Ambiguous Subjects: Dissolution and Metamorphosis in the Postmodern Sublime. (Genus: Gender in Modern Culture)

Ambiguous Subjects

GENUS: Gender in Modern Culture 10 Russell West-Pavlov (Berlin) Jennifer Yee (Oxford) Frank Lay (Cologne) Sabine Schülting (Berlin)

Ambiguous Subjects Dissolution and Metamorphosis in the Postmodern Sublime

Jennifer Wawrzinek

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Cover Image: Trapeze aerials, from the Women’s Circus’ production of Secrets. Courtesy of Tony Watts, Parrot Video. Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2548-6 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

For Julie

Acknowledgements

Peter Otto and Marion M. Campbell have been inspirational mentors on this project, guiding me with incisive and detailed feedback during discussions that were both thought-provoking and inspirational. The Women’s Circus generously gave me access to all files and working notes for the production of Secrets, and Tony Watts of Parrot Video supplied me with recordings and stills of Women’s Circus productions. Stephanie Trigg and David Bennett both read chapters of this book at various stages of completion and offered valuable advice; François Gallix gave me access to an academic environment during my year in Paris; and Russell West-Pavlov offered his support and encouragement, and a place in which to continue my work during the final months of revision whilst in Berlin. Discussions with, and feedback from Nicola Parsons, Thamy Ayouch, Samuel MacGeorge, Zeno Ackerman, Diane Simonelli, Fiona Hile, and John Mateer all greatly assisted me with clarifying my ideas and directions. And finally, I would not have been able to complete this project without François-Xavier Ducros, Jörg Kaufmann and Julie Wayne, whose untiring emotional support encouraged me to keep going when I was on the point of giving up. This project was assisted with a living stipend from a Melbourne Research Scholarship, supported by the Melbourne Scholarships Office, University of Melbourne. A Melbourne Abroad Travelling Scholarship (Melbourne Scholarships Office, University of Melbourne) and a Travel for Research in Postgraduate Study (Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne) enabled me to present chapters from this book at international conferences, where I received valuable feedback. A postdoctoral research fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft generously supported me through the final stages of this project and enabled me to finalise the working manuscript for publication. Earlier versions of chapters three, four, and five have been published in the following book collections: Désert(s): Entre Désir et Délire, ed. Corinne Alexandre-Garner

and

Guillaume

Cingal

(Centre

de

Recherches

Espaces/Ecriture Bibliothéque Durrell, 2003); Representing Minorities: Studies in Literature and Criticism , ed. Larbi Touaf and Soumia Boutkhil

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

8 (Cambridge

Scholars

Press,

2006);

and

Iterationen: Geschlecht im

Kulturellem Gedächtnis , ed. Sabine Lucia Müller and Anja Schwarz (Wallstein, 2008).

Contents

Introduction: Sublime Politics

13

The Haunting of Transcendence

33

Erotic Encounters: Nicole Brossard’s Radical Other in Le Désert mauve

57

Navigating the Contingent Subject in Morgan Yasbincek’s liv

87

“When I’m Up There It Feels Like Heaven”: Aerial Bodies and The Women’s Circus’ Secrets

113

A New Transcendental

141

Works Cited

145

This

failure of language is where the sublime begins

Blind, I am in the failure of language reaching towards you

Introduction: Sublime Politics

To inhabit the sublime is to confront one’s borders and boundaries. It is to come up against an excess that defies representation, an otherness that confounds the self. In the realm of the sublime, silence becomes something other than absence or nothingness. It becomes a space where one hears an undefinable Urgeräusch, a subsonic noise that lies within and beyond silence, an index to the existence of that which and those who cannot be represented. Quite simply, the sublime involves the perceiving subject’s encounter with a power that simultaneously exceeds and defines the self. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) Edmund Burke defines the experience of this power as something that can be neither quantified nor usable. These encounters are, he argues, characterised by pain and terror rather than by affection and love (the latter of which are more usually associated with the realm of the beautiful). The power that articulates the sublime is so great that the perceiving subject has the sense of being annihilated through the very encounter. The pleasure that arises from this encounter is one that is negative. It is a thrill produced from an encounter with the possiblity of one’s own death. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the sublime was often found in a confrontation with nature. One of the most frequently discussed depictions of such an encounter can be found in the painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Kunsthalle Hamburg), painted in 1818 by German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. Der Wanderer depicts the artist himself, standing on a rocky outcrop as he gazes out across a valley that is filled with fog, and through which the rocky outcrops of peaks and distant mountains rise. We, the audience, are invited to view the scene through the eyes of Friedrich, who stands with his back towards us, and who similarly looks out across the sea of clouds (der Nebelmeer). Apart from the foreground, where perceiving artist and rocky outcrop centre the image with solid tones in black, brown and grey, the scene of clouds and distant mountains are painted in shades of blue and white, giving the scene a heavenly appearance. This encounter is intensely private, personal and

14

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

solitary. It is an encounter with a natural world that is here shown to be powerful and potentially life-threatening, and yet, Friedrich is depicted as rising above the overwhelming force of the natural environment — not simply by looking over the clouds and valleys from his elevated position, but by foregrounding the self within the representation of this scene. Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer depicts the themes and issues that circumscribe the sublime. Moreover they are themes that continue to find cultural expression to this day. The confrontation illustrated in the Friedrich painting can, in contemporary versions of the sublime, be found within domains well beyond the natural environment. For example, the 1999 science-fiction action film The Matrix (Wachowski 1999) depicts a similar confrontation with power to that of the Friedrich painting, although here the setting is a post-apocalyptic world dominated by intelligent machines. The Matrix reiterates the notion of the artist as hero who rises above his physical limitations through the power of his mind, thus paralleling the hierarchical (and often heavily gendered) ordering of mind over body, and self over other, that traditional forms of the sublime (re)instate. The Matrix depicts the transformation of the very ordinary and nondescript computer programmer Thomas A. Anderson into ‘the One’, messianic superhero, leader of the resistance and saviour of the human race. This narrative is typically Romantic. The mode of Anderson’s transformation exemplifies a Romantic sublime that depends on an agonistic struggle with an overpowering other. Significantly, Anderson operates as a hacker under the pseudonym ‘Neo’, meaning reborn. He is recruited by an underground group of resistance fighters who are waging a war against a powerful conglomerate of intelligent machines. In this futuristic world, the human population is kept docile by the simulation of an everyday reality that elides the truth of their suppression by the machines who are harvesting human body heat and bioelectrical energy for their own power. Gradually, and painfully, Neo begins to believe in the power of his imagination as the key to self-determination. Furthermore, it is this power, rather than physical strength, that enables Neo to overthrow what had previously seemed to be the overwhelming power of the machines. Through the force of his mind, Neo is able to transcend the material ‘reality’ of the

INTRODUCTION

15

everyday to enter another dimension where he is able to fight the machines with the superhuman powers of his mind. The intelligent machines who exist as an unseen, omnipresent and Godlike force must be overcome if Neo is to realise the definition of his self as ‘the One’. This renaming (from Thomas A. Anderson, to Neo, to the One) emphasises the process of the protagonist’s rebirth into individuality and autonomy — both of which are used in the film to distinguish human qualities from the replicability of the machines and mass culture. At the end of the film Neo walks out of a phone booth after having delivered a speech about the eradication of rules and controls, borders and boundaries, a world where anything is possible. He looks around at the masses of people who are circulating around him, each seemingly indistinct from the others, their non-identity further emphasised by the short focus of the camera. Neo is clearly and distinctly defined against a mass of blurred figures. The camera cuts to an aerial view of the city as Neo jets out of the conglomeration of human bodies like a classic superhero figure (his black cape is highly suggestive of the comic book superhero Batman). The narrative of The Matrix

provides a poignant example of the

construction of the masculine, imperial subject whose mind enables him to transcend the everyday world and to be aligned with a greater power. It is this very structure that we also find in pre-twentieth century accounts of the sublime, and which demonstrate the longevity of the ideal of the autonomous subject who is master of his own destiny. Indeed, contemporary society is still negotiating many of the Western cultural tensions that emerged during the late eighteenth century when the popularity of the sublime was at its peak. These tensions not only drive the narrative of The Matrix, they similarly inform the structure of traditional, hierarchical accounts of the sublime. The conflicts that underwrite the narrative structures in both The Matrix and the traditional sublime (between the claims of the individual and those of the community; the role of the imagination and that of reason; transcendent principles and the materiality of embodied time and space) continue to be articulated and represented across a variety of sociocultural, political and academic discourses to this day. The sublime is deeply concerned with questions about the way we perceive the world and its others, the way we understand and represent the

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

16

relation between self and world, or between self and other/s. As such, it could be said that the sublime permeates the fabric of contemporary society, culture and politics. It is invoked whenever there is a call for a revolutionary overthrowing of a powerful individual or group, or whenever a minority group claims the right to political agency or self-determination. When silences are invoked as evidence of the suppression of difference, of multiple communities or of the legitimate place of the other, we are once again in the realm of the sublime. As I have already argued, the sublime in its traditional form depends on hierarchies that (re)instate mechanisms of power and domination. The construction of the autonomous subject that is enabled by these accounts depends on the (re)institution of borders and boundaries that frequently serve to keep some individuals, groups and nations in power at the expense of others. In the following chapter, I examine and critique hierarchical versions of the sublime that depend on an agonistic struggle of binary opposites, the result of which is consistently the elevation of one term over the other (perceiving subject over world; mind over body; self over other). In these accounts, the sublime becomes a strategy of appropriation underwriting the construction of the modern (political) subject. It is a strategy that is often described as masculine and imperialistic. William Wordsworth, writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, described the sublime as “the most important experience in life” (Day 1995: 193). However, much of Wordsworth’s poetry depicts this experience as a masculine one, even as he reverses the Kantian elevation of reason over imagination in order to valorise the latter. For Wordsworth the natural world is frequently depicted as inherently feminine and not of ultimate significance to the spiritual, invisible and transcendental, which are all associated with masculine principles. It is this masculinised, spiritual power that is often described in imperial terms: the feminine world of nature and body is expunged and colonised by the divinely sanctioned imperial force of the imagination. Wordsworth’s poem of 1814, The Excursion, combines the mystical voice of divinity with a distinctly imperialistic rhetoric used to describe the existing British state. In Book IX the protagonist of the poem, the Wanderer,

INTRODUCTION

17

places British power at the centre of the world and suggests that her future as a leader will be glorious: O for the coming of that glorious time When, prizing knowledge as her noblest wealth And best protection, this imperial Realm While she exacts allegiance, shall admit An obligation, on her part to teach Them who are born to serve her and obey . . . Thence look for these magnificent results! Vast the circumference of hope — and ye Are at its centre, British Lawgivers; Ah! Sleep not there in shame! Shall Wisdom’s voice From out the bosom of these troubled times Repeat the dictates of her calmer mind, And shall the venerable halls ye fill Refuse to echo the sublime decree? Trust not to partial care a general good; Transfer not to futurity a work Of urgent need. — Your Country must complete Her glorious destiny. (1853: Book IX 293-298, 398-408)

In the context of British imperial expansion, the Romantic sublime illustrated to a British audience the value of autonomous individuality. As Marlon B. Ross writes, the Romantics “helped to teach the English to universalise the experience of ‘I’, a self-conscious task for Wordsworth, whose massive philosophical poem The Recluse sets out to organise the universe by celebrating the universal validity of English values” (1988: 31). In the twentieth century, the imperialistic assertion of self that we see in the traditional sublime and in the imperial expansion of empires (such as those of Britain, Spain and France) is taken to the limit in the human catastrophes of the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the development of nuclear weapons and star wars technology.

18

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS German Idealism and the Holocaust Various critics have equated the aggrandisement of thought and of

transcendental ideals that is characteristic of German idealism (represented by the writings of Kant, Hegel, Goethe and Schiller) with an apolitical and idealist conception of freedom that in nineteenth century Germany came to be associated with the full development of moral character. German intellectuals were critical of the French revolution, which they saw as a preoccupation with materialistic aspects of everyday life and the neglect of the spiritual dimension. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, writing at the beginning of the century, argues that in contrast to the ideals of the French revolution (which pursued only material wealth), Germany’s task was to regenerate the world through the spiritual realm of transcendental ideals (1968). Moral freedom came to be defined as far superior to the animalistic and materialistic weaknesses of human nature — a notion that was firmly rooted in the Lutheran and pietist traditions that sublimated the flesh in the service of a higher freedom. This was a freedom that depended on heroic self-discipline, and that, as Roderick Stackelberg writes, “reinforced the practical imperative of German idealism to regenerate the world, not through reason, but through moral ideals and will” (1999: 45). In Germany, the idealistic commitment to transcendental ideas, spirit and soul above the materialistic world embraced the notion of these ideas as existing separately and autonomously, together with the commitment to put these ideas into practice. Stackelberg very effectively illustrates the way in which popular forms of apolitical idealism (Vulgäridealismus) pervaded the consciousness of nineteenth century Germany and discouraged social and political reform. This vulgarised version of idealism was predicated upon the notion of an individual who acts out of inner conviction despite any disadvantages to the self, and whose heroic conduct was deemed superior to the profit-oriented commercialism of liberalism or the levelling of socialism (both seen as intrinsically materialistic). Stackelberg argues that in the twentieth century this popular form of idealism came to be associated with nationalism and authoritarianism, both of which demanded the subordination of self-interest to the interests of class, the good of the nation and the idealised moral authority of the state.

INTRODUCTION

19

The principles underlying the valorisation of transcendental ideals and the moral authority of reason defined German national identity in the early twentieth century. Unity and conformity, self-discipline and subservience to the higher authority were denoted as higher values than the equal distribution of social benefits. Furthermore, Christian self-denial and the renunciation of the material world was juxtaposed against an identification of Jewishness with materialism and immorality. According to the antiSemitism that grew in congruence with the idealism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jewish religion refused to renounce material possessions in favour of a higher morality and a greater world ‘beyond’. Anti-Semitic stereotyping reinforced the view that Jewishness was equivalent to animalistic materialism, selfishness and a lack of self-denial that formed the basis of popular idealism. Despite the anti-Semitism that pervaded nineteenth century European society in general, the liberal democratic systems of many countries discouraged its mobilisation as a political force. In Germany however, the boundaries of national identity were increasingly drawn against a negative other defined as Jewish. Stackelberg argues that in this era “to be authentically German involved a commitment to idealism and the rejection of ‘Jewish’ materialism” (1999: 48). Accordingly, Jews were blamed for the rise of materialistic systems that enabled Jewish entrepreneurs to gain economic and professional success, thus threatening the German social order. If the first world war was, for many Germans, a war to save the world from the materialistic impulses of the modern age, and an ideological war to determine the cultural direction of mankind, her defeat generated a crisis of national identity that was expressed in the scapegoating of Jews and socialists. Many Germans of the post-war period were ready to believe the charges of the radical right who argued that the humiliating defeat of the German nation was due to a conspiracy that undermined the morale of the home front and betrayed Germany’s courageous troops. In addition, the years of liberal democracy of the Weimar republic following Germany’s defeat in the first world war were viewed by many as an alien system imposed by the Allied conquerors and that its intention was to keep Germany from being united and strong.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

20

The crisis of national identity that was exacerbated with Germany’s defeat in the first world war underwrites, I argue, the desire to reinstate a unified national identity through overcoming the political fragmentation of liberal democracy and the intrusion of perceived materialistic values from the West. The myth of der Führer (the leader) that was generated around Adolf Hitler, provided the ideal means through which this defeated and fragmented nation could reconfigure its sense of national unity and greatness — in other words, to reconsolidate the boundaries of German identity. It is this same process (one that overcomes a crisis of subjectivity in order to reinstate the autonomous individual) that we find in the traditional sublime. Hitler was perceived as a leader who would uphold order and morality against fanatical dissention. In his appeal to the German people in 1933, Hitler resurrected themes of idealistic morality and spiritual greatness as the way to national salvation: The national government sees as its first and foremost task the restoration of spirit and will of our people. It will preserve and protect the fundamentals on which the strength of our nation rests. It will preserve and protect Christianity, which is the basis of our system of morality, and the family, which is the germination cell of the body of the people and the state. It will disregard social rankings and classes in order to restore to our people its consciousness of national and political unity and the responsibilities that entails. It will use reverence for our great and glorious past and pride in our ancient traditions as a basis for the education of German youth. In this way it will declare a merciless war upon spiritual, political, and cultural nihilism (quoted in Sax 1992: 132). In a manner that parallels the structure of the traditional sublime, Hitler’s (re)instating of the traditional values of Christian morality and nation as the basis of German identity, together with the subsequent persecution of those who were perceived as the materialistic members of society, aimed at reconstituting a unified identity through reference to

INTRODUCTION

21

transcendental ideals and a higher power. The horrific result of its conclusion in the German case was the othering of those who did not accord with these governing principles, their imprisonment and often subsequent extermination. Approximately six million European Jews were killed during the second world war as part of a deliberate program executed by the National Socialists and led by Adolf Hitler. Other groups included within this program included Roma, Slavic peoples, ethnic Poles, the disabled, gay men, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The (re)construc-tion of German national identity in the years leading up to the second world war can be said to depend on those very bodies it marked for extermination. The vulgarised idealism of the popular movements that led to the Holocaust was not, of course, the logical outcome of the Kantian sublime and its elevation of reason as an index to a higher morality. However, the principle of struggle between binary opposites that informs the structure of the Kantian sublime parallels the very same struggle and valorisation of transcendent principles pervading the socio-political climate of Germany in the lead-up to the second world war. As Michael Mack argues, the hegemony of idealism that defined German culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that held an implicit disregard for empirical reality, served to reinforce a division between the spirit and the corporeal (2003: 171). The building of nation on the grounds of such a division, and as an attempt to transcend the material world and its others, not only found horrific form in the events of the Holocaust. This same structure can similarly be read in the reasons for developing nuclear weapons and the exploding of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear Weapons and Space Age Technology The development of Enlightenment thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries aimed to liberate humankind through a belief in the role of reason as that which would solve the problems of everyday life, dissipate the darkness of superstition, prejudice and barbarity, free humanity from a reliance on unexamined traditions, and therefore open the way towards a future of universal peace and happiness. For many this ideal came to be embodied in the inductive procedures of science. For others,

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

22

the role of reason was in the deduction of particular truths from clear and distinct ideas that were known only intuitively. The critical philosophy of Kant is often considered to be the highest product of the Enlightenment. In his essay of 1784, “What is Enlightenment?”, Kant argues that it is “the liberation of mankind from his self-caused state of minority” and that this is achieved through the “determination and courage to use [reason] without the assistance of another” (quoted in Snyder 1955: 14). The Enlightenment hoped to give men sovereignty over their own lives through the workings of reason. The rapid developments from the industrial age and through the twentieth century sustained a utopian belief in the possibility of unending technological progress. David E. Nye argues that the use of technology to control and master the natural world is evidence of what he terms a ‘technological sublime’ (1994). This argument is extended by Joseph Tabbi

who reads the work of several postmodern American

writers as an effort to engage with the proliferation of technology in the twentieth century (1995). In the United States for example, the railroad became a symbol of liberation, opening up forests and bridging expanses of water so that nature was effectively seen to yield its power to man (see Nye 1994). However, the development of the atomic bomb by the United States government under the auspices of the Manhattan Project, together with its use in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the second world war, illustrates what can be seen as the horrifying culmination of such faith in the beneficence of technological progress. Despite the claims of the Enlightenment for the use of reason as a progressive moral force, the explosion of the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did anything but serve as an agent of moral enlightenment. The use of these nuclear weapons enacted what can only be described as apocalyptic images of horror. I shall discuss the nuclear sublime further in chapter three. The point I want to make here is that discourses of power and control are frequently used to (re)consolidate and (re)instate a sense of national identity when that identity is suffering from a crisis of vulnerability and insecurity. In the period following the second world war the tensions between the liberal democracy of the United States and the communism of the USSR gave rise to the insecurities of the Cold War. As Paul Edwards writes, within the “closed

INTRODUCTION

23

world” of American Cold War technology “the ideological commitment to encompassing the globe with perfect technologies of command, control, surveillance and military nuclear power ultimately offered nuclear superpowers [the United States and the USSR] a perverse new form of immortality” (1996: 145). The drive to ally the self (whether private or national) to an overwhelming force and to appropriate that power as one’s own serves as the impetus of both the traditional sublime and the (re)consolidation of national identities in the cases discussed so far. In the United States, following the horrors of the atomic explosions in Japan, the domestication of atomic energy underscored an attempt by the US government to control the overwhelming force of the nuclear sublime. In American Technological Sublime Nye argues that the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes was a continuation of man’s desire to assert power over nature (previously expressed by the railroad). Space technology and the development of the first rocket launch similarly allowed the perceiving subject to be lifted out of the everyday through the overwhelming force of the technological spectacle. Unlike the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the rocket launch and the journey of the first man to the moon allowed the ordinary citizen to experience the greatness of human endeavour in the conquering of space, one that was linked intrinsically to national greatness. As Nye writes, “a pilgrimage to the Kennedy Space Centre promised a sublime experience that renewed faith in America and the ultimate beneficence of industrialisation” (1994: 256). It could be argued that with the horrific events of the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the attraction of the unified, autonomous and the absolute has lost its power. However, the veracity of debates over immigration, together with the anxieties over national identity and the place of the foreigner they illustrate suggest, unfortunately, that Western society of the new millennium has not yet managed to resolve the tensions and conflicts at work in the hierarchical sublime.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

24 Immigration Debates

The above examples illustrate the way that boundaries of self and nation are sometimes instituted with very imperialistic uses of power that violate, colonise and appropriate the world and its others. The genocide of the Holocaust and the bombing of Japan, both in the second world war, provide instances of ways in which the sublime can be read as an articulation of power for the assertion of self or nation. Indeed, in the aftermath of the war, the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the threat of annihilation by the atomic bomb, and the progressive destruction of the natural environment resulted in a socio-cultural disillusionment with the absolutist principles of unity and heterogeneity underwriting totalitarian states. However, while forms of postmodern cultural production began to value the fragmentation and multiple differences that traditional forms of the sublime attempt to transcend, contemporary debates over immigration continue to express all too familiar anxieties over self and nation. The issues of immigration and naturalisation can be seen as key processes shaping the existence of colonised countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States. I will further discuss the relationship of immigration and national identity in the Australian context in chapter four when I examine Morgan Yasbincek’s critique of Anglo-Australian hegemony. I read the measures and controls implemented by the British colonial government in Australia as a method used to draw a defining boundary around what was, in the newly emerging nation, a very tenuous sense of self. The crisis of Anglo-Australian identity manifested in a fear that certain (non-British) immigrants might divert Australia from its destiny as an outpost of the British imperium. The White Australia policy of 1901 therefore aimed to preserve Australia’s white heritage by restricting, to various degrees, the entry of certain immigrants deemed ‘undesirable’. Brian Murphy writes that “the preference scale which developed early in migration policy was dominated by Anglo-Saxons, with a descending measure of acceptance” (1993: 2). The emerging Australian nation depended on an idea of Britishness as its founding a priori principle, one that was reinforced by the active exclusion of coloured peoples and the abjection of non-Anglo-Saxon Europeans to the category of “white aliens” (Murphy 1993: 3). The construction of white

INTRODUCTION

25

Australian identity throughout most of the twentieth century left little room for cultural difference. The result was the social alienation and disaffection of many non-English-speaking immigrant groups. It was only towards the end of the century that Australian government policy moved towards one of multiculturalism, although in many other countries policies of integration and assimilation persist. The anxieties evident in the process of building the Anglo-Australian nation, with reference to transcendent principles of Britishness and the suppression of cultural heterogeneity, can also be seen in the immigration policies of the United States. The emerging American nation similarly depended on the ability of its government to actively select its immigrants. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 served as the basis for further acts of restriction against Asian immigrants. In Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act

(1998), Andrew Gyory argues that these

restrictive measures, aimed at a certain community on the grounds of race, were designed to displace social anxieties over class conflict and rising unemployment that were fracturing the fabric of American society. The call to unity and solidarity under the banner of nationalism, together with the redrawing and strengthening of boundaries against the ‘others’ that might destabilise the principles governing the idea of nation, is not something that is limited to colonised countries such as Australia and the United States. Contemporary debates on the issue of immigration can also be found in countries with strong imperial pasts such as Britain and France. In the 2007 French presidential election, Nikolas Sarkozy (himself the son of an Hungarian immigrant) successfully campaigned for tighter restrictions on immigration, law and order. After the 2005 riots in the banlieus of Paris he was quoted by the media as saying, “If people don’t like being in France, they only have to leave” (Willsher 2006). These suburban districts are home to a large, mostly immigrant North African population who consistently suffer from social exclusion and disproportionate unemployment. Media reports by the BBC and the New York Times located the cause of the civil unrest within the social disaffection so often experienced by African and Arabic immigrant communities in France (Sciolino 2005; BBC 2005).

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

26

Sarkozy, who was then interior minister, declared a policy of ‘zero tolerance’ towards the rioters. He responded to the violence with increased security measures consisting of seventeen companies of riot police and seven mobile police squadrons. Sarkozy’s use of the word racaille (scum), a word with particular ethnic resonance, to refer to the rioting youths underscored the racial nature of the conflict. The government’s response to the unrest was to draw upon principles of state and nation by issuing an order to deport foreigners convicted of being involved in the riots, even those with a French residency visa. The magistrate trade union Le Syndicat de la Magisture criticised Sarkozy’s attempts to promote the idea that the rioters were foreigners. Nevertheless, the effect of the debate that placed unruly foreigner against respectful and orderly French citizen was to secure the terms of French national identity through the authoritarian suppression of difference. Unsurprising perhaps is the recent introduction to French parliament under the Sarkozy government of legislation aiming to further restrict immigration and to make it easier for immigrants to be deported. Laws introduced in France in 2006 requiring French language tests for those seeking immigration to France, together with the signing of immigration contracts, highlight the French move towards a highly selective immigration policy. Sarkozy defends France’s right to selective immigration as “the expression of France’s sovereignty”. Furthermore he suggests “it is the right of our country, like all the great democracies of the world, to choose which foreigners it allows to reside on our territory” (Murphy 2006). Sarkozy’s claim to a national sovereignty that is based on the (re)institution of racial, cultural and linguistic boundaries between self and other echoes the claims of the autonomous, individual (and patriarchal) subject of the traditional sublime who rises above the material world of others and their differences in order to find a sense of his unique identity. It is somewhat ironic that the assertion of French nationalism in the early years of the twenty-first century should occur within a relatively similar time-frame as the fall of the iron curtain dividing East and West Europe in 1991 and the formation of the European Union in 1993, which adopted a common currency and single market for member states, thus facilitating more porous borders and freer movement across them,

INTRODUCTION

27

especially between East and West. I suggest that these events might go some way to explaining the popularity of Sarkozy’s hard-line stance on immigration, law and order. His rhetoric juxtaposes French sovereignty against a notion of ‘the foreigner’ in a clear act of othering. For a country whose colonial empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the third largest (behind the British and Spanish Empires), the decolonisation movements that resulted in the collapse of the French Empire have left the legacy of what Gary J. Schmitt and Reuel Marc Gerecht refer to as “France in Decline”. They write that “no one really dissents from the view that France’s always fragile glory has fractured” (2006). In this light, the reclaiming of French sovereignty in the context of restrictive immigration legislation reinforces the boundaries of French national identity, but at the expense of its others. The argument I am making here is that the progress of German idealism and the human catastrophe of the Holocaust, the explosion of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent development of more powerful nuclear weapons and Star Wars technology, and the rhetoric of various immigration debates in both colonised and colonising countries can all be read as instances of the traditional, hierarchical sublime where the construction of the individual, autonomous subject depends on the violent negation, suppression, colonisation and appropriation of the material world and its others. Moreover, these examples illustrate the will to power and domination over others that is characteristic of pre-twentieth century accounts of the sublime and which is, as I will show, critiqued and dissimulated in its postmodern versions. The following chapter provides an historical overview of the development of the sublime from the eighteenth century, when it garnered an unprecedented popularity, to the twentieth, when the hierchical ordering of terms implicit within its resolution became ethically unsustainable. I examine the Burkean and Kantian sublimes, and the Wordsworthian Romantic sublime, in order to illustrate the increasing psychologisation of aesthetic perception in the process of producing the (masculine) autonomous subject. I then place the category of the grotesque within this history as the often forgotten third term within the pairing of the sublime

28

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

and the beautiful. To this end, Mary Shelley’s brilliant critique of the Romantic subject in her novel Frankenstein serves as a poignant illustration of the way in which the sublime and the beautiful are defined in opposition to the grotesque and the monstrous, which thrreaten to disrupt the former’s aesthetic parameters. The discussion of Frankenstein is certainly not meant as a critical examination of the tropes and issues articulated in the novel. This would require an in-depth analysis and breadth of space that the scope of this book does not allow. Rather my purpose for using Frankenstein within the context of the historical overview is to illustrate the way in which the three-stage structure of the traditional sublime abjects the grotesque and sublimates the carnivalesque within its process of subject-formation. The second part of chapter two traces the work of theorists who have begun, in the late twentieth century, to rework the hierarchical sublime in order to harness its power and dynamism for the benefit of minority identities, but without its violence and domination. I examine the work of theorists such as Jean-François Lyotard, Barbara Freeman and Patricia Yaeger who, in various ways, restructure and reformulate the Kantian sublime in ways that maintain its potential for transformation but that deny any final and absolute transcendence. These postmodern reconfigurations of the sublime emphasise the point of contact between subject and world (self and other) as a defining moment in the structuring of perception, thus making spaces for the co-existence of multiple differences and allowing to sublime and the grotesque to be situated alongside one another. The way that we perceive and (re)present the world and its others informs our ethical relationships with that world. Rather than insist on the transcendence of the material world, these postmodern forms of the sublime place the world of nature and body at the centre of knowledge-production. The subject does not colonise the place of the other in the act of constructing the self but engages in mutual participation with that world. Witnessing becomes a strategy that simultaneously resists appropriation and respects the radical alterity of the other. As such, postmodern reconfigurations of the sublime destabilise hierarchies. Rather than existing as principles that transcend space and time, ideals emerge within their embodied context. The mind and the body work in tandem and knowledge of the world is gained through a recognition

INTRODUCTION

29

of the implicit reversibility of self and other. Accordingly, identities can only be determined contingently because they exist in time and space and are therefore reconfigured with every shift in the system that holds perceiving subject and world together. Chapters three, four and five each focus on a text that critiques and problematises traditional versions of the sublime in order to reimagine transcendence and/or transformation. These texts evoke a sublime that is horizontal, or multi-dimensional, rather than vertical, multiple and hybrid rather than singular, and where emergence depends on connections and becomings rather than on overcomings. All of the authors write from positions that can be classified as marginal. They belong to communities not legitimated by dominant discourses. They therefore take up illegitimate discursive positions, using a borrowed language in order to explore formations of self and transcendence not sanctioned by mainstream culture. In particular, their innovative writing practices actively resist the gendered binary divisions inflecting most accounts of the sublime from Burke through to Yaeger and Freeman. French-Canadian author Nicole Brossard’s Le Désert mauve depicts the sublime landscapes of the Arizona desert and the Montréal suburbs not as materialities to be overcome but rather as sites of engagement. The samesex desire that draws an open-ended possibility together between Mélanie and Angela Parkins sets them apart from a masculinist, heterosexual culture. In this novel the self is depicted as emerging from a symbiotic relationship between subject and world, or self and other. The shift of focus, in the second part of the book, from the Arizona Desert to a Montréal bookshop, foregrounds the view that the a priori suppositions underwriting the sublime are contingent, therefore suggesting that the sublime cannot be divorced from its historical context. In Croatian-Australian author Morgan Yasbincek’s novel in fragments liv the horizontal sublime becomes a cyberkinetic circuit board of pulses, currents and flows. Here the pure illicit desire felt by Mélanie and Angela Parkins in Le Désert mauve no longer exists. Indeed, Yasbincek complicates the space of subject formation through the cross-circuiting of narratives, languages, and geographic positions, effectively dismantling categorical distinctions so that what emerges are forms of identity that are highly

30

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

contingent and ambiguous. Moreover, these forms of emergent identity are always necessarily situated within, and as, a nexus of multiple relations. Yasbincek refigures the transcendent moment of the Kantian sublime into a series of momentary ‘transcendences’. Agency is engendered within a process of chaotic and unpredictable mappings within three-dimensional space. The authority of a priori principles such as the Phallus are undermined through the book’s focus on trajectories, flows and movements, which destabilise all fixed, unmoving points of reference. The fifth chapter examines the work of the Women’s Circus, a Melbourne-based community arts group whose 2001 performance of Secrets explored the effects and consequences of sexual assault, while also attempting to give the performers and audience an experience of (re)embodiment and (re)affirmation, experiences radically opposed to the structures of violence and domination characteristic of patriarchal culture. As a collage of memories and stories expressed through words, music and movement, Secrets attempts to produce an experience of (sublime) transcendence in which bodies, marginal selves and groups interact with and enable each other in order reclaim a degree of freedom and selfdetermination that is dependant upon an openness to the world. The conclusion of this book does not attempt to provide a neatly polished answer to the problematics described in the previous chapters. Rather it attempts to seize upon and tease out the gaps and suggestions made there in order to gesture towards other ways in which the ideas presented have been, and might continue to be, explored and developed by writers beyond the parameters of this work. The conclusion gathers the threads that traverse the book to insist, once again, upon modes of the sublime that allow transcendences and becomings that do not abject or deny the body. It reiterates the ways in which the texts presented in the previous three chapters all insist upon a relinquishing of control over the relationship between self and world, or between self and other. It gestures towards the ways in which these might be developed into a (re)consideration of what it means to be politically efficacious. The conclusion is, therefore, a simultaneous gathering together and teasing apart, a deliberate fraying of edges as a gesture towards further connections, dialogues and

INTRODUCTION

31

becomings that will inevitably transpose the ideas of this book into other contexts and other (re)formulations.

