Review: Holograms of Desire Author(s): Alice Parker Reviewed work(s): Writing in the Feminine: Feminism and Experimental Writing

in Quebec by Karen Gould Source: The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Dec., 1990), pp. 28-29 Published by: Old City Publishing, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20109683 Accessed: 22/03/2010 06:58
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Two
The Right i.

Poems
toMourn

Holograms by Alice Parker

across from us,

of

desire

So one more house is going up

down the road, almost

in Quebec, by Karen in the Feminine: Feminism and Experimental Writing Writing Gould. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990,302 pp., $32.50 hardcover. For THElast two decades Montreal has
been the scene of an exciting new writ

in what for thirty years I have regarded

not but as my personal as a meadow a hollow meadow that except for grass, Anne's Lace

suppressed the traditional lyrical impulse in

poetry and abolished author, narrative and

catnip,

stones, manure, was empty. needs to fix

log, a cowpath, maple wild strawberries, Queen No

possession

the watcher's

innocence.

No claim of mine permits me to intrude on the kingdom of another dreamer.

Anger, always neighbors, until now human there was habitation: an elsewhere.

ing that its practitioners have labeled "writing in the feminine." When I discovered this subversive writing several years ago with Nicole Brossard's French Kiss (1974), my first question was: How do they get away with this? Like many American readers I still believed thatQuebec was quaint, backward, ruled by the Fathers, and that women were largely absent from cultural life. How wrong
I was.

genre/gender sociopolitical
through the use the early By feminists began

in fiction, while transgression,

of eroticism. seventies, to find Gould

promoting especially
explains, to pre

creative

ways

serve the dynamism of the literary practice of

"modernity" ject. the subversive Acknowledging ter of their approaches respective charac to and to recreate a gendered sub

Strange: when I come to people the house inmy head, what I picture is a family gathered around the knowledgeable TV, thirsty for information of their kind,
our kind, the human turns Imean: moment news, sitcom, for our anecdote, A meadow race's ravening dramatized.

In her new book Karen Gould does a masterful job of explaining how a conserva
tive, agrarian, Church-dominated, colonized

to green

backdrop

appetite. Entertain us!

ii.

Less

than half awake, I hazily recall

conversation with my mother.

a recent

Checked
next how-it

tablecloth, a sweaty glass of tea: chin on fist, she n?eds me, facing
to no words to say is that death awaits us all.

people emerged suddenly in the early sixties into the age of "modernity," throwing off in short order centuries of cultural and religious ideology. As in theUS, feminism was bom of leftist politics and the civil rights struggle, in Quebec the struggle for Francophone inde pendence. The four writers Gould analyzes were deeply involved as university students in activity for political reform, precipitated by the death in 1959 of theQuebec "Fuhrer," as Maurice the twenty-year Duplessis,
premier, has been called. Serious r??valua

textual production, the four writers dis cussed at length in this study have challenged themaking of an in-dif
ferent worked text and, to unsilence have in so doing, and recover a

multitude
its own

of female voices, each with

rhythm, tone and story to tell.

(pp.2-3) The intent of this new feminist writing has

been to refashion the symbolic language of

the fathers in which women have functioned as fetishized objects of male desire. The joint goal of the four writers in question has been
to create a space of the "imaginary," literally

tion of the political

transformation

agenda and subsequent

in all areas of

Frightening? Sad? Absurd? Words to that effect.

But what words exactly?

occurred

Though well disguised as true, quotidian, boring, this is a dream thatmuffles both
the sleeper's tongues?as Sturdy, the speaker's do our waking conversations. and years old,

Quebec society. The feminist slogan was to become "No Free Quebec without Freedom forWomen, No Free Women without Quebec
Independence."

to re-figure the imagination by exploring the knowledge women have of their bodies and their feelings. The purpose is to refurbish?to TQ-store?the traditionally phallic repository
of images centered on an asexual Mother. In

The Aerial Letter Nicole

"to write in the feminine

Brossard explains:
means that women

healthy, seventy-four as a large eraser, unemphatic

walking through her days with almost no use left for spoken language, apologizing for the hopeless tedium of the topic,
nevertheless Hi. she dares deplore the end.

