Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction

by Ellen G. Friedman (Editor), Miriam Fuchs (Editor)

Overview

These nineteen essays introduce the rich and until now largely unexplored tradition of women's experimental fiction in the twentieth century. The writers discussed here range from Gertrude Stein to Christine Brooke-Rose and include, among others, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, Marguerite Young, Eva Figes, Joyce Carol Oates, and Marguerite Duras. "Friedman and Fuchs demonstrate the breadth of their research, first in their introduction to the volume, in which they outline the history of the reception of women's experimental fiction, and analyze and categorize the work not only of the writers to whom essays are devoted but of a number of others, too; and second in an extensive and wonderfully useful bibliography."--Emma Kafalenos, The International Fiction Review "After an introduction that is practically itself a monograph, eighteen essayists (too many of them distinguished to allow an equitable sampling) take up three generations of post-modernists."--American Literature "The editors see this volume as part of the continuing feminist project of the `recovery and foregrounding of women writers.' Friedman and Fuchs's substantive introduction excellently synthesizes the issues presented in the rest of the volume."--Patrick D. Murphy, Studies in the Humanities

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691636047
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #960
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 10.20(h) x 1.00(d)

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Breaking the Sequence

Women's Experimental Fiction

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By Ellen G. Friedman, Miriam Fuchs

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06755-1

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CHAPTER 1

FIRST GENERATION: BEFORE 1930

Dorothy Richardson Versus the Novvle

GILLIAN E. HANSCOMBE

Pointed Roofs, the first volume of Dorothy Richardson's experimental novel Pilgrimage, was published in 1915. The writing of the succeeding twelve volumes occupied the remainder of Richardson's life, the last, M arch Moonlight, being posthumously published in 1967. She conceived Pilgrimage as one novel and each constituent volume as a chapter: "I told them, since they admitted they had read only one volume of mine, that each volume is a single chapter of one book & cannot therefore be treated in the manner they suggest" ("Data for Spanish Publisher").

The conception was certainly remarkable for its time. In 1915 Richardson was forty-two years old, unmarried, unknown, untrained for any particular profession and with an occupational background that seems meager when considered as a literary apprenticeship. She had spent some years as a teacher, ten years as a secretary in a Harley Street dental practice, and had embarked on some casual journalism and translation. To her advantage, however, were roughly 25 years of economic and emotional independence from her family, together with an open-minded interest in people, incidents, and places. Although Pilgrimage is often criticized by traditionalists for its seeming formlessness, its internal structure and its thematic cohesion present Richardson's experience, through her persona Miriam Henderson, as that of a representative woman of the period.

Fundamental to Richardson's experimentation is the conviction that women and men constitute polarities and that her own work is representative of the polarity of women. Some feminists would question the gender stereotyping implicit in this conviction; and yet Richardson's distrust of language, her dissatisfaction with a tradition that ignores women's experience, and her exasperation with male novelists and male critics make her work central to the development of a feminist literary consciousness. She is "experimental" when seen in mainstream terms. She is "pioneering" in the context of the struggle of women writers. The ironies and paradoxes uncovered in the course of examining her work arise from her basic problem of having to use a language and a tradition in which women are alien in order to produce a work in which a woman's consciousness is central. That literary critics and commentators are also trained in the mainstream tradition presents further obstacles to any accurate reading of her work.

Richardson's monodic stream-of-consciousness technique is familiar to us after more than half a century's reading of her celebrated fellow modernists, Joyce, Woolf, Proust, and others. She makes her own wry comments on being the first English prose writer to develop this technique in her Foreword to the 1938 Collected Edition of Pilgrimage. Yet Richard- son was not only the first exponent in English; she was also unique in her exposition of a sole inner monologue. Nowhere in the long text of Pilgrimage is there a single paragraph extraneous to the perceiving consciousness of Miriam Henderson. Richardson saw herself, however, as a realist, setting out "to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism" and hinting that this project would be necessarily technically innovative (Foreword 1938). She loathed and repudiated May Sinclair's stream-of-consciousness tag, although its very aptness rapidly led to its widespread use in identifying the new techniques developed by the whole range of modernist writers of fiction.

