Body Doubles: Uncertain Ontologies in Contemporary Experimental Women’S Life Writing

Body Doubles: Uncertain Ontologies in Contemporary Experimental Women’s Life Writing

Emma Jenkins

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

The University of New South Wales March 2018 Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname/Family Name : Jenkins Given Name/s : Emma Abbreviation for degree as give in the University calendar : PhD Faculty : Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences School : School of Arts and Media Body Doubles: Uncertain Ontologies in Contemporary Experimental Women’s Thesis Title : Life Writing

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE) Contemporary feminist life writing is built on an extraordinary tradition of category-testing experimentation with language and form. The specific textures and individual embodiments of gendered experience have frequently inspired challenges to accepted renditions of canonical genres of ‘the life’. This thesis argues that contemporary women’s life writing continues to interrogate the limits of the discourse and genres of the self by examining three texts by North American feminist authors. These texts are Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia (2000), Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (2010), and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015).

From the 1990s onwards, following the problematisation of the category of ‘woman’ and the ensuing ontological crisis in feminism, metatheoretical women’s life writing has been deployed to explore and manage a set of productive and seemingly irresolvable contradictions around the state of women’s identity. These contradictions manifest in these texts as parataxis, comic inversion, and as the queer strategy to sit ‘athwart’ opposing ideologies rather than ‘against’ them. Using accounts of the grotesque and relational ontology as theoretical frameworks, this thesis explicates how these texts have commented on this ontological uncertainty, disrupted genre taxonomies, and challenged the individuality of the ‘I’. Both frameworks propose that identity functions in both literary and social contexts as a mediation or dialogue between self and other that allows for a feminist ontology that is both individual and collective. These frameworks are appropriate for the state of contemporary women’s life writing for their ability to parse contradiction, and for their ability to challenge boundaries. Through these frameworks, this thesis maintains a particular focus on the role of the body and the limits of individualism.

All categories are at stake in these texts. These texts understand that the questions and complications raised by the avant garde work of the twentieth century and the feminist theory of the 1990s cannot be solved, and a solution is not their desire. This thesis contributes to this ongoing discussion by arguing that ontological uncertainty is a compelling position from which to write and that this uncertainty has produced engaging and inventive contemporary experimental women’s life writing.

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Date ..... f./lf/18. Acknowledgments

Foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Fiona Morrison, for her continuous support and guidance not only throughout these past four years, but through the years preceding this project as well. Her expertise has been invaluable and I have learnt a great deal more from her than what is recorded here. I would also like to extend this thanks to my co-supervisor, Liz McMahon, and to the members of my panel, Meg Mumford and Chris Danta, for their feedback and encouragement throughout.

I would like to thank my family—Mum, Dad, Huw, Hannah, Antoine, and Bridie—for their enthusiastic support, for taking care of me, and for creating environments that have let each of us do our best. I’m very lucky to have you all.

Finally, I would like to thank the friends who have shared this journey with me; Lizzie King and Trish May, whose constant company has brightened not only the process of researching and writing, but also the challenges and rewards of everyday living; and Liam Robertson, whose friendship has brought a great sense of belonging to my life.

Table of Contents Originality Statement i Acknowledgements ii Abstract iii

Introduction: The Grotesque and Relational Ontology 1

Chapter One: Porous Skin: Neo-Medieval Bodies and their Paratactic Dis/Continuities in Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia (2000) 39 Parataxis 50 Collectivity 68 Anorexia 82 Porosity 92

Chapter Two: Serious Play: Laughing through the Binary in Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (2012) 98 Masquerade 102 Carnivalesque 117 Laughter 134 Genius 146

Chapter Three: Athwart Athwart Athwart! Ontological Irresolution in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) 155 Taxonomy 159 Family 181 Motherhood 193 The Cave 199

Conclusion 208 Bibliography 214

Abstract

Contemporary feminist life writing is built on an extraordinary tradition of category-testing experimentation with language and form. The specific textures and individual embodiments of gendered experience have frequently inspired challenges to accepted renditions of canonical genres of ‘the life’. This thesis argues that contemporary women’s life writing continues to interrogate the limits of the discourse and genres of the self by examining three texts by North American feminist authors. These texts are Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia (2000), Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (2010), and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015).

iii

Introduction: The Grotesque and Relational Ontology

These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first—killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful— and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against.