Editor of Quebec Studies and Director of Women's Studies and professor of French at Karen Bowling Green State University, Gould is ideally situated for the task of ex plaining experimental feminist writing prac tice in Quebec. She follows Quebec critic
Suzanne with the to work advice in collusion Lamy's on them, texts rather than to operate

must work at making

history, shape, result in the one where is a new

their own hope and

these can take The matter." "fiction-theory" the personal and

place where there is textual genre called

that blurs the boundaries between poetry, fic

tion and the essay, between

the public/political. Gould writes

the texts she reads

providing
works so we she can

luminous readings of the difficult them up and outKaren studies, opening

discern their inner workings and

in solidarity with
with such atten

Travelling,
castle, each

I could hardly wait for each

wind-scoured vineyard

to lie enamelled flat inmemory? an easy wish to gratify. Not only

was the journey's capsule soon to be

each writer's relationship to language and to writing. An astutely knowledgeable guide, she
leads the reader through France an impressive work ter

tion. Thus her Afterword, which ad dresses the theoretical and political implica tions of the act of reading and her own subject
position clusion, nurture mirable as a scholar/critic, developing of very and all is a welcome con on the care and thoughts texts. I find it ad special too rare that a critic combines

ritory that includes very different landscapes

and mindscapes. here she Th?oret's is

wholly digested in the guts of way, but also going home across the sea meant thatwe had no choice
but to turn tail on ten weeks' scenery

located at the juncture of gender and class;

attempts a women. to transmute centuries of

with

repression and silence into a writing

express class "newly-born" Madeleine desire Gagnon a certain

that can
the

such grace scholarship, theory and praxis. Gould has not only done her home
it is extensive?she has produced texts that chal

and pick up our old lives. And here they are, we are, I mean. A house is rising where
a cowfield used to be, the meadow's grace

for working remaps distance to inward perhaps history,

work?and

a volume
readers. She

that will
has

appeal to a variety of

body and inner spaces of the female psyche

work, an between political in her thus early and action putting Marxist commitment recent

presented

stripped brown and raw for driveway, wires, pipes all to hook up the house to other houses,
to place it in its context. There to shrink need now away from foreshortens Presence to There is past. Seated is no at time. sleep's table is no a slow present.

lenge all of our reading strategies without belying their complexity or overburdening
her own prose. of of She reads as she and writes as an accomplice, company sard wrote always, another the observes, Here, in her in the as Bros last novel,

a more

journey. plays?at

There is no time like the present

Louky the

Bersianik intersections

works?or between

woman.

I garble the act of mourning, then shutmy eyes to take it in: the span
of loss, the source, the memory, the green.

and myth, the philosophy emphasizing record of female oppression inWestern cul ture. The most challenging project is doubt less Nicole Brossard's Utopian vision, her "holograms of desire" that truly represent a writing for the twenty-first century. Gould's the American study permits
reader to assess the quiet revolution that has

translator

is a "body to body with the book," a fine metaphor both for reading and for writing. Of the four writers in question?Nicole
Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, France

first two Th?oret and Louky Bersianik?the are doubtless the best known outside of
Quebec. Brossard has more than 25 volumes

A Week
Friday, composes K.

