket, the blood in a
bow] - - .” (233). In his critical study of lists in nineteenth-century literature, The List: The

Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (2004), Robert Belknap notes that certain “literary
liStS” (basically lists in literature) can serve both as a record of careful observations of the
natural world and as and indication “that the mind has, with a spark of consciousness,
registered a ‘thing.”’ Particularly interested in nineteenth-century American
writers/Esters, Belknap demonstrates how Thoreau, for instance, “registered facts [to]
leave the record of his experience, his observation of particular objects of nature and
pal"iicular occurrences” (198). In contrast to Belknap observation of a listing function

that might suit Anna’s project, her “observations” evade necessarily visual registers nor

77

are they a recording of memory. Her experiences and “her life” evoke the visual as a
remainder of her experience, a memory reordered via language. There are a couple of
choices for how we might read this record of what is “not noticed”— First, the novel
proposes a naturalized, non-verbal feminine that originates with the mother and is
configured spatially. In this reading, Anna’s language lists will inevitably fail to capture
what is innate to the spatial “woman.” Or alternately, we might read the novel as
proposing that the sign structures, regardless of whether represented as spatial or
linguistic are equally limited. For it is not Anna’s mother of the Irish countryside that the
nove l privileges as the return to the originary mother, but Anna with her desire for escape
from the figuration of the mother that propells the narrative and offers the reader
something new in thinking of and through the possibility of the feminine.
What Anna notices is neither restricted to the kitchen nor reﬂected in word lists,
SO in her post-death reminiscences, she repeats over and over her mother’s list, moving
the tea cozy from kitchen surface to kitchen surface. By its nature, this verbal repetition
fails to perform her mother’s practice (well, that, and the fact that she’s dead). The
distinction between spatial meaning created by the ordering and reordering of kitchen
obj Gets and linguistic meaning organized via a string of words demarcates and limits her
mother’s domain. More severe than the distinction between public/private,
publie/domestic, the mother’s thinking space is restricted to the kitchen from which her
WOmanly thinking radiates through the house and to the shop. As an adult, Anna ﬁnds
Ianguage a terrifying and fraught space, full of hidden meanings that she cannot quite

grasp and of words that still cannot describe the “AnnA” who is both backwards and

78

forwards and the body she sees in the mirror (233). Her desire is then a fraught or

paradoxical desire to return to surety of the mother’s space:

Now, if I were to list the things in my life, that is the way I would like to
do it; moving things from place to place and knowing what they meant,
not just a string of words—the shopping list bouncing in my head, my own
breath cutting it short at every step. You move the tea cozy from the pot to
the table, you move it to the side of the range, you turn the cozy inside out.

I am stricken, here in my grave, by what the smallest things meant.
(emphasis mine, 234)

In this context, the return to the mother’s listing practice does not celebrate the maternal
(as signifying woman) but, rather, conveys a desire to locate some other kind of meaning
commensurate with AnnA signifying woman via the mother’s system. Her mother’s feet
may walk Anna’s grave, complicit with her father and husband, but the mother offers a
mOdel for potential growth, the representational freedom for the something else, the
Woman Anna desires to understand but cannot notice.
A ghostly narrator, Anna speaks literally and ﬁguratively between worlds,
.COnverting images from the Irish mother and an idealized but bereft iconography to the
dead mother of Anna’s daughter’s generation when the time seems attuned for women to
escape from a masculine socio-linguistic economy. Signiﬁcantly, one of the “things”
Anna notices that refuses listing is her own sexed body. She remembers as a newly
married woman standing naked in front of a full-length mirror Berts had temporarily
Stol‘ed in the hallway. Raised in a conservative Roman Catholic family, Anna looks for
the very ﬁrst time at her body and genitalia, “I could not ﬁnd the words for it,” she says,
“Pink. White. Hill. Cunt. Move. You move the tea cosy from the pot to the table, you
mOVe it to the side of the range, you turn the cosy inside out. MOVE” (247). As a

character trapped in Berts’ memory and Roman Catholic sexual repression/modesty, she

79

lacks the language to identify, to name her genitalia. Visual descriptors of color, shape,
and even pejorative slang fail to supply meaning, and Anna returns to the only feminine
order of her experience. The spatial listing used by her mother and a structure that
requires movement, “MOVE,” speaks of woman and Anna’s sex is marked as mobile and
“inside out,” rather than as the sum of its sexual parts.

Anna’s return to her mother’s list suggests Anna’s desire to signify and make
meaning of woman as subject, which for Anna is an impossible return. In the end her
search appears to have launched a desire for gendered self signiﬁcation affecting three
generations of mothers and daughters. Unlike Jackson and Anna’s mother who always
already ﬁgure the maternal, Anna cannot compile lists to place or locate her body or self
as a woman, much less stand in for socio-cultural and familial reproductive orders.

If Maria’s story is one of escape from the father’s mapping practices, Rose’s story
is one of reworking her mother’s listing practices to suit the daughter’s generation (pun
intended). The originary ﬁgure of the mother grounds feminist articulations and
representational economies. As Judith Roof observes, “The matriarchal [goddess/mother]
as a Single source is parallel to feminist aesthetic theories that posit a feminine experience
of the ‘real,’ the ‘authentic,’ or the material body as the source for their shape and
inspiration (A Lure 125). It is precisely this return to the maternal that Enright’s novel
Wants to reconﬁgure as Anna’s voice erupts into the text and we readers (not her
daughters) must list/en to her. For all of its psychoanalytic, imagery and semiotic
inVestments, Anna’s reminiscences about her own relationship with her mother seem to

dead-end. By evoking mother/daughter, pre-oedipal relationship and narrative, the novel

proffers an alternative to the predominantly oedipal literary terrain of twentieth-century

80

Irish literature, drama and ﬁlm—but a dead mother is still “mother,” whether sacriﬁcial
or not, and perhaps just as sought after as Rose’s journey suggests.

Patriarchy haunts Anna, restricting her expressions to either the space of the
mother or to the comparable invisibility of the feminine in a masculine Symbolic; and yet,
it i 3 Anna who haunts the novel resignifying what we know of her daughters’ attempts to
understand themselves as women. Retrospectively Maria’s desire to escape maps and
Rose ’ s desire to understand herself through lists bear the traces of their mother’s own
desire for representational escape, recognizable only by the reader since Anna as mother
does not speak about her daughters or recognize their struggles, nor do her daughters
meditate on the possibility that their mother wanted for something else as well. Anna’s
jarring eruption into the novel at the twin’s ﬁrst acquaintance is an interruption that

reorders how lists might be understood to clarify difference and feminine location.

At the close of the novel, the reader is offered three lists that project the sisters’
1:llture. The lists are multiple, incongruent, overtly incomplete and provide only odd bits
and bobs of the sisters’ life together after more than two decades apart:

These are the things they discovered about themselves.

They both had a best friend at school called Emily...
They both like Euthymol toothpaste, Mozart, the colour blue.
They were both afraid of falling.

There were also the things that they did not discover.

They both enjoyed putting in the bin bag the bag it came in.
They both held their shoulders high when they were in an airplane,
as if this might help keep it off the ground.

Some of these became apparent to them over the years. Some did not.

They also discovered some intriguing differences.

...Rose had the poorer eyesight. Maria slept around.
Rose had a dodgy elbow, Maria’s wrist was not to be discussed.

Maria looked older. Though as the years went by, she seemed to halt a

little, as though she were waiting for Rose to catch up.

And, they were the astonishment of everyone who met them. Rose
brought Maria to Leatherhead. . .. (255-6)

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Ag aim, for the reader of the novel, this transition to multiple listing is made logical
through the diegetic intrusion of the dead-mother’s voice. Anna’s discussion of listing
both marks a turn away from the anxious recreation of Rose’s self-identifying list and
alters the conventions depicting the future as a means of narrative closure; the lists refuse
to map out their lives ahead. If we read these lists as envisioning a particular expression
of womanhood or as describing “woman” at all, it must be drawn from Anna’s search for
meaning through lists, where the image of woman and her meaning is stabilized by the
mother in the kitchen. In the narrative progression of listing, these closing lists of WA YL?
acquire their feminine expression via association rather than depiction or deﬁnition. The
final chapter’s title, “Like, Like,” signals the associative doubling to emerge in their
discovery/not-discovery lists. The images we formulate of Maria and Rose(Marie) in later
years are the stuff of association. In this way, the novel does seem to privilege listing as a
Women-oriented writing practice, signaling a relationship between sisters without
descriptions of patriarchal imperatives of marriage and sexual reproduction (motherhood)
and, consequently, without the myriad hallmarks of happily-ever-after reunion narratives.
The delightfully quirky, if somewhat random, listing of similarities and
differences that the sisters do and do not discover falls short of the unity or deﬁnition that,
for example, Barr’s and Jackson’s feminine listing practices. Toothpaste and music
preferences, kissing Anton, and the physical differences between identical twins arrange
a depiction of relationship rather than a cordoning off of ethnic or sexual difference.
Iiutlmrous references to their mutual distaste for potatoes and perhaps the Britishisms of
“bins” and “Euthymol” mark the expression as associated to the islands of Ireland and

EIlgland, but nothing in their lists suggests that the twins claim a particular sexual

82

identity (universalized or heterosexual woman) or that we might read a particular
Irishness or Englishness (ethnic identity) from their discoveries. Akin to the image of
twins standing among dressing room mirrors where the reﬂection of woman returns as
multiple, dynamically asymmetrical and incomplete, the lists offer us an ambiguous, and
yet, poignant relationship between sisters, where some similarities and differences

become “apparent to them over the years” and others not.

Listing Ash

In Like, Amy’s only letter to Ash resembles an OED deﬁnition of “ash” followed
by eleven quotations containing “ash” from canonical love poems, including passages
from Such cliche'd sources as Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

A_sh_.' ash, n., a well-known timber tree (Fraxinus excelsior, or other

species) of the olive family,'... ; quaking ash, the aspen. Aesc, eschew, askr.

A_sh, ash, n. the dust or remains of anything burnt; volcanic dust or a rock

composed of it; plural, remains of a human body when burnt....

That body, where against

My grained ash and hundred times hath broke

And scarr ’d the moon with splinters. (Shakespeare)...

Wait soul until thine ashen garments fall! (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Ashling—a young ash sapling or tree.
Aisling—a vision, dream poem.

My grained Ash,
Are you running like sparks through the rubble? (list italicized in text 223-
4)
A heady declaration of one woman’s mediations on and, possibly, sexual desire for
another, Amy’s letter is a seductive claiming and naming—“My grained Ash”—

l.egiirdless of whether we, or Ash for that matter, can read Amy’s intent in collecting

deﬁnitions of, allusions to “ash”. The list is peppered with such erotic metaphors as

83

-».—'_t - -.-__. -_.,._...g..-- .~ .5. ‘g wu—ﬁnw»

quaking trees, sparks, and over-heated, burnt bodies. The letter as an itemization is a

kind of double-entendre wherein the list of deﬁnitions and examples of “Ash” suggests
she is the “ash” who has been thought about extensively, possibly fantasized about, and
then catalogued in Amy’s OED-like imagination—or at least this is how Ash reads the
list- In response to the letter she quits school, waves ‘goodbye’ to her summer lover,
Mi ss. Carroll, and leaves Scotland in search of Amy. Ash’s mistake is to presume Amy’s
list-letter is an invitation, signaling a lover’s intimate ponderings. It does not. Or maybe
it does, but Amy simply changes her mind (Amy’s desires in regards to Ash are never
clear).

Ash’s reading of Amy’s intent is, of course, skewed through Ash’s own desires
for What Amy seems to offer—self—recognition and deﬁnition and the pleasure in reading
a 1i st-letter that is all about the same. Ash contains numerous and a variety of lists, each
moving further from the above list’s taxonomic and deﬁnitional organization to the more
loosely organized lists of “Things Amy Said,” to the associative lists of Ash’s own

experiences and desires that eventually are no longer set apart within the narrative—so
that her lists by the end of the novel become the narrative itself. This progression is,
hOWever, less about marking the differences between list and prose but more about
calling attention to the interdependence of prose and list compositions (for we could go
so far as to sight lists within grammatical order, a common feature to descriptive syntax,
for instance, a series of adjectives to modify a noun). Aligned with Hall’s understanding
of lists, the lists in Ash are very much about producing a kind of pleasure that comes from
Sol'ting out similar items to account for the differences between two friends and sorting

out the desire of one friend for another. In this way, Ash’s list-writing may appear to

84

correspond with narrative’s capacity to establish difference and heighten and resolve
conﬂict, which is part and parcel of a pleasurable writing/reading experience. But such
an interpretation would focus only on the function of lists early in Ash’s story when they
seem to contain, to envision, to produce some sort of image of or knowledge about Ash
via Amy. Ash’s proliferating lists, as with Enright’s novel, suggests another kind of
pleasure to be gained from the impartial, effusive, and generative function of listing. In
this way, as they merge with and then turn into the primary narrative structure, Ash’s lists
evoke desiring as process rather than substitution for, or a fetishistic object of desire.

As with Amy’s list-letter, lists provide Ash with a kind of relational or
relationship method that seems to keep “Amy” close. For instance, her lengthy list about
“My. Friend. Amy” (the list’s title) seems to afford Ash a means for not only representing
but also reading her and Amy together in a way that prose alone cannot. Looking at the
placement of their names on the page, Ash remarks, “The strange and the known shape of
it. Me. Amy. Pressed together into one” (262). This list ostensibly identiﬁes Amy’s
complex beauty and unusual charisma—that which made Amy worthy of obsession—yet
it also exposes Amy to be a product of Ash’s imaginative fantasies and desires:

: just adored, she just adored a lot of things. Said a lot of things were

simply exquisite

:wore thin black wool on the coldest days of winter and the hottest days of

summer, as if in disdain of something so common as mere seasonal

change...

: said her favourite colour was white

: said I looked good in black...

: let her friendship with me lessen in proportion to a number of things.

The more important she became the less we saw each other and the more

indecorous invisible, northern and androgynous I felt myself becoming. . ..

:whom I hadn’t seen for quite some time, phoned me up in the middle of

the night to get me to come over, said on the phone would I mind, she
needed me for a moment. . .. (262-4)

85

The structure of this list, closer to poetry than prose, seems to both condense the
emotional distance between the two friends as Amy becomes “more important” and Ash,
“more invisible, northern and androgynous” as well as to establish a kind of
incongruencey structuring such difference. It is a fantasy list that suggests that the
comforts and pleasures to be gained from listing are not only a kind of gathering together
of similarities to leave differences outside as the pleasurable lists of popular culture that
Hall writes about—“10 Ten...” and “Who’s Hot” lists. Ash has internalized “Amy” as a
reader/critic, as the list continues to focus on a kind of detritus of Amy, who “: said a
moment ago inside my head, I think you know I’m less of a cliche’ than you’re inferring,
Ash” (263).

By the close of Like Ash’s journal, Ash has written all she can about an obsession
that culminates in her setting Amy’s apartment ablaze and rendering it appropriately to
“ash.” Signiﬁcantly, she both claims and denies that her writing is a diary, saying that
she is no Anne Frank and that her writing in a historical context amounts to “wanking”

A long slow circling self-important lot of wank. Though this was

never a diary. Vile idea. And at the same time it is one, vile as it is. I’m

pressing against all the written pages beneath my pen and I am wondering

what it is that I’ll have left out, what thing it is that I don’t know and never

knew. The things we so blithely forget or don’t see; the whole selves that

can disappear and nobody thinks to report it, nobody calls an inquest.

Instead there’s this blind obsession with something or someone; a

decadence. . . .I’ve wallowed in it, swallowed it, rolled in its musk and my

own, and I still haven’t made sense of it. Well, good. I wouldn’t want it

to lose its impact completely for me. (3 26-7)

This ﬁnal confession and self-reﬂexive account of what her diary has both
attempted to do and cannot be recalls Rose’s consistent failure to compose a list

that adequately describes her. Extending the common irritation that a crucial item

has been left off a shopping list and thereby escaped its purchasing to the

86

philosophical and psychological ponderings of self and narrative, Ash’s concern
about what it is that she has “left out—what thing it is that I don’t know and never
knew”——suggests that autobiographical narrative may be very much like list-
making and that invariably it will fail to include all that is needed, desired, and
known—or not-known as the case may be. However, rather than conveying an
anxiety over the unaccounted for “whole self,” which would recreate each list as a
repetition of the same self-accounting project (another version of the same), Ash
endorses and acknowledges the pleasures of the gap, the not-knowing as
necessary to the pleasure of not “making sense.” Accordingly, both the content
and identiﬁable (visible) structure of Ash’s lists gradually shift from the
beginning of her journal to its end becoming more and more invisible as her list

overtakes, becoming narrative.

Third, Disappear
Mirror Rim/miR rorriM: Reading Disappearance

Feminist models of thought remain within the conﬁnes of the phallocentric Law insofar
as the presence/absence of the phallus continues to constitute the primary organizing
principle of their theories of gender... To the extent, then, that the majority of both
dominant and reverse-discourses, such as feminism, take the notion of a binary,
oppositional sexual difference as their starting point, lesbian invisibility is inscribed in
the very coordinates of the phallocentric conceptual realm equallumderlying them.
renée hoogland, Lesbian Conﬁgurations

The deﬁnition of a lesbian narrative, however, has always been in crisis....[W]here is the
“lesbian ” in the lesbian narrative? The practical questions are endless once the ﬁrst
question is asked. For instance, must the characters be overtly lesbian? Must the author
be overtly or covertly lesbian? Must both be true at the same time? Must characters or
theme be positive instead of negative...How explicit must a text be to be considered
lesbian?

Marilyn R. Farwell, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives

87

If the double-chapter(s) opened with a meta-summary of how Enright’s and
Smith’s novels resist summary practices that tend to reduce and rewrite a story with the
general-izing goal of illuminating “what a novel is about,” these chapters close with
analyses of how mobile female subjects read and are read within each novel. The
doubling in WA YL? presents self-seeking female characters who resist conventional
signiﬁers of sexual difference and alter masculinist and nation-oriented identity
categories for understanding their self in relation to others (and nation). While this self-
reading strategy is common to both novels, Smith’s Like takes up the conversation of
women desiring women for self-reﬂection as a lesbian conﬁguration, and in doing so
notes how Smith’s Like challenges essentializing feminist and lesbian-feminist “identity”
discourses in addition to those of nation. In her survey of later-twentieth-century lesbian
ﬁction, Bonnie Zimmerman asserts that “lesbian novels are read by lesbians in order to
afﬁrm lesbian existence. Conversely, the books a woman reads are what make her a
lesbian feminist, or a member of the ‘lesbian community’” (15).“5 Within Zimmerman’s
formulation, reading becomes a politicized act for lesbian identity and community
formation; however, as rene’e hoogland and Marilyn Farwell suggest, the degree to which
lesbian desire and ﬁgurations can actually register in phallo-oriented language and
narrative orders, if at all, remains debatable. Taking up reading as a politicized act in its
characterizations and themes, Smith’s novel may relay something akin to Zimmerman’s
reading imperative but does so in such a way that experiments with what hoogland and

Farwell assert is the lesbian’s symbolic absence and historic invisibility in literature. In

 

'6 Zimmerman proposes a speciﬁc criteria for determining a novel to be a lesbian narrative: it must have “a
central, not marginal, lesbian character, one who understands herself to be a lesbian;” “love between
women, including sexual passion, at the center of its story;” and be written by a self-conscious lesbian (15).

88

this manner, any literal travel of Amy and Ash across national borders corresponds with
an already mobile ﬁguration of an eccentric lesbian subject.

More overtly than WA YL?, Smith’ novel incorporates the practice of reading into
its characterization and themes. Amy is functionally illiterate for much of her story, a
condition that seems to be the product of some past trauma about which the details are
never made clear. Her quest for literacy drives much of action in the ﬁrst half of the
novel, a story which closes with Amy and Kate building a beach ﬁre out of the journals
that Amy kept from her childhood through her doctoral studies. She, however, reserves a
single journal from the burning, which is presumably Ash’s journal as the second half of
the novel, Ash, follows this closing scene. Typical of the novel’s insistence that “what
we don’t know” is more powerful than what we know, we, readers of the novel, do not
know if Amy has read or intends to read the reserved journal. The journal simply
proffers an impression of Amy’s desire and the possibility of her reading anew. If Amy’s
quest was to restore her ability to read, the destruction of decades worth of her own
writing indicates that her desire was not a return to or an unearthing of her past but was
rather part of her process to read differently than before. In a similarly unusual quest for
reading, Amy’s daughter, Kate, is a school-aged child learning to read, and not always
conventionally, given her relationship with Amy. Kate’s word play and literal
(mis)understandings in many ways resemble those of other characters, implying that
regardless of acumen all are in-process of learning to read, in-process of meaning making,
and in-process of interpretation as the metaphor of reading expands beyond the literal act

of reading written texts.

89

Ash’s part of the novel offers some of the more provocative instances of reading
and its relationship to notions of self and desire. Amy and Ash’s mutual love of books
provides a base for their friendship. When Ash burns Amy’s apartment, she speciﬁcally
uses Amy’s beloved hardbacks by Proust, Woolf and Duras for the initial fuel.
Suggestively, they are the ﬁre’s point of origin. Yet, Ash with great care preserves
Amy’s journals since they might afford Ash an image of herself via Amy’s hand. Given
Ash’s own experimentation with narrative form and exploration of self in her own journal,
her act appears less a commentary on modernist stylistics and themes and more an
eroticized reading of self, an attempt to read her own image through another woman’s
writing. If she cannot have Amy’s hands touching her body and giving shape to its
contours, then the consolation is to read her self out of the pages of Amy’s handwritten
reminiscences, fantasies and thoughts. Ash’s desire reveals her initial presumptions of
how text works, or more precisely how a journal is presumably a personal form of writing
that exposes and explains the author’s experiences, thoughts and feelings as that create
something (or someone) real and true. It is in many ways what she tries to do in her own
journal, and by the end she realizes the futility. But instead of seeing bits of who she is
as sketched in Amy’s journal, Ash ﬁnds Amy’s meticulous notes on Amy’s daily reading
and her snide commentaries on her colleagues’ ﬂawed understandings of Derrida,
Kristeva, and, frankly, their misunderstanding of poststructuralism overall. Ash is
effectively invisible in Amy’s writing, and perhaps ﬁttingly, so is Amy, whom Ash must
read through subject matter and tone to ﬁnd the ardent scholar, the professor’s dutiful

daughter become professor herself.l7

 

‘7 It should be noted that the objects of study in Amy’s journals (written texts and conversation) are
likewise only inferred or interpreted in Ash’s own writing, creating a doubling of absence via the act of

90

Reading in Like is not a singular literacy nor is it taken for granted as an
uncontested transference of meaning via written or spoken word, but rather reading is a
plethora of metaphors, politicized actions, and complex instances of women revising
myths, women interpreting other women, and women understanding self through the
stories other women tell—even if that self is recognizable only by an absence of self and
an inability to understand. This insistence on the methods and means of reading in a
novel “about” two women and their complex relationship and desires takes up concerns
common to feminist reading theory and theorizations of lesbian subjectivity in narrative.
What constitutes a woman or lesbian reader? And, how might readers understand
women-oriented desires which are often conﬁgured as existing somewhere else, as a site
of utopian possibility, or as a members-only code, or as simply non-existent? Necessary
to the self-reﬂexivity of Like’s narrative is the image “the reader,” a subject that shape-
shiﬁs, who is multiple characters and even multiple voices within a character, and who is
often the most detailed imagining of self that characters can access. In this way, Amy
and Ash’s stories reconﬁgure lesbian-feminist and feminist identity-oriented writing and
reading paradigms to be something other than an excavation of lesbian and/or woman and
toward something more radical—a transforming of the invisibility that has characterized
lesbian ﬁguration into a strategy for narrating self that resists the structures of essential

difference. '8 What is resisted, revised, rewritten and reread into some image of presence

 

reading. An absence performed in this summary of a summary. The contours of the “woman,” Amy as
academic, are then fashioned in Ash’s journal which is a self-proclaimed “liary,” always a suspect text.
The desire that we read as indicative of subjectivity, while presumably Ash’s, must be understood as a
desire translated via another reader and another discourse—a return to the academic and an “I,” however,
not of Amy but rather that of this writer as reader.

Farwell notes, “Lesbian-feminists, who argue for an essentialist deﬁnition of “lesbian,” are willing and
eager to see narrative as a tool for change if not for representation. The emphasize thematic and imagist
readings of realistic narratives and tend to rely on a theory which casts both lesbian and narrative into
relatively unproblematic waters. Both categories should, the argument goes, reﬂect experiential and

91

so that lesbian and woman might be made visible, and become the protagonists and
heroes of their own stories are the very same gaps, the very same symbolic invisibility
that Like employs to write “a new kind of politic” and model new ways for reading
multiplicity and proliferation.

In so far as Amy/Amy is the story and character most imbued with such attributes
of myth as the hero’s quest and the recovery of what has been lost,19 the self-reﬂexive
qualities of her story continually turn upon myth to reject origins as an excavatable site
for reading the feminine anew. If the narrative is siphoned through a limited-third-person
narrator who switches back and forth between Amy’s and Kate’s perspectives, our
readerly position remains relatively stable and one akin to the student who wants always
to learn more. The opacity of Amy’s past and motivations work on the reader’s desire to
know, to have the narrative make character and story apparent and knowable. And yet,
the presumption that Amy’s story will reveal the essence of either Amy or Kate is the
very notion that is altered through the story. Rather the novel offers reading lessons that
disrupt the sites of origin, of excavation that underpin any readerly ability to know. For
instance, Kate’s parentage is ambiguous, her passport a fraud, and toward the close of
Amy, Kate literally toys with the impossibility of ﬁnding any origin. “You could never
know,” reasons Kate about the contents of the street drain where she loves to play, “you
could never ﬁnd out, where all the dirt and grim and grit and germs and things that have

got stuck in there had come from in the ﬁrst place” (14]). Kate plays at the drain’s edge

 

political goals. Thus, lesbian is either an unproblematic, empirical category—women who are sexually
attracted to other women—or more problematically and still reﬂective of a uniﬁed and essentialist identity,
lesbian is a political metaphor for women’s alliances with one another” (10).

'9 Bonnie Zimmerman observes a variety of myth narratives in lesbian ﬁction, but she notes that the quest
for romance stories that were common to coming out narratives of the 19705 shift in the 19805 to quest
formulations for psychic “recovery” to restore the lesbian protagonist’s “power and integrity” (212).
Amy’s quest both follows this latter trend and undermines the notion of restoration of the psyche.

92

with her toy animals, musing and remembering bits of her recent travels. Initially, this
description of Kate’s solitary game appears to be a repetition of earlier descriptions of her
playtime. But coming as it does at the close of Amy, Kate’s play becomes an iteration of
something else when she uncharacteristically pushes her toy kangaroo past the edge of
drain and then looks into the grimy pit to conﬁrm to the toy has disappeared, “gone.”
“That’s for you, she tells the dead girl who lives in the drain. That kangaroo’s for you to
have” (141). When Kate looks into the drain, she conﬁrms, in addition to the
disappearance of her toy, the impossibility others tracing the kangaroo back to her. It is
literally part of the drain’s general detritus and muck. It is also a gift and, therefore,
metaphorically the recognition of a feminine ﬁgure who exists at the site of uncharted
origins and who is mute, invisible, and declared dead. Akin to the dead mother of
WA YL?, the ﬁgure of the dead girl in the drain may be deserving of respect and kindness
but she forestalls the return to mythological ﬁgurations that might direct our
understanding of Kate’s origins. Kate simply plays on the edge of the excavatable site.
Amy’s journey to Vesuvius not only conveys both the opacity of Amy’s character
and the novel’s general self-reﬂexivity (as discussed in Chapter 1) as well as a kind of
“literary edginess” that denies originary returns to recuperate either woman or lesbian.
Something else gets produced in iteration. For instance, Amy’s trek to Vesuvius is a
quest for reading that calls forth a Western literary tradition heavily invested in tracing its
classical origins and its cultural rebirth (Renaissance) via Italy as well as a expressing a
very modernist angst of looking into the abyss of meaning. As a former literature
professor, Amy’s quest carries the traces of her profession and the weight of the West’s

literary history, which is, of course, its own kind of myth of origins. Yet, akin to Kate’s

93

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kangaroo, Amy’s lost literacy does not trace back. The details of her aphasia are never
revealed nor does her connection of signiﬁer to signiﬁed elicit a sense of enlightened
liberation via literacy. Instead, Amy stands at the top of Vesuvius, at the edge of its
crater and contemplates how the connection between word (Vesuvius) and the thing
(mountain) is like a “barbed dark between the word and the world; nothing but a rope
bridge hanging by knots across a ravine, dropping loose slats as soon as you put your
weight on it. A path around a chasm, that’s all there is” (96). Literally the image of the
“woman on the edge,” Amy becomes a more a ﬁgure of poststructuralist intellectual than
of the hero questing for knowledge of her reading origins, failures and triumphs. Akin to
Amy’s later rumination on Pompeii’s historical sites that display excavated men and
women who died in Vesuvius’ eruption of ash and lava in 79 AD, it is not their bodies
that speak of their attempt to escape the volcanic eruption, but it is the absence of their
bodies. The heat having obliterated all but their shape, only their contours, their edges
remain. Like directs the novel reader’s attention toward the absences upon which we
make meaning from our reading. In the context of Amy as subject, she and Kate’s play at
edges also resembles the troping of a subject in process and on trial that Jean Graybeal
ﬁnds so necessary in Julia Kristeva’s writing. In her essay “Joying in the Truth of Self-
Division,” Graybeal notes that “the subject in process and on trial” is developed as “the
image of the possibility of a subject at play in the differences. (This is still a subject
playing like a child on a cliff, constantly in danger yet joying even in the danger itself)”
(139).

Not only for its titular reference but also for it evocation of travel to a site of

literary origins as a feminized return to reading, Amy’s Vesuvius-trek is also reminiscent

94

of Adrienne Rich’s essay “Vesuvius at Home.” Rich’s essay opens with her “traveling
the speed of time, along the Massachusetts Turnpike” toward Emily Dickinson’s house.
Rich is traveler, reader, and woman, journeying toward a new reading of Dickinson’s
poetry not only by way of tumpikes but by way of literary excavation, unmasking
volcanic Emily, the woman and writer.20 Reading out a ﬁgure of a woman with volcanic
power behind Dickinson’s child-like play with language in her poem, Rich writes that the
“woman who feels herself to be Vesuvius at home has need of a mask, at least, of
innocuousness and of containment” (108). Rich’s essay suggests a kind of excavatory
move toward woman that is reworked in Like. Amy, the former literary scholar, is in a
comparable reading/searching position as Rich; however, in going to the source, Amy
does not ﬁnd her own Vesuvian power as woman or lesbian.

The Amy section of Like is a relatively linear narrative with a quest thematic that
shadows the myth-making imperative that Zimmerman identiﬁes as crucial to lesbian-
feminist novels. In her extensive collection and interpretation of lesbian ﬁction, The Safe
Sea of Women, Zimmerman recognizes a prevailing “expression of a collective myth of
origins” to make the lesbian visible, which can be understood as expressing: the lesbian
self, the lesbian couple, the lesbian community and/or difference (xv). Zimmerman’s
ordering of literary productions and textual politics intersects with the Amy story, but
perhaps less as a diagnostic or interpretive category and more as the very site of Smith’s
critique of identity. For the mythic carries traces of the logocentric processes for

founding and universalizing a subject as well as for legitimizing that subject within a

 

 

20 See Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home,” Shakespeare ’3 Sister: Feminist Essays on Women Poets. ed.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979: 99-121. For a discussion
0f how Rich’s “Vesuvius at Home” addresses a feminist reading politic located in a lesbian or a “female
communal space as the source for knowledge,” see Roofs Lure of Knowledge, 152-9.

95

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common or collective social order. Reshape the story and main players, and, thus,
reorder heteronormative and patriarchal signifying systems. This trajectory surely marks
the most revolutionary goal of lesbian—feminism’s attack on patriarchy via myth-making.
Remythologizing is perhaps a limited form of literary experimentation that in retracing
the borders of conventional narrative orders to include the previously excluded lesbian
cannot affect a radical systemic change.

Amy’s position as protagonist, as a sort of hero on a quest is always ironic,
slipping out of the corrective. She returns “home” to the caravan in Scotland, only to
leave that home once again, and her Vesuvius trek allows her simply to voice that if she
is a woman, she’s “not like that” to the only man who has pursued her. In this way, I
would suggest Smith’s mythic experimentation maintains the “literary edge” of the minor.
As Deleuze and Guattari caution in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, literary
experimentation retains its political edge only if such experimentation remains minor.
For instance, not only are remythologizing practices made possible by radical and
politicized revision of woman but they risk, as rene’e hoogland notes, replaying
patriarchy’s structuring symbolic order by simply ﬂipping the sexual binary and
positioning woman as the privileged term, the signiﬁer of ontological presence.
Figurations of lesbian as already another kind of desiring female subject (one not looking
toward the penis/phallus) complicate broader schema informing feminist mythologizing
pr0jects wherein the excavated and visible woman attains symbolic clout within such
binary correctives as goddess/god, pre-oedipal mother/oedipal father, earth-
mOther/masculine civilization, and so forth in which the phallus still organizes desire just

as the penis visibly marks sexual difference.

96

According to its narrative disposition, the mythic mode that Smith employs is
instructional. The stories Amy tells Kate are as much lessons for the readers of the novel
as they are for her daughter. We learn as she does that “all the best stories end in the
middle” and that narrative does not necessarily reveal the object of desire but rather
produces desire. Take for instance the story Amy tells Kate about “a photo of your
mother and her ﬁiend” (81). It is presumably a picture of Amy and Ash as teenagers
standing in front of a Scottish memorial when Amy and her family employed Ash as their
tour guide. Kate wants to hear their story, desires to unearth bits of her mother’s
inaccessible past. After many unsuccessful attempts to divert Kate’s attention to artsy
picture-postcards of knights and ladies for what she assures Kate would make a much
better story, Amy settles in to tell her daughter the story of two friends. She opens the
tale with a girl sitting at the edge of a river and looking into the water. “She sees her
reﬂection,” interrupts Kate. “Yes,” but according to Amy the girl looks below the
surface to see a ﬁsh that she wants, and with a bit of wool string from her sweater and a
berry from a bush, she catches and angles the ﬁsh onto the river bank. In the realm of
myth, a ﬁsh is of course never just a ﬁsh, and once on the bank, the ﬁsh transforms into a
beautiful girl. The ﬁsh/girl immediately returns the berry and string and then vanishes
from the other girl’s sight:

So she [girl who looks] rolled the wet thread round her ﬁnger, tied it in a

knot, and swore on the knot that she would search her whole life, if it took

that long, until she found the one she’d caught again.

What for? Kate says.

I don’t know. To take her home for dinner, I suppose, Amy says.

That’s not the end, Kate says. It didn’t have an end! Anyway
what about the statue? What about the photo? It wasn’t the story I was

wanting.
Well it’s the only story you’re going to get, Amy says. (83)

97

Kate, the listener/reader of Amy’s tale of two friends, is of course dissatisﬁed
with the story. Similar to Kate’s critique of another of Amy’s improvised myths about
two girls who argue about whether the sun is rising or setting, Kate protests that the story
of the photograph is incomplete, unsatisfying. “It didn’t have an end!” she decries. The
story is not the one desired, the ﬁsh is a girl, and the girl is somewhere else. If narrative
transparency—visibility—is one of the goals of identity-afﬁrming lesbian-feminist
readers and writers, Amy’s myth-like story of her relationship with another woman is not
only opaque in excluding past, experiential or “real” details but also rejects transparency
as necessary to narratives of the desires and relationships between women. Transparency,
according to Amy’s tale, yields something different than what is expected, a girl instead
of a ﬁsh and whose transformation shifts the form and body of the object of desire.
Furthermore, “she” becomes desirable precisely because she disappears. Thus, even if
we read Amy’s myth as an archeological narrative to excavate woman, the woman from
below the mirroring surface of image, language, sign refuses to stay put, becoming
instead indeﬁnitely or in-deﬁnitionally locatable.

If in Amy, many of the instances about story and reading work registers associated
With myth with a (post)modem twist, in Ash instances of reading correspond with what
Zimmerman categorizes as lesbian coming out and romance stories. We read an account
0f Ash’s outing at school—an outing that signiﬁcantly takes place only via association
and through Ash’s defense of a famous female tennis player’s recent marriage to a
Woman. We also read Ash’s recollection of Amy interpreting Ash’s dream; we read of
A811 reading books, reading her self-images, reading notes from her father, pictures of her

mother, and so on. Though all of these types of reading and types of texts being read, the

98

reader’s position becomes less stable than the relative consistency, albeit an opacity, of
the readerly position afforded in Amy. Although the suggestion of a more stable readerly
position and subject is a bit of a mis-apprehension of what is going on in Ash’s journal, it
could be argued that in any narrative instance of a character looking to a text, another, or
self-image and responding is an instance of “reading.” It may be more apt to describe the
reader as in the position of “becoming reader,” to rework a Deleuzean expression of
becoming. The reader, akin to Ash as a writing subject, is multiple, always elsewhere,
and in-process of becoming a reading/subject, which draws upon similar imagery to
Amy’s story of two friends to craft an impression of a reader/writer/female subject as
multiple and, yet, disappearing:

I threw my book across the room and scowled at the mirror. . .The
haunting possibilities. I shook my head. Something was beyond me. I
couldn’t see what it was, how to get to it. Something was slipping past,
barely sensed, the vague outline of it gliding down the stairs and through
the shut front door, goodbye. . .. The small child with the insolent eyes
stared back at me. The girl swinging her legs off the top of the high wall,
waiting for me to tell her to jump off, amusement on her face, scorn, of
course, she’d land on her feet, what was I waiting for? The girl with her
eyes over the top of that book I’d hurled against the wall, she’d been there
only two minutes ago and already she was lost, fading. That one,
crosslegged on the other side of the mirror, silent, frowning, waiting for
me to tell her something, anything. All the likenesses. Sometimes when I
was alone in the house and it was late, the other’s, the ones I was really
frightened of, would come and settle at the bottom the bed, the selves that
didn’t have faces yet or shapes, their eyes trapped and sealed shut inside
the skin, small black x’s where their mouths should be, like two stitches,
one sewn over the other. (214)

I quote Ash’s encounters with and impressions of her doubles at length because it
conveys not only the speciﬁc kind of self-doubling at work in Ash but also Ash’s multiple
anxieties about her likenesses, about a self that is never present, and about her own

sexuality and obsessions. Her likenesses as with “girl with her eyes over the top of that

99

book” consistently disappear, and in many ways her story is another sort of coming out
story than the acknowledgement—either explicitly or implicitly—of her non-
heteronorrnative sexuality. The motif of disappearance points to both the gaps and
absences within signiﬁcation as well as to Ash’s “coming out” as a desirous self that
reads as invisible, that seems to disappear into a space eccentric to a masculine,
heteronormative conception of the subject (masculine).

The coming out scene distances Ash’s reading and writing further from an “I,”
from a singular and visible subject position that seems visible in the present moment,
who sits on a bed looking about at her past, future, potential, and lost selves. In addition
to marking the speaking/writing/reading self as potentially elsewhere, the coming out
moment draws upon a tradition of lesbian desire and sex that is written in “code.” The
reworking of the coded lesbian crafts the moment Ash’s coming out as an associative
reading of homosexuality. As her prefect colleagues’ snigger and spew homophobic
remarks about a female Wimbledon tennis player’s marriage to another woman, Ash
ﬁnds her self speaking, albeit unwittingly, against their homophobia. “. . . [A]nd Shirley
and some other people I can’t remember were all sitting round, like I was, reading—and
Shona was rattling the newspaper, holding it up, saying out loud: God that’s disgusting.
That’s one of the most revolting things I’ve ever read” (215). Signiﬁcantly, only Shona
reads the article and that her classmates extrapolate their own reading of the tennis
player’s relationship and marriage from Shona’s speech. All of which shifts the type of
reading taking place so that the news story becomes the secondary to the reading of

“lesbianism.”

100

“Ash,” however, speaking as a disembodied “voice” interrupts the jocular
conversation between the males who proclaim they are not “poofs” precisely because
they desire to watch two women have sex and the females who retort that sexual
relationships between women are simply “disgusting” (215-17, 219). “[A] small voice
from somewhere inside my throat before I could stop it was saying, well, maybe, maybe,
they like each other” (216-17). The voice simultaneously Ash and someone other than
Ash enters the fray repeatedly to counter arguments from female classmates on the
“unnatural” nature of women sexually desiring women. “No it’s not, the voice said, and
it was coming from me. Not unnatural, I said. J ust unexpected. It’s just a different kind
of natural (217). Her classmates interpret the voice’s counter argument as a simple
equation: Ash=lesbian. If Ash’s speaking position in the narrative is multiple, her
classmates’ voices seem grounded, if not anxiously heterosexual, and uniﬁed, including
an anti-homosexual diatribe from Ash’s lover, Donna. As the conversation turns from
the tennis players to teasing Ash about desiring other women, Donna remains a
participant, laughing when the males joke that they must watch out for their girlfriend’s
“fronts” (instead of backs) when around Ash. Shaking and confused, Ash leaves the
prefect’s lounge to sit along a wall outdoors and think about which self spoke out and
why.

In this “outing” scene of multiply layered “readings,” the word lesbian remains
unspoken and is glaringly absent from the entire novel (nor, I should note, are other
labels of sexual preference/identity used). The many descriptions of Ash having sex with
women, of her many girlfriends, of her occasional sexual encounter with a man tend to

make Ash a difﬁcult character to ﬁt into any sexual preference label. The refusal to

101

“label” is in many ways part and parcel of the larger sexual politic at work in the novel,
which proposes “like”——associative meaning and desire—as a better term for sexuality.
In support of “like,” an unassuming and oft teased classmate, Ruth, follows Ash, sits on
the wall, and says timidly, “. . .you were right. To say that. I mean, what you said. That
people should be able to like who they want to like. I think that was right. . .brave.”
Ash’s responds, “God, Ruth, isn’t it a really lovely day” (220)? If we read Ash’s
statements as a kind of public “coming out” as her classmates clearly do, it is an outing
that lacks the presumed “coming into” a deﬁned category or identity of “lesbian.” Ash’s
desire seems to be coded differently. But if so, why and what does Ash’s assertion of the
freedom to “like” who one wants and it being another kind of “natural” translate into?
One possibility might be found in how we read the image of two young women sitting
together but apart from their peers, “out” of the school and on a wall. I currently read it
is an image of companionship and sweetness in which any clear sense of lesbian
“identity” or otherwise has been intercepted by a moment of like as two young women sit
along a wall and enjoy the warmth of the sun. As with the image of woman in Amy, this
is not an excavation for some essential self but, rather, it suggests the pleasure of
momentary alignment of the possible like-nesses between two women. Even as Ash’s
voice positions her in opposition to a heteronormative majority and seemingly locates her
along what Rich terms the lesbian continuum, this scene performs the problems of both
uttering and reading utterance as an expression of cohesive self or ﬁxed sexual identity. 2'

All of which, likewise, diffuses the text as a mirror through which the reader might sight

his/her own “identity” clearly.

 

2' See Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Blood, Bread, and Poetry.
Norton: New York, 1994.

102

Shortly before the climax of her “liary,” Ash describes a dream she has been
having night after night in which she cannot see her own reﬂection “on the surface of the
water” (293). The dream’s repetition appears as disquieting to Ash as its subject, or more
aptly, the lack of Subject matter:

You know, I said, I’ve been having this horrible dream, I’ve had it
three times now. I can’t get it out of my head. What do you dream? she

said, and I told her about the reﬂection, the surface of the water. I look
and look, I said, but I can’t ﬁnd it anywhere.

Think of it Ash, she said. You’re blessed with a reﬂection that has

a mind of her own. Other people see themselves on the surface of things,

but you’re lucky. Not only can you see past the mere mirror of yourself.

Even more, your reﬂection is free to go where she wants, do what she

wants, regardless of what’s expected of her. She’s a reﬂection who is free

to choose. She doesn’t even have to look like you, she’s so free (293).
It is a dream that recalls that dreams are a mainstay of modernist rejection of “reality”
and were crucial to Sigmund Freud’s early rumination on the oedipal in the development
of the psyche and social subjects. Ash’s recounting of the dream and Amy’s
interpretation provides a lesson in reading, much like Freud’s dream-reading strategies in
his Interpretation of Dreams (1902) in which the analyst (Amy) is in a position of
authority in relation to both the dreamer and the dream-as-text. Ash’s account, however,
reverses these positions so that the dreamer controls the narrative of the dream as well as
the response of the “therapist” in so far as we are reading Ash’s version. Such a reversal
contributes to the re-order-ing of authority commensurate with most of the “reading
lessons” in the novel, making Ash’s account not so much suspect, but curious.

The mirror-image is perhaps the quintessential literary trope for a subject’s

relationship to self. When evoked, the mirror-image directs our attention to image

reversals, mis—recognitions, strange obsessions, and the textual terrains of who is

103

narrating and who/what is narrated. Both literary doubles and the key concepts in
psychoanalysis incorporate the mirror into readings of subjectivity and its developmental
phases. Dr. Jekyll’s self-appraisal and confession, Freud’s study of narcissism and ego
development, Lacan’s mirror-stage, Anna’s fraught sexual identiﬁcation rely on mirror
tropes to articulate the processes by which the subject might be recognize, understand and
value itself. The mirror is, of course, always plethora of tropes, and in the context of
psychoanalytic examinations of binary sexual difference, woman functions symbolically
as a mirror, reﬂecting masculinity back to “man” in a reproduction of subject/Same .
wherein the feminine, as Irigaray and de Lauretis note, might be sighted only in-
difference to the masculine.