Virginia Woolf, Professions For Women (1974: 240)

This thesis engages with a long-running conversation about the dynamic ways in which gendered experience interacts with writing, and how that interaction often manifests in women’s writing as experimentation with genre. Its focus is on twenty-first-century texts that build on a rich set of heuristic, playful, and subversive writing from the twentieth century in particular. It is evident that there are key shared elements in the ongoing work of experimental women’s writing about ‘life’ that extend and complicate this feminist heritage. In their investigations into gendered lives, bodies, and knowledges, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein “succeed[ed] notoriously in disturbing the fundamental tenets of the autobiography genre” (Cavarero 2000: 81). Extending this avant-garde work, three contemporary texts from North American women writers have emerged as both provocative and significant. I read Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia (2000), Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (2012), and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) as case studies that continue this investigation into the project of representing the experience of gender and the body, specifically through experimentation with genre.

The three texts under investigation in this thesis can be categorised as contemporary women’s life writing. These prose works elaborate accounts of gendered lives at the intersection of fictional, autobiographical, and theoretical discourses. By slipping between different discourses and epistemologies—such as ‘theory’ and ‘life writing’—these texts are able to replicate the disorientation their authors experience within a system in which the gendered body is conceived of as both irrelevant and yet also constitutive. The result is textual play that disrupts prescriptive genre and gender norms by drawing attention to the flexibility and fallibility of these governing structures.

All three texts treat the body as something both personal and intellectual, and as both private and yet still an object that is often up for public debate. I read their acts of genre- resistance as a tactic that reflects the complexities of each author’s position both inside and outside of highly gendered institutions—particularly the academy, but also the art and film world, and the family unit. The place of the body in writing is still understood as an immense obstacle for women writers, almost one hundred years after Woolf identified the problem. This problem is yet to be “solved” though it continues to be investigated through the use of genre disruption.

Genre disruption or combination has routinely seen texts interpreted as examples of ‘new’ genres, like ‘autofiction’ or ‘autotheory’ (Pearl 2018: 200). However, both Julie Rak and John Frow argue that this proliferation of neologisms is the result of the ongoing “caricature” of genre as a “neoclassical […] prescriptive taxonomy,” (Rak 2013: 17-18). I therefore argue that it is more productive to resist such specific terminology in order to focus on why these texts play with genre rather than how they can be classified. Because this thesis is concerned with how genres come apart, not how they are built, I will define my primary texts more broadly as examples of experimental life writing. This is both an acknowledgement of the proliferation of genre-disrupting texts in recent decades for which there cannot be a universal term, and also in keeping with Kraus, Heti, and Nelson’s understanding of their own work. Each refuses to classify their texts, preferring them to remain intra-categorical in order to prompt a questioning of the ostensible necessity of literary conventions.

Life writing is a difficult to define genre because its criteria have shifted so often over time. Rak explains that the meaning and conventions of life writing and its overlapping sub- genres, like memoir, autobiography, biography, and other kind of personal non-fiction, have shifted for hundreds of years, and their limits have often been determined not only by the contents of the text but by the social trends of the time, and, significantly, by the developing “capitalist economy of publishing” (2013: 4). Rak observes that memoir and autobiography have often been distinguished only by how popular or how literary they are perceived to be (2013: 5). Attempts to distinguish between this collection of interrelated genres continue today. Criteria such as commercial viability (Rak 2013: 5), adherence to truth (Rak 2013: 21), and, more recently, social and cultural demographics, particularly the age of the author (Douglas and Poletti 2016: 6), have dictated which term is used across an increasingly confused field. For this reason, I have chosen to use the term ‘life writing’ which acknowledges the variety and versatility of personal non-fiction.

This difficulty with definition is, importantly, more than a terminological issue. Life writing, when positioned as a distinct genre, reveals the paradox of thinking of genre as a taxonomic system. As Derrida explains in his influential essay, The Law of Genre, genre is a kind of classification system that reveals the impossibility of classifying because no text is comprised of a ‘pure’ single genre (1980: 57). John Frow explains the implications of this paradox, asserting that generic structure “both enables and restrict meaning,” (2007: 10). In the case of life writing, I understand this to mean that the conventions of the genre assist the reader in determining the meaning of the text, yet, at the same time, those conventions might encourage a reader to overlook or criticise an aspect of the text that defeats those expectations. The effect is that experimentation suffers because it is read as a fault, a monstrosity within the taxonomic system of genre.