in February
rediscovers fourteen Cavafy. seconds of Saturday, a concerto J. turns four. and nearly G. Sunday, has his hand

slammed in the door by a neighbor who in nine years has so far failed to look him in the face and so doesn't recognize him. Mon day,Woody Allen's film crew is rumored to have thrown away
eighteen Tuesday, cakes the size of bathmats young man and sixty-three fatigues roast an angel-faced in army turkeys. another kills

young man with a karate kick to the head. Wednesday, theAnglo Greek Marxist poet who wants to trash convention mails out a poem that ends "Rain smells like rain." "Feel the rhythm through your fingers!" cries the children's music teacher on Thursday. Big ger and stranger than our separate uses, the spirit of the city wob bles over the park, anchored by a ravelled thread of longing. Friday, preparing to teach The Tempest again next week, Iwonder how to conjure it up newly, that island where travellers keep stum bling embarrassingly over their hearts' desire.
?Rachel Hadas

taking place just across the border; a generation of innovative feminist work has come of age in Quebec, with another just behind it. Although some of us may barely know the names of the principal writers, numerous texts are available in English. On our doorstep, a writing practice is being elaborated that interweaves feminism with all of the significant 4*posts"of our time: post been
modernism, colonialism. post-structuralism and post

to her credit, and was

important Gagnon, avant-garde a professor

founding
and feminist and

editor of
journals. col

sometime

laborator of H?l?ne Cixous, has likewise published continuously since the early seven
ties. She was somewhat slower than Brossard

to relinquish leftist politics in favor of feminism in her writing; recently she has explored a more subjective terrain. Th?oret
has consistently addressed sexism and clas

sism, stressing how painful

working-class women, mired

it has been for

in traditional

Benefiting from their familiarity with European philosophy, Marxism and psycho analysis, avant-garde writers in Montreal went to work in the sixties on the language and on a literary tradition that had focused on the "terroir," the land. An experimental writ ing practice evolved, given the name "New Its practitioners Writing." emphasized, paradoxically, a formalism ("textuality") that

roles, to articulate female desire. Bersianik, trained in linguistics and philosophy, pro vides a subversive rewriting of theory, his tory and myth, emphasizing, as do all of the writers, the significance of memory for the feminist enterprise: as Monique Wittig
have if we declared, to invent cannot remember we will

28

TheWomen's Review of Books / Vol. VIII,No. 3 /December 1990

Feminist readers will discover the distinc tiveness of each writing practice, the struggle
of each writer with a revised process of grammar and syntax, words the physical that can transmuting

tegrate,

as do

the readers'

expectations

of

coherent narrative landscape, but the intent is to "dismantl[e] the barriers to discourse," to chronicle the entry into language for those
who have been and denied consciously act." In her positions words, radically work expression inventive as a "self female

her body, her thoughts and her feelings

ing here in the mid-seventies, is the creation of and called a female that adequately is, as Adrienne

into

them. Writ speak Rich recommended

Keeping by Elizabeth Gratch

How by Maryemma $9.95 paper.

faith

at stake "re-visionary": female subject positions libidinal what Cixous economy, dark continent"

recent

Madeleine writer as,

the woman

Gagnon in Gould's

I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature, by Margaret Walker, edited Graham. New York: The Feminist Press, 1990, 157 pp., $29.95 hardcover,

"unexplorable in the North in question for

denied us by Freud and Lacan.

Grounded four writers ing-place and insistence American interest soil, the us as a meet pragmatics with espe per enter

"an archaeologist of her own body thought," examining layer after layer of sedi mented sensations and experiences WHEN feelings, "as she retraces and hid the shadowy clues den cracks in her own internal development." She she as is above fashions "blueprints new all a survivor; what for...a traces from her solitude in Lueur she characterizes

MARGARET

WALKER'S

Jubilee

? appeared in 1966 30 years in the and critic Guy making?writer

denounced it as a "romance"

Anglo-American on gender

Davenport

specificity

post-structuralisms, Franco-European deconstruction. Gould argues cially for the of their significance suasively prise?the density of their texts,

mitting...the ing forth non

of trans writing capable flashes shoot of archaic

the urgency under the

of their ambitions and the diversity of their

which approaches, rubric of "writing Because lesbian Nicole radical. readers Letter, they come together in the feminine."