On the surface, so to speak, Ash’s inability to locate her own reﬂection, suggests
a version of Freudian mirror-image doubles as signaling a “morbid preoccupation of the
individual with his own essence” (Rogers 18). Until Amy’s reading, Ash ﬁnds her dream
disquieting, anxiety—producing, horrible because it appears to lack—image, her, woman,
essence. The water’s surface cannot produce an image of essence or self. She fears she
is no-thing, no-image, no-essence or no-self on this surface. Ash’s preoccupation
becomes one of horror as if the desire for self-recognition is inevitably or irrevocably
denied. Freud’s narcissism depicts a literalizing of “self-love,” a splitting of the ego
wherein the ego takes itself as the object of desire. But if the viewing “subject” is
already denied subject-status by her lack of signiﬁcation woman, any essence of self is
already absent, non-existent. Ash’s dream if it remains in a Freudian cosmo-typology
can never reﬂect Ash, her femaleness becomes excluded, her reﬂections generating only

distant Echoes and rejections.

104

If, however, the interpreting narrative is reconﬁgured, as it is through Amy’s
analysis, the structures informing lack, essence, and self shiﬁ into an alternative
arrangement for reading a female subjectivity as mobile and “free.” Amy speaks not of
lack nor does she reinforce or endorse Ash’s anxiety. She speaks of Ash being both
lucky and blessed that her reﬂection “has a mind of her own” that enables her mirror-
image the freedom to go wherever it/she desires and chooses. “Not only‘can you see past
the mere mirror of yourself,” says Amy. “Even more, your reﬂection is free to go where
she wants, do what she wants, regardless of what’s expected of her. She’s a reﬂection
who is free to choose. She doesn’t even have to look like you, she’s so free” (293).
What Ash has initially perceived as a disturbing absence, 3 lack or even loss of self-
reﬂection, Amy reconﬁgures as a kind of Braidotti-esque nomadic female subject, albeit
a conscious one. The dispersal of the subject, her dislocation of the signiﬁer from the
signiﬁed in this context does not become the fragmented/decomposition or the neurotic
multiple-personality typical of conventional literary doubles. The mirror-image—Ash’s
likeness as ego-less—appears unconﬁned by social conventions or expectations. As
reﬂection, she can also transform her image through freedom of movement, desire and
agency so that “she” might not even physically resemble Ash.

The ego’s split and taking of itself as object of desire is, according to Freud, an
erotic process capable of reorienting self-desire to external objects that resemble the
subject. Amy’s interpretation, however, understands Ash’s traveling mirror-image as
simple “free,” selective but not seeking. Her reﬂection shape-shifts and yet remains
continually a reﬂection of Ash, of her as “me.” The nothingness on the water’s surface

suggests then a stability of self even as Ash’s “me” has moved on. Amy’s interpretation

105

as her own wish-fulﬁllment, marking her own desires of freedom not Ash’s—This is
where the disconnect and obsession and desire—tension between Amy and Ash
accumulates. In the portion of the novel devoted to Amy and Kate’s narrative, Amy
travels. Her story opens with her standing on a train platform, and she continues to move
through migratory spaces. She acquires a caravan on a Scottish sea-side recreation park,
a temporary home for she and Kate made more transitory by her status as an illiterate,
low-paid laborer. If the reader re-turns to Amy’s section, the traumatic event that lead to
her inability to read for at least a decade appears connected not just to Ash’s burning of
Amy’s library and apartment sans her journals but also to her own interpretation of Ash’s
dream. Amy becomes the one who wanders, free to momentarily land and alight as she

desires. Her story, like Ash’s dream, is a series of departures and arrivals.

Fourth....

In many ways, Like reads as the response in a conversation for which the reader
has been denied the opening statement or as a simile where an original object of
reﬂection, or the primary source for the double, has become indistinct, inaccessible, or
unreadable. In this arrangement of the indistinct, the excess of associations becomes an
exploration of narrative deferral and the anxiety and potential freedom recognized in not
reﬂecting in heteronormative structures. As the title forecasts, the novel cannot reﬂect
either woman or her experiences; they are an approximation, an incomplete simile that
gestures toward meaning and connection but that refuses to provide deﬁnition to either

female protagonist.

106

renée hoogland notes that writing that directs woman’s desire away from the
phallus as the organizer of subjectivity and narrative meaning poses an alternative to the
oedipal processes that establish man as man and woman as his reﬂective other. In so far
as the phallus, as an organizer of meaning and sign of narrative mastery, may be critiqued
in feminist models of writing, the alternative produces a writing that resembles the same-
sex eroticism or woman-oriented imagery associated with the lesbian but which, in the
case of WA YL?, may be devoid of the historical erasure and codings of lesbian sexuality.
Like, however, takes up the notions of a lesbian sexuality that have been both historically
absent in Western literature and encoded within ostensibly heterosexual narratives to
produce a self-reﬂexive story of woman-oriented desire. 22

If Enright’s novel conjures a reconﬁguration of Irish literature away from an
oedipal standard toward a feminine self imaged as sisterhood, Like draws upon the
historic in/visibility of lesbians and the coding of lesbian desire to conﬁgure a mobile self
that is consistently disappearing. In this way, the ground of “sexual difference” upon
which Smith’s characters and story are organized refuses easy recuperation into a
nationalized literary tradition and instead participates in/ against the mythmaking
strategies that Bonnie Zimmerman claims to be common to later—twentieth-century
lesbian ﬁction. We could awkwardly squish Smith’s childhood in Scotland and adult life
in England or the corresponding settings in the novel into a reading of Smith’s novel as
nationalized literary expression. For much of the twentieth century, literary critics such

as Hugh MacDiarmid and Gregory Smith promoted the double and embraced self-

 

22 hoogland notes that the “in/visibility” of the contemporary lesbian subject as an excluded or damaged
ﬁgure follows a trend dating back to the seventeenth century. See: hoogland’s Lesbian Conﬁgurations (6)
and Terry Castle’s The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993.

107

contradiction “to make it the basis of a revived national [essentially Scottish] art”
(Carruthers 11). However, such an interpretation of Ali Smith’s underlying politic and
textual doubling dismisses Like’s attentiveness to reading as a method for making self
and meaning according to the registers of sexuality rather than nation. It is thus more
ﬁtting to locate the novel’s political impetus according to its evocations of the myths that
shape a sense of self and its insistence that critical reading/writing alters the relationship
between self and others.

Radical transformations of self necessitate not only a rewriting or revision of the
narrative conventions performing or depicting self but also a corresponding and
commensurate method for reading that self as not-conventional. In that narrative
experimentation carries a politicized imperative for literary, cultural and/or social change,
experimental texts such as WA YL? and Like risk that readers will either recuperate the
revisoned self into more familiar conventional discourses and orders23 or disregard
unfamiliar textual strategies as simply incomprehensible or meaningless.24 What is at
issue then is how experimentation or change in self presentation/perception might be read
in discussions undertaking the intersections of sexuality and self. Often the very notion
of experimentation, which marks a deviation from normative or dominant oedipal-

narrative orders, can, thus, be a strategy for feminist writing and representations of non-

 

23 Recuperative readings inform most of the promotional materials and book reviews of What Are You Like?
by presuming Maria’s and Rose’s self-searching is a quest for “identity,” particularly for their “Irish
identity.” Such interpretations minimize Enright’s questioning of Irishness and representations of the
feminine. “Reading” in this context reﬂects publishing interests and reviewer’s desires to contain and
package the novel’s complexities and more radical narrative/sexual politics into familiar notions of the
“Irish woman.”

24 Cautioning against radical linguistic and narrative experimentation for feminine articulation, scholar
such as Kim Worthington who are skeptical of poststructuralist feminism often criticize l’écritureféminine
on the basis that it becomes “an unintelligible (if deﬁant) babble which is readily dismissed by men as
meaningless” (1 l I). See: Worthington’s Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in Contemporary
Fiction, 1996.

108

heteronormative identity categories, such as feminist, lesbian, gay, queer and so forth.
Thus, writing that deviates from convention either in its imagery or its syntax to represent
or perform a non-masculine subjectivity often walks a tightrope of representational
invisibility to revise (make visible) the repressed woman and the doubly repressed lesbian
out from masculine representational orders.

In the context of later-twentieth-century feminist (re)writings of women’s roles
and symbolic placement in social and narrative structures, the critical challenge has been
twofold. On the one hand, the goal has been to read women out of the silences and
passivities informing traditional ﬁgurations of the feminine. On the other, the strategy has
been to interpret/create new roles, placements, and understandings of and among women
via writing that constructs woman as otherwise to the masculine or as elsewhere and,
thereby, to be experienced/expressed through an alternate imaginary space. Regardless
of critical goal, feminism’s revisionist imperatives have oft been channeled into
remythologizing narrative strategies. Accordingly, the primary means for reading woman
has generally worked on archeological or excavatory models, through which a “true self,”
“originary woman,” or “feminine identity” might be recovered, uncovered or disinterred

25 This excavated woman appears most strongly in feminist

from a masculine imaginary.
revisionist and remythologizing discourses wherein such ﬁgures as the goddess,
(earth)mother and lesbian provide an anti- or pre-oedipal origin for conﬁguring
subjectivity and gendered social relations. Yet, what if woman is revised, as I have

suggested in my reading of the feminine in WA YL? and Like, as a process, a proliferation,

a gesture toward rather than an excavation of the feminine?

 

25 For a broader discussion of ﬁgurations of “woman” and “lesbian” that inform feminism and reading, see
Marilyn Farwell’s Heterosexual Plots, Bonnie Zimmerman’s Safe Sea of Women and Judith Roofs
“Beginning with L,” Lure of Knowledge.

109

In different ways, both of the novels under discussion in this chapter attempt to
revise excavatory feminism through conﬁgurations of twins and lesbian. In WA YL?, the
revision is generational. The daughters who are so like their mother in their quest for self
and meaning do not retrace their mother’s path into marriage and childbearing, but rather
ﬁnd an alternative means for self reﬂection. A ﬁgure of failed feminine liberation, the
mother, Anna, is imprisoned in the phallocentric (woman and death), a ghost looking in
her husband’s mirror and back to her mother’s lists to recuperate a language for her self,
which cannot escape the essentialist move tethering “woman” to genitalia. Her failure
bequeaths the search for a feminine self to her daughters who refuse the fantasies and
mirrors of the patriarchal to favor reﬂections among sisters. If the novel, however,
depicts Anna’s mode of reading/seeing as reminiscent of feminine excavation, the
broader textual moves gesture to a self generated as the multiple images of sisters
(feminine) but as an ultimately ambiguous relationship (indeterminate and impartial
knowledge between sisters).

“Sisterhood” affords the most stable descriptor of Maria and Rose’s relationship
and is, likewise, evocative of Rich’s lesbian continuum that bridges disparate and
increasingly fractured feminisms, and encourages women to look to one another to reﬂect
their desires, goals, as well as their sense of self and place in the world. In this way, even
with the gesture toward proliﬁc and mobile femininity, Enright’s novel—typical of her
ﬁction in general—is never quite rid of the return, the ﬁnal discovery, which reclaims a
woman to support the feminine as “gesture.” And yet, with a bit of irony, Smith’s novel
with its explicit characterizations of Ash’s obsession with another woman does not

connect the dots between the desire in/among women and the image of self emerging out

110

of an excavated feminine. Women may desire intimacy—sexual and/or conversational—
but their desires do not return a clear or concrete image of either woman or lesbian. In
Like, the erotic relationships among women are overtly non-reﬂective, creating a desire
for self that is targeted toward a production not to be found on the page, akin to Deleuze
and Guattari’s lines of ﬂight or Braidotti’s nomadism (see: Chapter 6). Rather, Smith’s
narrative experimentation exposes, claims and plays with the symbolic absentia of the
lesbian, thereby, conﬁguring a ﬂeeting image of self/subjectivity that is attached to what

Ash proposes as a better politic of “not-knowing.”

lll

CHAPTER 3

DIASPORIC MOVES: ELSEWHERE IN ANOTHER PLACE

For, if that view [a new gendered discourse] is nowhere to be seen, not
given in a single text, not recognizable as a representation, it is not that
we—feminists, women—have not yet succeeded in producing it. It is,
rather, that what we have produced is not recognizable, precisely, as a
representation. For that “elsewhere” is not some mythic distant past or
some utopian future history: it is the elsewhere of discourse here and
now, the blind spots, or the space-off, of its representations.

Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender

Whether the national narrative is one of common origins or of gathered
populations, it cannot assimilate groups that maintain important
allegiances and practical connections to a homeland or a dispersed
community located elsewhere. Peoples whose sense of identity is
centrally deﬁned by collective histories of displacement and violent loss
cannot be “cured” by merging into a new national community. This is
especially true when they are the victims of ongoing structural prejudice.
Positive articulations of diaspora identity reach outside the normative
territory and temporality (myth/history) of the nation-state.

J ames Clifford, “Diasporas”
Migratory subjects suggests that Black women/ ’s writing cannot be
located and framed in terms of one specific place, but exist/s in myriad
places and times, constantly eluding the terms of the discussion. It is not
so much formulated as a “nomadic subject, ” although it shares an affinity,
but as a migratory subject moving to speciﬁc places and for deﬁnite
reasons. In the same way as diaspora assumes expansiveness and
elsewhereness, migrations of the Black female subject pursue the path of
movement outside the terms of dominant discourses.

Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity

Critical Evocations of Elsewhere
The narrative and reading strategies within Anne Enright’s and Ali Smith’s

“double” novels generate glimpses of female protagonists as mobile women and

112

 

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elsewhere in relation to a masculine discourse. Smith’s Like, in particular, torques
feminist reading practices that attempt to recuperate woman from the elsewheres—the
suppressions and silences of women in history and myth. Her writing proffers
intermittent, belated glimpses of women in a manner akin to how Teresa de Lauretis and
Luce Irigaray ﬁnd the Alice(s) in alternative looking-glasses and in a multiplicity of
feminist articulations, actions, and activisms.26 As de Lauretis reminds us, sighting
representations of the “feminine” is not a matter of being inside/outside discourse, nor is
it a matter of recuperating a past or a seemingly lost feminine discourse, nor is it a matter
of waiting for a future libratory language/system to appear through social progress.
Instead, representing woman is a matter of the elsewhere of discourse’s “blind spots, the
space off of its representations.”27 Elsewhere, however, is a delightfully slippery and
inexact locational term that de Lauretis takes pains to ground “here and now” since in its
spatial and temporal inexactness, it tends to slip into nostalgic or utopian visions and/or
to become a catchall that masks our conceptual befuddlement and camouﬂages what may
be the limit of a theoretical model. Thus, elsewhere’s rhetorical and theoretical power

lies in its gesture rather than its capacity to denote, to specify, which makes it both

 

26 See the introduction to Teresa de Lauretis’ Alice Doesn 't (1984). In This Sex Which is Not One

(1977/ 1985), Luce Irigaray reads out of “Alice” and her relationship to the looking glass more broadly to
write of woman as signifying from “elsewhere”: “When she returns, it is to set off again from elsewhere.
From another point of pleasure, or of pain. One would have to listen with another ear, as if hearing an
"other meaning ” always in the process of weaving itself of embracing itself with words, but also of getting
rid of words in order not to become ﬁxed, congealed in them... It is useless, then to trap women in the exact
deﬁnition of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so that it will be clear; they are already
elsewhere in that discursive machinery where you expected to surprise them” (29).

7 “Space off” is a cinematic term, which de Lauretis explains is “the space not visible in the frame but
inferable from what the frame makes visible. In classical and commercial cinema, the space-off 1, in fact,
erased, or, better, recontained and sealed into the image by the cinematic rules of narrativization (ﬁrst
among them, the shot/reverse-shot system). But avant-garde cinema has shown the space—off to exist
concurrently and alongside the represented space, has made it visible by remarking its absence in the frame
or in the succession of frames, and has shown it to include not only the camera. . .but also the spectator (the
point where the image is received, re-constructed, and re-produced in/as subjectivity)” (26).

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apropos to discussions of the feminine that work to destabilize discourses of patriarchy as
well as those that tend toward recursion.

In the context of diaspora theory, a predominantly race-, ethnic-, and nation-based
(sub)ﬁeld of Cultural/Postcolonial Studies, elsewhere is likely to call forth many more
seemingly grounded locations and signiﬁcations: a lost homeland or sense of belonging,
or perhaps a migrant’s new or future home, or absent, displaced family and cultural
traditions. In the 19903, James Clifford promoted “diaspora” as a ﬁgure/term for
identifying radically disparate “cosmopolitan hybrid” communities of migrants and as the
organizing nomenclature for a historically and socially situated ﬁeld of cultural study.28
His anthropological and race-centered approach to reading diaspora as a counter to
dominant discourse (i.e, that of Euro/American nation) works another register of
difference than that of de Lauretis and studies of gender; yet, his partiality to elsewhere as
a way to characterize “diaspora” implies a similarly slippery rhetorical move. Drawing
upon patterns of modern exile, the dispersed middle-passage theorized by Paul Gilroy,
and studies of non-Zionist Jewish communities, Clifford traces a version of diaspora that
is not quite like, but also not quite distinct from, the assimilation-oriented connotations of
immigration. And, with a radical anti-nation potential, diasporic cosmopolitan
communities can be “settled” (i.e., not nomadic) but excluded from and refuse to
contribute to national projects and visions of their resident country (a nomadic

characteristic). Diasporic allegiances and alliances simply remain literally elsewhere.

 

28 Etymologically “diaspora” comes from the Greek forms of dispersion/disperse and to sow or scatter.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of the term dispersion to describe the movement of
people originates in Devarim, the ﬁfth book of the Jewish Torah also known as Deuteronomy in the
Christian Old Testament. The use of “diaspora,” as a term pertaining more speciﬁcally to groups of people
than the more general “dispersal,” comes into favor in the late-nineteenth century to describe in particular
the large-scale movement of Jews from “the East.” It carries connotations elsewhere in the form of Moses’
Promised Land.

114

According to Clifford, these links to an elsewhere (perhaps homeland, perhaps
cultural, familial roots, and so forth) disrupt the myths and histories constructing the
nation’s imaginary community by maintaining cultural and political afﬁliations “outside
the normative territory and temporality of the nation-state” (307). In a related conceptual
move, Stuart Hall claims, “the concept of diaspora provides an alternative framework for
thinking about ‘imagined communities’.” In his essay “From ‘Routes’ to Roots,” Hall
deﬁnes diaspora as that which “cuts across the traditional boundaries of the nation-state,
provides linkages across the borders of national communities and highlights connections
which intersect—and thus disrupt and unsettle—our hitherto settled conceptions of
culture, place, and identity” (207). Thus, one of the common characteristics of elsewhere
is its capacity to destabilize the dominant discourses and narratives of power, proposing
another location to direct desires for belonging and project visions of self and community.

If Clifford and Hall embrace the hybridity and mobility associated with diaspora
to theorize primarily African, Afro- and Indian-Caribbean (im)migrant communities in
Britain, such scholars of gender and migrant literatures as Anuradha Dingwhaney
Needham and Carole Boyce Davies have been more cautious, or, in Needham’s
sentiments, “use[s] the term ‘diaspora’ with some trepidation” to describe migrant
women’s writing to and from the metropole (England). In Using the Master ’s Tools:
Resistance and the Literature of the A frican and South Asian Diasporas (2000),
Needham focuses in part on the exclusion of women writers from postcolonial, diaspora-
focused studies, and she suggests that the troubled relationship such women writers as
Ama Ata Aidoo from Ghana have with “home”—whether home is “lost” or not—makes

their work an uneasy ﬁt within what she sees as the still predominantly masculine

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structured diaspora literary studies (male subjects travel; women stay home). 29 Needham
and Davies suggest that if women are/have been part of the depictions of African and
Caribbean diaspora(s), their experiences and writing reside “elsewhere” to the broad
strokes of diasporic cultural and literary studies.30 In Black Women, Writing and Identity
(1994), Davies endorses the appellations of migrancy as a double-edged terminology that
she uses to describe how Black women writers and their work “e1ude[s] the terms of
discussion.” “I want to pursue the understanding of the resisting subject,” she states,
“and apply it in different ways to the diasporic elsewheres of a radical Black diasporic
subjectivity” (37). What makes her formulation radical is of course the inclusion of
women and Continental reading practices of Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous which
emphasize the mobility of subjects in language. While her critical goal is to complicate
narrow, essentialist deﬁnitions of race and “Black” in American literary studies, Davies
employs multiple formulations of subjectivity from psychoanalysis to postcolonialism,
depending on the text she is reading in order to account for the “resisting subject,” “the
migrant subject,” the “Black female subject” who “asserts agency as [she/it] crosses the

borders, journeys, migrates and so re-claims as it re-asserts” (37). 3 '

 

29 In Needham’s critical study of metropolitan writers oﬁen leﬁ out of postcolonial analyses of diaspora
writing, she uses Khachig Tololyan’s and James Clifford’s deﬁnitions of diaspora now opened up from
depicting a speciﬁc Jewish, Greek and Armenian “dispersion” to speak more broadly of the communities of
immigrants, expatriates, refugees, and so forth that share within their abroad-community a “longing,
memory and (dis)identiﬁcation” with a homeland. But she likewise acknowledges that “diaspora” is a
fraught term when uncritically employed to describe the writing of women from places of dispersion.
Davies’ formulation of a “migrant subjectivity” in Black Women, Writing and Identity is particularly
nuanced and intriguing. In many ways, however, her arguments about subjectivity, mobility and generative
openness of feminine writing call for a particular tension, which ties the “elsewhere” to a recuperative,
excavatory feminist strategy: “Yet, this is the reality [exclusion and disenfranchisement] out of which one
must reacquire the ‘power to create’ and re-create. Black women writers are engaged in all kinds of
processes of reacquisition of the ‘tongue.’ And these, I assert, are movements of re-connection and, at times,
of re-evaluation.”
3' Davis is invested in both using “Black” as a kind of Spivakian strategic essentialist term and expanding
“Black” to include Caribbean, African, and South Asian migrant writers who are oft excluded in US

116

I, however, am more cautious than Davies about the power of “re” emboldened as
it may be by the movement of a migrancy that moves to speciﬁc places for speciﬁc
reasons. What exactly is re-claimed in Black women’s re-assertions of self and from
where? From the mother? From the homeland? Certainly, not from historical narratives
or discourses of the diaspora. The elsewhere in models of diaspora patterned on exile
often evokes the lost motherland, the place longed for but made inaccessible due to
political, economic, or select idiosyncrasies related to personal temperrnent.32 Unlike
ﬁgurations of exile, diaspora tends to diffuse elsewhere so that the recuperations of
origins or essential identity are complicated but ultimately desired. If “elsewhere denotes
movement” as Davies claims in quoting Michael Hanchard, it may be most powerful,
most resisting and disruptive when, as de Lauretis notes, elsewhere is tethered to the
“here and now,” spinning through discourse to reveal a feminine that exists just out of
sight.

Such is the rhetorical strength and activism of Dionne Brand’s poetry, novels, and

ﬁlms.33 Brand’s writing and ﬁlmmaking expresses and extends a social activism that is

 

African-American literary canons that tend to narrowly deﬁne “Black” according to US history of slavery
and Civil Rights movements.

32 In so far as diaspora might account for communal experiences and what Clifford calls a diasporic
identity, it is a descriptor somewhat at odds with the tropes of subjectivity and mobility featured in this
dissertation. One could argue, as Caren Kaplan has in Questions of Travel, that diaspora is primarily a
ramped-up revisioning of “modern exile,” which if more relevant to contemporary mass migrations and the
rapid technologies associated with later-twentieth-century travel and community-building, and diaspora still
carries forth the modern exile’s imperial proclivities and the ahistoricism of exile literary studies and
cultural theorizations. 1 agree that “diaspora” shares with exile an attendant “longing, memory, and
(dis)identiﬁcation with homeland” that I will discuss in the following chapter in the context of returns to
the motherland, but the potential dispersal of exilic home/motherland into multiple sties suits the
complexities of women’s writing engaging the Caribbean as theme and setting.

33 Dionne Brand immigrated from Trinidad to Canada in the earl 19505 to pursue degrees in English and
Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Most well-known as a poet, Brand’s writing tends to blend
literary styles of lyricism, autobiography, cultural criticism, and narrative (ﬁction/novel). She has been an
outspoken and savvy anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-patriarchy activist, often as critical of social activist
organizations and visions as she is of the broader social oppressions and programs she sees operating at the
levels of national policies and of a masculine social imaginary.

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complex and proliﬁc—women-oriented, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist.
Her writing takes up Caribbean themes and settings often within the context of women’s
movements between the Caribbean and Canada to explore (im)migrant conditions
relevant to her politics. Topics of migrancy, diaspora, and exile are prominent motifs in
her writing but are less evident in her characterization of her female protagonists. For
example, if migrancy can be identiﬁed according to one’s movements to speciﬁc places
for speciﬁc reasons as Davies and Rosi Braidotti note, the migrant subject—whether
racially or psychically proscribed—is predominantly a conscious, discerning, and
opportunistic traveler (Black Women 37, Nomadic Subjects 24). Migrancy, not Only in
the context of Anglo-Caribbean writing but in other race/ethnic literatures of dislocation
and relocation, generally asserts economic reasons for a woman’s movement from one
country or region to another. This is the case in Brand’s characterization of Caribbean
mothers and families who move to North America to work as domestic laborers, and
other unskilled, but occasionally skilled, workers. Her female protagonists, however,
complicate such models of migrancy, if they ﬁt the models at all. These women often do
not know why they move or they move for one reason and they later realize (or the story
reveals to the reader) that they traveled for reasons they were/are unaware of or cannot
acknowledge.
In Another Place, Not Here

Similar to Ali Smith’s Like, Dionne Brand’s ﬁrst novel, In Another Place, Not
Here (1996), is divided into two discrete sections with two female protagonists who were
once lovers. The ﬁrst half of the novel is devoted to Elizete’s account of falling in love

with Verlia and her emigration to Canada after Verlia’s death. Elizete, born and raised

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on an unnamed Caribbean island, works her husband’s sugar cane ﬁelds alongside other
low-wage laborers this is until she meets and falls in love with Verlia. A returned
emigrant and communist revolutionary, Verlia embodies for Elizete a version of life and
womanhood that extends beyond the plantation that has conﬁned Elizete’s sense of place
and desires (laborer and wife). “Verl was sure,” Elizete remembers, “Sure of everything.
And sure like that was not something in my life. I was sure that I would wake up each
day, I was sure that I had to work cane, I was sure that the man they give me to was
Isaiah Ferdinand. . .I was sure of what anybody would be sure of. Spite, hunger, rain. But
Verl is sure of what she make in her own mind and what she make didn’t always exist”
(6-7). Elizete’s surety rooted in her experience of the plantation does not extend to a
broader knowledge of the island and its socio-political workings overall. Prior to Verlia
and immigrant experiences in Toronto, Elizete’s “politics” and world-vision are limited
to what Jamaica Kincaid calls a “smallness of place” typical of Caribbean island thinking
that restricts Elizete’s knowledge to her immediate surroundings and to issues of daily
survival. In many ways, however, Elizete’s portion of the novel is the more complex
narrative, both stylistically and conceptually. Through a non-linear, polytonal, and multi-
dialect style, her narrative zigzags through childhood memories on the island and through
her search abroad to understand Verlia. Each dialect-shift coordinates Elizet’s altered
sense of self with her primary relationships—lover(Verlia), absent-mother (unknown),
fantasy mother (Adela), substitute-mother-caretaker (Moriah), husband (Isaiah). Overall,
her story proposes an alternative narrative to Verlia’s relatively linear and historicizing

account of her radical activism, which in its recording suggests that the underground

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militant cell Verlia joins to bring class revolution to the island is a small vision and
equally, albeit differently, limited as Elizete’s.

A cross-current to Elizete’s narrative, Verlia’s story follows Elizete’s and tells of
her childhood emigration to Canada and the radical, separatist activism through which
she strove to embody Che Guevara’s revolutionary philosophies to effect socio-political
change ﬁrst in Canada and ﬁnally in the Caribbean. “She bet all her life on the revolution.
She had no place else to go, no other countries, no other revolution” (114). Her narrative
stages the prison-like effects of her activism on her body. As her body experiences limits
of revolution—manifesting as increasingly debilitating joint pain and headaches—her
narrative breaks down, becoming more disconnected and eventually overtaken by other
voices that speak for her and about her death. Born on the island but having emigrated
with her parents as a teenager, Verlia returns to the island a grown woman to ﬁght for
social (class and racial) justice and equality. In contrast to visions of “a migrant’s return”
to either the motherland or a Caribbean birthplace associated with the early-twentieth-
century Negritude Movement or more contemporary pan-African literature, the return
home in Verlia’s story does not envision a new beginning nor rejuvenate latent or nascent
revolutionary anti-colonial causes. 34 In fact, the return home to enable revolution in
Verlia’s case parallels the trend in Anglo-Caribbean women’s writing to problematize
and undercut literary visions of national and political revolutions with images of
politically “meaningless” self-sacriﬁce.

What remains meaningful in Brand’s novel is the loving relationships between

women who travel between the Caribbean and Canada—Elizete and Verlia, Verlia and

 

34 1 am thinking particularly of Aimé Césaire’s poem “Catiers d’un Retours au Pays Natal” (Return to My
Native Land) here, which while not of the “Anglo-Caribbean” literary tradition also suits the vision of a
migrant’s return to the place of his birth to spark a cultural/political revolution.

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her girlfriend Adela in Toronto, and ﬁnally Adela and Elizette who meet at the end of the
novel, and overtake Verlia’s narrative. The erotic, signiﬁed through the relationships
between these three women, models an eroticism of proximity, stressing an emotional
and sensual connection to the world reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s embrace of a feminine
sensuality in “The Uses of the Erotic” (1978) as a method to create healthy, loving
connections among daughters, mothers, sisters and lovers. Her erotic is “an assertion of
the life force of women: of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and uses of
which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our living, our
work, our lives” (341). While Lorde often employs images of her own family in what she
calls her “biomythographic” writing to maintain a connection to the Caribbean as a
unifying source within a Black diasporic community abroad, Brand’s novel is less
celebratory, more cynical of both the value of the Caribbean as a connective tissue for
communities abroad as well as the capacity of imaginative returns to offer anything more
than a kind of nostalgia that keeps (im)migrants from living politically engaged lives I
abroad.

The return to mother/homeland in women’s writing about the Anglo-Caribbean is
oft marked by a female protagonist’s recognition of self-hatred or trauma of
woman/motherhood accompanied by expressions of dislocation. This vein in Caribbean
themed literature, which includes such texts as Joan Riley’s The Unbelongt'ng (1985),
Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988) and Lucy (1990), and Michelle Cliffs No
Telephone to Heaven (1987) generally portrays a (im)migrant woman’s either

imaginative or literal return to the Caribbean as the return to a site of trauma, distress,

121

and/or unredeemable violence.35 Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here, follows this trend,
or at least it does in part. Paralleling the plot of Cliffs No Telephone to Heaven, one of
Brand’s protagonists, Verlia, returns to the Caribbean island of her birth (a ﬁctional,
unnamed island) to take part in what will eventually become a failed social revolution,
one in which she will die, leaping from a cliff in a barrage of bullets shot from an
American military helicopter. Cliff’s strikingly similar wandering protagonist in No
Telephone, Clare Savage, also dies in a failed uprising, shot by American military forces
protecting a ﬁlm crew in Jamaica. According to Cliff, Clare’s death in Jamaica assures
that Clare “in death has complete identiﬁcation with the homeland. . . [becoming]
indistinguishable from the ground” (“Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character” 265). It is
a signiﬁcantly different ﬁguration of female mobility and a woman’s relationship to
home in Brand’s characterization of Verlia who instead of becoming one with the island
“ﬂies away to a place less ﬂeshy,” into another place, into an elsewhere (247). Verlia’s
characterization, however, does draw upon themes of mother/daughter strife and self-
hatred in a manner common to such Anglo-Caribbean ﬁction as that of Joan Riley and
Jamaica Kincaid. For instance, Abena, Verlia’s former lover, describes the Caribbean as
the source for a tradition of undesirable and damaging relationships between generations
of women. “Mothers,” forced by economic hardship to migrate, says Abena, “washed
our [daughters] faces in their self-hatred. Self-hatred they had learned from the white

people whose toilets they had cleaned...” (231).

 

35 In as much as Clare Savage is a mobile female protagonist, she is also a fairly conventional character of
exile and return to the motherland. Michelle Cliff states, “At the end of No Telephone to Heaven, Clare
Savage has cast her lot, quietly and somewhat tentatively, but deﬁnitely. She ends her life burned into the
landscape of Jamaica, literally, as one of a small band of guerrillas engaged in a symbolic act of
revolution. ...In her death she has complete identiﬁcation with the homeland; soon enough she will be
indistinguishable from the ground. Her bones will turn to potash, as did her ancestors’ bones” (265).

122

Verlia’s story is only part of the novel’s characterization of mobile women and
their relationship to place and one another since Brand’s novel is a double-narrative
focused on two protagonists but also includes a range of dialects and other women’s
perspectives. The sutured story of Elizete and Verlia doubles female protagonists and
likewise doubles the possible contexts of feminine dislocation and (re)turn to a place of
belonging. In these multiplied contexts, the literalizations of the mother/homeland also
become dispersed between an inaccessible Africa, an unnamed Caribbean island, and
Canada. Just as the term Caribbean is a marker of heterogeneity, a creolized collection
of islands, languages, cultures, colonial projects and histories, so too is the concept and
location of motherland in Anglo-Caribbean literature. Is the motherland England as
found in the writings of George Lamming and Joan Riley? Is the motherland a
distant/differed Africa as in the writings of Caryl Phillips? Is she the multi-islanded
Caribbean of Audre Lorde and Jamaica Kincaid? Is the mother/land split between two or
more locations as in the writings of VS. Naipaul and Michelle Cliff, who evoke India
and Africa, respectively, to ﬁgure a character’s rebirth in England, the United States,
and/or the Caribbean? 36 Or is she somewhere else altogether? Brand’s novel is
intriguing precisely because it draws upon nearly all of these conﬁgurations of
mother/homeland to redirect notions of belonging away from the discursive weight of
masculinist representations of home that conﬂate feminine imagery (virgin, mother, spirit)
with land. Brand’s sutured story, however, recalibrates belonging to the space of Black

women’s bodies and the erotic, not necessarily maternal, relationships among women,

 

36 Carole Boyce Davies notes, “. ..for [Audre] Lorde and [Paule] Marshall, both Afro-Caribbean/American
in terms of parentage, the re-connection with home occurs in at least three levels—ﬁrst, the parental home,
the Caribbean homeland occupying the secondary level, and at the tertiary level the African identiﬁcation.

This tertiary level is one at which Cliff gets sustenance...(Black Women 91).

123

thereby, dispersing mother/homeland. In fact, in Another Place mother/homeland(s)—
particularly Africa and the Caribbean—are sites not of loss but of misrecognition,
misunderstanding (the limit of knowledge), and serve to displace disturbing and

complicated desires.

The Problem of Elsewhere in Verlia’s Activism

Verlia’s return to the Caribbean follows a fairly conventional model
diasporic/exilic desire for return to the homeland in so far as Verlia escapes from the
“parched well” and speechlessness of immigrant life in Canada to ﬁght a worthy
revolution on the island of her birth (124). However, unlike images of masculine exile
that revision and revitalize the mother/homeland often through bloody sacriﬁce and death,
Verlia’s death—depicted as a leap away from the island—does not alter the political
landscape of the island, suggesting the failure of a returned migrant/exile either to bring
about socio-political change or to produce a new social vision for racial and/or national
self-determination.37 As the title, In Another Place, Not Here, suggests, the novel’s main
themes—dislocation from self and belonging, escape from oppression, and the radical
possibilities of (re)tuming to a place of feminine pleasure and passion—are reconﬁgured
away from “land” and to the more mobile and ﬂuid tropes of air and sea. Verlia’s leap,
which Elizete recounts early in the novel, is a scene that repeats throughout her narrative
of grieving and searching for what Verlia knew and then her death scene returns to close

the novel:

 

37 Some critics such as Johanna X. K. Garvey claim that the unnamed island in Another Place bears
striking resemblance to Grenada and might be historically situated at the US invasion of Grenada in 1983.
While a histo—geographical location may help make connections between historicized events and Verlia’s
death, it is more signiﬁcant that the island remains unnamed, potentially historically ambiguous, and, thus,
further dislocated from the “literal,” and representations of the “real.”

I24

She’s ﬂying out to sea and in the emerald she sees the sea, its eyes
translucent, its back solid going some place so old there’s no memory of it.

She’s leaping. . . .Her body is cool, cool in the air. Her body has fallen

away, is just a line, an electric current, the sign of lightness left after

lightning, a faultless arc to the deep turquoise deep. She doesn’t need air.

She’s in some other place already, less tortuous, less ﬂeshy.” (246-7)

This theme is crucial to the novel’s ﬁgurations of mobile female protagonists and
their (dis)oonnections from diasporic (migrant and exilic) models of belonging and self.
If Verlia is dead in the ﬁrst few pages and her death repeats throughout the novel, the
repetition of her ﬂight to elsewhere not only produces a kind of corpselessness to imagine
an (im)migrant’s death, but also derails the narrative potential for closure that death
secures in narrative. In the context of Verlia’s portion of the story, her leap suggests that
she has connected with a version of the elsewhere that does not cause her physical and
psychic pain in the same way her political activism and unwittingly masculinist notion of
elsewhere invariably does.

Verlia’s story is primarily an accounting of her political activism in Toronto and
her work back home in the Caribbean. She is a volatile and energetic character, as
passionate as she is contradictory. Her characterization does, however, grant access to a
range of relationships to and longings for elsewhere in diasporic and women-centered
representations of mobile subjects. Verlia recounts that the Black immigrant community
in Toronto is a diverse community where “everyone is from someplace else”—Jamaica,
Nigeria, Trinidad, South Africa, and other implied sites associated with African diaspora

(181). It is very much resembles Clifford’s description of cosmopolitan hybridity and his

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claim that “diaspora communities are ‘not here’ to stay.” “Diaspora cultures,” continues
Clifford, “thus mediate, in a lived tension, the experiences of separation and
entanglement, of living here and remembering/desiring another place” (311). In contrast
to Clifford’s version of diasporic desire and community, Verlia is a character who comes
to despise the collective “nostalgia,” the shared desire to be elsewhere. Instead, she
recognizes that, yes, this desire for another place (Aﬁica or Caribbean) is a response to
the racism, ghettoizing, and socio-political and economic marginalization that immigrants
experience: “It (Toronto) wraps them in the same skin and slides them to the side like so
much meat wrapped in brown paper” (182). But even with such insight, it is a version of
collective separation that she cannot endorse or abide. For Verlia, the (im)migrant
nostalgia, the looking to the past, to another place appears to her a dangerous
immobilizing acquiescence, a denigrating balm to make collective poverty and raced
disenfranchisement palatable and even essential to a collective sense of belongingness.
“All this thinking of another place. Well she was there and doesn’t want to go back [to
the Caribbean]. Give her the day-to-day hardness, real and here. She didn’t want to be
anywhere but now, nowhere but the what to do about” (183). Her resistances are,
therefore, multi-edged: posing a challenge to Canada’s white majority that prefers its
Black immigrants to be invisible laborers in “their place” as well as rejecting the
retrograde nostalgia that provides coherence to an ethnically and sexually diverse
community.

In many ways, Verlia simply impersonates the voice of social justice activists
calling for reforrnations of power structures in her call for something “real and

here. . ..now.” But she is also impatient and prone to despair when she cannot control the

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outcomes of activist actions or even her own desires. When her protesting and
community volunteerism do not produce a visible and radical social change in Toronto,
she channels her desire for change through a pan-African underground military
organization called the Committee for Revolutionary Struggle. Verlia seems to miss the
irony in her new political afﬁliation through which she will raise money to supply
revolutions in Africa and the Caribbean. While she initially participates in local protests
and volunteers for assistance programs with her partner Abena, the labors of “day-to-day
hardness” begin to seem akin to the affects of nostalgia, a balm, a palliative and
ultimately ineffective measure to take on the monolithic “white city” (183, 180).

In addition, her sexual desires complicate and seem to undermine her vision of
Black social justice. For instance, while at a “Rally against the Klan,” she ﬁnds herself
inexplicably attracted to a demonstrator on the opposite side of the cordon, a white
woman with “KKK” tattooed above her cleavage. Verlia cannot sort out her response. Is
she drawn to the woman’s breast? To the whiteness of her skin? Or to a symbol of white
power? These latter two possibilities disturb her, suggesting a gap between her
conscious desires for racial justice and a less readable desire for a version of power and
belonging that are shaped through white standards and constructions of racial difference.
For while she understands that such ciphers of racial difference (skin, tattoo) mark the
fantasy of race and signify a white “superiority” made possible through the labor and
oppression of Blacks, she is less able to read her own desire in relation to such signs.
Verlia links the possibility that she might unconsciously desire the woman’s whiteness
rather than her breast with her understanding of her own mother’s internalized racism that

manifest as very “white” desires for respectability and class mobility. If Verlia’s desire is

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an unconscious desire for whiteness, it is one she cannot fully confront or address, and it
suggests to her a new version of the self-hatred passed from Caribbean mothers to their
daughters.

While the various and insidious manifestations of racism in Toronto and her
potential self-hatred establish Verlia as a compelling and complex character, they do not
coalesce into an overall endorsement of Verlia’s brand of activism in the novel. Rather,
the politic of the novel works on and ultimately endorses the logic of a gendered
elsewhere rather than a racialized, diasporic elsewhere. In a highly contradictory move,
Verlia travels back to the island of her birth, the place not exactly “here and now,” part of
a dispersal of her underground “cell” who gradually leave for revolutions in Zimbabwe,
Guyana and “elsewhere.” Verlia’s (re)turn to the island is, however, a move that appears
to her girlfriend, Abena, simultaneously disingenuous in that Verlia leaves to avoid
confronting the “here and now,” but is also completely genuine in that Verlia’s goal is to
put her beloved Che’s teachings into action someplace where they might matter. She
repeats phrases from his journals over and over—“True revolution is guided by great
feelings of love”—a mantra for self-love to be made reality in what Verlia longs to
believe will be class revolution in the Caribbean, a political activism that on the surface
takes the issue of her disconcerting desires and potential self-hatred out of the equation
(183). Her reverse-migration is, thus, a diverting of her desire to make real that which
was imagined from one place to another, in particular, to alter the socio-political
landscape of a former home according to the insights of the displaced diasporic subject.

In this way, hers is perhaps a common exile-inﬂected vision/project, one that substitutes

128

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the liberation of a diverse, Aﬁican community abroad (Canada) with the liberation of
workers from state power (neo-colonialism) in the Caribbean.

This replacement ultimately fails to satisfy Verlia, however, because it does not
deliver what she believes she wants and reveals itself in ways that she cannot connect to
her very practical model of activism and social change. “It [island labor revolution] had
begun to seem endless, useless, and she hated that feeling. Just like home again. She
needed to move, feel light” (190). On the level that Verlia cannot read her desire but that
we who read her story can, her return to Caribbean translates as part and parcel of a self-
oriented desire to love herself, to ﬁx that which the “mother” has broken, to heal a mind
and body that feel “torn,” “afraid,” and constantly “hurts” (223, 224, 227). Verlia’s
(mis)direction of her desire does not level the necessity for political activism, and sexual-
racial-class revolution; rather, it depicts a complex and illogical manifestation of politics
as militant “opposition.”

Verlia is a tragic character; the failures of her island revolution parallel her failure
to liberate herself from both hetero-masculinist notions of the “the mother” and the,
consequent, damaging mother/daughter relationships manifesting through a race-centered
migratory labor economy. If Verlia is a familiar character of troubled national and sexual
revolutions, her characterization undercuts exilic conventions that portend that “exile”
can create or enable a new body politic for homeland or elsewhere. In Alien-nation and
Repatriation: Translating Identity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature, Patricia Joan
Saunders observes that the popularity of exile among diaspora writers promoting political
change can largely be attributed to the “power of ‘Elsewhere’ [that] historically endowed

Caribbean male writers with (canonical, political, and cultural) authority to speak on

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behalf of the nation and its citizens, despite their distance from both” (93). If elsewhere
provides an authorizing distance from the homeland—a vantage point to see political
options, and a valued disinterestedness—it also paradoxically positions the homeland as
authentic, as real precisely because it has become elsewhere to the site of exile. Caren
Kaplan notes of modem(ist) exile and cultural authenticity: “for the exile the site of the
authentic is continually displaced, located in another country” (Questions 64). Yet,
elsewhere has a tendency to ping-pong back and forth between home and away,
particularly in Brand’s novel, depending on the (im)migrant’s literal location in the here
and now. While Verlia’s raced and classed revolutionary vision is already formed
“elsewhere,” it must then, according to diaspora/exile logics of elsewhere, require an
authentic site, another place, another culture to support its vision. The obvious answer
would be Africa. But Brand’s novel is not so obvious. While migrant Afro-Caribbean
women’s dislocation from Africa typically manifests in Anglo-Caribbean writing through
accounts of slavery and (neo)colonialism which do play a role in Brand’s characterization
of Elizete, the novel avoids making any claims to an authentic or real Africa as an
elsewhere that might symbolically ground an essential Blackness to fuel and unify
political change.