My language fails to capture you every time, I dis appear my origami wings fail to hold my existence

The Haunting of Transcendence

Accounts of the sublime routinely describe an experience in which the appearance of a sublime object precipitates a sense of the limits of perception, thought or language, of a power or reality that exists beyond the merely human and, at the conclusion of the sublime experience, of one’s own unique individuality. As this suggests, the experience reinforces a dyadic structure of oppositions (such as subject/object, self/other, seeable/sayable, image/word, or mind/body), as well as an association with lofty ideals, freedom and dignity. Boileau’s 1674 translation of Cassius Longinus’ first century AD treatise, Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime) marks the birth of a modern fascination with the sublime (Kirwan 2005: vii). From this moment, it becomes a key term in the discourse of aesthetics, despite the various forms it assumes in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Peri Hypsous Longinus describes a rhetorical sublime, which he associates with moral, spiritual and intellectual dignity. This emphasis on morality and ethics is repeated in accounts of the sublime throughout the eighteenth century, and then again in the twentieth century when the sublime is celebrated for its liberatory possibilities. In the eighteenth century, interest shifted to the natural sublime, and to the ways in which certain classes of objects affect the subject. John Baillie (1747), James Beattie (1783), Alexander Gerard (1759; 1780), William Gilpin (1794), David Hume (1739; 1777a; 1777b; 1779), Richard Hurd (1762), Lord Henry Kames (1762) and Richard Payne Knight (1805) all made important contributions to the study of the sublime as an affective experience. However, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful was, for the eighteenth century, the most influential analysis of the sublime, and still provides a key point of reference for contemporary discussions of this subject. Although a detailed examination of Burke’s Enquiry is beyond the scope of this study, it is nevertheless important to note some of the significant aspects of the Burkean sublime, in particular because it develops an account of the sublime that is simultaneously empirical and psychological, while also being underwritten by rhetorical principles.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

34

According to Burke an experience of the sublime passes through three distinct stages from the state of everyday equilibrium to, first, blockage or standstill, then transport, and finally, inflation. As he writes in the Enquiry: The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence and respect. (1757: 53) The sublime begins when the spectator is brought to a standstill by an object too vast to comprehend. “The mind is so entirely filled with its object” that “all its motions are suspended.” The second stage commences when the blocking power takes hold of the mind, creating the sense that the subject is being transported by an “irresistable force”. In the third stage of the sublime, the mind recovers and the subject emerges with a heightened sense of his own importance, of the relation he bears to the ground of all things, and a profound sense of “admiration, reverence and respect” for the sublime power. These three stages define the central movement of traditional accounts of the sublime, based on a vertical mode of transcendence and a dialectical division between self/other, nature/culture, and body/mind. Amongst the ‘objects’ productive of the sublime, Burke lists terror, obscurity, power, vastness, infinity, difficulty, magnificence, and pain. The first of these terms is, Burke argues, “either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime” (1757: 54). Serpents and poisonous animals are considered as objects of terror, because clearly dangerous (1757: 53), but a dog, who is “sociable, affectionate, and amiable” is not (1757: 61).

THE HAUNTING OF TRANSCENDENCE

35

Burke describes the various classes of sublime objects, while also attempting to explain how and why these objects, denoted by Burke as empirically sublime, affect the subject. The Burkean sublime is, therefore, a paradoxical conjunction of the psychological (he is concerned with subjective states of mind), the empirical (he delineates objects productive of the sublime), and the social (he attempts to ground his psychology in the commonality of taste). Burke argues that because taste belongs to the imagination, “its principle is the same in all men; there is no difference in the manner of being affected, nor in the causes of the affection; but in the degree there is a difference” (1757: 20-21). The universality of taste is in turn underwritten by language, even though, as Frances Ferguson notes, this seems in part to contradict Burke’s insistence on the singular aspect of the sublime (1992: 47). In their respective accounts of the Enquiry, Frances Ferguson and James Kirwan both point to the rhetorical principles that inform Burke’s account of the role of language in experiences of the sublime and in underwriting the universality of taste. Burke draws examples from literature to argue that there are things that can affect the passions, even though they can be known only as ideas or through verbal or literary descriptions. Indeed, according to Burke, the obscurity that can be suggested by language gives it a power to evoke a sublimity that is much greater than pictorial representations. In Burke’s example, Milton’s phrase, “universe of Death” collocates “two ideas not presentable but by language” (1757: 159) and can clearly be distinguished from clear and strong representations grounded in the world of objects. Language plays an important role in many accounts of the sublime, but it becomes an increasingly important aspect of twentieth century attempts to rework the sublime as an experience that is more open, diverse and inclusive. In The Critique of Judgement

, Kant radically transforms Burke’s

account of the sublime. Where the Enquiry analyses the effects of sublime objects upon the perceiving subject, Kant argues that the sublime is not located in the object itself, which provides only the occasion for the a struggle between the faculties of imagination and reason. In Kant’s account, the sublime is a highly subjective experience that cannot be shared.

36

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS Kant distinguishes between the mathematical and the dynamical

sublimes, both of which follow the three-stage structure articulated by Burke. An experience of the mathematical sublime is prompted by objects or concepts so great that the imagination is unable adequately to represent them, whereas the dynamical sublime is prompted by forces or powers that radically exceed our own. In the former, the individual realises the limits of imagination; in the latter, he realises the limits of his physical power. In both cases this limitation throws into relief a power or faculty within the self that exceeds every standard of sense. Limitation in this sense provides an indirect presentation of the supersensible. In his account of the mathematical sublime, Kant describes the attempts of the imagination to find a sensible representation of infinity. The imagination attempts but fails adequately to comprehend infinity in a single representation. It “strives towards progress ad infinitum , while reason demands absolute totality, as a real idea” (1790: 97). In contrast, reason is able effortlessly to conceive what the imagination is unable to represent, suggesting reason’s ability to exceed the sensible world to which the imagination is confined. Imagination’s failure therefore throws into relief the power of reason, suggesting the ability of reason to rise above nature itself. This interplay between imagination and reason enables the mind to “feel itself elevated by its own estimate of itself on finding all the might of imagination still unequal to its ideas” and, in the process, natural magnitude as “sinking into insignificance before the ideas of reason” (Kant 1790: 105). In this experience, the subject glimpses a supersensible destiny as an autonomous, rational individual. The dynamical sublime also presents the unpresentable, but it is prompted by an encounter with a “power which is superior to great hindrances” (Kant 1790: 109) and which is potentially lethal. Fear is, therefore, the first emotion aroused by the dynamical sublime. Any attempt to resist this superior force is futile. The subject consequently becomes acutely aware of the limits of his bodily powers. This experience of physical helplessness is, however, merely the prelude to an experience in which the “forces of the soul [allow us to rise] above the height of the vulgar commonplace . . . [so that we] discover within us a power of resistance of

THE HAUNTING OF TRANSCENDENCE

37

quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming impotence of nature” (Kant 1790: 111). This power of resistance is evident in our ability to act ethically, whatever natural or human forces are arranged against us. The physical impotence experienced in the face of natural power highlights “an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature” so that what is revealed in us is the “basis of a self-preservation quite different from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us” (1790: 120-121). The dynamical sublime foregrounds the autonomy of moral sense as an inner freedom over and above the physical limitations of the perceiving subject. In the confrontation with natural might, the subject discovers an inner humanity and a sense of moral good that are superior to nature. Once again, this experience provides strong evidence for the subject’s supersensible destiny. Although Kant distinguishes between the mathematical and dynamical sublimes, in both cases the sublime operates ‘negatively’. In other words, the failure of imagination or the limits of bodily strength provide a negative representation of what cannot be represented. Kant aligns the sublime with a respect for the moral law as the work of reason, arguing that the aesthetic pleasure resulting from the sublime operates negatively: The object of a pure and unconditioned intellectual delight is the moral law in the might which it exerts in us over all antecedent motives of the mind. Now, since it is only through sacrifices

that

this

might

makes

itself

known

to

us

aesthetically, (and this involves a deprivation of something — though in the interests of inner freedom — whilst in turn it reveals in us an unfathomable depth of this supersensible faculty, the consequences of which extend beyond reach of the eye of sense,) it follows that the delight, looked at from the aesthetic side (in reference to sensibility) is negative, i.e. opposed to this interest, but from the intellectual side, positive and bound up with an interest. (1790: 123)

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

38

The process of sublime experience is based upon the ability of the perceiving subject to esteem and respect that which is on occasion opposed to the subject’s sensible interests. The imagination’s failure and the pain this causes allows the power of the moral law to makes itself known as an aesthetic pleasure. Because moral and ethical frameworks dictate, or proscribe, actions that are often in contradistinction to those resulting from pure desire, it is necessary that reason has what Kant argues is “a power of infusing a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction in the fulfilment of duty, and consequently that it should possess a kind of causality by which it can determine sensibility in accordance with rational principles” (1785: 144). In this way, because the sense of satisfaction produced from the fulfilment of duty in accordance with reason (or respect for the moral law) produces the same impulse to activity as does a sensation of agreeableness arising from desire, the subject believes that the determining ground of both actions is a sensuous one. In the Kantian sublime, reason is elevated over the imagination and the understanding, in the service of a moral framework. This recourse to an ethical

and

moral

framework

is

of

interest

to

twentieth-century

(re)formulations of the sublime that attempt to use its force and power as a means for enabling the abject and the subaltern. Moreover, the tension in the sublime, between the faculties of imagination and reason, as the power of representation and that of the idea, opens a space within which transcendence can be reconfigured. In its Kantian formulation however, the sublime remains vertical: reason rises above the imagination, and the sensible world of the body is negated in favour of transcendent principles and realities. Wordsworth’s Romantic sublime reverses the Kantian elevation of reason over the imagination so that it is reason which is blocked, confined to a world that it can only scrutinise and survey, but not change. For Wordsworth, it is reason’s limits that provide the backdrop against which the might of the imagination can be seen as a faculty whose medium is sense and whose power is transcendent. Wordsworth illustrates this dynamic most poignantly in the blind beggar episode of “The Prelude” when he writes, “And, on the shape of that unmoving man,/His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,/As if admonished from another world” (1994: 370).

THE HAUNTING OF TRANSCENDENCE

39

Echoing the other sublimes we have considered, greatness in the Romantic sublime emerges from defeat and in contrast to human limitation and incapacity. Although the Romantic sublime claims to have found a truth superior to all dogma, this truth is a reflection of the poet’s individuality and genius. The degree of arrogance in this position is suggested by James Kirwan when he notes that Romanticism is marked by “a feeling that the world is too small for the self, that is the badge of genius” (2005: 121). Although Romantic transcendence is centred on the power of the imagination rather than that of reason, it follows the Kantian sublime in sublimating the sensual, corporeal world in the service of a transcendent, individual consciousness and a subject who is autonomous. The vertical and hierarchical transcendence of the Burkean, Kantian and Romantic sublimes instates the sublime as an agonistic struggle of domination, mastery and control. The valorisation of one faculty at the expense of another creates the impression that one can determine, or at least rise above, the forces of the natural world or, more broadly, that which is designated as other. An experience of the sublime concludes by reinstating principles of subjectivity based on individuality and autonomy. Although typically presented as universal, these socio-cultural principles are not equally accessible to all members of society. For this reason much recent criticism of the sublime focuses on the way in which it has been used as a mode of self legitimation that (re)instates some selves as superior to others (most commonly those who are white, male, middle-class, Western etc.). Mary Shelley was one of the first writers to critique the structures of domination inherent to traditional models of the sublime. Her novel Frankenstein (1818) serves as a paradigmatic illustration not only of the individual who realises his autonomous self through the workings of the sublime, but also the corporeal abjection that this entails. In the opening chapters of Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein, a young scholar and man of science, emphasises his progressive politics and social status. “I am,” he notes, “by birth a Genevese; and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics; and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation” (1818: 31). He chooses, nevertheless, to move

40

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

to the margins of that society: first, when he leaves his family to enter an all-male university; second, when he chooses to study what is seen as the archaic and very unscientific discipline of alchemy by reading the works of Magnus, Agrippa, and Paracelsus; and third, when he encloses himself in the womb-like space of the laboratory, hoping to discover, not simply knowledge, but “the secrets of heaven and earth” (1818: 37). Victor’s belief in the metaphysical as that which will provide knowledge of the deep causes of life and death is coupled with a belief in the power of an individual consciousness able to transcend the historical conditions of its existence. In the central section of the novel, Victor flees to the Mer de Glace in the Swiss Alps after the monster, which he has created, murders his younger brother, William, and frames the family’s maid, Justine, for the crime, with the result that she is executed. Victor, filled with remorse and guilt, hopes to find in the Mer de Glace a respite from the horror he has introduced into the world. As he remarks before beginning the journey, “I suddenly left my home, and bending my steps towards the near Alpine valleys, sought in the magnificence, the eternity of such scenes, to forget myself and my ephemeral, because human sorrows” (1818: 94). As Victor traverses this alpine landscape, he is distanced from ‘mere’ human society and is brought into apparent proximity with the divine. The mountains and valleys that surround him lift his spirits as he climbs higher and higher towards “a power mighty as Omnipotence”. From high above the valley, he views a scene of “singular beauty”, with “ruined castles hanging on the precipices of piny mountains; the impetuous Arve, and cottages every here and there peeping forth from among the trees”. At the same time, this scene as a whole is “rendered sublime by the mighty Alps, whose white and shining pyramids and domes towered above all, as belonging to another earth” (1818: 94). For Victor Frankenstein, the affective pleasures offered by the beautiful and the sublime provide an antidote to the horrors he has experienced at the hands of his monstrous creation. The equilibrium between the sublime and the beautiful (one above, the other below him) is, however, soon disturbed. As Victor ascends, he moves further and further away from the beautiful, the social (the little houses dotting the valley), and the familial. He assumes a position analogous to that of “the supreme and magnificent Mont Blanc [which] raised itself from the surrounding aiguilles” and whose

THE HAUNTING OF TRANSCENDENCE

41

“tremendous dôme overlooked the valley” (1818: 95). The sublime is here associated with a desire for omnipotence, mastery and possession, and this desire is evident in Victor as a steady movement away from the domestic and the feminine. Victor’s ascent of the Alps, like his journey to the all-male university at Ingolstadt (where he studies the natural sciences), involves a journey away from the domestic, the feminine, and the beautiful. In Frankenstein, one of the key representations of these terms is Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor’s adopted sister and fiancée. Victor describes Elizabeth as “the beautiful and adored companion of all my occupations and pleasures” (1818: 35), as an object he possesses, and as that which readily submits to him. When Elizabeth is introduced into his family, he looks “upon Elizabeth as mine — mine to protect, love, and cherish. All praises bestowed on her, I received as made to a possession of my own. . . . till death she was to be mine only” (1818: 36). Later, Victor describes Elizabeth as possessing a “warm affection”, a “heavenly vivacity”, a gentle and soothing voice (1818: 189190), and she is described as looking forward to their impending marriage with “placid contentment” (1818: 191). In contrast to the sublime, which involves a confrontation with that which will not submit to the self, the beautiful involves calm acquiescence and agreement. In the Mer de Glace scene of Frankenstein, embedded in the central section of the novel, Victor enters a remarkable natural environment: The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glacier overhung me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial Nature was broken only by the brawling waves, or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche, or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been a plaything in their hands (1818: 96).

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

42

These “sublime and magnificent scenes”, he says, “elevated me from all littleness of feeling; and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillised it” (1818: 96). The next day, he attests to being filled with “a sublime ecstasy, that gave wings to the soul, and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy”. Victor’s arrival at the top of the mountain is marked by a clearing of the mist and cloud which had previously swathed the glacial valley, so that Victor can now look out over the expanse below him. Curiously, the experience finds its apotheosis in a quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Mutability”. This foregrounds the transposition of affect (grounded in the natural and corporeal world) into language (as the art of rhetoric so intrinsic to accounts of the sublime), while also implying that the apparently transcendent self glimpsed in the sublime is in fact contingent. Shelley’s poem suggests that selves are transitory compositions, like “clouds that veil the midnight moon” or “forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings / Give various response to each varying blast” (Shelley, P.B. 2003: 112) and that the experience of the world, and of the self, can only ever be momentary: Victor’s recitation of the last two stanzas of this poem, “Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; / Nought may endure but Mutability” (Shelley, M. 1818: 98; Shelley, P.B. 2003: 112), prefigures the return of the monster, as the return of the abject, precisely as mutability itself. Monstrous Irruptions In Frankenstein sublime transcendence is always coupled with the possibility of a fall, a descent into the chaos and corporeality from which subjects have divided themselves. As I have argued earlier, in traditional accounts of the sublime, the sensible and material world is eclipsed as a trascendental faculty emerges (the former provide the ground against which the figure of reason (in the Kantian sublime) or the imagination (in the Romantic sublime) becomes visible. The emergence of the monster in the Mer de Glace suggests the disruptive return of the sensible, physical and abject. This highlights the role of the monstrous (as a figuring of the grotesque) as the often forgotten third term that accompanies the sublime and the beautiful.

THE HAUNTING OF TRANSCENDENCE

43

As Victor is contemplating the magnificence of Mont Blanc, the monster appears on the edge of the glacier valley. He demands Victor’s attention and reminds him of the responsibility a creator has to their creations. In Frankenstein, the monster exists outside the symbolic orders of culture, language and society. He is little more than an animated corpse, a nameless assemblage of body parts, with muscles and arteries clearly visible beneath his translucent yellow skin. The monster, as a loose collection of fragments, intrinsically material and clearly not part of an organic unity, is cast off as social refuse. Abjection, Julia Kristeva writes, involves the collapse of psychic boundaries (1982). The abject is consequently neither subject nor object but an ambiguous disturbance of identity, system and social order which respects no positions, rules or boundaries. In Frankenstein, the monster’s appearance on the Mer de Glace and his demand for recognition confronts Victor with the disorder he wants to leave behind and, implicitly, with what lies beyond the limits of his narrowly circumscribed self. Each appearance of the monster presents the disruptive potential that, as Noël MacAfee argues in his description of the abject, constantly challenges the “tenuous borders of selfhood” (2004: 46). When the monster first appears on the Mer de Glace, Victor, trembling “with rage and horror”, orders him to disappear. The creature is a “vile insect” that Victor will destroy (1818: 98). If, as Elizabeth Grosz argues, “the corpse seen without God, and outside of science . . . is death infecting the We” (1989: 75), the monster’s appeal to Victor can be interpreted as the demand of flesh for compassion. Through the sublime, subjects glimpse their place within an order that exceeds the natural world. The monster, however, is a product of human activity; he is a being of flesh, lacking a supersensible order to which he can be said to belong. His existence has of course been disavowed by even his human creator: when Victor first sees the monster, he abandons it, fleeing from the laboratory in horror and disgust. The monster is henceforth a nonthing, existing within an indeterminate zone of non-existence analogous to that occupied by social outcasts such as prostitutes, convicts, and the handicapped.

44

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS While the sublime landscape of the Mer de Glace and Montanvert allows

Victor to gain a sense of his place in the order of things, the monster confronts him with the thing itself, the materiality of his existence. As a figure who is simultaneously monstrous, grotesque, and abject, the monster represents an excess radically distinct from the excess of the sublime. It is therefore surprising that some critics assume that these terms are interchangeable, or that they work to similar ends, both in Frankenstein and within aesthetic discourse in general. Andrew Smith, for example, argues that, for Victor, the monster functions as the sublime object because its excessive stature, superhuman strength, and unnatural ugliness stops him in his tracks. Similarly, Elizabeth Susan Bolton argues that “the sublime and the grotesque are in fact a single tradition” (1992: 3). Bolton admits that the grotesque critiques and extends the power of the sublime, but then aligns the two discourses in order to illustrate how they work in similar ways to achieve similar ends, even going so far as to conflate the “interior infinite” of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque with the “natural infinitude” of the Romantic sublime (1992: 21). In my view, this argument obscures the extent to which the sublime depends on the sublimation of the corporeal world in the service of the supersensible beyond. Victor Frankenstein’s response to the monster’s disruptive presence more accurately suggests the relation between these two types of excess: “Begone! I will not hear you. There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies” (Shelley 1818: 100). The grotesque, the abject and the monstrous, and arguably terms such as carnival and the subaltern as well, can more accurately be placed in opposition to the sublime. They exist outside the structures of legitimacy inhabited by the sublime and the beautiful. The abject and the subaltern are defined in opposition to the legitimate self as what is not-the-self (the abject) or the non-representable (the subaltern). The revelry and disorder of carnival and the grotesque inhabit a material, heterogenous world, actively resisting sublimation by the hierarchical sublime. It is of course true that the sublime and the grotesque stage a confrontation with the excessive as a precondition to transgression and transformation. Nevertheless, both Mikhail Bakhtin, the primary theorist of carnival and the grotesque, and Immanuel Kant, are very careful to distinguish each term from the other.

THE HAUNTING OF TRANSCENDENCE In Rabelais and His World

45

(1984), Bakhtin associates carnival and the

grotesque with the collective social body. Carnival denotes a space in time during which social barriers are removed and the individual, through contact and exchange with others, loses his solitary self to become a member of a festive community with a heightened awareness of the material world. For Bakhtin, the grotesque is closely associated with the disordered revelry of carnival: it presents an open and heterogenous body — a body which is unfinished, continually expanding and, therefore, radically different from the transcendent individual and bourgeois ego. Bakhtin argues that the folk cultures of carnival and the grotesque are devoid of all “mysticism and piety” (1984: 7). Their rebellious nature depends upon a position of alterity that would be diminished if it were to become a legislatable category (such as the sublime). Kant does not discuss the relationship between the sublime and the grotesque per se , although, in his discussion of the mathematical sublime, he takes care to clearly distinguish the excess associated with the sublime object from that belonging to the monstrous. Whilst conceding that aspects of the sublime are close to the monstrous, he distinguishes between the two terms by arguing that an object is “monstrous where by its size it defeats the end that forms its concept”. In contrast to the sublime, the monstrous begins and ends with the defeat of intellectual end and concept by material form. In Frankenstein, when the monster demands the attention of Victor, he is opening a dialogue between incompatible terms. The monster’s demand that Victor recognise his existence as a legitimate member of the symbolic order is, in effect, a demand that the sublime take note of the unspeakable condition of its existence — the monstrous and grotesque body which forms the occulted ground of its own pre-eminence. Reverse Sublimations Carnival and the grotesque deflate all that is sublime and portentous. Defined in opposition to the lofty ideals of transcendence and the autonomous subject, they effect a reverse sublimation that revels in the disordered social body — the same loose collection of material diversity,

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

46

openings, fissures, disruptions and voices that sublime transcendence attempts to leave behind. Carnival highlights the creative disorder of the social body, in contrast to the contingent order of the individual, the state and the church. Its discourse, unlike that of the sublime, focuses on the liminal zone of the hybrid, ignoring the uplifting moment of transcendence. These features of carnival and the grotesque, according to critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Mary Russo, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, amongst others (see Bell and Gardiner 1998; Cohen 1996; Mills 1999), enable it to depart from models of rationality, progress and liberation, to mark the spaces of failure and error within processes of normalisation. Like Victor Frankenstein’s monster, the grotesque belongs to time and space, rather than the supersensible world of the sublime. It insists upon a body that is open and incomplete and which exists within a social and ecosystemic network. In Rabelais and His World , Bakhtin identifies the space of the hybrid as the essential condition of carnival — a space of topsy-turvy and excess where everything is ritually defiled and degraded. In this world, any authoritarian position is unsustainable: “no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images; these images are opposed to all that is finished and polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook” (1984: 3). Where the sublime affirms the individual subject, confirming the line that divides self from all that is other, enforcing and maintaining order with reference to “the figures of its territorial edge” (Stallybrass and White 1986: 200), carnival and the grotesque interrogate those very limits by undoing discursive hierarchies along with “the stratification of bodies and cultures” (1986: 200). According to Stallybrass and White, Bakhtin’s theory of carnival and the grotesque can be modelled in two ways. The first, they argue, sets up an oppositional dichotomy between high, or official culture, and low, or nonofficial, folk culture. The second does away with this straight-forward opposition. Carnival and the grotesque are here generated by hybridisation or “inmixing of binary opposites, particularly high and low, such that there is a heterodox merging of elements usually perceived as incompatible” (1986: 44). Hybridisation unsettles the binary structures and dialectical oppositions underwriting the sublime. Instead of serious portent, the

THE HAUNTING OF TRANSCENDENCE

47

grotesque as hybridisation foregrounds a Nietzschean gay affirmation of life, death and renewal. This emphasis on fanciful play recalls the derivation of the word ‘grotesque’ from the excavation of the baths of Titus, whose decorative ornaments, grottesca, were a fanciful, free and playful treatment of human and animal forms, interwoven in and through each other. Bakthin suggests that these forms depict “an inner movement of being itself . . . expressed in the passing of one form into the other, in the ever incompleted character of being” (1984: 32). The claim that carnival and the grotesque are revolutionary powers that can escape the structures of transcendence is of course questionable. Terry Eagleton argues that carnival has historically functioned as “a permissible rupture of hegemony” that is circumscribed and licensed by the state as a pressure release valve for the masses — that is, to allow the unruly and defiant expressions of the populace but only within a specifically determined geographic zone and a specifically determined time-frame. To support his argument, Eagleton quotes Shakespeare’s Olivia, who says, “there is no slander in an allowed fool” (1981: 148). Whilst there are numerous examples of the state allowing but nevertheless circumscribing the carnival festivities of the marginalised, there are some groups unable to achieve even this degree of recognition. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes that, beyond the abject, the ‘subaltern’ has no access to the socio-cultural arena in any form. Because hegemony is exerted upon subjects who actively participate in a culture dominated by ideological forces, those who do not share the interests of that culture (as defined by the state) are denied access to its representational structures. The subaltern are, therefore, non-narrativisable, and the only position they can occupy is one of non-narrativisable opposition (Spivak 1988: 271-313; 1990: 141-145). Therefore, if carnival allows a ‘pressure release valve’ and a space for expression, albeit patrolled and regulated by the state, according to the definition by Spivak, it is an ineffective political strategy for those marginalised members of a society bracketed by the term ‘subaltern’. Postmodern accounts of the sublime often focus on the early stages of the sublime, on the moment of disruption and destabilisation, in order to affirm the unspeakable presence of the abject and the subaltern other.