Life writing, because of its many composite genres, lends itself to combination and experimentation, and therefore encourages genre’s use as a taxonomic system to be rethought. Leigh Gilmore argues that life writing “has always been defined by formally experimental works” (2001: 18), and Saunders also notes that “life writing is fundamentally

intertextual” (2010: 5). While selecting appropriate terminology for the discussion of these texts is important, it is also important to acknowledge that life writing is a broad, evolving, and often experimental genre. Life writing, when combined with other distinct genres like theory, resists the taxonomic structure of genre and instead encourages an understanding not of how genres are different, but of how genres overlap and interplay. Texts do not “belong” to a genre, they derive their complexity from their relation to the “economy” of genres (Frow 2007: 2). This relational understanding of genre that defies category and isolation is central to my analysis of these texts.

This experimental quality and frequent difficulty with classification is a central concern of this thesis, and allows me to locate these three texts in specific relation to the state of contemporary feminist theory from which they have emerged, and which they incorporate into their own textual bodies. Women’s life writing in the twenty-first century is being pulled in two contradictory directions. It needs to both dismantle itself as a category in acknowledgment of the diffuse and multiplying state of gender itself, and its discourses, while also reaffirming its ability to make visible the marginalised experiences of life as a woman. The texts I have selected transgress the limits of life writing and theory in order to generate distinctively experimental representations of the interaction between the intellectual and the bodily. This particular combination provokes long-standing feminist debates concerning the gender codification of genre, and women’s historical relationship to academic discourses.

This thesis seeks to map the contours of feminist theory that has produced and responded to this dilemma, and to analyse how Kraus, Heti, and Nelson each identify, create, and complicate the field of contemporary women’s life writing. When analysed together, these texts advance the feminist inquiry into the ways in which genre has historically operated as a tool of social control over women’s bodies, revealing that the questions of genre categorisation and experimentation have, in the twenty-first century, amplified certain ontological questions around gender and identity. (Novak 2017: 6).

The destabilisation of the category of woman within feminist theory predates the 1990s. Feminist theorists have argued for alternate understandings of ‘woman’ from the 1970s, at least. Farwell notes that Adrienne Rich argued that women do not occupy a “static ontological category but a composite of behaviours and stances by which any human being relates to others, nature, language, and the self,” (1977: 195). Throughout the 1980s the category of woman further destabilised as theorists such as bell hooks argued that ‘woman’ was used as an exclusive and oppressive category, applied only to white women (1981). Andre Lorde also denounced the category of woman as deployed by white feminists for its erasure of subdivision and the complexities of identity in her influential essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House” (1984). These erased complexities included class, age, gender, sexuality, health, and particularly race, pre- empting the emergence of intersectional feminism many years later.

My case for the significance of the 1990s and early 2000s, rests on several extensive developments within and around the field of feminist theory which suggest an intensification of this destabilisation, resulting in ontological uncertainty for women connected to the academy. These developments include not just the destabilisation of the category of woman but its apparent evacuation. I argue that the “boom” in academic life writing from the mid 1990s onwards (Rak 2013: 3) and the sudden resurgence of theories of the grotesque within feminist body theory suggests a invigorated interest in positions of ontological liminality, hybridity, and uncertainty. Trinh T. Minh-ha famously noted that “despite all our desperate, eternal attempts to separate, contain and mend, categories always leak,” (1989: 94). The category of woman has long been understood as destabilised, always leaking and grotesque, but the specific theoretical interventions and developments of the 1990s enabled this fact to enter the mainstream and its ramifications for women can be read within the texts here analysed.

Throughout the 1990s, this category was further implicated in a series of theoretical debates. Some of these debates threatened its existence, such as the evacuation of the category of ‘woman’ following Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), and the subsequent influence of post-feminism and individualist ideologies. However, other debates affirmed

its existence, including the rise of identity politics, and the return to materialism within feminism, both of which supported the status of ‘woman’ as a distinct subject position. These debates have overlapped, evolved, faded and grown over recent decades, yet none has been more influential than the rise of identity politics throughout the late twentieth century.

The rise of identity politics led to a surge of interest in the field of women’s life writing in the late 1980s and 1990s. This well-noted phenomenon worked to transform identity into “a legitimate object of study,” (Laurie 2000: 9). Some argued that this in turn worked to resurrect the author following her premature death at the hands of poststructuralism (Moi 2008: 261). This shift has been celebrated by feminists as it encouraged greater visibility for the marginalised voices of women who had been both historically excluded from the discourse of knowledge, and whose life stories had often been devalued due to the feminisation of the personal (Laurie 2000: 5). Saunders agrees that this growing interest in life writing might have occurred (2010: 3)

not only because more and more writers are exploring it, including writers who might have been expected to be suspicious of it as a form—philosophers, psychoanalysts, materialist critics, historians, and so on—but also because critics have recently turned to it as a legitimate field of study.