both explores female unconscious. These

Like Cixous, Gag meaning." a and a collective personal a sense give barely or Gould's the works, the in Writing in ap the

few examples the rich diversity of on meditation them of Feminine. Gould's

and its author for having "swallowed the myth" of slavery. Walker saw it differently, and in her republished essay "How I Wrote describes the way she went Jubilee''?which about first imagining, then writing, her great Civil War novel ?she calls herself "a novelist in the role of social historian." Fifty years of writing have proved thatWalker is
that?and Her much contribution more. to our literary canon in

insist

on

and desire, body are Brossard perhaps

consciously the texts the most for The

of

Especially noteworthy are her collected essays, and her rewriting

new Aerial (a

to readers peal are writers in question, but also to those who interested in experimental feminist writing, and to those who have a stake in the relation ship between current feminist practice. in explaining theory She and

study will naturally are familiar who with

cludes ten published books (poetry, fiction,

autobiography, social history, literary criti

cism) and many speeches. That she has been neglected and that, according to this vol
ume's editor Maryemma ? even Graham, as an anthology of selection. Margaret "too few

of motherhood

an

particularly difficult institution for Quebec women, given Catholic ideological tradition)
in These Our Mothers. Gould from since all of tracks formalism the mid the struc of a Brossard's through seventies tures of development radical feminism: she has the challenged exploring the she dictionary scrutinizes, word

avant-garde ticularly issues plex

literary successful of

is par the com to a it is a is both

students in today's colleges and universities

know her name poet,

lay audience. "feminist writing women-centered jecting process," elsewhere a vision

in the feminine" "writing As she notes of Brossard, that practice and future-oriented," that of an is

which

she certainly
in our

is," indicates what

system

is
Walker.

abominable

language,

the roots as both modifies in order

word, every using tool and a weapon; and create recontextualizes a new female her

a vision among

pro in "necessarily "ultimate intimate on a woman's

the words

How IWrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature is a first step toward cor recting the omission. This collection of fourteen speeches and essays spanning the years from 1943 to 1988 represents, inGra
ham's words, student years dismissed "a vivid, self-told account was Walk University critics who "uncom of the author's er's life." Graham, who at Northwestern ago, suggests are that

writing
ministration

stint with
in the

the Work
thirties

Projects Ad
and her friend

ship with Richard Wright.

naive storyteller, Walker

Far from being a

has made a for

each

to

page."

4*

midable
ideas?in al culture

contribution
ideas particular and its values family, of women. racial

to the history
about in the US nation realms

of
of and

subjectivity.

that has us:

become I am

"to write

signature a woman is full

In a phrase she reminds of conse

quences."

Similarly, Louky Bersianik

her deconstruction metaphysics. to mock and rewrites Western

ismerciless

in
and she

off our backs

the best in feminist journalism
"oob is international in scope and focuses on diverse topics dealing with poor women, working class women, minority women, prison, custody, and It'swhat I abortion. It's never been simple-minded. think of as feminism. "--Marilyn F rye women's news from every continent-working issues, health, reproductive rights, Black women's issues, lesbian rights thorough reports of women's conferences book reviews, commentaries, letters, more

twenty have

Walker

in fact

religion, the role

consciousness

of patriarchal history In U Eugu?lionne the master

fortable with her aesthetic vision," which combines traditional American values with a troublesome social radicalism nurtured by
such early experiences as her three-year

uses the distancing device of a visitor from

outer our space culture, she discourses Vacro as a to as of sur in Pique-nique Plato's Symposium to mourn been

is a thread that runs through History Walker's canon, from her first published poem, "ForMy People," which won the Yale Award for Younger Poets in 1942, to the

pole feminist which

banquet women have female based

the mutilations subjected as well

to celebrate no power. Gould longer

for a love capacity on objectification Th?oret's Nous

that is and

St.

Lawrence
university of Dana Fellow will be shared invites at the

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The Women's

Review

of Books

/ Vol. VIII, No. 3 /December

1990