48

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

Andrew Slade argues that this configures the postmodern sublime as a site of witnessing that propels us to search in language for the phrases that will make our witnessing meaningful, even though we are dispossessed of langauge (2007: 31). In this sense, the postmodern sublime foregrounds an ethical framework that depends on the uses to which the sublime can be put, rather than what the sublime is. Jean-François Lyotard privileges the moment of disruption and destabilisation in the Kantian sublime in order to combat totalitarian metanarratives (see Malpas 2002; Williams 2000), although the anti-humanistic tendencies of the Lyotardian sublime tend to deconstruct the subject to the point where agency and political efficacy become little more than an idealistic illusion. The dispersal of the subject in the postmodern sublime accounts for some of the criticisms that have been levelled against it. For example, Temeuga Trifonova (2007) argues that the postmodern sublime is “fuelled by a barely disguised hatred for subjectivity and intentionality” (2007: 128) because for Lyotard both come to be associated with the idea. However, other critiques such as Hans Bertens, counter accusations of neoconservatism in Lyotard, by arguing that the aesthetic of the postmodern sublime is based on a consistent critique of representation that aims to preserve heterogeneity. Because it resists totalitarianism and absolutism, the confrontation with the unrepresentable enables what Bertens refers to as a “radical openness” (1995: 133). Lyotard’s work is developed further by critics such as Patricia Yaeger and Barbara Freeman, who reread the sublime in ways they hope will affirm rather than exile, occlude or sublate the radical other. They refuse the third stage of the sublime — the inflation with which an experience of the Kantian sublime concludes, or the egotistical delusion of the Romantic sublime — in order to sketch a sublime more appropriate to a secular postmodern world that is distanced from the social and metaphysical hierarchies of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

With every mistake I erase myself Only to find you there Beneath my alphabet tongue

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

50 The Postmodern Sublime

In the twentieth century the events of the holocaust, and the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, provide what has seemed to many the horrific culmination of western attempts to transcend the sensible world. In the face of the suffering associated with these events, sublime transcendence and the subject it endorses are made questionable by a moral and ethical framework that demands a degree of responsibility to the natural world and the others who live there. The transcendental subject of the sublime is also increasingly anachronistic in a world where multinational capitalism calculates the worth of things in terms of exchange value. When Theodor Adorno wrote, “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch [To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric]” (1955: 34), he sparked an intense debate on the ability of language to represent the unspeakable. Josh Cohen (2003), for example, suggests that Adorno underscores the necessity to remember history and to make art that can provide moral principles in order to guard against the repetition of an even such as Auschwitz. Naomi Mandel (2001) argues that Adorno compels us to confront the implications of effacing the possibility of language in response to the unspeakable, and Kalliopi Nikolpoulo (2006) insists that the Adornian tradition is one that is concerned with interrogating the possibility of poetry after catastrophe. Whilst Adorno’s comment draws attention to the role of the sublime within a postmodern world and the need for a means of expressing that which exceeds language, Adorno also emphasises the way in which consumer capitalism continually empties and reifies experience, together with the objects of that experience — whether this is the natural world, the people in that world, or events such as the holocaust. Adorno argues that in this society there can be “no more ideologies in the sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence” (1955: 34). Consciousness thus degenerates into little more than idle chatter. For Adorno, consumer capitalism depends on the barbaric as a sympathy with the undifferentiated, thereby disabling any possibility for objectivity or truth. Richard Kearney reiterates this notion by arguing that the postmodern

THE HAUNTING OF TRANSCENDENCE

51

sublime effectively disables the ethical claim because, in the face of the unspeakable, we are deprived of “any access . . . to the reality of evil” (2002: 94). Kearney, like Adorno, is critical of the way in which consumer captialism commodifies representation to the point where political efficacy and the moral claim are invalidated. Postmodern models of the sublime therefore shift the focus from a stable transcendental self ‘discovered’ in an experience of the sublime to a self in process, and from a fixed transcendental order to one that is contingent. For Lyotard, postmodernism “denies itself the solace of good forms” (1984: 81). Accordingly, his postmodern sublime is figured as the moment where form is experienced as contingent, to the extent that every form exists simply as an invitation to create new forms. Rather than discovering a pre-existing form, truth or faculty, Lyotard’s sublime is performative, creating forms that are contingent, the products of a cultural performance. To claim that a transcendental order governs such processes would be to negate an ethical heterogeneity, introducing what Lyotard describes as “a period of slackening” (1984: 71). The disruptive potential of the Lyotardian sublime (that which continually destabilises and unsettles the “solace of good forms [and] the consensus of a taste” (1984: 81) has suggested to some critics that the sublime is contained by the grotesque. Elizabeth Susan Bolton suggests, for example, that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the location of the sublime within the breakdown of form effectively encases the former within the grotesque (1992: 21). Similarly, Deborah Caslav Corvino argues for a model of transcendence that depends on the grotesque for its power by reading Matthias Grünewald’s painting “Crucifixion” as a depiction of the grotesque body of Christ made sublime. Corvino argues that the grotesque is neither a departure for the sublime nor a condition of the abject. In yet another version of this argument, Barbara Freeman and Patricia Yaeger rework the postmodern sublime in ways that attempt to open it to embodied others, and therefore to the carnivalesque and the grotesque. Freeman and Yaeger’s feminist appropriations of the postmodern sublime emphasise the encounter with sublime excess as an engagement and relation with an other, rather than an agonistic struggle. Hierarchical models of the sublime, Freeman argues, are patriarchal constructions that

52

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

contribute to women’s subjugation (1997: 10). Canonical theories of the sublime exclude an otherness which, she argues, “almost without exception, is gendered feminine” (1997: 3). Yaeger similarly argues that the traditional vertical sublime divides the masculine self from the ‘chaos’ of the (feminine) generative body (1992: 12). Both Yaeger and Freeman recognise, however, that although vertical models of transcendence have been used to aggrandise the (masculine) self at the expense of the (female) body, the sense of transport and empowerment engendered by the sublime makes it valuable, once properly harnessed, as a political strategy. Freeman develops the Lyotardian sublime into a model that she calls the ‘feminine sublime’, where a subject enters into a relation with an otherness that is both excessive and unrepresentable. Rather than leading to the possession, mastery or domination of the other, the sublime opens “a site of passage and border crossing in which meanings collide and transform one another [in] an ongoing process of re-metaphorisation” (1997: 10). Where the Lyotardian sublime draws attention to the unpresentable within presentation, the feminine sublime draws attention to the voices that have been silenced. It gestures towards a “radical alterity that remains unassimilable to representation” because it is concerned with an irrecuperable excess of excess (1997: 11). The focus on the relation between perceiving subject and radical other, an interaction that occurs on the border of consciousness, recalls the hybrid spaces of the carnivalesque. This is developed more explicitly by Patricia Yaeger, who develops what she describes as ‘the horizontal sublime’ (in opposition to the vertical sublime of Kant and Romanticism), and then as ‘the maternal sublime’. The horizontal and maternal sublimes refuse the “fight to death with the father” and expand, instead, towards others within a field of multiplicities (1989: 191). The horizontal sublime, because it is not dependant upon rising above the other in a struggle of domination and control, emphasises the importance of expenditure, the spilling or giving of whatever energy the sublime moment promises as the possession of the subject. The moment of empowerment is figured, by Yaeger, as contingent and liable to dissolution so that the perceiving subject can become something other than a unified and transcendent subject.

THE HAUNTING OF TRANSCENDENCE

53

In the maternal sublime, Yaeger tropes the maternal birthing body as the epitome of expenditure without appropriation, and as the origin of transformation. This articulation of a process of transformation in which “the grotesque and sublime cease to be oppositional” (1992: 18) is an attempt to provide a language that can legitimate the experiences of those, such as the subaltern, who are normally excluded from structures of representation. Rather than transcending corporeal humanity, the sublimes described by Freeman and Yaeger reach towards humanity through a spreading of awareness. As Greg Lewis Peters suggests, this mode of sublimity depends on context and association (1992: 150), so that, in effect, the value of a ‘horizontal’ sublime lies in the explicit refusal to dominate and/or appropriate the other. Critics who rework the sublime in the service of the feminine often aim to contest binaries and a rigid notion of sexual difference that reinforces distinct gender positions. Nevertheless, their dependence on an opposition between a ‘feminine’ mode of the sublime (horizontal or maternal) and a ‘masculine’ mode (vertical and hierarchical) reinscribes the dialectical oppositions and gender categories underwriting the sublime they are criticising. I am not suggesting that gender is irrelevant to the sublime; arguably the sublime has more often than not been employed for the specific purpose of installing and maintaining a hegemony that is not only masculinist, but also white, middle-class, Western, and heterosexual. Although the recent (re)formulations of the sublime suggest the possibility of opening the sublime to what it excludes, it can be debated whether this is sufficient to overturn its hierarchical structures. Does this merely enable the other to speak in a voice not their own? Theorists of the grotesque have argued for a corporeal politics of the carnivalesque as a way of undoing the structures of domination that ordinarily exclude the abject body. Certainly the notion of hybridity can destabilise the fixity of concepts and categories, not as an attempt at transcendence or an allusion to infinitude (as in the postmodern sublime), but as a freeing of human consciousness to ever-new potentialities. However, the ways in which social structures discipline and control ‘unruly’ behaviour, or else permit ‘frivolity’ under the limitations of a state-

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

54

sanctioned ‘carnival’, raise serious doubts about the ability of carnival and the grotesque to change existing structures of signification. For these reasons, I want to focus on representations of what Jennifer de Peuter describes as less a property of the mind than a joint production of dialogue situated on “the boundaries of selfhood and otherness” (1998: 39). This model of transcendence, by giving equal weight to forces of synthesis and fragmentation, to the whole and the part, treats integration, authenticity and coherence not as final and complete, but as highly contingent moments within a network of dynamic relations. As such, this work positions itself in relation to postmodern reformulations of the sublime such as those by Lyotard, Freeman and Yaeger, in order to examine how models of the sublime that assume a rigid order and a transcendental ground are contested from positions of alterity and by certain practices of reading and expression. Rather than instating what Thomas Weiskel refers to as a “debased sublime” (1976: 36), where the totalitarianism of the people functions as a replacement for the Romantic and Kantian elevation of the individual, I will suggest a (re)structuring of the relation between the sublime and the grotesque, such that neither takes precedence over the other, but which, nevertheless allows moments of autonomy and agency. Each of the texts I examine in the following chapters engage, in one way or another, with hegemonic power structures in order to destabilise, reconfigure and reperform them. As such, they attempt to construct a sublime that allows a process of affirmation without the agonistic struggle inherent in more traditional and hierarchical models of the sublime, and without the dialectical oppositions (re)instated by some of its more recent postmodern versions.

it was an accidental collision — the sun struck the windscreen and I, caught in the moment where my language failed to read your presence my fingers slipped from the page marking you in braille

Translation as Erotic Surrender: Nicole Brossard’s Radical Other in Le Désert mauve

The development of the atomic bomb at the end of the Second World War, together with its deployment in the bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, takes the Kantian and Romantic dream of transcendence to its tragic limit, one that paradoxically was used to underwrite the power of the United States and, as David E. Nye argues, a belief in “the ultimate beneficence of advanced industrialisation” (1994: 256). When the atomic bomb was first detonated on the sixteenth of July 1945 at the Alamorgordo Test Range in New Mexico, its audience felt awed by its force and magnitude, ‘puny’ before its overwhelming power. The bomb was clearly a sublime object, an indirect presentation of a sublime power. Nevertheless, this was a sublime significantly different from its precursors. While suggesting the power of its creators, it soon also invoked terror without inflation, suffering from radiation poisoning and the destruction of life. In Frankenstein, Victor retreats to his laboratory to work in secret and in isolation. The Manhattan Project was also secret, not subjected to open debate, or to the normal controls of a democratic political process. Both projects were similar insofar as they were both attempts to master the causes of life and death. However, whereas Victor’s monster inspired only horror and disgust, witnesses of the first atomic test explosion in 1945 described the experience as one of intense sublimity. General Leslie Groves referred

to

the

event

as

“unprecedented,

magnificent,

beautiful,

stupendous and terrifying”: The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, grey and blue . . . Thirty seconds after the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

58

made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty ” (my emphasis) (Nye 1994: 227). The juxtaposition of the finite human form with the overwhelming force of the atomic bomb clearly marks such an experience as sublime, although the words of two of the scientists who witnessed the test explosion, physicist Robert Oppenheimer and physical chemist George Kistiakowsky, anticipate the horror that would result from the use of the bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Oppenheimer watched the newly created bomb explode into a massive orange fireball, deepening into red and then pulsating as it cooled, he marked the encounter with two quotations from the Bhagavad Gita: If hundreds of thousand of suns were to rise at one in the sky, Their radiance might resemble the effulgence of the Supreme Person In that universal form (Bhaktivedanta 1983: 497). Time I am, the great destroyer of the worlds, and I have come here To destroy all people (Bhaktivedanta 1983: 510). Less poetically, Kistiakowsky uttered the words, “Now we are all sons of bitches” (Rhodes 1986: 675). This is a sublime predicated on the destruction of the material world, and the erasure of the multitude of differences that are part of that world. The horrors which Oppenheimer and Kistiakowsky glimpse,

undermine

the

dream

of

self-affirmation

suggested

by

Oppenheimer’s identification with “death, the mighty destroyer of the world.” One month after the test explosion in the New Mexico desert, the US bomber named Enola Gay dropped the uranium bomb ‘Little Boy’ on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Several days later, the plutonium bomb ‘Fat Man’ was released over Nagasaki, flattening half the city, killing 39,000 civilians and injuring another 25,000 — all in the space of a few seconds.

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER

59

The residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, unlike the scientists who viewed the spectacular effects of the test explosion from a safe distance, did not encounter a sublime object. The experience of the bombings was so horrific and terrifying that it seemed, as Spencer Weart argues, “less like a military action than a rupture of the very order of nature” (1988). This was rupture and transport without inflation or return. Victims of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Hibakusha, often describe the phantom-like civilians wandering around in the aftermath of these explosions, horrifically mutilated and unable to speak. One Hibakusha, Takahashi Akihiro, remembers seeing A-bomb survivors “like a procession of ghosts”. He describes seeing a man who had “hundreds of glass shards piercing his body from the waist up,” another man whose skin “had peeled off his entire upper body, exposing a mass of red flesh,” and a woman, covered in blood, whose eyeball was dangling from its socket (Akihiro 1986). These scenes of suffering compelled several scientists associated with the Manhattan Project, including Oppenheimer and Kistiakowsky, to publicly lament the use of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer used his position as chief advisor to the United States Atomic Energy Commission to lobby for international control of nuclear arms and to oppose the development of a more powerful nuclear device, the hydrogen bomb. Nevertheless, the United States government continued to develop its nuclear arsenal, despite the protests of prominent scientists and large sections of the general public. Moreover, powerful nations of the world such as the USSR, France, and Great Britain, and to a lesser extent, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea, began a series of nuclear weapons testing that continued well into the late twentieth century. Large scale nuclear testing began in the 1950s largely as a result of cold war tensions between the USA and the USSR. The first hydrogen bomb was tested by the United States at the Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1952. The largest nuclear weapon tested to date was the ‘Tsar Bomba’ — a test conducted by the Soviet Union at Novaya Zemlya in 1961. Testing by Great Britain and France concentrated on the Pacific region, with Britain conducting tests off the coast of Australia and at Christmas Island between 1952 and 1958, and France relocating its nuclear program to Polynesia after nuclear fallout from an Algerian test spread out across the Iberian

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

60

peninsula. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has conducted a total of 1054 official tests, the ex-Soviet Union 715 tests, France 210 tests, and the United Kingdom 45 tests. China, India, Pakistan and North Korea have also engaged in nuclear testing. The state of Israel is believed to possess a significant nuclear arsenal even though it has never officially conducted nuclear testing (Krech 2004: 941-945). During the late seventies and early eighties, there was an increase in tension between the USA and the USSR. In what was termed “the second cold war”, US president, Ronald Regan (who held office from 1980-1989 as leader of the Republican Party) adopted a hard-line stance on communism and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Regan referred to the USSR as an ‘evil empire’ and publicly supported anti-communist movements worldwide. The United States significantly increased its defence budget, developing new technology such as SS20 and Cruise missiles, B-1 bombers, and the neutron bomb. In response to these developments, civil protests in Europe and the United States became more frequent. In 1981, a group of women established a peace camp outside Greenham Common Air Force Base in Berkshire to oppose the installation of Cruise missiles, and membership to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the USA grew rapidly from five thousand members in 1958 to ninety thousand in 1984. Literature dealing with nuclear holocaust proliferated — from protest literature to analyses of the ecological effects of nuclear fallout and to movies depicting the efforts of human communities to survive in a post-nuclear world. For example, Edward Thompson and Dan Smith’s Protest and Survive

(1981) criticised

British civil defence initiatives; Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (1982) and Helen Caldicott’s Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do!

(1979)

emphasise the ecological devastation that would follow nuclear war; and the movies The Day After

(Meyer 1983) and Threads (Jackson 1984)

represent communities dealing with social decay and environmental contamination in the aftermath of nuclear attack. These events provide a context for understanding French-Canadian author Nicole Brossard’s novel Le Désert mauve as an engagement with the nuclear sublime and as an attempt to criticise and displace its structures of transcendence and self-empowerment. The narrative of Le Désert mauve begins in the Arizona desert, not far from the Alamogordo test site in the

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER

61

New Mexico desert. One third of the way through the novel, the action shifts to the French-Canadian metropolis of Montréal. This allows Brossard implicitly and explicitly to compare the destructive transcendence of the nuclear sublime with the cultural and linguistic diversity of Montréal. The latter foregrounds the communities and multiplicitous voices the former would annihilate. Le Désert mauve is constructed as a novel within a novel, and is divided into three sections. The first part, a novella with the same title as the book, Le Désert mauve , narrates the story of 15-year-old Mélanie, her mother, Kathy Kerouac, and her mother’s lover, Lorna Myher. Periodically, Mélanie takes her mother’s car, a Meteor, to drive across the Arizona desert to visit her friend Grazie and to lie by the pool of the Red Arrow Motel. She often meditates on the splendour and magnificence of the desert landscape and on her infatuation with the geometrist, Angela Parkins, who she meets in the bar at the Red Arrow Motel. Interspersed throughout the first section are episodic fragments concerning the nuclear scientist l’homme long (whom I will hereafter refer to as Longman). He spends most of his time confined to his motel room thinking about his mathematical equations and an explosion which, although described as imminent, is not specified in any detail. References to the explosion are oblique and general. The most specific references describe it simply as “the explosion”. This collocation of an inadequately defined but nevertheless imminent threat and the nuclear scientist, Longman, effectively evokes nuclear war as an ever-present but invisible menace. It might also be thought to allude to the ‘Star Wars’ technology that was in the 1980s being developed under the Strategic Defence Initiative, which involved the location of space-based laser battle stations

and

X-ray

laser

satellites

(designed

to

intercept

hostile

Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) out of ordinary sight in the upper atmosphere. The second section of the novel, ‘Un Livre à Traduire [A Book to Translate]’, concerns Maude Laures, who finds the novella of the first section, Le Désert mauve , in a Montréal bookshop. This section traces Maude Laures’ reading and deconstruction of the text Le Désert mauve . It describes translation as an interactive process (between translator and text, and translator and author). Maude Laures mediates on aspects of the novel,

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

62

such as its places and things (the swimming pool, the motel, the car, the revolver etc.), its various dimensions (reality, dawn, light, beauty, fear etc.), as well as aspects of the characters, whom she represents with a series of ‘portraits’ (including a photo series depicting Longman in his motel room). ‘Un Livre à Traduire’ also includes a series of imaginary dialogues between the various characters, and between Maude Laures and the author of the first section, Laure Angstelle. Maude Laures’ translation of Le Désert mauve, l’horizon,

entitled Mauve,

appears as the final section of Brossard’s novel and as a

reinterpretation of the first section. The narrative is almost the same, but the words and expressions used to tell the story are slightly different. This re-enactment of Le Désert mauve

turns the reader’s attention to the

problem of translation, which Brossard uses to displace Longman’s vertical transcendence with a temporal or horizontal metamorphosis. Le Désert mauve presents ‘translation’ and ‘metamorphosis’ as erotic surrender, and the knowledge derived from this surrender as an amalgam of sensual immediacy and visual awareness that respects the radicality and unknowability of the other. The process of translation, of reading one through the other, and of intertwining disparate elements, is represented by the structure of the novel itself, which is a tri-partite and yet, at the same time, a fragmentary whole: the two narratives (one a reconstruction of the first) frame, while at the same time being divided by, the central section of notes, photographs and meditations. The central section functions as a space that divides and joins the two versions of the story. It is a between-space that allows new possibilities, forms and relations to emerge precisely because it is a temporal, corporeal space rather than a space of transcendence, and because it refuses to underwrite either complete identity or difference between the parts of the novel (between self and other). Le Désert mauve therefore refigures the hierarchical, vertical movement of transcendence inherent in the Kantian and Romantic sublimes, replacing it with a movement that is horizontal and which proceeds in relation with, rather than over and against, others. Not only does the narrative move from one form to another (reconfigured) form — that is, from Laure Angstelle’s Le Désert mauve, across the spaces of its ‘deconstruction’, to its (re)formation

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER as Maude Laures’ Mauve l’horizon

63

— the story also shifts geographic

locations, moving from the Arizona desert, where Mélanie lives with her mother and Lorna Myher, to the suburbs of Montréal, where Maude Laures finds Le Désert mauve , only to then circle back again to the (newly imagined) deserts of Arizona with Maude Laures’ rereading/translation. This emphasis on engagement and interaction, and on the space joining/dividing self and other/s as the space of new possibility, destabilises the idea of an autonomous subject, while also drawing attention to the material grounds that this subject relies upon and disavows. Brossard contrasts the abstracted ideals of the nuclear sublime with a community of heterogenous voices in a way that highlights the destructive potential of a sublime power harnessed in the service of a centripetal and national authority. Radical Others The first section of Le Désert mauve

constructs dichotomous subject

positions that are somewhat dependant on essentialist notions of gender and sexuality, and which could be seen to reinscribe the dialectical hierarchies underwriting the sublime, and the construction of the subject. Brossard juxtaposes the space of autonomous subjectivity, configured as masculine and represented by the figure of the nuclear scientist Longman, with a communal space of lesbian intersubjects, represented as intrinsically feminine. Throughout the narrative of the first section, Le Désert mauve , Longman appears as a threatening presence. In distinct contrast to the female characters who interact and engage in dialogue with each other, he either remains at a distance from the other guests, confines himself to his motel room or sits alone in public spaces, watching others move around him. For the most part, he is preoccupied by an unspecified set of mathematical equations and by the forthcoming explosion. Longman’s dreams of the transcendence made possible by the nuclear sublime echo his efforts to escape the material world around him and the voices of the others in that world. However, the subsequent sections of the novel problematise the dichotomous relationship between the transcendent masculine subject and

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

64

the community of lesbian intersubjects, by presenting subject-constitution as predicated on dialogue between difference and trans-substantiation of one form into another. Without suggesting that these opposites are in any simple sense equivalent, or that they are morally equivalent (Longman is clearly presented as a negative figure), the novel nevertheless undermines the idea that they are incommensurate spheres and that one can be pitted against the other. When the autonomous subject is contextualised — that is, when Longman is read in context with the voices that surround him — and when, in the process of deconstructing the first section, Maude Laures engages with the character of Longman, the dichotomies of the first section begin to be destabilised. At the same time, dialogue with an other, with whom one can enter into intimate relation (erotic surrender), and yet who ultimately remains unknowable, calls into question the claims of sublime transcendence. As his name suggests, Longman is a long man, who rises above others. In French, however, the juxtaposition of noun and adjective takes on a different significance depending on which word is placed first. Brossard names the nuclear scientist l’homme long, rather than le long homme, or le grand homme — all of which are grammatically correct. The name l’homme long, with the adjective ‘long’ positioned after the noun rather than before, emphasises its particular significance as a comparative term in relation to other dimensions. Furthermore, this configuration foregrounds a moral characteristic that would not be the case with the more commonly used le grand homme . The adjective grand is used to describe physical height and grandeur. L’homme long , on the other hand, suggests both physical height as well as a sinister morality. Placing the adjective after the noun attests to a mysterious element in the character of Longman, which would not be the case if he were called le long homme , or le grand homme . This peculiar configuration of noun and adjective suggests that Longman is a man who can never really be known and that he exists at a physical and moral distance from others. Longman is depicted as a highly analytical man who studies the world around him like his mathematical formulas, without becoming emotionally involved. His suit, briefcase and ballpoint pen all suggest that he is a professional man. His interest in Persian poetry and the pleasure he feels

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER

65

when reciting Sanskrit associate him with the nuclear physicist, Robert Oppenheimer. The quotation in the first chapter of the Longman sequence from the Bhagavad Gita, “I/am/become/Death” (1987: 17), makes the link between Longman and Oppenheimer still more explicit, while also suggesting that the explosion to which the novel refers is a nuclear explosion — one which Longman alone anticipates. Indeed, Longman is the only character who refers to the explosion. His speculations on this topic are conducted in the privacy and secrecy of his motel room, while the other characters, Mélanie and Angela Parkins, Lorna Myher and Kathy Kerouac, as well as the employees and other guests of the motel, interact with each other in the world outside. These allusions to the first nuclear test explosion and Longman’s dreams of transcendence, introduce the nuclear sublime to Le Désert mauve. In this regard, Longman seeks to distance himself, from others and the material world which conditions his existence, by aligning himself with an overwhelming and inhuman force of death and destruction. This is most emphatically realised in the first and second chapters of the Longman sequence, in the lead up to and at the moment of the explosion, in the passages where phrases in English erupt into the French text. In both instances, the English voice brings with it a sense of authority and menace. Destabilisation is in this context threatening rather than creative and inclusive of difference. In a French-Canadian text, with French-speaking characters, it evokes the political power of the United States and its efforts to consolidate its global dominance by harnessing the powers of the nuclear sublime. The first of these eruptions occur as Longman is pacing the floor of his motel room, contemplating the explosion. He recites a few verses in Sanskrit that had earlier delighted his colleagues (Brossard 1987: 17). There is at first no reference to the world outside this room. The narrator concentrates instead on the minute details of Longman’s movements — a ballpoint pen that falls to the floor, the lighting of a cigarette, and the way that Longman fingers the brim of his felt hat, hesitates before the mirror, washes his hands, and takes off his jacket (1987: 17). His world is distanced from others, until in fantasy their differences from him are erased as he repeats words spoken by Oppenheimer and Kistiakowsky: “L’homme long

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

66

allonge avec des visions blanches puis oranges puis le sol sous ses pieds se transforme en jade — I/am/become/Death — maintenant nous sommes tous des fils de chiennes [Longman stretches out with white visions then orange then

the

ground

beneath

his

feet

transforms

into

jade

—

I/am/become/Death — now we are all sons of bitches]” (1987: 17). This line, from chapter 11, verse 32, of the Bhagavad Gita is usually translated as “I am become Death” or “I am death, mighty destroyer of the world”, although sometimes the word ‘Time’ is used in place of the word ‘Death’, as quoted at the beginning of this chapter (see Prasad 1988). The English phrase “I/am/become/Death” interrupts the flow of the paragraph in French with a voice that cannot be reduced to the everyday, whether of English or French. Instead, the phrase’s reference to a personified Death, with which Longman has become one, suggests a moment of transport, transcendence and inflation in which the individual aligns himself with a much greater power. The passage concludes with Longman resting his head on a page covered with his equations, underscoring the suggestion that science, and Longman’s intelligence, have enabled him to rise above the everyday world of humanity. English is also used in the next section of the Longman sequence, at the moment of the actual explosion, which is depicted as a scene of vicarious sexual pleasure. Longman’s distance from the living world around him is evident in his curiously hyperreal descriptions of his environment, as well as his partaking of sexual pleasure devoid of human connection. As Longman continues to think about the explosion, he flips through the pages of a pornographic magazine, “measures the genitals and their colouration. He doesn’t see the faces [L’homme toise les sexes, leur coloration. Il ne voit pas les visages.]”. The passage depicts Longman’s memories of the past, but even these are somewhat fetishised so that the landscape of his past becomes a panorama of kitsch, exemplified by the way he knows the beauty of blue lakes, a great petrified forest of everlasting amethyst trees, and his dreams of a past, where it snows in the eternal [“L’homme long connaît de beaux lacs bleus, la grande forêt pétrifiée aux arbres d’améthyste à tout jamais éternels. Il rêve d’un passé. Il neige dans l’éternel.”] (1987: 23). Longman reduces the world around him to an image available to his analytic gaze. He seems unaware of a greater world that cannot be reduced

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER

67

to the images retained by his memory or those reproduced in his pornographic magazines. In this context it is appropriate that Longman refers to the imminent explosion as art, “the art of the energy spectrum [l’art du spectre énérgetique]” (1987: 23), thus emphasising not only its mobilising force, but also its uniqueness within a banal field of everyday objects and memories reduced to images. Aligning the explosion with an art object, effectively positions the atomic bomb as authentic and exclusive against the inauthentic, banal world of the everyday. As in the previous passage, Longman clearly aligns himself with the force of the explosion. He registers the explosion as a sexual pleasure while using words that echo the “thou shalt not” of the ten commandments: Maintenant que earth and death and tongue became thy shall not. L’homme long entend le bruit de l’explosion. Haut-lecoeur, haut-le-corps. Un dernier frisson. Il caresse son feutre mou. Il allume une cigarette. [Now that earth and death and tongue became they shall not. Longman hears the sound of the explosion. The heart leaps, the body leaps. He caresses his soft felt hat. He lights a cigarette.] (1987: 23) Longman, the perceiving subject, aligns his self with an object of overpowering force, the explosion, which is representative of an even greater force. This alignment is registered as an intensification of bodily and implicitly sexual energy (“The heart leaps, the body leaps. He caresses his soft felt hat. He lights a cigarette.”), but this is a negative rather than a positive development; it is coterminous with an event that brings the material world to the edge of existence. Despite these powerful experiences, it is reasonable to question the effectiveness of Longman’s transcendence. The disproportion between Longman and the power he unleashes (and the still greater power he invokes) has the effect of high-lighting Longman’s fragility and instability. The passages which follow emphasise the emptiness of Longman’s transcendent self by alluding to what has been excluded by

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

68

sublime transcendence. Every attempt to distance himself from the world that surrounds him is destabilised by the return of what he has foreclosed. In the passage following the explosion, as Longman recalls its force, rather than feeling the bliss and rapture of transcendence, the motel room is shrouded by his shadow. He feels lost, rather than free, “cold reason falling again on his shoulders [raison froide qui retombait sur ses épaules]” (1987: 29). Sanskrit poetry doesn’t allow him to escape the nightmarish images of violence and suffering which prefigure a return of the now devastated material world: “Déjà la cendre, déjà le sang, déjà les cries, des bouches formidables, figées dans la silence de la nuit, luisaient comme des cristaux dans chacun de ses neurones [Already the ashes, already the blood, already the cries, formidable mouths, congealing in the silence of the night, shining like crystals in every one of his neurones]” (1987: 29). This imagery is striking for the way it invokes material presence in the form of damaged, suffering bodies, whose screams intrude upon his silence. Just as in Frankenstein, when the monster appears at every moment when the magnificence of the sublime is invoked, the horror of the mutilated and grotesque body, the body of plurality and difference, undoes the transcendence promised by the nuclear sublime. Le Désert mauve invokes a similar threat and sense of claustrophobia: Longman’s dreams of overextension are consistently coupled with a sense of the silence and blackness of the exterior, material world closing in on his mind. Two thirds of the way into the first section of Le Désert mauve, Longman is confronted with an absence that he experiences as oppressive: “It was the silence of the night [C’était la silence de la nuit]” — which Longman attempts to avoid by telling himself that “tomorrow the sky will be blue [demain le ciel sera bleu]”. Morning is nevertheless not one of freedom, beauty and clarity; it is instead contaminated by the horror of a grotesque body emerging from silence and the night: Mais l’aurore était partout explosée dans son cerveau. Sur les murs, les chiffres suintaient et venaient se confondre aux mots qui le suivaient, qui le suivaient partout dans la petite chambre.