Richardson commented often that a writer should write only about what she (or he) knows best; and since her own life was what she knew best, it was self-evident to her that it should provide her material and that the result would be entirely consistent with her realist aims. That she exploded the form of the English novel, recast its parameters, dissected and reassembled the syntax of its sentences, were to her all inadvertent side effects of the pursuit of her technique. The small but intense and passionate bubble of interest created by her technique among some literati seemed to her fundamentally aberrant. What she wanted, what she desired without ambivalence, was for the reader to see, feel, and think the experiences of Miriam Henderson without any comment or judgment passed upon them by the author. Richardson's pursuit of realism entailed a deliberate intention to remove the distinction between author and persona by removing the author entirely.

No ironic distance, therefore, between Richardson's voice and Miriam's is admitted. The total egocentricity of Miriam's viewpoint is sustained throughout Pilgrimage — in itself, no mean technical achievement. And it is this egocentricity with its corresponding absence of ironic detachment that focuses the hiatus between fiction and autobiography experienced by most readers of Pilgrimage. If the reader can participate without reservation in Miriam's consciousness, the conventional distinction between author and persona becomes irrelevant. Miriam's irritation with male novelists corresponds to Richardson's. They do not write about anything she — as a reader and as a woman — can recognize. It is this irritation with men's style, egoism, plot, moral stance, characterization, tradition, and language that feeds Richardson's own efforts as a writer.

In The Tunnel, the novelist Hypo Wilson urges Miriam to begin writing (as H. G. Wells in life had urged Richardson to do). Miriam's immediate reaction is to reject the novelist's awareness of the exercise of style, which she diagnoses to be a male characteristic:

Rows and rows of "fine" books; nothing but men sitting in studies doing something cleverly, being very important, men of letters; and looking out for approbation. If writing meant that, it was not worth doing. ... To write books, knowing all about style, would be to become like a man. Women who wrote books and learned these things would be absurd and would make men absurd. (130–31)

Wilson's criteria are practical: first, to have had the experience that provides the material and then to have freedom enough to devote the time. Miriam's reaction is defensive; to the degree to which authors knew what they were doing, they were contemptible, playing a "trick" on their readers. Their cleverness connotes control, together with the desire for approbation, which Miriam clearly delights in not giving. Her defense against her own ignorance, since she does not know "all about style," becomes inverted into pride that she is free from the hypocrisy of those who do. What makes this inversion possible is her contention that the contradistinction between those who know and those who do not corresponds to the difference in consciousness between men and women. Men always "know," but their knowledge makes them manipulative and therefore contemptible. Women hardly ever "know," so their reliance on instinctual life makes them more real, more alive, more authentic than men. Those women who do trouble to "know" are absurd; they are not really women, but imitation men.

Here we see Richardson's feminism as the motivating force behind her struggle to find the individual voice that characterizes any writer's sense of style. If she can identify all her distinctive differences as features particular to women, then she can avoid the crucial problems of the isolate. She is aware that her subjection to the overwhelming pressure of an alienating traditional culture cannot be lifted by a reliance on her individual ego alone; but if that ego can be made representative of a female alternative to the dominant culture, then she can become allied to half the human race, and her voice can assume a new role as the exponent of the female vision. This assertion allows her to resist conforming to a cultural model from which, by temperament and because of ignorance, she feels excluded.

But it is not just a sense of being excluded that troubles Richardson (and Miriam). The pyrotechnical display of "style" comes across as a manifestation of egoism:

most writers have been so consciously and laboriously, literary, that in reading them ... one is so fascinated by what they are doing, technically, by tracing exactly how they get their effects, that one is tempted to paraphrase Emerson's "What you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say" into ... "you have really nothing to say, and are keeping back what, if anything, you want to say, in the interest of a cunning way of saying it." (to Henry Savage, August 26, 1948)

In Dawn's Left Hand Miriam reflects angrily on a conversation she has had with Hypo Wilson about novels:

Hypo's emphasis suggested that the hideous, irritating word novvle represented the end aim of a writer's existence. ... The torment of all novels is what is left out. The moment you are aware of it there is torment in them. Bang, bang, bang, on they go, these men's books, like an L.C.C. tram, yet unable to make you forget them, the authors, for a moment. (239)

The phonetic "novvle" here is contemptuous and yet teasing. Miriam is drawn to the form because of what she feels is "left out." She resents the measured regularity of novels — of pace and sequence — which is to her as blind and mindless as a tram, serving only to confront the reader with the personal quirks of the author; in other words, to promise to offer "life" and instead to offer the author.