Laurie asserts that from the 1990s onwards there has been not only an “outpouring of published memoirs” in general, but that this legitimisation of identity and its study has produced a subset of contemporary women’s life writing, which she describes as the “phenomenon of academic autobiographies” (3). This phenomenon has also been identified by Rak and Gilmore (2013: 18, 2001: 1). Laurie asserts that a key provocation of these academic autobiographies as the sense of “personal alienation” (5). Women’s alienation has often been the inspiration for this kind of genre experimentation, particularly at the intersection of the theoretical and life writing, which, despite these theoretical developments, continue to be codified as masculine (Ahmed 2017: 111) and feminine (Cavarero 2000: 13) respectively.

The combination of these two genres in particular has been a powerful feminist technique for disrupting and resisting the confines of phallogocentrism. Irigaray has described this alienation as responding to patriarchal structures, as the result of living both as a utilitarian object and a bearer of value (1985: 174), as being everywhere seen and objectified, but never able to be represented within masculinist language (1985: 178), and as a feeling of being “divided in two irreconcilably” (1985: 180, emphasis original). The psychological effect of this division has been characterised by Moi as an “alienating split” between the writer’s “gender and her humanity,” combined with the understanding that “there is no correct solution to this dilemma” (2008: 266).

The particular combination of life writing and theory, as seen in this “boom” of academic memoirs, invites an examination of the “enigmatic relation between the objective and subjective” where “theory is understood to hew closer to the ‘objective; and autobiography closer to the ‘subjective’,” (Gilmore 2001: 11-12). This combination throws life writing’s relationship with truth, identity, and category deeper and deeper into a state of uncertainty.

This dilemma regarding life writing’s apparent proximity to the truth of “the real world” has been debated before, and recalls Paul de Man’s assertion that life writing is proposepoeic, that is, “an address from the dead that highlights the impossibility of representing the real world in a text,” (Rak 2013: 22). Life writing’s relationship to truth continues to be unclear, and these debates span across not only literary theory, but also impact the possibility of relational ontology, to which I will return shortly, and the question of whether or not identity can be communicated. However, far from divorcing life writing from truth altogether, this uncertain relationship between the two has been described as life writing’s “genius,” that is, its ability to overturn and “disfigure” the truth even as it seeks to or purports to represent it is one of its key strengths (Larson 2007: 188, quoted in Rak 2013: 34). Life writing’s complex relationship to truth is, I argue, amplified by its combination with “objective” theory. This specific combination of life writing and theory

works to contest ontological categories by distorting or erasing the apparent line between subjectivity and objectivity.

Though this combination of life writing and theory is not unique to the twenty-first century, it’s contemporary popularity ensures that it cannot be separated from this particular socio-cultural moment—a moment that Gilmore describes as “the skittish period around the millennium,” (2001: 1). Skittish, unstable, and uncertain are descriptors that are easily applied to this moment, to these texts, their characters, and to the uncertain ontological positions of the authors who produced them. Gilmore explains that, in the twenty-first century, “even academics, perhaps the group considered least likely to cross over, are producing personal criticism, hybrid combinations of scholarship and life writing and memoir proper,” (2001: 1). Academics are considered unlikely candidates for life writing because the academy is thought to deal with objective truth whereas life writing is considered subjective, and therefore disrupts that truth.

This is not the only shift in the profile of the typical life writer that further complicates the expectation that life writing will relate truthfully to the “real world” (Rak 2013: 21). In the past, life writing might have gained some sense of authority, despite this subjectivity, because it was largely produced by elder public figures who sought to take stock of their careers or life experiences. However, this is also no longer the case. Gilmore writes that “memoir is now dominated by the young, or at least youngish in memoir’s terms, whose private lives are emblematic of a cultural moment,” (2001: 1). This is a point also argued by Poletti and Douglas who write that young people use life narrative to demonstrate and “increase their participation in their respective cultures,” (2016: 6). The face of life writing has shifted in accordance with broader social changes, and life writing’s relationship to truth or to making authoritative claims about the “real world” is increasingly up for debate.