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER

69

[But the daybreak had exploded all over his mind. On the walls, the numbers were oozing and intermingling with the words that were following him, that were following him all around the little room.] (1987: 35) Frances Ferguson argues that every effort to think the nuclear sublime “dwindles from the effort to imagine total annihilation to something very much like the calculation of exactly how horrible life would be after a significant nuclear explosion” (1984: 7). Similarly, Longman’s attempts to imagine the nuclear sublime lead not to total annihilation but to dismembered bodies and disembodied mouths that press against the walls of his fragile consciousness. Intersubjects Longman’s dreams of nuclear sublimity and self-affirmation are contrasted with a series of relationships between women — the lovers Kathy Kerouac and Lorna Myher; Mélanie and Angela Parkins; Maude Laures, the translator, and Laure Angstelle, the author of Le Désert mauve. Kathy Kerouac is the owner of the Mauve Motel, where she lives with her daughter, Mélanie, and her lover, Lorna Myher. Mélanie’s love of speed and the desert is evident as she drives through the countryside in her mother’s car, a Meteor. After visiting her friend Grazie, she stops in at the Red Arrow Motel on the way home and meets the geometrist, Angela Parkins. Their desire for each other leads to a sensuous and erotic dance, during which the two women lose themselves in the voluptuousness of the moment, to such an extent that Mélanie doesn’t notice the bullet that kills Parkins. The first section of Le Désert mauve, the novella of the same name written by Laure Angstelle, ends with this murder — but just like the explosion, the murder is described in terms that are oblique and non-specific. The women are so caught up in their dance that neither notices a gun fire. Mélanie notices only that Angela Parkins suddenly becomes heavy in her arms and that her “body is pulled downwards [son corps est attiré vers la bas]” (1987: 50). In the midst of a silent commotion, she notices only Longman, who sits at the end of the room, staring impassively. The

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

70

suggestion is, of course, that Longman has fired the bullet that kills Angela Parkins. Although this is not certain, Longman’s threatening presence in the text, and his refusal to actively engage with the world around him, make this plausible. Moreover, during the scene following the murder — one described simply as “commotion all around like in a silent movie [L’agitation tout autour comme dans un film muet]” (1987: 50), Longman remains immobile at the far end of the room, staring impassively and refusing to be a self in the accusative (that is, to be a self who actively responds to the address of others). He refuses, moreover, to accept responsibility for actions that may impinge upon or affect that world. In the second section of Le Désert mauve, Maude Laures discovers Laure Angstelle’s novella in a Montréal bookshop and decides to translate it. Her engagement with, deconstruction of, and refiguring of this novella (the first section of Brossard’s book), disrupts and recontextualises its events and characters by placing them within a larger narrative context. Rather than standing alone, Angstelle’s novella is placed within a reception history: we, the reader, read about Maude Laures, another reader, reading the text of Le Désert mauve . In this way, Brossard foregrounds writing as an ongoing process of engendering the subject, and as a site of resistance where women can struggle against, by refiguring, the symbols and codes of an oppressive patriarchy. Annamarie Jagose, writing on La Lettre aeriénne (published two years before Le Désert mauve ), argues that Brossard’s program of emancipatory transformation is flawed because it relies on an essentialist notion of the feminine and the lesbian. Jagose suggests that La Lettre aeriénne assumes the existence of a pre-discursive feminine body that is either suppressed or disavowed by the dominant codes of patriarchy. Brossard’s notion of political struggle, she writes, involves “recovery or discovery in a feminist search and rescue operation” (Jagose 1994: 44). However, as Charlotte Sturgess argues, Brossard’s writing is much less concerned with the discovery of the female, or lesbian, body than with interrogating the “material roots of subjectivity and the way language . . . naturalises the abstracted, homogenous forms it in fact produces” (2003: 90). This configures the body of the feminine and the lesbian as a “radical discursive strategy” (Sturgess 2003: 90) that undercuts the notion of an underlying

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER

71

essentialism as it “works to inscribe a feminine subjecthood” (Sturgess 2000: 59). Brossard’s belief that writing and speaking the female body offers a way to “break down the oppressive structures of the patriarchal system and to establish a space — discursive, sexual and social — for and between women outside that system” (Jagose 1994: 45) is also evident in Le Désert mauve, in the construction of spatial and discursive oppositions between Longman (as representative of the phallus, the patriarchal transcendent signifier) and the various female relationships described in the book. The first section of Le Désert mauve represents the patriarchal project as involving violent force, obliterating the voices and bodies of difference. Whilst Longman exists in isolation, dreaming of transcendence in the nuclear sublime, Mélanie, Angela Parkins, Lorna Myher and Kathy Kerouac occupy a space of embodied relations inflected by their transgressive, lesbian desire. The Mauve Motel, where Mélanie lives with Kathy and Lorna, and where the first section of Le Désert mauve takes place, is situated in the desert, far from large cities. This suggests that the utopic space of lesbian desire exists close to nature, beyond the social. Furthermore, the death of Angela Parkins (perhaps the most transgressive character because, as a geometrist from the city, she moves between the zones of patriarchal society and lesbian desire) identifies the lesbian body as a figure for all that is disavowed by patriarchal culture. At the end of the novella of the first section, policemen arrive at the scene of the murder to “chalk around the corpse of Angela Parkins [la craie autour du corps d’Angela Parkins]” (1987: 51), thus reinstating the boundaries that divide her lesbian body from the status quo. It is in the second and third sections of Le Désert mauve that writing and communication between women are presented as necessary for the emancipation of the lesbian and, more broadly, the female body. In La Lettre aeriénne , Brossard writes of the female body as having been “long frozen (besieged) in the ice of the interpretation system and in fantasies relentlessly repeated by patriarchal sex”. Writing, and a proximity to other women’s bodies, she argues, can bring the female body back to its own, particular reality (1985: 83). Maude Laures’ decision to translate Laure Angstelle’s novella could arguably be seen as an attempt from within

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

72

culture to access a utopian space found deep within nature (the desert). However, her interactions with that space, in terms of dialogue, open it out to others so that it is no longer enclosed in the desert, but exerts a transformative force on culture. In this sense, Maude Laures problematises the utopic lesbian space found in the Arizona desert in the first section of the novel by engaging with it from within the urban spaces of a Canadian city. Furthermore, she locates Longman within the very community of intersubjects that he disavows. If

subjectivity

is

an

ongoing

process,

involving

interpretation,

reinterpretation, and engagement with embodied others, then the binary oppositions suggested in the first section of Le Désert mauve can be seen as contingent rather than necessary or essential. If, as Margaret Allen Quigley suggests, this destabilisation of dialectical oppositions enacts a resistance to the terms of the “coloniser’s interpellation of the colonised other” (2000: 19), then it is a resistance which is itself contingent upon further (re)negotiations and interpretations, further interpellations. Any sense of unified, or originary, pre-discursive space, is destabilised, unravelled, or undone, by what Susan McGahan argues is the gap Brossard leaves between signifier and signified (1992: 109). Sections two and three of Le Désert mauve, ‘Un Livre à Traduire’ and Mauve, l’horizon, configure subjectconstitution as involving interaction with, rather than movement apart from (or elevation above), others. Maude Laures deconstructs Angstelle’s novella Le Désert mauve into a series of meditations on: various objects of significance from the narrative; individual portraits of the characters (she places her own self-portrait amongst the others); imagined dialogues with and between the characters; and finally the spatial ‘dimensions’ of the text. This serves to highlight the ways in which these elements exist in a network of relations that can be revised and reinterpreted. Even the relationship of perceiving subject to sublime object, and the third term that mediates it, as depicted in the Longman sequences, is refigured by Maude Laures’ deconstruction of the text, so that each of these elements can be realigned and reinterpreted. The series of deconstructions in ‘Un Livre à Traduire’ begins with the section titled, ‘Lieux et Objets [Places and Objects]’. This section is divided into passages that describe the motel, the swimming pool, the car, the

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER

73

television set, the tattoo, the revolver, and the bar, as if Maude Laures is a detective walking through a crime scene identifying its various elements. The motel is identified as the first motel on the left, when arriving by the Phoenix road, and is described in intricate detail, with its “blinding metallic roof and a Mauve MOTEL neon sign which resembles a bird on the point of taking off [un toit métallique qui aveugle un instant et un néon MOTEL Mauve qui fait penser à un oiseau sur le point de s’envoler]” (1987: 69). The owner of the motel, Kathy Kerouac, is also described with a particularity appropriate for evidence: she is speaking on the phone, “the headpiece cradled between her shoulder and her ear, her hands busy looking for something in a file box [le combiné entre l’épaule et l’oreille, les mains occupées à chercher dans un fichier]” (1987: 16). This form of description, creating a sense of immediacy and presence, compels an engagement with the objects of Le Désert mauve as embodied and material. In the passage describing the swimming pool, for example, the description of an unnamed man who is reading and who slightly shifts his chair so that “the sound mix of metal and tile scorches the discrete forenoon [le son mixé du métal et de la tuile écorche l’avant-midi discret]” (1987: 18) creates a feeling of sensuous, material immediacy. The following section of ‘Un Livre à Traduire’, titled ‘Personnages [Characters]’, is a collection of portraits depicting the characters of Le Désert mauve, along with Maude Laures and Laure Angstelle (the author of the novella Le Désert mauve). The portraits of Laures and Angstelle suggest that they are objects as well as subjects, readers as well as authors, and selves located within community. Longman’s portrait, placed between that of Angela Parkins and Mélanie, places him amongst the community of others from which he attempts to remove himself. Despite his attempts to rise above others, he remains amongst them, albeit isolated. Where the other portraits are drawn with words, Longman is portrayed in photographs. He is therefore associated with a static world rather than the temporality, immediacy and multiplicity of the world evoked in the previous series, ‘Lieux et Objets’, and through the other portraits. In each of the images, Longman is depicted in his motel room. First we see Longman reclining on the bed, with an open book and some pages of mathematical equations. The next photo superimposes two ghostly images of the man. In

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

74

one he is lying on the bed, in the other he appears to be packing a portfolio. This is followed by an image of Longman with his back to the camera, upon which several other images of him have been superimposed, each larger than the previous one. The sequence of superimpositions is overlaid with mathematical equations. The fourth image shows Longman looking at himself in the mirror. Only the corner of his unshaven jaw is visible because his face is hidden beneath a white flare of light that solarises the image from the centre. In the final image we see Longman’s back, as he moves away from a wooden chair, and the blurred outline of his shadow on the wall. Longman’s face is not clearly seen in any of these photographs. He is seen but not seen. In the portraits, his back is either turned to the camera, his face is out of the frame or, when in frame, his face is blurred (as in the first shot) or solarised (as in the mirror shot). Longman’s anonymity is a key ingredient of his power. It is the mirror shot, however, in which Longman’s face has been solarised by a white flare, that most effectively encapsulates the terrifying nature of his power, by evoking an infinity of light without flesh. This suggests that, like the face of God, one can’t look on Longman’s face without being destroyed. Longman consequently remains unreadable and inhuman, refusing ethical responsibility. In contrast, the other portraits gesture towards discursivity, rather than invisibility, as the voices of other characters begin to supplant Longman’s silent, invisible face. In these portraits, the face represents an excess not contained by any particular representation. These portraits insist upon a notion of infinity as flesh, rather than Longman’s infinity that escapes flesh. The portrait of Mélanie that follows those of Longman, describes her face as a form of anarchy and as a present that falls out of synchrony with itself and into diachrony. Her face opens up “chasms of comparison [des abîmes des comparaisons]” and is described as “a physical act of thought [un acte physique de la pensée]” (1987: 117). Rather than appropriating everything within her field of vision, Mélanie’s eyes “thread, one after the other, the thousand details of speed and light converging [enfilent, l’un après l’autre les milles détails de la vitesse et de la lumière croisèes]” (1987: 118). She is open rather than self-enclosed, and her face invites dialogue.

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER

75

The portrait of Kathy Kerouac reports similar qualities, most vividly evident in her voice and its ability to create spaces in time: La voix de Kathy Kerouac était à elle seule une présence, un enchaîment sonore de l’espace et du temps qui traversait comme un parfum les chambres, les corridors, l’appartement. Tout le Motel était imprégné de sa voix grave et mélodique, une voix qui pouvait, lorsqu’on ne prêtait pas attention aux mots, faire penser à un motet. Chaque vibration des cordes vocales donnait l’impression d’un son originé de bouches multiples. . . . La voix de Kathy Kerouac était un espace à l’horizon. Elle pouvait crépiter, pluie torrentielle ou tempête de sable, s’allonger comme un écheveau d’acquiescements ou isoler une phrase investie dans le dédale de l’ennui. [The voice of Kathy Kerouac was itself a presence, a sound sequence of space and time which filters like a perfume through the bedrooms, the corridors, the apartment. The entire Motel was impregnated with her voice, serious and melodic, a voice which could, when one didn’t pay attention to the words, make you think of a motet. Every vibration of the vocal cords gave the impression of a sound originating in multiple mouths. . . . The voice of Kathy Kerouac was a space on the horizon. It could crackle, torrential downpour or sandstorm, stretch itself out like a skein of consensus or isolate an invested sentence in the maze of boredom.] (1987: 95-97) In contrast to Longman’s static, elevated self, these faces suggest life, movement, interaction and change. They do not provide a mirror reflection of the body, where perception resembles sensation because the image reflected by the mirror, or the mind, has lost the volume of the body and the other is transformed into a projected alter ego divided from the flesh. Instead they enact forms of what one might call ‘contingent or temporary transcendence’. They imply a horizon that is moving rather than fixed, and

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

76

that points beyond itself to the freedom of the other (rather than a disembodied infinite). The subjects of Maude Laures’ portraits, with the exception of Longman, escape her efforts to represent them. This occurs not because they turn away but because they are alive, dynamic and receptive to others. They represent the realm described by Luce Irigaray as the ‘sensible transcendental’. For Irigaray, and arguably for Maude Laures, being is that which is given in relation to a particular sensibility, a particular body of flesh and blood. Laures’ deconstructive rereading of Angstelle’s novella transforms its world into one characterised by relation and intersubjective dialogue. This is perhaps most clearly evident in the section of ‘Un Livre à Traduire’ titled ‘Scènes [Scenes]’, which depict the various characters of Le Désert mauve

in dialogue, maintaining an open responsiveness and

receptiveness to each other. In the first of these scenes, Kathy Kerouac, who spends her spare time in front of the television set, is confronted by her daughter Mélanie. The latter announces that she is going to leave the motel for “the sun, the heat, the solitude [Le soleil, la chaleur, la solitude]” (1987: 128) of the desert, and Kerouac responds by warning her daughter not to reach too far beyond the material self: “Eyes that seek to get ahead of the horizon. Impatient eyes will always be disappointed [Les yeux qui cherchent à devancer l’horizon. Les yeux impatient sont toujours déçus]” (1987: 128). Dialogue is also a feature of the next three scenes: Kerouac and Myher discuss the nature of desire; Mélanie and Angela Parkins discuss the way that night changes the rhythms of the body; and then Angela Parkins confronts the author of Le Désert mauve, Laure Angstelle, demanding an explanation for her death and that Angstelle assume responsibility for it. Rather than reducing affect to consciousness or ideal representation, the sensible transcendental and the space of dialogue encompass visual, tactile, aural and non-ideal dimensions of existence (Colebrook 2005: 140). Angela Parkins invokes a similarly expansive realm when, in the third dialogue, she claims that the beauty of night “forces us to feel with our skin and our inner eyes [elle nous oblige à ressentir avec notre peau et les yeux de l’intérieur]” (1987: 137), and compels our bodies to change their trajectory in the universe so that they move in such a way “that all of our senses can

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER

77

transmit freely [à ce que tous nos sens puissent transiter librement]”. Passages such as this suggest that we can move beyond this world, and beyond a world limited to the visual, into one that includes the caress and the erotic. Transcendence here takes us into embodied rather than abstract existence, represented in Le Désert mauve by the dialogues of ‘Scènes’. As I have noted, ‘Un Livre à Traduire’ functions as a space of division and connection between the first and third sections of Le Désert mauve , between Angstelle’s text and Laures’ translation of that text. It understands the view that transcendence involves translation between states, rather than transcendence and sublimation. Rather than involving a simple transfer of meaning from one text, language and culture to another, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes translation as an interaction between logical systematicity and rhetorical play. Rather than being transferred whole and complete, meaning (logical systematicity) is in part transformed as a work is translated into another language, and therefore into another form. This is not a cause for regret because it ensures that translation is the site of new possibilities, as one language opens to and is disrupted by another, and as a translator engages with the text of another. As Spivak writes, emphasising the intrinsic materiality of this opening, we “must feel the selvages of the languagetextile give way, fray into frayages or facilitations” (1993: 179-180). Similarly, Clem Robyns argues that translation should be understood as “the intrusion of the alien [where] the migration and transformation of discursive elements between different discourses” acts in a similar way to aberrant particles that enter foreign substances to act as catalysts for change (1994: 407-408). Seen in this light, translation is an act of surrender analogous to Mélanie’s drives through the desert, in which she surrenders herself to a world that is radically unknowable. As she observes: Trés jeune j’appris à aimer le feu du ciel, la foudre torrentielle ramifiée au-dessus de la ville comme un écoulement de la pensée dans le cerveu. Les nuits d’orage sec, je devenais tremblements, détonations, décharge totale. Puis je m’abandonnais à toutes les illuminations, ces fissures qui

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

78

comme autant de blessures lignaient mon corps virtuel, me lisaient à l’immensité. Et alors le corps fonds comme une lueur dans l’abrégé des mots. Les yeux, l’existence plient devant ça qui s’avance en nous, certitude. Le désert bois tout. La fureur, la solitude. [Very young, I learned to love the fire from the sky, torrential lightning branched out over the city like the flow of thinking in the mind. On dry storm nights I would become tremors, detonations, total discharge. Then I would abandon myself to all of the illuminations, those fissures which like so many wounds lined my virtual body, reading me into the vastness. And then the body melts like a glimmer in the abbreviation of words. The eyes, existence submits before that which moves forward in us, certitude. The desert drinks everything. Furore, solitude.] (1987: 20) Transcendence is represented here as self-abandonment instead of control and domination. Rather than standing at a safe distance from the sublime object, contemplating its force and power, Mélanie immerses herself in the environment, to the point where her “body melts like a glimmer in the abbreviation of words [le corps fonds comme une lueur dans l’abrégé des mots]”. As Mélanie, or Laures as translator, encounter an other who exceeds the self, they discover not an inflated, transcendent self, but openings towards further possibilities or, as Mélanie suggests, new illuminations. The willing surrender to otherness that this implies is evident when Mélanie drives to Albuquerque to visit her friend Grazie. Here the material presence of the environment, and the sense that it throws into relief the limits of her perceptual world, orients her body towards language. Only by entering the fear of the unspeakable, a fear that arises as one moves to the horizon of one’s world, does change as enfolding becomes possible: J’étais maintenant entrée dans la peur de l’indicible, dans la fureur des mots sans le vouloir j’abdiquais devant le silence.

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER

79

Dans le désert, on plie sans calcul avec la souplesse de l’être adonné à l’espace. L’horizon est un mirage qui orient le corps assoiffé. [I had now entered the fear of the unspeakable, in the furore of words I was involuntarily abdicating before the silence. In the desert, one folds without calculation with the suppleness of a being devoted to space. The horizon is a mirage which orients the thirsting body.] (1987: 30-31) Change is depicted here as one of folding rather than transcendence, the “suppleness of a being devoted to space [la souplesse de l’être adonné à l’espace]”. The scene of transport does not lift the subject into a transcendental world. Instead, transport opens a world that is contextual, immediate and present. The subject locates itself in relation to the ‘sensible transcendental’, and a horizon that is an enabling mirage, not a transcendental framework. The self is two and one at the same time, and any position of absolute authority becomes unsustainable. Maude Laures’ translation of Le Désert mauve as Mauve, l’horizon places still greater emphasis on the importance of surrender to the materiality of the world and of language. Change, she insists, can only be effected by a power outside one’s control. Her translation of the passage quoted above, for example, reads: J’étais maintenant entrée dans la peur de l’indicible. Sans le vouloir, j’avais franchi la limite, fractionné le frayeur et maintenant tout était décalé. Un pli énorme dans le silence. Dans le désert on plie sans calcul. Face à l’horizon, le corps s’expose, avide, à ne point trouver de sens. [I had now entered the fear of the unspeakable. Involuntarily, I had crossed the limit, fractioned fear and now everything was out of sync. An enormous fold in the silence. In the desert one folds without calculation. Faced with the horizon, the

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

80

body exposes itself, avid, to the point of finding no sense.] (1987: 200) This translation draws attention to the physical vulnerability that is intrinsic to surrender. A transformation engendered by the exposure of a vulnerable body to the horizon, and therefore to what lies beyond our sight, is one that locates meaning in the moment. Maude Laures’ translation of Le Désert mauve

is a ‘witnessing’ that,

without attempting to reproduce the original in her own language, nevertheless abolishes the self in the service of a ‘reality’ that attests to the truth of the other. This form of witnessing entails a responsibility to the other, and to the text, through a deeply complicit engagement with the world. From Laures’ self-portrait we learn that she likes “the raw sound that accompanies reverie when one plunges into the city with its multiple outrages and devices [le son cru qui accompagne la rêverie quand on s’enforce dans la ville aux multiples outrages et dispositifs]” and that “nothing escaped her of the signs and fires that stoke enthusiasm or which, on the contrary, inhibit all perspective in the great rectangle of solitude which acts as a screen for urban chests [rien ne lui échappait des signes et des feux qui activent l’enthousiasme ou qui, à l’opposé, refoulent toute perspective dans le grand rectangle de solitude qui sert d’écran aux poitrines urbaines]” (1987: 122). As this suggests, her witnessing involves attentiveness to the materiality of the world and the text, and a risky exposure to the other, depicted as a stretching out “when night has come on the naked ground, eyes on the alert while the Taurids shoot by [la nuit venue sur le sol nu, les yeux aux auguets pendant que les Taurides filent]” (1987: 122-123). Eros and the Night In contrast to Miléna Santoro and Barbara Godard’s argument that Brossard takes the historically weak and silenced terms ‘woman’ and ‘translator’ in order to reconfigure them into actively producing subjects (Santoro 1997: 153-154; Godard 1989: 50), in my view, Maude Laures’ engagement with and reconstruction of Le Désert mauve

affirms the

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER

81

importance of carnal intimacy, erotic connections and surrender of the self in the abolition of power. As we have seen, translation as transubstantiation shifts one discourse or text into another through a material process that can be likened to folding and unfolding so that one form is carried into another whilst maintaining the trace of the other in the same. The actions of intertwining or spiralling might also be described as an enfolding of two into one, to produce a single action that leaves difference intact, and in which the erotic provides the space of contact between diverse entities. The dance of Mélanie and Angela Parkins at the end of the first section of Le Désert mauve (and repeated in the third section, Mauve, l’horizon ) provides a useful analogy for this folding and intertwining. Mélanie discovers Angela Parkins in the bar of the Red Arrow Motel, after returning from a visit to her friend Grazie in Tucson. After watching the guests gathered around the swimming pool, she proceeds to the bar, where Angela Parkins, by circling her hand through the air, invites her to dance. This dance involves a sensuous intertwining of bodies: Ses mains virevoltent au-dessus de nos têtes. La paume de nos mains, parfois sa main glisse sur mes hanches, parfois, nos doigts acrobates et aériens se saisissent comme pour tourner le sens des sons au-dessus de nos têtes, tout autour de nous, parfois son regard, sa joue. [Her hands swirl above our heads. The palms of our hands, sometimes her hand slides over my hips, sometimes, our acrobatic and aerial fingers seize one another as if to turn the sense of sounds above our heads, all around us, sometimes her regard, her cheek.] (1987: 49) The passage goes on to describe the unknowability of Angela Parkins, as someone who is simultaneously close to and distant from Mélanie. The interaction between them is mirrored by the sentence that describes it, in which, as Daphne Marlatt argues, one senses one’s way “through the sentence, through (by means of) a medium (language) that has its own

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

82

currents of meaning, its own drift.” Marlatt argues for an understanding of translation as an erotic transgression of borders where sense is enacted as a filtering rather than a transcendence. “Mauve is a mauve,” Marlatt writes, “like a rose in English, mauve is a flowering plant in French, a mauve is a mauve is a mauve. It’s not that the spiral stops here but that it circles back and stains everything leading up to it with its meaning” (1989: 29). Eroticism figures truth not as Longman’s transcendent or Platonic light, a once and for all time revelation of being and truth, but as the mystery of night: La nuit, il y avait le désert, les yeux luisants des lièvres antilopes, les fleurs de senita qui ne s’ouvrent qu’à la nuit. Il y avait sous les phares de la Meteor le corps gisant d’une humanité qui ne connaissaint pas Arizona. L’humanité était fragile parce qu’elle ne soupçonnait par l’existence de l’Arizona. Si fragile. [The night, there was the desert, the shining eyes of antelope jack rabbits, senita flowers that open only in the night. Under the lights of the Meteor, there lay the body of a humanity who did not know Arizona. Humanity was fragile because it did not suspect the existence of Arizona. So fragile.] (Brossard 1987: 13) In Le Désert mauve, night is a space of subtle disclosure and immediacy, in contrast to the harsh light of scientific analysis. As Mélanie remarks, under the harsh light of noon “there is only certitude traversing reality [il n’y a que certitude qui traverse la réalité]” (1987: 14); whereas during the night, the self is exposed to “the violence of the moment which propels consciousness [la violence de l’instant qui meut la conscience]” (1987: 19). By partially disabling vision, and heightening our experience of our other senses, we are exposed to what Levinas refers to as a “presence full of the nothingness of everything” (1978: 58). Cathryn Vasseleu, writing of the mystery of the erotic encounter, reiterates this notion when she suggests

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER

83

that “the body loses its status as an existent in the night [and] is exposed as an unsignifiable materiality in erotic nudity” (1998: 104). Maude Laures refers to the mauve light of dawn as a threshold state, a distortion of night and its “purplish noises [les bruit violacés]”, that allows glimpses of the abject and the subaltern: “the eye catches the long colourful form of a transvestite, the crazed stare of a junkie, chapped hands, urine-stained pants [l’oeil capte la longue forme colorée d’un travesti, le regard fou d’un junkie, des mains gerçées, un pantalon taché d’urine]” (1987: 151). In the Longman photos, the harshness of light effaces his material existence. Similarly, Laures presents strong light as a bruising of reality which “shreds in every sense the fine fabric of colours [déchire en tous sens le tissu fin des couleurs]”. At the same time, however, she refers to a light experienced as “heat on the skin, an intensity rendering bodies translucent [la chaleur sur la peau, une intensité qui rend les corps translucides]”. It is this light, she claims, that allows the body to rise up as a “fabulous animal, gifted with splendour and ingenuity [animal fabuleux, doué de splendeur et d’ingéniosité]” (1987: 151-152). This is not an analytical light that reveals but one that generates an intensive awareness, propelling movement. The juxtaposition of opposites such as light and dark, day and night, opens a transitional space analogous to the mauve light of dawn. This is a space of indeterminacy, where uncertain juxtapositions and the doubletouch of differences in contact with each other engender identities that, to quote Vasseleu, are “constantly taking form, or turning to life, in the gesture of giving away” (1998: 128). Luce Irigaray argues that the double touch involves touching and being touched, similar to lips that touch, and are touched by each other, without taking hold (1993: 170). A similar notion is implied by Lorna Myher and Kathy Kerouac as they discuss, in one of Maude Laures’ imaginary dialogues, the nature of love and desire. When Myher argues that love is impossible to sustain without a corporeality to support desire, Kerouac questions the nature of desire: Qui parle de désir? Je parle d’une émotion précise qui crée de la présence bien au-delà du corps réel. . . . Je ne te désire

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

84

pas. Je suis émue par toi. Je suis touchée à vif par tout ce qui en toi signfie. Cela est infiniment plus précieux que de te désirer. Je suis vitalement touchée par toi. [Who is talking about desire? I’m talking about a specific emotion which creates presence way beyond the real body . . . I don’t desire you. I am moved by you. I am keenly touched by everything in you which signifies. That is infinitely more precious than desiring you. I am vitally touched by you.] (1987: 133-134) Because, as Levinas argues, the caress seeks what is there as though it were not there, “as though the skin were the trace of its own withdrawal, a languor still seeking, like an absence which, however, could not be more there” (1998: 90), the subject emerges in the voluptuosity of a self which is the self of another, and not purely the self of a self (1969: 270). The sensual immediacy of Laures’ encounters with the characters and dimensions of Le Désert mauve

(the

imagined

dialogues,

the

portraits,

and

the

contemplations of its various objects and aspects) allows the various subjects of the novel to be transformed through a form of becoming similar to that described by Tamsin Lorraine as the “becoming spiritual of embodiment” (1999: 86), not as a spiritualisation of the flesh but as a heightened awareness of a sensibility that continually reworks itself within an infinite field opened by relations between self and other. Laures’ translation of Le Désert mauve into Mauve, l’horizon does not offer a definitive endpoint to this process of transformation. The novel concludes with a return to dawn, the desert, and the mauve horizon, underlining the view that there is a world beyond the horizon of Brossard’s text. The sensible transcendental opens the subject out towards the variations and differences of the lived world. The process of translation becomes, therefore, one of engagement with an other as if through a living mirror — that is, one that moves beyond Longman’s specular economy to add something of its own materiality to the image it reflects. Irigaray, Levinas and Spivak all refer to this interactive process as the condition of love (see Irigaray 1996; Levinas 1969: 254-266; Spivak 1993: 179-200). For

TRANSLATION AS EROTIC SURRENDER

85

Maude Laures, this means that the process of translating Le Désert mauve into Mauve, l’horizon, is effectively a process of erotic love, or what Spivak refers to as “a love that permits fraying” (1993: 181), where the undirected caress is given over to a night full of nuanced possibilities and where the mauve light of dawn allows one to glimpse the trace of the abject and the subaltern. The mauve of Laure Angstelle’s desert becomes, in Maude Laures’ translation, the mauve of the horizon, and the repetition of the curiously ambiguous final phrase in both versions, “Je ne peux tutoyer personne [I cannot

get

close

to

anyone]”

(1987:

220),

reinstates

a

sensible

transcendental that leaves intact both the irreducibility of difference as well as an elemental indivisibility as the material for a frayage into further becomings.