The novel reveals an alternative and particularly female experience of exile that
travels with women and is radically altered through a female erotic.38 For if woman is
already the in symbolic site of the exile/Other as Cixous and Irigaray propose (see
chapter 4) and migrant women are doubly othered in the “host” nation as Audre Lorde

recognizes, the political vision that can articulate woman cannot be one that re-visions

 

38 See Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Uses of the Erotic” (I976).

130

nation or woman in conventional, heteronormative imaginings of family and home. In
this fashion, Verlia’s misconstruing of revolutionary love and Elizete’s meditations on
her affair with Verlia suggest that the site of radical political change gains its vision from
the love and erotic desires for/among women. The female body is, thus, repeatedly
disengaged from what Verlia calls the “masculine seduction” in Toronto that regulates
her body and her desires for the purposes of the national (Canadian) body. In this way,
Elizete’s imaginative “return” is less identiﬁably connected to the island, but rather to
Verlia’s body, and the memories of her and Verlia in bed and Verlia leaping from the
edge of the cliff amidst gunﬁre.

The crisscrossing of the protagonists’ between the Caribbean and Canada also
complements the complexity of dislocated cultural belonging and suggests that the
belonging associated with home for generations of black women in/of/from the
Caribbean is always paradoxically deﬁned. Belonging in the context of Brand’s novel is
shaped through both a series of dislocations from “home” and the pleasure of connecting
with another, albeit differently, mobile woman. Such is the image toward the end of the
novel when Elizete and Adela meet in an immigrant aid center in Canada and take over
what had been Verlia’s narrative. Signiﬁcantly, their relationship becomes something
more than aid-worker and struggling immigrant when their conversation focuses on their
mutual love for and loss of Verlia. The novel’s doubled protagonists and their
geographic movements to and from an unnamed Caribbean island realign the possibilities
of return and belonging to a woman’s body in ﬂight, becoming mobile and light. The
“she dreaming,” is an image Elizete uses to describe Verlia and her desire for political

change (16). “She dreaming” does not craft a vision of political revolution for nation but

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rather a vision of a revolution of the masculine social imaginary that is performed by the

“bridge” that women’s bodies make to the “elsewhere” (16).

The Elsewhere of Orphans

The thwarted return, and the inability to return to a motherland, are common
themes in the literature on/of diasporic exile.39 Such Carribbean writers as George
Lamming and VS. Naipaul have built their literary careers writing about and critiquing
images of the exile’s fraught return. If Lamming’s novels and critical writings such as
The Emigrants (1954) and The Pleasure of Exile (1960) focus on the migrant’s
experience in the metropole (London), they do so in a manner suiting Patricia Joan
Saunder’s claim that exile creates authorizing visions. Lamming’s emphasis is on the
mother as colonizer, and England as the motherland—a racist site that both enervates
Caribbean immigrant sons and reinvigorates them to redeﬁne themselves as men.
Conversely, in Naipaul’s novels, the oedipal relationship between mother and migrant
son is one of impossible desires and deferrals of meaning, and his ﬁction consistently
portrays masculine subjects emerging out of colonized spaces (broken motherlands)
never to become men. Naipaul’s themes of an impaired, perhaps tragically broken,
masculinity can be found in such novels The Enigma of Arrival (1988) and Half A Life
(2002). In the latter, Little Willie (honestly, that is his phallo-anxious nickname) travels

from India to England to Africa and, ﬁnally, to Berlin, a journey that is very much a

 

39 Myriam Chaney notes: “[E]xile needs to be reviewed with an awareness of an alienation that occurs not
only as a disjunction from ancestral African culture or Caribbean cultures, which are every day left behind
in the search for economic or other freedoms, but as a component of everyday life for women within the
islands themselves. Exile, seen in this light, is an insidious part of the marginalization of women at ‘home’
as well” (qtd in Garvey 487). And while Chaney is speaking speciﬁcally of the relationship between exile
and home in Afro-Caribbean literature, this trend is also found in later-twentieth and early-twenty-ﬁrst
century(s) Atlantic Rim Women’s texts.

132

compensatory act, a search for his father’s and, hence, his own masculinity. If diasporic
exile provides a model to negotiate masculinity or to mourn its loss, then the exile of
women within the “motherland” would seem to offer on the one hand a tradition of “self-
hatred” passed from mothers to daughters, as in Verlia’s characterization and, on the
other, a potential for dislocation from the mother and cultural memory as in found in
Elizete.

While Verlia’s story tells of mothers who internalize white racism and patriarchy
as a self-hatred, Elizete’s portrays mothers as absent, disinterested and spiritually,
psychically empty. Her mothers—literal and ﬁgurative—are multiple. As a toddler, her
biological mother (name unknown, a woman not remembered) left Elizete under the
saaman tree of Moriah, an older, childless woman who if not wealthy had land, a cow,
and seemingly enough to raise a child. The last of a line of generations of daughters,
Moriah is a disinterested caretaker, and she talks more oﬁen to the walls of her house
than she speaks to Elizete. She tells the story of their great-great-great-ma, Adela, who
came to the island aboard a slave ship as labor and breed-stock for what was then a cocoa
plantation (later the sugarcane plantation that Elizete will work). Adela’s tale is one of
grief, resistance, and retribution compiled through a series of women’s voices, not always
Moriah’s or Elizete’s, but also other unnamed narrative voices, signaled through a shift in
dialect. Her voice produces an arrival without departure, for her grief and resistance
manifest in a dual refusal, neither speaking of Africa nor acknowledging her enslavement
and life on the island. She called the island “Nowhere” and it is thus ﬁtting that the
island remains without another, “ofﬁcial” name in the novel (18). As a mother ﬁgure,

Adela signiﬁes brokenness, a refusal to bridge past to present and Africa to the Caribbean

133

for her many daughters born into slavery or for the future generations of women. She is
the ghostly trace of a someplace, an elsewhere, an Africa prior to her enslavement that
cannot be accessed but that Elizete both tries to understand and eventually challenges: “I
think deep about how a name Nowhere could make sense and I discover that Adela had to
make her mind empty to conceive it. The place she miss must have been full and living
and take every corner in she mind so when she reach, there was no more room for here”
(20).

If Adela is the direct connection to Africa—the potential matriarch of slave
history and memory—she signiﬁes a lost connection, memory, and history. “Leave is all
she could think so much she wasn’t there” (36). In Elizete’s childhood loneliness, she
makes Adela her invisible friend, realigning the relationship between mothers and
daughters. They carry on conversations about ants and the beauty of the island’s ﬂora
and fauna, and while Elizete understands Adela’s grief about the loss of her African
family and home, she does not understand Adela’s reﬁisal to acknowledge the pleasures
of the island or to begin again with naming, claiming it as another place and “home.”
Taking her imaginary Adela by the hand, so to speak, Elizete extends Adela’s single act
of naming (a resistance) and begins to name all that she comes across but does not know
the words for—“tear up cloth ﬂowers, stinking fruit tree, draw blood bush, monkey face
ﬂowers” (23). Her project of giving unknown/unnamed plants names suggests a kind of
healing task, a making connection to place, and is, for Elizete, a means for understanding
the “intention” of her place (social and geographic) on the island. “Where you see
nowhere I must see everything,” she tells Adela, “Where you leave all that emptiness I

must ﬁll it up. Now I calculating” (24).

134

This characterization of young Elizete borders on a kind of second-wave feminist
imagery of the earth mother/goddess/woman, and Elizete’s seemingly earthy relationship
with the island is largely what makes her attractive to Verlia. “She [Verlia] needed a
woman so grounded as to name all she encountered...someone who believed the world
could be made over as simply as that. . .but more. . .needing it to be done and simply doing
it” (202). But Elizete’s seeing “everything,” “calculating” and ﬁlling of “emptiness”
does not create a whole new-woman-centered discourse and social order. Her project is
too singular, too esoteric, and too restricted to her experiences on a small part of a small
island in a much larger maelstrom of patriarchal and capitalist forces. It may create
somewhere out of nowhere, but it is small, insular, and little consolation in the face of
Morah’s eventual selling Elizete to Isaiah to be his wife and ﬁeld laborer.

Neither does Elizete’s power to name extend beyond Verlia’s death or assist
Elizete with the hardships of immigrant life in Toronto. If Adela’s transport to the island
and Verlia’s parents’ migration to seek work in Canada are instances of dislocation and
relocation undertaken for economic gain and shaped by larger economic forces
(conventional migrancy model), Elizete’s relocation is reasoned through her desire to
understand Verlia, to know what Verlia knew about the world and resistance politics.
Things already have names in Canada, and it is not easy for Elizete to recreate or to read
the “intention” of Toronto: “Intention. Intention is what she could not make out. She
could not get her mind to recognize this place” (66). Having left the island to search for a
way to understand Verlia—her knowledge, politics, and desires for something more,
Elizete ﬁnds that Toronto seems to offer little more than the kind of life she had on the

plantation with Isaiah. While time is difﬁcult to gauge in the novel, it appears that

135

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Elizete spends more than a decade scraping together a subsistence living as a domestic
and with little time to search for “Verlia.” She is doubly dislocated, unable to make sense
of Toronto and unable to desire a return to the island. “She could not size it [Toronto]
up. . .This city was imaginary that’s all. . .Or was it she who disappeared into her other life
into the descriptions that she had always known and which had followed her here?...And
each time she tried to get a hold of the city she longed for another place. . .The thing was
she had no one here” (69—70). Her longing for another place is, as she confesses to
Abena at the immigrant aid center, not a longing for the island—for that is a place whose
“intention” she knows all to well and longed to escape—but a place recalled in Verlia’s
leap and the memory of her body “opening” with Verlia’s body (78).

Elizete’s story and voice opens the novel with descriptions, or more aptly
impressions, of cutting cane beside Verlia, of their affair, and of Verlia’s leap. The
memory of Verlia’s death/leap that repeats in Elizete’s narrative adds a traumatic
repetition and logic to her narrative that shufﬂes dialects, voices, locations, and time. Her
a jarring, disorienting narrative brilliantly jumbles through then and now, here and there,
so that neither chronology nor geographic locations organize her story. Rather, the
narrative structure seems loosely to follow Elizete’s learning process, which is neither
linear nor always clear. Descriptions of her “learning” and the repetition of Verlia’s
ﬂight, akin to Adela’s “Nowhere,” create a motif of escape imbued with an experience of
ecstasy. In this way both the narrative structure and Elizete’s desire are focused on a
version of elsewhere that resists the directives and locations of conventional diasporic

model as either motherland or new homeland.

136

 

Gender, Politics, and Elsewhere/Nowhere

The privileged return in the novel is a (re)turn charged through the pleasure of
seeking and desiring a woman, signiﬁcantly not the “mother.” Verlia, of course, returns
to the island of her birth to avoid the possibility that she has internalized the mother; and
Elizete is for all intents and purposes motherless. If Verlia is the tragedy of a
(mis)directed female desire channeled through conventional models of political
revolution, she is also the unwitting trigger for an alternative vision of mobility and
returning. Verlia, for instance, teaches Elizete about pleasure and eroticism that are
something other than “seduction,” something other than “rescue,” and more akin to
“escape” (70). “Seduction is a thing between a man and woman,” Verlia tells her, “There
is no seduction between women. This is harder” (74). According to Verlia’s instruction,
the seduction of woman by woman signiﬁes an impossibility in the discourse of sexuality,
which is designed according to and reﬂective of a heteronormative design and the
consequent power inequalities between a man (seducer/subject) and woman
(seduced/object). The sexual desire of a woman for another woman invariable overﬂows
or “escapes” the discursive structures and social norms organizing and directing female
desire—which in a heteronormative structure tends to channel a woman’s sexual desire
via reproductive imperatives. A woman’s desire, thus, signiﬁes not as her own desire but
a desire to fulﬁll her destiny as mother. Eccentric, Verlia and Elizete’s sexual desire
becomes “harder” for them to speak and reveals a discursive absence, a kind of
“nowhereness” that stands-in for lesbian, women-oriented (non-penis/reproductive)
desire. If nowhere stands in for the signiﬁcation of lesbian, her desire is not, however,

without direction. It is directed toward what de Lauretis reminds us is the blind-spot of

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discourse, the elsewhere of the feminine. In the context of Brand’s novel, the elsewhere
of the feminine is multiple. Elsewhere is then both the process and the result; it is the
crossing over, the escape, the pleasure of orgasm, the delights of another woman’s body.
“A woman can be a bridge. . .because she don’t know where the bridge might lead,” says
Elizete, “no assurance except the arch and disappearance. . . .A woman can be a bridge
from these bodies whipping cane. A way to cross over” (16).

Elizete’s narrative, in particular, suggests a usurping of the law of the father, that
regulates discursive meaning and narrative logic according oedipal conﬂicts and
resolutions. Elizete’s lack of father (never mentioned) and multiple if painfully joyless
and inadequate mothers suggest any story she tells are in part an effect of her own
attempts to name. Her narrative’s disconnection from the father’s prerogative to name
and claim, however, does not mean that her story or she escapes the effects of patriarchy.
She is still sold to a man as wife and laborer on the island and ignored, dismissed, and
raped by men in Toronto. However, her loving Verlia does free her from Isaiah when,
early on in their affair, Isaiah witnesses his wife in bed with another woman and his mind
snaps. In reaction to this incomprehensibility, he abandons his plantation to become a
town drunk, muttering incoherently to passersby. That is what might be called an erotic
female revolution.

Isaiah’s incoherent thought and speech suggests the effects of an already
incoherent ﬁguration of lesbian desire in a heteronormative symbolic ordering of
meaning as incoherent. Another Place is shaped through an absence and/or a break the
lesbian protagonist’s relationship to the mother. In A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian

Sexuality and Theory, Judith Roof notes that ﬁrst object of desire—mothermprovides a

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point of origin and narrative logic for female desire in psychoanalytic readings (Kristeva
and Chodorow) of mother/daughter ﬁgurations (108-9). Brand’s novel in many ways
corresponds with Roofs reading of mothers in lesbian narratives functioning as a
narrative absence or unremembered ﬁgure. “If heterosexual scenarios of maternity play
on illusion of maternal fulﬁllment,” notes Roof, “many lesbian novels focus on the
remainder—on desire for desire. Lesbian protagonists in a number of lesbian novels have
no mother, nor are they likely to be mothers. . . .Lack of mother means lack of origins and
vice versa” (108). As with Elizete’s story, the mother is conﬁgured as a site of multiple
absences and silences, who as a ﬁgure of radical resistance, refuses to speak of origins, to
claim only a “nowhere.”

If the maternal is the organizer of desire in Lamming’s writing and the crises of
the paternal become the lament of Naipaul’s, Brand’s novel suggests that the mobile
lesbian’s relationship to the maternal is “nothing simple” and akin to “breaking bones.”
In meditating on the nature and power of her relationship with Verlia, she avoids the
simplicity of calling it love—a concept so easily routed into a framework of ﬁrst love,
ﬁrst desire of a child for his mother. “I wouldn’t call nothing that we do love because
love too simple. All the soft—legged oil, all the nakedness brushing, all the sup of neck
and arm and breasts. All that touching. Nothing simple about it. All that opening like
breaking bones” (78). This Opening and breaking in the novel function as an additional
acknowledges a breaking away from a particular version of Black feminism that situates
the Black woman’s resistance to both racism and sexism within a particularly
heteronormative framework to articulate a woman’s economic and social oppressions

according metaphors of the home and in relation to a man, i.e., motherhood. In the

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introduction to Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, seductively titled “Home,”
Barbara Smith asserts that “Black people who are threatened by feminism have argued
that by being a black feminist (particularly if you are a lesbian) you have left the race, are
no longer a part of the black community, in short, you no longer have a home” (xxii).
There is a certain logic to Smith’s formulation that works for Brand’s protagonists who
are in many ways constituted either literally or ﬁguratively as homeless. And yet, the
conﬂation of community with home is an impossible ﬁguration through which to channel
her protagonists’ desire. I

If Verlia’s narrative insights reveal problems of political activism in diasporic
frame, their narratives taken together do is a kind of political work in the social imaginary.
Brand’s poetry, ﬁlmmaking and novels are consistently and often aggressively political in
their anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-sexist characters and imagery, but her work is never
blindly, rather always critically, so. The dynamic doubling of Elizete’s and Verlia’s
stories, and their counter-migrancy movements allow for a dynamic reading experience
similar to how Ali Smith’s Like tangles with the recuperative possibilities of woman.

As I will discuss in the following chapter on exilic moves, childhood experiences
signify as a narrative absence and perhaps a narrative impossibility in women’s exilic
writing. Elizete’s connection to an African heritage marks a similar kind of absence.
Verlia’s relationship to Africa is one represented and siphoned through her fraught
relationship with her pan-African Canadian community and her underground activism.
For her, the search for origins and historical connections is less of an imperative than

tackling the current effects of racism in Toronto and the Caribbean. Elizete’s and

Verlia’s African heritages remain unspoken, literally untold. It is not that these

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“foundational” markers do not circulate within the diasporic/exilic economy of the stories,
but rather their narratives absentee the heteronormative, the “originary” mother and
nation—nascent or otherwise—that would logically become the interlocutor of woman
protagonists.

In the middle of In Another Place resides a gap, literally a blank page; it is a space
of suturing, of doubleness that refuses to allow Verlia, her relationship with her mother
and to the Caribbean take over the narrative. For as Verlia’s portion of the story moves
toward the (dis)closure of death, Elizete’s voice enters once again and Verlia’s radically
self-centered and overtly political narrative again becomes their story. Not only returning
us to their ﬁnal moments together, which were conspicuously absent in Elizete’s early
accounts at the beginning of the novel, but also to incorporate a series of portraits,
depicting such events as the meeting of Elizete and Abena as they try to understand
Verlia, absent mothers, ultimately, recreating a bridge to elsewhere. In the last few pages
of the novel, Elizete and the voices of her polytonal narrative return, taking over the
narrative to describe Verlia’s cliff side leap to “someplace so old there’s no memory of
it. . .She doesn’t need air. She’s in some other place already, less tortuous, less ﬂeshy”
(246-7). Presuming that openings and conclusions tend to elevate one thematic over
another or privilege particular narrative perspectives, Elizete’s opening and closing of the
novel suggests that her assertion that the passion between women creates a kind of bridge
to some place necessary and healing serves to reorganize the logic of elsewhere in a
narrative plotting attuned to migrancy. Elizete paints her portrait of Verlia’s death as a
leap to a pre-matemal, pre-colonial, pre-slavery site, and the novel draws to a close as

two women begin sharing their common love for and loss of another woman who had

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struggled and fought, always searching for “the enough.” Thus, Elizete and Abena come
to symbolize a kind “here and now” politic possible for mobile Black women from the
Caribbean and an alternative to the diasporic and exilic vision that Verlia had found never

to be “enough.”

142

 

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CHAPTER 4
EXILIC MOVES: LIVING AT HOME IN LANGUAGE

This is serious. You [man] are not in exile: you remain in continuous

relation with your ﬁrst object, with your ﬁrst love, with your ﬁrst

attachments. If you displace them, it would be according to your laws: the

language, the culture that you have made.

A woman, if she cannot in one way or another recuperate her ﬁrst object,

i. e., the possibility of keeping her earliest libidinal attachments by

displacing them, is always exiled ﬁom herself

Luce Irigaray, “Women’s Exile”

Opening Teleology

Somewhat counter-intuitively, exile,40 in its twentieth-century literary and critical
formulations, does not begin with a subject’s departure from but rather with his return
home. This return can be found in exilic expressions spanning the century from James
Joyce’s exact literary mapping of Dublin in Ulysses to Edward Said’s and Salman
Rushdie’s emphasis on the postcolonial migrant’s desire and need to reimagine his
homeland."l At base, the literature of exile carries two primary characteristics of

mobility. First, a traveling subject leaves a place of belonging for a foreign destination,

either voluntarily or forcibly and in a manner that makes the return home fraught, if not

 

40 In the context of post/modemist and diaspora literary studies, the exilic ﬁgure appears in one or more of
a plethora of travel and psyche related guises. Exile can function as a metaphor for psychic difference, for
modern alienation, and as an allegory for separation, it is often interchangeable with a variety of labels and
tropes relevant to the increased movement of people in twentieth- and twenty-ﬁrst-century post/modemities:
the émigré, the expatriate, the immigrant, the foreigner, the migrant, the wanderer, the nomad, and so forth.
As Edward Said reminds us in his Reﬂections on Exile, exile is perhaps the most prominent metaphor for a
“nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal” human experience in a century shaped by modern warfare and
imperialism (183). Yet it is also, as Patrick Ward claims in Exile, Emigration and Irish Writing (2001), a
particularity of expression, marking a speciﬁc nostalgia or melancholy rooted in the exile’s cultural and
historical context. Thus, while the exile arguably extends to universalize a modern sensibility of loss,
whether of psychic or national wholeness and belonging, it also can be recuperated into expressions of
difference, of speciﬁc ethnic or diasporic literary traditions.

4' See Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and his memoir, Out of Place (2000), and Salman Rushdie’s
essay in his collection of the same name Imaginary Homelands.

143

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impossible. Second, s/he experiences a corresponding sense of loss, homesickness,
nostalgia and/or melancholy, which may either be heightened or ameliorated by the
exile’s act of remembering or re-imagining the lost or distant home. In each of these
primary characteristics of exile, the (im)possibility and manner of return distinguishes the
exile from other formulations of travelers—nomad, tourist, explorer, colonizer or other
ﬁgures—whose relationship to home is more present or certain.

This movement of the exile from what we might call point A (homeland) to point
B (place of exile, which can include additional moves to C, D, and so forth) supplies a
clear and common teleology within narratives of exile via the imagined or longed for
return to point A. In this way, the exilic narrative is very much about points and
locations, particularly A, as well as the exiled subject’s often painful but sometimes
invigorating experience with such dislocations. Perhaps overdeterrnined and certainly a
metaphor for modern alienation, psychic difference, and, more broadly, an allegory for
the separation of people from a homeland, the exile’s narrative is compelling because of
its simplicity, its consistent and familiar teleology, and its capacity to expose a kind of
rawness, a vulnerability and sorrow that seem to extend beyond categories of difference
into something seemingly universal and identiﬁable.42

According to this conventional conﬁguration, the exile is a retrograde ﬁgure, a
foreigner in a foreign land, looking back through memory or history to a home, an
authenticity, a land, and quite often a mother distanced by geographic space and the

passage of time. Symbolically, however, the site of exile has been reserved for ﬁguring

 

42 Malcolm Crowley’s Exile ’s Return (1951), Terry Eagleton’s Exiles and Emigrés (1970) and Michael
Seidel’s Exile and the Narrative Imagination (1986) highlighted the work of modemism’s great literary
men. For instance, Eagleton’s Exiles and Emigrés expanded upon his observation that the “outstanding”
twentieth-century British literature “had been on the whole, the product of the exile and the alien” (10).

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woman as Luce Irigaray notes in her 1977 interview about feminine sexuality and
linguistics, “Women’s Exile.” Irigaray says, “According to him [Freud], as soon as she
realizes her castration, the little girl turns away from the mother, because the latter does
not posses the valued sex which she thought she ha ” (95). Marking exile as an
operation of sexual difference, Irigaray continues, “for man, the ﬁrst object of love is...
the mother. . .a man always looks for his mother” (96). In this psychoanalytic
arrangement of attachment to the mother, a man “remain[s] in continuous relation to [his]
ﬁrst object” of desire, the mother or, if he does not, his displacement is only by virtue of
laws already governing a masculine imaginary. Woman becomes a ﬁgure radically
excluded from the “laws: the language, the culture” and is, thus, already framed by her
foreignness and exile, having lost the mother as her primary object of desire. In other
words, she is oedipally destined to rival and must become the mother herself in order to
belong within the homelands of subjectivity and nation, albeit if only by her otherness.
By “belonging” within the very system that excludes woman from subjectivity and
representational presence, she paradoxically belongs within the symbolic apparatus of
patriarchy by virtue of her non-belongingness.

Notice what happens if we simply exchange exilic location for the libidinal object
in lrigiray’s formulation: For man, the first location of love is point A ...a man always
looks for point A ..... and he remains in continuous relation to point A. Such a
substitution is, of course, already at work in the representations of woman in the
masculinist discourses of nation and exile. For instance, the common deployment of
exile as a redemptive motif for self-generation and celebration in narratives of nation

inevitably produces feminine characters along the lines of the sacriﬁcing mother, spirit of

145

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nation, and occasionally colonized fecund landscapes that stabilize the masculinist
imaginary for self-representation. A woman does not travel into exile; she is already the
exile.

Given its teleology, the ﬁguration of exile in and diasporic ﬁction and criticism
results in an endgame of masculine Sameness either celebrating women’s
(non)belongingness or redirecting women’s writing from abroad into oedipal, nation-
inﬂected narratives for cultural-reﬂection and identity formation. According to this logic,
feminine expressions of conventional, teleo-logic exile are often restricted either to
reinforcing masculinist conﬁgurations of women (versions of traveling domestic, spirit of
nation, and the like) or doubling her “othered” conditions upon leaving the homeland,
heaping upon a (sex/ gendered) Symbolic location a presumably more literal—cultural,
racial—exile. The apparent universality of exile, however, obscures its range of
expressions as it occurs in mobile women’s writing. If a particular trend in post-1968
experimental or minor women’s writing employs ﬁgures of subjectivity and images of
feminine mobility to narrate alternate routes for feminine writing—routes that are
generative and rhizomatic (an alternative to arborescent/oedipal models)——then the quite
masculinist and teleological exile becomes a less than obvious ﬁgure for noting this trend.
Yet, if we begin where psychoanalytic feminism of the 19705 and 19803 claims as the site
of woman, the other, the exile—point B, C, D. . ., the teleology of the conventional
migrant-as-exile is already altered. Since woman does not move into exile, but rather by
her position in a patriarchal and phallic order is always already in exile, exilic texts of/by
mobile women cannot help but reﬁgure the exile’s narrative potential in writing that

employs transnational movement to conﬁgure feminine subjectivity. Given that woman

146

is the ﬁgure of exile when at home, what Isabel Hoving calls the “zero point” (32) in her
study of exile in Caribbean women’s writing, exile in terms of traveling women’s
narratives raises a number of questions: How do the tropes of exile alter representations
of women who (e)migrate and then “look back” to speak of the homeland? ls female
exile simply layered with additional conditions of exile (race, political, economic)
deposited upon an originary notion of exile? What is the relationship between the
movement of woman away from homeland and her symbolic exile? And, given that the
emphasis on diaspora in literary studies of the “posts” tends to be on racial and cultural
othering, is national difference the primary lens through or by which to read such exilic
conventions as departure, return and loss in later-twentieth-century and early-twenty-
ﬁrst-century women’s writing?

Departure in the context of postnational feminine writing becomes double-edged,
signifying both a female subject’s departure from the homeland with all of its attendant
belongingness as well as her deviation from the normative, the symbolic space for
woman. The conﬁgurations of female mobility in which I am most interested depart
from the oedipal narratives of nation and inevitably disrupt the conventional masculinist
teleology of literary exile. Emma Donoghue’s short story “Going Back” (1993), much
like Dionne Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here, does so by engaging an explicitly
lesbian desire which reshapes feminine exile through an eccentric relationship to hetero-
patriarchy. Edna O’Brien’s memoir Mother Ireland (1976) reforrnulates the exile’s
imaginative return as a feminine longing for a pre-oedipal knowledge. And, Helene
Cixous’ autobiographical essays in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (1998) fashions a

politicized femininity as departure into writing that rejects the arrival of conventional

147

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meaning. Hers is a meditation on the ways literal departures from ﬁxed notions of home
and identity might be reconﬁgured through a self/writing practice of arrivance, continual
travel, continual movement of self within language.

While far from being a comprehensive study of (post)modem literary exile, this
chapter approaches these questions through texts that evoke two speciﬁc diasporas—Irish
and Jewish—and analyzes speciﬁc exilic literary moves in postnational women’s writing
that directly challenge masculine and nation-oriented exile as a coherent discourse
through which to write of woman and her (un)belongingness. The texts themselves direct
this exploration, and as such, it is not the complex histories of multiple diasporas or any
uniﬁed, homogeneity among diasporic/exilic writings by women that have encouraged
me to bring these particular texts together. Rather it is in part their common interest in
James Joyce’s self-imposed exile from Ireland and his literary stylistics, particularly
O’Brien’s and Cixous’ investments, that has shaped this examination of both the
iconography of literary exile (masculinist) and a reconﬁguring of exile to write of woman.
Donoghue’s short-story, although not overtly Joycean, does provide an excellent starting
point to begin unpacking exile as the symbolic site of woman. As Cyn, the female
protagonist of her short story puts it, “Listen, I felt more of an exile for twenty years in

Ireland than I ever have in the twelve I’ve been out of it” (160).

Points for Departure 00.
Emma Donoghue’s short story “Going Back” (1993) is constituted largely of a
series of conversations between Cyn and Lou, two immigrants who left Ireland to live

“out” in London’s more sexually open and liberal clime. Cyn, a lesbian, and Lou, a gay

148

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man, meet at Brixton’s Gay Pride Parade, where “Lou was. . .funking along behind the
Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. What made her notice him was the shamrock in relief on
the back of his No. 2 shave. . .The most testicular of symbols, [Cyn] commented
afterwards” (158). Their fast friendship, rooted in common interests and sense of humor
that implies familiarity and attraction, might be explained by similar cultural backgrounds
or a kind of belongingness that extends beyond “gay pride” to a particularly Irish-
inﬂected gay pride. Accordingly, their conversations generally revolve around sexual
politics, Ireland, and why Cyn refuses to “go back” home. Stylistically, the story offers
all of the implied intimacy that conversation brings, which gives the reader the
impression that she has been included at their table in the pub or welcomed to walk by
their side as they stroll toward the tube station. This conversational intimacy is
misleading, however, as it is a cover for each character’s deeper, ambiguous, and
questionable relationship to Ireland. What is expressed tends not to reveal. For instance,
Cyn’s authoritative claim to feeling the exile in Ireland is ultimately unaccompanied and
unsupported by the smallest of details about her experiences there. Memories of
childhood, ﬁiends, family, the juicy bits of conversation remain in the past, in Ireland and
purposefully distanced from Cyn’s life in England, and we get the sense that the common

cultural bond between Cyn and Lou is quite tenuous, uncertain and perversely necessary.

‘ The exile is a binary ﬁgure, reinforcing conventions of sexual difference

. Ireland/England, there/here, home/foreign, belonging/outcast, straight/ gay,

man/\’voman, point A/point B—C-D. . .—the oppositions of exile are commensurate with

the binaries producing nation-building narratives. In Donoghue’s story, Lou is the

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character who embraces the possibilities, the liberations, and the rejuvenations of exile
while looking back to home, longing for his home country to change. Expelled from
seminary for reasons that are not made clear but that have to do with his homosexuality,
' Lou empathizes with Cyn’s inability to live “out and proud” in a politically conservative
and predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland; however, he cannot understand her steadfast
refusal to return home for the occasional visit. “Closeted” in Ireland but “out” in England,
he travels home once a year, incog-hetero, to celebrate Christmas with his family, but he
muses that he could begin going back more often given Dublin’s recent launching of its
own Gay Pride. “It’s a new decade,” he tries to convince Cyn (160). Given the Republic
of Ireland’s recent modiﬁcation of Age of Consent laws that decriminalized sexual acts
between men,43 Ireland’s sexual landscapes suggest a kind of perrnissiveness, if not
acceptance of gays and lesbians; and Lou suggests that Cyn’s “exile” may no longer be
necessary or is perhaps unhealthily self-imposed. To Lou, her refusal to go back
indicates that she has somehow missed the point of departure—the experiences of sexual
liberation and the immigrant’s nostalgia for family and Irish community that makes the
occasional return pleasurable. Lou understands his exile quite literally: exile is his
incommensurability with heteronormative Ireland (that which keeps him away) and is
expressed as his geographic and sexual-political distance from a homeland from which he
clearly desires afﬁrmation and acceptance.

Lou’s version of exile corresponds with conventions that underscore the exile’s
distance from the homeland and an acute sense of cultural and symbolic loss that is both

sharpened and mitigated through imaginary returns, imagined reconstructions of the

 

43 Passed in 1993.

150

hetero-homeland. In Lou’s case, his imaginary return takes place in his yearly
performance of heterosexuality for his family in his literal return to Ireland:
“Let me guess: you’re not exactly out to them.”
“Not in so many words, and certainly not in those particular
words.” Lou pulled at his ear lobe. “You’ve forgotten what it’s like back
there.”
“I remember too well.” Cyn took a deliberate sip. “So why fold
yourself back into the closet once a year?”
He made a face. “Because being a bit discreet is better than the
ructions it would cause if I said anything. Besides, I couldn’t miss the
Christmas.”
“Missing it’s easy after the ﬁrst time,” Cyn assured him. “I get an
old friend to send me a box of Taytos every year.” (160)
Ironically, Lou’s complex negotiation of being “out”—out in London while out of
Ireland—marks him outcast in Ireland while cast “in” the role of good, heterosexual son.
Analogous to this binary negotiation of in/out, his understanding of exile is quite
normative, conventional—hetero and masculinist. Lou’s exile is as much about his
distance from heterosexuality and the Church as it is about his geographic distance from
Ireland. His attempts to convince Cyn that she must miss something more about Ireland
than the pleasure of eating Taytos reveals a desire that is quite conventional, quite
normative in its expression. Lou, for all of his queemess, is a familiar characterization of
the outcast whose self-story preserves the exile’s teleology, and accordingly he

repeatedly discusses his emigration, his movement from point A to point B-C-D. His

151

literal notion of exile obscures his homosexuality as a measure of his distance from home,
and, thus, his character provides a necessary narrative tension against which Cyn’s more
eccentric relationship to Ireland can be understood. In many ways, Lou is the straight-
man of Donoghue’s story of sexuality to comment on Ireland’s sexual politics—or is it
the other way around? Either way, as the straight-man, Lou will be used by both
Donoghue and Cyn to return to Ireland in the most eccentric fashion, and, taking their cue,
I, too, exploit Lou’s relationship to home in order to situate points of departure in

women’s writing on exile.

Celebratory exile reinforces hetero-norms o

In many ways, Lou is a character who recalls Ireland’s historical celebration of
exile that establishes its great religious and literary ﬁgures.44 Lacking a tradition of
Christian martyrs, Irish religious heroes from St. Patrick onward tended to go into exile,
wandering the land or sailing away into infamy. Signiﬁcantly, Ireland’s female
equivalent to Patrick, St. Brigid is rumored to have deﬁed her pagan parents to enter a
convent and dedicate her life to nurturing and expanding Kildare Abbey. This division
between the man as a traveler and the woman as sedentary nurturer is restricted neither to
saintly characterizations nor even to Irish religious/national self-representations but is
common to Western patriarchal expressions and to the valorization of exile as an

authorizing and invigorating experience. It is signiﬁcant that Lou returns home once a

 

44 Drawing an atypical connection between Edward Said’s secularism, exile, and Christianity, John
Barbour notes in his essay “Edward Said and the Space of Exile” that “although Edward Said was critical
of the dangerous sacred space, the space of exile is in certain respects similar to religious myth in its
shaping inﬂuence on his life.” For Said, the representational capacity of exile “as a metaphor is in several
ways analogous to the ways in which religious communities orient themselves in relation to space and
time.”

152

year for the celebration of Christ’s birth—the son returns. Not so far removed from the
Church’s model of exile as the ultimate self-sacriﬁce and conﬁrmation of holiness,
Ireland’s most celebrated authors of the twentieth century achieved literary greatness by
leaving Ireland, although generally for artistically subversive purposes.

In Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics (1991), Gerardine
Meaney points out that in the twentieth century James Joyce emerged the epitomic ﬁgure
of the Irish author as cultural hero and that this exile-as-hero mythology is highly
masculinist and legitimates a “particular,” oedipal “view of Irish culture” (1 9). The
literary hero is fashioned as “a ‘son’ escaping from the ‘nets’ of the ‘Mother’ church,
‘Mother’ country and, perhaps, ‘Mother’ tongue.” “If the male Irish writer must speak
from the Oedipal place of exile, what position as speaking and writing subject is available
to the Irish woman?” queries Meaney (19). To address this question, Meaney turns,
logically, to He’lene Cixous’s proﬁle of the feminine in Freudian developmental and
symbolic schemas as the “dark continent,” the site of repression, an internalized horror,
and the ﬁgurative location of “woman” in the phallocentric representational economy of
Irish literature writ large.45 If exile literature may be characterized by a deep sense of
loss and/or displacement from a homeland, the criticism and theory of literary exile might
be characterized by its celebration of the displaced artist/intellectual. Corresponding with
Meaney’s connection of exile to phallocentrism (which is far from the only criticism to

recognize the masculinist formulation of the exile in Irish literature or the literature of

 

45 Meaney’s nod to écritureféminine is strategic, intended to address not only the marginalization of Irish
women writers in later-twentieth-century Irish literary studies but more importantly the double
marginalization of Irish women in the rapidly changing socio-cultural and political landscapes of which
Ireland increasingly participates. Her query into the celebration of exile as the exclusive purview of Irish
men functions both as a means to address how contemporary women in Ireland continue to be shaped by
and marginalized in its national culture as well as an embrace of Continental feminist theory to
(re)invigorate conﬂicted, and perhaps nascent, feminist dialogues in Ireland and Irish Studies.

153

modernism broadly“), exile in modern and/or contemporary diaspora literatures revolves
around and through the myth or cult of the literary artist. Meaney’s query about the
writing position of Irish women is equally, albeit differently, productive for Opening up
ﬁgurations of exile to an eccentric function that might be read out of Irish women’s
writing on exile as well as in other diasporic writing from Atlantic Rim women. Cyn’s
and Meaney’s similar claims that woman is the exiled subject within a homogeneous and
heteronormative formulation of Irishness reorder the teleology of exile. Of/in l’écriture
feminine, woman has symbolic shape, meaning and comprehensibility via the
renunciation of exile, a negative writing position which casts her escape into elsewhere,
to someplace other than the product of a masculine imagination. If Lou wants to occupy
this mythic, celebratory position, Cyn adamantly rejects the possibility that her
emigration is a displacement or marker of a loss worthy of mythmaking. Her literal
migration, a kind of doubling of exile (ﬁgurative and literal), however, does not recast the
symbolic Irish woman from which Cyn left behind when she came out, or came into the
lesbian, in Ireland.

According to Cyn, “she,” unlike Lou, was “never illegal” in Ireland and her
“exile” was not a product of her leaving the homeland but rather a condition of Irish
womanhood that preceded her departure (168, 160). In their conversations, Cyn is more
interested in sorting out what she calls the “age of consent for being Irish” than she is in
the legalities of her sexual orientation: “All that cultural baggage. . .absolutely foisted
upon us. . .And what happens if you try and refuse it or leave it behind? Everybody freaks

out as if you’ve dumped a baby in a carrier bag at the airport” (161). Cyn’s cultural

 

46 See: Kaplan, Questions of Travel (36-39, 48, 106)

154

baggage is not what she carries with her in the hopes of ﬁnding its weight relieved abroad,
as in Lou’s yearly re—repressions, but rather baggage is the precondition to her becoming
an Irish woman, whether or not she remains in Ireland.47 If Lou speaks of his exile
literally, Cyn speaks ﬁguratively. Hers is a symbolic and oedipally inﬂected exile
reminiscent of Freud’s allegory of femininity through which the female child travels
across the Oedipal complex toward feminine passivity and the satisfactions of
motherhood.48 That is a lot of baggage, perhaps too much, to dump Wildean style (as
Wilde’s Miss. Prism does] at a terminal. Teresa de Lauretis observes that in
Freudian/Oedipal arrangement, “the end of the girl’s journey, if successful, will bring her
to the place where the boy will ﬁnd her;” thus, her journey “is guided by a compass
pointing not to reproduction as the fulﬁllment of her biological destiny, but more exactly
to the fulﬁllment of the promise made to ‘the little man,’ of his social contract” (133). If
for Lou exile is the fraught experience of leaving his homeland to live abroad, for Cyn
exile was and perhaps always will be Ireland. Thus, we encounter in Donoghue’s short
story two distinct versions of exile-inﬂected-displacement that revolve around Ireland’s
patriarchal and heteronormative disposition.

0

Not all departures from home are the same

 

47 Aidan Arrowsmith in his essay on exile in Irish women’s writing likewise notes the reproductive
imperative informing Cyn’s analogy. See: “M/otherlands: Literature, Gender, Diasporic Identity,” in
Ireland in Proximity (1999): 134.

48 I must acknowledge my debt to Isabel Hoving’s discussion of exile in Jamaica Kincaid’s and other
Caribbean women’s lives and writings, which in fact directed my attention to de Lauretis’ “Desire and
Narrative” in Alice Doesn’t. However, I am less inclined to read, as does Hoving, the movement of
Caribbean women writers as a literalization of their doubly exiled (sex and race) life that is generated upon
leaving the Caribbean. This is a point I took up in the previous chapter and which will be addressed further
in the concluding section of this chapter.

155

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Cyn left Ireland more than a decade before becoming friends with Lou, and we
get the impression that Cyn both has avoided connecting with an “Irish community”
while in London and has worked, either consciously or unconsciously, to lose her Irish
accent. It seems unlikely, however, that Cyn’s retoned accent signiﬁes a desire to
become English, since her life in England is purposefully marginal. She seems to have
embraced London’s gay scene, to enjoy Brixton’s multi-ethnic milieu, and to give back to
her “community” by volunteering at the local community theatre, appropriately named
the Rainbow Centre, none of which suggests that she desires to disappear into
mainstream Englishness. She is neither presenting herself as someone other than the
English “Other” (i.e., assimilating), nor performing the Gaelic “Other” to position herself
in opposition to Englishness. In fact, it takes two additional encounters with Lou
following Pride for Cyn to pursue a friendship, which she adamantly (for Cyn is more
often than not adamant) refuses to acknowledge has anything to do with their Irish
backgrounds. To Lou’s assertions that she is “one of us,” a “Gay-licker” (pun on Gaelic),
a “Little green fairy,” she declares, “I’ve never felt like one of an us” (158). While as a
lesbian, Cyn ﬁts within the broader framing and alliance of “queer,” she does not suit the
overtly gay male imagery of “gay-licker” or “fairy” and is likewise excluded from Lou’s
strikingly universal notion of an “us.” And yet, as with Cyn’s claim to feeling the exile
in Ireland, her all-or-nothing expressions of never feeling that she belonged to an “us”
begins to sound as if she protests too much. Her protests certainly reveal her fraught
relationship with Irish womanhood and her inability to think or speak of being Irish and a
lesbian simultaneously; however, her declarations also provide cover for a deeper desire

to be an Irish lesbian, to speak of Ireland and women-oriented sexuality at once.

156

Cyn’s departure from the homeland, therefore, is very much a departure from the
heteronormative reproductive imperative as her coming out in Ireland repositioned her
sexually as something other than “woman as exile” in an Irish phallo-representational
system. Her resistance is not just a resistance to the category of woman but a speciﬁcally
Irish-accented or inﬂected woman. In this way, her departures from Ireland are perhaps
more consistent than Lou’s emigration as it literalizes her escape from an oedipal “social
contract,” repositioning her as “eccentric” to a historically and predominantly straight
patriarchal Irishness.49 An outspoken lesbian, Cyn’s symbolic departure from Ireland
suggests an alternate point of departure (point B, C, D...) that takes her to what Monique

Wittig describes as the lesbian’s symbolic position as “not-woman.”50

Wittig notes that if
“woman” is a ﬁgure deﬁned through a particular “social relation to man” that regulates
her domestic, sexual and reproductive duties, this is “a relation which lesbians escape by
refusing to become or to stay heterosexual.” Given that lesbians are “not a woman, either
economically, or politically, or ideologically” (20), it makes a certain kind of sense that

Cyn’s return, her “going back” to Ireland takes place as a symbolic return via the

heteronormative—She seduces Lou. O

o The return to homeland can be shaped through the memory of the body 0

 

49 In this use of the lesbian as eccentric, I am recalling Teresa de Lauretis’ and Judith Roof’s terminology
from The Practice of Love and The Lure of Knowledge, respectively.

50 In Straight Mind, Wittig details the conceptual space of the lesbian in opposition to “woman”: “Lesbian
is the only concept I know if which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the
designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what
makes a woman is a speciﬁc social relation to a man, a relation that we have previously called servitude, a
relation which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation (‘forced residence,’
domestic coree, conjugal duties, unlimited production of children, etc.), a relation which lesbians escape by
refusing to become or to stay heterosexual” (20).

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If one of the deﬁning characteristics of exile is the migrant’s imaginative return to
the homeland, Donoghue’s story recalibrates that return to the body, the sexual memories
of Cyn’s body, effectively blurring the division between imagination (mind) and body. It
could be argued that “Going Back” is itself an imaginative return to Ireland, a series of
conversations in London that recreate, remember Ireland from abroad. And yet, if Cyn
and Lou’s conversations revolve around their relation to Ireland’s sexual politics, the
details of their memories and experiences in Ireland are seductively absent. In one of the
more sweet and awkward post-coital scenes I have encountered, Cyn and Lou ﬁnd
themselves trying to make sense of how they wound up in Cyn’s bed and how having sex
might affect their friendship. The charming awkwardness of their situation is drawn
through their physical alignment, the not-quite-ﬁtting of their bodies: Lou had
“comforting, the weight of his hip against the small of her back, her soles against his
heels.” Lou ponders never having “been to bed with a woman before. Did it count if she
was a lesbian? In some ways, Lou thought, stiﬂing a giggle, it was the most logical
choice” (166).