Gilmore argues that these shifts emerge from “identity-based movements [that] have shaped recent developments in autobiography,” (2001: 17). The past several decades of identity politics is therefore inseparable from this thesis’ consideration of life writing, theory, and genre more broadly. Developments in feminist and identity theory throughout

the 1990s and early 2000s which worked to complicate the status of ‘woman’ inevitably also impacted the kinds of life writing women are able to write, publish, and consume.

As a result of this complex socio-cultural relationship between life writing and theory, this thesis conceives of genre in two key ways. First, as a set of conventions and expectations that authors work with or refuse, that indicate either participation in or rejection of the status quo of a given discourse. And second, this acceptance or refusal of genre expectations is used as a litmus test for cultural change, in this case, the specific ontological changes experienced by women who worked with theory, or as part of the academy, from the mid-1990s onwards. I argue that Kraus, Heti, and Nelson exploit the assumption that genre functions taxonomically (Rak 2013: 18), and that life writing relates to the truth (Rak 2013: 21), in order to indicate the complexity of their experiences both within and outside of theoretical discourse. By testing, challenging, and breaking the conventions or expectations of both life writing and theory, and by combining these ‘distinct’ genres into uniquely hybrid forms, these authors’ texts are here read as representative of a state of ontological uncertainty.

This feeling of alienation, division, and irresolution to which the “academic autobiographies” of the 1990s are responding is not only ongoing in the twenty-first century, but has since intensified. Following Gender Trouble, ‘woman’ as a term lost its specificity and its ability to evoke a set identity (Moi 2008: 264, Budgeon 2013: 281). Given that ‘woman’ had typically nominated a specific morphology and social experience—namely, the marginalisation that has often provoked experimentation—the implications of this shift meant a great deal for the category of women’s life writing. Identifying as a ‘woman writer’ in this climate has been seen by some as a method of encouraging greater visibility for a distinct “female tradition” of writing, and by others as an uncomfortable artefact of an outdated essentialism (Moi 2008: 267). So, even as women’s identity has become more important and more visible than ever before with the rise of identity politics, the status of ‘women’s writing’ as a category seems precariously close to being foreclosed.

Butler has described the feminism of the 1990s as undergoing a “crisis in ontology” over this contradictory state (1999: 6). Moi describes women writers as experiencing “intellectual schizophrenia,” a symptom that she attributes to the “theoretical malaise” arising from the exhaustion of endlessly having to confront and police one’s own personal investment in the meaning of ‘woman’ and what its indeterminacy or fixity then means for one’s writing, identity, and the ways in which one can experience life (2008: 264).

The relationship between theory and lived experience is clearly not a one-way street (Parker 1987: 7), and has operated as a productive liminal area for feminist experimentation and resistance for more than a century at least. The ways in which these fields interact are more important than ever. However, they are rarely considered alongside one another and, often, they remain positioned as categorical opposites. Sara Ahmed has recently urged feminists to rethink the extent to which these fields shape one another, asserting that “the personal is theoretical. Theory is often assumed to be abstract […]. We might then have to drag theory back […] to life” (2017: 10). Ann V Murphy also notes this critical tendency to treat life and theory as independent of one another. She writes that (2012: 2):

Little to no attention has been granted to the problem of the contemporary experience of theory […]. The philosophical imaginary profoundly shapes our experiences of theory, of what it is to do theory. The philosophical imaginary shapes our affective responses to the world; it informs what we fear and hope, herald and condemn.

Therefore, the analysis of twenty-first-century experimental women’s life writing demands this relationship be given due attention. The question is no longer just one of categorisation, but one of ontology as well. Understanding the effects of theory on the state of the personal, and how the personal can be represented within this climate of ontological uncertainty is the task of this thesis. This thesis is concerned with the relationship between and mutual impact of theoretical developments around women’s ontological uncertainty and the shapes of women’s life stories, and how those stories are being recorded.

The problematisation of the category of women pre-dates the 1990s, as discussed above, but ontological uncertainty emerges from the specific cultural and political moment around the turn of the century. Ontological uncertainty in this thesis refers to the particular contemporary experience of women familiar with feminist theory who understand that there is an ongoing theoretical instability that governs the discussion of the category of ‘woman’. This ontological uncertainty is compounded by the understanding that, because of the magnitude of often conflicting theories around the limits and uses of the category of ‘woman’, that there are very limited actions available that can both take into account this history while also attempting to alleviate this condition by offering some semblance of stability.