Your lips move in the silence of my night-time wanderings unfolding a space between you/me it seems to go on forever I read you In the failure of language where swallows dart through my August twilight but your presence eludes me once more

Navigating the Contingent Subject in Morgan Yasbincek’s liv

In the nineteenth century, when European colonial expansion reached its zenith, the British Empire covered approximately one quarter of the globe (Berger 2006: 26). The Empire maintained authority over these vast territories by implementing a variety of direct and indirect measures, the latter inceding the introduction of British linguistic, juridical and social systems. British authority was often justified by referring to so-called natural law, a law whose content in purportedly set by nature and which therefore has universal validity (Coleborne 2001: 10). Significantly, when countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and Canada gained their independence, their constitutions were heavily influenced by the sociopolitical legacies of the former British Empire. Postcolonial theorists such as Edward Saïd, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak foreground the ways in which colonial powers exercise authority through systems of representation (linguistic, social, and juridical) that reinscribe hierarchical self/other oppositions. These binary oppositions, Saïd argues, simultaneously (re)constitute European identity while also displacing anxieties about the unknown (1979: 60-62). It is no coincidence that the Australian government implemented the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901, the same year in which the country achieved independence from Britain. This act, otherwise known as the White Australia Policy, aimed to preserve the cultural and linguistic dominance of Anglo-Australian society by forbidding immigration from non-white communities. The main method presecribed for the administration of the White Australia Policy was a dictation test of fifty words in length. This test was carried out by Australian Customs officers and could be conducted in any European language. The English language was generally adopted for the purpose of the test, although this could be substituted for another language at the discretion of the Customs officer (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2001). In practice this meant that the vast majority of migrants to Australia were not just white but British as well. In the decades following the Second World War, labour shortages in Australia forced the government to allow large numbers of Europeans from non-English-speaking-backgrounds to migrate to Australia. On the European

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

88

continent, millions had been displaced from their homelands due to the ravages of war, and nation were left with the task of rebuilding their cities and their economies. As a consequence, during the decades after the Second World War, large numbers of migrants left the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Greece, and the former Yugoslavia for a new life on the Australian continent. In 1947, as Christine Inglis notes, only 2.7% of the Australian population was born outside Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland (Migration Policy Institute 2006). With the relaxing of immigration controls and the opening of Australian borders to certain non-English-speaking Europeans, the predominantly Anglo-Australian public was anxious to be reassured that the government was still committed to the White Australia policy. Arthur Calwell, the architect of the policy that led to the first post-World War II wave of immigration, during the years 1947-51, promised that “for every foreign migrant there would be ten from the United Kingdom” (Tierney 2006). This promise could not be kept. There were simply not enough Britons wanting to migrate to Australia. According to the Australian Department of Immigration, almost six million migrants have arrived in Australia since 1945 (ADI 2007). Government policies aimed at assimilating migrants into Anglo-Australian society, and the dominance of Anglocentric linguistic and socio-cultural norms, effectively excluded non-English-speaking immigrants from full participation in Australian culture (Jupp 2001: 755). Aboriginal Australians were even more vigorously excluded: they denied citizenship and the right to vote (Jupp 2001: 48). Australia’s policies on assimilation and integration remained in place until 1989, when the notion of multiculturalism was introduced. According to the Australian Department of Immigration, in 2005, migrants to Australia were drawn from a staggering one hundred and eight five countries. Nevertheless, despite this adversity and the adoption of a policy of multiculturalism, for many of these people, the experience of displacement and of alienation remained powerful elements of everyday life. In the previous chapter, I examined Brossard’s depiction, in Le Désert mauve, of the nuclear sublime. According to Brossard, while consolidating American national pride and global power, the nuclear sublime regales and

NAVIGATING THE CONTINGENT SUBJECT

89

represses difference. Arguably, the production of the colonial subject involves a similar erasure of difference. And, as we shall see in this chapter, to the extent that this complementary affirmation and negation is the result of an encounter with an overwhelming force, it also involves the sublime. In her novel liv, the Croatian-Australian poet Morgan Yasbincek tells the story of a family that leaves war-torn Croatia to settle in the suburbs of Perth, Australia. It focuses primarily on the lives of Olivia (whose name is sometimes abbreviated as liv), her mother Sancha, and grandmother Lydia, examining the effects on their lives of the dislocation consequent on migration and the entry into a culture whose language is not one’s own. There is, nevertheless, no single plot to the novel and no central organising perspective or point of view; instead it draws together poetic fragments, jumping back and forth through time, across geographic locations, and between various voices and perspectives. The narrative fragments of liv vary in length and style. Sometimes they evoke a sense of cinematic realism, with straightforward dialogue between characters and detailed, vivid descriptions of things and people. At other times, the prose is compact and intensely poetic. Both kinds of fragments are sometimes only two or three lines long. They often exist as short fictocritical meditations on the nature of writing. One reads simply, “In the drive there are accidents, small deaths that put out the heart of writing” (2000: 40); another, focussing on language, reads “Adrienne, Adrienne. Only your name stutters through thought. Adrienne, Adrienne . . .” (2000: 54). The fragments mostly concern Olivia, Sancha, and Lydia, and their sisters, husbands and partners, but sometimes they also catapult back in time to depict moments in the life of Olivia’s great-grandmother, Anika, and her husband, Franjo, whose lives in war-torn Croatia are depicted as bleak and difficult. When Lydia and Yosep decide to leave Europe and emigrate to Australia, although they no longer have to struggle for physical survival, they encounter a new source of emotional and mental anguish, the result of their exclusion from culture. Yosep and Lydia respond by trying to assimilate into Australian society. They struggle to learn the English language (something which Lydia is unable to achieve) and change their surname to the more anglicised “Meadows”. In contrast, Olivia resists the authority of Australian

90

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

culture, as well as that claimed by Yosep, her grandfather. Her movement through quite heterogenous spaces of culture and language suggest that cultural boundaries are porous and that language is fluid. Rather than being circumscribed by her family or the culture she has entered, she is willing to linger between Anglo-Australian and Croatian cultures. She occupies a hybrid space within which identity involves contingent alignments and realignments within a field of difference. In Le Désert mauve , the desert provides a backdrop for the individual and national identity foregrounded in the nuclear sublime: although it is an environment teeming with life, for Longman it is a sublime object, an infinity where all distinctions are lost, and that will be eclipsed by the much greater power of Longman’s nuclear ‘one’. In liv, subject formation occurs in what, at first sight, also seems to be a sublime landscape. In her novel The Carpathians , Janet Frame conjures an analogous sense of sublimity when she writes that “walking to the end of your block, you gaze and gaze at the seemingly endless street of similar houses, on and on to the ends of the earth, and the further you gaze the easier it is to lose your sense of being somewhere” (1988: 15). The traditional sublime would overcome such lack of distinction by turning to a greater power capable of reaffirming the boundary between self and other. Typically, the individual emerges from this experience with a heightened sense of their own identity. In contrast, liv suggests that this affirmation of self is for many migrants not possible and that, for at least some migrants, this ‘failure’ returns them not to a wasteland but to a landscape of difference and creative potential. The order insisted upon by the sublime affirmation of borders is broken by the migrant experience and it is in this very disruption that voices of difference can be heard. The sameness of suburbia is an indirect presentation not of an infinity in which all difference is lost but one of infinities of difference. liv presents Australian society not as the monocultural field fostered by the White Australia policy but as a fabric of diverse voices, stories and viewpoints. The supposedly stable identity produced in the course of the traditional sublime is displaced by an identity in process. Yasbincek explodes the horizontal sublime of Brossard’s Le Désert mauve into a cyberkinetic circuit board of pulses, currents and flows, refusing to reinstate the linear or hierarchical narrative underwriting

NAVIGATING THE CONTINGENT SUBJECT

91

traditional accounts of the sublime and the constitution of the Anglocentric subject. Instead, culture is presented as intertextual, interspatial, multiple and diverse, similar to the warp and weft of a multi-coloured fabric. “Everything begins with the fabric,” Yasbincek writes. “You touch the fabric, you listen to it. . . . Fabric is the criss-cross, the thread by thread appearing and disappearing. The magic carpet” (2000: 111-112). In liv, it is the weaving of connections across space, the passing of the weft across the ‘shed’ (the opening through which the line passes), that creates a magic carpet that, rather than lifting us above the material world, transports us from sameness to the diversity contained by that sameness, and to the potential hidden in the actual. The perceiving subject transported by this magic carpet engages with, rather than transcends, the diverse cultural and linguistic fabric of culture and language. Still more significantly, the movement between and through various elements allows traumatic

memories

to

be

recontextualised

and

reconfigured.

For

Yasbincek, this movement in and out, through and between elements (rather than transcending or sublimating them) enables healing and recovery. Another passage in liv depicts the body itself as “an electrical system which operates in thousands of circuits” (2000: 54), underscoring the importance of a life in which dynamic relations between different elements open possibilities for becoming. In the world described by liv the migrant’s role in Australian culture is similar to that of a foreign particle that, when introduced into a previously inert substance, acts as a catalyst for change. The form of liv represents this destabilisation, while providing a textual environment in which the vertical and horizontal sublimes can be displaced by a sublime that emphasises vectors of movement through elements (forms) rather than the forms themselves. As I shall argue, Yasbincek uses the symbol of the Rainbow Serpent to represent different ways of moving through the culturally

and

linguistically

fragmented

landscape

of

liv.

In

this

environment, traditional notions of the transcendent and autonomous subject, the subject who says ‘I’, become irrelevant as hegemonic structures of representation are destabilised in the flux and flow of cyberkinesis.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

92 Dispersal

The fragments that comprise liv demand a style of reading that is nonsequential, exploratory and constructive. The reader’s focus of attention moves between characters (the various members of the family), viewpoints (first person, third person, direct address), geographic locations (the suburban Australian metropolis and the Croatian countryside), and temporal locations spanning half a century. He or she must follow discontinuous pathways to navigate a multi-dimensional fabric that is fluid and processual and that suggests that the process of movement between and through fragments is more important than points of stability in themselves. Ironically, liv opens with a diagram of a family tree, beginning with Olivia’s great-grandparents, Franjo and Anika, and following the sequence of generations through to Olivia’s daughter, Josephine. The tree maps a linear progression from one generation to the next. Although each generation is lifted further from the ground, the line that connects each generation to their origin is clear. The family is a stable, organic, cohesive form, the bedrock of society as a whole. Yet in liv, familial difference and cultural diversity exceed the ‘wholes’ that attempt to contain them. The vertical family tree, locating family elements within a fixed spatial form is, in the novel itself, displaced by an arborescent structure, a horizontal, branching, temporal form. Rather than providing a first step in a narrative that would begin in Croatia, with the story of Franjo and Anika, and conclude with the birth of Olivia’s daughter, Josephine, the first paragraph of the book destabilises normative cultural, personal and familial identity: For some of us it’s the death drive that turns the winding key as we motor through in our contraptions of being. I was too young when I fell through life. I had no solid bones, no big hands to push with, no language to protest with. I went quietly into the non-life and have always despaired at its unfairness, at the way it will not foster the substance of my faith. . . . I had a penchant for dark places, for being alone. I always refused to smile for my mother as she cooed at me

NAVIGATING THE CONTINGENT SUBJECT

93

from behind her Kodak. She took the photos anyway and with each one I had the sense that another door had been locked behind me, I’d made another choice toward annihilation, away from the buoyant responses of life (2000: 7). Instead of emphasising origins and organic forms, this passage foregrounds artificial forms (contraptions of being) driven by winding keys, themselves turned by death rather than life, as well as the absence of solid forms, whether bones that hold the body in place, physically support the subject or a pre-given “language to protest with”. The speaker, presumably Olivia, although this is not specified, refuses to be marked, ordered, and identified by social and familial structures, and as a result slips away from what others take to be life. While door after door is shut behind her, she escapes through dissolution, making an active “choice toward annihilation”. As the shutter opens and her image is registered on film, Olivia feels that she is being “taken down into the dissolve, the chemical relief of grey and nothing” (2000: 7). The death drive is presented here as a force that pulls one away from the structures that determine the subject. By moving “toward annihilation”, Olivia moves away from the ‘death’ that others call life and towards ‘real’ death; but the space between these two realms is one pregnant with possibility. Where the first fragment portrays dissolution as a way to escape social and familial structures, the second fragment turns to the body. The narrator, presumably Olivia, imagines making love to Mondo, who is “next door bumming lemons” (2000: 7): My hands will seek the pads of flesh around his nipples and I will bite him there until I hear him gasp and pull back gently so that the hairs caught between my teeth won’t be plucked. And we’ll start to push away the layers of flesh and bone until we’re heart to heart. Our tongues will wrestle and thrust, our skin will shiver off, the blood will race excited and hot into our organs. . . . It’s the absolute realness of Mondo that I reach for when I touch him in the mornings . . . (2000: 8)

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

94

Rather than falling into nothingness, the subject here imagines falling into another: the skin that once marked the boundary between self and other now shivering off, and the blood rushing into organs that seem the belong to them both (“our organs”). Touching Mondo gives Olivia a glimpse of absolute reality, a corporeal reality that extends beyond the limited reality of the self. As readers move further into the text, they gather fragments into contingent wholes, in part constructing the book’s narrative. Although it is likely that most readers will move sequentially through the book, this is not the only way the novel can be read. Instead, any one of the fragments can be juxtaposed with any of the others, therefore creating an endless number of possible ways to navigate the book. liv takes the form of a rhizome within which every individual unit, node, or fragment, can be origin, link or destination. The reader does not trace a pre-existing reality but is an active participant in the construction of the book’s reality. The rhizome does not reach towards a transcendent ideal. Instead it sends out lateral growths, randomly and unexpected, at varying intervals. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, where arborescent models of identity, such as the family tree, impose the verb “to be”, the fabric of the rhizome is composed of the conjunctions “and . . . and . . . and” (1988: 25). To be rhizomorphous is “to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet, to connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but putting them to strange new uses” (1988: 15). In liv, writing (along with reading), is presented as a process of drawing fragments and (as fragment) being drawn into contingent wholes: “As I write the book of me I am being written into the book of my life. A larger writing precedes me. There are nodes where they clash. Short circuit. My book is gone” (2000: 234). In contrast to Sancha’s attempt to give Olivia fixed form by taking photographs of her, this fragment suggests that the subject emerges by writing and being written by the book of her life. The sometimes volatile interactions between the book of her life and “a larger writing” ensure that the former is tenuous, sometimes disappearing in a short circuit. The narrator goes on to compare the contingency of writing, and of the subject, to the life of an insect:

NAVIGATING THE CONTINGENT SUBJECT

95

The sensation of the fragment, its life, evaporates before the pen even touches the paper. Like those tiny insects that don’t even have a name. They appear on your skin, or on a letter you’re reading. They are white and they have wings and if you look carefully they look like miniature cicadas. They sit on a single hair on the back of your hand and preen themselves as comfortably as a monkey on a tree. No matter how careful you are, you can’t pick one up without killing it. You can’t even brush it off. You are left with a pale greenish smear about the size of a pinhead on your paper, or silvery dust on the ridges of skin at your fingertips. The life and form and animation are gone. Just like that (2000: 235). The insect and the fragment are both destroyed by the attempt to hold them or even brush them off. Yet until that time they are clearly visible, a life that opens out from and exceeds one’s own life. As the fragments so far discussed attest, liv attempts to deterritorialise the arborescent structures of family and state, opening in their place a space more open to change, reversal and contradiction. The ‘tomato game’ played by Olivia and her sister, Adrienne, offers a playful illustration of the process and the possibilities it opens. The aim of the tomato game is to have a conversation using only one word, in this case, ‘tomato’. This produces sentences such as the eloquent “Tomato tomato tomatotomatotomato tomato tomatotomato” and the equally remarkable reply, “Tomato? Tomato tomato tom ato” (2000: 123). The game produces pleasure by detaching the sign from its referent and rearticulating its parts. The word tomato is in this way defamiliarised and its meanings multiply. It suggests a radically polyvocal language that is transcursive rather than linear (as we see in the horizontal sublime) or vertical (as we see in the hierarchical sublime) because of the multiple and unexpected ways in which it can be articulated and the consequent variety of real and imagined things and emotions it can be used to evoke. The tomato game is of course in itself ‘only’ a game, yet it provides a useful analogy for the processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, dispersal and recombination, repetition and distortion, that underwrite the productivity of language.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

96

As also suggested by Adrienne and Olivia’s word game, this productivity is itself in part driven by desire, which unhooks signifiers from referential structures, allowing them to take forms not entirely governed by preexisting reality. The result of the game, which splits the word ‘tomato’, disperses it, recontextualises its various parts, then recomposes it, suggests that all forms of naming (including the ‘I’ who both precedes and is brought into being by discourse) can be similarly swept up in the productiveness of desire. As the name of a person and a book of fragments, itself capable of assuming a number of forms, the name liv/Olivia underlines the extent to which life and identity exceed language. This multiplicity enables the subject to escape the signifying structures (such as those of family and state) that attempt to circumscribe the subject. At the same time, Yasbincek makes clear that fragmentation can be the result of trauma and violence (rather than a political strategy or choice). A fragment placed towards the middle of the novel, describes a shocking violence that leaves survivors disabled by loss and trauma. The passage begins by describing the use, by Serbians, of one hundred and forty United Nations hostages as human barricades. It link these events with an unnamed person driven mad by these “vicious entertainments” (2000: 134). In this context, when the narrator says “I am fragmented and each day signals a new shattering”, it is clear that the structures of signification for this subject, liv, have been broken by the traumatic events of the past. In that aftermath of this violence, the narrator clings “to the idea of life as one clings to the promises on the horizons of fairy tales; the happily-ever-after that one draws over one’s own life as a haze of hope: vague, elusive, accusatory”. Olivia is here already referred to as Oliv-i-a, the splitting apart of the letters of the word underscoring the fragmentation produced by violence. The account of the taking of hostages is followed by memories of an undefined personal trauma, and then by a representation of the subject as Oliv-i-a, haunted by “such losses” and left with only “a maze of hope”. As the last line of the fragment notes, the narrator has been left with no more than “a handful of fragments and my breathing in and out” (2000: 134). The nadir is in this case also a place of new beginning: the narrator’s breathing

NAVIGATING THE CONTINGENT SUBJECT

97

suggests a life and desire capable of gathering up the handful of fragments and rearticulating them. Later in the novel, Olivia’s name (this time further fragmented as O-livi-a), is pictured as forming elipses around her body, which point towards (and name), but never adequately represent her: O-liv-i-a — my name forms ellipses around my body. This is my body; round knees, fine fingers, once broken toe on my right foot, veins that blue the creamy skin of my inner arm. None of this is true, none of this can ever be true. I chase images of myself around the ideas of my body and it slips through the gaps between the ellipses (2000: 196). Identity and self-presence are pictured here as being in excess of language, things that cannot be grasped and that elude representation. A similar idea is developed in another passage, which suggests that although the self is “much more than language”, what is lost can be regathered only though language: I am so much more than language. It divides me, isolates me from myself and the only way I have to absorb the leakage is language, is the tendency of the paper, is the imagining space, and a perpetual will towards myself (2000: 222). Olivia, O-liv-i-a, or simply liv, functions as a trace of what exceeds it. Having already been fragmented through social and personal trauma, and dislocated from pre-signifying structures, the subject is compelled to construct rather than discover its own form. For this self, the term ‘Australian’ remains out of reach, unless it names a multiple and heterogenous rather than unified identity. As the narrator writes, “Australian is unattainable. Its glare is hollow and singular — unless it’s what I already am” (2000: 225). Instead of the term ‘Australian’, and the implication that there is a unitary Australian identity, Yasbincek emphasises the trace and the particle, drawn together by flows and

98

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

pulsations. In the narrator’s words, “I gather a sense of narrative at the point of each fragment so I don’t totally disappear” (2000: 291). This remarkable text disables traditional versions of the sublime, along with the distinction between the sublime, beautiful and grotesque on which it depends. In place of the solitary, ‘grounded’ subject produced by traditional versions of the sublime, liv evokes a self with a “rich sense of connectedness, an inevitable and mutually informing contact with a surrounding terrain, and the arbitrariness of staking out one’s boundaries” (Lorraine 1999: 125). This dynamic fosters a series of intense connections with others, as the narrator and the addressee are drawn together: You and I say words that are banal and they follow this line of attraction and enter the body of the other. They curve as majestically as the arch of a horse’s neck and cup as tenderly as a hand carrying some small life and we feel this forward serpentine motion, we feel how they mean something else. They register in our pupils, flood them with a weight, with the pull. We step back from one another to weaken the link . . . (2000: 276-277). Complementing the notion that it is at the “point of each fragment” that a “sense of narrative” can be gathered, in this passage a “forward serpentine movement” is felt when words are heard and so embodied by the listener, drawing bodies and identities (fragments) together. Once self and other (“You and I”) have stepped back from each other, ensuring that the one is not lost in the other, each element is free to pulsate out towards other fragments, nodes and subjects. Like the word ‘tomato’ in Adrienne and Olivia’s word game, fragments, names and identities, become caught up in a flow of affects and contaminations, allowing unexpected collisions and transformations. This is in effect a method for unusing everyday language and slipping into the relief of ‘smooth space’: if the word ‘tomato’ can be unlearned, recontextualised and rearticulated, then why not the name Olivia/liv or the cultural identity ‘Australian’ as well? This style of writing is akin to what Brian Castro describes as ‘migrant writing’, in other words a writing where “we not only

NAVIGATING THE CONTINGENT SUBJECT

99

invent ourselves but we free up the sclerotic restrictions of our own language. We feel free to transgress, to metamorphose, to experience the uncanny, where we are receiving what Wilson Harris has called the ‘quantum immediacy’ of another culture” (1996). (Un)Naming the Abject Body In contrast to Adrienne and Olivia, their grandmother, Lydia, struggles to become part of mainstream Australian society. This involves a form of mimicry in which she tries to adopt the behaviours of those around her. At the same time, as Castro notes, the attempt to ensure that immigrants conform to the culture they have entered is, effectively, a way to reinforce “their subaltern status by trying to change their skins”, and to “keep out those who don’t really fit; people who are less than ‘normal’. Outside shared consciousness” (1998). For Lydia, this means that her body is always already coded racially and sexually other, and her social position preinscribed as marginalised and abjected. Lydia is depicted as a woman who, from an early age, accepts her position within social structures that have been determined by others. As a young girl in Croatia, Lydia works as a servant for Mrs Horvath, an abusive elderly woman who reminds Lydia that she is “just a poor idiot” (2000: 33). The passage in liv which describes Lydia’s first meeting with her future husband, Yosep, portrays her as a loner who, although she keeps to herself with “her face hidden in a scarf” (2000: 32), nevertheless dreams of the glamorous women she sees in the piazza, with “their dark lipstick and thick cigarettes”. She has no social life and no friends. She is described as hardworking and reliable, but nobody “seems to want to know her”. Lydia’s invisibility is presented in stark contrast to the woman she sees being kissed by Yosep in the piazza — a woman with strawberry blonde hair and a cream and pink floral dress with a wide neckline. The contrast between the latter’s vivacious presence and Lydia’s self-effacing absence, underscores the extent to which she accepts her social positioning as a working class woman and her fear of jeopardising a position (as servant to the wealthier classes) that enables her to survive.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

100

Lydia’s invisibility, lack of power and passivity are emphasised when, after the war, she and her daughter, Sancha, move into the Delac family home. Lydia is afraid that, owing to her presence in Germany during the war, she might be taken away for questioning by the authorities. The Delac home is for this reason described as a sanctuary, despite the fact that her work is unpaid and that Mrs Delac borrows from Lydia’s purse without remembering to repay the money she owes her servant. When Lydia is in the pantry one morning, “collecting breakfast things” (2000: 69), she steps back into Mr Delac’s “open hands and erection”. He proceeds to penetrate her from behind. When he is finished, he turns around and goes to take a shower. Lydia responds to her rape by accepting rather than judging or railing against it. When Mr Delac leaves for his shower, Lydia feels she is “nothing . . . unable to summon a word or a thought” (2000: 70); nevertheless, she then proceeds to justify Mr Delac’s actions by arguing that “she was made a whore in the war”, that “men need these things of women” and that Mr Delac might harbour a secret desire for her. Lydia dismisses anything that might disrupt the hierarchies of the world in which she lives, which places the wealthy Delacs in a position of authority over her, and identifies her body as available for appropriation by others. When Lydia migrates to Australia, she is continually frustrated by her inability to fully assimilate into Anglo-Australian society. The cultural and linguistic signs of her foreignness inadvertently disrupt the social systems into which she is trying to incorporate herself. She remains a misfit. She is unable to master the grammar and pronunciation of the English language, and her re-naming as Mrs Meadows causes confusion by highlighting the disjunction between her self and the identity she is trying to assume, the signs of her foreignness (her appearance, accent, and Croatian-English) and the society and culture in which she lives (Anglo-Australian society). Lydia’s frustration is perhaps most vividly expressed in a moment that foregrounds the futility of attempting to mimic pre-determined sociocultural structures and of passively acquiescing to the dictates of others: “I’m sig an tie of this bloody name . . . my husband change my name. Than he like more English name in this country. He voz so silly. He voz make so much trouble for me vit this bloody name. I don’t vonted this name. I hate