Lou’s logic—a simple substitution of lesbian for woman—is accompanied by a
stereotypical masculine insecurity about his performance, which, while taking on a kind
of hilarity given their respective sexual orientations, seems to miss the point of their
encounter. If Lou is not quite sure what to make of having had sex with Cyn, Cyn
recognizes that their encounter was not about physical pleasure, intimacy or any of the
number of more typical reasons friends might have sex. For Cyn, sex with Lou is a
bodily return, a place of the past, and a memory of a young Irish woman’s body that

brieﬂy belonged at home. Concerned that his sexual performance might not have equaled

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his honed incog-hetero skills, Lou wonders if sex with him was “different.” Cyn replies,
“’Not different enough,”’ and then explains, “’It’s not you, it’s me,’ she said as if to a
child. ‘You’re very different from them, you make a totally different [pause] shape. But
I’m afraid I still can’t quite see it’” (166). The 0 is not their sex act but Cyn’s
negotiation of exile. Cyn succumbs not to a repressed desire for her gay-best-friend but
instead to a repressed longing to connect once again to and belong within Irishness. Her
primary, expressed desire is a negation—a desire never to step foot in Ireland again—
which is obviously fraught. Her bodily return to Ireland by having sex with an Irishman
speaks for what she cannot express—her desire to become an Irish not—woman. In this
way, her desires to see the sexual landscape of Ireland change are not that different from
Lou’s overt desires and arguments about the country’s potential for change. Nonetheless,
from the position of the exiled subject within the homeland, her desire marks a
cataclysmic cultural shift and an inverse trajectory, altering conventional ﬁgurations of
exile rather than the Republic’s Constitution.

Cyn’s eccentric return to Ireland via the penile penetration of her body—the
reenactment of her sexual relationships with men when she lived in the Irish
countryside—reconnects her to Irish womanhood, but it is a womanhood
incommensurate with her sexual desires and sexual politics. Her unexpected seduction of
Lou ultimately reveals an anxiety about self, tied to Cyn’s understanding of her
“Irishness” rather than her sexual desires. She may be comfortably “not woman” in
England, but to understand herself as an Irish woman living abroad as Lou inadvertently
and yet persistently reminds her requires a particular sociO-sexual relationship to an Irish

man, no matter how legislatively liberal their home country has become. 0

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Returning Elsewhere

The possibility of living without taking root was familiar to me. I never

call that exile. Some people react to expulsion with the need to belong.

For me, as for my mother, the world suﬂiced, I never needed a terrestrial,

localized country.

Helene Cixous, Stigmata

The imaginative return to a place of belonging or homeland is the deﬁning
characteristic of early twentieth-century expatriate, émigre’ literature and contemporary
diasporic writing. This commonality of expression not only relies upon a particularly
oedipal relationship to a maternally inﬂected home but also reveals the modernist
underpinnings of and resonances within Atlantic Rim diasporic literatures as noted by
such critics as Paul Gilroy and Simon Gikandi in their studies of Aﬁican and Caribbean
transnational cultural expressions.5 ' A scholar of the postcolonial and a self-identiﬁed
exile, Edward Said describes his own experience with (post)modem exile in his memoir
Out of Place thus:

Each year the late-summer return to the United States opened old wounds

afresh and made me reexperience my separation from her as if for the ﬁrst

time—incurably sad, desperately backward-looking, disappointed and

unhappy in the present. . . .I still ﬁnd myself reliving aspects of the

experience today, the sense that I’d rather be somewhere else—deﬁned as

closer to her, authorized by her, enveloped in her special maternal, love,

 

5] See: Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and Gikandi’s Writing in Limbo.

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inﬁnitely forgiving, sacriﬁcing, giving—because being here was not being

where I/we had wanted to be, here being deﬁned as a place of exile,

removal, unwilling dislocation. (234)

The mother tongue, mother country, motherland pinpoint the exile’s return as a native
son’s memory of a past shaped and coded through a desire for his “authorizing” mother.
This oedipally inﬂected return is easily recognized in Said’s poignant and candid writing
about his own longing to “return” to his mother, his desire to be “enveloped in her special
maternal love, inﬁnitely forgiving, sacriﬁcing, giving.”

In a manner similar to Cyn’s symbolic, sexual and bodily return to Ireland as
illustrative of her refusal to travel into Irish womanhood, commensurate images of non-
arrival persist in such mobile women’s post—1968 writing as Edna O’Brien’s Mother
Ireland and Cixous’ critical work on literary exile and feminine writing. In her
autobiographical writings on her early childhood and her life “elsewhere,” Cixous plays
within the slipperiness of language so as “to depart not to arrive from Algeria,” the
colonized-country of her birth (204). Negating and refusing arrival as Cyn and Cixous do
consequently reshapes the diasporic traveler’s relationship to “home,” the ﬁgurative site
of mother or in Said’s language, the authorizing, enveloping “special maternal love.”

Figurations of mother oft occupy spaces of silence and trauma, unable to
“authorize” daughter’s actions and self-vision. The mother’s notable absence in
Donoghue’s “Going Back,” in part, matches her female protagonist’s refusal to return
home and her search for alternative images of womanhood. However, mother ﬁgures are
just as likely to be the primary focus of exile-themed, self-narratives, and just as likely to

provide a ﬁgural access point to critique the operations of patriarchy and nationalism

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constituting the homeland. Having built her literary career by living elsewhere and
writing of Ireland, Edna O’Brien’s work tends to fall into the latter approach to mother
ﬁgures. It is noteworthy that she holds the honor of having the most novels banned by
the Ireland’s Censorship Board for aberrant sexual content.52 And yet, this repeated
banning of her work reveals more about the Board’s attempt to monitor and control
female sexuality than it does about the relatively straight-forward, coming-of-age themes
and formulas common to O’Brien’s oeuvre. Given her interest in the feminine
bildungsroman, her texts are generally both critical of the conventional, idealized image
of mother and intrigued with alternative ﬁgurations for women who do engage in sexual
relationships with men and/or opt for motherhood.

O’Brien’s experimental memoir, Mother Ireland (1976), is a writer’s literal return
to a ﬁgurative mother—the sacriﬁcing, nurturing, and the occasionally wild, irrational,
and wounded spirit of Irishness. “Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender
the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire,” her memoir opens and then
continues, “Ireland has always been a woman, a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow,
a bride, a harlot, and, of course, the gaunt Hag of Beare” (1).53 Unlike more conventional
Irish memoirs such as Frank McCourt’s Angela ’s Ashes and ‘ T is that offer a ﬁgurative
(imaginative) return to a literal Ireland (real-in-memory/place), O’Brien’s narrative
resists the descriptive, realist imperatives of biography and does not actually “describe

growing up in rural County Clare, from her days in a convent school to her ﬁrst kiss to

 

52 “I offended the Catholic church,” says O’Brien of the banning of her Country Girls Trilogy. “1 betrayed
Irish womanhood. They even used that phrase—l was a ‘smear on Irish womanhood.’...l showed two Irish
irls full of yeamings and desires. Wicked!” (Carlson 76).
3 . . . . .
By different accounts the Hag of Beare rs a pagan goddess or a pagan storyteller tamed to Christianity.
She was of interest to Lady Gregory, who translated Gaelic folk tales of the hag who held great power as a
once oral storyteller funneled into written folklore records.

162

her eventual migration to England,” no matter what the dust jacket claims. Instead her
narrative juggles second- and third-person points of view, deferring her experiences and
opinions to the surrogates of “you” and “one”——that is until the ﬁfth chapter when we
stumble upon her life at a convent boarding-school and O’Brien’s “1” begins to guide the
story.

O’Brien’s return to Mother Ireland is a critique, a parody, and a revisioning of the
sacred site of Irish motherhood. A writer whose love of James Joyce is well-known—
according to literary lore, Portrait of the Artist inspired her both to leave Ireland and
begin writing—O’Brien may have incorporated a form of Joycean exile and even a
Joycean style into her writing, but she has done so to sidestep conventional ﬁgurations of
mother, both literally (her life in England) and ﬁguratively (in her writing).54 Her
autobiography is part of Irish feminism’s revisionary projects from the 19703 onward
that attempt to remythologize the nation, a project that includes such generically diverse
work as Eavan Boland’s poetry, as Anne Devlin’s plays and prose, and Anne Crilly’s
historically-corrective documentary ﬁlm, Mother Ireland. This national mother, as
O’Brien notes, is a composite ﬁgure of masculine fantasy—land, womb, hag—she is a
projection of imagined wholeness drafted into an Irish Renaissance and tethered to
nation-building causes. The sacredness of the mother ﬁgure, whether she is Yeats’
Cathleen or Dedalus stiﬂing religiosity and mystical modernism, sustains an umbilical tie

for Irishmen abroad, a means for creating something new, revolutionary. “To ourselves,

 

54 An acknowledged fan of Joyce, O’Brien recently welcomed the opportunity to write his biography,
which ironically received a strikingly similar mix of reviews to those of her memoir when it came out in the
mid-19703. (Edna O’Brien. James Joyce. New York: Penguin Lives, 1999) For instance, Allen B. Ruch
suggests that her biography of Joyce plays fast and furious with historical details and her poetic prose
proves a bit too much for critics looking for a “realistic” accounting of Joyce’s life, which seems a great
irony, given Joyce’s turn against realism and O’Brien’s lyrical prose style.

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new paganism, omphalos,” rejoices Stephen Dedalus upon his return in Ulysses (7). The
“omphalos,” that formative and archaic cultural tie that binds mother country and native
sons, is, of course, negotiated differently for daughters of Ireland, who are excluded from
the sacred circle until they mature and become mothers themselves. The oedipal
interplay between culture, policy and subjectivity might be found as Jane Elizabeth
Dougherty observes of the conﬂation of woman and mother in the Irish Constitution, we
get the sense that only two subjectivities exist within Irish imaginary: the male child and
Irish mother (60).

O’Brien’s return to her past opens up the feminizing of mythic Ireland, forcing us
to confront the mother’s body as a pastiche, far from cohesive and circuitous rather than
linear. The early chapters, for instance, are organized in a non-linear, ahistorical, and
tokenistic fashion according to the hallmarks of nation—land, home, education, and
literature. Each chapter incorporates Irish folklore/mythology, national history, local
lore, and even tourist perspectives that challenge and undermine the proclaimed thematics
of its chapter headings: “The Land Itself,” “My Home Town,” “The Classroom,” “The
Books We Read.” Nonetheless, within these pages Irish history and the compelling
nature of colonial rebellion suggest a kind of generative conceptual process as we ﬁnd in
this passage from “The Classroom” describing the power of post-Revolution Irish history
lessons:

Another world altogether sometimes prevailed—one of arms,
crests, spears, Lughaidh Laeighseach, son of Laeigh, son of the renowned

Conall Cearnach. . ..These daily inculcations of history, so immediate, so

heart-rending and so riveting that it was possible to conceive of Sarsﬁeld,

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Shane O’Neill and Bold Robert Emmet, and Sarah Curran his sweetheart,
as characters who might step out of the pages and into the room. All had

sacriﬁced themselves for the Cause, and each had failed. . .. (55-6)

Sarah Curran stands out in this passage and in the memoir overall as one of a
handful of historical women mentioned. The heart-rending and riveting immediacy of
Curran’s own sacriﬁce and failure can only be shaped, however, through legend as an
eternal love for Emmet and his revolutionary mission. The subject of multiple ballads,
including one by Tomas Moore, and even rating a brief mention in Ulysses, Curran’s life
is conventionally rendered a tragedy due to her loss of Emmet and the larger loss of an
independent “Ireland” (via migration and fail revolution). Stories vary, but the common
threads suggest that Curran’s father disapproved of her falling in love with a rebellion
leader; therefore, the father married her off to another, and they moved to Italy where she
died of tuberculosis not long after her Emmet was executed. “Fair Sarah Curran went
abroad,” writes O’Brien, “married and of course died of a broken heart” (56). Curran,
thus, unlike Joyce cannot be model of mobility for Irish women. The underlying
“history” lesson here suggests that women who leave Ireland are invariably recuperated
into the land and legend of mother Ireland. Curran’s life story is subsumed as is her
“sacriﬁce” to the confrontational relationship between the father and the “true love,”
Emmet.

In O’Brien’s jumbling of Irish myth, history, and literature, we read the
cultural/personal memory of a woman who bristles openly and refuses to enter her own

story until her sexual desires and the force of her critical voice can be attributed to a

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woman’s body and a speaking “I.” The narrating “I” is, for example, suspiciously absent
from the majority of the autobiography, imaged occasionally as a “tourist” of the Irish
countryside or as an immigrant having arrived in England. As a memoir, it is either bad
history or bad autobiography or perhaps both, as some critics claim. What it is not,
however, is a son’s historicized memorial to his own art and character or an accounting of
his “self” that can only be renewed (written) and recognized upon his return to the
reﬂective mother (country). Rather, this is a daughter’s “quarrel” with the country of her
birth, which O’Brien claims “had warped me, and those around me, and their parents
before them, all stooped by a variety of fears” (127). Like her literary antecedent,
Joyce’s Portrait, O’Brien’s reﬂections on Ireland literalize her ﬁgurative escape;
however, while modeled on a suspiciously Joycean pattern, her writing does not endeavor
to produce the new literature, the new art that might save Ireland from retrograde
mysticism or Roman Catholic dogmatism. Instead she expresses a desire for a new
female-inﬂected Irishness.

If anything, O’Brien’s self-narrative proves the endurance of such early-
twentieth-century Irish self—representations (religious) as well as the somewhat
paradoxical and coterrninous celebration of Joyce as the model for Irish author’s
“Iiterary-subversive-in-exile.” The memoir is conceivably a haunting of/by her favorite
author, James Joyce, not his exile, although perhaps that, too, as Joyce’s and Stephen
Dedalus’ escapes are oft conﬂated and Sarah Curran offers a poorer model for escape.
Rather, suggestive of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dedalus self-
narrative that displaces the “I,” O’Brien’s “I,” likewise does not break into the narrative

until the closing third of her memoir. If her early chapters engage a broad, character-

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shaping thematic of Ireland’s self-representation that subsumes a little girl’s “I” to
establish Irish tropings of woman as land, national spirit, and mother of savior son, the
ﬁnal chapters reveal the emerging sexual desires of a young woman, who now speaks an
“I.” This ﬁrst-person narrator is unapologetic in her infatuations and ﬂirtations with nuns,
in her seeking the sensual pleasures of sweets, drink, and men in Dublin, and in rewriting
Dedalus’ ﬂight to create art elsewhere as a woman’s ﬂight to write the Irish feminine

from London.

The oedipal daughter, however, is not creator, as her body and reproductive
potential subsume her expressions and artistic passions to the position as incubator for
cultural birth. O’Brien’s sexually desirous “1” takes over her story as an escapee from
exile with a literary goal that subsumes Irishness to the desires of a woman, not mother.
O’Brien claims her ultimate “desire” in her memoir has been to “retrace heritage” and
that “trenchant childhood route. . .in the hope of ﬁnding some clue that will, or would, or
could, make possible the leap that would restore one to one’s original place and state of
consciousness, to the radical innocence of the moment just before birth” (129).

In retracing and returning to the mother, she makes the doubleness of her
revisionary project explicit. She returns both to challenge the ﬁguration of Ireland as
mother, which is oedipal, as well as to evoke the site of the pre-oedipal and the possibility
of reﬁguring the connection between mother and daughter. Her latter goal imagines a
version of Kristeva’s chora, a pre-oedipal stage wherein the infant has yet to acquire
language or to separate from the mother, so that an undifferentiated “self” experiences the
pleasure of unity and an absence of boundaries. This uniﬁed image of daughter and

mother suggests a productive tension with O’Brien’s retracing of heritage through a

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ﬁgurative daughter’s critical lens. However, in spite of this ﬁgurative and non-realist
strategy, critics of the memoir have taken her revisionism, and her memoir overall, quite
literally, including the concluding passage that proclaims a desire for pre-oedipal
connection to the mother. For instance, in his review, John Broderick mistakes the
ﬁgurative mother for the literal and spouts:55
This is an ominous threat. Not content with boring everybody with

the very ordinary experience of poor little me, she is evidently now

preparing to regale us with her pre-natal experiences also. . . .In many ways

this is a sad book. It is obviously a pot-boiler; and even on that level it is

not good. . ..After knocking off the history of Ireland in her not-too-elegant

prose, Miss O’Brien goes on to repeat all she has told us before about the

village in Clare where she was born and brought up. . . .Then we get the
boarding-school days in a convent. These were pretty awful too. And
unconsciously, I imagine, Miss O’Brien presents herself as a thoroughly

silly girl. (73)

When it comes to sexual awakening, it always comes down to nuns, doesn’t it?
of, quite often it does in women’s narratives including depictions of burgeoning sexual
de Sire in a Roman Catholic Ireland. Broderick’s representation of a sexually awakened
O ’ Brien as a “silly girl” is such a misnomer, however, that it reads as a compensatory act
thOUgh which he attempts to control and recontain the larger “threat” O’Brien’s desires

DO se, not only for the pre-oedipal—which threatens to open up Irish self-representation to

\

S 5
Early reviews of Mother Ireland, in the late-19703, tended to be mixed if not evisceratingly harsh, and of
er writings, her memoir remains little studied or is simply read literally, a text to supply details and
character to O’Brien’s biography.

168

alternative, feminine narratives—but more importantly her erotic longings for women

that exclude men, the penis, the phallus, or patriarchy to orient feminine desire.

In her analysis of desire in Irish women’s memoirs, Dougherty observes that “The
convent school turns out to be. . .a place of suppressed, though not necessarily misdirected,
erotic longings” (64). O’Brien writes openly of the multiplicity of illicit desires and sins
to be found in a convent, describing the convent school as a place where the stringent
“rules for everything” and the proper covering of the female body commingled with the

sexual awareness of teenage girls (92). It was a place where girls held hands under the
table, learned to kiss, and vied to become a nun’s “favorite.” Winning that auspicious
honor herself, in a moment of infatuation and honesty or, more aptly, honest infatuation
O ’Brien declared to a nun that her deepest desire was to become a nun herself. Glimpses
and touches of the forbidden—the sighting of a nun’s eyebrows or a lock of her hair, the
accidental brush against her shoulder or slide of a ﬁnger across the back of her hand——
these were both the fodder of fantasy and the sustenance of a compelling women-oriented
Sexual desire. In the context of the convent, it was a desire primed ultimately, however,
by the denial of female sexuality. And later when O’Brien cannot explain why she both
embraces and denies herself sensual pleasures, she recognizes she “would not be a nun.”

IrlStead of pursuing the delights of the convent, she proclaims, “I would be a ﬁlm star...”

( 1 04). Ominous threats abound.

Surely the memoir’s most ominous threats are those that spiral through a
danghter’s reordering of the father’s stories of the motherland, and the daughter’s desire
to continue that project, to take it further, to mark her writing unﬁnished and as yet to

have achieved its full effect and meaning. If exile is largely a performance of alienation

169

and/or distance from the mother, O’Brien’s literary return to Mother Ireland and the
epitomic image of Irish womanhood refuses to make nice with a disaffected self and
instead proposes an alternate image of an escaping self to write the fumbling “hope of
ﬁnding some clue that will, or would, or could” imagine her relationship to Ireland
without fear and the exclusions of exile. In many ways, O’Brien embodies the very
model of Irish authors seeking exile that Gerardine Meaney observes as being
problematic for Irish women authors. O’Brien’s escape, her writing out-of-Ireland
inspired by Joyce traces his omphalos not to symbolic apron strings but to the imaginary
of the pre-oedipal. And while writer Joseph O’Connor proclaims Joyce the greatest
irrelevance for contemporary Irish writers—which ironically kills the father by
sequestering him to impotent irrelevancy—for most-mid-century and many later-
twentieth-century writers, Joyce retains an iconic, paternal status, modeling the Irish
Writer par excellence gone abroad to write of home. In fact, Cixous has spent much of
her career writing about Joyce, both his life and writing, ﬁnding within each narrative a

method and style to write other than the conventions of Jewish diaspora and feminine

exile.

I '1 Absence of Arrival

France was never the Promised Land. The sentence ‘next year in
Jerusalem’ makes me ﬂee. The desire, the necessity of arriving ‘home, ’I
understand them and do not share them. What loss! What renunciation of
the marvelous and inﬁnite human condition.

Helene C ixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts

One of the consistencies of the exilic in post-1968 mobile women’s writing that

Donoghue’s, O’Brien’s, and even Brand’s work exhibits is the return to the woman’s

I70

body, a kind of extension of I’ e’criture feminine, to write that body elsewhere,
rhetorically displaced from a masculine imaginary. Compulsory heterosexuality, the
ﬁgural mother, and the lover serve as bodily sites of return for a female protagonist’s
negotiation of the female body and its ﬁgurative capacities for self. The return to the
body, as opponents of Continental feminism decry, however, carries traces of biology and
an essentializing, binary sexual difference—a potential trap suggesting that the woman’s
body can be written and signiﬁed only in/of the masculine. In the context of exilic
ﬁgurations, the question becomes: Whether texts evoking exile necessitate a return, albeit
to resist and critique, to binary gender and sexuality? Exile’s emphasis on the return to a
place of belonging or at least birth, and a coming into female consciousness, seem to
proffer an alternate arrangement or constructions that make sense, but only to one no
longer in that home space, which seems to suggest that location—nation, mother,
woman—offers a kind of stability or a Cixousian launching pad to generate an-other kind
of writing.

Cixous is one of the Continental theorists of the feminine who has been
consistently interested in conﬁgurations of exile, particularly in relation to Joyce’s own
exile and modernist stylistics. From her doctoral project, The Exile of James Joyce
(1 968/transl972), to her later “autobiographical,” self-inﬂected essays about her writing-
life in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (1994), Cixous recognizes exile as a drive, a
performance of desire to extemalize psychic alienation. In the context of Joyce, for
instance, Cixous reads his exile in relation to his fascination with Aristotle’s notion of
man’s numerous potential selves being limited through his actions. According to Cixous,

Joyce’s unconscious desires and conscious measures to recognize himself as a “poet” are

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l

simultaneously a liberating and alienating pursuit, which alienates his-poet-self from his
other potential selves—“musician, painter, heretic, orator, political savior.”56 The
dominant poet-self, although not unlike Joyce’s other expressions of self, necessitated an
extemalization of his internal exile; thus, his emigration from Ireland to wander through
Italy, Switzerland and France. In Cixous’ formulation, he “plays the role of the Irish
exile” so that he might create poetry and actualize his-self as a great “artist” of words
(Blue 188). Similar to O’Brien, Cixous ﬁnds a model for a new writing of self, of writing
itself in Joyce’s autobiographical ﬁction and in Stephen Dedalus’ epiphany, his parting
from mother and father, with all of their oedipal connotations. “Away! Away!”

Although Cixous’ critical interest in Joyce and her personal writings demonstrate
a consistent interest in the character of “exile” as subject and condition of subjectivity,
her use of the term in regards to her own self and writing is penned carefully. For
instance, in Rootprints, she brieﬂy refers to her school-girl experiences of exclusion in
both Algeria and later in France as a form of exile related to both her femininity and
race/ethnicity. 5 7

In France, what fell from me ﬁrst was the obligation of the Jewish
identity. On one hand, the anti-Semitism was incomparably weaker in
Paris than in Algiers. On the other hand, I abruptly learned that my

unacceptable truth in this world was my being a woman. Right away, it

 

56 See: Chapter 4 of The Exile of James Joyce.

57 In her collection of essays, Helene Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, Cixous claims: “In
1955, in khcigne at the Lycée Lakanal—that is where I felt the true torrnents of exile. Not before. Neither
with the Gerrnanys, nor with the Englands, nor with the Africas, I did not have such an absolute feeling of
exclusion, of interdiction, of deportation. I was deported right inside the class. In Algeria 1 never thought I
was home, nor that Algeria was my country, nor that I was French. This was part of the exercise of my life:
I had to play with the question of French nationality when I was born. But no one ever took themselves for
French in my family” (204).

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ll

was war. I felt the explosion, the odour of misogyny. Up until then,

living in a world of women, I had not felt it, I was a Jewess, I was Jew.

From 1955 on, I adopted an imaginary nationality which is literary

nationality. (204)

Cixous claims the recognition of exile for women and a Joycean departure, but one that is
of literary departure that refuses to reinscribe, return to and secure the idea of a homeland.
Broadly, the conception of homeland is a conceptual violence that translates into the
experience of violence as borders, languages, and ethnic expressions are maintained by a
sexual difference that already ﬁgures the colonized and diasporic as feminine regardless
of genitalia or biologically written sexual difference.

The imaginary return, then, the imperative of exilic and diasporic writing does not
have to correspond to a literal homeland, a literal nationality but can, in Cixous’
formulation, return the writer to “literary nationality,” a literary homeland. This
renunciation of the place of one’s birth is reminiscent of Joyce’s/Dedalus’ epiphany that
to create a uniquely Irish art would require his leaving Ireland, and yet, unlike
J oyce’s/Dedalus’/Icarus’ continual turning and returning to Ireland, Cixous has made
language, predominantly the French language, the space of her continual retumings for
self-articulation, self-location, self-meaning.58

Her essay “My Algeriance, in Other Words: To Depart Not to Arrive From
Algeria” takes up her recurring theme of living at home in language and refusing a claim
to any nation as homeland. “My way of thinking was born with the thought that I could

have been born elsewhere, in one of the twenty countries where a living fragment of my

 

58 See Cixous’ essay, “’Mamae, disse ele,’ or Joyce’s Second Hand” in Stigmata (131-170).

173

maternal family had landed after it blew up on the Nazi mineﬁeld. With the thought of
the chanciness, of the accidence, of the fall” (204). The elsewhereness, the chanciness,
the accidence of her birth likewise mark her provisional “belonging” to any of the
“national” zones through which she has subsequently passed but never belonged to. The
political force of her piece emerges from her resistance to Zionism’s call “home” to the
Promised Land which she deems a “loss” and her call to “arrivance, movement,
unﬁnishing” modeled as her inﬁnitely deferred arrival after leaving Algeria (170).
Concurrent with a feminist interrogation of patriarchal structures and a common thread
among the literary artists included in this dissertation, national belonging for Cixous is
always a “fake,” a prosthetic of self-articulation and actualization.

Cixous’ constant deferral of national arrival and rejection of nationalizing
identities speaks not only to her feminist practice but also of her
Jewish/Algerian/English/French experience that has “no single mother-father tongue”
(169). Her return then shifts the focus of “home” away from geo-cultural/national
language and ethnic identity formulations to perform an alternative, feminine, non-
oedipal writing. The very obvious invocation of Algeria, the accidental birth place,
functions not as a mother-country to be either revered or reviled but rather as a place of
harsh beauty, a place of family, and a space of memories that contain a great affection
between siblings (Cixous and her brother) and between her parents and her-childhood-
self re-membered. The colonized, conﬂicted place of her birth, Algeria, surfaces as a site
of the personal made political, which Cixous returns to as neither colonizer nor colonized
but rather to as a dynamic subject of and in writing—Departing but not arriving from

Algeria. This is a kind of nostalgic tie and connection to a place, which parodies an

174

exilic attachment and poignancy reminiscent of Said’s refusal to let go of the mother. 59
Her primary move is a semiotic move, that lest Cixous be described as too esoteric, too
abstract, disconnected or even modernist in her evocation of the exilic, it should be noted
that she has been equally active and connected through her work for “social justice”
movements and immigrant rights in France. Critics of celebratory exile in theoretical
practice like Caren Kaplan have queried the ways in which exile becomes a special site
and elite method for supporting the purview of the select to assure their difference from
both the Other and the others at home (i.e., “exile” reshapes and replays colonial/imperial
discourses of Eurocentrism). While often recrafting a modernist (J oycean) aesthetic to
write woman, Cixous’ theoretical practice is less attuned to an imperialistic Eurocentrism
and more commensurate with a World War 11 Jewish intellectualism wary of twentieth-
century, nationally-framed conceptions of homeland.

Along similar lines, in her introduction to the collection of Walter Benjamin’s
meditations on art and culture in Illuminations (1969), Hannah Arendt writes of
migration of Jewish writers in pre-war Europe:

What was decisive was that these men did not wish to “return” either to

the ranks of the Jewish people or to Judaism, and could not desire to do

so—not because they believed in “progress” and an automatic

disappearance of anti-Semitism or because they were too “assimilated”

and too alienated from their Jewish heritage, but because all traditions and

 

59 I should note that while Said’s writing on exile is often that of the nostalgic son and is quite poignant,

Said is likewise careful to draw lines and declare that his expression is not displaced nor celebratory, noting
that such “exile can make a fetish of exile, a practice that distances him or her from all connections and
commitments” (19).

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cultures as well as all “belonging” had become equally questionable to

them. (36)
In a similar manner, Cixous torques exile, seeing value in the not-belongingness of
dislocation and extends it through what Arendt observes in a Benjaminian model of
mobility a refusal to belong to a particular nation. Cixous suggests an alternative to the
diasporic and exilic pattern of “looking back” as return to a homeland in memory;
consequently, her writing alters masculine and patriarchal orders of belonging, whether

ethnic or sexed. The [m]otherland cannot sufﬁce.

The Importance of Being Alice

There is a feminine-inﬂected critical trend to open up male-dominated ﬁelds of
diaspora studies—Irish Studies, Caribbean Studies, Postcolonial Studies—to include the
work of mobile women writers. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham’s provocative criticism
of postcolonial women writers, Isabel Hoving’s intriguing study of migration and Anglo-
Caribbean women authors, and Caren Kaplan’s analysis of (post)modemist travel ﬁgures
in Euro-American literary theory and criticism writ large are a few examples. Yet, akin
to Cixous, Donoghue, O’Brien and even Brand (from the previous chapter), I am less
certain of the value of inclusion, the opening up of current theoretical trends to claim that
postnational mobile women’s writing belongs or should belong within these exile-
affected ﬁelds. Or if their work does belong, it is only by virtue of its non-belongingness,
an unstable and threatening ﬁt.

Convention suggests that the sense of 1033, so crucial to an oedipal-inﬂected exile,

revolves around the loss of the mother as presence. Said notes that when the motherland,

I76

the mother tongue, the mother-mirror-for-a self fashioned as “I/we” are recognized to be
absent or at an unbridgeable distance, the exile’s experience of such absence translates as
feeling of loss that takes two common but not always mutually exclusive forms. One
form of loss borders on or veers into melancholia, a kind of social and linguistic
withdrawal that manifests as a crippling or silencing of the exiled subject. The other is a
kind of renewal, often conﬁgured as the pleasures of exile when the migrant embraces
new experiences, new customs, and new languages/writing practices. In this
conventional characterization, what has been left behind—the homeland with all of its
cultural baggage and nurturing comforts—manifests as something re-imagined akin to
Rushdie’s imaginary homeland within migrant writing. Said and Rushdie share a project
of simultaneously working with conventions of exilic loss while working to disrupt a
Euro-centric crafting of that lost homeland as the place of something other, exotic,
authentic, if not, real.

In a century marked by the recognition of the split subject and an ever increased
movement of people across geopolitical borders, the ﬁgure of the exile, more than any
other trope of self in this dissertation, has attained a particular resonance and import in
literary and cultural studies of modernity and its post(s). From psychoanalytic readings
indebted to Lacan, Cixous, and Irigaray to ideological approaches rooted in Marx and
Althusser to hybrid postcolonial readings evocative of Said and Spivak, “exile” it seems
offer something to everyone interested in representations of a (post)modem condition and
experience. Not all women’s international movement and literary evocations of exile,
however, are a call for inclusion, to claim a place for women within categories of high

modernism or post-colonial diasporic literature. The literary and theoretical work of

177

women artists who are often ﬁgureheads of a variety of diaspora and border-inﬂected
studies such as Michelle Cliff, Eavan Boland, Audre Lorde Gloria Anzaldua tend mark
exile and the return home as fraught if not impossible for women, and exile in their work
tends to expose the literal and social exclusion of women from the social, political and
economic registers of knowledge and national representation.

It is, however, possible to read through the torqued exile or exilic moves of
O’Brien, Donoghue, Cixous, and Dionne Brand a form of gendered political activism that
is likewise a revised social justice activism, diverting the attempt simply to insert or
include woman/women in an established masculine social imaginary and its attendant
literary ﬁelds. Women’s writing collected broadly within the disciplinary ﬁelds that are
organized around ﬁgurations of diaspora, exile, and nation suggests that such new terms
as arrivance are necessary to conceptualizing women who live elsewhere from the place

of their birth.

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CHAPTER 5

STRANGE MOVES: FOREIGN DESIRES AND DISPLACEMENTS

My discontent in living with the other—my strangeness, his strangeness—

rests on the perturbed logic that governs this strange bundle of drive and

language, of nature and symbol, constituted by the unconscious, always

already shaped by the other....How could one tolerate a foreigner if one

did not know one was stranger to oneself?

Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

The stranger is a traveling ﬁgure whose very apprehension suggests a prior
mobility in its dislocation from a space of origin or belonging and its eruption into a
space of recognition and non-belonging. In other words, the stranger is a foreigner, an-
Other who has traveled from elsewhere and is now recognizable in “our” or the 1’s midst.
In her survey of the ﬁgurations and psycho-social processes of estrangement in Strangers
to Ourselves (1989/ 1991), Julia Kristeva points out that the stranger is a compelling
ﬁguration of otherness, conveying the psychic and/or social disturbances that expose the
dual fantasies of a unitary subject/“identity” and collective/national identities. The
arrival of a stranger signals that the borders of self and/or social orders are permeable and
unﬁxed, yet this quality of arrival from the unconscious or distant geo-cultural space
suggests a suspension of movement in the recognition and signiﬁcation of an-other, if
only temporarily. The stranger arrives and disturbs, disrupting fantasies of coherence and
the conceptual and political border that regulate and assure sameness. Thus, formulations
of strangers and estrangement can appear somewhat static in that the stranger is a ﬁgure

that itself stresses arrival and re-cognition on a mobile logic similar to that of masculine

exile.

179

In contrast to Helene Cixous’ and Emma Donoghue’s rejection of exile as a viable
ﬁgure and strategy for woman writing woman, Kristeva promotes the estrangements and
alienations of exile as essential to the speaking and writing subject, although often
intriguingly eliding sex/gender differences. Cixous—like Luce Irigaray and Rosi
Braidotti—argues that discourses of knowledge and self (philosophy and psychoanalysis
in particular) reﬂect a masculine imaginary in which woman is the embodiment of exile,
death, and psychosis; thus, women must write themselves otherwise in order to be
written as subjects at all. Kristeva, however, seeks such exilic forces as estrangement,
abjection, and alienation (oft carrying forth the repressed feminine crafted as the pre-
oedipal and maternal) within existing discourses and conceptual structures while
seemingly side-stepping more explicitly “feminist” or gender-directed theoretical
projects.6O

Writing from Julia Kristeva, Svava Jakobsdéttir, Menna Gallie, and Shani
Mootoo present the strange and foreign as a range of forms and purposes in mobile
women’s writing. In Kristeva’s recent writing on strangers and estrangement, she tends
to neither completely ignore her own status as a female writer nor assert a writing
practice distinctive of/to sex/ gender difference. Rather she is intrigued with how
strangers, in and of language—which would include her own writing persona (“I”/self)—

transgress psychic and national borders, disturb the “I” and the “us,” and therefore reveal

 

60 In a Kristevan context, mobility and instability are effects of language and yet crucial to the generation
of the self in, through, and against language. As with Kristeva’s earlier writing on the semiotic (poetic
mode, transgressive and destabilizing function of language), the Symbolic language constitutes a subject
that is never complete in its constitution; this Symbolic permeability is crucial to Kristeva’s “transgressive”
writing. In that the symbolic is the rule-goveming mechanism of linguistic meaning that makes reference
and therefore judgment at all possible, the element of meaning associated with the structures and rules
governing grammar and syntax. The Symbolic (master ordering of language associated with Lacanian
Phallic) might be invaded by the semiotic, a kind of signifying foreignness, to create alternative,
revolutionary changes in social and psychic orders.

I80

the perpetual and rhythmic “crisis” of self and belongingness. While Kristeva’s
investment in psychic and social disturbances may only imply the strange or foreign
quality of a woman writing herself (not necessarily of woman), Svava Jakobsdéttir’s short
stories and novels of the 19603 draw readers into an aesthetics of the abject, suggesting
that if woman can be written it is through signiﬁcations that must terrify and paralyze the
masculine imagination. On the other hand, Menna Gallie’s novel In These Promiscuous
Parts (1986) strategically estranges the reader from familiar oedipal narrative structures,
playing upon the pleasures of transgressing order to suggest that narratives of community
are perhaps best understood through narratives of transgression and estrangement.6| And,
ﬁnally, this chapter examines Shani Mootoo’s crafting of migrancy as a perverse mode of
writing the female subject. Her migrant is becoming foreign, becoming stranger to the
“Other,” marking mobility as crucial to representing an eccentric subject that both enjoys
and exposes the fetishized authenticities of cultural otherness.

Their conﬁgurations of the stranger and performances of estrangement do not
work in exactly the same way for the same purpose, but in their variety of approaches and
ﬁgurations they expose how psychic, social, and linguistic estrangement is at work in
representations of mobile female subjects and their writing of self. Neither
comprehensive nor even a consistent survey of stranger/foreign and estrangement
(Kristeva has spent her career on such work), this chapter introduces a range of
investments in the aesthetics of literary estrangement and foreignness in post-1968
mobile women’s writing. This partnering of writing from Kristeva, Jakobsdottir, Gallie,

and Mootoo spans poststructuralism from 19603 to the early-twenty-ﬁrst century and

 

6' As in Chapter l—Deuce, I am indebted to Judith Roof and her theorizing of narrative in Come as You
Are (67-9) and the complementary work of Roland Barthes and Teresa de Lauretis, in which oedipal
narratives is noted to privilege a satisfactory end and reinforces notions of masculine mastery.

181

evokes such questions as: What are the representational relationships between the
stranger/foreigner and woman? To what extent can the evocation and processes of the
strange/estrangement craft a feminine aesthetic or literary practice? (i.e., Is the
stranger/foreigner just another manifestation of the Other and the symbolic site for the
feminine/woman?) In what ways do the transgressive qualities of the stranger/foreigner
characterize and mobilize a particularly feminine writing strategy? And, ﬁnally, how is
estrangement (strangeness) a participant in other mobile conﬁgurations manifesting via
alienation, loss, and repression (exile, diaspora, uncanny doubles)?

While each of the traveling conﬁgurations of self focused on in this dissertation—
neo-doubles, diasporic subjects, exile, and nomad—threatens to collapse under the
weight of its (over)determinations and generalities, this threat is that much more acute in
examining strangers/foreigners and the narrative potential of estrangement for women
writing women. For might not every encounter with an-other, an unknown text, an
unknown desire provoke strangeness, in which the repeated and possibly perpetual
encounter with the unknown is so common as to be a familiar condition? And, certainly,
what may have once been strange and unfamiliar can become familiar through repeated
encounters. Following Freud, Kristeva, in some ways, points the way through this moras
of all thing strange by limiting the stranger to conditions of the abject and uncanny, to
that which disturbs and estranges the subject in his/her confrontation with the strange (as
repressed familiar). Thus according to Kristeva, the strange/r can only be accepted, never
made familiar. And so, it is with this formulation and with Kristeva that this strange

encounter continues.

182

Strangely Mobile

Consistently interested in the estrangements in/of language, Kristeva often writes
of her personal experiences as a foreigner and female intellectual in what Anna Smith
notes is the persona of the “female voyager” (8, 57). Kristeva is, however, less than
obvious in marking the sex/gender of her self descriptors. Her more recent writings on
subjectivity and the politics of community spin through such tropes as stranger, foreigner,
migrant, exile, wanderer, and occasionally nomad to describe not only her personal
experience of living elsewhere from the nation of her birth, Bulgaria, but also the
processes of the psychic subject uttered in/through language. “I like to think that since
humanity speaks,” she muses in a 1996 interview with Ross Mitchell Guberman, “it is in
a state of transit; between biology and meaning, the past and the future, pleasure and the
absurd ” This collection of mobile ﬁgures (in-transit metaphors) corresponds with
Kristeva’s strategic reworking of psycho-linguistic terminology, a consistent feature of
her writing style and subject theorizations. As Anthony Elliott notes, Kristeva is known
for “the deployment of neologisms or terms used differently from established usage—the
semiotic, thetic, chora and so forth” that is part of a linguistic strategy indispensable to
her “attempts to pioneer a post-Lacanian psychoanalytic method” (132). Her pioneering
suggests only a temporary estrangement in/of language, however, since Kristeva’s goals
are to re-deﬁne, reﬁne, and potentially adds to existing masculinist discourse. For some
critics, this propensity toward “terminological innovations” contributes to the
incomprehensibility of and/or unreliability in her writing; for others this effusiveness of
“self “deﬁnition(s) and play upon mobility to write “subjects-in-process” produces

model(s) of self that have revolutionary psychoanalytic and socio-political potential with

183

the capacity to alter how “we” understand our unconscious, our repressed desires and,
consequently, our relationship with Other(s).62

Since the late-19803, Kristeva’s terminological innovation has played with
mobility metaphors that are geared toward re(in)novating psychoanalytic discourse to
address the broader issues and cultural politics of later-twentieth-century nation,
revolution and globalization. Still rooted in psychoanalysis and linguistics, her later
writings—particularly Strangers to Ourselves (1989/1991) and Crisis of the European
Subject (2000)—cycle through ﬁgures of modern travel and subjectivity, suggesting that
linguistic innovation is not just using terms in unfamiliar and new contexts and ways but
is refusing to let one ﬁgure bear the weight of self representation. In these habitually
self-conscious writings, Kristeva’s deployment of travel ﬁgures performs a kind of
catachresis that works to displace her own self-fashioned female intellectual/female

661,9

voyager even as her remains central to the conversation. Kristeva’s “I” is, depending
on the context, ﬁgured as foreigner, exile, migrant, nomad, wanderer, and stranger,
although each seems more a refashioning of the “exile” as foreigner, as migrant, nomad
and so forth to write her-self.

In her extensive assessment of Kristeva’s interest in estrangement, Julia Kristeva:
Readings of Exile and Estrangement (1996), Anna Smith observes, “When Kristeva
speaks of her experience as a foreigner in France, it is often to stress exile as the state that

causes the subject to come to pieces: ‘Consequently, as you may have noticed,’ she says,

‘I have no ”I” anymore...’ (Desire: 161). The exile cannot claim to have a settled identity,

 

62 For additional discussions regarding Kristeva’s critical receptions see: Anna Smith’s introduction to
Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement (1996); Tina Chanter’s and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek’s
introduction to Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva 's Polis (2005). And
Nancy Fraser’s essay “The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Discourse” in
boundary 2 (Summer 1990) gives a sharp critique of Kristeva’s ﬁguration of “woman.”

184

nor can she ever be fully at home with her sex. Everything is disﬁgured, or escapes into
hyperbole. Yet her reﬂections on exile, foreignness and estrangement are so frequent that
one cannot fail to suspect that an autobiography is being written all the same” (5 5-6). If
as Smith observes, Kristeva has been “inconsistent” and “surreptitious” in her writings on
feminism and on the possibility that women might possess a “distinct advantage over
men as exiles within the Symbolic,” sexual difference is often a key elision in Kristeva’s
theoretical work (168). Kristeva’s writing is, according to Smith, then perhaps best
thought of as a refusal of the mundane, rejection of common sense, and an innovative
approach to characterize psychic/linguistic instability (5, 68-9). All of which is mirrored
in Kristeva’s more consistent interest, return to, and incorporation of poetic and
musicality of modernist aesthetics and literature as she often returns to such writing
ranging from Stéphane Mallarme’ to James Joyce to Samuel Beckett. However, given her
consistent attention to her own experience of exile and foreignness in the
autobiographical details she includes in much of her writing, her inconsistency and
surreptitiousness on the ftmction of gender in affecting a writing subject all the more
curious.

The ﬁgure of Kristeva as woman is a ﬂickering occurrence, which is perhaps its
own, although never explicitly recognized, performance of estrangement from/of
linguistic structures ordering a masculine social imaginary. For feminist critics such as
Nancy Fraser, Kristeva’s surreptitiousness is both intriguing for and dangerous to a
feminism that takes the politics of sexual difference and the signiﬁcation of woman and
gender identity as necessitating sophisticated clarity and unmistakable commitment.

“She [Kristeva] ends up alternating essentialist gynocentric moments with anti-

185

essentialist nominalistic moments,” claims Fraser. “She reverses herself and recoils from
her construct insisting that ‘women’ do not exist, that feminine identity is ﬁctitious and
that feminist movements therefore tend toward the religious and protototalitarian” (190).

As Fraser’s concern points out, such “inconsistency” in the writings of a mobile
female intellectual begs such questions as: Whether the exile of stranger/foreigner a
process ultimately without sexual difference for Kristeva? 13 her desire to sidestep the
issue of sex/gender enunciation and the psychic, social and economic disparities that
follow from difference—and thereby stepping into the speaking position of the universal
(masculine) subject? Or is her self-deﬁnition as exile et. al. an implicit acknowledgement
of woman as the symbolic side of such otherness and alienation—and thus her writing,
whether overtly or provisionally gendered, performs feminine writing? None of this is to
dismiss any transgressive quality to Kristeva’s inclusion of her “I”——as exile, foreign,
stranger—that, if not strictly feminist, gestures toward the impossibility of a female
subject’s writing from a position of Symbolic estrangement. But such questions

6619’

underlying Fraser’s concerns direct attention to Kristeva’s persona as multiple, a
persona who speaks as the psychoanalyst, the clinician, and witness-to-the-foreign
appears strikingly masculine in its depiction of the feminine and woman. While such
questions are, necessary when looking to the place of sex/gender in ﬁgurations of the
stranger and estrangement, they mimic Kristeva’s own writings on the stranger/foreigner
and seem a bit too direct, to delimiting. Answers are better sought in her proliferation of
mobile ﬁgures to trOpe her “I,” which attempt to replicate the moves of a stranger that

proliferates, that moves from space to space but also tends to return the witness to a site

of re-cognition, judgment, and language of the Same. All of which suggests that perhaps

186

the strangest ﬁguration of all is then the female psychoanalyst. Yet, Kristeva claims, “I
am very attached to the idea of the woman as irrecuperable foreigner,” Kristeva claims in
her Guberman interview. Speaking out of line with “American” (equity and justice)
approaches to feminism in particular, Kristeva describes her desire for a “positivist notion
of woman. I see the role of women a sort of vigilance, a strangeness, as always to be on
guard and contestatory” (45). In this way, woman becomes a ﬁgure of mobility and
aligned with Kristeva’s writing on the psychic processes of abjection as a kind of
“journey.”

