Lingual Tremors

Janet Fitch: The Anti-Feminist Feminist

I finally gave up on Janet Fitch's Paint it Black.  I bought it the day it came out, hungry for the kind of prose and heart-stopping narrative that kept me engrossed in White Oleander from the first page to the last.  I ended up getting 3/4 of the way into Paint it Black and I just couldn't connect with the main character, Josie.  She spends too much time flaking out on life and responsibility. 

And it led me to wonder:  what does it mean when an author celebrated for her feminist writing, like Fitch, consistently writes women who can't cope with their lives?  Both books are like 21st century versions of Olsen's I Stand Here Ironing, but I'm not sure what greater social truth they reveal.  While Olsen's work was a testament to working-class women during the depression, both protagonists in Fitch's work are self-absorbed.   They don't have perfect lives--in fact Fitch's oeuvre is based on lives that are far from perfect.  What saved White Oleander was Astrid, of whom we could also hope for more.

But there's something self-indulgent about Josie (Paint it Black) and Ingrid's (White Oleander) misery that I don't get from a writer like Olsen.  Olsen's characters can't choose happiness;  the system is too against them.  I feel like Fitch's characters could choose different lives.  In fact, as I write this, I think Fitch's characters are more like Hemingway's Bret with her beautiful, self-destructive drive.  But what's the point?  Hemingway was a mysogynist who couldn't (or wouldn't!) write women any differently.  Perhaps it's sexist on my part, but I expect more from Fitch.  I want her characters to make different choices, to care about their lives in different ways.  I want them to be the kind of women I care about.  But in the end, I just stopped reading Paint it Black.

What We Learn From Writers

American literature often oscillates between the perilous extremes of utile and dulce;  forever locked in a battle over the "use" of literature and the "appropriate" role of poets, writers, playwrights, and other artists in society.  The often immature sibling of older literatures--most notably Eastern European and Latin American literary traditions--American literature falls, even so often, into the firmly apolitical stance.  Literature, the aesthetes claim, should only offer pleasure.

Increasingly, against the 1980s and 1990s backlash against political literature, more and more writers and poets have emerged to claim their literary production as a crucial site of social and cultural critique.  Of course there are many uses for literature, but for me, raising social conscience is among the most important roles that a vibrant literature can offer its society.  A studied consideration--through fiction, poetry, & drama--can often offer a more compelling & affective commentary on historical and contemporary events than non-fiction accounts. 

So, I'd like to acclaim Sharon Olds and Harold Pinter (yes, I know he's British!), both recently in the news, for their firm stance on the relationship between literature and society.

Writing With the Body

We're all whores of language.  We work for it, feed it, humble ourselves on its account;  we brag about it--and in the end, what?  Language demands more.  It will always be asking us to give more, to delve deeper.

Luisa Valenzuela, Black Novel with Argentines

Academia: A Global Disease

Snicker... Snicker...A few global academic moments from Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons...

• At that moment the paranoia factory opened for business, tooled up for a day of capacity output.
• Now, I gather we all agree that Mr. Johanssen's paper was suspiciously far above the rhetorical level of any other work he had submitted.
• Plaudits for what you have achieved.  Strength for the fight ahead.  Never stop battling the fire, which has not died out.  Remember the prison-bound citizens.  Be scrupulous in your academic work.

Character Reflections...

From Kate Atkinson's Case Histories:

...she did because she was driven by something, only she didn't know what it was but she was sure that if one day she could get everything finished then she'd be free of whatever it was that was driving her...