NAVIGATING THE CONTINGENT SUBJECT

101

this name!” (2000: 55). It is the disjunction created by her inability to dissolve seamlessly into the new culture that creates so much difficulty for Lydia — the impossibility of transforming her skin and re-creating herself as Anglo-Australian. One of Lydia’s responses to her frustration is simply to vacuum the carpet of the house in which she is living. Like the processual fabric of liv, the carpet holds small particles, or fragments of those who have passed over its surface. Lydia’s vacuuming is depicted as an attempt to erase the signs of her life, along with that of her daughter and grand-daughters, so that she remains invisible within (can become one with) Australian society. Lydia, her daughter, Sancha, and grand-daughters, Adrienne and Olivia, all speak a different language. As a result, it is not only the signs of Lydia’s otherness to Anglo-Australia, but the familial disruptions, which cause words to be “coughed out in tangles”, that must be removed by Lydia’s vacuum cleaner: She sucks up Sancha’s ash, dried-up Milo granules from the drink that Adrienne let soak into the carpet and the knotted excessive words. She empties the bag into the rubbish bin out the front by the letterbox. Her lips grip together so nothing can jump back in (2000: 41). When Mrs Horvath was verbally abusive, Lydia responded by working hard. When confronted with the vivacious women in the piazza, she hides her face under her scarf. When she felt Mr Delac’s semen trickling down her leg, she wiped it away and continued her work. Vacuuming the detritus of ash, Milo granules and misplaced words from the carpet of the family home, is a similar attempt to erase the signs of their existence. Lydia’s experience of mainstream Australian culture is analogous to her encounter with the natural force of Cyclone Alby. When the cyclone causes a black-out, Lydia rushes her pots and pans outside to the barbeque in order to finish cooking. Yasbincek writes that “the wind was so wild with dust that you couldn’t see her from the back door. She just vanished right into another dimension, like something from The Twilight Zone or Star Trek . There were moments of shadow as she reformed, then shape and colour.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

102

She stood on the back step, hair blown out of its combs, with a pot of beans in her hands” (2000: 136-137). The cyclone is clearly a sublime power that brings everyday life to a standstill. When Lydia rushes her pots and pans outside to the barbeque, she is immersed within a whirling vortex of dust particles that transport her from the familiar world into another dimension, an alien world where it is impossible to orient oneself. Transport is, however, not followed by inflation. When Lydia returns to the back step, she appears as a caricature of herself, framed by a scene that strips her of all familiar points of reference, and to that extent individuates her, but without offering an alternative point of reference of ground. This scene is framed by a fragment that describes Yosep’s attempt, when he is a boy, to avoid having his photo taken. For Yosep, having his image captured on film is a sort of death, a view fostered by his father, who advises his son that “you are the child of the devil and he will suck your soul into the throat of the camera; that black box is your coffin” (2000: 136). Despite his protests, Yosep’s photograph is taken. After describing this event, the narrative jumps forward in time to show Yosep’s daughter, Sancha, looking at the photograph after Cyclone Alby has passed through. This conjunction of photograph and cyclone emphasises the continuity of violence and of stratifying power. Unlike the playful dynamic of the tomato game, or the opening of Olivia/O-liv-i-a/liv to other connections and transformations, the cyclone and the camera freeze their subjects in space and time. Although Yasbincek provides a vivid picture of the suffering caused by hegemonic, hierarchical structures, she does not advocate an agonistic or oedipal struggle to destroy them. In liv, this kind of action disables the actor. Although Yosep’s decision to murder his abusive father and then turn the rifle on himself is described as “the best decision he ever made” (2000: 138), the narrator does not suggest it should be applauded. While this act involves something other than passive acceptance of pre-determined social and familial structures, it damages Yosep: after killing his father, Yosep lies on the bed and pulls the trigger. Yosep survives his suicide attempt, but this there is no sense of liberation; instead, this fragment is followed by a remarkable evocation of

NAVIGATING THE CONTINGENT SUBJECT

103

the decaying body, a female body after a botched abortion. In this scene, the subject is unnamed; its focus is on the body rather than the person, and on the body as remainder, with its “insides wretched and infected, her skin swelling; her poor blind eyes always too wide with surprise; always waiting for light to come” (2000: 139). The juxtaposition of the murder of Yosep’s father and the implied death of the woman’s embryo, and Yosep’s attempted murder-suicide with the grotesque (female) body underscores the inadequacy of a subjectivity based on binary oppositions. Moreover, the gendering of these positions, with Yosep inhabiting the position of active male (in violent and aggressive opposition to his father), and Lydia as passive female (subject to the aggressions of men), suggests that it is the dynamic itself, the structural oppositions of the masculine subject/ feminine object, which leads to the destruction of both self and other. Lydia as passive female (dutifully accepting whichever role is ascribed to her), underscores suggests that it is the dynamic itself, the structural oppositions of the masculine self/ feminine object dyad, which ultimately results in the destruction of both self and other. Lydia and Yosep’s inability, or refusal, to distance themselves from hegemonic structures blocks closes the possibility of lines of flight and movements of deterritorialisation. In contrast, Yasbincek attempts to portray a mode of perception and relation that takes us beyond the subjectobject, male-female, active-passive oppositions. Perception is represented as a movement between particulars. In one of the scenes discussed earlier, the narrator gathers meaning and narrative at the point where she comes into contact with each fragment, before then moving onto the next. This embrace of the processual flux of movement destabilises hegemonic forms, including the self. It allows a subject to emerge as the point where narrative fragments are brought into contingent relation. The possibility of this movement and gathering is evoked in a passage that follows the descriptions of Yosep’s murder of his father and his attempted suicide, and the decaying female body: yes, yes, here i am bless my sweet, sweet old cunt here i am free of faces, free of flesh, alive to the smooth darkness i am i

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

104

am i am beyond my skin and deeper in than a kidney i am i am what i have always been, here, here, here and here, swimming in the freedom of never having to speak again, flying through the purity of my silence, the velocity of a meteor, the fluidity of mercury, the wisdom of my death-held tongue (2000:139). These lines evoke a body, and therefore a source of desire, and to that extent an ‘i’, that exists beyond (and survives) violence. The subjects slips away from the first person pronoun, ’I’, escaping the social, cultural and linguistic powers that marks the abject body. Escape leads, however, only from ‘I’ to ‘i’, not to absolute deterritorialisation and loss of distinction, so that this experience can be a new beginning rather than a retreat or death. Becoming-Snake In liv, the snake provides the most important image of the multidimensional movements of narrative and of becoming (and of the book as a whole). Scientific studies distinguish between four types of serpentine motion: lateral undulation, rectilinear motion, concertina progression, and side-winding. Furthermore, as Carl Gans notes, snakes often move in several of these directions at once, so that “as the snake travels, its parts move and accelerate at different speeds” (1974: 40). The novel presents reading and writing, and by implication history and the self, as a still more complex (desiring) assemblage of parts and relations, dependant upon contingent coordinations, articulations, and orientations. To quote Ira Livingston out of context, in this book history “moves like a snake, by its insinuations, by torque and friction across its whole length, moving by virtue of its multiple diagonalities to the directions in which it is moving” (1997: 12). Becomings occur at the point where particularities (fragments) meet, but also from zones of indeterminacy and uncertainty, where the boundaries between subject and object, or between mind and body, become uncertain. In liv, this is poignantly illustrated in a passage where the narrator describes her mad lover as having both the solidity of a Morton Bay Fig tree and the ethereality of air:

NAVIGATING THE CONTINGENT SUBJECT

105

My first lover was a madman. It was a total lust thing. His body reminded me of a Mother Morton Bay, a tree I used to play in. You could touch his arm, his chest, and feel the torrents in him, the rivers that frothed up from the centre of the earth and became him at the level of his feet. He didn’t feel human. He felt elemental; heavier than earth, yet not as solid as rock. Yes, he had the density of a tree. Yet psychically he was lighter than ether. He could float away on less than a glance. When I was with him I wanted him. I felt the currents of the earth enter me and fill my cunt like a cup . . . (2000: 62-63). From the point of view of the narrator, the boundary between her lover and the elemental powers of the earth, and between her lover and the freedom represented by the air, are uncertain, creating a zone of becoming that fills her with desire. Her lover becomes a river, then heavier than earth; he gains the density of a tree, yet is psychically lighter than air. His self and the narrator’s relation with him are, and in turn, the narrator herself becomes, a threshold, or dimension: a becoming situated between various multiplicities. Becomings depend upon proximities that bring one into relation with others. In liv they are therefore represented as dependant upon touch and connection, imagined as relations in which the individual participates in but doesn’t control what occurs. The process involved is illustrated by a fragment in which Olivia climbs to the top of a hill overlooking a river estuary, from where she can see a remarkable sight: A line of people are making their way out along the bank. Each has a pole of colour struggling to free itself at the top. More people are gathering on the shore and lifting poles out of the sand. Each is loyal to their colour, wants to see their colour set free. . . . Even from here, Olivia knows that within them a singing has begun, a hum that happens in moments of harmony, a collective inaudible purr that is particularly shy

106

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS and vulnerable to shame and mockery. A woman with reddishblonde hair is running up and down the limping rainbow, shouting. The rainbow staggers at these points. At one point it even bows out into the river. These points are where there are breaks in the thread of the hum. They reform as she moves on and the hum continues its flow. Eventually there is an enormous rainbow ribboning out into the brown river. It sways and gyrates, like a charmed snake trying to make sense of its charmer. The hum travels up and down its spine in a hot current of shuddering coloured silk (2000: 118-119). The forming, breaking and reforming of the rainbow snake, the way it

staggers at moments of collision and confrontation, the relation between the whole and the parts that compose it, and the way the snake gathers its elements together, propelling them into forward movement, provides an apt image of the book as a whole. The sonorous hum that issues from the snake invokes language at its most intense, being individual and collective, perceived but paradoxically not heard by Olivia, simultaneously visual, tactile, and implicitly aural (“the thread of the hum”). The snake provides a metaphor for life as mobile and mutable, and of form as musical composition. John Cage, writing on his own process of composition, argues that music is a “total sound space” where the position of a particular sound is determined by five elements: 1. frequency or pitch; 2. amplitude; 3. overtone structure or timbre; 4. duration; and 5. morphology, or how the sound begins to die away. Cage suggests that the alteration of any one of these determinants changes the position of the sound in sound-space (1938: 9). Each performance is, one might say, a line determined by its passage through this space. In a similar manner, Yasbincek constructs the narrative fabric of liv as a multi-dimensional spatial field (a total sound space), so that reading is a performance, a rainbow serpent, whose form depends on the reader’s passage through the book. It is not my intention here to suggest that Yasbincek reduces narrative and the subject to aesthetics, or that she believes the subject is simply a composition of sound and colour. What is important in the riverbank scene,

NAVIGATING THE CONTINGENT SUBJECT

107

as well as in the ways that the subject emerges and dissolves into the movements traversing the novel as a whole, is how a specific element (the colours of the flags, or the shouting voice) acts upon other qualities within that particular assemblage, as well as those in other assemblages. The scene on the riverbank is itself juxtaposed with a passage that describes the stillbirths of four of Anika’s children, the fatal illnesses of another four, as well as her increasing desperation to protect the survivors. The consequences of this collocation of fragments depicting life and death, happiness and suffering, can in part be compared to a chemical redox reaction where, in the process of chemical reduction, the complementary chemical reaction produced as a result of the combination of two properties (such as cypric oxide and hydrogen) enacts a transference of electrons which results in the formation of entirely different substances (such as copper and water). The result of this particular interaction of elements is, of course, always the same; however, in liv, the way in which fragments interact depends on the characters and the reader. Juxtaposition therefore becomes a metaphor for the entwining of limitation and possibility. Secret Histories and the Question of Silence The becoming of the rainbow serpent preserves particularities and differences, even as they are caught up within a process that transforms them. The ‘inaudible purr’ experienced but not heard by Olivia draws attention to the wealth that can be contained by silence, and by implication, to the lives that mainstream culture in unable, or refuses, to hear. Some of the key elements of the scene of becoming that we have been discussing, (the serpentine movement, rainbow colours, the riverside location near the Western Australian city of Perth) allude to voices that have been effaced by colonisation. The indigenous Australian community of the Swan Valley, known as the Noongar, believe that the Darling Scarp (a low escarpment running NorthSouth for almost one thousand kilometres along the Swan Valley coastal plain) represents the body of the mythical Dreamtime Rainbow Serpent known as Waugul — a snake-like being who travels across the earth creating waterways, billabongs, and rivers as it moves. Significantly, the Rainbow

108

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

Serpent is also credited with the creation of the Swan River (SWALSC 2007). Anthropological studies suggest that the Rainbow Serpent’s combination of oppositional qualities represent, for indigenous communities such as the Noongar, a grotesque parade of beings whose hallucinatory phenomena designate various bands of intensity that destabilise any preconceived notion of representation. Kenneth Maddock notes, for instance, that the myth suggests forms who are “male but have a womb or female breasts, who are down in the water but up in the sky, who . . . look like a snake but also like a woman” (1978: 10). The becoming-snake scene, with its ‘hum’ that is perceived but not heard, evokes the indigenous Australian voices that have been erased or are hidden within white Australia’s cultural and linguistic landscape. Similar to the work of historian Henry Reynolds, which aims to reinterpret European histories of Australian colonisation and to recover erased Aboriginal voices (1996), the becoming-snake scene recalls a past when aboriginal landscapes were over-written by the patterns of European settlement, large numbers of aboriginal people were killed and their communities destroyed. The violence of the cultures that in part destroyed aboriginal culture and that, in a later incarnation, marginalise difference, is evoked in a highly disturbing series of passages that depict child abuse. Most of these scenes portray ritualistic abuse enacted by an older man, or a group of men, upon the body of a young girl, presumably that of Olivia herself. However, sometimes an unnamed young boy is the victim, presumably that of the grandfather, Yosep. One of the most horrific of these passages concludes with the victim being buried alive: The earth is mostly exposed, an odd clump of weed here or there. It is reddish and damp. They dig a hole, I pretend to be asleep but inside I am begging, screaming for my life. . . . They fill the hole with dirt. I know I am cold but my body doesn’t shiver. I leave my body quickly, before I struggle for breath. I go to a place where there is nothing. . . . After a while they take me out of the hole and lay me on the edge of the hole. I lie there pretending to be dead (2000: 76).

NAVIGATING THE CONTINGENT SUBJECT

109

In this scene, the narrator’s body is confined by her grave. Even when she has been taken out of the hole, its boundaries remain. She lies “on the edge of the hole . . . pretending to be dead.” Although the perpetrators in this scene are men, Yasbincek does not gender domination and violence as specifically masculine. Later in the novel, the narrator describes a hand placed over her larynx. This hand “squeezes the bony tissue” to cut off the air. The hand is, however, generic: it is “my grandfather’s/ grandmother’s/ stepfather’s/ mother’s/ stranger’s hand” (2000: 144), suggesting that it is the structure of filiation, rather than the individual per se, that needs to be undone. In the passage immediately following the burial scene, the narrator tells us that she wants “to write everything from here in neon ink so that it is untraceable without considering that each word might be alive, might hold a secret reptilian belly.” The passage then goes on to speak of “writing amongst the fragments, testing their edges on the soft rim of my heart” (2000: 77). This reference to an as yet unborn movement, or an existence that has not yet taken form, offers an alternative to the scenes of violent authority. The words written in Yasbincek’s neon ink appear as desire itself. Because each word holds a secret reptilian belly, they cannot be expressive of a single intent or order. Instead, they express the freedom of becoming. In the final paragraph of liv, Yasbincek emphasises the importance of the hybrid subject who is always, necessarily, on the point of becoming other: My body is the country where fragmented subjectivities jostle for relativity, proximity. They don’t all originate with me. I am their drive. I am the mother tongue and the second language and the idiolect (2000: 300). This formulation of the contingent subject refuses the singular transcendent subject. The I referred to here is a body, drive and language, in other words, a conjunction of forces and spaces within which identity is formed. As a novel, liv functions as a series of enunciation assemblages that articulate a range of variable affects and states across different levels of distribution. In this way, subjects can take up positions in relation to one another, but only, however, as clustered proximities that are contingent,

110

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

unstable, and continuously overrun by the affects and movements which exceed them.

On arrival I am caught within a juxtaposition of cultures my reflections mirrored threefold in the world clock on Alexanderplatz words held in check dans l’espace sous ma langue in this mischling language, my bastard tongue fails What did you say?

“When I’m Up There It Feels Like Heaven”: Aerial Bodies and The Women’s Circus Secrets

Sexual assault, child abuse and incest involve the violation of one person’s body by another. A crime in most countries around the world, typically more than half of the incidents go unreported. Consequently, statistics significantly under-represent the scale of the problem. Of those that are reported, the victims number in the millions. In the United States, there were 191,670 convictions for the sexual assault of persons over the age of twelve in the year 2005 alone (RAINN). In England and Wales, for the year ending March 2006, sexual offences recorded by police numbered 62,081 (Home Office 2007), and in Australia, the Australian Institute of Family Studies estimates that 1.2 million Australian women over the age of eighteen years have experienced some form of sexual assault at some point in their lives since the age of fifteen (2007). Statistics such as these generally do not take account of the sexual molestation of children; incidents of child molestation remain largely unreported. Although not all perpetrators are men and not all victims are women, sexual abuse is most commonly committed by men, against women. David Finkelhor notes that while girls are four times more likely than boys to be a victim of sexual assault, men are less likely than women to report incidents of molestation. Statistics estimate that men and boys make up ten percent of the victims (Finkelhor 1994), and that women make up between one and two percent of all sex offenders (Vandiver and Walker 2002). Sixty percent of male survivors report at least one perpetrator to have been a woman (Mendel 1995). These figures are a reminder that this problem crosses gender divisions. In 1991, the Women’s Circus was established in Melbourne, Australia, as a community arts group with the aim of providing women who are survivors of sexual assault a means for self-affirmation through the performance of their own and others’ stories. The publication Women’s Circus: Leaping Off the Edge (Beissbarth and Turner 1997), which arose from their collective journal, confirms that they are a political theatre — both on the level of personal affirmation, in that the circus aims to provide a means for women

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

114

to re-establish control over their bodies, and in the context of society as a whole, where the circus aims to challenge and reconfigure hegemonic narratives,

such

as

the

discourse

of

sublime

transcendence

and

individuation, that abject, marginalise and silence particular socio-cultural groups. The political concerns of the circus are articulated by many of the testimonials which form the body of the publication. Adrienne Liebermann remarks: “We hoped that by writing our own story we could help transform and redefine the cultural myths that deeply influence our psyches and shape society” (Beissbarth and Turner 1997: xv), and Jen Jordan hopes for a “renewal of face-to-face community in a society increasingly suffering from atomisation and alienation” (Beissbarth and Turner 1997: xiii). Similar sentiments are expressed in the entries by Donna Jackson (the circus founder and first director), Jean Taylor, and Alison Richards — all of which reiterate the importance of reconfiguring the socio-linguistic structures that foster the domination of one group by another, and that circumscribe some identities as marginal, and some bodies as abject. In this regard, it is significant that the Women’s Circus has gradually become more and more inclusive of those who have been marginalised. Its initial charter as a group for the survivors of sexual assault was later expanded to include women over forty and immigrant women. In 1995, the group also decided to include indigenous women, and in 1996 they included big women, whose spin-off group, ‘The Mangoes’, addressed the socio-political issues faced by large women (Beissbarth and Turner 1997: 34-35). In 2001, the Women’s Circus wrote and performed Secrets — an exploration of alienation and bodily disassociation as the effect and consequence of sexual assault. The performance drew on the women’s memories, expressed through word, movement and music. Secrets critiques traditional, hierarchical models of the sublime through its portrayal of terror and blockage before an overwhelming power not as a stage before transport, but as an ongoing condition. In a conflation of the first and second stages of the sublime, the victim of sexual assault is indeed blocked and then transported from the everyday world into one marked by on-going fear and terror. Secrets depicts sublime transport as a moment of sexualised assault upon the body of the other that reinscribes dialectical hierarchies and suppresses the (often female) body.

“WHEN I’M UP HERE IT FEELS LIKE HEAVEN”

115

Secrets is composed of three parts. The first part, entitled “A Child’s Nightmare”, deals with the scene of sexual assault and provides an effective critique of the hierarchical sublime and its subordination of the body to the mind. This section of the performance intersperses scenes of children playing with ones that depict the everyday life of suburban domesticity, where housewives move around in their kitchens and gather in groups to gossip. As the first part of Secrets continues, the scenes of children playing are replaced with a depiction of sexual violation. Significantly, this is enacted in a scene that depicts fear as an unknown but always present force. Part 02, “The Impact”, deals with the effects of child abuse. It portrays self-abjection and self-alienation as a continuation of and participation in the violence to which these women have been subjected. The scenes in Part 02 depict the suburban domesticity of the previous part, only now they foreground the sense of something being hidden. One scene shows two housewives who sneak outside to play on a trapeze swing in secret delight. Another scene depicts an argument taking place inside one of the houses. The scenes of child’s play first depicted in Part 01 are repeated, only now they also show an isolated girl who lingers on the edge of the group, too afraid to join in with the others. Another scene repeats the depiction of sexual assault that first occurred in Part 01, except that here, the perpetrators are multiplied. They enter on stilts and then elevate themselves even further on ropes as they perform aerial movements and, simultaneously, a scene of sexual violation. At the end of Part 02, various voice-overs begin to testify to the speakers’ own memories of sexual assault, before the entire cast of the circus gathers on stage to hold hands and sing defiantly as an affirmation of their own strength and resilience. The third part of Secrets, entitled “Growing”, deals with the process of healing and self-affirmation. The scenes in this section of the performance begin to evoke a sense of the sacred. One shows a group of women bathing the girl who, in Part 02, watched other children playing but was too afraid to join in. The women form a stairway with their bodies so that the girl can climb higher with their support. Another scene depicts a group of women climbing ropes and then sliding back towards the ground, and another shows a procession of women who enter the stage and proceed to wash their faces

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

116

from large, white bowls. Part 03 explores the possibility of a horizontal and embodied sublime that allows the individual to rise from and return to the collective. In each of the three parts of Secrets, a scene recurs in which an elderly woman quietly tends her garden. On these occasions, the background music is gentle and the action of the woman gardening is always slow and methodical. The scene remains the same until the end of the performance when another woman enters the garden and begins to assist the elderly woman, and then groups of women enter to donate urine in order to fertilise the lemon tree standing in the centre of the garden. The performance of Secrets finishes with an act of celebration, where the cast gathers on stage to sing and dance with and acknowledge each other. Secrets was performed in a disused shipping warehouse in the Melbourne docklands, known simply as “Shed 14”. At the centre of this space was a large, open area where the women performed carefully choreographed acrobatic routines, and which was used to stage representations of those aspects of the women’s lives that were public: the children’s play scenes; moments of collective grouping as affirmation; and large-scale scenes of terror and sexual assault depicted not as a private, domestic affair but as a wide-spread social problem. The space was bounded on one side by tiered seating for the audience and on the other side, at the back of the space, a small garden and above it, on a second level, a row of houses, suggesting the conventional elevation of culture (and language) over nature and the body. A lemon tree was positioned in the centre of the garden, with an empty bamboo bird cage hanging from one of its branches; its door remaining open for the entire performance. Behind the tree stood a brick wall, painted blue, with white, fluffy clouds sailing overhead. On the second level, a row of 1950s pastelcoloured fibro houses stretched from one side of the open performance space to the other. Each house had a door through which the performers entered and exited the houses, and windows, which allowed the audience to catch glimpses of events that occurred inside. The upper and lower levels were joined by two flights of stairs. The first began from the left-hand side, and the other from the right-hand side of the lower level. The stairs met at the centre of the upper level, forming a triangle. The passage enabled by

“WHEN I’M UP HERE IT FEELS LIKE HEAVEN”

117

the stairs (from nature to culture, from the garden to the city) suggests the process of reduction and transcendence through which the energies of the body are contained by the fixed identities of the social (the apex of the triangle). The stairs also open the possibility of a counter movement, from the social to the more open-ended spaces of nature and the body. At the same time, these fixed paths ‘up’ and ‘down’ are multiplied, transformed and deformed by the less constricted movements of the circus aerialists as they move through the air, passing between the two realms. The narrative of Secrets was performed by stilt-walkers and acrobats, as well as aerialists using trapeze swings and tissue swings (which are, as the name suggests, long streams of tissue fabric suspended from the rigging above the performance space). These performances were interwoven with narratives, spoken by women not seen by the audience (voice-overs), that related the women’s memories of sexual molestation. Both were complemented by a musical score, composed by circus member Kim Baston and performed by circus musicians who, although seated, were visible to the audience. This interlacing of music, speech, acrobatic display, and aerial movement produced a multi-modal art, a kind of ‘plastic speech’ or ‘hieroglyphic writing’, that was used to reveal the dependence of language on mind and body, and the subject on itself and the community of ‘many hands’ that supports it. This interdependence, and the embodied transcendence it implies, is best seen in the way the circus revised the traditional role of the aerialist. In a conventional circus, the aerialist’s flight suggests a release from earthly bounds. It is “breathtakingly mobile”, taking “possession of infinite space with an enviable freedom” (Auerbach quoted in Martin 1999: 198). As Michael Balint remarks, typically in such performances “a powerful and highly skilled man produces on his own a powerful erection, lifting him away from security, performing in his lofty state incredible feats of valour and daring” after which he returns to “the safe mother earth” (1959: 29-30). In contrast, in the Women’s Circus, the aerialist remains embodied, subject to falls and tumbles while also climbing, spinning and flying. The aerialist never claims to untangle herself from the corporeality that links her to others. Instead, the individual and the community emerge in relation

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

118

with each other, suggesting forms of difference that are so contingent that even the term ‘woman’, upon which the circus is based, is itself open to an endless (re)negotiation. Cathryn Vasseleu argues that in the work of Merleau-Ponty the language of subject and object is replaced by “an opaque differential logic of the flesh” (1998: 24). Arguably, the Women’s Circus attempts a similar transformation, denying that consciousness is transcendent and that disembodied vision is the dominant form of perception. Furthermore, in the Women’s Circus, this “opaque differential logic of the flesh” allows a reworking of sublime transcendence as a crisscrossing of the tangible and the intangible — that is, as movements that divide themselves from, even as they incorporate themselves within, a larger world. An anonymous entry in the Women’s Circus journal emphasises the importance of this kind of interweaving: “Many other women’s hands were there . . . I learnt that we had to watch each other’s eyes closely, that we had to be conscious of our dependence on each other. That we were a formation of intricate links, minds and bodies. That we had to work together for each other and ourselves” (Beissbarth and Turner 1997: 30). In Secrets, as in many other Women’s Circus productions, it is the network of interconnections between self and other, mind and body, individual and world, that produces possibilities for change. Transcendence is consequently a process of becoming, rather than a moment of overcoming, and it belongs to a world that can never be completely articulated. Assaulting the Body Part 01 of Secrets depicts sublimity not as liberation and the elevation of the soul to a higher plane of consciousness, but as a process that leaves the body vulnerable to assault and violation. This dynamic is highlighted in Scene 07, “Nightfall”, which presents the moment of confrontation with sublime power that is coincident with a violent splitting of voice from body and of language from materiality. The lighting dims to a dull bluish-mauve as the stilt figures of men and women, who have been playing with children in the previous scene, now exit the stage — all except for one stilt-woman, who stands at the rear right-hand-side of the stage with her face turned to

“WHEN I’M UP HERE IT FEELS LIKE HEAVEN”

119

the blue wall and her back to the audience. She remains immobile throughout the entire scene, refusing to acknowledge or witness the unfolding sequence of events. A voice-over is heard singing the nursery rhyme “Hush Little Baby”, as the children lie sleeping, curled into knots with their arms around their heads, at various intervals across the stage. The notes of the nursery rhyme are high-pitched and discordant, the voice strained almost to breaking. Periodically the singing is broken by a sharp note that pierces the air, creating the sense that, although still invisible beyond the edges of the stage, an object of terror is approaching. With each discordant note, the children look around themselves in fear, but without seeing anything. This is repeated several times until all the children are on their knees, seemingly paralysed by fear. The moment of transport is provoked by a sudden, discordant note in the music which is low, guttural and off-key and which drops into the atmosphere of tension and fear like a lead weight. Rather than elevating the children, it provokes a chaotic scene of violent spinning that is curiously reminiscent of the whirling dervishes, whose dance of religious ecstasy, the sema, depicts a man’s spiritual ascent through love and the desertion of his ego to truth and perfection (Friedlander 85-104). Rather than religious ecstasy, spinning is here a symbol of the violent disarticulation of part from whole. As a long red tissue falls from the rigging overhead to the centre right of the stage, some of the children join hands and spin furiously in pairs. Some stand alone and rigid, each with a hula hoop spinning around their necks, as if they are being decapitated. One girl runs towards the red tissue and begins to climb towards the ceiling in an effort to escape this scene of violence and terror. Upward ‘flight’, however, is not depicted as liberation, but as loss of the body and the self. Confronted by overwhelming power, the self is abandoned, in effect, occupied by others. This extreme depersonalisation disables voice, movement and the possibility for expression and transformation. The ‘subject’s’ perspective is displaced by the gaze of the other, so that she becomes an object in space, rather than a focal point organising space.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

120

As the scene proceeds, the body of the aerialist slips back towards the ground as a voice-over repeats the same lines again and again, the tone becoming urgent and more insistent with each repetition: There is a small spot on the ceiling — and I am not here. I am a small spot on the ceiling — I am not here. There is a small spot on the ceiling — and I am not here. I am a small spot on the ceiling — I am not here. (Lemon 2000: Part 01, Sc.07) The movement downwards leaves the aerialist’s body hanging like an aborted embryo, alone in the dark, unable to see, pushed aside by a child leaving the stage (Figure 01). When the voice-over stops, a single, highpitched note pierces the air and then fades, leaving an extended and uncomfortable silence that lingers for a full minute. Violent panic has been displaced by a silence that suggests death or paralysis. While the shadowy figure of a man leaves a pink fibro house on the second level of the stage (the level representing culture and family) and walks along the platform to another house, the child and the woman below him (the hanging aerialist and the stilt-woman facing the blue wall) remain immobile, fixed in place by overwhelming force. Roger Caillois writes that the loss of lived space that occurs when an individual is defined or positioned by another results in a form of psychical mimicry analogous to that found in the insect world. To those caught up in this process, he explains, space becomes a devouring force: Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks out of the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space (1984: 30). When the aerialist identifies with a small spot on the ceiling, she distances herself from her corporeal body. In the terms of the sublime, she occupies a place above and beyond her everyday life. Yet here there is no

“WHEN I’M UP HERE IT FEELS LIKE HEAVEN”

121

moment of self awareness or of individuation; there is only a phagocytosis, an absorption by the force of the other that leaves her isolated and paralysed. In “Nightfall” (the scene that we are discussing), the Women’s Circus offers a critique of transcendence by illustrating how objective vision or self-reflection (seeing oneself at a distance or looking back at oneself from an elevated position) is not necessarily productive. In Secrets, the effort to rise above the body (identifying oneself with the spot on the wall) signals only a profound breakdown in the self. As a result of this breakdown, the subject cannot move. Her body remains lifeless, inert and open to appropriation by others, suggesting that, for survivors of sexual assault whose bodies have consequently been marked as abject, (political) action requires something other than the interventions that depend on a strong sense of self and agency.