In Kristeva’s earlier rumination on the subject, the abject marks a “perpetual loss
of identity” through bodily expulsions and waste—blood, vomit, corpses, and such—that
the subject experiences as horror, “drawing me [Kristeva; the subject] toward the place
where meaning collapses” (Powers 2). The abject, neither subject nor object, in this
fashion recalls a pre-oedipal, pre-entry-into-the-Symbolic (subjectivity). What was once
part of “1” becomes simultaneously “not 1,” foreign, strange, and exiled, disrupting a
subject’s sense of self coherence and meaning as the borders of soma and psyche are
demonstrated to be permeable. “Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre—
objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated
from another body in order to be” (10).

In her essay “Bulgaria, my Suffering,” Kristeva imaginatively returns to the
country of her birth to articulate an ethics of being a subject of/to/in contemporary
“Europe.” It is a return to a country of one’s birth that counters the self-conceiving

moves of Cixous, whose own return to Algeria rejects masculine formulations of exile to

187

practice a feminine-imbued arrivance, Kristeva shapes the exilic through the expulsions
of the abject and calls for generating:

[N]ew beings of language and blood, rooted in no language or blood,

diplomats of the dictionary, genetic negotiators, wandering Jews of Being

who challenge authentic, and hence military, citizens of all kinds in favor

of a nomadic humanity that is no longer willing to sit quietly. ...[E]xile is

the only way remaining to us. . .And it is never found except in the seeking

that knows it is seeking, or in exile exiled from its exile’s certainty, its

exile’s insolences. In the endless mourning, in which language and the

body revive in the heart beat of a grafted Friend, I examine the still warm

corpse of my maternal memory. (168-9)
She argues broadly that Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria might contribute
signiﬁcantly as “supplements” to a Western European-dominated European Union to
produce dynamic, altemate-narratives for a socio-political body that can no longer be
sustained by the symbols and structuring coherencies (legal constitutions and nation-
building narratives) of what she sees is a (post)modem nation-state experiencing “crisis.”
For Kristeva, “culture is. . .the very stuff of politics,” notes Anthony Elliott, and in Crisis
of the European Subject her overall concern “is that a sense of cultural belonging or
identity has begun to stall in the face of globalizing forces. suited to the success of the
far right and a general climate of hostility to immigration, and less and less open to
voices speaking up for cultural difference, moderation or reason” (128). Through her
own and Bulgaria’s exile, she discovers a model of othemess/foreignness/exile that

disrupts the xenophobic/anti-foreigner discourses of European nations (speciﬁcally

188

France). Bulgaria emerges the site of the (m)Other, presumably a “supplement” to the
European Father. Here the foreign and strange, in particular Bulgaria’s Orthodox
Catholicism, turns out to be essential in creating a kind of (un)belonging and
reassessment of a European socio-political body after its historic loss of mythic/religious
Que—nation) and national organizing narratives. In one sense, it is a new image of the
social, privileging an ethic of acceptance over belonging and seemingly savoring the
exorbitances of the nomadic, the exiled, the migrant, and the rootless as a re(in)novated
terminology for conﬁguring socio-cultural and political change. Such exorbitance is
tethered, however, to the maternal body and an imagery of origin, Bulgarian, that is
suspiciously “rooted” in a sexual difference, which makes use of the symbolic mother but
does not fully account for the female intellectual/voyager, who is more “foreigner” than
daughter.

While Cixous rejects formulations of mother- or father-tongues as authorizing and
enunciating agents of the self and, instead, privileges the image of a border-crossing

661,9

polyglot to emphasize mobility, play, learning and speaking her persona, Kristeva
clings to a gendered troping of tongue as mother. Cixous’ polyglot pitches self-
representation away from the gender essentialism that fuels Fraser’s issues with Kristeva,
for it is difﬁcult to read Kristeva’s investment in exile as something other than an
investment in a Symbolic that aligns woman and female desire with motherhood as well
as cultural belonging and stability with patriarchy. Highly sensitive to the potential
conﬂation of a symbolic mother and the institution of motherhood, Braidotti, like Cixous,

claims, “There are no mother tongues.” Kristeva on the other hand opens “Bulgaria my

Suffering” by declaring, “I have not lost my mother tongue” (165). Bulgarian surfaces in

189

her dreams, helps her translate and speak other “alien” languages such as “Russian and
English,” and when she is tired, Bulgarian is the language of her common sense.
Bulgarian is, according to Kristeva, her “original source,” and if French has befriended
her, “exile cadaverized this old body (the Bulgarian enunciated Kristeva) substituted
another for it” (165). For purposes different than Cixous, Braidotti, and even Fraser,
Kristeva aligns language with the body as it is a body strangely universalized through the
abject image of the mother corpse.

“Nomadic humanity,” however, seems to endorse through a profusion of travel
metaphors and imagery, a dislocation from monolingual that “roots” the self in a
seemingly female body of language. And yet, it is the ﬁgure of the “exile,” not the
nomadic polyglot or “wandering Jews of Being,” who comes to dominate Kristeva’s call
for a “new beings [Europeans] of language and blood.” It is an exile imbued with the
abjected loss and mourning of the male subject’s entrance into the Symbolic and into his
own Oedipal complex that cleaves son from mother and must, as Cixous observes, pitch
daughters differently. In stressing “being” rather than the processes of “becoming,”
Kristeva recalls her earlier work on the abject as an unstable “being” rooted the condition
of exile that asserts its masculine representational framework. Kristeva’s desire to play,
to innovate—since one cannot escape—the Symbolic surfaces in her writing of self and
mobility as a kind of a rhetorical and linguistic malfunction, a quandary that no profusion
and substitution of travel metaphors can re-mobilize. For exile’s moment of
apprehension, for it is a (re)cognition, reﬂects the corpse of her mother-tongue, the
Bulgarian language from which she is exiled, and the momentary suspension of meaning

affecting a rhetorical presence that Kristeva consistently resists in her being apprehended

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as “woman” is displaced into comforts of the foreign and the strange. There is no woman,
only strange.

At times, there is, as can be noted in the above passage, an effusive quality to
Kristeva’s stylistics which is, in part, the effect of a succession of novel, in—transit
descriptors—“new beings. . .rooted in no language or blood, diplomats of the dictionary,
genetic negotiators, wandering Jews of Being.” This profusion is both strategy of the
semiotic function in language so that no single term must carry the weight of
representation as well as a displacement of what seems, to me, a desire to limit the
slippages and mobilities of language so that the writing and speaking subject can make
meaning. Reading “Kristeva” is then akin to being on a journey, alternating between
going with the beat and going with the ﬂow often punctuated by abrupt landings into sites
of exile, the alienated subject, the loss of meaning. It is this estranged exile that
dominates Kristeva’s writing and ﬁgurations of self, female or otherwise.

Crisis of the European Subject complements and expands upon her earlier
writings on aesthetics, the polis, and the uncanny processes of estrangement in Strangers
to Ourselves. While taking up the mythic and historical import of the stranger/foreigner
to the framing of narratives of community, Strangers to Ourselves reﬂects on and
(re)turns to her more prominent theorizations of effects of horror, love, and melancholy
in speaking/uttering the self/subject. And this wide-ranging study of the
stranger/foreigner replays a common tension in Kristeva’s writing between a desire to
evoke and promote mobility and a desire to identify, classify, and “level” the very
effusiveness and differences (sexual, racial, class, and so forth) of estrangement. Her

guiding questions are quite simply: “[S]hall we be, intimately and subjectively, able to

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live with others, to live as others, without ostracism but also without leveling? The
modiﬁcation in the status of foreigners this is imperative today leads one to reﬂect on our
ability to accept new modalities of otherness” (2). This is one of the chief struggles of/in
Kristeva’s writing practice—how to write of the subject-in-process, as characterized by

‘61”

mobility without leveling or ﬁxing the Other and, consequently, the in the moment of
apprehension.

The proliferation of mobile ﬁgures in her writing suggests a range of modalities
and yet they tend to get sucked into the vortices of the exile’s “nomadic humanity.”
Kristeva rightly refuses to imagine this new living with other in her analysis, but again
the underlying presumptions of acceptance of a potentially inﬁnite selection of psychic
and social differences reads bit too sound-bite. If Kristeva values “woman” as the
irrecuperable foreigner, a ﬁgure of exile, she delineates between what is to be an
irrecuperable, transgressive and revolutionary estrangement and what is beyond the
border of acceptable otherness by reading as a psychoanalyst invested in the health—
body and psyche—of the subject.

The opening essay in Strangers to Ourselves, “Toccata and the Fugue for the
Foreigner,” brings together anecdotes, personal observations and mini-readings of
ﬁgurations of the strange/foreign to produce a polyphonic piece that is less cohesive
argument than a collection of literary estrangements and foreigner sightings. Kristeva
ultimately isolates three distinct limits to acceptable estrangement: transconsciousness
(“lost consciousness”), unchecked sexual desires, and unknowing utterances. Illustrating

the psychically dead subject through a reading of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, she argues,

“Meursault carries to an extreme the separateness of the uprooted person” (29). If to

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accept the “stranger within” can be a corrective to what she implies as the “isms” of the
nation-state (racism, sexism, classism), this is not to claim that all destabilizations and all
strangers or extremes can or should be accepted. According to her reading, Meursault’s
indiscriminant and unrepentant killing of an Arab and his casual sex with Maria, never
mind his lack of expressed grief at his mother’s funeral, make him incomprehensible,
perhaps undecipherable, and a “stranger” to those sitting in judgment in the court and
jury at his murder trial. Siding with the jury, although for different reasons, Kristeva
rejects Meursault as a potential model for the stranger who must be accepted: “One
realizes then that Meursault has always lived as though he were in a state of lost
consciousness, of transconsciousness as it were, and the dazzled vertigo, which, at the
end, changes him into a murderer, was always there, more deceitful and more indistinct,
but permanent. . .His [consciousness] is indifferent. Why? We shall never know” (25).
Accordingly, the value of the foreigner/stranger/exile/rootless is not who might be
recognized as such, as the jury, the reader, and/or Kristeva recognize Meursault, but in
Meursault’s “I,” no matter how fractured, “seeking that knows” the I “is seeking.”
Meursault’s failure as an ideal stranger is that he does not seek self-knowledge and does
not recognize his impulses and desires (murder, promiscuity) as acts of psychic and social
estrangement. This is the murky ground of the border between unconscious and
conscious, drive/desire and unknowing/knowing expression that Kristeva is known for
traversing. Meursault in his state of indifference likewise becomes Kristeva’s
undecipherable stranger, an other who represents the boundary between good
estrangement and bad estrangement, knowing and unknowing. Uncannily evocative of

Irigaray’s location of Woman in the Symbolic as the subject in-difference, Meursault

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strangeness resists the clinical reader who desires to “know” the why of Meursault’s
psyche.

In the context of Kristeva’s larger argument, the representational relationship
between the stranger and woman is not her overall concern (more an Irigaray query). Yet
following her discussion of Meursault’s psychic deadness, she locates another limit of
estrangement in an extended metaphor of the sexually adventurous foreigner, particularly
her observation of a female immigrant in France (observed sometime between 1969 and
the late 19803). Kristeva stages a kind of clinical observation of a female immigrant’s
sexual experimentation, a sexual desire unrestrained by either the mores of the home
culture/country or the likely untranslatable/unreadable sexual mores of the new country:

I have known a foreign student, who was a virgin and a strait-laced person

when she arrived in Paris, and then threw herself headlong into the ‘group

sex’ of the late sixties, impressing her lover with her daring. Now a few

months later, after they had broken off, I met up with her again; she was in

a welfare institution, suffering from lung disease. Repression hellishly

well knows how to fool us! One thinks to have outsmarted it while it is

moving around perﬁdiously, on a lower level, on the borders between

soma and psyche, where the sluice gates of jouissance become snagged

and unleashed eroticism is obliged to resort to new limits those of organs,

which then falter. The foreigner who imagines himself to be free of

borders, by the same token challenges any sexual limit. Often, but not

entirely. (31)

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This is no longer a display of innovative language or in-transit metaphors to
characterize a subject who embraces exile. This is the clinician Kristeva writing yet
seemingly without an analyst’s couch or notepad. The timing of her record is off (when
is this observation—19603 or l9803?—“months later” do not help). Surely the
disorientations of estrangement, as with the disturbances of the abject, fracture the
signiﬁcation of time as well as all spatial meaning, but for the estranged subject, not the
clinician, as the skilled witness who apprehends the strange/r. Amidst the deadening
potentiality of estrangement as unchecked eroticism, Kristeva levels a judgment via an
anecdote of a woman’s body and female sexual desire. A prudishness seeps into her
writing that seems less about her own/France’s sexual mores and more a literal effort to
frame (categorically maintain) the libidinal drives and desires that produce foreignness
via the female body minus the maternal.

To denote the third, and ﬁnal category of unacceptable estrangements, Kristeva
links the unknowing utterances of the foreigner to a failed re(in)ovation in/of language.
Avoiding the speciﬁcs of literary models or personal observation, she sketches a foul-
mouthed foreigner, a kind of caricature of the conversational language-learner who is
enticed by slang and profanity, enjoying the perversity of language that s/he would likely
avoid uttering in his/her mother-tongue and/or home country. This stranger’s linguistic
transgressions elide his/her mindful and precise selection of words to speak his/her self.
“In that sense, the foreigner does not know what he is saying. His unconscious does not
dwell in his thought, consequently, he is satisﬁed brilliantly to reproduce everything there
is to learn, seldom innovating” (32). This is a logical inversion of the sexually

adventurous foreigner whose repressed desires become an all too innovative expression.

I95

Kristeva values the poetic, the musical (the semiotic) of language to alter consciously the
social imaginary and political borders of nation. Still, her portrayal is curious given her
own innovation of language that often plays with and mimics incoherency (although I do
acknowledge that my own reading may in part be an effect of Kristeva-in-translation, but
her terminological slippages are too common a signature of her writing practice to be
entirely attributable to the lapses and gaps of translation). Kristeva’s concern in marking
this third limit is with the degree to which the language/drives of the unconscious can be
read out from the utterance of the conscious subject. An indiscriminate reproduction
rather than discriminate innovation of/in language muddies her own translation and,
consequently, our re-cognition of what is strange (perhaps even in this case “authentic”)
and, thus, who can be read as the seeking, healthy, and acceptable strangers to ourselves
and nation.

To reiterate Cixous and Braidotti’s concerns with employing the ﬁgure of the
exile to write “woman,” such binary ﬁgurations—belonging/exile, subject/other,
Same/Other, man/woman—tend to return us to the Symbolic and a preoccupation with
Oedipal narratives of patriarchy and nation. Kristeva’s more sustained writing on the
stranger and estrangement ultimately regulates the category of the stranger/foreigner, et.
al.—lost consciousness, botched sexual pleasure, unknowing speech—and in the process
suggests that the value of strangers whether within or without is in due course about the
reader/clinician/I’s mastery of and in service to the health of the subject in relation to
Symbolic (the Law of the Father). In other words, a “perpetual loss of identity” is

transgressive and celebratory only to the degree that it does not wrest control of reading

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and signifying the Conscious (Meursault), Body (immigrant woman), Knowledge

(controlled utterance) from the wandering master clinician.

Strange Desires

For a moment she feared, was almost certain even, that someone would

open ﬁom the other side and that her whole existence was being reversed:

the inside was turning outwards, the outside inwards, and just as she felt

she was losing herself in this ominous reversal, he stopped his pounding.

Svava Jakobsdéttir, The Lodger

Strange indeed is the encounter with the other—whom we perceive by

means of sight, hearing, smell, but do not “ ame ” within our

consciousness. The other leaves us separate, incoherent; even more so, he

can make us feel that we are not in touch with our own feelings, that we

reject them or, on the contrary, that we refuse to judge them—we feel

“stupid, ” we have “been had. ”

Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

At the close of Svava Jakobsdéttir’s novel The Lodger (1969) the unnamed
protagonist, a housewife, stands in the foyer of her newly-built, sea-side villa paralyzed
by insecurity and literally turning to stone, as if becoming one with her home. She is
trapped, caught up in the impossibility of making a decision on her own and ﬂanked by
two distinct versions of strangers—a “stateless man” who has rung the doorbell for
entrance and her husband and their “lodger” who have merged into a single, grotesque
version of a “man with two heads and four arms on two legs” (76, 78). She and the
husband/lodger have prepared to sit down to their Christmas dinner, and she is unsure
whether or not she should extend a Christmas welcome to the “stateless man” whom she
has often seen wandering their beachfront. Peter, her husband, has become so enamored

with and reliant upon the lodger—literally now his other half—that he can no longer

dictate how she should respond to the stranger at the door. Lessons of Christianity and

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rules of hospitality would suggest, yes, let him in. And, before moving to the villa, the
stateless man might have simply entered as “the lodger” had done. She and her husband
never locked their apartment, believing “there was no point in locking the front door
because the landlord had an extra key; she was thus always conscious of a key to her
home in the pocket of a stranger” (l 3). But those days of unlocked doors were gone.
Those days were before the “the lodger” took up residence in their hallway without so
much as a knock, a greeting, or a prOper welcome.

The Lodger’s concluding scene multiplies deviations and estrangements from
what makes a home proper and civil—a crippled, two-headed man in the house; a fearful
woman turning to stone at its entryway; a stateless man on the other side of the door——
each possessing a peculiar otherness and potential threat to social order and the wife’s
psychic stability. Jakobsdéttir’s story is riddled with strangers, and they manifest
themselves as foreigners, exiles, feminine and racial/ethnic others—and, of course, the
lodger. But not the man, the husband, Peter. In this ﬁgurative slide, the stranger refuses
singularity and serves to reveal the inaccessible, repressed desires that ﬁx a woman,
symbolically and, in the end, literally in the home. This is a story very much about
woman and female desire as foreign and estranging to a masculine imaginary.

For the wife, each encounter with strangers—the lodger, the stateless man, and
eventually her monstrous husband—provokes an uncontrollable and dizzying
destabilization of self in which “her whole existence was being reversed: the inside was
turning outwards, the outside inwards” (15). Typical of the uncanny and abject stylistics
of Jakobsdéttir’s short stories, The Lodger reproduces familiar narrative structures but in

a manner that is itself distancing, disturbing, estranging. Jakobsdéttir’s story is

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provocative precisely because the wife’s desires are not only crafted as a “wife’s” desires
funneled through the husband’s but also as a powerfully destabilizing eruption of
otherness, of the repressed. We observe her superﬁcial claims to desiring a beautiful
house and her more private reﬂections on desiring “security” and comfort. But the
explosive disruptions of self, her repeated experiences of disorientation and confusion
express a desire that has been so repressed as to become horrifying. The psychic reversal
of inwards and outwards, the destabilization of the wife’s boundaries echoes Freud’s
depiction of the uncanny as return of the repressed and anticipates by decades Julia
Kristeva’s own theorization of how strangers disclose the instabilities of identity and the
indeterminacy of borders between self and other.

In her own writing about women writing, Jakobsdéttir suggestively replays the
basic precepts of French Feminism that demonstrate language to be masculine, claiming
that “the street of literary tradition that she walks along is well trodden and paved by men.
A woman writer always runs a risk of being seduced with elegant symbols and beautiful
metaphors which originate in a perspective toward the subject that is totally different
from hers, and which lead to a perspective that the woman writer, in the end, has only
appropriated for herself but not experienced. Thus the female experience has not been
conveyed’” (qtd in Kress 503). Published in 1969 on the eve of the galas of post-
structuralism and Continental psychoanalytic feminisms, The Lodger anticipates Cixous’,
Irigaray’s, and Kristeva’s negotiations in/of Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis and the
processes and/or impossibilities of a woman writing her place into the male Symbolic.
The woman writing, according to Jakobsdéttir, may “appropriate” the perspective and

language of the Symbolic, but she remains strange and foreign to the language of her

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experience and subjectivity. Corresponding with this notion of “appropriation,” the
wife’s encounters with the “stranger” signal her own absence, and her lack of purpose as
a lack of reﬂection. For instance, looking through the peephole into the stranger’s “coal-
black and alien” eyes, “[s]he could not ﬁnd herself in them no matter how hard she tried.
She received no indication, no initiative from these eyes” (78). The resounding question
in and about Jakobsdéttir’s ﬁction tackles whether or not it is possible to write as and of
woman. Her propensity toward the grotesque and abject suggests a literary strategy to
destabilize, if momentarily, the seductions of the Symbolic and its “beautiful” but empty
metaphors for woman.

The tendency among scholars of J akobstttir’s work, however, has been to read
The Lodger, as Astradur Eysteinsson notes, as an allegory of the establishment of an
American military base in Iceland post-World War II (6). Allegorically, the lodger
represents the American military, and, consequently, his presence undermines Iceland’s
recently gained independence from Denmark (in 1944) and Iceland’s (husband/wife’s)
attempt to build a new, distinctive nation/home. 63 His presence is ﬁnancially lucrative
and legitimate (sanctioned by the husband), but the lodger is also dangerously
charismatic, foreign, uncouth, and hyper-masculine, stirring up talk among the neighbors
and suggesting that the husband and wife cannot “make it” on their own. The husband
(Peter) and the wife (unnamed), accordingly, represent the people and national spirit of
Iceland, a young couple (country) caught between establishing their own comfortable

routine and working to satiate their upwardly-mobile desires. The lodger is an

 

63 During World War II, the United States military partnered with British armed forces and took over the
British base in Iceland in 1941. US military presence was intermittent after the war, but by 1951 the US
established a military base which suited both NATO and US Cold War interests in the North Atlantic as
well as assuring military protection to Iceland, which has never maintained its own armed forces. The US
withdrew its forces in 2006, and Iceland agreed to maintain compliance with NATO defense guidelines.

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invader/foreigner/stranger who becomes less threatening to the household’s order when
the wife renames him “lodger.” In such an allegory, the stateless man threatens the
tentative community and belongingness of ‘home’ with his illegitimate/illegal presence
and wandering ways. Shadowy and intriguingly distant he represents both that which
helps deﬁne the settled borders of the home (nation) and that which signals its instability,
its permeability, and heterogeneity. In this sense, he ftmctions similarly to such
postcolonial readings as Franz Fanon’s correspondence of colonial Others, whether
biologically male or female, as inhabiting the Symbolic space reserved for the feminine.

While Jakobsdéttir’s own political career as a diplomat to Norway and her
parliamentary seat convey her personal interest in Iceland’s national politics, allegory is
not the primary structure organizing The Lodger. For the wife, who sustains the focus of
the story, gets lost in national allegory, subsumed her to part of a nation as couple, to the
complement of the “husband.” In many ways, allegory works to recontain, normalize,
and stabilize the very narrative and symbolic disruptions Jakobsdéttir’s story provokes.
In addition, reading The Lodger as an allegory of nation actually manufactures a narrative
of the “real” via the replacement of a signiﬁcant narrative displacement or absence, i.e.,
Iceland. For instance, references to Iceland/nation are decidedly absent from her novel
and must be read as an implication or an obverse characterization of the stateless, the
foreigner, the exile. In other words, allegory’s extension of the power of metaphor to
substitute for the nation’s absence in her story implies an authentic version of Iceland’s
postcolonial struggles ‘outside’ of her story but to an “Iceland” to which her novel may
or may not be read to refer. This is the slipperiness and power of allegory. Thus, the

processes of allegorical substitution maintain particular binary set of

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inclusions/exclusions so that Iceland as nation might be better understood through the
bizarre but seemingly instructional tale of a heterosexual couple and their domestic
desires. The very title of Jakobsdéttir’s novel, The Lodger, should be read as a caution
against our all too easy embrace of metaphorical substitutions that delimit the novel’s
representation of strangers and estrangement to allegories of nation or otherwise.

In so far as the novel’s title signals the wife’s own rhetorical substitutions to quell
dissolutions of self she experiences when he arrives and in his presence, her own
renaming of the “stranger” and “foreigner” who enters her home uninvited with the more
benign, but observably false name, “lodger” is part of the very processes that repress her
desire to speak, to say “no” to his uninvited entry, to his rearranging of her furniture to
his liking. It is possible to read the wife’s substitution of “stranger” with “lodger” as a
moral and method to embrace strangeness, or as Kristeva would have it, “accept the
stranger within” (at least in the wife’s home). However, her repeated experience that
“she was losing herself in this ominous reversal” is the constant threat the stranger poses
to the protagonist’s coherence of self. For the invader/foreigner/stranger/ Lodger’s
determination and his decision to move in with the couple is precisely a power unknown
to her and is, therefore, disruptive and disorienting.64 Again, the feminine is signiﬁcantly
undermined in reading The Lodger allegorically. Allegory subsumes the strangeness of
woman as desiring subject to the broader desires of a house of men—husband and lodger.

Known for her blending of “gross realism and fantasy” and credited with bringing

feminist politics to Icelandic literary modernism,‘55 Svava Jakobsdéttir (1930—2004) wrote

 

64 Given that the stranger shifts, replicates, multiplies, renaming the stranger creates only the illusion of
transformation of what is made foreign via repression is only a temporary ﬁx.

65 Helga Kress in A History of Icelandic Literature locates Jakobsdéttir’s writing and Jakobsddttir the
literary artist at the fore of Icelandic feminism, a revisionist and “ground-breaking” position. She translates

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novels, short stories and plays that featured female protagonists and strangeness in equal
measure. According to Daisy L. Neijmann, she “employed the mode of fantasy, but
described it as if it were completely real, an everyday occurrence. Thus, ordinary reality
for women becomes in Svava’s ﬁction, grotesque and horriﬁc” (59). Neijmann observes
that Jakobsdottir’s writing is a staging of the grotesque and horriﬁc to access and signify
women’s real world experiences. Yet, like the power of a “stateless man” in allegory to
reveal Iceland, signiﬁcation here becomes a bit of a shell game that presumes something
“completely real” resides under one of the terms in play—woman, wife, stone—and if we
overturn the right term or set of terms we might ﬁnd the external realities her story
represents.

It is just as likely, however, that the extension of the representational economies
of verisimilitude—realist style, linear sequencing, and conventional sex/gender roles—to
a logical end-point exposes both the fantasy of ordinary reality and the narrative function
of a masculine imaginary that manufactures the very category of “woman” upon which
the fantasy of reality relies. Instead, her female characters often engage in startling,
bodily acts of abj ection that function in the text both metonymically and metaphorically,
thereby, negating easy substitution by partitioning the female body and its disrupting
realistic signiﬁcation. For instance, in her short story “Give Unto Each Other,” a young
bride horriﬁes her husband-to-be when she amputates her hand to give her hand in

marriage literally, and she in turn is stunned in the end when he accepts what she knows

 

and quotes Jakobsddttir essay on women’s writing, “’Reynsla og raunveruleiki”: “The street of literary
tradition that she walks along is well trodden and paved by men. A woman writer always runs a risk of
being seduced with elegant symbols and beautiful metaphors which originate in a perspective toward the
subject that is totally different from hers, and which lead to a perspective that the woman writer, in the end,
has only appropriated for herself but not experienced. Thus the female experience has not been conveyed’”
(503)

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to be a prosthetic to mean the return of her real hand. In “A Story for Children,” a
mother, whose curious children have removed her brain to see its contents as she goes
about her daily chores, must eventually cut out her enlarged heart in a futile attempt to
restore her own health after her children have grown and left home. Such images expand
upon an already abject ﬁguration of woman that troubles the boundaries of
intemal/external, real/fantastic, metaphor/metonymy, and mark woman as the site of
sacriﬁce in heteronormative, patriarchal rites of the “real” that French Feminism, in
general, associates with the pre-oedipal, the woman’s body, and death.

The extension of economies of the “real” to their phantasmatic limits also feature
in The Lodger in such moments as when the wife offers Peter her “warm bosom. . .a
spring of security” to quell his own uncertainties in facing the stranger-cum-lodger. With
an eroticism rivaling the styling of D. H. Lawrence, Peter’s nursing is both a
metaphorical substitution for sexual intercourse as well as a metonymic slide into
signiﬁcations of the feminine as “wife” blends with the literal and abject mother: “He
was going to gobble her up; she whimpered as she felt his teeth. He then eased up, but
without stopping his sucking which gradually became calm and rhythmical; she saw his
Adam’s apple go up and down as he swallowed deeply and came up again for more...”
(33). Satiated with the milk from a single breast, Peter sleeps like a babe and the wife
“suppressed her anger and envy, incarcerating them in the innermost recesses of her
mind” and slips out of bed (33). Agitated with her own unsatisﬁed longing for the
security Peter received in nursing, she expresses the milk from her other engorged breast
alone in the dark. Her agitation and suppressed “rage” surely points toward the

disparities and inequalities of the pleasures to be had in traditional sex roles, but the

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expulsion and sucking of breast milk in this instance does not force a collapse of meaning
either for character or reader in a Kristevan manner. Rather they direct our attention to
the familiar and natural conﬂation of woman with mother in a masculine imaginary. In
Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) Luce Irigaray draws upon similar imagery to claim:
“It must be concluded, once again, that this preeminence ﬁnds its rationality elsewhere or
otherwise. In any case, the culturally, socially, economically valorized female
characteristics are correlated with maternity and motherhood: with breastfeeding the child,
restoring the man” (25).

If the abject imagery of Jakobsdéttir’s ﬁction anticipates much of Kristeva’s
incorporation of the abject to theorize psychic estrangments from social meaning,
Jakobsdéttir’s writing is alternately invested in the more Irigarayian and Cixousian
appeals to write feminine subjectivity and desire. It is thus telling that the closing image
in The Lodger is one of a woman, who unable to see her reﬂection in a stateless man’s
eyes, is turning to stone. In looking into another’s eyes, an Other reminiscent of the
“dark continent” of woman who cannot direct her response to his expressed desire for
entry (so unlike her husband and the lodger), the wife must confront her own strange
desires to speak, to decide, ultimately a desire to desire. Not quite a decade after The
Lodger’s publication, Cixous will celebrate and embrace the paralysis of woman ’s
Medusa-like power and desire that is alluded to but remains beyond the borders of
Jakobsdéttir’s wife/woman’s story. In “Laugh of the Medusa” (1976) Cixous describes a
commensurate indecision, the fear, and madness of female desire: “I, too, overﬂow; my
desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I,

too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst. . .And I, too, said nothing,

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showed nothing; I didn’t open my mouth. . ..I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed
my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are madl... Who, feeling a funny desire
stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring about something
new), hasn’t thought she was sick?” (876).

In Jakobsdéttir’s story, the eruption of the feminine as strange that “ominous
reversal” of other and subject gesture toward a new kind of speaking and feminine
expression. The ray of Cixousean hope in a seemingly less than optimistic ending is that
the wife, in turning to stone, her indecision, her feminine lack, is not representative of
that lack but rather is symptomatic of a feminine desire coming into recognition,

performing the strangeness of something rather than the estrangement of nothing.

Foreign Pleasures

T ext of pleasure: the text that contents, ﬁlls, grants euphoria; the text that
comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable
practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the
text that discomforts merhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles
the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the
consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation
with language.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

Nearly all the writers and ﬁlmmakers whose work is the subject matter of this
dissertation reside(d) in transnational spaces of two or more countries for extended
periods.66 Obvious strangers/foreigners in the “elsewhere” of their itineraries, these
artists are more aptly strangers to the nationalizing impetuses of authorial biography,

which often recontains their foreignness by legitimizing and authenticating the artists via

 

66 Marina Carr is an exception while Svava Jakobsdéttir (Iceland, United States, England, Norway), Shani
Mootoo (Ireland, Trinidad, Canada, United States) and Menna Gallie are more the rule. Or, possibly,
Gallie is the excess.

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the nation or postcolonial region of their birth. For Kristeva, her immigration to France
and her travels as a scholar play a signiﬁcant role in her writing of
self/subjectivity/identity through which she makes it clear that she may legally be a
French citizen, but she always remain a foreigner to both France and Bulgaria.
Jakobsdéttir, while born in Iceland, was educated in the United States and England, and
lived in Norway as an Icelandic diplomat before returning to Iceland to hold a
parliamentary post. Her biographers often credit her international travels to her bringing
both literary modernism and feminist writing to Iceland. Likewise Menna Gallie’s
biography marks her as one of the more mobile, although less studied, Atlantic Rim
authors. She may have been born and raised in Ystradgynlais, Wales, but she spent most
of her adult years living in England, the United States, Italy, Northern Ireland, France,
Switzerland, Austria, and the former Yugoslavia. 67 This life in multiple countries
suggests a ﬁgurative promiscuity of sorts, as if one community, one home, one nation
was either not enough to satisfy or not what was desired in the ﬁrst place. Derived from
the Latin misce're, to mix, promiscuity and its adjective/adverbial form, promiscuous,
connotes a provocative sense of randomness and indiscriminant, disordered groupings
etymologically useful in approaching the heterogeneity and effusive qualities of mobile
women’s writing and ﬁgurations of estrangement (OED). A contrast to her life in

multiple countries, Gallie’s novel In These Promiscuous Parts (1986) is primarily set in a

 

67 Gallie is most well known, at least in Welsh literary circles, for her period novels Strike for a Kingdom
(1959) and The Small Mine (1962) that take up settings and themes of British colonialism in the contexts of
Welsh industrialism and labor disputes. Her later novels and writings are set elsewhere such as Northern
Ireland and Eastern Europe in You ’re Welcome to Ulster and Travels with a Duchess, respectively. Her
ﬁnal novel, In These Promiscuous Parts (1986), is a return to Welsh setting and characters in a
contemporary setting. Menna Gallie left Wales to study and teach literature; she returned to Wales in the
19803 upon her husband’s retirement from a professorship at Cambridge University. Her husband, W.
Bryce Gallie, was a political science professor. I suspect that Menna Gallie’s work will feature
prominently in forthcoming revisions of the Welsh literary canon since her death in the 19903 and the
archiving of her papers in 2002 at the National Library of Wales.

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small-seaside Welsh village, and yet its narrative structure and characterizations recall a
promiscuity that marks the novel as intriguingly strange.

Focused largely on Rosie Kendrew, an Oxford University professor of literature,
who returns to her sea-side hometown in Wales to help her aging mother work on the
local election, In These Promiscuous Parts is peppered with stories of international and
local crimes and assorted gossip and lore told among the locals. Rosie is the small-town
girl who made good by getting out, which positions her simultaneously as a local and a
foreigner. She provides the primary narrative perspective and siphons many, but not all,
of the antics and tales of the village, and her split perspective alternates between the
intimate knowledge of all sorts of unlawful goings on and the naive, limited perspectives
but remarkable insights of one new to the village. For example, she is included in the
gang of men who poach the river for salmon, taking the place of her father who died a
few years before, but her feminine wiles and university-honed intellect sidetrack the
Water Bailiff and protect the group from arrest. And while she converses easily with all,
from the hippies and self-sufﬁcient commune types to the police, she remains apart from
and knows little if anything about the Welsh Nationalists who sit in the shadows of the
pub. Nor is she privy to the sexual exploits that have shaped her family and local
genealogy. In These Promiscuous Parts, as its title suggests, takes the reader into the
pleasures of the heterogeneous and the transgressions of social codes and narrative
structures. Unlike Gallie’s earlier novel Travels with a Duchess (1968), which chronicles
a middle-aged housewife’s adventures on an Eastern European holiday ﬁlled with casual
sex and much alcohol-induced ribaldry, the transgressions In These Promiscuous Parts

are not always sexual but rather revel in the pleasures of botched narrative order.

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Overall, the novel reads a bit like a colorﬁrl detective story, yet one overcrowded
with crimes and containing too few detectives. There are crimes of a political nature such
as the repeated vandalism of English language road signs and the poaching of salmon in a
river protected by “English laws for English tourists.” There are the more scintillating
and proﬁtable crimes—Antiquities stolen from Cambridge University and shifted through
a network of locals, Italian immigrants, and an English art dealer; caravans of exotic,
foreign prostitutes hidden away in the hills; heroin from Amsterdam moved through to an
Irish ship in the bay that is also rumored to be running guns for the IRA. There are
crimes of a personal and social nature—bestiality; blackmail and nepotism among
politicians and police ofﬁcers as well as the more mundane, but always evocative,
adultery and incest. There are crimes feared but never committed, such as the potential
vandalism of ancient Celtic stone circles. There are crimes committed unwittingly but
later revealed—the illiterate wanderer Lance’s transport of priceless, purloined books
from Cambridge, and the elderly commune couple who accidentally prepare a soup made
from psychedelic mushrooms for their dinner quests. And ﬁnally, there are crimes that
are unrecognized by all but the reader, such as the Water Bailiff’s killing of Myfanwy,
Rosie’s mother, whilst he peeps in her window and unknowingly scares her to death
when he knocks over a potted plant as he turns to leave. In fact, mid-way through the
novel, it would be easy for a reader to both lose track of how many transgressions of
social and legal orders have been committed and exactly what rumors and cover-stories
about those “crimes” are circulating.

What is absent is an overarching plot under which all of the sub-plots or minor

crimes and antics ﬁt. In this sense, the narrative itself is transgressive and strange and

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functions differently than the proliferation of strangers represented by J akobsdéttir’s and
Kristeva’s work. The pleasures of reading the novel are non-oedipal in that they are not to
be found in the tying up of narrative threads and the reassertion of law. Although certain
crimes are solved, such as the Cambridge painting heist and heroine drug trade, in each
case signiﬁcant artifacts, details and criminals remain unaccounted for, which for the
conventional mystery-lover might prove exceptionally frustrating. For instance, priceless
books stolen from Cambridge remain on Rosie’s shelves, the majority of known
criminals have not been caught in the end, and a number of crimes such as the vandalism
of road signs remain unsolved by the police and the perpetrators never revealed even to
the reader. All of this suggests that either Gallie’s novel is poorly structured or
something else is going on, more likely the latter. Poorly structured stories tend to
disappoint, to displease with their gaps and inconsistencies so easily ﬁlled in by an
observant, skilled reader, and thus the narrative is judged to be lacking and perhaps not
worth reading through to the end. Gallie’s novel, however, pleases; and in the end it
disturbs rather than comforts. Upon ﬁnishing the novel, for example, I was compelled to
return to the beginning, to read through it once again to see what signs I had missed—For
how I could not have seen that the Water Bailiff was actually Rosie’s brother and that
they would have sex just as the police were closing in on the antiques and drug dealers?
There are signs, of course, they simply do not anticipate the narrative’s ending. How
strange indeed.

In The Pleasure of the Text (1973/ 1975) Barthes recognizes the satisfaction
readerly texts offer in the end are an “Oedipal pleasure (to denude, to know, to learn the

origin and the end). “[I]f it is true,” he continues, “that every narrative (every unveiling of

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the truth) is a staging of the (absent, hidden, or hypostatized) father—which would
explain the solidarity of narrative forms, of family structures, and of prohibitions of
nudity” (10). If as Barthes notes, the comforts to be found in ﬁction are the pleasures of
the Oedipal, the “striptease,” the gradual “reveal,” the reveals in Gallie’s narrative are
inconsistent, and what remained hidden—while of the father—leads to Rosie’s
estrangement and, certainly, not to the reader’s comfort. The voice of the father returns
in the form of a letter that reveals the Water Bailiff to be the product of the senior
Kendrew’s affair with a local working-class girl when Rosie was an infant. The Water
Bailiff, George, was not a particularly major or even likable character, although perhaps
sympathetic in his conﬂicting desires to belong and remain an outsider to the community.
Blodwin, Myfanwy’s housekeeper, recounts George’s local birth, illegitimacy, and after
the death of his mother, his fostering with an abusive, adoptive father in Cardiff. He
returns to the village a grown man and despised ﬁgure, representing the English
government’s control of Wales’ rivers for corporate interests. His simultaneously local
and foreign characterization might tip the reader off to his similarity to Rosie
(insider/outsider). But the reader’s powers of discernment are reduced and distorted by
the sheer number of other crimes and broken signs so that Rosie’s one-off with the Water
Bailiff in the grass behind beach pub may seem gratuitous and out-of-character, yet it
hardly registers as signiﬁcant amidst the bigger expose’s of what was behind the Irish ship
and who was proﬁting from Cambridge’s stolen art.

There is a subtle strangeness to Gallie’s unconventional plotting and humorous
style. The strangeness lies less in violent disruptions—although those feature as the end-

point of most of her storylines—and more in the multiplicity of stories, perspectives, and

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disuniﬁed logic that characterize both the people and places of her ﬁction. Her style, as
Katie Gramich points out, often blends “tragic subject-matter with a robust comic style”
that “contributes to making her novels slightly uneasy reading—there can be a
modulation from the humorous to the heart-rendering within the space of one paragraph”
(126) The modulation Gramich observes is just as likely to occur within a single
sentence as in this sentence in the novel’s opening that provides the gypsy-thief Lance’s
perspective of the grounds of Cambridge: “It was a crisp, spring evening, and the Cam
and the meadows were bright in the lights of the Graduate Centre, a hideous, penitential,
pretentious building that curdled Lance’s blood” (1). Aside from the uncanny
commentary on academe and the Cambridge Graduate Centre, the rapid shift from
conventional registers of beauty to the grotesque jars, brieﬂy disorients, creating not the
pleasures of narrative consistency but rather the pleasures of transgressing consistency,
perhaps aligned with the order of comedy but implying the seriousness of tragedy. The
metaphors point us in one direction but, as with the novel’s storyline(s), lead us
elsewhere.

Out of this disorientation emerges one of the novel’s themes pertaining to who
can read and cannot read signs. The repeated destruction of English language road signs
is part of a larger motif of signs that suggests that regardless of our literacy and critical
skills not all signs (in this instance, crimes) can be read. As Lance, a gypsy-bom
wanderer, tells Rosie when she asks about his formal illiteracy and his nomadic lifestyle,
“There are plenty of illiterate people who get passports. . .The real problem was getting a
birth certiﬁcate, but I’ve got this friend I sometimes work for—he knows the ropes and

got the certiﬁcate for me. It worked, genuine or not. . . [A]nybody who’s in a foreign

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country and doesn’t know the lingo is as good as illiterate, in any case” (203). Working
on a similar logic to Ali Smith’s characterization of Kate’s passport as a legal ﬁction and
transgression of the “real” signiﬁers of national belonging, Lance’s formal illiteracy
fashions certain kinds of illiteracy as holding transgressive and political import. In the
context of Gallie’s novel, one’s inability to read and comprehend proposes that the
foreign and one’s foreignness can be not only necessary but also comforting. It is
signiﬁcant that the two characters most at ease with illiteracy are the son of gypsies and a
nomad (Lance) and an educated woman (Rosie). Their international travels and abilities
to read otherwise generally serve them well. Lance, for instance, evades detection and
arrest for his part on the Cambridge rare book and art thefts. And Rosie is for the most
part, the foreigner at ease, transgressing and crossing intellectual and national borders.
Typical of Gallie’s “politics”—which one reviewer of You ’re Welcome to Ulster
describes as being so multi-perspective that the novel offers a compelling but “strange”
look at the troubles in Northern Ireland—In These Promiscuous Parts sides with the
power of the underdog against the monolith, whether that is nation-state or corporate-
state. This is perhaps a reﬂection of the novel’s timing, written in the aftermath of
Wales’ 1979 vote against devolution/home rule, a decision that would not be revised until
after Gallie’s death. But more likely the narrative of nation with its oedipal imperatives
becomes a failure in Gallie’s novel. In These Promiscuous Parts is an intriguing
evocation of Welsh nationalism and English colonization since there are too many stories
in circulation and the series of crimes never ﬁt together and cannot be fully attributed to a
Welsh response to colonization and yet neither are they entirely disconnected. For

instance, the once powerful but now aging and annoying ruling class, the Llwynrhos

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spinsters—the last of the locals to retain proﬁts from English colonization—may still live
in the big house of their childhood but it is house in decline. They live off its treasures
and wealth, selling off bits and pieces which will essentially dismantle the house as the
Llwynrhos line comes to an end. Similarly, the repeated reports of vandalized English
road signs which the police attribute to the teachings and political actions of the Welsh
Language Society (WLS) may be, according to Rosie, simply local teens looking for fun
in a town with little to keep them entertained. The single act of vandalism of which we
know the vandal, Handel, cannot be linked to the teachings of WLS and becomes a
humorous instance of sticking it to the man. After a night of drinking in the pub, Handel
tore down a sign, breaking his arm in the process. His plans are to sue the state (English
Government) for damages as it can be held responsible for erecting dangerous and
defective road signs. That the road signs were not structurally defective and that the
danger posed to Handel is his own drinking are beside the point. All in all, the motives
for Welsh national independence are difﬁcult to read—just as fraught as the texts of
Celtic/Welsh history and culture.

A skilled reader and professor of literature, Rosie is often intrigued by the
indecipherable and foreign more so than the comprehensible and familiar. For instance,
upon her return home, Rosie walks to the graveyard, not to visit her father’s grave, but to
touch “the great Standing Stone, the Maenhir, witness to the much-earlier-than Christian
holiness of this place. With cold-numbed ﬁngers she felt for the words on the stone,
some in Latin, some mere Ogam cuts, she felt for the basic immemorial facts: her city
ﬁngers probed the roughness, felt the eternal security of stone, the everlasting verities.