As the argument proceeds, Wilson reinforces Miriam's suspicion that by "creative imagination" men mean the ability to invent and to fanta-size. "Women," says Wilson, "ought to be good novelists. But they write best about their own experiences. Love-affairs and so forth. They lack creative imagination" (240). Wilson does not have the least notion what Miriam means. When she reads male egoism, he reads invention and a created universe. From his point of view, men do not write about themselves, but about "life." From her point of view, the opposite is the case.

In Honeycomb, Miriam expresses one of her many reactions against narrative, seeing it as not merely extraneous to the nature of the novel, but actually obstructive, due not only to servicing the cause of egoism, but also to the stance of moral authority implicit in the tone of the third-person narrator:

People thought it silly, almost wrong to look at the end of a book. But if it spoilt a book, there was something wrong about the book. ... It was a sort of trick, a sell. ... Then you read books to find the author! That was it. ... I have just discovered that I don't read books for the story, but as a psychological study of the author. ... In life everything was so scrappy and mixed up. In a book the author was there in every word ... that was why the people who wrote moral stories were so awful. They were standing behind the pages preaching at you with smarmy voices. ... An author must show himself. Anyhow, he can't help showing himself. A moral writer only sees the mote in his brother's eye. And you see him seeing it. (384–85)

For Richardson, neither plot nor moral tone should interpose between the author's representation of reality and the reader's apprehension of it. What is implicit is a rejection of the authoritative stance of the writer, either as the craftsman manipulating events, or as the seer who imbues his manipulations with moral value judgments.

Not only are plot and narrative unacceptable, so too is characterization. In Revolving Lights, during a visit to the Wilsons, Miriam overhears a conversation between Wilson and a novelist called Miss Prout, about proofs for her new book:

She had put people in. ... People he knew of. They joked about it. Horrible. ... As she gazed, revolted and fascinated, at the bundle of pages. ... Cold clever way of making people look seen-through and foolish; to be laughed at, while the authors remained admired, special people, independent, leading easy airy sunlit lives, supposed, by readers ... to be creators. (342)

Here again Miriam's anger is elicited by the thought of the elevated status of authors. To treat people they know as material to be manipulated seems to her a violation of their integrity, a violation they are helpless to prevent. As Miriam is a fictionalized persona of Richardson herself, and as Pilgrimage is peopled entirely by Miriam's friends and acquaintances, it is clear that Richardson does not object to the accurate presentation in books of living people, so long as they appear, as they do in "life," as the percepts of the observer without any attempt to give the objective facts and details that only a "godlike" creator can know. People can be perceived, but not known. What Richardson finds objectionable is the manipulation of other people's lives and qualities in order to serve the creative ends and designs of the author. For Miriam, such an activity is a kind of cannibalism.

Richardson's is not only an anti-Romantic stance; it derives from a fundamental puritanism, one characteristic of which is a dogged fidelity to literal-mindedness, a condition of mind that makes ironic detachment almost impossible. It is this puritan resistance to fantasy that provides the bulwark for Miriam's feminism against the relativism inherent in all humanist art, especially literature, which of its nature not only encourages, but endorses, imaginative engagement with the total range of experiences, however "untrue" some of them may be. Not only does Richardson reject humanist art because it is untrue to "life"; she is also unmoved by its moral stance, which seems to her to be mere preaching. When the reader can understand, if not endorse, her puritan logic, Richardson's revulsion against the portrayal of character in fiction becomes comprehensible. She was aware of the correlation between characterization and moral tone and sought to exorcise utterly a moral tone from her work, so much so, that she was shocked by the suggestion that she may not have succeeded: "You make one comment that leaves me gasping. ... You find that Miriam has a 'high moral tone'! I feel like shrieking where is it?" (to E.B.C. Jones, May I2, I921).