Figure 01. A solitary aerialist left hanging in an embryo position. Secrets, Part 01, Scene 07: “Nightfall”. Reproduced courtesy of Tony Watts, Parrot Video.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

122

Psychoanalytic theories of subject-constitution often emphasise the role of vision in the process of detaching the ‘I’ from the undifferentiated flux of the infant’s relation with his or her (m)other. Julia Kristeva, for example, following Lacan, describes the child’s recognition of his own image in a (literal or metaphorical) mirror as essential if the subject is to enter the realm of language, society and signification (1984: 46-47). However, the action in “Nightfall” suggests that mirroring (where the subject recognises an alienating image of himself as his true self) can disable the subject and leave the body open to violation. When understood in the context of visibility politics, and the claim for rights based on the assertion of a visible identity, “Nightfall” problematises processes that compel the sublimation of the body in the service of subjectconstitution. Part 02 of Secrets extends this critique to implicate the sociocultural structures underwriting subject-formation as involving disembodied self-reflection. “Nightfall” depicts the individual child trying to escape the terror of an overpowering and terrifying force that seems to be omnipresent because it is not embodied in any specific form. A similar scene of terror and violation appears in “Disclosure” (Part 02, Scene 12); but here violence is exerted against an entire community. Part 02 of Secrets shifts the focus of the performance from the individual to the community. It depicts some of the ways in which violence is perpetuated by a refusal of the community, and of society and culture, to accept responsibility for certain actions. Scene 09, “Hiding”, depicts a young girl, sitting in a bath, furiously scrubbing herself in order to erase the shame of her sexual molestation. She is alone. The bath and the girl are illuminated by a white spotlight; but beyond the pool of light is darkness. In Scene 10, “Isolation/Otherness”, the same young girl crouches on the edge of the performance space, watching a group of girls as they swing playfully on trapeze swings. The happiness of the latter reinforces the sense of exclusion felt by the former, highlighting the distance that now separates here from the community. Scenes 09 and 10 foreground the problems that confront attempts by the young girl to transcend the bodily suffering depicted in “Nightfall” (Part 01, Scene 07). At the same time, it is communal refusal to acknowledge that a child has been abused, that allows the violence to continue. While the

“WHEN I’M UP HERE IT FEELS LIKE HEAVEN”

123

young girl of Scenes 09 and 10 lingers on the edge of the social, unable to speak or participate, and while the community depicted in Scene 10 ignore her, the violence of “Nightfall” is certain to be repeated. Scene 12 also centres on the violation of a young girl’s body. However, unlike “Nightfall”, the violence is witnessed by women who stand in rows along the stairs at the rear of the stage. They watch three men, dressed in suits and elevated by stilts, trek across the performance space. The ‘stiltmen’ then proceed to lift themselves onto trapeze bars and perform aerial stunts. Simultaneously, three women dressed in the orange costume of the circus, climb up to the ceiling on rope trapezes. Each of these ropes is anchored by a single woman standing below. At the centre of the stage, a young girl sits in a pool of light, isolated and facing the audience. As the scene unfolds, a hypnotic and ritualistic swinging swells out into the performance space.

The stilt-men begin to swing themselves in large

circular motions with their elongated legs striking at the ground and propelling them forward (Figure 02). The women anchoring the rope trapezes start to spin the women aerialists, who are now high above the ground and hanging upside-down from the ropes. As they are spun more and more rapidly, they contort and twist their bodies. Suddenly, in a powerful representation of violent force, the isolated girl is caught by one of the stilt-men and is pulled up into the air against her will. Eventually she falls to the ground, inert and lifeless. Curiously, the stilt-men and the spiralling women, together with their anchors, mirror her collapse, each becoming still. The violation of the isolated woman is mirrored by the collective body. It would be easy to imagine the survivors of sexual assault and physical violence that act and are depicted in Secrets adopting an oppositional politics or, more drastically, taking revenge upon those who have violated their bodies. However, the way in which the three spinning women mirror the movements of the three circling stilt-men, suggests that Secrets is, in fact, warning against the adoption of excessive force by marginalised groups. The former do not overthrow the structures of oppression represented by the latter. As Sara Martin argues, women who dream of ‘growing balls’ can only lead to “creating monsters, no matter how effective they may be in redressing the wrongs of patriarchy” (1999: 208). The

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

124

Women’s Circus gestures instead towards a politics of exchange and connection.

Figure 02. A stilt-man about to take off. Secrets, Part 02, Scene 12: “Disclosure”. Reproduced courtesy of Tony Watts, Parrot Video.

The women who stand in the background of Scene 12, witnessing the events unfolding before them, do not move. They are unable or they choose not to intervene. They parallel the audience sitting on the other side of the stage: both are lined up in rows, passive witnesses of the events enacted on stage. Although this parallel clearly indicts passive witnessing, there are signs that the women who line the staircases are on the verge of becoming active. As I argued earlier, the stage set represents a world where culture is elevated over nature. The line of fibro houses stands on a platform elevated above a small garden. This division between the worlds of culture and nature parallels the division between mind and body that is a result of the violence from Scenes 07 and 12. The necessity of these divisions is, of course, already implicitly questioned by the fact that the staircases link and allow movement between these two worlds. Moreover, this intermediate zone between nature and culture, and between mind and body, is inhabited and embodied by the lines of interlinked women, foreshadowing the change

“WHEN I’M UP HERE IT FEELS LIKE HEAVEN”

125

and metamorphosis that will arise from moments of play, carnival and celebration. The movement away from violence and towards festival is fully explored in the third and final part of Secrets, entitled, “Growing”. Significantly, however, the idea of growing as unfolding, emerging, and metamorphosing, begins much earlier in the performance, most notably in the gardening scene, where an elderly woman is tending her flowers and her lemon tree. As I mentioned earlier, this scene reappears, with minor variations, in each of the three parts of the performance. In Scene 04, “Bad Dream”, the elderly woman is shown tending to her lemon tree which, although rooted in the earth, reaches towards the fibro houses above it. Furthermore, in the first scenes of the performance, children knock on the doors of the fibro houses and then run away, spy through the windows, or play hide and seek with each other. Although the children’s joy is soon to be destroyed by the stilt-men, these scenes of innocent play, in combination with the gardening scene, suggest that the seeds of transformation are always already present in our lives. Rather than valorising culture and mind over nature and body (or vice versa), these early scenes anticipate the coming together of the individual and the collective, of mind and body, civilisation and nature, that is seen in the third part of Secrets. Seen in this context, the tissue and rope swings, trapeze swings, stilts, even the staircase are devices that do not simply providing the means of lifting oneself. Instead they open passages between differences. The staircase and the lemon tree connect the worlds of nature and culture, and the tissue swings and trapezes allow the women to lift themselves above the socio-cultural definitions that had posited them as passive or abject bodies. The ideal implied here, an ideal of integration and inclusion, is realised in the final part of Secrets. Like most other performances by the Women’s Circus, Secrets concludes with celebration. In Scene 14, entitled “Celebration”, the entire cast of characters, including the stilt-men from Scene 12, returns to the performance space in order to participate in the festivities: to dance, to sing, and to entertain. The scene begins with triple trapeze acrobatics. The triple trapeze is composed of three trapeze swings joined together so that aerialists can perform in groups of three. Here the aerialists assume positions that repeat

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

126

the triangular form of the staircase, but this form is now embodied and fluid rather than lifeless and fixed. The bodies of the aerialists rise and fall: the ascent of the central aerialist is framed by the descent of the women who flank her. As the latter begin to rise, the former begins to fall. The self emerges in concert with the group; the movement upwards corresponds with movements downwards; mind and nature are part of a single, yet fluid, emergent system. This emphasis on relation and inclusion suggests an ethics similar to what Michael Gardiner, writing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, refers to as a “true morality”, because it is a system based on communication and contact with others (1998: 138). At the end of Secrets, even the stilt-men, who were previously the perpetrators of violence and destruction, are included in the festivities. They are brought back into the community, where their activities involve exchange rather than incorporation and domination. Participation transforms both the appearance and behaviour of the stiltmen. When they enter the performance space after the triple trapeze routines, they have exchanged their suits for bright orange costumes. Their predatory circling above the stage is no longer evident and instead they twirl poles through the air and kick up their legs like cabaret dancers. Furthermore, although they sometimes perform individually, they now more commonly hold hands and move in groups of two or three. The remarkably optimistic suggestion is that the ethics of inclusion and the experience of festival has transformed the stilt-men. This scene therefore evokes what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as ‘transgrediance’, namely that which transcends, or lies outside, our immediate subjective existence and which partakes of ‘otherness’ (Gardiner 1998: 137). The celebrating women do not try to disguise the otherness of the stilt-men; instead they attempt to include them. In a sign of remarkable individual and communal strength, festival includes rather than abjects or represses even threatening figures such as the stilt-men. It is important to note, however, that the stilt-men are not the focus of Scene 14. They act in conjunction with the other members of the circus, but as soon as they have performed their pole twirling and cancan routines, they move to the back of the space in order to make room for other performers. A single trapeze is then lowered into the centre of the space,

“WHEN I’M UP HERE IT FEELS LIKE HEAVEN”

127

followed by two red tissues, one on each side of the trapeze — all of which form a triangle that recalls the other triangular formations that have helped structure this performance. A woman dressed in an orange costume, similar to those of the stilt-men, climbs onto the central trapeze, while two housewives wearing floral dresses climb onto the red tissues, one on each side. As the orange-costumed woman and the housewives perform aerial routines, the stilt-men watch the performance while holding each others’ hands. Simultaneously, other women climb both flights of stairs, coming to a halt at regular intervals from each other. They each lift a large red or orange flag into the air and wave it back and forth so that soon the entire space is filled with the fluttering of colours and the interlinking of bodies across the performance space. The final stages of this scene are composed of routines that resonate with each other, building complex patterns of connection and difference. On the triple trapeze, the audience sees routines that mime the emergence of an individual from and her return to the group. This movement is constructed as an opening and closing, emergence and disappearance, unfolding and refolding. These fluid movements resonate with the women standing on the stairs. These passages between nature and culture are now alive with moving bodies and fluttering flags, suggesting a logic of the ‘flesh’ capable of transforming the previously destructive relations between nature and culture. The gap between nature and culture has become a zone of life force. Affirming Flesh: Theatre as Life Force Secrets is a theatre of affirmation that attempts to transform the culture of violence depicted in Scene 07, “Nightfall”, and Scene 12, “Disclosure”. As noted in the previous section, the seeds of this transformation can be found in the scenes, occurring early in the performance, of children at play, and in the sequence of scenes depicting a woman tending her garden. This is made explicit by a series of parallels between early and late scenes. For example, Part 02 begins with a scene entitled “Adult Play”, which recalls the first two scenes of Part 01, “Joy” (Scene 01) and “Child’s Play” (Scene 02). This suggests that the children’s

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

128

sense of wonder has not been entirely erased by the violence of “Nightfall” and that seeds of renewal remain that, with care and tenderness, can spring into life. “Adult Play” (Scene 08), begins with stereotypical images of the 1950s housewife. Two women, wearing green elbow-length rubber gloves, hair rollers and fitted floral dresses with pumped-up tulle skirts, “sneak downstairs to the triple trapeze [and] play with secret delight” (Lemon 2000: Part 02, Sc.08). At first they find it difficult to manage the triple trapeze: they try to lift themselves up onto the bars but, each time, fall back onto the ground. As they try to help each other up, the chorus sings the words, “My mother said, that I never should, play with the gypsies in the green green wood. And if I did, then she would say, you’re a naughty girl, to disobey . . .”. To attempt to enter a realm traditionally associated with men (the realm of the trapeze artist and, in the logic of the performance, or culture and self-empowerment) is to act against the codes that determine what is proper for women. Eventually the housewives do climb onto the trapeze and they begin to play. One of the women is more adventurous than the other. She lies across the trapeze and over her friend’s knees (to the consternation of her friend). She then lifts herself up into the air so that she is directly over her friend in the central section of the triple trapeze, then lowers herself down over her friend, who disappears beneath her voluminous skirts. The second woman soon reappears but now, as part with the first woman, of a single creature with four arms and four legs. Legs and arms appear and disappear as the women perform an acrobatic routine that involves turning upside-down to expose their fluffy bloomers. When the routine begins only one woman is visible, the second hidden beneath her skirts. Then as the pair rotate, the hidden woman becomes visible and her dress falls to cover her partner. The pair repeat this routine several times, emerging and disappearing, folding together and then apart from each other. The women merge and re-emerge as if they were flowers emerging from and then being drawn back into a seed pod. As their bodies rise and fall, they sweep their arms through the air as if they are swimming. As the first woman rises, she stretched her arms out wide and opens her mouth as is if gasping for breath (Figure 03). These actions seem to invite the audience to

“WHEN I’M UP HERE IT FEELS LIKE HEAVEN”

129

join in their game. Moreover, they dramatically transform the image of the ‘good housewife’, with her tightly-bound bodice and neatly manicured face. As the song sung by the chorus suggests, these women have moved quite some distance from the roles prescribed for women.

Figure 03. Clowning around: 1950s housewife aerials. Secrets, Part 02, Scene 8: “Adult Play”. Reproduced courtesy of Tony Watts, Parrot Video.

Routines in which actors rise and fall, emerge and then retreat, unfold and refold, appear again and again in Women’s Circus productions. In their 2003 production of Odditorium, one of these scenes develops the implications of “Adult Play” and for this reason it merits discussion at some length. In Scene 15 of Odditorium, the performance space is illuminated with a soft blue that is evocative of twilight. The gentle notes of a piano can be heard as groups of women enter and lie on the ground, curled up in groups of two or three except for a large woman who lies by herself in the centre of the performance space. After a few moments, a woman rises slowly into the air. She grasps a trapeze suspended above her, pulls herself up to the bar, curling her knees up to her chin, and then slowly descends back into

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

130

the arms of the other women lying on the ground below. This action is repeated several times, and then echoed by other groups of women. Eventually all of the women are involved in this movement except for the large woman at the centre of the stage who now sits up and watches the others. When this activity has stopped, the women curl up again on the ground and sleep quietly. The music changes to a song by Kasey Chambers, entitled “Not Pretty Enough”. Unlike her neighbours, the large woman is still awake. She stands in front of a rope swing and, with a look of excitement on her face, attempts to pull herself onto the rope. The chorus of the song makes the meaning of the scene explicit: “Am I not pretty enough/ Is my heart too broken/ Do I cry too much/ Am I too outspoken?” Inevitably, the woman falls heavily to the ground. As the scene progresses, the large woman is successful, but only with the help of the other women. Following “Adult Play”, this scene provides a powerful image of individuality as a difference that unfolds, or splits off from, while nevertheless depending on, the same. Merleau-Ponty compares this kind of relation to a glove that turns back on itself, so that difference is understood as a chiasmic doubling/crossing: Consider the two, the pair, this is not two acts, two syntheses, it is a fragmentation of being, it is a possibility for separation

(two

eyes,

two

ears,

the

possibility

for

discrimination, for the use of the diacritical), it is the advent of difference (on the grounds of resemblance . . .). (1968: 217) “Adult Play” is preceded by one of the gardening scenes that we have discussed in the previous section. In this scene, an elderly woman, often digging in the earth, plants some seedlings and then waters them. Her actions are accompanied by a nursery rhyme, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary”, that anticipates the contrary housewives. In the following scene, the housewives, in their pretty floral dresses with their tulle skirts, are not the “pretty maids all in a row” referred to by the nursery rhyme. Nevertheless, the performance suggests that we can see them as the kind of ‘flower’ produced by the elderly woman’s gardening.

“WHEN I’M UP HERE IT FEELS LIKE HEAVEN”

131

As the women move up and down on the trapeze, the opening and closing of their skirts, the appearing and disappearing of their bodies, suggests the motion of a giant flower, emerging perhaps from the seedlings planted in the previous scene, as it blooms and then fades only to bloom once again. In traditional versions of the sublime a faculty and/or the self seems to be lifted above the world of the flesh, to a state where creative, ethical or intellectual freedom can be gained. In the scenes we have been discussing transcendence remains wedded to the flesh and to temporal existence. In other words, transcendence becomes a dehiscence, an opening out of the perceivable world. Seen in this light, as Cathryn Vasseleu argues, sense becomes as “‘fleshing out’ of embodied existence, with flesh disclosing its (in)coherence or ‘carnal meaning’ in its differentiation of itself” (1998: 30). For Merleau-Ponty, flesh is, therefore, a double medium of being born and giving birth, and sensibility is both the medium of its transcendence and of its own emergence. Sacred Offerings In an essay, entitled “‘The Language of Blood’: Toward a Maternal Sublime”, Patricia Yaeger describes subjectivity as fluid and changing. She explores this subjectivity as it appears in “the maternal sublime”, arguing that a sublime that doesn’t turn away from the female, maternal body (“the language of blood”) makes problematises the opposition between the grotesque and the sublime (1992: 18). Yaeger advances an account of the horizontal sublime as essentially feminine. In Secrets, however, the Women’s Circus uses the fluid process of emergence, unfolding and splitting as a way to destabilise categorical distinctions between male and female. The predominance throughout Secrets of the colour red, together with the use of deep red tissue swings is unavoidably suggestive of blood. This could suggest that the Women’s Circus, like Patricia Yaeger’s maternal sublime, emphasises the generative capacities of menstrual blood as the female fluid par excellence. In the first scene of the third part of Secrets, “Becoming Visible/ Struggling to Rebuild” (Scene 13), a group of six aerialists climb long blood-red tissues all the way to the ceiling, where they

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

132

turn to face the ground (each woman attached to the tissue by only one ankle), before sliding back down again. As they descend, four women dressed in red costumes, file onto the stage, each carrying a large white bowl filled with water. They walk to the front right of the stage and kneel in a group before washing their faces. On the other side of the performance space, three women begin bathing a fourth woman, who sits naked in an alabaster bath tub. When they have finished washing her, they wrap a large white towel around her shoulders and she emerges dressed in a red costume like the others. After the bathing women and the aerialists have left the stage, another group of women enter and, after performing a series of acrobatic routines, the aerialists return to the stage and climb the tissues once again. Having wound the tissues around their bodies they allow it to unravel and, consequently, plummet towards the ground. Before hitting the stage, however, they are ‘caught’ by the tissue. After climbing back up to the ceiling, the routine is repeated once again. The words that accompany these ascents and controlled falls refer to a struggle that involves “two steps forward [and] one step back, a struggle in which “I am not alone” (Lemon 2000: Part 03, Scene 13). Voices can be heard that speak about “becoming different” and they in turn are accompanied by a song with the refrain “there are many arms to hold me”. As these elements of the scene suggest, becoming is enabled an intercorporeal community (the many arms) and the individuation or differentiation suggested by the blood-coloured swings. In the Women’s Circus, however, becoming is not inherently feminine. Although the tissueswings are blood-coloured, there is nothing to link them exclusively with menstrual blood. Furthermore, the final gardening scene of Secrets, which takes place at the very end of Scene 13, depicts the elderly womangardener fertilising her lemon tree with another bodily fluid, that of urine. As she confides to the audience, “I’ll let you in on a gardener’s secret. Citrus trees love nitrogen. And there’s lots of nitrogen in wee. So I’ve been putting mine on the lemon tree. I told my friends about it, and now they’re bringing theirs for the tree too!” (Lemon 2000: Part 03, Scene 13). The neighbours who come to offer their urine to fertilise the tree could just as easily be men.

“WHEN I’M UP HERE IT FEELS LIKE HEAVEN”

133

The use of blood and urine as metaphors for an embodied, fleshly life suggests that Secrets is intended as an articulation of life as force, rather than only as a vehicle for reflection or as a mode of detached representation. Rather than withdrawing from the world towards a unity of consciousness, it attempts to evoke what Eugen Fink describes as a sense of “wonder in the face of the world” (1966: 115-116). In Part 01, Scene 01, “Joy”, children run out into the centre of the performance space and stand facing the audience. There is an “energy in the stillness” (Lemon 2000: Part 01, Sc.01), and the children’s faces are alive and open, their eyes wide in astonishment. This scene quickly moves into Scene 02, “Childsplay”, where the children begin playing games with each other. As the script advises, they are free with their bodies and unconcerned “whether their undies flash or not” (Lemon 2000: Part 01, Sc.02). The scene highlights both the innocence of childhood and a child’s sense of wonder at the world around them. After play with hula hoops, they slowly start to spin with their arms held out and their faces turned towards the sky, in a moving gesture of openness and trust. For Merleau-Ponty wonder involves a transcendence towards the world, quite different from the Kantian notion of transcendence. To quote Merleau-Ponty out of context, wonder involves immersion in a temporal flux where the subject “steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them closer to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals the world as strange and paradoxical (2002: xv). Part 03 of Secrets attempts to re-embody the dispossessed self through forms of ritualistic cleansing so that the sense of wonder depicted in the performance’s opening scenes can re-emerge. As noted earlier in this chapter, at the beginning of Scene 13, just after the group of six aerialists have climbed the red tissues and are slowly slipping back towards the ground, a line of women with white faces enters in single file. They each carry a large white bowl filled with water, which they cradle with both hands as they slowly walk towards the front righthand-side of the performance space. Here they kneel on the ground, with their bowls placed carefully before them, and begin a ritual cleansing that erases the masks of anonymity and allows their individual faces to emerge.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

134

The words of the accompanying song, “I close my eyes; I can see where I want to be”, underscores the paradox of an emerging visibility with a closing of the eyes to affirm an inner space that opens out towards a desire that is not held within a pre-existing world. Emerging into visibility through closing one’s eyes engenders a desire that is productive and effectively highlights a notion of the sacred that calls forth Antonin Artaud’s conception of a ‘theatre of cruelty’. Jacques Derrida argues that Artaud’s notion of the sacred is more than a simple displacement because it enables an “irruptive force fissuring the space of the stage” (2001: 308). In Secrets this generative life force begins to take shape in the second sequence of aerials in Scene 13, after the woman from the bath tub has closed her eyes, and with the support of the other women, entered what is effectively a form of ‘blind vision’ and which enables forces of life and generation to erupt within the sequence of rising and falling aerials that follows. In contrast to the representation of mirroring and violence depicted in “Disclosure” (Scene 12), the movement here is one of reversibility, one that is embodied by the movements of the aerialists along the red tissues and which underscores being as process and the emergence of difference as that which is enabled through an embodied community (represented by the trope of interlinking arms and many hands). This is what allows the aerialists to complete the sequence of climbing and tumbling and to slide back towards the earth, upright, and with their arms extended (an action that mirrors the children gazing towards the sky in awe and wonder at the beginning of the production). The sacredness that imbues the representation of the aerialists as they slide down the red tissues with their arms extended and their palms held open, towards the audience, is curiously resonant with the biblical image of Christ on the cross (Fig.04). The reversibility of the controlled falls unfolds into the offering of one’s body to the other and to the world. Rather than attempting to colonise or suppress the other, this action of blind offering (closing the eyes and opening out the body) invites participation with an other who remains radically other.

“WHEN I’M UP HERE IT FEELS LIKE HEAVEN”

135

Figure 04. Sacred offerings. Secrets, Part 03, Scene 13: “Becoming Visible/ Struggling to Rebuild”. Reproduced courtesy of Tony Watts, Parrot Video.

In the gardening scene that follows the aerial performance of Scene 13, the elderly woman is visited by her neighbours who bring gifts of urine for the lemon tree as offerings, so that the tree will reach higher and higher (towards the level of culture) and then bloom into a profusion of citrus blossoms and fruit. The tree does not subsume the women in its growth. The urine that has come from the body of the women, as a splitting away, is offered to the tree as a life process, and the blossoming of the tree reenacts the offering as another form of transgrediance, one which is intrinsically material. The aerialists and the woman from the bath tub in Scene 13 all close their eyes to enact an emergence into a visibility that lies within the invisible as an emergence-in-reverse. At the same time, they elevate themselves towards the level of culture and language, emerging towards individuality, to enact a surpassing that does not leave its field. The aerialists are caught by the tissue when they tumble back towards the ground, and the tissue becomes the means of elevation and descent in its support of the body. The woman from the bath tub rests on the hands of the many women who support her elevation and emergence. Similarly, the

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

136

lemon reaches towards culture and language (the upper level of the stage set) but remains rooted — both roots and branches spreading through the soil and air simultaneously, and blossoms erupting with new life. This series of relations suggests that the visible and the invisible therefore remain inextricably linked as the inverse and obverse of each other. The community of ‘many hands’ that is continually reiterated throughout the production of Secrets, the interlinking bodies and the voice-overs narrating the heterogenous experiences of the women, all attest to experience as a cluster of visions, touches and ‘little subjectivities’. Visibility therefore becomes what Merleau-Ponty argues is “a quality pregnant with texture, a grain or corpuscle born by a wave of Being” (1968: 136). As Part 03 of Secrets illustrates, the emerging individual does aim for a transcendent Subjectivity but is part of a complex process that implicates texture and materiality within all systems of meaning-production. Radical Negativity and Political Efficacy The paradoxes of being and expression articulated by the Women’s Circus in Secrets, together with their refusal to resolve these tensions into a singular transcendent principle, foregrounds an inherent radical negativity implicit in the relationship between the one who sees and the one who is seen. The process of cleansing in Scene 13 and the emphasis on seeing through the closing of one’s eyes underscores the invisible, unmarked aspects of identity. In Secrets, these are enabled by moving away from the objective world represented in the mirroring actions of Scene 12 as one which bifurcates consciousness and object, and instead moving towards a world of desire that is a radical negativity of the invisible. Such a move resists reappropriation into hegemonic structures of signification which have marked the bodies of the women in the circus as other, abject, and/or grotesque. The processes of emergence and retreat, of rising and falling, enfolding and splitting, which underwrite the contingent subject in Secrets engender a politics of presence in absence — one which is predicated on impotence and loss. In Secrets, individual identity emerges in the space of a blink as a resistance to pre-determined and fixed structures of representation. Secrets

“WHEN I’M UP HERE IT FEELS LIKE HEAVEN”

137

illustrates the ways in which stereotypical images (such as the good housewife, or the victim of violence) are inscribed and contained by structures that exist external to the self, and also how these structures can be destabilised through a politics of radical negativity. This kind of politics accepts the slippages that occur in the failure of both the body and language to fully express the intentionality of meaning. Moreover, it resists the idea that visibility equals efficacy and that one need only speak to be heard. The Women’s Circus integrates an intrinsic physicality into the process of representation. The housewife aerials in Scene 08 effectively illustrate the way in which meaning diverges from perception, so the excess that is encapsulated in the sign of the ‘good housewife’ or the ‘pretty maids’ can be taken up in new processes of becoming, new forms of embodiment. Artaud argues that the embodiment of speech construes the process of affirmation as pure expenditure (1970: 69), where experience of the world (perception) unfolds and produces its own space at the limit of representation. In Secrets, the cleansing routine of Scene 13 enables the women to close their eyes and move towards a radical negativity of the invisible, which in turn generates a sense of intensive awareness — both of wonder towards the world and its others (the other women and the audience). The invocation of an intensive awareness that is both conceptual and highly corporeal engenders what Derrida refers to as a “passionate overflowing, a frightful transfer of forces from body to body” (2001: 315). The gesture of invitation to participate by the aerialists in the second red tissue sequence of Scene 13 emphasises the ways in which the audience (those who look and hear) is necessarily implicated within the structures of the performance, and of representation itself. Their gesture of open arms, as they slide back down towards the ground to reconnect with the materiality of the earth, is immediate and contextual. Their gesture of opening towards the audience includes everyone within the force that is beginning to sweep through the performance. When the act of celebration occurs in Scene 14, the audience is then swept into the joy of the festivities, and perhaps transformed through an experience that has implicated both performers and audience in its unfolding. As pure

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

138

expenditure, the performance cannot be reproduced and so it resists the actions of those systems that ordinarily seek to colonise or suppress it as a legitimate discourse. It is significant that Women’s Circus productions inhabit borrowed spaces with the (sub)urban fabric of the city. Their performances have taken place in a disused brickworks factory, a ballroom, a town hall, and, for Secrets, a disused shipping warehouse in the docklands area. I have already discussed at some length the way in which the violence of Scenes 7 and 12 critique the imposition, or mirroring, of representational systems that are external to the self and which, in most Western societies, are governed by a masculinist hegemony that (re)inscribes woman, nature, and body, as an inferior other. I also discussed the ways in which the women in the housewife aerials nevertheless take up a position within this system (one which predetermines them as either ‘pretty maids’ of ‘good housewives’) in order to undermine those very structures. In a similar manner, the Women’s Circus production of Secrets inhabits the borrowed space of the shipping warehouse — one which can also be seen as the traditional domain of a masculinist culture. In this way, the critique in Scenes 07 and 12 of structures underwriting culture and language as ones that are based on an agonistic struggle resulting in colonisation and appropriation of the other’s body can also be applied to systems of capital exchange and proprietary power. Situating the performance of Secrets in a zone of capital exchange suggests that the Women’s Circus is here enacting what Michel de Certeau refers to as “a guileful ruse” (1988: 37) — that is, a surprise eruption into dominant systems (of exchange, or of representation) which creates fractures and crosscuts in their frameworks. Accordingly, references to a singular, transcendent meaning become unsustainable. We are compelled to view such systems as “an ensemble of practices in which one is implicated” and through which the force of life, or the passionate overflow of being, is intrinsically at work. The articulation in Secrets of radical negativity as a form of political efficacy is analogous to the work of the New York-based performance group, the Guerrilla Girls —an anonymous group of women whose aim is to expose the racist and sexist practices prevalent within the art world. The Guerrilla Girls hide their faces beneath furry gorilla masks but dress in conventional

“WHEN I’M UP HERE IT FEELS LIKE HEAVEN”

139

women’s clothing, such as mini-skirts and high heels. Their first action was inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1985 survey of contemporary art, in which they included only nineteen female artists and none of colour amongst the 165 artists they represented in their exhibition. The Guerrilla Girls displayed posters and signs all over New York city listing statistics on gender and race discrimination in New York galleries. One poster in particular noted that of all the art displayed in the Met Museum of New York, only 5% of the artists were male, and yet 85% of the nudes displayed were female. These posters were placed in unconventional zones, in a similar manner to graffiti, such as on construction sites, the sides of buildings, and the doors of closed galleries in order to highlight these actions as subversive to mainstream systems of representation (Freeland 2001: 122). Both the Guerrilla Girls and the Women’s Circus attempt to undermine the structures of masculinist culture by inhabiting the spaces within those structures differently — that is, in a manner that resists the visible identities that have ordinarily consigned them to an objectified sexual object (nudes in art, or victims of sexual molestation). The Women’s Circus resists the elevation of any singular individual to the status of ‘star performer’. When the cast and crew participate in the final act of celebration, they move in groups to the front of the stage and then retreat to the back in order to allow others to appear. The motion once again enacts a fluid process of emergence and retreat that is not predicated on visible signs of identity, or marked by the notions of ownership and exchange that govern capitalist economies. In Secrets, the Women’s Circus depicts the movement towards a radical negativity of the invisible as a political action that is engendered through a reversibility of flesh and the idea. Taking up a position of radical invisibility, or radical otherness, does not renounce the body, but insists upon the materiality of all being and consciousness, so that, as they are caught up in the passionate flow of life force, the audience is prompted into a consideration of the silences and absences existing within dominant structures of culture and language. The scenes of violence and domination depicted in Secrets highlight the way in the body of the other is abjected as a remainder in the process of transcendence — one that parallels the

140

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

process inherent within the hierarchical sublime and where the presence of the grotesque remainder lingers as a textured absence. Despite their resistance to hierarchical models of transformation, the Women’s Circus also resists processes that aim to include differences without contradiction. Instead, they depict relations as reversible (flesh and the idea, individual and community, body and mind, self and other, nature and culture, and so on) where one moves beyond the other without leaving or fully transcending its condition of possibility. This process underscores a version of the sublime that is not only horizontal, but one that remains incarnate. In this sense, the sublime articulated by the Women’s Circus is an oxymoronic sublime because it gestures towards a transcendent principle but remains humanistic. This embodied horizontal sublime is a fleshly sublime that sustains both mute perception and language, and manifests by a carnal existence of the idea as well as a sublimation of the flesh.