Comforted, she turned towards the Golden Oak, the pub...” (35). Rosie’s ﬁnger-reading

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of the stone posits an acceptance and version of Welsh history and culture that is
ultimately indecipherable and foreign. She reads the Maenhir’s already mixed ciphers
(Latin/Celtic) at night, without illumination, and without sight, her ﬁngers probing the
ciphers that she, with all her book learning and formal education, cannot decode.
Incongruously, what might be known about the history, culture and traditions of her small
Welsh village do not comfort, but the “basic immemorial facts” that might that conﬁrm
her sense of belongingness remain lost. Custom and belonging are, thus, paradoxically a
version of being in a foreign country while home.

Aptly, at the end of the novel the very readable letter from her father, a display of
mastery of language and the social, catalyzes Rosie’s estrangement from self and
community. With her mother’s corpse only a few feet away, Rosie reads a letter from her
father that he penned shortly before his death and entrusted to the conﬁdence of Byron
and Blodwin, to be given to Rosie upon her mother’s passing. The letter stages the voice
of the father in the form of confession, however, does not satisfy the reader’s desire to
know as Barthean pleasure, for in Gallie’s novel “to know” devolves rather than develops
narrative closure as Rosie makes her escape in manner more akin to Bartheanjouissance:

“Right,” she said, “now we know. I’m leaving everything in your

[Blodwin and Byron] competent hands. . .I love you, but I must leave,

because you see, well...” She turned her face away from them and said,

“Well, I never had it so good.”

They heard the engine of her car jerk into life and Rosie was away.
“Best this way,” Byron said, “Poor little sod. To start now, what

story will we give about her going away?” (264)

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The return of the voice of the Father, the father’s letter and the confession reveals what
we might have known all along, if this were a different and less promiscuous narrative.
The letter is a symbolic Sledgehammer, laying down the law of the father and prohibition
of incest which cannot recontain or control what has come before, or even Byron’s future
crafting and telling of events for that matter. The ineffective father who returns belatedly
to prohibit incest is reﬂected in his ineffective son, whose job as Water Bailiff is to patrol
and protect the salmon that swim the river to spawn from Welsh poachers—a job he does
poorly. George is repeatedly thwarted, made a laughing stock and is soon to lose his job
if rumor holds true. His ineffectiveness is both a tribute to the poacher’s skills and an
indication of the impossibility of the job to control sexual reproduction (the salmon’s) in
the interest of a law designed to maintain the advantages of an elite few (English tourists).
All of which signals the broken regulatory function of the law—symbolic and
Westminster—in the village.

What takes the reader by surprise in the end, the letter from the father that
belatedly claims and identiﬁes his son is that the narrative still does not cohere. With its
celebration of criminal transgressions of the law and its multiple theories/stories that
circulate about who has done what, there is a decided lack of narrative tension that might
signal the return of the law to reestablish proper order either to the small Welsh
community or the narrative. For, this was not a story of a young woman’s desire to
reconnect with her father who unwittingly chooses her brother as a substitute. If so,
Rosie’s choice to have sex with her brother, while on one level is transgressive and

horrifying, might make more sense, at least to the novel’s reader. It would call forth a

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sense of tragic inevitability, a sense of closure, making this an-other sort of narrative
about a woman’s otherness.

What ultimately attracts Rosie to George is his unreadability, and like her reading
of the Maenhir, she will run her ﬁngers across the scar on his face trying to read his past
as they leave the pub for the hills. Aside from having her powers of discernment
undercut by a dinner of psychedelic mushroom soup, Rosie does not appear drawn to an
underlying similarity between father and son but rather to the son’s inscrutability.
Notably, the sense that Rosie experiences pleasure in having sex with George gets blurred,
in fact, the sex act is disrupted, likely incomplete and suggests a failure to reach orgasm.
Their sex scene is diverted into a sequence of other pre-climaxes. The mad dash of drug
mules and pursuing policemen who have lost their cars and ﬂeeing art criminals and who
join the pursuit literally trip over Rosie and George lying on the darkened hillside near
the beachfront, all of which brings multiple narrative strands together, if only in setting.
Sexual intercourse as a kind of (re)nnion, however, does not usher forth closure. For in
one sense there is little to bring closure to as there is little build up of sexual tension,
intrigue or desire between the (un)likely couple, Rosie (an insider who elects to become a
foreigner) and George (an unacknowledged insider who becomes a foreigner but longs
for to become an insider). After the dust has settled, the art theft/drug crimes are
according to form haphazardly and likewise somewhat unsatisfactorily wrapped up. Only
the letter from the father, which does have full textual exposure in that we readers read
the contents of the letter as Rosie reads the letter, addresses what remains of our desire
for narrative closure. The disclosure of the father’s prior sexual release, however,

produces for Rosie and reader alike a kind of Kristevan shock associated with the abject

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and built on the prohibition of incest to introduce a narrative of dis-closure. This affect
explains Rosie’s escape to leave Byron and Blodwyn to arrange Myfanwy’s funeral. It
does not so easily account for Rosie’s parting declaration that she had “never had it so
good” (if we are to read the declaration as “readable”) or for the narrative logic that
necessitates she have sex with her brother in the ﬁrst place.

In Powers of Horror, Kristeva offers another reading, another logic of abjection
that does correspond. After analyzing structuralist accounts, primarily Freud’s, of the
social’s dual founding prohibitions of incest and murder, she turns away from Freud’s
Moses and Monotheism, Totem and Taboo, and his abiding interest in Sophocles’
Oedipus Rex (the King), drawing on Oedipus at C olonus to propose a form of abjection
rooted not in radical exclusions but one that is a “transgression due to a misreading of the
Law” (88). Freud’s models for the patriarchal social and the subject’s manifestation
within that social as subject are accounted for by the narrative of “the archaic
father. . .killed by the conspiring sons who, later seized with a sense of guilt. . .end of
restoring paternal authority, no longer as an arbitrary power but as a right. [T]hey
establish at one stroke the sacred, exogarny, and society” (56). It is a familiar model of
social order and communal narratives, and one in which the Law is readable and in which
“woman” emerges an object for exchange, a tool maintaining symbolic meaning and
knowledge. The alternative narrative, Oedipus at Colonus, proffers Kristeva a model of
abjection that is understood through not-knowing and misreading that sanctiﬁes the
subject’s, no longer the sovereign’s (father’s) death. Oedipus now blind, in exile and “on
the threshold of death. . .says that he des not know the Law.” “I do not know the Law, the

one who solves logical enigmas does not know the Law,” thus asserts Kristeva, “a ﬁrst

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estrangement is introduced between knowledge and Law, one that unbalances the
sovereign” (87).

This model of symbolic unbalance, of unknovvingness better suits the narrative
logic of Gallie’s novel and writing style overall. Rosie’s estrangement, based on her
unknowing act of incest, cannot reestablish the sacred father any more than his letter
which claims her brother and exposes her incestuous act can either reinstate or
(re)inaugurate his order. Akin to Kristeva’s reading of the symbolic import of Oedipus’
second abjection as a “ﬂaw in knowledge” that ultimately is “for the beneﬁt of others, of
foreigners,” Rosie’s misreading is a correlate and extension of her earlier reading to not
know that likewise embraces and escapes into foreignness, producing a strangely
promiscuous narrative and image of mobile female subject.

More often than not promiscuity brings to mind notions of casual sex and a
corresponding indiscriminancy or lack of judgment about sexual liaisons that transgress
patriarchy’s regulation of sexual reproduction. While not always a rejection of
patriarchal reproductive imperatives, for the cliched sowing of oats would seem to
sanction sexual promiscuity as training for men prior to marriage———if generally in a wink-
wink, nudge-nudge fashion—female promiscuity speciﬁcally subverts patriarchy’s
regulation of women’s bodies and sexuality to ensure and track the male’s progeny. As
with Gallie’s novel, promiscuity offers a potential strategy for woman-writing-woman, a
form of proliferation that puts at risk those patriarchal imperatives associated with the
social and symbolic laws of the father that claims progeny and manifests in fantasies of

meaning through narratives of coherence.

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Perversely Foreign

All The Irish I Know All The Hindi I Know
Oh Sullivan! Oh Keefe! Acha
Oh Sharkey! Chalo
Mc Namee Siobhan Aap ke naam kya hai?
Mcguire. Bayti bayta,
Nail Erin banshee Meera naam Shani hai.
begorrah?
Elish ni gwivnamacort, Dhadi Dhada,
Kavanagh! Nahi
Hai
Healy Mcliamurphy.
Dermot durcan, Healy!
Oh Sullivan, Oh Keefe,
Oh Sharkey!
Leprechaun begorrah!

Shani Mootoo, The Predicament of Or

Born in Ireland, raised in Trinidad, and currently residing between New York and
Toronto, Shani Mootoo once claimed in an interview that the “last thing” she wants “to
be known as is an Indo-Trinidadian-Irish-Canadian-lesbian writer” (Canadian Literature).
It is arguably less the label “writer” that Mootoo rejects—although she did start out and
continues to work as a visual artist and video/ﬁlmmaker—but it is likely the hyphenated
list of race/ethnic/national/sexed modiﬁers she disclaims since they veer toward ascribing
her an “identity” rooted in or routed through the very categories of difference her writing,
ﬁlmmaking, and visual art challenges.68 This is not to say that Mootoo or her work is

“label-free” but to stress that her work is concerned with how mobile characters negotiate

 

68 Mootoo has been similarly reluctant to label/identify her overtly “queer” characters. For instance, she is
most well-known for her novel, Cereus Blooms at Night (1997), which is a story of healing and love
featuring a cross-dressing, perhaps “trans” and homosexual, male (although his sex/sexuality is never
ﬁrmly established) narrator, Tyler, who befriends an elderly and seemingly psychically broken woman. In
interviews about the Tyler’s sexuality, Mootoo has been circumspect and unwilling to label Tyler as
transsexual, homosexual, transvestite, and so forth, preferring instead to allow Tyler’s sexuality to remain
unconﬁned by labels and distanced from the imperatives of identity politics that produce taxonomies of
non-heteronormative classiﬁcation in relation to heteronorrnativity.

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a sense of self (in)difference(s) rather than with how such characters might represent a
group/self rooted in difference. Similar to the other literary artists and theorists of this
dissertation, Mootoo strategically destabilizes and, as in her interview, rejects labels of
cultural, national and sexual difference to identify her and/or her work. For example, one
of Rosi Braidotti’s own strategies has been to hyphenate herself excessively not only
terms of race/ethnicity/nation/sex but also terms of political attitude and critical
approaches that de-scribe her international background and mobile drinking. She then
recombines and reforrnulates her descriptors so that they cannot become a singular, albeit
hybridesque, moniker of her scholarly voice or classiﬁcatory tactic for assigning her an
“identity” position. Braidotti is thus only contextually a “whitened halo-Australian,
Franco-Dutch feminist postructuralist,” who speaks “Franglais,” “New Yorkese Parisian
patois, ‘Dutch-lish” and so forth (“Difference” and Nomadic Subjects 10).69 For Braidotti,
parodic hybridity is a strategy of becoming; it performs nomadism, ever changing, and
her label-lists affectively challenge and resist the unifying, naming, and legitimizing
imperatives of patriarchy and nation.

Mootoo, however, displays a greater mistrust of the hyphenated identity list that is
reminiscent of Gerry Smyth’s caution in his essay “The Politics of Hybridity” that the
hybrid subject (the hyphenated subject in popular formulations) is easily if not inevitably

recuperated into binary structures in support of existing structures of power.70 In other

 

69 In writing of her own experiences as a nomadic polyglot in Nomadic Subjects, Braidotti hybridizes
language: “I subsequently [during her doctoral studies in Paris] moved in and out of Italian, French, and the
English language—in its British, Australian, American, and other variations—not in straight lines, but
rather by an inﬁnitely shifting scale of degrees of hybridization. Even when I decided to settle for English
as my main vehicle of expression, it only resulted in a web of hyphenated English dialects” (10).

70 Smyth cautions that “hybridity” is a largely overdeterrnined and increasingly ineffective term and
political project: “Functioning perhaps as ‘discourse’ did in the 19803 and ‘ideology’ in the 19703,
hybridity is all things to everyone and anyone—anyone who, either by desire or by fate, ﬁnds herself on the
margins of institutionally organized power.” Reading hybridity within a critical/institutional context,

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words, the hybrid—what Homi Bhabha links to the “third space of enunciation” that
destabilizes imperialist identity positions and power structures—slips into being simply
another formulation of the multiple and incoherent Other in both popular and critical
discourses. The hyphenated and hybrid subject is easily recast within the very binary
imperatives and structures it ostensibly deconstructs—renaming without restructuring the
binary landscape of socio-political power. Correspondent with Mootoo’s evocation of
identity labels to reject them in her interview, her ﬁction tends to formulate “otherness”
and then to pitch her mobile (geo-sexuaI-cultural) characters as something eccentrically
Other, as migrants of and strangers in language. Her fashioning of self and woman, while
not far off from Braidotti’s nomadism, zeros in on and retools the ﬁgure of the “migrant”
from a subject who moves to a speciﬁc location for a speciﬁc purpose to one whose
destination is less clear and repeatedly or, more aptly, perversely mobile.

This ﬁnal section of this chapter takes up Kristeva’s third limit to acceptable
strangeness—the unknowing speaker of a foreign language—and pulls on additional
threads of strange desire and transgressive sexuality previously addressed Jakobsdéttir’s
and Gallie’s novels. As Mootoo’s interview comment alludes, her ﬁction is broadly
invested in recrafting representations of cultural and sexual otherness often by aligning
geographic mobility to symbolic transgressions of the hetero/nonnative. In her collection,
The Predicament of Or (2001), from which the epigraphic poems come, and her short
story “The Upside-Downness of the World” from her Out on Main Street collection
(1993), the perversity and modes of unknowingness that are typical of Mootoo’s

thematics and style do, however, create an irresolvable tension in her work that reveals

 

Smyth notes that “although it is a typical tactic within colonial ‘reverse discourses,’ hybridity is also
hegemonically recuperable, easily absorbed by those with an interest in denying the validity of a coherent
discourse of resistance” (43, 54).

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desires to pitch the self “outside” of heteronormative and phallic signiﬁcation while
invariably relying upon those same structures to speak the self in opposition. Signifying
tensions represent Mootoo’s crafting of the perverse to shape woman as something
strangely other than Other. Teresa de Lauretis’ reading of perversity and the lesbian
fetish in The Practice of Love is appropriate to this reading of not-knowingness and
cultural fetishism in Mootoo’s work as it discloses a way of revealing such strange
otherness to be a formation of perverse and mobile desire.

Working within Freud’s theorization of sexuality, de Lauretis locates the perverse
as a function, not a distortion or a “negative side,” of sexuality. Reading Freud’s
founding theories of the human psyche back through his clinical work with
psychoneuroses, she argues, “In this respect, the ‘normal’ is conceived only by
approximation, is more a projection than an actual state of being, while perversion and
neurosis (a repressed form of perversion) are the actual form and contents of sexuality”
(xii). She continues, “. . .Freud’s theory contains or implies, if by negation and ambiguity,
a notion of perverse desire where perverse means not pathological but rather non-
heterosexual or non-normatively heterosexual (xiii). Such perversions as fetishism,
which in a Freudian scaffold is a diversion of sexual instinct away from an appropriate
object (genitalia/phallus) for an appropriate sexual aim (intercourse/reproduction) to an
non-reproductive object (hair, clothing, feet, etc.) might be re-read as productive sites for
analyzing non-normative sexual desires as crucial to the workings of sexuality proper and
the psyche in general. Elaborating a “model of perverse desire” attuned to lesbian desire
and sexuality, de Lauretis draws upon Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutiot’s “Fetishism and

Storytelling,” who read fetishism as mobilizing desire (shifting the singular primacy of

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phallus-directed desire) in so far as the “son’s” initial disavowal of the mother’s
castration (lack of penis}—essential to the fetishist’s redirected desire and in a Freudian
framework may “re-place” but keeps the penis/phallus as central to his desire—is also a

’99

recognition that the phallic object of desire “’was never anywhere to begin with and,
thus, “’derange[s] his [Freud’s] system of desiring’ even as far as ‘deconstructing and
mobilizing the self’” (225).“

This conﬁguration of fetishism/perverse desire, which acknowledges the site of
woman not only as lack but more importantly as a “never anywhere” of the penis, is
provocative and aligns with the absence, the “never anywhere” of the sign. In the
context of Mootoo’s writing, while as mentioned generally includes stories of non-
heteronorrnative and migrant characters, her ﬁction is often preoccupied with meta-
narrative thematics that align ﬁgurations of the sexuality with the socio-linguist and
cultural concerns of the (im)migrant. In this way, her writing also picks up on Kristeva’s
differently invested commentary on fetishism and language. In Powers of Horror, she
muses on the relationship between the “unnamable” and fear turned phobia in Freud’s
case-study of Little Hans:

It is perhaps unavoidable that, when a subject confronts the

factitiousness of object relation, when he stands at the place of the want

that founds it, the fetish becomes a life preserver, temporary and slippery,

 

7' De Lauretis’s summary of fetishism in a Freudian ﬂame is worth noting: “In the accepted or clinical
view of fetishism, the perversion is related to the subject’s disavowal of the mother’s castration, which
occurs by a splitting of the ego as a defense from the threat of castration. Disavowal implies a
contradiction, a double or split belief: on the one hand the recognition that the mother does not have a penis
as the father does; and yet, on the other hand, the refusal to acknowledge that absence of the penis in the
mother. As a result of the disavowal, the subject’s desire is metyonymically displaced, diverted onto
another object or part of the body, clothing, hair, etc—which acts as a substitute (Freud says) for the
missing maternal penis” (223). According to such deﬁnition of fetishism de Lauretis notes, “women” who
do not ever have the penis and thus do not fear castration cannot be fetishists.

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but nonetheless indispensable. But is not exactly language our ultimate

and inseparable fetish? And language, precisely, is based on fetishist

denial ('I know that, but just the same,‘ 'the sign is not the thing, but just

the same,’ etc.) and deﬁnes us in our essence as speaking beings. Because

of its founding status, the fetishism of ‘language; is perhaps the only one

that is unanalyzable. (3 7)

Between de Lauretis’ Freudian reading of fetish as something that is a function of the
sexual—if simply outside of sexuality’s norming institutions—that is itself “sign” and
Kristeva’s claim, while working the tensions within a Freudian framework, marks
language as the ultimate fetish, Mootoo exposes the perverse desires of mobile subjects to
want to craft an image of self and relationship to others eccentric to the norm.

Mootoo consistently writes about the non-heterosexual and non-dominant, her
strategy to mobilize her subject characterizations, to migrate desire away from such
phallic engendered notions as authenticity (cultural, ethnic, sexual-identity) and the
unitary subject/text to the less secure gaps and meaning slippages of language itself. This
strategy is made explicit in her poetry. In The Predicament of Or, the migrant is
characterized as being at odds with the taxonomies of sex/racial/ethnic difference, a
characterization manifesting through assertions of becoming foreign in/to language(s).
The title, The Predicament of Or, indicates the collection’s negotiation of binary
categories of difference (the categories produced by “or”)—man/woman, subject/other,
us/them—through which her eccentric and mobile characters neither operate nor
“position” themselves. Offering the ﬁgure of the migrant as a privileged term for self and

relationship with others, Mootoo’s call to migrancy (geographic, literary, self) in some

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ways resembles He’lene Cixous’ promotion of arrivance. According to Mootoo’s poem
“Mantra for Migrants,” the migrant is “Always becoming, will never be/Always arriving,
must never land” (81). If arrivance conveys Cixous’ strategy to write herself and women
elsewhere to feminine exile, migrancy offers Mootoo a perverse and resistant trope for
self and writing that is not quite elsewhere but is eccentrically foreign to exile’s Others.
In the “Mantra for Migrants,” the verbals, “becoming” and “arriving,” couple with the
negation of their causal end-points, “will never be” and “must never land.” This, the
poem’s refrain, already structurally multiple (a mantra within the mantra), doubles
migrant imperatives, repeating via an inter-line negation that simultaneously recuperates
in order to deny the ﬁxities of being and landing—producers of or binaries. Mootoo’s
migrant jostles through opposition, “between back home and home unfathomable, is me,”
and overtly challenges identity discourses and imperatives, particularly those of the
nation state, reframing them to speak of a mobile subjectivity. The ﬁnal stanza reads, “I
pledge citizenship, unerring/ Loyalty, to this State of Migrancy” (81).

Her “All the Irish”/”Hindi I Know” poems are similarly resistant in that they are
not what they purport to be. Their titles suggest each poem contains a comprehensive
account, the “all” of the narrator’s Irish and Hindi vocabulary and the “1’s” complete
knowledge of an-other language. They are suggestive of, but not quite, the voice of a
school-aged child who excitedly lists his/her new “foreign” vocabulary to demonstrate a
base knowledge and, thus, is an atonal misshaping of the knowing subject who makes
progress in and desires to master language and self. The poems’ titles instead limit and
seemingly ﬁnalize the narrator’s knowledge stating deﬁantly, this is it; this is all I know.

Each poem’s body, however, calls our attention to the strikingly improper, nonsensical

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(Irish) and conversational slang (Hindi) collection of the [’3 knowledge. Both poems’
main theme of (re)naming—“Oh, Sullivan” and “Mcnamee Siobhan” are, for instance,
less vocabulary and more a bastardization of surnames to craft a list of faux-apostrophes
and humorous bursts of family names and stereotyped images of Irishness—leprechauns,
begorrah (by God)!

The “Irish” more so than the “Hindi” poem is a readerly poem, not so much in the
Barthean sense of readerly, but in its humor, its nonsensical play with names to perform a
lack of knowledge that displaces the formality of the surname, the marker of patriarchy
into the comic hyperbole of the apostrophe. Thus, O’Sullivan—literally Of Sullivan—
becomes an apostrophic “Oh, Sullivan.” Such word-play, however is one caught by the
eye on the page not by the ear tuned to the word/accent, which suggests an alternative
framing of dialect and orality often associated with both her ﬁction and the larger
category of “contemporary Caribbean women’s writing” into which critics and publishers
tend to place her ﬁction.

In contrast, the “Hindi” poem appears to be a more direct listing of foreign
language knowledge, containing such conversational and introductory phrases as “Aap ke
naam kya hai?” (What is your name?) and “Meera naam Shani hai” (My name is Shani).
While such words and phrases might be found in Hindi instructional primers, other words
such as Acha (Okay) and Chalo (Let ’s go) are Hindi slang and less likely to be found, if
at all, in formal dictionaries and instruction.72 Mootoo’s appreciation of and
incorporation of slang as literary strategy of estrangement will be discussed further in the

context of her short story “The Upside-Downness of the World,” but in the context of her

 

72 I must thank Krishna Shrestha and Ritupama Mitra for their assistance in the translation of “All the
Hindi I Know” and for sharing their knowledge of formal and informal Hindi.

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“Hindi” poem, the opening of “Acha” (Okay) and closing of “Hai” (Is) contour the
poem’s body to improper forms of Hindi and frame a list of phrases about the naming of
“I” and the casual, perhaps intimate, forms for parents and grandparents as a decidedly
informal relationships.

These poems in particular confront the “Irish-“ and “Indo-“ markers oft ascribed
to Mootoo as a kind of inside joke, playing upon both Mootoo’s biography and women-
oriented politic. We cannot fully trust the titular claims to completeness (All) anymore
than we understand “Oh, Sullivan” to be another version of “O’Sullivan” proper. It is not
a version of the Same or the masculine reﬂecting the masculine. Mootoo’s lyrical lists
function as a disclaimer of this migrant’s “I” having special cultural insights and
language knowledge that her biography may suggest. And yet, Mootoo’s writing does
often employ a range of languages and in particular Caribbean-dialects or creole to speak
migrancy. Elsewhere in Mootoo’s ﬁction, for instance, the multilingual migrant is often
made narrator/protagonist, as in “Out on Main Street,” a story written primarily in an
East-West-Indo-Trinidadian-working-class dialect in which a young immigrant
negotiates her out(ed)ness in relation to her in-the-closet girlfriend and her own use of
non-standard Hindi in a visibly and linguistically heteronormative East-Indian immigrant
enclave:

Yuh know, one time a fella from India who living up here call me a

bastardized Indian because I didn’t know Hindi. And now look at dis, nah!

De thing is: all a we in Trinidad is cultural bastards, Janet, all a we.

Toutes bagailles! Chinese people, Black people, White people. Syrian.

Lebanese. I looking forward to de day I ﬁnd out dat place inside me

where I am nothing else but Trinidadian, whatever dat could turn out to be
(52).

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In having the narrator claim a ‘bastard’ status—here both a marker of cultural
relationships and patriarchial discourse—Mootoo makes explicit the underlying
assumption of cultural and racial purity that draws upon the same phallocentric
language system and patriarchal social orders informing the name—of-the-father.
And yet, the narrator’s experience of cultural and sexual displacement informs the
narrator’s desire to “ﬁnd out dat place inside me where I am nothing else but
Trinidadian, whatever dat could turn out to be,” suggesting a displacement of the
site of meaning, a kind of mobilization of desire based in the “never anywhere” of
Trinidad as sign.

Mootoo’s writing indicates a fascination with what Isabel Hoving, in In Praise of
New Travelers, notes is a range of “english(s)” spoken and written in/of the Caribbean
that both contribute to a diverse, shifting creole characterization of place and self
according to racial and class differences.73 Mootoo’s interest, however, deviates from
Hoving’s emphasis on Black Caribbean Creole women’s writing in that Mootoo employs
multiple englishes and her linguistic innovation is relevant to the function of desire and
the intersections between the desire and language that speak a perverse and deﬁant
“migrancy” rather than of the troping (un)belongingness.

Women who prefer estrangement is common thematic and mode of
characterization in Mootoo’s short stories of Out on Main Street (1993). The collection

features mobile female protagonists, often lesbians, who live perversely and ﬁnd solace

 

73 Hoving’s interest is in representations of nation, (post)coloniality, and voice in Caribbean women’s
literature in which Creole is a common, although not deﬁning, feature of Caribbean writing. Hoving warns
readers of conﬂating Caribbean writing with Creole: “let us not make the mistake of assuming that all
Caribbean writing, or Caribbean migrant writing, is characterized by a Creole or an oral aesthetics.
Nevertheless, all Caribbean women writers can be seen to relate to the gendered and ethnic tensions
between the more Standard English and the more Creole registers in the Creole continuum, even if their
works do not engage as explicitly and radically with the issues of orality and Creole as Merle Collin’s’
Angel does (156).

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in foreignness. For instance in “Garden of Her Own,” 7" Vijai, an isolated wife and
english-speaking Caribbean immigrant to Vancouver, occasionally seeks solace in French
television programs as she sets about planting a balcony garden of her own. “Something
about listening to a language that she does not understand comforts her, gives her
companionship in a place where she feels like a foreigner” (23). The alienated positions
of Mootoo’s female characters are often multiple as in the case of Vijia
(woman/wife/immigrant/english speaker) and are productive convergences of foreignness
that mark the strange relationship between what one speaks, what one knows, and what
others presume one should know. Alternating settings between North American cities
(often Canadian) and East-West-Indian communities in the Caribbean (often Trinidad),
the majority of these stories feature (im)migrants and explore issues of language and
transnational mobility characteristic of the migrant subjects of her later novels and poetry.
Akin to the exilic moves discussed in previous chapters, the stories’
protagonists/narrators have a tendency to “look back” to acknowledge and embrace a
version of sex/ gendered and cultural “otherness” that warps their sense of difference
away from the “authenticities” common to representations of diasporic communities and

identities.

 

74 In “Garden of Her Own,” Vijai is a new wife and recently-arrived Caribbean immigrant in Vancouver.
Her dislocation ﬁom her Caribbean home and family only enhances her estrangement from her hard-
working and emotionally catatonic husband. She longs for the kind of intimacy she imagines her parents
shared and the laughter of her childhood, but instead her husband rapes rather than woos, maintains silence
in the house, and leaves her money for groceries as if she was a prostitute. Recalling her mother’s apparent
pleasure in serving a husband, Vijai ﬁnds herself trapped by the same desires and routines, wondering,

“ Mama, why did you wait to eat?....Why did you show me this, Mama? 1 must not nag” (15). Embarrased
to tell her family how different her life is from what they imagine is an exciting, rich life in Canada, she
remains displaced, out of step with their imagination and yet equally out of place in Canada. Her
foreignness and estrangement are rooted, however, in her role as wife so that her cultural foreignness is a
supplement to the foreignness of being a woman.

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While Vijia’s comfort in the foreign simultaneously recalls and displaces exilic
elsewhereness, the unnamed female narrator of Mootoo’s closing story of Out on Main
Street, “Upside-Downness of the World,” remembers the power of linguistic play to
spark the innovative unknowing speech of the female migrant. “The Upside-Downness
of the World” could just as easily have been titled “the upside-downness of the word”
given its a memoir-like approach to a (im)migrant’s woman’s relationship to language
tutoring, englishes, Hindi and the perverse desires (hers and others) that surface in
learning an-other language. Overall, she recounts snippets of childhood memories in
which she learned the “Queen’s English” in Trinidad and her more recent memories of
learning of “India” in Vancouver.

Like most all of Mootoo’s primary characters, “knowing” language does not
necessarily comfort the narrator; rather it carries a potential danger, a trap of signiﬁcation
and discomforting enclosure. This is a contrast to what Kristeva notes in Freud’s case-
study of Little Hans, whose phobia of horses reveals a fear of the unsigniﬁed, the
unnamed, and consequently a failure of the paternal (his father’s) function in the
household. In the context of Mootoo’s story, the narrator remembers the power of
language both to reinforce the racial and class differences her family and hired-help and
to provide a new vocabulary for bickering among sisters. In her English etiquette and
language lessons as a young girl with her sister in Trinidad, she recalls turning the
language of grammar into weapons and curses wherein the two sisters humorously
employ the arbitrariness of the signiﬁer to craft verbal slings and arrows for their rivalry.

Signiﬁcation becomes ancillary to their speaking and play:

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Boyle [the family chauffer] never crossed the gate; he was afraid that it

would close behind him, trapping him, subjecting him to synonyms,

antonyms, onomatopoeia and other words he heard us hurling at each

other as if they were ultimate insults.

“You synonym!”

“Do you want to get subjunctived?”
“Onomatopoeia sme-ell, onomatopoeia sme-ell.”
“No they don’t. You do. You smell.” (107)

The sisters’ linguistic “hurling” loosely replicates the potential in language, as
Kristeva points out, for it to be made “new” through innovative, illogical placements and
usages. In the passage above, syntactic and grammatical orders are recognizably
“English,” and while their logic of word (part of speech) placement is standard, the girls’
spewing of the specialized terminology of the rhetorician, the science-imbued discourse
of literary form and studies surfaces as an ironic version of Kristeva’s cursing foreigner.
Their casual “hurling” reforrnulates Kristeva’s foreigner who speaks unwittingly and
whose ﬁrst recourse is to invectives, crassness, and slang rather than innovation. To read
this passage as innovative, it cannot simply be read as a depiction of two young
Caribbean girl’s recalcitrant entry into a privileged discourse—although, it may
encourage such a reading of resistance. In their improper usage of a quite proper
language or, more aptly, the meta-language of the proper, the sisters instead maintain
syntactic order to reveal the perverse in the proper.

The girls’ desire to turn specialized terminology into labels, threats, and

denotative categories for one another also mimics the very function of the subjunctive

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case, the grammatical carrier of wishes and desires. Their verbal hurling, however,
escapes the denotative mark and spirals as it does with the “want” the threat to make
meaning hurt. Certainly, the irony of their word play lies in the unwittingly celebration
of connotation and the proximity of meaning rather than the clarity of deﬁnition and
denotative meaning. To be a synonym, contrary to the declarative umph of “You [are a]
synonym,” only approximates meaning through a relationship to a word implying the
existence of other words with similar meanings. Even if we reread the implied verbage
as deﬁnitional, “’ You’ [is a] synonym,” the invariable absenting of a referent, of who
“you” might be a synonym for performs the second-person pronoun always to be a
replacement for an absence. Not unlike our unnamed narrator who endeavors to recall
and write a word that was once too perverse to be spoken.

The structure of the story, however, with its adult narrator who reﬂects on her past
controls the girls’ speech, and in this way, we trust her to be the knowing subject, the
non-foreigner who now knows what her younger self did not. She is no longer the same
cursing foreigner of English proper. Her inclusion of rhetorical terms for likeness,
“synonym,” and the verb case for desire, “the subjunctive,” and the merging of sound
with concept, onomatopoeia, directs us to the narrator’s principle concerns and questions:
What does it mean to be like others? To what degree does she want to be what others
desire her to be? What is the relationship between English and Hindi to the narrator’s
sense of self? And, if she sounds like an Indian will that make her into the Indian that her
grandmother and her Canadian friends and family desire her to be?

Such underlying questions are focused through the narrator’s record of the effects

of two primary sets of relationships on her sense of belonging to and desire for the

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foreign—her English tutor in the Caribbean and her “India” teachers/friends in Canada.
Of the former, the narrator describes sitting down to write her story but cannot do so
without ﬁrst recalling/writing the trauma of once having spoken perversely. “I was just
about to type the word with which I would launch into my story, but that word has a way
of evoking a memory of the attack of a slender 18” x 1% “ length of wood sprung
thwaaakl..against a thinly-covered row of bones, and my knuckles remember the
ache...decommissioning my ﬁngers. A simple, overused word” (106). Gradually, after
writing bits and pieces of her childhood English tutorials with Mrs. Ramsay, the owner
and wielder of a ruler (appropriately named Rudyard), the narrator eases into writing
about her linguistic offense. “I answered some command or other with the word—are you
ready for it?—with the word okay” (110). Mrs. Ramsay fumes that okay is the worst kind
of slang, “an Americanism [from] that history-less upstart, a further butchering of our
Oxford!....[A] meaningless utterance” (110). The tutor’s abuse, however, reveals both
“okay” to be anything but “meaningless,” making it a fundamental marker of cultural
difference as well as revealing her own fear that words, any word, may be just that—
meaningless.

As additional punishment she requires that the narrator look up “slang” in the
dictionary to understand okay’s indecency. It is a diversion of the logic through which
Mrs. Ramsay directs the narrator away from looking at okay and redirects the narrator’s
gaze to the terrn’s linguistic category, okay’s grammatical category—j—slang.
Unfortunately for Mrs. Ramsay, her punishment fails to recontain the indecency and
arbitrariness already within English. Rather than chastening or shaming the narrator, she ‘

ﬁnds the dictionary’s list of synonyms captivating. They excite her with their perverse

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potential, exposing the “nonstandard ...subculture...arbitrary...ephemeral ...coinages...
spontaneity... peculiar...raciness” (110). This slide of signiﬁcation announces a radical
range and slipperiness within categories of difference such that what the girl had though
was a unitary and single language of Whiteness. Of an elite Indo-Trinidadian class, she
had presumed a kind of racial/ethnic/class unity among English-speaking whites, a
naturalized unity between skin and language, not available to Others, regardless of class
status. “White,” slang announces to her, “is not all the same” (111). What was once a
monolithic category of sameness and standards now includes its own difference, its own
others, marked by the arbitrary and ephemeral rather than the ﬁxed, by the peculiar and
racy rather than the pure and proper. Acha. . .Hai—Okay. . .Is. In this way, Mrs.
Ramsay’s proper English becomes to the narrator akin to Ramsay’s prized decorative
plate commemorating the Queen’s coronation, a kind of fetish. Accordingly, Mrs.
Ramsay diverts her fear of the slipperiness and lack of meaning in language to what seem
to be more secure icons (meanings) of Englishness, “Oxford” standards and the Queen’s
image.

The narrator’s pleasure in the nonstandard directs her to North America instead of
England. “Early in life I already displayed the trait of championing the underdog,” she
writes, “and so much better if the underdog were also ‘Other’ . . .North America became
the ‘Other’ underdog for me. When it came time for me to go abroad for further
education, this is where I ended up, to the veritable irritation of my parents” (111).
Unlike Vijai of “A Garden of Her Own,” the narrator describes her experiences in North
America as pleasurable, if occasionally heart-breaking, a coming out and into a lesbian

community, a new “family” with international potential (113). She is, however, not

235

interested in giving us the particulars of her coming out or many details of her great love
affair and recent break up with Zahara—whose Zairean and Muslim background the
narrator muses ironically legitimizes her purchase of North Aﬁican music to carry her
through the self-indulgent mourning that invariably follows breaking up. “Of course I
debated questions of exoticization and exploitation by the World Beat craze, but always I
assuaged my conscience with the thought that Zahara is Muslim and from Zaire, close
enough to Sudan, and since I had bedded with her I had some right to this music as a
balm for my sick heart. I was misguided perhaps, but those who are losers in love
usually are” (112). In such descriptions of her desire for the “underdog” and her unease
with and rationalizations of cultural consumption, we glimpse the narrator’s own fetish—
one that she cannot quite sort out as easily as those of Mrs. Ramsay.

Aside from losing at love, she is out sexually and aware politically. That she has
“arrived” in Canada, and that she is “okay” generate a naturalized setting against which
her desires to be something other than the “authentic Indian” that new family of women
desire her to be play out. If in Trinidad she perceives Mrs. Ramsay’s English fetish, in
Canada she faces the upside-downness of the colonial proper, revealing ever more of her
own and her ﬁiends’ “taste for ‘Other”’ (112). “India was not Other enough for me,” she
remembers, “India was at home in Trinidad” (111). But in Canada, even in her preferred
James Dean aesthetic of jeans, white t-shirts and cropped hair, which to her scream
“lesbian” and by extension signify her belonging to an international family of women-
oriented-women, she discovers she is pegged initially as “Indian,” not simply “lesbian,”
within that very same community. In her desire for the underdog, she refused her

grandmother’s tutorials and went to North America ignorant of Indian cooking, language,

236

fashion, and all the general knowledge and customs that would help her be synonymous
or correspond with her ethnic label. “The only Indian words I know are those on the
menus in Indian restaurants and in my very own Indian Cookery by Mrs. Balbir Singh,”
she explains. “From the ﬁrst day when I arrived in Canada people would say, ‘Oh, great!
You can teach me to cook Indian food. . . ’. But I didn’t know. ...Instead of disappointing
people before I even got a chance to make any ﬁiends, I went out a bought that
cookbook” (117). This is another version of the “All the Irish”/”Hindi I Know” poems,
but one strengthened by the narrator’s already supplied cultural and linguistic background,
which emphasizes not only the narrator’s perverse resistances to being “Indian,”
whatever that may be, but also the desires and assumptions of “Canadians” to turn an
Trinidadian immigrant with a India-born grandmother into an “Indian.”

Of the two sets of relationships that dominate the narrator’s story, the second key
relationship is with Meghan and Virginia, 3 Canadian couple who met in India and fell in
love with each other and all things Indian. They speak Hindi to each other, attend temple
(Hari Krishna style) attired in perfectly folded saris, and they take on the narrator as a
pupil, a “cultural orphan” to teach her about “her culture” (116). As the ultimate sign of
their commitment to each other and in the logic of India-love, they go so far as to move
their household from Toronto to Vancouver 30 that they might be “even closer to India,”
a comical metaphor for “India’s” capacity to provide a distant but common direction for
their love. Their relationship with the narrator, like the narrator’s relationship with Mrs.
Ramsay, is based on a series of strange instructional encounters infused with all of the
power dynamics of master/student, colonizer/colonized and through which the narrator

consistently learns something other than the designed lesson.

237

In the context of Mootoo’s tale, the term “Other” as with “English” and “White”
houses a variety of differences but as label-made-fetish represents a desire for the
authentic and true signiﬁcation. Mootoo’s linguistic play upon English proper and its
companion Indian authenticity produces a perverse coupling that refracts her narrative
through images of cultural authenticity made fetish. Like her “All the Irish”/”Hindi I
Know” poems, the story can be quite wryly humorous, and analogous to a joke it closes
with a punch-line in the form of a letter from the narrator’s mother in Trinidad. In the
letter, her mother reports Mrs. Ramsay’s death and describes the narrator’s family’s
endeavors to see that the funeral and burial were in accordance with Mrs. Ramsay’s
wishes. The English tutor’s death, however, does not resolve the underlying tensions in
and questions of the narrative. It does not wrap up the narrator’s meditations on language,
difference, and knowledge or her own desire for the underdog. The old guard, the
protector of cultural and linguistic (English) purity and socio-economic elitism will
continue on in its different variation in Megan and Valerie who desire Indianness to
signify that their India and love is real. The letter of Mrs. Ramsay’s death rather delivers
a punch line. “After several telegrams back and froth, Papa found George [Mrs.
Ramsay’s nephew] living in Philadelphia, USA. with his new bride, an Indian woman
from East Africa. . .80 her body was sent to him there. . .we sincerely hope this
arrangement was okay” (122). Ironically, the dead Mrs. Ramsay becomes the migrant,
the mobile subject and the only “family” to attend to her burial are her non-English
neighbors who sincerely hope Mrs. Ramsay ﬁnds their efforts on her behalf “okay” (122).

The phrase “rolling over in her grave” comes to mind.

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By triangulating the desire for cultural authenticity—Ramsay’s English fetish,
Meghan and Valerie’s Indian fetish, the narrator’s underdog fetish—Mootoo’s story
displaces fetishism from the margins of the improper to a ﬁrnction of the proper and
normative, proposing that fetishism as the generative force behind cultural categories of
difference. As with her poetry, the narrative jostles readers between multiple sites and
expressions of fetishism—from the politically correct (Meghan and Valerie) to the racist
(Ramsay) to the strangely other (narrator). In this context, the strange eruptions of drive
and desire that make the subject/text foreign are channeled into conﬁguring a
contemplative and confessional narrator who desires the fetish, to have something other
than Other, rather than have authentic knowledge. Such a conﬁguration positions the
migrant woman narrator as eccentric to the phallic impulses of/for knowing, mastering,

naming.

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CHAPTER 6

NOMADIC MOVES: TOO MANY PASSPORTS

[ N ]omadic consciousness consists in not taking any kind of identity as
permanent. The nomad is only passing through; s/he makes those
necessarily situated connections that can help her/him to survive, but s/he
never takes on fully the limits of one national, ﬁxed identity. The nomad
has no passport—or has too many of them.

Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects

And yet, alongside the nomadic freedom that we all dream of we are
constantly confronted with the brute facts of how territoriality affects
lives—whether it takes the form of simple (or not-so-simple) border
crossings, ethnic conﬂict [and ownership disputes or the injustices
suffered by refugees and migrant labourers. Our world is ﬂooded with
images showing that in the age of globalism a nomadic existence is not
necessarily something to aspire to. It is a miserable plight to be a
postmodern nomad, to be homeless, wandering, a refugee, following not a
dream of disembodied bliss but a slim hope for survival. Indeed the mould
that casts mobility so inextricably with struggles for survival...has
rendered all but meaningless what was once an important conceptual tool
in making sense of social forms tied to mobile production.

John K. Noyes, “Nomadism, Nomad‘ology, Postcolonialsim”

The nomad, more so than any other ﬁgure, proliferates in the chapters of this dissertation.

She is Amy and Ash’s continual movement through geo-cultural spaces without laying

claim to national identity; she is Cyn’s and Elizete’s relinquishment of a homeland for

self-deﬁnition. And as textual strategy, she is Kristjana Gunnars’ shape-shifting writer

in/of the novel; she is Vivienne Dick’s reframed documentary; and she is the

metaperforrnance of sexual difference in Marina Carr’s Low in the Dark that forces us to

question what we thought we knew about Irish drama and about the character of gender.

However, she is also a ﬁgure of controversy in the critical terrains of postcolonial,

transnational, and the newly-recognized nation-inﬂected literary and cultural studies

ﬁelds-~Irish, Scottish, Caribbean and the like. Caught up in the debates over the status of

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the subject, the nature of representation, and the politics of identity, the nomad tends to
be, depending on the critic, either valued as metaphor for the radical rethinking of
subjectivity and political activism or condemned as an extension of Western imperialism
and ramped up global capitalism.

Brought to the critical fore as a revolutionary anti-state, anti-capitalist ﬁgure in
Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Thousand Plateaus (1980), the nomad
proposed a savvy militant intellectualism for the anti-_ (ﬁll in dominant socio-
political or economic order here). Suggesting mobility and a disregard for both
conceptual and political borders, nomadism garnered favor among theorists working to
move beyond structuralism’s interest in theorizing linguistic, cultural, and political orders
toward the murky and slippery terrains of (re)signiﬁcation associated with the “post.”
Noyes notes that Jean Baudrillard’s and Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralisms, Edward
Said’s postcolonialism, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s postMarxism at some
point incorporate the ﬁgure of the nomad to disrupt the binaries ordering their respective
ﬁelds, both in relation and prior to Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology.75 By and large,
the nomad emerged the metaphor for mobile characteristics that make subjectivity and
textual meaning unassimilable to national and tenitorial allegiances, counteractive to

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industrial capitalism’s wage-labor forces, and a ﬁgura for the shiftiness of signiﬁcation

 

75 Noyes references: Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, New York: Semiotext(e), 1977.; Geoffrey
Bennington. Legislation: The Politics of Deconstruction. New York: Verso. 1994; Jacques Derrida, L’
écriture et la difference, Paris: Seuil. 1967; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Empire Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press 2000; and Edward Said Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf 1993.