Behind Richardson's rejection of the conventions of the novel is no superficial boredom with familiar techniques, but a fundamental antipathy to any of the organizing principles of rationalism and to the traditional culture embodying them. In her view, the rationalist impulse itself and all its hierarchical classifications had to be resisted in science, in religion, in politics, and most particularly in literature. Writing with the confidence of old age to the poet Henry Savage, Richardson illuminates her hostility to tradition by revealing a hostility to all influences that could be called formative, both on the microcosmic-personal level and on the macrocosmic-cultural level. In the first instance, she denies the value to a writer of the psychological influence of other people. She sees influences necessarily resulting in the distortion and constriction of literary creativity: "Joyce remained hampered by the handcuffs firmly fixed by the Jesuits. V. Woolf, via Leslie, was a diluted male, wobbly and irrelevant" (to Henry Savage, January 5, 1950).

At the macrocosmic-cultural level, she denies any relevance to the novel of literary theory, which is

eternally debated between the Priests who believe "the novel" to be a matter of sacred unities forever unchangeable and the Prophets who do not so believe and produce a series of formulae; labels that slip about and never quite fit. Humanists they nearly all are, both Priests and Prophets, their world a drama going forward in a resounding box, empty of all but "people." (to Henry Savage, December 19, 1946)

The weight given here to "humanists" we must take to be derogatory since humanism, contradistinguished from mysticism, is mechanistic, devoted to categorizing and systematizing experience. Late in her life, she denied any influence on her literary work from outside her own consciousness: "I was never consciously aware of any specific influence beyond the overwhelming longing to pay tribute to the marvel of existence, anywhere, of anything; to sing a song of thanksgiving to the spirit of .the universe" (to Shiv Kumar, August 10, 1952).

Clearly, the social flux of the years between the 1870s and 1914 contained many of the seeds of antitraditionalism that Richardson and her contemporaries inherited. Richardson's rejection of tradition, however, was feminist rather than literary to the extent that she felt unable as a woman to identify herself within it and unable to endorse its values. Her referential framework was primarily psychological rather than ideational; unlike other novelists, she diagnoses the conventions she perceives not as cultural but as "masculine." The corresponding feminine vision, which she designates "life-as-experience," she finds lacking.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. ix
• PREFACE, pg. xi
• PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xvii
• Contexts and Continuities: An Introduction to Women's Experimental Fiction in English, pg. 3
• Illiterations, pg. 55
• Male Signature, Female Aesthetic: The Gender Politics of Experimental Writing, pg. 72
• Dorothy Richardson Versus the Novvle, pg. 85
• Woolfenstein, pg. 99
• Breaking the Master Narrative: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, pg. 117
• The Radical Narrative of Djuna Barnes's Nigbtwood, pg. 129
• Jane Bowles: Experiment as Character, pg. 140
• H.D.'s Fiction: Convolutions to Clarity, pg. 148
• The Music of the Womb: Anaïs Nin's "Feminine" Writing, pg. 161
• "Stepping-Stones Into the Dark": Redundancy and Generation in Christine Brooke-Rose's Amalgamemnon, pg. 177
• Marguerite Young's Miss Macintosh, My Darling: Liquescence as Form, pg. 188
• Fiction as Language Game: The Hermeneutic Parables of Lydia Davis and Maxine Chernoff, pg. 199
• The Artists of Hell: Kathy Acker and "Punk" Aesthetics, pg. 215
• Voices in the Head: Style and Consciousness in the Fiction of Ann Quin, pg. 231
• One Hundred and Three Chapters of Little Times: Collapsed and Transfigured Moments in the Fiction of Barbara Guest, pg. 240
• The Sense of Unending: Joyce Carol Oates's Bellefleur as an Experiment in Feminine Storytelling, pg. 250
• Experimental Novels? Yes, But Perhaps "Otherwise": Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, pg. 267
• The Clandestine Fictions of Marguerite Duras, pg. 284
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS, pg. 299
• SELECTED LIST OF WOMEN EXPERIMENTALISTS, pg. 301
• INDEX, pg. 319