A New Transcendental

Western definitions of the political have traditionally understood this term as predicated on organisation and action. The domain of political action is usually thought to pertain to a notion of adhering or belonging to the interests of status and/or authority in an organisation. It is not usually thought to concern matters of principle but as a striving to attain legitimacy within state-sanctioned representational structures. Groups or individual working within the political have most often strived towards such goals through the assertion of voice, identity and self-empowerment, asserting claims for visible space as a way of staking such claims to identity. Traditional theories of subject-constitution, as well as the traditional hierarchical sublime, also reiterate claims to legitimate subject positions through increased visibility, individuality and autonomy by underscoring the process of mirror-reflection, which is, they argue, necessary to the formation of organisational structures (of the individual or the State). The authors and performers I have examined here, in various ways, resisted the notion of a politics grounded on action and visibility. They have refused representational structures that engender the construction of a subject who is solely individual and autonomous, and which found a notion of agency, power and legitimacy upon the idea of such a subject. Brossard, Yasbincek and the Women’s Circus welcome forms of nonbeing as potentiality. In other words, in Le Désert mauve , liv and Secrets, being is depicted as a potential non-being, or a potentiality that resides in non-being. These texts articulate forms of action on the verge of being, an action which resides within passivity and which is not simply opposed to activity but is passive in the radical sense. Each of these texts suggests that before taking on the particularity of a ‘subject’ (before entering into the ‘I am’ of being as existence), the ‘self’ remains an extreme possibility. The self therefore exists as potential. As Thomas Carl Wall writes, this kind of ‘subject’ is “the null event of an actuality” (1999: 2). A politics of radical passivity, and of the potential, is a politics that does not canvas action or engagement as a means of bringing the perceived world, or ‘reality’, into an alignment with the ideal. Instead, it is a politics based on the notion of subtraction or withdrawal. It is one that emphasises

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

142

the limits of being and discourse not as closure, but as an opening and an invitation to further (trans)mutations. When

Maude

Laures

gestures

towards

a

(mauve)

horizon

of

consciousness, she highlights the limit-zone as a space of possibility. In liv, Olivia consistently reiterates the notion of a subjective dissolution as a way to escape structures that fix meaning and circumscribe identity. One gathers a sense of form at the limit boundary, at the point of dispersal. The Women’s Circus highlights a reverse-invisibility where the subject emerges at the point of speaking, not as one who can be identified as an autonomous individual, but as a circulation within discourse itself. The notion of radical passivity is also inherent to Barbara Freeman and Patricia Yaeger’s versions of the horizontal sublime. They argue for a relation to the world that does not attempt to master, control or dominate the other but to respect the radicality of the other. These sublimes are predicated on a passive openness towards the world. A true radical passivity would, however, resist the claims to ownership that Freeman and Yeager make in the service of a ‘feminine sublime’. A sublime that is radically passive would undermine the gendered binaries determining masculine/ feminine oppositions. To a certain extent, Brossard constructs a similar space of femininity (a lesbian utopian space in the desert) which might, on first account, seem to accord with the horizontal sublime of Freeman and Yaeger. However, as I argued, Maude Laures’ interaction with this space through dialogue begins to gesture towards transformations that are more open and fluid than either Freeman or Yaeger’s sublimes would suggest. Yasbincek and the Women’s Circus take this notion even further by refusing to claim radical passivity as the domain of any one individual or group. They open structures of representation to indeterminacy, flux and process so that any such claims of ownership become unsustainable. While the authors and performers we have discussed recognise the value of the sublime as a means of political engagement, they focus on the space that is opened up between subject and world rather than on the final stage of inflation and individual autonomy. They foreground a relation to the world that is, as Giorgio Agamben writes, concerned not with “discovering its object but in assuring the conditions of its inaccessibility” (1977: xvi).

A NEW TRANSCENDENTAL

143

Inhabiting the sublime from a position of radical passivity means that the other, who remains radically other, elsewhere and unknowable, must be approached as other — that is, outside identity. The characters of Maude Laures, Olivia, and the women of the circus do not attempt to claim ‘selves’ as subjects of discourse but to inhabit zone of communicability and interaction where they can brush up against the other without claiming ownership of the world or its representation. In Le Désert mauve, Brossard highlights the mutual dynamic of an encounter between two as an unfolding and a double-touch. In liv, Yasbincek emphasises the multi-dimensional nature of complex systems that insist upon multiple connections and dispersals, thus engendering complex ‘subjectivities’. In the Women’s Circus, community and individual participate in a process of mutual recognition that enables each as a process of unfolding and splitting. Therefore, in the spirit of radical passivity, and as I approach the last pages of this work, the point where I make my language visible by silencing it (and thus by turning it into an object), I want to position Brossard, Yasbincek and the Women’s Circus within a dialogic zone that gestures towards further connections and reverberations beyond this moment of my speaking. In other words, I would like to suggest that these last pages function not as closing statements, but rather as a frayage towards other possibilities, openings towards new explorations where free radicals enter zones of proximity to dis/rupt and trans/form contexts and meanings. In recent years, theorists such as Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot and Giorgio Agamben have developed ways of thinking about radical passivity and radical otherness that parallel representations of a contingent ‘subjectivity-in-process’ depicted by Brossard, Yasbincek and the Women’s Circus. Blanchot describes a region of obscurity, the il y a [there is], that is intrinsically alien to revelation because, as he argues, “it transforms everything that has access to it, even light, into anonymous and impersonal being, the Nontrue, the Nonreal and yet always there” (1982: 31). According to Blanchot, writing enacts a withdrawal of the self into this region of ambiguity where nothing is revealed or expressed because nothing is hidden. The il y a withdraws language from the world (as a separation of power), not into interiority or privacy but into an exile in which inwardness is unhoused (1982: 26).

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

144

Agamben also articulates an experience of language that does not rest on a negative foundation but which attempts to define an ‘interworld’ that is populated with beings who neither betray an essence nor a substance but a “not-otherwiseness” (1993). The performers in the Women Circus exemplify this form of ‘non-subjectivity’ as that which is beyond identity. The women of the circus do not identify with any one specific role (there are no ‘stars’ in the circus) but move freely between and imperceptibly within interzones. They exist within these intermediate zones as fragments of identity. These articulations of being and subjectivity gesture towards an unknowable other, or a world that cannot be defined. In this sense we might question whether radical passivity is, perhaps, a new transcendental. The insistence of these writers, from Brossard to Agamben, on the radicality of the other underscores an ethics that, as Levinas suggests, occurs in every encounter with difference. Contact with the other as radical other invokes a call to responsibility and accountability that cannot be negated, even if this difference is denied or annihilated. As we saw only too clearly in Frankenstein and in Le Désert mauve , the ‘subject’ who attempts to deny the call of the other is always already a hostage of the other, and of the ethical demand. It is through the encounter with the other who remains radically other, and through the giving over of the self to the world as an open responsiveness that the self becomes aware of corporeal boundaries at the point of contact. It is this limit-state of dual or multiple contact, the moment of speaking, where little subjectivities emerge, not through inflation and self-consciousness awareness, but as a circulation across the wide-ranging complexities of discourse.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. 1981 [1955]. Prisms. Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community.

Translated by Michael Hardt.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Akihiro, Takahashi. 1986. “What Does it Mean to Live in Hiroshima?” Survivor Testimony. Hiroshima Peace Memorial Virtual Museum.

<www.pcf. city.hiro-

shima.jp/virtual/VirtualMuseum_e/visit_e/vist_fr_e.html> (15 October 2005). Artaud, Antonin. 1970. The Theatre and Its Double.

Translated by Victor Corti.

London: Calder Publications. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 2001. “Australia’s Centenary of Federation”. <www.abc.net.au/federation/fedstory/ep2/ep2_institutions.htm> (06 December 2008). Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship. “More than Sixty Years of PostWar Migration”. (30 January 2007). Australian

Institute

of

Family

Studies.

2007.

“Statistics.”

Home

page.

<www.aifs.gov.au/acssa/statistics/html> (26 August 2007). Baillie, John. 1953 [1747]. An Essay on the Sublime.

Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint

Society. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World.

Translated by Hélène Iswolsky.

Bloomington: Indiana UP. Balint, Michael. 1959. Thrills and Regressions. New York: International Universities Press. BBC. 2005. “French violence ‘back to normal’”. BBC News. 17 November. Beattie, James. 2003 [1783]. Dissertations Moral and Critical.

Whitefish: Kessinger

Publishing. Beissbarth, Ev, and Jo Turner (eds.). 1997. Women’s Circus: Leaping Off the Edge. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Bensmaïa, Réda. 1986. “Foreword: The Kafka Effect”, in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. By Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Foreword translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

146

Berger, Stefan. 2006. A Companion to Nineteenth Century Europe, 1789-1914. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Bernard-Donals, Michael. 1998. “Knowing the Subaltern: Bakhtin, Carnival, and the Other Voice of the Human Sciences” in Michael Mayerfeld Bell and Michael Gardiner (eds.). Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words.

London: Sage

Publications, 112-127. Bertens, Hans. 1995. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge. Bhaktivedanta, A.C. (trans.). 1983. Bhagavad Gita: As It Is.

Alachua: Bhaktivedanta

Book Trust. Blanchot, Maurice. 1989. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Bolton, Elizabeth Susan. 1992. “Transcendence and Transgression: From the Sublime to the Grotesque”. Dissertation, Yale University. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brossard, Nicole. 1985. La Lettre aérienne. Montréal: Remue-ménage. Brossard, Nicole. 1987. Le Désert mauve. Montréal: l’Héxagone. Burke, Edmund. 1990 [1757]. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford UP. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1997a. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.

New York:

Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1997b. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection.

Stanford:

Stanford UP. Cage, John. 1938. Lectures and Writings. London: Marion Boyars. Caillois, Roger. 1984. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”. Translated by John Shepley. October 31, 17-32. Caldicott, Helen. 1979. Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do! New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Caslav Corvino, Deborah. 2000. “Abject Criticism”. Genders 32. <www.genders.org/g32/g32_corvino.html> (19 August 2003).

WORKS CITED

147

Castro, Brian. 1996. “Writing Asia”. Australian Humanities Review

1.


robe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-April-1996/home.html> (05 September 2004). Castro, Brian. 1998. “Dangerous Dancing: Autobiography and Disinheritance”. Australian Humanities Review

12.


December-1998/home.html> (05 September 2004). Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome (ed.). 1996. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cohen, Josh. 2003. Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy.

London:

Continuum. Coleborne, Catharine. 2001. Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of the Empire. Manchester: Manchester UP. Colebrook, Claire. 2005. Philosophy and Post-Structuralist Theory: From Kant to Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 2000. Collected Letters, Volume 1, 1801-1806.

Edited by

Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Curran, Beverley, and Mitoko Hirabayashi. 1997. “Translation: Making a Space for a New Narrative in Le Désert mauve ”. International Journal of Canadian Studies/ Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 15, 109-120. Day, Aidan. 1995. Romanticism. London: Routledge. De Bolla, Peter. 1989. The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject. London: Basil Blackwell. De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life.

Translated by Steven

Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1984. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1999. Foucault. Translated by Séan Hand. London: Continuum. Deleuze,

Gilles,

and

Félix

Guattari.

1983.

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, et al. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: The Athlone Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1980. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

148

Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. De Peuter, Jennifer. 1998. “The Dialogics of Narrative Identity” in Michael Mayerfeld Bell and Michael Gardiner (eds.). Bakhtin and the Human Sciences. London: Sage Publications, 30-48. Eagleton, Terry. 1981. Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London: Verso. Edwards, Paul. 1996. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT Press. Felman, Shoshana. 1983. The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Ferguson, Frances. 1984. “The Nuclear Sublime”. Diacritics 14.2, 4-10. Ferguson, Frances. 1992. Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation. New York: Routledge. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 1968 [1806]. Addresses to the German Nation. Translated by R.F. Jones and G.H. Turnbull. New York: Harper Collins. Fink, Eugen. 1966. Studien der Phänomenologie 1930-1939. Berlin: Nijhoff. Finkelhor, David. 1994. “Current Information on the Scope and Nature of Child Sexual Abuse”. The Future of Children 4.2, 31-53. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol.1: An Introduction.

Translated

by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. Frame, Janet. 1988. The Carpathians. London: Flamingo. Franklin, Bruce. 1988. War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination. Oxford: OUP. Freeland, Cynthia. 2001. But Is It Art? Oxford: OUP. Freeman, Barbara. 1987. “Frankenstein with Kant: A Theory of Monstrosity, or the Monstrosity of Theory”. Substance 16.1, 21-31. Freeman, Barbara. 1997. The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in W

omen’s

Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Frielander, Shems. 1992. The Whirling Dervishes. New York: SUNY Press. Gans, Carl. 1974. ”How Snakes Move” in Norman K. Wessells (ed.). Vertebrate Structures and Functions: Readings from Scientific American. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Co., 38-47.

WORKS CITED

149

Gardiner, Michael. 1998. “‘The Incomparable Monster of Solipsism’: Bakhtin and Merleau-Ponty” in Michael Mayerfeld Bell and Michael Gardiner (eds.). Bakhtin and the Human Sciences. London: Sage Publications, 128-144. Gasché, Rodolphe. 1986. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Gerard, Alexander. 1759. An Essay on Tatse, with Three Dissertations on the Same Subject by Mr De Volatire, Mr D’Alembert, Mr De Montesquieu. London: A. Millar. Gerard, Alexander. 1780. An Essay on Taste: To Which Is Now Added Part Fourth, of the Standard of Taste, with Observations Concerning the Imitative Nature of Poetry. London: J. Bell, W. Creech, and T. Cadell. Gilpin, William. 1794. Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Other Woodland Views. London: R. Blamire. Godard, Barbara. 1989. “Theorising Feminist Discourse/Translation.” Tessera 16, 4253. Gould, Karen. 1996. “Rewriting ‘America’: Violence, Postmodernity, and Parody in the Fiction of Madeleine Monette, Nicole Brossard and Monique LaRue” in Mary Jean Green, et al (eds.). Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 186-209. Groves, Leslie R. 1963. Now It Can Be Told: The Inside Story of the Development of the Atomic Bomb. London: Andre Deutsch. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1989. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists.

Sydney: Allen

and Unwin. Gyory, Andrew. 1998. Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hartman, Geoffrey. 1964. Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814. New Haven: Yale UP. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1997 [1802]. Faith and Knowledge. Translated by W. Cerf and H.S. Harris. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hertz, Neil. 1985. “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime” in Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.). Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1976-77. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 40-60. Home Office. “Sexual Offences”. Home page. <www. homeoffice.gov.uk/crimevictims/reducing-crime/sexual-offences /> (26 August 2007). Hume, David. 1986 [1739]. A Treatise on Human Nature. London: Penguin Classics. Hume, David. 2000 [1777a]. Enquiries Concerning Human Unde Concerning the Principles of Morals. Oxford: OUP.

rstanding and

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

150

Hume, David. 2004 [1777b]. The Natural History of Religion.

Whitefish: Kessinger

Publications. Hume, David. 1990 [1779]. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. London: Penguin Classics. Hurd, Richard. 1762. Letters on Chivalry and Romance. London: Richard Watts. Inglis, Christine. 2004. “Australia’s Continuing Transformation”. Migration Policy Institute. <www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/Display.cfm?ID-242> (19 April 2006). Irigaray, Luce. 1993. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Irigaray, Luce. 1996. I love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History. Translated by Alison Martin. New York: Routledge. Jackson, Mick (dir.). 1984. Threads (telefilm), by Barry Hines. British Broadcasting Corporation. Jagose, Annamarie. 1994. Lesbian Utopics. London: Routledge. Jupp, James. 2001. The Australian People: An Encyclop edia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Kames, Lord Henry. 2002 [1762]. Elements of Criticism. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific. Kant, Immanuel. 2005 [1785]. The Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Translated by H.J. Paton. London: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel. 1993 [1787]. The Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Miller Dow Meikeljohn. London: Everyman. Kant, Immanuel. 1952 [1790]. The Critique of Judgement. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford UP. Kearney, Richard. 2002. Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness. London: Routledge. Keats, John. 1975. Letters of John Keats. Edited by Robert Gittings. Oxford: Oxford UP. Keller, Evelyn Fox, and Christine R. Grontowski. 1983. “The Mind’s Eye” in Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (eds.). Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 207-224. Kirwan, James. 2005. Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics. New York: Routledge.

WORKS CITED

151

Knight, Richard Payne. 1805. An Analytical Enquiry Into the Principles of Taste. London: T. Payne and J. White. Krech, Shepard, et al. (eds.). 2004. Encyclopaedia of World Environmental History, Vol.2. New York: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP. Kristeva, Julia. 1984. The Revolution in Poetic Language.

Translated by Margaret

Waller. New York: Columbia UP. Lemon, Andrea, et al.

2000. Secrets.

Unpublished script. The Women’s Circus,

Footscray. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority.

Translated

by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1978. Existence and Existens.

Translated by Alphonse Lingis.

Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence.

Translated by

Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. Livingston, Ira. 1997. Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity.

Minnesota:

University of Minnesota Press. Lorraine, Tamsin. 1999. Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Mack, Michael. 2003. German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maddison, Angus. 2001. The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Paris: OECD. Maddock, Kenneth. 1978. “Introduction” in Ira B. Buchler and Kenneth Maddock (eds.). The Rainbow Serpent: A Chromatic Piece. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. Mandel, Naomi. 2001. “Rethinking “After Auschwitz”: Against a Rhetoric of the Unspeakable in Holocaust Writing”. Boundary 2 28.2, 203-228. Marlatt, Daphne. 1989. “Translating MAUVE: Reading Writing”. Tessera 6, 27-30. Malpas, Simon. 2002. Jean-François Lyotard. London: Routledge. Masco, Joseph. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton: Princeton UP.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

152

Mayerfeld Bell, Michael, and Michael Gardiner (eds.). 1998. Bakhtin and the Human Sciences. London: Sage Publications. MacAfee, Nöel. 2004. Julia Kristeva. New York: Routledge. McGahan, Susan. 1992. “Cleavages of Mauve Desert as a Post-structuralist Feminist Mystery Novel: Re-covering the ‘private’ investigative subject”. Tessera 13, 101118. McMahon, Cliff. 2004. Reframing the Sublime: Pillars and Modes.

Lewiston: Edwin

Mellen Press. Mellor, Anne K. (ed.). 1988. Romanticism and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Mendel, M.P. 1995. The Male Survivor: The Impact of Sexual Abuse.

London: Sage

Publications. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern UP. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Meyer, Nicholas (dir.). 1983. The Day After (telemovie), by Edward Hume. American Broadcasting Company. Mills, Alice (ed.). 1999. Seriously Weird: Papers on the Grotesque. New York: Peter Lang. Murphy, Brian. 1993. The Other Australia: Experiences of Migration.

Cambridge:

Cambridge UP. Murphy, Kara. 2006. “France’s New Law: Control Immigration Flows, Court the Highly Skilled”. Migration Policy Institute.

<www.migrationinformation.org/fea-

ture/display.cfm?ID=486> (12 March 2008). Nikolopoulou, Kalliopi. 2006. “As If: Kant, Adorno and the Politics of Poetry”. MLN 121, 757-773. Nye, David E. 1994. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge: MIT Press. O’Connor, Flannery. 1971. “The Displaced Person” in The Complete Stories.

New

York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 194-235. Olalquiaga, Celeste. 1999. The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of Kitsch Experience. London: Bloomsbury. Pease, Donald. 1984. “Sublime Politics.” Boundary 2 12.3/13.1, 259-279. Peers, Douglas M. 2006. “Britain and Empire” in Chris Williams (ed.). A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 53-78.

WORKS CITED

153

Peters, Greg Lewis. 1992. “Dominance and Subversion: The Horizontal Sublime and Erotic Empowerment in the Works of Kathy Acker”, in Nicholas Ruddick (ed.). State of the Fantastic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, 1990. Westport: Greenwood Press, 149-156. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Pireddu,

Nicoletta.

1996.

“Beyond

Figuration,

Below

the

Threshold:

Some

Observations on Postmodernism and the Sublime”. Negations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Social Thought

1.1.

<www.datawranglers.com/negations/is-

sues/96w/96w_pireddu.html> (25 June 2002). Prasad, Ramanand (trans.). 1988. “Bhagavad Gita”. Exploring Ancient World Cultures. <eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/gita.htm> (05 January 2006). Quigley, Margaret Allen. 2000. “Desiring Intersubjects: Lesbian poststructuralism in writing by Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, and Dione Brand”. Dissertation: University of Alberta. RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network). 2006. “Statistics”. Home page. (26 August 2007). Reynolds, Henry. 1996. Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Rhodes, Richard. 1986. The Making of the Atom Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster. Robyns, Clem. 1994. “Translation and Discursive Identity”. Poetics Today 15.3, 405428. Rose, Steven. 1975. The Conscious Brain. New York: Knopf. Ross, Marlon B. 1988. “Romantic Quest and Conquest” in Anne K. Mellor (ed.). Romanticism and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Russo, Mary. 1994. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, Modernity.

New York:

Routledge. Ryan, Vanessa L. 2001. “The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason”. Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2, 265-279. Saïd, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Santoro, Miléna. 1997. “Feminist Translation: Writing and Transmission among Women in Nicole Brossard’s Le Désert mauve and Madeleine Gagnon’s Lueur” in Roseanna Lewis Dufault (ed.). Women Writers of Fiction in Quebec since 1980. Dickinson: Associated University Presses, 147-168.

Fairleigh

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

154

Sax, Benjamin, and Dieter Kuntz. 1992. Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich. Lexington: D.C. Heath. Schell, Jonathan. 2000 [1982]. The Fate of the Earth. Chicago: Stanford UP. Schmitt, Gary J., and Reuel Marc Gerecht. 2006. “A Post-Gaullist, Pro-American France?”. AEI Online. <www.aei.org/publications/pubID.25264/pub_detail.asp> (11 December 2006). Sciolino, Elaine. 2005. “Chirac, Lover of Spotlight, Avoids Glare of France’s Fires”. New York Times. 10 November. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 2003. “Mutability” in Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (eds.). The Major Works. Edited by Oxford: Oxford UP, 112. Shelley, Mary. 1969 [1818]. Frankenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slade, Andrew. 2007. Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, and the Postmodern Sublime.

New

York: Peter Lang. Smith, Andrew. 2000. Gothic Radicalism. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Snyder, Louis Leo. 1955. The Age of Reason. New York: Van Nostrand. South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council (SWALSC). 2007. “Noongar History and Culture Fact Sheet”. Home page. <www. noongar.org.au/ factsheets.php> (27 August 2007). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (eds.). Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.

Chicago:

University of Illinois Press, 271-313. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1990. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Edited by Sarah Harasym. London: Routledge. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. Outside in the Teaching Machine.

New York:

Routledge. Stackelberg, Roderick. 1999. Hitler’s Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies. London: Routledge. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Sturgess, Charlotte. 2000. “Body, Text and Subjectivity in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Nicole Brossard’s Mauve Desert”. Etudes Canadiennes/ Candian Studies. 49, 59-66. Sturgess, Charlotte. 2003. Redefining the Subject: Sites of Play in Canadian Women’s Writing. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

WORKS CITED

155

Tabbi, Joseph. 1995. Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Thackeray, Frank W., and John E. Findling. 1996. Events That Changed the World in the Nineteenth Century. Westport: Greenwood Press. Thompson, Edward, and Dan Smith. 1981. Protest and Survive. New York: Monthly Review Press. Tierney, Robert. 2006. “Migrants and Class in Post-war Australia”. Marxist Interventions: Articles from Australia in the Social Sciences. <www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/interventions/migrants.htm> (19 April 2006). Trifonova, Temenuga. 2007. The Image in French Philosophy. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Trottein, Serge. 2000. “The Beauty of the Postmodern Sublime” in Robert Harvey and Ann E. Kaplan (eds.). Afterwords: Essays in Memory of Jean-François Lyotard. Stony Brook: State University of New York, 73-84. Vandiver, Donna M. and Jeffrey T. Walker. 2002. “Female Sex Offenders: An Overview and Analysis of 40 Cases”. Criminal Justice Review. 27.2, 284-300. Vasseleu, Cathryn. 1998. Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. London: Routledge. Wachowski, Andy, and Larry Wachowski. 1999. The Matrix. Edited by Zach Staenberg. DVD-ROM. Village Roadshow. Wall, Thomas Carl. 1999. Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben.

New

York: State University of New York Press. Weart, Spencer. 1988. Nuclear Fear: A History of Images. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Weiskel, Thomas. 1976. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP. Williams, James. 2000. Lyotard and the Political. London: Routledge. Willsher, Kim. 2006. “Sarkozy reaches out to far-right voters”. The Guardian. Monday 24 April. Women’s Circus. 2001. Secrets. Performance. Written by Andrea Lemon. Directed by Sarah Cathcart. Music composed by Kim Baston. Shed 14, Melbourne Docklands. 22 November — 08 December. Women’s Circus. 2003. Odditorium. Performance. Directed by Andrea Lemon. Arts House, North Melbourne. 29 November — 13 December. Wordsworth, William. 1853. The Excursion. London: Edward Moxon.

AMBIGUOUS SUBJECTS

156

Wordsworth, William. 1994. “The Prelude” in John O. Hayden (ed.). Selected Poems. London: Penguin. 307-429. Yaeger, Patricia. 1989. “Toward a Female Sublime” in Linda Kauffman (ed.). Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 191-212. Yaeger, Patricia. 1992. “The ‘Language of Blood’: Toward a Maternal Sublime”. Genre 25: 5-24. Yasbincek, Morgan. 2000. liv. Fremantle: FACP. Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.