It is important to note that many factors that contribute to this ontological uncertainty that are discussed throughout this thesis are not exclusive to women’s experience of life. In particular, this state of ontological uncertainty has also been shaped by broader socio- cultural phenomenon such as the rise of neoliberalism which has encouraged a turn towards individualism rather than collectivity, promoting feelings of alienation, competition, and precariousness. Therefore, ontological uncertainty is not specifically a feminist issue as this phenomenon impacts aspects of identity and life experience far beyond gender. Other research might frame this phenomenon as generational because of the impact it has had on young people whose identity has been shaped early by these changes, or it might be framed as a class phenomenon because of the immense role of capital in prolonging this experience of uncertainty.

However, this thesis narrows this wide impact and considers the specific kind of ontological uncertainty affecting feminist scholars who were working or being educated within the academy during the conflicted period of the 1990s and early 2000s. In addition to economic, cultural, and generational shifts, these feminists have inherited a lineage of contradiction and debate that has resulted in sectarian divisions within feminism, including fields such as radical or trans exclusionary feminism, intersectional feminism, and even post-feminism, discussed further below. The texts analysed within this thesis present uncertainty as the condition of attempting to resolve not only interpersonal conflicts but

also inter-ideological conflicts, such as those that have characterised feminist theory from the 1990s onwards. When surrounded by such conflict, uncertainty becomes the ontological condition.

Where once the combination of the intellectual and the personal sufficed to express women’s dissatisfaction with or resistance to phallogocentrism, the texts examined in this thesis develop this genre experimentation. Kraus, Heti, and Nelson are less invested in representing the experience of ‘woman’ as a marginalised but distinct identity. Rather, these are authors who are working to represent the contemporary ontological experience which, from the 1990s onwards, has become indeterminate. Kraus, Heti, and Nelson each demonstrate a dual obsession with and fear of identity as something fixed and commodifiable, yet at the same time diffuse and impossible to pin down. This branch of women’s writing continues to deploy an experimental, genre-disrupting style in order to convey the complex experience of feeling imprisoned in one’s identity, and simultaneously unable to locate that identity at all. Their works foreground this dilemma, playing between and complicating the need to both deface and assert their identity.

These texts emphasise this disruption by resisting the limits of identity at the level of gender, and at the level of the individual. The conventions of life writing are perceived as working to stabilise and individualise the subject through the linear narrativisation of life events (Saunders 2010: 11; Friedman and Fuchs 1989: 4). Though autobiography in particular tends towards intertextuality and is often thought of as an indistinct, or “blurred” genre, it nevertheless continues to be seen as self-focused and individualising (Saunders 2010: 516, 4). As such, disrupting the limits of life writing can also be read as a disruption of the limits of the individual. Therefore, through genre experimentation, each of these texts confronts the complex and evolving relationship between the individual and the collective. Though they present themselves as instances of life writing, featuring protagonists that share the same name as their author, these texts are not about representing the life stories of their author; rather, they are dedicated to challenging the limits of selfhood altogether.

Each text focuses on a subject other than the author. I argue that this method, in conjunction with genre experimentation, textually reproduces the feeling of being both inside and outside of oneself, or both trapped within and excluded from the narrative of one's own life. Aliens & Anorexia spends as much time outlining and analysing the lives of Paul Thek and Simone Weil as it does recounting the events of Kraus’s life; the main narrative tension of How Should A Person Be? concerns the ambiguous ethics of Sheila imitating and citing her best friend Margaux Williamson; and The Argonauts reveals more personal information about Nelson’s partner, Harry, than it reveals about herself. In doing so, they not only capture something of the experience of life in the early twenty-first century in the wake of the ontological developments of the 1990s, they also work to challenge the phallogocentric tradition that has classified ‘women’s writing’ as a distinct category in itself. In addition to this disruption of the typical individuality of the life writing genre, they each challenge what Laurie describes as the “implied contractual agreement between reader and writer that something like the events described actually happened,” (2000: 18). In doing so, these three texts not only traverse the theoretical and life writing genres, but also incorporate elements of the fictive.

Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia takes up the “difficult task of trying to understand another person” (2000: 68) through their own writing, and through their always-partial and “hagiographic” biographies (2000: 92). Kraus confronts the shortcomings of auto- and biographical forms, recouping aspects of life that are frequently excluded from life narratives. She does so through the use of parataxis, a technique which allows her to distort and combine various temporalities and spatialities. In doing so, Kraus works to expand the idea of what ‘counts’ as identity, proposing that selfhood doesn’t end at the skin. This figuration of identity has been a staple of feminist theory since Donna Haraway asked, in her influential A Manifesto For Cyborgs, “why should our bodies end at the skin?” (1985: 2190). Kraus implements this insight, using technologies of communication and information transfer to extend her identity, including within it her community, her previous works, and the works of others. In effect, Kraus applies her research methods to her own life, leading Heti to describe Kraus’s practice as not only tracing that “whole period of her life” but also including “everything surrounding it” (Believer Magazine 2013). Leslie

Jamison notes that although key autobiographical features of both Kraus’s life, and the lives of her research subjects, Paul Thek and Simone Weil, appear in this text, it is difficult to classify it as either auto- or biographical (2015). Kraus borrows from epistolary and philosophical traditions, modifying their forms to suit her needs. Yet even these forms are disrupted as Kraus cites contradictory material, mis-references her sources, and self- plagiarises from her previous works. As Aliens & Anorexia progresses, it is increasingly difficult to trust the veracity of Kraus’s research and accounts, or to draw a line between truth and fiction.

Heti’s How Should A Person Be?, similarly, has been characterised as “semifictional” (Naimon 2012: 108), and as blurring “the boundaries between fiction and memoir,” (105). She combines these genres by switching back and forth between them rather than hybridising them, deploying a strategy of comic inversion that tends towards the satirical. Heti herself has expressed apathy for the text’s classification, stating in interview with Jonathan Derbyshire, “is it a play? Is it a novel? Is it a diary? I think of it as a novel—but only because I can’t think of a better word” (2013: 47). This genre indeterminacy is a performance of the narrative trajectory of Sheila, the character. Heti has made it clear that this character is a performance, accentuating the alignment between the disruption of genre and the uncertainty of the protagonists. She has stated that “there’s been a lot more confusion about that than I anticipated. Because I named the character ‘Sheila’, people assumed I named her ‘Sheila Heti,’ which I didn’t,” (in Derbyshire 2013: 47). Sheila is unable to negotiate the limits of her own identity, jumping between archetypal roles in an attempt to control and contain what she describes as her “ugly […] flightiness, confusion, and selfishness” which “revealed my lack of unity,” (Heti 2012: 22). Sheila struggles to “learn why my play was not working, which was maybe the same reason my character was not working, and thus discover how I and the play should be” (Heti 2012: 96). The fate of Sheila’s writing and the fate of her identity are linked. Heti enacts her own anxiety over her uncertain ontology by experimenting at the cusp of several genres and producing an indeterminate form.

Finally, Nelson’s The Argonauts has been described by Donegal as an “episodic, nonlinear narrative” that combines the “disciplined academic and the disobedient, confessional queer” (2015). Elsewhere, it has been described as part philosophy, part memoir, and part literary analysis (Als 2015). In 2015, The Argonauts was awarded the National Book Critics’ Award under the “critical theory” category for lending “critical theory something that it frequently lacks, namely, examples drawn from real life, real art-making, and real bodies” (Als 2015). The narrative of the text itself is determined to discover—or recoup— terminology that is capable of nominating without defining, terminology that skips over the “cookie-cutter function” of language (Nelson 2015: 4) and makes space for the representation of the endlessly evolving experience of the body (53). Nelson, more than Kraus or Heti, makes references to the specific developments within queer and feminist identity politics in the 1990s and early 2000s, negotiating the various freedoms and traps they have offered. Maggie and her partner Harry return again and again throughout the narrative of The Argonauts to debate whether or not language is capable of conveying the experience of one’s own life to another without having to submit to limiting identity labels. Nelson’s fear of labels manifests as an “identity phobia” (Nelson 2015: 111), and The Argonauts is dedicated not only to representing ontological uncertainty, but to preserving it as well.

Despite this variety of composite genres, these three texts are united in their refusal to submit to distinct genre classifications. Kraus, Heti, and Nelson are all more invested in de- classifying their texts and in saying what they are not: not simply autobiographical, not even really a novel, and definitely not anything fixed or nameable. Though the borders of genre categories are never closed (Derrida 1980: 65; Saunders 2010: 5; Novak 2017: 4), this methodological refusal of category mirrors Kraus, Heti, and Nelson’s shared obsession with the difficulty of representing not only the identity of the author, as something that remains ambivalently amorphous and verging on fictive, but identity altogether. They are each determined to disrupt the notion of classification, continuing the feminist tradition of working at the intersection of genres. This allows them to convey the experience of being displaced from one’s own identity, following the evacuation of the category of ‘woman’.