76 Braidotti uses the term ﬁgural to suggest thinking and consciousness (a philosophical tool/term) that
shifts the focus from the more aesthetically attuned term ﬁgurative. “Alternative ﬁgurations consequently
are ﬁgural modes of expressing afﬁrrnative ideas, thus displacing the vision of consciousness away from
the phallogocentric mode: rhizomes, becomings, lines of escape express the fundamentally Nietzschean
nomadism of Deleuze. He emphasizes in particular a general becoming-minority, or becoming nomad, or
becoming-molecular. The minority marks a crossing or a trajectory; nothing happens at the center, for
Deleuze: the heart of being is still, like the center of a nuclear reactor. But at the periphery there roam the

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and linguistic meaning. In other words, the nomad refuses to settle in one place and does
not “work,” either literally or metaphorically, within “the system.”

Over the last decade, while the nomad as a metaphor for radical politicization of
the subject and its constituting cultural systems has been largely surpassed in critical
discourse by the hybrid, migrant, and border- and transnational-subjects, Rosi Braidotti
returned to Deleuze’s theorizations of the nomad and concepts of “becoming,”
particularly the “becoming woman,” to reinvigorate a much maligned and faltering
international, but not universal, feminism. In the decades proceeding from the second-
wave of feminism and the turn toward a feminism of self-reﬂexivity and open
acknowledgment of vast differences among women (including debates about whether or
not the terms “woman” and “women” were useful, necessary or even meaningful),
possibly only an anti-patriarchal agenda has remained the consistent feminist organizing
principle. And yet, the anti— as the context of feminism sets itself in opposition to
diverse expressions of patriarchy and phallogocentrism. For Braidotti, the work of a
feminism that includes a resistance to the major categorical hierarchies of race, class, sex
and gender must continue, becoming a shift in feminist consciousness that is shaped by
mobility, ﬂexibility and effusiveness instead of models of unity or female sameness. In
this context, the ﬁgure of the nomad is less a metaphorical straightjacket denoting or
reﬂecting a unitary woman, feminist or otherwise, than a metonym, a series of easily
replaced and always excessive—although never complete—signiﬁers for diverse women.
In this Deleuzean/Braidottian theorization, the anti—always gestures toward the anarchic

and schizophrenic, for the purposes of discussing issues of subjectivity and gender, and

 

youthful gangs of the new nomads: the horsemen and horsewomen of the postapocalypse” (Nomadic
Subjects, 1 I3).

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yet, as John K. Noyes notes, this framing of nomad through an “anti” is easily cast as the
negative image, an inversion, and, therefore, nomadism might be perceived as reinforcing
binary representational structures when employed, deployed, and understood as a
metaphor of “otherness” with mimetic or realist capacities.

At the heart of the critical debates about the value of nomad/ism as a critical
approach, as Braidotti and Noyes suggest, lie questions concerning the nomad as
representational matter and as a metaphor for identity. 77 One of the more vocal critics of
travel metaphors in post/modem theoretical practices, Caren Kaplan explains the
nomad’s representational troubles thus: “Euro-American recourse to the metaphors of
desert and nomad can never be innocent or separable from the dominant orientalist tropes
in circulation throughout modernity” (66). For Kaplan, the strategic critical deployment
of “nomad” is more often than not the extension by other means of a historic imperialism
that appropriates the “other” to serve the colonizer’s (postmodern masculine critic’s)
desires for self-reﬂection, a strategy that fails to acknowledge literal, perhaps “real,”
nomads and the material conditions that historically produced “nomad” as “other” in the
ﬁrst place.78 Within her framework, the emancipatory or radically deconstructive
processes (deterritorialization) afﬁliated with Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad, whether of
the text or of the subject, will always reproduce an imperialist and masculinist agenda at

the moment of reconstruction (reterritorialization).

 

77 For instance, instance in 1993 Yale French Studies devoted two of its issues to discussions of the value
of nomadism, exile and migrancy for the ﬁeld of postcolonial studies. More recently, Routledge’s journal
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2004) put together a special issue on
“nomadism, nomadology and postcolonialism.”

78 I should note that Kaplan’s work on nomadism is highly inconsistent and reaches back to the late-19803
when she initially embraced Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialization to speak of lines of connection
between an increasingly fragmented “feminism.” See: “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and
Exile in Feminist Discourse.” Cultural Critique 6. (Spring) 1987: 187-198.

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Kaplan’s dual insistence that nomadism cannot subvert the binary orders of
othering and that any “deterritorialization leads to reterritorialization” of the same binary
vein seems to be a common critique of nomadism’s rhetorical moves and supposed
political bankruptcy. Or as Ikem Stanley Okoye points out in his analysis of
contemporary urbanist ﬁlm and architecture projects that employ nomadic imagery and
(de)structuring techniques: “Things nomadic as metaphor and nomadology as an
intellectual practice waning against both capital and the state serving its interests have
both become absorbed, for example, into the advertising of major corporations” (181).
The problem for critics such as Kaplan and Okoye centers on a politicized literality, the
metaphorical capacity for the nomadic to be both recognizably literal and ﬁgurative
enough to be appropriated to imperialist and capitalist causes as with the promotion of
tourism. The colonizing wolf, according to Kaplan, has simply changed his clothes to
hunt the same terrain, thus, “Deterritorialization is always reterritorialization, an increase
of territory, an imperialization. The nomad serves as the site of this romanticized
imaginary entry into the ‘becoming minor’ of deterritorialization” (89). Along similar
lines, the utopian freedom that Noyes suggests is the ultimate feature of the nomad and
what makes it particularly attractive to liberal scholars studying mobility emerges as a
thinly veiled cover for a humanism already and repeatedly taken to task for its attendant
racism and sexism. 79 Trapped within his own tropings of critical debate, Noyes’ all
encompassing “we” who “dream of disembodied bliss,” however, appears something like

the humorous and dismembered King of the Moon in The Adventures of Baron

 

79 I should note that while John K. Noyes in his editorial essay on “Nomadism, Nomadology,

Postcolonialism,” initially focuses on the problems of using “nomadic” images and theories in postcolonial
studies, he eventually asserts the viability of a modiﬁed Braidotti-kind of nomad ﬁgural—one that is
understood through its speciﬁc material contexts and conditions.

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Munchausen, whose head (image of Reason and stand-in for the royal “we”) ﬂoats about
ruling his kingdom and despairing over the irrational and base urges of his body.

This conception of the nomadic as a disembodied and imperialist ﬁgure, who is
invariably masculine and universalized, differs drastically, however, from what we
encounter in the kind of nomadism emerging out of the ﬁgures and narrative structures of
mobile Atlantic Rim women writers who often produce literary art that takes up motifs,
themes, and characterizations of mobile feminine subjects. In their work, the nomad is
not a catchall for an unfettered subjectivity, free from social or linguistic constraints, nor
a realistic representation of racial/ethnic/national identity. Instead, the nomad functions
as a metonym of women in-process and in-transit of self-articulation and a strategic
unmooring of a feminine subject from national matrices of myth, icon and realist
narrative/history that perpetually inscribe and enlist woman in the cultural and sexual
reproductive causes of patriarchy and the nation.

The nomadic moves found in such generically diverse Atlantic Rim works as
Kristjana Gunnars’ novel The Prowler (1989), Vivienne Dick’s short ﬁlm Visibility
Moderate (1981), and Marina Carr’s play Low in the Dark (1989) are metonymic
expressions of a reterritorialization or reconstruction that does not necessarily, logically
or progressively follow deterritorialization or deconstruction as a substitution for a lost
conceptual territory a’la Kaplan. The language and narrative orders affecting feminine
subjects in these texts are nomadic not by application but rather by proximity, a
subject/ive generation that is about multiple relations that never fully constitute or
identify the “female” protagonist. When focusing on the character of mobile female

subjects, the inverse of the “deterritorialize to reterritorialize” appears more apt——

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reterritorialization is the initial textual move, which lays the groundwork for the
conceptual and systemic deterritorialization of/in the text. Accordingly, the adage of
critics tethering poststructuralism to oppositional political causes and visions—“we
deconstruct so that we might reconstruct”—might be reshaped to assert that “we
(re)construct so that we might deconstruct.” Since categories of sex and gender require
continual reassertion and reestablishment to maintain binary difference and their very
repetition exposes the unstable character of sex and gender difference, this
reestablishment becomes the initial move of each text. Critical concerns often hinge on
the end result or production value of detenitorialization as a textual strategy and political
approach. If deterritorialization is the end result, the limit of nomadic writing,
representation and thinking, then where is the new territory? Gunnars’, Dick’s, and
Carr’s work asserts, that, yes, deterritorialization is the limit, but one that is in continual
process of experimentation with narrative and representation rather than in the production
of a new tenitory—if nomads do not carry a single passport, why reiterate the'nation?
Drawing together Gunnars’ The Prowler, Dick’s VisibilitysModerate and Carr’s
Low in the Dark—three texts produced in the l9803——is in many ways an inadvertent
periodization. Yet, this grouping is useful as a way to disrupt any strictly historic or
progressive reading that might be made of the travel/subject ﬁgures discussed throughout
this dissertation. Focusing on nomadism, therefore, cannot be read as the end-point for
traveling ﬁgures/strategies in disrupting the masculine social imaginary any more than
the double chapters on Enright’s and Smith’s tum-of-the-twenty-ﬁrst-century novels in
Chapter 1 & Deuce could be read as a precursor to Gunnar’s novel, published more than

a decade earlier. This arrangement addresses those critical discussions of mobile literary

246

ﬁguratic
Kaplan

historic

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ﬁgurations attuned to modemist/postmodernist explorations of subjectivity (Grewal,
Kaplan in particular) in which the organizing impulse is to impose a progressive, linear or
historicized frame onto textual quality and aesthetics.

A focus on the increasing rapidity of movement of women post-1968 may or may
not always correspond with an increased textual fragmentation or “experimentation” as
Emma Donoghue’s quite conventional and realist writing style points out. And, while the
arrangement of my chapters on dominant ﬁgurations of self might suggest a movement
from structuralism/modernism, with the double and exile, to ﬁgures more often
associated with poststructuralism/postmodemism, my goal has been to draw out the
ﬁgurations from the writing itself with little regard for their publication date or with little
desire to assign them a place within larger critical categories. Rather, this arrangement of
ﬁgures and publications works productively against historical impulses toward
teleological arguments or reading, and, instead, aligns with and respects textual
resistances to narrative and critical practices that have tended to exclude, marginalize
women literary art/artists in the ﬁrst place. Interestingly, Carr’s rise as a popular
representative for Irish female dramatists may be the exceptionﬁthe “ghetto” is now
golden. (We will also have to see what happens to Anne Enright’s literary value and

critical cache following her 2007 Booker Prize for The Gathering.)

The Prowler

In the metastory there are ﬁgurative prowlers looking for something. But
there is very little for them to ﬁnd. The prowler does not know he already
has what is being sought.

Kristjana Gunnars, The Prowler: A Novel (section 110)

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Kristjana Gunnars’ The Prowler: A Novel, as its title indicates, employs the ﬁgure
of a prowler as a reconstituting, reterritorializing motif to represent a woman writing
about her past. This novel is a nomadic anti-story through its disruption of the
cause/effect linearity that plots conventional personal narratives of memory. As a
reterritorializing ﬁgure, the prowler is a masculine and composite ﬁgure that stands in for
the reader and writer, a wanderer of stories who looks for “dialogue” and “threads” to
make connections and piece together a whole story, a whole portrait, a whole picture
(sections 74, 108, 111, 120). And while there is a subversive quality to Gunnars’
prowler, who is an invader of personal spaces and private properties, the prowler relies on
the rules that govern narrative and territory in order to be “the prowler.” The prowler
moves through places not his own and steals not goods, but rather looks about and
touches another’s things and perhaps places his body in another’s favorite reading chair.
This wandering ﬁgure suggests a perversity that is akin to that of the voyeur but without
the voyeur’s erotic othering. If the prowler’s desire to move about in someone else’s
private space is criminal—breaking both capitalism’s and civil law’s protection of
property—he is not necessarily partner to the nomad’s anti-state, anti-nation, anti—
narrative politics.

A complex allegorical ﬁgure, to be sure, the prowler personiﬁes the
writer/reader’s desire for sedentary order, for someone else’s home space to wander
through as well as the perverse desire to not-belong to that order. Overtly masculine,
occasionally threatening, he enters the novel through the narrator’s childhood window.
“My sister and I were alone, trying to sleep. . .Our parents had taken the train into

Copenhagen for the evening. We lay in silence in the dark and heard the prowler

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climbing onto the balcony. His shadow appeared on the wall, ﬂanked by moonlight”
(section 56). His dark image, his presence without being present, frightens but ultimately
inspires the narrator to engage in her own prowling activities, which range from
wandering through a neighbor’s unoccupied home, to breaking her boarding school’s
rules so that she might read pilfered books in the library after hours, to piecing together
puzzles and looking for “the point” in her self-portraits. Between these bodily and more
intellectual activities, the narrator’s prowling generates a particularly subversive notion
about the nature of art, narrative and self-portraiture, “It was a long time before I
understood that the point is an illusion. That portraits occur without center” (section 110).

The prowler is the stand-in for subversive writers but not the strategy; he is too
necessary to the support of such regulatory orders as civil and phallic law. His
subversion, a deviance rather than challenging order, reinforces the image of law’s
regulatory effects as necessary or, in the case of story, the desire for phallic regulatory
order. As alternative to the moves of the prowler, the novel’s narrative structure and
representation of the feminine offers us a nomadic organization for feminine self-
expression that resists narrative conventions reliant on national or ethnic identity motifs
to order personal history. Akin to the list structures in What Are You Like? and Like that
propose an alternative for a generative and feminine writing, The Prowler embraces the
list as its principle narrative structure. Privileging the motility and interchangeability of
sections, Gunnars’ novel has no page numbers but instead contains 167 sections ranging
from one sentence to a dozen or so paragraphs in length.

The self-reﬂexive narrator compares her history to a “deck of cards” that mimics

how she remembers her past and encourages the reader to shufﬂe though the book and

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read sections out of numeric order (section 81). The lack of page numbers assists in
creating the affect of a non-progressive and writerly narrative. The novel reads as a
series of epigraph-like paragraphs that both resist getting to “the point” and contain its
own point, modeling the puzzle pieces of the narrator’s self portrait. Gunnars’ narrator
offers us a puzzle-text, a version of both a decentered and excessively centered self:
“[P]ortraits occur without center. In a puzzle every piece is its own center, and when
compiled the work is either made up of entirely of centers or of no center at all” (section
110). A substitute for conventional narrative’s reliance on plot and the logic of causality
to create a story, Gunnars’ list opens up to the reader, a woman’s memory and
meditations on writing, encouraging him/her to reorder, to exchange one passage for
another, and to read a memory-based story differently.

Let’s for the moment presume that our reading begins at Section 1. We wander
through a personal list that begins with a description of a “him” not wanting her to “write
this book” and closes with descriptions of the narrator’s parents arriving in Iceland during
World War II, escaping occupied Denmark. The text’s wandering while ending with the
arrival of the narrator’s parents to a new country is not a conventional literary return to
the migrant’s homeland. With this historical “closing,” we appear to be at a beginning,
the arrival of a man and woman to a new home, a narrative return to origins that was
lacking from the ﬁrst. The prowler who looks for connections, the whole picture, ﬂips
this ﬁnal card and returns it to the top of the deck, for this must be the start of the
narrator’s story of homeland. Yet, this closing, if it is a memory of a beginning, is

memory of a story but not the narrator’s desired story. Rather, it is a family history and

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what the narrator calls a “love” that competes with the other stories the narrator and her
sister tell of their origins:
But my father was always going far away in airplanes and bringing

home Toblerone chocolates. He did not tell stories of gypsies. My sister

and I made up the stories. The gypsies were out on the Hungarian plains,

and our father went to see them. He was in love with a gypsy. He stole

our mother and brought her back, for she was a gypsy as well. (section 6)

Aligning mothers, daughters, and sisters with gypsies, the narrator revises the
travels and story of the father, orienting herself with a tradition of nomadism and exotic
alterity. Radical difference in this context may carry the connotation of racial difference,
but common to ﬁgurations of the gypsy in Euro-American literature, the primary marker
of difference is rooted in the gypsy’s refusal to settle down and to work within not only a
state but a realist narrative system. In her study of the gypsy in eighteenth- through
twentieth-century realist ﬁction, Amit Yahav-Brown claims that gypsy ﬁgures, because
of their nomadism, may be included in realist narratives but are actually shaped through
fantastic and “nonrealist characterization” (l 125). 80 In its metaﬁctional mode and deck-
o-cards structure, Gunnars’ novel encourages us to confront prowlers “as if” we are the
gypsy writer (not prowler) herself. Thus, the text wanders always aware of the potential
of its own undoing.

Paralleling Gunnars’ own movement from Iceland to the United States, and later
to Canada, her writing tends to incorporate characters who move from place to place as a

framework for nonlinear, non-progressive mappings of experience and momentary

 

80 Yahav-Brown continues, “. ..British realism does not apply its realist conventions to gypsies, not because
this tradition fails to recognize the gypsies’ humanity, but because it recognizes the gypsies’ nomadism——
their refusal of the sedentary precepts underwriting the logic of the nation-state” (1143).

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identiﬁcations. The reader gets ﬂashes of nations-in-relation, pieces of other stories that
highlight military actions ranging from the German occupation of Denmark and the
consequent British occupation of Iceland in World War II, to the continuing presence of
an American army in Iceland during and after the Cold War. While Gunnars’ novel often
refers to twentieth-century European, American and Icelandic colonial/national
relationships and historicity, her work is neither historical nor is it strictly “Icelandic” nor
is it particularly Danish, British or American in its character—whatever those labels
might mean, to recall Mootoo’s challenge. Such historical references are nomadic in that
they are points that the narrator’s story passes through; they are not, however, the point of
her story. Any reader in search of the authentic Icelandic or immigrant experience ﬁnds
such a desire redirected, channeled into a self-reﬂexivity that simultaneously includes a
historically contextualized Iceland but which is not the source of the narrator’s
international movements. “Words are not what they signify,” the narrator writes, “words
are suitcases crammed with culture. . .imagine a story of emptied containers. . .To come to
no destination at all” (section 52). Akin to Cixous’ submission of the portmanteau as a
ﬁgure for ever unfolding feminine signiﬁcation and her insistence on the political
necessity of arrivance, the value of a new kind of storytelling resides in the gaps of
meaning, the non-transference of cultural inscription, the refusal of destination.

The unnamed narrator in The Prowler speaks of multiple or concurrent “versions”
of childhood, lived in Iceland, Denmark, America as well as on ships crisscrossing the
Atlantic. This multiplication of the narrator’s homelands and alternate tellings of her past
signiﬁcantly undermines the possibility of telling the story of a single nation, family or

even a cohesive “feminine” memory/identity. Her novel scatters memory and effectively

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challenges the collective historical experience that is crucial for authenticating the
narrator’s “Icelandic” ethnicity as an expression of identity. “Locating” or reading out
the nomadic in Gunnars’ writing then becomes not simply a question of which nation,
culture or language shapes a subject’s voice, but a question of which nations are in
relationship and which voices the reader tunes into. A version of the nomad, Gunnars’
ﬁrst-person narrator repudiates patriarchal orders, such as national belonging, and has
either no passport or, as Braidotti asserts, too many of them.

661,,

The writing “she” is from the novel’s opening a self-reﬂexive writer—an who
is produced by lack of signiﬁcation as well as by the shufﬂing of stories about a woman
who, in writing a story about a woman, writes about the inability of her writing to create
a stable narrative (story) or narrator (self). The few lines read:
Perhaps it is not a good book, he said, James Joyce said, but it is

the only book I am able to write. It is not a book I would ever read from. I

would never again stand in front of people, reading my own words,

pretending I have something to say, humiliated. It is not writing. Not

poetry, not prose. I am not a writer. Yet it is, in my throat, stomach, arms.

This book that I am not able to write. There are words that insist in

silence. Words that betray me. He does not want me to write this book.

The words make me sleep. They keep me awake. (section 1)
While the narrator’s transatlantic movements are noteworthy and lend an overtness to her
nomadic character, the nomadism that characterizes both the narrator and her narrative

(anti-story) surfaces from the self-reﬂexive account of representation. The writing

narrator refuses or cannot supply direct signiﬁcation to her sex or gender. She is,

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therefore, contingently female/feminine, made so both by lack and the initial disavowal
of the “book,” the invocation of silence, the rebelling against a “he” who does not want”
her “to write.” The initial reterritorialization, the reinscription of binary gender that takes
place in the novel’s opening is a reterritorialization supplied in large part by the novel’s
readers. The criticism on The Prowler, for instance, consistently takes for granted the sex
of the writing subject, as do I, but in doing so, we readers must initially capitulate to
“her” signiﬁcation as a product of being read “in relation to,” as ambiguous, uncertain,
and “as if” the narrator ﬁgures as woman. 8‘ In this way, the narrator’s gender slips the
mimetic presumptions of metaphor, the naming and substituting capacity that claims,
denotes, assigns, identiﬁes, and ﬁxes her.

If the narrator’s femininity evades direct signiﬁcation so, too, does the he against
which the narrating and reading I position her. Reading according to adjacency, the he
might be a Stein-inﬂected James Joyce—“he said, James Joyce said”-——a progenitor of
Modernism, the oedipal-father, the writer contemporary experimental authors must
surpass, kill. Perhaps. However, Joyce’s speech is also channeled through another he,
the arbiter of “good books.” This he, who returns a number of times, seems more like a
lover, imbued with phallo-authority to judge writing and who writes his own story of
childhood as an autobiography, a personal history. The arbiter, the ineffectual censor
father/lover, he is the storyteller against whose “story” the narrator’s own writing must be
named “book.” Reading between and through the lines and sections of the narrator’s

writing, we encounter the contours of his story about his escaping the Russian invasion of

 

8] Braidotti writes of her preference for “as if” representations of self and gender: “In a feminist perspective,
I prefer to approach ‘the philosophy of “as if,”’ however, not as disavowal, but rather as the aﬁinnation of
ﬂuid boundaries, a practice of the intervals, of the interfaces and of the interstices” (Nomadic Subjects 6).

254

Hungary in 1956. “Yet it is a good story, the one he tells,” the narrator comments. “That
he was a young boy, the family ﬂed the country separately, one by one. . . .Did he know
when there was a border? Can borders be felt? Is there perhaps a change of air, a
different climate, when you go from one country to another? That story has bearing on
this book only insofar as one is contained in the things one loves” (section 60). This
“story, the one he tells,” implies that the linear narrative orders, of autobiography, of
history and a belief in realist representation as “good.” By contrast, the narrator’s
feminine and self—reﬂexive narrative suggests another order, another desire or “love.”

Like the novel’s multiplicity of national settings, the text plays upon multiple
genres: novel, poetry, autobiography, literary criticism, postmodern philosophy, and the
list goes on. The text, titled in full The Prowler: A Novel, inscribes its genre within the
title, a bone of contention for such critics as Janice Kulyk Keefer who feel duped and
betrayed by generic categories that attempt to deﬁne or prescribe Gunnars’ writing.
Preferring the categories “book” or “map,” Keefer queries:

Why the compulsion to ascribe genre, to behead the book, serving it up on

a platter to readers who haven’t yet turned a page? Text, memoir,

autobiography, theory, detective story, novel. The Prowler is all and thus

none of the above. I want to call it what it is, in its sheer materiality—a

book, a map the reader draws in the process of turning pages, a composite

map of a place that resembles that archetypal image of ambiguous

perception. . .. (90-1)

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It is not clear whether the title’s generic qualiﬁer was an author’s or publisher’s decision,
all of which is somewhat beside the point here.82 What is much more interesting is the
tracing of a representational tension that has much to do with how we read Gunnars’ text
and the site of feminine subjectivity as an authorizing agent. Privileging the novel’s own
insistence that the narrator cannot write a story of herself or of Iceland that would
complement “his” story, Keefer wants the title to be more true to the narrative, the
narrator’s terminology and desires to call her writing, “writing,” and her book, “book.”
In their simplicity and evocation of the physicality of reading and writing, such terms
seem to ground The Prowler’s complex narrative structure and oft theoretical style in the
materiality of its physical composition. The Barthean pleasure of the text feels corporeal
and thus less fraught with the anticipations and assumptions that follow in the wake of
genre. Keefer’s essay is in many ways a tribute-reading, replaying The Prowler’s
elliptical, poetic style to express the affect of the text on readers. I, too, share Keefer’s
love of The Prowler, and I ﬁnd myself sympathetic to Keefer’s desire to remain true to
the one we love even as I read the titular qualiﬁer, A Novel, is indispensable to the
nomadic politic of the text. On the one hand, to assign a single genre category to
Gunnars’ writing seems an exercise in inadequacy since no genre can measure up to the
jarring smartness and compelling starkness of prose that opens itself up and invites the

9, ‘6

reader to travel around between passages that “turns out consciousness wherever it
desires to settle” (Gunnars section 98). On the other hand, the paratextual label short-

circuits the reader’s temptation to grab hold of the “author” to ground textual meaning in

 

82 The promotional genre labels of the publishing world are easily understood to be either a necessary evil
dictated by “market” and formula writing practice or a bane to those writers who work against genre
categories. And while Gunnars’s writing consistently falls into the latter, she also often relies on and
reafﬁrms such categories in the interviews about her work.

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The Prowler as if autobiography and the expression of an authentic minority, ethnic
woman’s identity. Meaning must be made in ways other than the cause and effect of
linear narratives, of personal histories that account for a girl’s progress into womanhood,
and as such, it is not that Keefer’s criticism is anti-label, anti-classiﬁcation, which I think
would suit the nomadic and anti—settlement structure of the text, but rather Keefer’s
response marks a desire for a materiality that is all too easily recuperated into a play for
the “identity” of the author to ground the narrative.

Minus the tagline, a ﬁrst-person, unnamed narrator, “I,” who writes of childhood
experiences and of the meta that is her story, is all too easily conﬂated with the other
tagline on the cover, “Kristjana Gunnars.” Following in the wake of the “death of the
author” and the death of the novel, The Prowler asserts its genre ironically, falsely if
Barthes is to be believed, and in doing so, it deters the easy resuscitation of the author as
a real ﬁgure (or as something other than fantasy). 83 A generic label, as with any signiﬁer,
is always contingent, ﬂexible and a place holder for a reader’s approach. In the case of
The Prowler, the qualiﬁcation of the text introduces a broader narrative strategy for
disrupting “identity” categories that tend to limit the text’s representational and political I
potentials to the sex/race/nation and so forth of the author. Signiﬁcantly, Gunnars has
rejected attempts on the part of the literary establishment to label her according to
ethnicity or gender as “ethnic-Canadian,” “immigrant-Canadian,” “Icelandic-Canadian,”
“Canadian woman writer.”

It is one thing for a novel’s character to exhibit the nomadic qualities that divest

nation as the locator and interlocutor of her story and sense of belonging; it is quite

 

83 Roland Barthes, “The Novel is a Death; it transforms life into destiny, a memory into a useful act,
duration into an oriented and meaningful time” (39).

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another to shift critical discourse and analyses to accommodate a nomadic authorial
character. The custom of categorizing an author according to national origins or his/her
foreign/migrant status is part and parcel of twin fantasies of national belonging and
narrative verisimilitude. Akin to Shani Mootoo, Gunnars has been relatively consistent in
her rejection of identity labels regarding them as a form of “artistic straightjacket”

(V erduyn 172). Intermittently described as a writer of such ﬁction as Icelandic, ethnic
Canadian, immigrant, or just plain Canadian, scholars ﬁnd it tempting to reinscribe ethnic
or an Icelandic origin to her writing via diasporic models of ethnic and racial belonging, a
particularly strong temptation when looking at writers born in post/colonial sites. For
instance, in addressing Gunnars’ resistance to identity markers, Christ] Verduyn
somewhat paradoxically asserts in her essay “Culture and Gender in Kristjana Gunnars’s
Writing,” “It is important to note, though, that this rejection [of identity labels] does not
involve denying the past or throwing the baby out with the bathwater” (176). Extending
Verduyn’s cliche’, the baby at risk reads suspiciously like a return of the essentialism and
a small, but real, identity born in nationally framed stories and realist narrative
strategies—the very aesthetics Gunnars’ writing works to displace, or throw out as the
case may be.

Expressing a similar predicament, Salman Rushdie has claimed that the most
common questions readers ask about his novels pertain to their “autobiographical” nature,
which is something that has become a bit of an inside joke for Rushdie fans. The ﬁlm
version of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones ’ Diary (2001) plays this up and provides a
humorous example author/novel/ethnic identity conﬂation. At a book launch, Bridget’s

female competition and rival for Mark Darcy asks Rushdie, “So, how autobiographical

258

are your books?” Rushdie appears genuinely intrigued by the question and responds,
“You know, no one has ever asked me that before.” Sufﬁce it to say, the rival does not
get the man, nor does she get the joke. In this context, Rushdie’s “authenticity” becomes
clearly a performance of genuine interest more than a performance of an Indian,
immigrant, ethnic-British, and so forth, experience to be channeled into his writing.
Given that the majority of his novels might be subcategorized as magical realism, the
desire to read “Rushdie,” the author, man, Indian emigrant, British immigrant, and
similar identity labels out of Saleem Sinai’s incredible nose in Midnight’s Children
reveals both a readerly anxiety about the dislocation of the “real” from representation and
the desire to ﬁx meaning via an authentic authorial experience. Certainly a vestige of
biographical criticism and a privileging of authorial intent, this connecting between
narrative and authorial/authorizing experience appears less prevalent, however, among
those writers perceived as non-mobile and non-ethnic/raced. Who, for instance, is asking
Julian Barnes, “How autobiographical is England, England?” As Rushdie notes in his
essay, “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist,” what is a ludicrous or moot question
for one author who pushes the boundaries of genre and plays with representational forms
is less so for the “other.” Again, the predominant tendency among critics interpreting the
work of mobile artists is to read the text as an authenticating expression of the “other,”
and, consequently, the author emerges a representative voice for a larger and “foreign”
community or country. It the process of othering by which we control the
representational capacities of travel tropings of subject and mobile aesthetics, preserving
the site of the “other” as a site of the authentic and restricting its “minor” disruptions to

reﬂecting the dominant, the imperial.

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As I return to the pages of Gunnars’ book, ﬂipping through its sections and
looking for connections that will help me explain the subversive quality of her writing, I
ﬁnd myself in the position of the prowler turned thief, looking for threads, connections,
and ways to pull my own prose together so that this writing “about” The Prowler might
ultimately say something of the representational moves and narrative strategies of the
novel in the form of conclusion. This is of course the desire to master the text, the
narrator, her story, and, perhaps even Gunnars, so that they might reﬂect the nomadic and
justify my(self) reading. How un-nomadic! I ﬂip and I travel, jumping forward and
backward through sections on the Barthean love of the text, images of a sister
hospitalized for anorexia, multiple parental ﬁgures in Iceland, Denmark and the United
States. By chance, I ﬂip to the epigraph, a quotation from Marguerite Duras’ The Lover.
Unnumbered, does it count as a playing card or perhaps as the Joker? “The story of my
life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it.” And I smile,
comforted; no longer prowling but acting on the invitation to travel gypsy-style the

fantasy of destination.

Visibility Moderate: A Tourist Film

In some respects, Visibility: Moderate seems to be her most personal work,
but, unlike her earlier feminist ﬁlms, the political stance here is hard to
ﬁnd. There are various references to the “troubles, " but they're so
perfunctory you have to wonder if Dick’s point is that sectarian violence is
an indelible aspect of the Irish condition, and that she 's as sick of the H-
Block as she is of the Blarney Stone.

Jim Hoberman—“Partly Cloudy,” Village Voice (1983)

Part parody of pre-video family vacation movies and part documentary/docu-

drarna, Vivienne Dick’s Visibility: Moderate [aka Visibility Moderate: A Tourist Film]

260

(1981) takes as its subject matter an Irish-American woman’s vacation in Ireland. Like
all good tourists to the Emerald Isle, the protagonist, played by Margaret Ann Irinsky,
visits the major tourist spots and frolics through the countryside: she kisses the Blarney
Stone, dances in fairy rings, stands in green ﬁelds to point at plump Irish cows, and visits
distant family members. Eventually, she ventures to urban Ireland, Dublin and then
Belfast. During this second part, the 48-minute ﬁlm shifts modes from travelogue to
include the more distanced techniques of cultural documentary and drama with scenes of
the tourist in casual conversation with a Dublin man, a staged sequence set in a sparse
apartment in which an unidentiﬁed male speaks of his IRA politics, and “an interview
with the former political prisoner Maureen Gibson. It is ﬁlmed straight to the camera, in
the manner of a press conference” (Connolly, “From No Wave” 70). However, by the
end of the ﬁlm, the “tourist” is no longer the main focus or narrative guide, becoming
increasingly absent from the action caught on camera.

While a contrast to Dick’s earlier “punk” and overtly feminist ﬁlms, such as
Guerillere Talks (1978) and Liberty’s Booty (1980), Jim Hoberrnan’s confusion of the
unclear “politics” of the ﬁlm feminist and nationalist is both understandable and
intriguing. A long-time supporter of Dick’s ﬁlms in his Village Voice ﬁlm reviews,
Hoberrnan’s tepid response hinges on what he reads as “perfunctory” references to Irish
nationalism and its ambiguous feminism. If, however, we read the politics of the ﬁlm as
not-of-nationalism and not-of—l 970’s-American-“feminism,” in short, if we embrace
what Hoberrnan claims to be “perfunctory,” Visibility: Moderate’s politics surface
through a representational ambiguity that corresponds with a mobile feminist politic via

the ﬁlm’s refusal to objectify and package woman and/or Irishness. In this way, the ﬁlm

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projects a nomadic space, a space Deleuze and Guattari describe as comprised of a “set of
relations” and “not points and objects” (Thousand Plateaus 382). It is a space of the
minor and rhizomatic connections. In this regard, Dick has noted that the title of her ﬁlm
came from a radio weather report captured in the background while ﬁlming in New York,
which corresponds with the ﬁlm’s focus on the minor, the background, or, in de Lauretis’
terminology, the elsewhere. “Visibility moderate” also uncannily recalls Deleuze and
Guattari’s own assertions that “visibility is limited” in the space of the minor, the
nomadic, where movement focuses attention on the next resting place (not on nation-
building). Overall, the “politics” of the ﬁlm that so concern Hobennan are sideswiped by
the representation of traveling woman, a “tourist” who refuses to remain in a
conventional (masculinist, capitalist) framing. Rather she is in-process of becoming,
becoming nomad (not-tourist).

As Braidotti reminds us, “Nomadism is a form of intransitive becoming: it marks
a set of transformations without end product. . ..Hence, the importance of ‘visiting’ not in
the bourgeois mode, but rather as the attempt at sharing the same embedded location.
This kind of ‘visiting’ is the opposite of the consumeristic mode of apprehension of the
‘other’ in the tourist subject position. The ‘visit’ is an exchange that calls for both
accountability and care” (“Difference”). Both in its aesthetic and its narrative of
travel/vacation, Visibility: Moderate proffers a version of nomadic “visiting.” The
audience, as with Margaret Ann Irinsky’s character, seems to share a generative location,
one in which a woman who resists objectiﬁcation and othering, but who initially gains

pleasure from objectifying and othering, moves off screen. In this way, the ﬁlm evokes

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the sense of a strange intimacy with the traveler and Ireland, without offering any clear
political vision.

Shot on Super-8 (8mm), 3 ﬁlm gauge typical of home movies and American No
Wave Cinema ﬁlmmaking in the late-19703 and early-19803, Visibility: Moderate
proffers a strange kind of intimacy with its subject matter—woman as traveler and
Ireland as destination. The home movie aesthetic contributes greatly to the sense that the
camera is being operated by someone who knows the ‘tourist’ all too well so that the
standard introductions to character in documentary and realist ﬁlm are absent and instead
we encounter a jarring sense of intimacy.84 This intimacy, found particularly in the ﬁrst
sections, works productively against the increasingly fragmented random interruptions of
background noise and the gradual distancing of the tourist from her own ﬁlm as the
camera focuses on her travels less and less and her story becomes something of staged
encounters and the documentation of city streets and political prisoners. In this way,
Dicks ﬁlm recalls that the politics of representation may be personal but that that personal
is easily shackled to oppositional, binary and broader nationalist and capitalist modes of
image production. Offering an alternative political terrain, the ambiguity of the ﬁlm’s
position on post-1968 Irish Troubles and the lack of sustained focus on the tourist’s
travels denies the audience a clear sense of character growth via political enlightenment.
In other words, we do not know exactly what the tourist has learned and, consequently,

we do not know what we are to take from the ﬁlm or how to position ourselves in relation

 

84 Maeve Connolly is perhaps the most active scholar currently working on Vivienne Dick’s ﬁlms and the
intersection between avant-garde ﬁlmmaking and Irish cinema. Her historicizing of Dick’s work has
contributed greatly to my understanding of the ﬁlm movements and critical terrains affecting readings of
Dick’s ﬁlmmaking. Of 8mm ﬁlmmaking, Connolly notes, “Super-8 appealed to the No Wave ﬁlmmakers
[late 19703 to early 19803 New York avant-garde punk ﬁlmmakers] and its long association with home
movies. In the mid-19703 it also became possible to record sync sound and the ‘anti-aesthetic’ of Super-8
became associated with Punk.”

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to the residual effects of Ireland’s partitioning and a continued British occupation of
Northern Ireland. This “perfunctory” political treatment of the “real” (travels and
troubles), thus, functions as the reterritorialization of feminine representation and avant-
garde ﬁlm practices, which Visibility: Moderate redirects to comment on the cultural
packaging and consumption of Ireland, whether of green rolling hills or political
prisoners.

Visibility: Moderate indicates a cautious reliance on feminist avant-garde
practices intent on constituting subjects of vision. For although these ﬁlms evoke avant-
garde forms such as non-linear narrative, pastiche and parody, the incorporation of a
punk, do-it-yourself aesthetic and themes of mobility produce something more akin to a
neo-avant-garde feminism. In contrast to such feminist avant-garde ﬁlms of the 19703 as
Laura Mulvey’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), Yvonne Rainer’s Film About a Woman
Who... (1974) and Kristina Taking Pictures (1976) which deconstruct the gaze and
reorient the cinematic apparatus to document feminine experience, Dick’s Visibility:
Moderate conveys a skepticism about the libratory capacities of documentation and
gynocenteric ﬁlmmaking. The tourist may well be the focus of the ﬁrst two-thirds of the
ﬁlm, but the mending of her consumptive and neo-imperialist ways is never quite certain
nor can we assume that she, or we, has understood the national(ist) politics that constitute
and affect female political prisoners in Ireland.

What we can see or know is that Visibility: Moderate appropriates feminine and
cultural iconography while unmooring such images as a woman’s body and rural Ireland
(often a feminized landscape) from conventions of masculinist and nationalist narratives

and framings. From the ﬁlm’s opening sequence onward, we ﬁnd that we cannot read

264

woman or landscape according to convention—neither woman nor setting is easily coded
as the object of the cinematic or male gaze. Visibility: Moderate opens in a New York
parking garage with the tourist seemingly dancing with, but not for, the camera. In this
scene, the female subject, not the camera, controls the visual content. She moves
playfully in and just out of reach from the camera’s frame, as if the camera must work to
keep track of the dance and woman. She both exceeds the camera’s frame and denies the
voyeuristic pleasure associated with the female-made-object. This disruption of being
looked at, a common feature of 19703 avant-garde feminist ﬁlmmaking, is not, however,
the point of the ﬁlm but rather the basis for further disruptions. In a most Deleuzean-
Braidottiesque manner, the mobile woman becomes part of a representational
conﬁguration and/or territory scheduled for deterritorialization. This scene in New York
parking garage, however, shifts abruptly, and the camera moves away from the dance and
focuses on a pineapple lying on concrete. With demonstrable pleasure, the woman
begins to slice the prickly fruit with a large knife. Prefacing an underlying anti-capitalist
and anti-narrative commentary, the pineapple suggests colonialism and the consumable,
the exotic product, positioning the soon-to-be-tourist and perhaps audience as
consumer(s).

The pineapple also evokes the processes of cinematic objectiﬁcation and links
together an arrangement of signiﬁcations ranging from the more familiar exotic and
consumable aspects of cultural tourism to the perhaps less well known partitioned status
of Ireland. On one level, the tourist wields the phallic knife that cuts through the
products of elsewhere in order to consume. On another, Ireland is akin to the pineapple,

which is parted and parceled for both political purposes and for purchasable,

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romanticized picture postcard images. The landscape imagery that follows the
pineapple’s slicing, however, cannot be contained by travelogue and documentary
narratives—the vacationer’s story refuses to be “the pineapple.” Always a parody of
cinematic form, the ﬁlm disrupts the audience’s consumption of an idealized, eroticized
and packaged Ireland. For the very Super-8 stylistics that suggest a kind of intimacy or
personal relationship between camera, subject and audience include interruptions from
the culturally banal—television commercials, radio weather reports—which disrupt a
cohesive, realist or naturalist narrative of traveling Ireland and expose the market forces
that shackle cultural representations to a tourist industry manufacturing image and
narrative for proﬁt. We do not know the woman who travels beyond the camera’s frame;
she is neither family nor friend for all her friendliness with the camera. If the “real life”
connections upon which the family vacation ﬁlm in part rely for the audience to identify
with the subject being ﬁlmed are absent, so too are the connections to the slick packaging
and Ireland’s landscapes associated with tourist industry advertisements. Maeve
Connolly suggests that “despite an initial focus on tourism and performative ethnicity,
Visibility: Moderate is ultimately concerned with the politics of representations, both in
relation to the ‘troubles’ and the experience of women” (“From No Wave” 70).

For the most part the discussion of mobility, representation and the feminine in
this dissertation have not engaged the character and conventions of tourism. The tourist-
as-cultural-consumer proves an unlikely ﬁt given the rejection of uniﬁed subjectivity that
shape the aesthetic politic of Atlantic Rim women’s novels, stories and ﬁlms. Generally,
the tourist travels to consume, to feed his/her base pleasures by “getting away,” by

escaping the drudgery of the daily grind—an escape that supports conventional orders of

266

self-location rather than offering semiotic disruption. Visual records of a tourist’s
adventures abroad, such as home movies, for instance, are akin to souvenirs and serve as
artifacts to reﬂect self and location, a consumptive practice that veils the mechanisms of
cultural construction with fabrics of authenticity, of nature, of the “real.” Along this line,
Paul Willemen notes that “the tourist sees in the landscape only mirrors or projections of

his/her own phantasms”85

(qtd. in Connolly, “Sighting an Irish” 256). Landscapes,
historical sites, and local people (racial/ethnic other) become objects that mollify the
modern subject’s anxieties and alienations, reﬂecting and reassuring the traveling subject.
In one of the more vivid anti-tourist diatribes of the 19803, Jamaica Kincaid characterizes
the tourist/reader, “you,” in her Antiguan essays, A Small Place (1988), as a privileged
European or American who moves from being “nice blob just sitting like a boob in [an]
amniotic sac of the modern experience to being a person lying on some faraway

beach. . .marveling at the harmony. . .and the union these other people. . .have with nature”
(16). In general, the tourist is an easy target of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist
criticism. More a ﬁgure for embracing signiﬁcation and capitalist structures, the tourist
makes an unlikely protagonist for postnational, mobile feminist literary artists.

If travelogues attempt to document or to imagine locales for viewing subjects to
travel—either as a retrospective self-narrative or as a projection of future experience
commonly part of the desire-producing narratives of the tourist industry— Visibility:
Moderate undermines the assertions of the “real” that support the travelogue as narrative.

As a kind of anti-travelogue, the ﬁlm often demonstrates the banality of everyday

conversations and train travel, ﬁlmed so that neither the tourist nor the camera seems to

 

85 Connolly quotes Paul Willemen’s essay “An Avant-Garde for the Eighties.” Framework 24. 1984: 53-73.

267

ﬁnd much of interest in the passing landscape. Without clueing the audience into the
effect of such banalities on the woman who travels, the camera distances the viewer from
identifying with and making a personal connection to the traveler’s experience.
Television commercials and the general background sounds of modern Ireland create a
detritus of noise that undercuts any idealized, romantic images of a simpler and quainter
place. In addition, the romantic and feminized imagery that commonly supports
representations of Irish landscapes in ﬁlm becomes overtly satirized through such fantasy
sequences as the tourist dancing as a Celtic goddess across green rolling hills at the Ring
of Kerry. Her dance in Ireland feels just as contrived and out-of-place as the images of
her dancing in a parking garage earlier. Thus detritus and satiric fantasy thwart the
tourist’s and, consequently, the viewer’s, cinematic pathway to a simpler time, a way
back to Irish roots, and to a charm and quaintness that might soothe the alienated tourist’s
soul. Shufﬂing scenes that emphasize both marginalia and fantasy in traveling Ireland,
the ﬁlm lives up to its title; cultural and political visibility becomes moderate.86 The
historical, cultural and political narratives that provide long-range vision and coherence
to national, ethnic and sex/ gendered identity emerge as a site of critique and fail to unify
into a cohesive, oppositional vision for a new, alternative politic. In this manner, the
deterritorialization of tourism’s consumption and. complicity with ethnographic narratives

becomes the limit of the ﬁlm’s politic.

 

86 Dick noted in an interview with Scott MacDonald that the title of the ﬁlm came from a weather report
picked up in the background of a scene. “It's like a little comment of my own on the ﬁlm, which I felt was
really a surface thing; it was the best I could do under the circumstances, moneywise and with the pressures
on me. While 1 was doing it, and as I was ﬁnishing it, I met all these other people; it could have been quite
different. I was just getting into living in Ireland again. I want to make more ﬁlms there, better ﬁlms” (qtd.
in Connolly, “From No Wave” )

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Unlike Gunnars, whose international movement and (im)migrancy have bled into
a critical desire to authenticate her ﬁction as expressions of an Icelandic or immigrant
experience, Vivienne Dick’s biography and her Irish background has, until recently, had
relatively little inﬂuence on the critical reception and interpretation of her ﬁlms. This
difference may in part be explained by a difference in media and the distance often
afforded directors from the content of their ﬁlms, particularly if the ﬁlm’s subject matter
and form either refuse to make claims about “identity” or to capitulate to Hollywood
genre conventions and formulas. Questions about identity, self, and representation are
often made moot or invisible within mainstream narratives and their seemingly
transparent representational mechanics. There are of course exceptions to and complex
negotiations of the cultural authenticity of a director’s “identity” and cinematic vision; for
instance, Neil Jordan’s Irish background tends to be of greater critical interest and import
in reviews of his ﬁlms with identiﬁably Irish themes and characters such as The Crying
Game (1992) and Michael Collins (1996) than in reviews of his Hollywood ﬁlms
Interview with a Vampire (1994) and In Dreams (1999). However, a more compelling
explanation for this elision of Dick’s Irish birth in the reviews of her earlier work lies in
the types of ﬁlms Dick made early in her career. Dick’s ﬁlms are generally small
productions, with a limited crew and with Dick having a hand at every level of
production from the preproduction writing, to the cinematography, to postproduction
editing.

Often overtly feminist in content and drawing on experimental techniques, Dick’s

ﬁlms tend to be shorter than feature-length productions and to highlight the place where

269

she is living at the time of ﬁlmmaking—New York, London and the west of Ireland.87
Alongside other No Wave ﬁlmmakers such as Beth and Scott B in New York, her early
ﬁlms include parody, pastiche and punk, “do-it-yourself” aesthetics to focus on social
policies and representational politics affecting women. For instance, Guerillere Talks
(1978) is a parody of documentary news journalism that featured young punk artist Lydia
Lunch; She Had Her Gun Already (1978), a “trash melodrama,” features Pat Place and
Lunch as “an androgynous voyeur and a nihilistic femme fatal;” and Liberty ’3 Booty
(1980) is a fragmentary exploration of prostitution in a rapidly globalizing commercial
landscapes. These ﬁlms expand upon avant—garde feminist ﬁlmmaking of the 1970388
and feature strong female leads and storylines that expose both social margins and the
mechanisms of representing contemporary women all with anti-Hollywood, anti-woman-
as-object. While these ﬁlms drew directly or indirectly upon such feminist texts as
Monique Wittig’s Les Guérilléres (1969), Dick notes that most of her own work
happened “outside the feminist thing,” in the margins of the margins, the minor of the
minor (Zalcock). Although Dick’s later ﬁlms employ Irish settings and cultural
iconography, they do so with a characteristic self-reﬂexivity that challenges the audience
to think of Irish landscapes and culture as manufactured, crafted, and “as if” Irish.

Only within the last couple of decades, when Irish Studies turned to embrace a

history of diaspora and an internationally inﬂected Irishness, have Dick’s 19803 New

 

87 Her ﬁlm New York Conversations, which was made after her move to London, is both an exception to
Dick’s general use of “locale” and a reinforcement of the dynamism and diversity of “arts communities.”

In an interview with Bev Zalcock, Dick spoke candidly about feeling isolated within gatherings of avant-
garde feminist ﬁlmmakers. Reﬂecting on a showing of She Had Her Gun All Reaay in Betty Gordon’s loft,
Dick says: “Nobody spoke to me. . . .so I felt estranged. Betty was the person I knew the most in that group
and her friend Karen Kay wrote about the ﬁlm in one of the magazines connected to 'The Collective‘ which
was a downtown alternative cinema at the time. Amy Taubin also wrote about the work. I think the ﬁlm
really upset Yvonne Rainer.”

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York ﬁlms been drawn into the margins of Irish cinema and cultural studies. In this
regard, Maeve Connolly’s scholarship walks a tightrope between the projects and
paradigms of an Irish cinema studies preoccupied by motifs of nation and oedipal themes
and a more mobile version of feminism that threatens to dislocate Dick’s cinematic roots
from an Irish artistic tradition. Connolly’s tightrope balance-bar, however, is Dick’s self-
proclaimed sense of feeling the outsider and the outsider status of avant-garde
ﬁlmmaking in cinema studies.89 Dick has been quite candid in interviews about her
“outsider” status; speaking with Bev Zalcock, she reveals:
I've always felt a kind of an outsider in Ireland anyway. I feel that

everywhere I am. And I've decided that's just how it is. . .I identify with

being Irish because I grew up there and have an understanding. But I think

no matter where I go - it seems that I'll always feel somewhat of an

outsider, 'cos it's just sort of the way it is. And maybe it's not a bad thing

either because it detaches you a little from stuff. Maybe that's why I'm

making ﬁlms even. Always trying to ﬁgure things out. And making ﬁlms

is like trying to make sense of something - trying to understand something.

If everything was all easy and I slotted in to somewhere, I'd just be doing

that wouldn't I!
The “anti_” moves of nomadism (corresponding beautifully with the internationalism
and politics of “punk”) serve as a better trope for Dick’s Visibility: Moderate and ﬁlm

work in general than the trope of outsider. Given the overt inclusion of and attention to

 

89 Connolly notes that “Dick’s work contributes to this wider critical project [postmodernist challenge to
modernism], through its exploration of American society and popular culture from the perspective of the
immigrant outsider, and through its exploration of the particular place of Hollywood iconography within
the Irish imaginary” (“Sighting” 265).

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ﬁgures and production of popular culture in her ﬁlms—particularly her early works—her
ﬁlm aesthetic and anti-consumerist, anti—Hollywood, feminist politic relies upon a
strategic appropriation of conventional markers of ethnicity, identity and culture, which
feels intimate, familiar, and less of the outsider looking in than of an insider, a constituted
subject refusing to reproduce or create the conventional narrative.

Visibility: Moderate’s deployment of transatlantic tourist industry and pop-culture
iconography in what Connolly aptly describes as “iconic John Hinde postcards and, most
obviously, the romantic landscape of John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952)” (“From No
Wave” 69) produces a sophisticated familiarity with and usurpation of cultural
productions rather than the psychic and cultural distance characteristic of the foreigner or
the exile. Her mobility and work gesture toward a migratory practice, one extending
beyond Dick’s movements from and to Ireland, the United States and England (those
stereotypical sites of the Irish diaspora).90 Incorporating mobility as both method and
content, Dick appropriates pop-culture to subvert conventional narratives that inform that
very same pop imagery so that they literally “make sense.” She has produced ﬁlms
within metropolitan arts communities using both sides of the Atlantic and makes use of
“local” spaces that are already transitory, already migrant, foreigner saturated, and

unconventionally communal.”

 

90 In a 1980 East Village Magazine interview, Barth plays up Dick’s wanderings through Europe and North
America to add depth to her character and vision as a ﬁlmmaker: “Vivienne herself has done a lot of
changing in her own life. She left her original country, Ireland (“as soon as I could”) in the early 70’s &
went to France, teaching English to Armenians there. Then she went to Germany for a year, took “the
hippie trail to India” where she met nothing but Western smugglers & fake gurus, came to the US. for a
few months, made it down to Mexico, there met an American and went to live a “few dismal years with
him” for another stay in France. In 1975 she came to NY. & has been here ever since.” (10)

9] See: London Suite and New York Conversations.

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The anti-Hollywood or anti-genre, anti-consumerist, and anti-masculinist politics,
which provide a connective tissue throughout her oeuvre, nomadically resist easy
recuperation into nationalized cinematic traditions and expressions. Perhaps the most
critically recognized ﬁlmic “tendency” in Dick’s ﬁlms corresponds with “punk” aesthetic
and expression (No Wave), which Nicholas Rombes observes overlaps with nomadic
politics and minor aesthetics:

Unlike the Cinema of Transgression or the New American Cinema, new

punk cinema is not really a formal movement, but rather a tendency and an

approach to ﬁlmmaking that share certain key gestures and approaches

with punk. Like punk itself, it is not conﬁned to one city, nor one nation

and it carries an almost romantic notion that anyone can create something

that matters, a troubled desire for and yet a suspicion of authenticity and

the Real. (1 1-12)

One of the pleasures and hallmarks of punk performance emerges from its live,
underground venues and non-mainstream environments that channel overt revulsion and
rage about mainstream values and art forms. In that such revulsion includes or is directed
at the audience, punk proposes an (in)authenticity, an undermining of conventional realist
narratives, that both includes the audience in and challenges the audience to be co-

creators of something that matters.92

 

92 Opening up the notion of artistic creation to those who don’t identify themselves as “artists" is a
common refrain in Dick’s interviews and a belief that compliments her ﬁlm co-operative work in the
United States and England as well as her profession as a ﬁlm professor at colleges in Dublin and Galway,
Ireland. In her 1980 interview with Stephen Barth, Dick critiqued the formula and stories of TV news
media and then opened up options, beyond complaint to East Village readers: “And it’s precisely because
of this situation that most people feel helpless[sic] that they can’t do anything about it, which isn’t true at
all. That’s what people have to get into their heads: that they can produce better ideas and use them to start
organizing their lives” (10).

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Refusing to work within a single, recognizable cinematic and cultural system, her
ﬁlms consistently challenge her audiences to become co-creators of meaning. Even her
later ﬁlms set in Ireland—become dislocated from such authenticating registers as nation-
of—origin, (im)migrant identity, product consumption and essential notions of woman. In
other words, the themes and stylistics of Dick’s ﬁlms work to disrupt authenticating and
essential notions of subjectivity that inform the cinematic representational practice
common to her ﬁlm’s cultural and geographic setting so that identifying, labeling, and
categorizing her work within a speciﬁc terms of politicized artistic or social liberation
movements is inevitably an uncomfortable ﬁt. While Dick’s early ﬁlms made in New
York have classiﬁed her as an American No Wave ﬁlmmaker, her later ﬁlms drawing on
English and Irish settings and themes display a continual wariness of narratives that
reinforce mainstream imaginary and economic orders well as a continual questioning of
representation and the nature of the real overall. Accordingly, that same resistance to
national narratives contributes to the difﬁculty of identifying and classifying her work.

At the risk of appearing to miss the point of academic discourse and the necessity
of critical claims, I cannot locate or classify Dick’s ﬁlms as either American No Wave
feminism or as an Irish avant-garde; rather my ﬁnal approach is more ﬂuid, perhaps
wishy, but not washy. With this in mind, I understand Dick’s ﬁlms to be expressions of
post-national mobile feminism that intersect with the nomadic and employ iconography
of Dick’s shifting locales.

Dick’s ﬁlmmaking rejects the narrative conventions of the “real” intent on
projecting uniﬁed female subjects. Avant-garde ﬁlmmaking of the 19603 and 19703

attempts to represent women’s experiences as an alternative aesthetic. In this way, her

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feminist vision reﬂects what Teresa de Lauretis calls “a gesture of both community and
deﬁance,” as much a reaction against Hollywood narratives and cinematic conventions as
a questioning of avant-garde feminist practice that often promoted documentary making
for “purposes of political activism, consciousness raising, self expression, positive
images of women” (128). Her punk-inﬂected, often described as a “do-it-yourself
aesthetic,” likewise resists the formalism of the feminist avant-garde even as her work is
most easily aligned with what de Lauretis describes as the feminist avant-garde’s goal to
disrupt and “disengage the ideological codes embedded in representation” (128).
Vivienne Dick has said that her goal with ﬁlmmaking is to “choreograph images and
sounds that breathe”——a project that surely draws upon the women dancers and feminist
ﬁlmmaking of Maya Deren and Yvonne Rainer while expanding to a ﬁlmmaking practice
that is less politically certain, more nomadic. However, rarely Dick’s ﬁlms question
sexual difference—for her work does not question whether woman exists but the
representational apparatuses that make woman possible. In this sense, a nomadic
feminist aesthetic becomes possible regardless if there is woman or a dick behind the

camera.

Low in the Dark

At other times, there could be many different stories being told at the same
time with no reference to each other. These parts were most intense when
Curtains was present. We would all have our individual lines which had
no relation to the other actor’s lines. Each one ’s lines had a logical
throughline of their own but not to anyone else ’3. Whilst concentrating on
your own throughline, you also had to watch out for the rapid rhythm that
the scene was ﬁring along on and not miss your cue.

Sarahjane Scaife “Mutual Beginnings: Marina Carr’s

Low in the Dark”

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Unlike Kristjana Gunnars and Vivienne Dick, Marina Carr has spent the majority
of her life living and writing in Ireland, and while Carr lived and taught in New York
brieﬂy, she returned after a year, not especially liking that year abroad. Recently she has
become a major representative of a contemporary Irish drama that still draws heavily on
themes of “nation” for self-deﬁnition but that has expanded to include themes of
sexuality, gender and immigration, (to Ireland not away from). However, reading the
nomadic, as I have already noted, is not explicitly about reading the author’s mobility or
identity through her writing. Nor does it, as in the case of Low in the Dark, require that
characters cross multiple national borders or summon the nation explicitly in order to
resist the cultural politics, narrative conventions, and subject positions attendant to
“nation” and its imperatives. Low in the Dark stages sexual difference rather than
national difference, and in doing so it disengages the sexed body from gender
conventions, effectively unhinging the staged body and sexual reproduction from national
coding. If at the beginning of the play, “women” make babies and “men” build walls, by
the end of the play the men are heavily pregnant and the story of men and women is
becoming something other than convention dictates. To appropriate Scaife’s terminology,
the play lacks a “throughline,” a kind of Stanislavskian or realist logic to clarify character
motivation and carry the play’s narrative from point A to point B.

While being the ﬁrst of her plays to be staged and while often glossed within
studies of Carr’s oeuvre, Low in the Dark, has not garnered the sarrre critical attention
afforded her later dramas, particularly The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996), and By

the Bog of the Cats... (1998). 93 The critical marginalization of Carr’s early plays seems

 

93 The most extensive analyses of Low in the Dark are Sarajane Scaife’s autobiographical meditation on
her role as Binder in the initial Crooked Sixpence production in The Theatre of Marina Carr: ‘before rules

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to have little to do, however, with the fact that they are “experimental” or that in the
timeline of Irish drama they were crafted by a minor ﬁgure, a woman. For
experimentation worked well to establish Samuel Beckett as a major ﬁgure in Irish
literary studies, and Carr’s sex has been similarly instrumental in establishing her
reputation as a contemporary Irish, albeit woman, playwright. The critical short-shrifting
of her early work does seem, however, to have something to do with the inﬂuence of
Beckett’s absurdist drama and narrative techniques. When read through a Beckettian lens,
Low in the Dark appears to many critics derivative and seems to suggest, as Carole-Anne
Upton claims in her biography of Carr, that Carr had yet to “discover her own voice”
(“Marina Carr”). Pointing to Carr’s three-year absence from Ireland’s theatre scene
following her Beckett-period, Upton recounts that Carr moved to rural Ireland, steeped
herself in classical drama, and then returned to the Dublin theatre scene with a fresh,
distinctive style and Irish perspective. “The laconic humor of the absurd” of her earlier,
Beckettian plays had been “replaced with the emotional depth of the mythic” (“Marina
Carr”).

Upton implies that drawing inspiration, style and character from Greek tragedies
produces less derivative writing than if drawn from twentieth-century experimental
theatre, and she constructs a familiar Synge-like biography for Carr, where the West of
Ireland still serves as a site of authentic Irishness to inspire another generation of “Irish”
playwrights. Even as the majority of Carr’s later dramas are rich and suggest a dark,
rendition of rural Ireland, Upton’s line of reasoning misses Carr’s overt denial of mimetic,

realist representation, a’la Beckett, in Low In the Dark, which performs a kind of

 

was made ' (2003) and Bernadette Sweeney’s socio-historical reading of the play as “pioneering” new
directions for Irish Theatre writ large in the later-twentieth-century in Performing the Body in Irish Theatre
(2008).

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detenitorialization of sexual difference, Irishness, and even authorship that is equally,
albeit differently, rich dramatic terrain. For instance, Carr’s authorial ownership of Low
in the Dark, as Scaife points out, is problematically assigned since many of the ideas and
much of the dialogue came out of improv sessions with the actors, making the writing as
well as the production overall a collective and community process. It would seem that
something other than derivation was at work here. Even the evocation of “Carr” in this
analysis must be acknowledged a fabrication of sorts, an imitation of single authorship.
Low in the Dark’s imitative quality will also continue to be at issue in my discussion of
the play, but less in the context of Carr’s incorporation of Beckettian characterization and
narrative experimentation and more in the context of a theatricalization of sex/ gender
difference that produces a series of shifting and changing 3ex(self)portraits without center,
to recall Gunnars and Duras. In this way, Curtains, a contingently feminine character,
who is shrouded from head to toe in curtains and who orates a myth of man and woman,
becomes not an organizing center of the play’s action but rather a further, nomadic
disruption of binary difference.

While Beckett’s go-to thematic and dramatic structure often revolved around
querying “who/what is the speaking subject?,” expressed in such works as Not I (1972),
Play (1963) and his novel trilogy (1951-3), Carr’s Low in the Dark attunes a Beckettian
aesthetic and thematic to query “how is the speaking subject gendered?” Accordingly,
Low in the Dark’s Beckettian qualities consider the conventions, typographies, and
utterances of that constitute sex and gender difference. That a subject speaks is taken for
granted in Carr’s play, but that a subject’s speech is gendered and constitutive of that

subject, however momentary and uncertain, becomes its very focus.

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Low in the Dark splits the stage into two gender-speciﬁc spaces that seemingly
position and divide the “male” from the “female” characters, all of whom cross-dress and
role-play. A disheveled, “bizarre” bathroom assigns one side of the stage as the space for
women, and a partially-built wall with “tyres, rims. . .and blocks strewn about” assigns the
other to men (5). Even as the audience might easily recognize the troping of
gender/sexual difference via minimalist depictions of women’s and men’s spaces, the
incomplete and odd arrangement of each space challenges conventional representations
of a familiar theatrical setting of the domestic. Replacing the kitchen with a bath and
presenting the building site as impartial and incomplete, Carr’s stage breaks with the
characteristic settings of Irish realism. In his scholarship on Irish drama and the
prominence of naturalist representation on the stage, Nicholas Grene notes, “The country-
cottage kitchen, by the 19503, had become synonymous with the stereotypical realism of
the traditional Abbey Theatre play” (214). In so far as a bathroom and part of a wall can
produce recognizable, gender-speciﬁc domains, Carr’s stage deconstructs dramatic
convention, attuning it to meta-theatrical representations of sexual difference that are,
akin to Baxter and Bone’s wall building project, never complete. As such, the audience
is exposed to a spatial version of sexual difference that is always an incomplete and
deconstructed rendering of that difference.

Low in the Dark is in many ways the staging of the unstable character of
sex/gender difference. A comedy focused on the relationships of men and women, it
incorporates cliche’d, stereotyped conversations and cross-dressing, approaching
sex/gender difference, desire and longing in a metatheatrical parody of difference. It

features three “female” characters and two “male”: Bender, a mother in her ﬁfties, and

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her daughter Binder, who is in her twenties, spend much of their time in a bathroom
where Bender births babies that number into the millions and Binder attempts to usurp
her mother’s claim to the tub (birthing space). Their conversations often involve Bender
offering Binder womanly advice or Binder putting on “hat and tails,” performing
Bender’s long-gone lover(s) and/or father of the children. But as Bender is consistently
giving birth through Act I without “having” sexual intercourse, the “father,” and
consequently his penis, become an image “beside the point” of reproduction and
something else seems to be at work. In a similar parodic vein, Baxter and Bone, the
contextually male characters, spend much of their time at a building site rehearsing past
romances and future romantic fantasies, alternating who is the “woman” in their
relationship at any given moment.

The third female character, Curtains, offers an alternative ﬁguration of the
feminine and an alternative telling of the relationship between men and women.
Curtains does not “play” conventional roles nor does she dress to perform binary gender.
According to stage directions, she is to be “covered from head to toe in heavy, brocaded
curtains and rail. Not an inch of her face or body is seen through the play” (5). She is
gendered “woman” primarily through a feminine voice and her friendship with
Bender/Binder, but she is always only tenuously feminine. Her sexual liaison with
Baxter, for instance, which leaves him heavily pregnant at the close of the play, farcically
seems to position her as “woman” alongside Binder (who impregnated Bone, but who is
also pregnant with Bone’s baby). It is a rollickingly fun “play” on sex/gender difference
through which Curtains’ wanders through the spaces assigned to “difference,” often

occupying the gap between and the space designated as off stage. Curtains, akin to the

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wandering of disembodied wombs and penises, stages a kind of nomadic feminism.
According to Braidotti, nomadic feminism is neither the utopian disavowal of “woman”
nor the recuperation of an essential woman (history, genitalia) but is constituted by a
strategic, thoughtful search for new identiﬁcations and subjectivities. Curtains’
movements enact what Braidotti describes as the mobile in-between of nomadic
feminism, a feminism that does not disavow sexual difference or the category of woman
but works to strategically unmoor woman from a masculine social imaginary. “I think,”
writes Braidotti in Nomadic Subjects, “that there cannot be social change without he
construction of new kinds of desiring subjects as molecular, nomadic, and multiple. One
must start by leaving open spaces of experimentation, of search, of transition: becoming
nomads” (171). In a suggestively nomadic manner, Carr’s staging of the sexed body and
the character sexual difference as performed “roles” mobilizes desire and makes explicit
the function of fantasy in both mobilizing desire and representing/maintaining sexual
difference.

In Low in the Dark’s perverse universe, biological sex is never clariﬁed or
stable—Baxter’s pregnancy, for instance, will manifest on his shoulder—and binary
gender difference is never entirely represented or staged. Curtains’ sex is, of course,
most ambiguous and her costuming is neither masculine nor feminine, but rather a
performance of something attuned to the theatre apparatus—curtains. Fantasy, however,
is essential to the pleasure and articulation of difference. Bender/Binder’s and
Baxter/Bone’s performances of romantic relationships for each other becomes a fantasy
of a sex/ gender. For instance, Binder often plays the man to Bender’s woman in scenes

that apparently re-member conversations and romantic moments of Bender’s past. In

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these scenes, the transgressive or subversive power of Binder’s cross-dressing comes not
from the performance of masculinity but from the scene’s apparent repetition of a
romantic fantasy, a part Binder has held in her mother’s memory play at least “a hundred
times” (35):

Bender: Do you remember?

Binder (puts on the hat and tails, bad humour) Yes, I remember!

Bender: Let me ﬁnish!...The ﬁrst time we heard that song?

Binder: (impatient) Yes, I remember!
The scene continues with Bender and her lover (Binder) describing their “memories” of
the ﬁrst night they made love and then went for a moonlit stroll through the woods. This
cliché as memory closes:

Binder: I love you.

Bender: Have you said it to others?

Binder: Hundreds, and I’ll go on saying it. I’ll say it a million times. I’ll say it

even when I don’t mean it. I’ll yell it to the spaces between the branches, I’ll

whisper it as they nail the lid on.

Bender: That’s exactly how he said it.

Binder: (taking off hat) Must’ve been a rare tulip.

Bender: None rarer, none rarer. (37-8)
In as much as cross-dressing in Low in the Dark spotlights and destabilizes gender as the
signiﬁer of a natural sex, the subversion of gender as a real, mimetic performance of

sexual difference relies not on drag but on the destabilization of memory and conventions

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of realist drama.94 Bender/Binder’s evocation of memory, of a time and place not present
on the stage, suggests a site of lived experience, a real time, place and series of events
that dramatic performance might recall in the present and represent with a kind of
accuracy. Bender’s ﬁrst line in the scenario, “do you remember,” is, however, so
ambiguous that Binder easily misunderstands and misses her cue. Is Bender a theatrical
director asking the actress if she remembers her lines? Or is Bender acting as Bender in
her own memory-play asking her lover, played by Binder, if he remembers a night of
romance and passion? Although Binder quickly catches on that the memory-play has
already begun, she ultimately reveals that she is playing a part with speciﬁc lines written
by her mother.

Binder’s cross-dressing more than dislocating masculine signiﬁers, a man’s
clothing and speech from a male body, effectively calls into question the “men” who
might exist somewhere outside their bathroom “play.” Occasionally Bender and Binder
jockey for the attention of a man who catches their eye out the bathroom window on the
street below or who telephone to request payment for overdue utilities. Such men are
always staged through Bender and Binder’s conversations, and we, the audience, know of

their existence only through Bender and Binder’s longing to speak with them. Like their

 

94 All of this play on and with sex/gender difference without doubt recalls Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
(1989/1999), albeit strangely. In Butler’s formulation gender produces gender through performance which
can only ever be the performance of the fantasy of a biologically sexed or natural (real) body (xii). Drag
then serves as the ultimate exemplar of gender’s perfonnative nature, yet drag cannot be, Butler cautions, a
“paradigm of subversive action” or a “model for political agency” (xxii). It is subversive only to the extent
that the viewing subject recognizes the drag as a transgression of normative gender expression. In other
words, drag, in order to be drag, relies on the audience recognizing gender as an existing parody, clarifying
what is clearly false (gender expression) by what is surely underneath (genitalia). Butler expands upon this
notion to address the pleasure of drag: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure
of gender itself—as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance
is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural
conﬁgurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary” (175).

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memory performances, they produce “man” via a projected fantasy of that man as
complimenting the drama already occurring in their bathroom. Their “man” as a category
of sexual difference is thus repeatedly staged as an absence and it is up to the audience if
they believe that the “men” of the play exist somewhere other than in their fantasy. Thus,
the mimetic representation of sex/ gender that is often taken for granted in realist and
naturalist drama can not be represented as real or predetermined by norms (religious,
national, oedipal narrative) outside the theatrical staging taking place in the bathroom and
perhaps even the theatre itself. Instead, sexual desire becomes its own production,
suggesting that the men Bender and Binder long to attract are a product of theatricality,
which the audience cannot take as fact or as grounded in a lived experience outside of
their performance of difference. In this sense, rather than longing for the “man” they
long for a fantasy of the man that consistently fails to satisfy as it, like Binder, misses its
cued entrance.

On the opposite side of the stage, the place of men likewise does not produce the
male. Baxter and Bone, who engage in similar fantasy “play,” are consistently
dissatisﬁed with their performances. Baxter enters the stage in Act I already playing the
role of woman, arm linked with Bone who is eventually revealed to be the director of this
particular fantasy:

Baxter: (woman’s voice) You’re marvelous, darling you really are.

Bone: (pointing to the wall) So you like it?

Baxter: (examining the wall) It’s exactly what we needed. . .exactly. (16)

Just as Binder misses her cue, Baxter alternates between ignoring his cues and speaking

out of character—as Baxter, not woman. This scenario, like their other role-playing

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sessions, dissembles into a hilarious parody of an argument between a presumed
husband/wife about tea and buns, lack of money, and how the woman hardly sees her
man anymore. Disagreements about how women do and should speak further interrupt
their scenario:

Baxter: (taking off women’s clothes and shoes) Women don’t talk like that!

Bone: That one did! (unsure) How do women talk?

Baxter: (putting on his own shoes) I don’t know! They just talk, they never stop

and there’s no sense in anything they say, ever! Anyway I’m off!

Bone: You’re always leaving me here.

Baxter: You could go somewhere yourself you know.

Bone: Where?

Baxter: Anywhere. . . just move around, I suppose.

Bone: Here?

Baxter: Here’s as good as anywhere, it’s just matter in motion, place is

unimportant.

Bone: Well, will we have some tea and buns before you head off?

Baxter: Alright. . .but just tea for me. (19)

The pleasure Baxter and Bone experience in acting either the man or woman is
heightened only to the extent that gender can be theatrically clariﬁed in their scenario.
Their production thus seems less like a performance and more like a rehearsal that has as
its goal an eventual performance and opening night. Initially Baxter’s slippages in
character and interruptions that critique Bone’s theatrical vision appear to be the eruption

of an irrepressible masculine authority and knowledge to critique an inauthentic

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production—“women don’t talk like that”—and the reassertion of the phallic order that
organizes gender and determines its signiﬁcation and meaning. But when their play
disintegrates and Baxter removes his feminine costume, the thematic conﬂicts of their
play continue in a conversation among dramatists who are never ﬁxed ﬁrmly as men.
Similar to their conversations prior to and following the staged fantasies, Baxter and
Bone each display suspiciously feminine longings for pregnancy and insecurities about
being left behind, about their baking, and about their love for each other being recognized.
All of which begs the questions: Who really “wears the pants” in their relationship? And
what do pants really signify anyway?

Without the cause/effect or oedipal plotting of conventional drama, Low in the
Dark, as one critic complains, dissolves into a staging of sex/gender stereotypes that
either do not cohere or do not tackle stereotypes in any worthwhile or “meaningful” way.
Which is precisely the line of reasoning at work in the play. Gerry Coglan, for instance,
in his review for the Irish Times criticizes that “[t]here is little more than an accumulation
of jokes. The pace had already begun to ﬂag by the start of the second act, which
disintegrated into forced farce, with bits of dance thrown in, up to a meaningless ending”
(qtd in Sweeney 173). The lack of coherence, the “meaningless” quality Coglan ﬁnds 30
un-dramatic not only signals another representational system at work but also gestures
toward a meaning that refuses to stay ﬁxed, to conclude, to ﬁrlly satisfy. In expressing
his desire for drama to mean, Coglan becomes trapped in the very same fantasy of
difference that characterizes Bender/Bender and Baxter/Bone, desiring that the staging of

gender accumulate into something coherent and polished by the time the curtains close.

286

The theatricalization of sex/gender difference in Carr’s play draws attention to the
pretense of binary sex/ gender difference as real, essential, and authenticating. If
Bender/Binder’s and Baxter/Bone’s performances subvert the mechanisms of memory
and authenticity that constitute sexual difference as binary, Curtains’ covering “from
head to toe” literally in curtains suggests that she does not operate within the same
representational system as the other characters. Akin to the nomad, Curtains does not
literally or metaphorically work in a binary, phallocentric system. This may in part
explain Sarahjane Scaife’s comment that Curtains’ presence on stage intensiﬁed the
already disconnected and fragmented dialogue between characters so that actors had to
work hard to “not miss their cue.” In a play in which a character’s lines may or may not
intersect with, connect to, or address another character’s lines, as Scaife notes, a
character’s speech and expression of desire is not necessarily functioning on a logic of
lack. Rather, Curtains’ attire of curtains creates a conceptual log-jam of metaphoric
meaning. Literalizing the connection between signiﬁer and the signiﬁed—curtains as
Curtains—“she” cannot be read either by her companions or by the audience according to
conventional gender codes. Her covering and the presumably female body beneath are a
source of repeated intrigue for the other characters. “Why does she never open her

'9,

curtains? Even an inch complains Binder. Her mother concurs, “I’d love to rip them
offer her! There’s a life to be lived I’d say as I’d rip them off. . .it’s not every woman can
say that she’s been Ioved” (7)!

Curtains, however, is not obsessed with being loved but rather with two things:

curtain-like coverings of all kinds and telling the story of man and woman. Bender and

Binder’s window blinds hold a particular fascination for her, as does their shower curtain

287

 

which she attempts to abscond with at one point. And, in a strangely erotic moment of
revealing what might lie beneath, Curtains proudly hands Bender and Binder a bit of her
lingerie, a “slip” consisting of “strings of beaded wood, Indian-style curtains;”
meanwhile, she adamantly refuses let them, and us, see how it shapes and/or sexily
reveals her body (31). Curtains literally denies the pleasure of viewing woman as the
object and product of a masculine gaze. This includes the theatrical audience as well as
Bender and Binder, who preen and jockey for male attention, complying with patriarchal
imperatives and conventions of feminine beauty. More artifact than woman, Curtains
reframes how the feminine can be represented as an embodied subject. In this way,
Curtains’ self-chosen clothing, more so than the cross-dressing of Bender/Binder and
Baxter/Bone, emerges a transgressive act, subverting the mechanisms of gender that rely
on visual registers to locate the masculine in relation to a recognizable and, hence,
authentic the feminine.

Curtains’ lack of conventional gender signiﬁcation is heightened by her
lack of designated stage space, her lack of home. If for the other characters their
designated “masculine” and “feminine” spaces are necessary for staging their
memories and romantic fantasies, Curtains neither participates in their role-play
nor belongs to their gendered arenas. Instead, Curtains wanders in between and
through their spaces, always on the move, never settling down, represented in
both her transgressing of stage space and her story. Curtain’s mobility in many
ways anticipates Braidotti’s description of the nomad as “literally a “space”
traveler, successively constructing and demolishing her/his living spaces before

moving on. S/he functions in a pattern of repetitions which is not without order,

288

though it has no ultimate destination. The opposite of the tourist, the antithesis of
the migrant, the nomadic traveler is uniquely bent upon the act of going, the
passing through. Nomadism is form of intransitive becoming: it marks a set of
transformations without end product” (“Difference”). Even after impregnating
Baxter, Curtains does not heed the reproductive imperative to settle down, to
reproduce again. She continues to move about in the between, behind and around
the bathroom and wall, telling bits of a story about the unbridgeable distance
between the sexes.95
Curtains’ second obsession is a story of “a man and woman” who “before they
ever met. . .had a dream” that they met (7). It is a story of fantasy, travel, and quest—the
stuff of myth and legend—about two universal ﬁgures, “man” and “woman,” who roam
the earth together, sleeping in ditches, hitting old women, and arguing about nothing in
particular. Although at times, they argue about crucial but hilarious particularities:
“’Babies are for women,’ the man said to the woman. ‘I think we have a crisis on our
hands,’ the woman said...” (52). Even as Curtains’ story opens and closes the play,
recalling the Greek chorus, her story is never complete, uniﬁed, whole. Other characters
repeatedly interrupt her telling or contribute their own notions of what happened next, all

of which consistently sidetracks or stalls its telling. As a narrative, Curtain’s story is far

from cohesive; it has multiple beginnings, multiple middles, and multiple endings; and,

 

95 We encounter ripples of this gesture in Carr’s later suicide plays, The Mai, Portia Coughlan, and By the
Bog of Cats... , in which the characterization of female protagonists hinges on their being emotionally
tethered to a particular place. The Mai, Portia, and Hester are women who have been left behind and await
a loved one’s return. The Mai waits for her husband, Hester for her mother, and Portia for her brother, each
with tragic consequences. In Low in the Dark, the traveling or lost lover generates desire or, in Bender’s
case, quite literally fertilizes woman, and the lover’s staged absence and traveling organizes action of what
happens in a little changed bathroom and building site. However, what heightens elements of the absurd in
Low in the Dark is Bender/Binder and Baxter/Bone’s dedication to their place becomes an insurmountable
obstacle in the later plays. Bender/Binder and Baxter/Bone maintain their separate spaces, just as Mai is
tied to home, Hester to the bog, and Portia to the Belmont River.

289

akin to the communal writing of Carr’s Low in the Dark, Bender, Binder, Baxter and
Bone will each contribute bits and pieces of memory and innovative criticism to the story
of man/woman.

That Curtains’ story opens and closes the play, however, produces an illusion of
coherence to the seemingly random actions and interactions of the characters. Upton
notes, “In the absence of plot the action is held together by Curtains” (“Marina Carr”). 1
am less certain that Curtains’ narrative works to “hold together” the action of the play,
but rather, it seems more a more focused or correspondent dispersal of a sex/ gender
difference already dispersed from registers of convention and oedipal order. In other
words, just as Curtains’ dress seems to correspond to her name, her visible mobility on
stage seems to correspond to the mobility characterizing the story of man/woman: “[T]he
man and woman became like two people anywhere, walking low in the dark through a
dead universe. There seemed no reason to go on. There seemed no reason to stop” (59).

Reminiscent of Beckett’s closing lines of the speaking “I” in The Unnamable, “I
can’t go on. I’ll go on,” Curtains’ story of a man and woman who meet but never meet
extends experimental narrative to a staging of a feminist representation of sexual
difference (414). Just as Beckett’s narrative resists fatalism and extends the speaking
subject into the possibility of its inﬁnite continuation, Curtains’ closing lines extend an
invitation to tell stories as something other than the product of phallologocentric
discourse and masculinist, oedipal narrative structures:

One day the man looked out of his window. “It’s time,” he said. So he

got up on his bicycle and he rode all over the earth and he cycled all over

the sea. One evening as he was ﬂying over the highways he saw the

290

woman in his path. “Get out of my road,” he yelled, but she would not.

“I’ve two choices,” the man said, “I can knock her down or I can stop.”

He did both. “You,” she said, “if you have courage get off your bicycle

and come with me.” (99)
Having spoken these same lines twice before in the ﬁrst act, Curtain’s chorus-like
“conclusion” repeats and returns us to what has come before with the
resigniﬁcation common to Greek drama and oedipal narratives. There is no great
insight, death, vindication, or unifying summary to unify what Coglan bemoans as
absent—meaning. Yet, neither is this closing meaningless. It invites and
encourages a new kind of travel and gestures toward the possibility of
resignifying and restaging drama and the story of sexed roles and the feminine
aligned with a kind of nomadic “becoming” of a Deluezean “non-Oedipal woman,
who refuses to function in the procreative socio-symbolic contract of
phallocentrism.” As Braidotti notes, “the non-Oedipal woman remains stubbornly
and proudly polymorphous and therefore opposed to sexual difference as a
metaphysically constituted polarity. In so far as the ‘becoming woman’ requires
this rebellion against Oedipalized sexuality,...women, too, must undergo the
process of deterritorialization or of “becoming” (“Nomadism with a Difference”
308)

If taken to be a literalizing of subjectivity, the nomadic coincides with the
geographic mobility of a character and/or author; however, the representational
capacity of nomadism is not inevitably restricted to a character’s movements as I

have addressed in the readings of anti-story and self-reﬂexivity in The Prowler,

291

anti-docu-tourism in Visibility: Moderate and what might be called, “theatrical
sex,” curtains, in Low in the Dark. The nomadic may have nothing to do with a
subject’s physical movement, but rather according to Braidotti, “it is the
subversion of set conventions that deﬁnes the nomadic state, not the literal act of
traveling” (5).

Structurally, the nomadic text and/or the nomadism of a text is quoted or parsed
with difﬁculty, the “points” are less apparent as they are subordinated to the movement of
the narrative. In this way, an academic discourse or project, including this dissertation,
may restrict a nomadic narrative strategy that privileges pathways and the ﬂow of ideas
by marking and clarifying nomadic characteristics as a metaphor or allegory for Atlantic
Rim women’s writing. Relying in part on evidentiary models and point-based narrative
orders—claim (point) and textual evidence (quotation)—critical writing lends itself to
phallic order and imperatives of knowledge production and mastery. In my discussion of
Atlantic Rim women’s literature and ﬁlm, the nomadic suits innovative and
“experimental” writing and textual practices that resist coherence and unity, and instead
create lines of ﬂight, to evoke Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology. These works
privilege a kind of passing (with all of its mobile and perforrnative connotations) along
intersecting pathways informing the feminine and self rather than an insistence on the
locations, points, and destinations of a cohesive, embodied feminine subject. It is not that
points do not exist in nomadic thought, but as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “points” are
never a goal to be reached since they structure “sedentary” or conventional and statist
models of knowledge and mastery. Instead, the point in nomadic writing becomes a relay,

a site to be left behind and then returned to when trajectory allows.

292

ANYWHERE

In Lieu of Concl...

In the cafe’ of the Hilton, the speaker from Belfast says: Being a woman is a
nationality I carry around with me.”6 She pauses, cradling the cup of coffee toward her
lips and Woolf traveling her memory. Maeve Sweeney adores Virginia and gazes into
the mirror behind the barista into another woman’s eyes. Here, among
morethancolleagues, conversation repeats, returns on the imag(e)ining of woman.
Placing her cup on the table, Claire De'rive, full of thinking on whether writing that
quotes was a repetition to be born or prohibited, slides the backs of her ﬁngers along her
neck feeling the vibrations of her response. If “woman is to be occupied and owned,” a
sighting of masculine imagination, a vision by lack, an image of a vesselized organ that
also births a nation, I say none of us are to be a woman. Amy smiles, and with ﬁngers
and eye, she traces the steam of her tea, retracing the conversation back and further along
since woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She ﬁnds pleasure almost
anywhere.97 The café is crowded—Cyn observes we are surrounded by tourists, satchels
of paper and laptops at our feet. Here in the Hilton a location is a location is a location
that (dis)organizes our conference and not for the ﬁrst time I notice Ash skipped the
gathering.

I (who am not the writer Nicole 'Brossard or the ﬁlmmaker Nicola Bruce)

remember us looking to Dublin for images of women who did not turn to stone, frozen on

 

96 From Pat Murphy’s and John Davies’ 1982 ﬁlm Maeve, which is often credited in Irish Cinema studies
as being the ﬁrst “feminist” feature-length ﬁlm (see: Martin McLoone and Kevin Rockett/Luke Gibbons)

’7 From Maeve and Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 28.

293

the screen and resurrecting the eternal mother.98 We spoke around the failures and
through our fantasies of reclamation, the (re)claiming of an originary woman to ground
our conversation and direct our (future) vision. Desires and dis/agreements bouncing as
points light so that after tea, we walked to the beach, speaking out of our satchels and
embracing other escapees. It was at the sea we spend the evening; many drinking wine
and some swimming, and I lounge, gazing senselessly until the conversation turns once
more to women and myth and Dublin and glimpses of ash on the horizon. The mention
of Joyce at the conference, observes Elizete, all too easily hijacks discussion into the
obsessions of fathers and sons and the night, the conversation trundles along as real.
Voice: ls moving through the sea that much different than a city if seeking the feminine
as if down in the depths? Either way, I have found maps an impossible metaphor offers
Maria Delahunty, the geography of her pleasure more diversiﬁed, more multiple in its
difference than is commonly imagined in an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on
*reproducing* sameness.99 Pouring the last of a bottle, a lover of Claire Dérive’s rises to
trace the sea through her toes and laughingly quotes: Studious girls, we will divert the
course of ﬁction, dragging with us words turn in and turn about, igneous spiral, picture
theory, an existence in these terms while the crepuscular bodies, we walk in the direction
of the boat surrounded by tourists. '00

Earlier, in line at the theatre, I write on the painted concrete with a pen from my
satchel. Ash stands so close I can feel her breath upon my cheek, her hand moving with

mine, calligraphy at the side of a building. We need both political strategies and

 

98 In reference to Nicole Brossard’s experimental novel Picture Theory (1982/2006) and Nicola Bruce’s
memory ﬁlm on Irish immigration to England I Could Read the Sky (1999).

99 See Anne Enright‘s What Are You Like? and lrigaray’s This Sex, 28.
'00 Brossard, Picture Theory, 100.

294

imaginary figurations that are adequate to our historicity, and I know we have read
that somewhere before but it might have been anywhere."” If I Could Read the Sky
proclaims the marquee, light escaping around the borders of black plastic letters——hung—
and waiting to be rearranged. Now, there is an imperative the lover whispers and I tilt
my head to the side and smile since her context is always multiple. A hologram another
mobile ﬁgure of imagination, a future novel, a ﬁction of science. A Visioning of light and
mobility to be gazed through, read from potentially inﬁnite number of angles, her text
adjusts, iterates a touch of my hand. I watch from my seat located in the light from the
screen as Bruce’s returned Irish immigrant mourns his father’s memory that was always
partial, missing a whole story, a whole memory of the life of an immigrant, as unreadable
as if written upon a sky-line. Amy says, “good,” and I wonder if I will cry.

Hours before the theatre’s last showing, Maeve Sweeney lounges naked on a
cliche’ of a bedspread at the Hilton. She looks to herself in the mirror and her direction
challenges us to see her other than as a man sees a woman. She is a ﬁgure(ative)
seduction and her performance stirs us to think otherwise even as she apologizes for the
seating she has arranged for us upon her suitcases. She speaks lecture-style as is her
wont, and our conversation begins to swirl, returning over the words of the sea, rocky
pathways, and back alleys of Belfast, Dublin, London, Toronto, and the place of our
island convention center. Our location becoming ruse and fantasy.

I remember that Claire Dérive speaks, impressing each of us with her surety for
response and I strain to detect her desire to control my e/motions. She places her cup on

the table and turns to rummage through her bag for pen and paper. At the source of each

 

'01 From Rosi Braidotti’s essay “Difference, Diversity and Nomadic Subjectivity.”

295

emotion, she or another writes (there is an abstraction whose effect is the emotion but
whose consequences derive from the ﬁxity of the gaze and ideas. Each abstraction is a
potential form in mental space. And when the abstraction takes shape, it inscribes itself
radically as enigma and afﬁrmation. Resorting to abstraction is a necessity for the woman
who, tempted by existence, invents the project of going beyond routine daily anecdotes
and the memories of Utopia she meets each time she uses language). '02 And I respond
that my memory confuses time, is multiple and in forgetting this I too often anxiously
move to seek. If becoming becomes seeking, it’s missed the boat quips Cyn—always a
lover of the cliché for its nothingness.

The elevator is at the center of the hotel and it carries us up and down from our
entrance to the ﬂoors above and below. It is a strange and often empty heart, pumping
along a cable and containing numerous safety features lest it move too fast or get out of
line. I ride with Claire, Rosie, Cyn and the numerous others and the writing 1’s in a
dimly lit interior—hung—waiting for the doors to open. A limited form of transport
sighs Elizete who fantasizes the doors may open between ﬂoors, affording a leap to
elsewhere. Gravity beckons. I reach into my satchel for the typewritten, the handwritten,
the anxiously written and I toss them mid-destination into the air, they hang, folding
around and amongst themselves. Language is feverish I remember reading not just

'03 And ﬁnally, we move about into the city or

anywhere but potentially from anywhere.
wander along the beach paths as is our want. Light refracts off the text of our skin,

altering the shape of the air brushing our bodies and I reach toward what I will write next.

 

'02 Brossard, Picture Theory, 77.
'03 Brossard, I67.

296

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