This shared process of declassification and complication characterises the contradictory state of ‘women’s life writing’ and its ontological effects.

Butler’s influence on the field of feminist theory, and the ongoing centrality of ideas of performativity when unpacking gender identity, encourages a reading of these texts and their cross-genre performances as a parodic rehearsing and inverting of the “masculinised” theory genres (Ahmed 2017: 111) and the “feminised” life writing (Laurie 2000: 5, Cavarero 2000: 13). Much of the narrative tension in each text emerges as their protagonists negotiate the various performances required to participate, as women, in fields that value masculinist formulations over the feminine. Kraus, as a filmmaker, is determined to uncover why certain qualities, such as “intelligence” and “courage” are “considered negative attributes in female filmmaking,” (2000: 182). Aliens & Anorexia presents itself overtly as a response to the ongoing gendered control that plays out through genre classification, and that dictates the reception of both creative and critical work produced by women. Her work is rejected when it is assertive, and ignored when it is not (Kraus 2000: 32). This double standard contributes to the feeling of alienation that manifests as women’s sense of ontological uncertainty. Addressing the text’s reception, Kraus concludes in an interview with Denise Frimer (2005), that:

what really fucks with everyone’s head is when women […] combine graphic first- person sex stuff with quote unquote objective, analytic cultural thought […] as if [women are] this mushy botanical subordinate thing at total variance with the dynamic integrity, the ‘masculinity’ of analytic thought.

Kraus is self-consciously working to disrupt theoretical and life writing genres not only as a means of expressing ontological uncertainty but also to re-assess and re-expose the gendered ‘scripts’ that play out through every action. “I’m moving through the terrain of this book as a performer,” Kraus states to Heti (2013).

This exaggerated dynamic between the “mushy” feminine and the integrity of the masculine is also played out in How Should A Person Be?. Heti writes that “one good thing

about being a woman is we don’t have too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me. There is no ideal model for how my mind should be. For the men, it’s pretty clear” (2012: 4). The influence of Gertrude Stein’s self-declaration of genius is particularly clear in this text. Heti sets up a dichotomy between the fixed “ideal” form of the intellectual masculine and the uncertain formlessness—even absence—of the feminine. However, tongue-in-cheek, Heti twists this typically misogynistic formulation into one that encourages experimentation. She frames formlessness as a feminine attribute that has less to do with an absence of intelligence, and more to do with the possibility of freedom from the restriction of prescriptive roles.

Nelson also makes it clear that she is performing whilst negotiating the gendered ‘scripts’ of genre. She describes her relationship to the division between academic discourse and life writing as a kind of “paranoia” where she must constantly fight the urge to add “little phrases of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble” (2015: 98). She continues, “my writing is riddled with such ticks of uncertainty […]. I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me. […]. At times I grow tired of this approach, and all its gendered baggage,” (2015: 98). Again, “boldness” and assertiveness are characterised as masculine traits that are aligned with the intellectual, while “uncertainty” is aligned with the feminine. Nelson makes it clear, however, that this gendered alignment is a performance over which she has control; though writing might be read as gendered, it is neither automatic nor mandatory.

Each of these texts is tapping into the discourse around phallogocentrism, which understands language as taking on masculine behaviours, and even the morphology of the male body (Irigaray 1985: 189). In this formulation, institutionalised language privileges the masculine in its assertiveness, argumentativeness, and its tendency to come to a phallic “point” (Parker 1987: 9). Writing that defers or dilates, that is “uncertain” or “mushy” has therefore frequently been thought of as taking on the morphology of the female body (Gibbs 2005; Parker 1987: 15).

With this in mind, it is clear how Kraus, Heti, and Nelson are, in combining the theoretical and life writing genres, engaging with and exaggerating this alignment between “woman- body” and “man-reason” (Cavarero 2012: 77). Their performances are unmissable, and frequently verge on the parodic, demonstrating the influence of Butler’s work in Gender Trouble, where she writes (1990: 180):

if gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured.

These three authors are clearly playing with and against the ways in which life writing is read in order to challenge prescriptive and pre-determined models of identity—such as those that accompany ‘woman’. This self-awareness demonstrates their investment in and knowledge of the history of experimental women’s life writing, and its performative qualities.

This said, a performativity reading is not my approach in this thesis; Kraus, Heti, and Nelson have covered that terrain themselves. These authors are not interested solely in inverting and parodying gendered ‘scripts’. Rather, they are working to disrupt genre to the degree that it replicates textually their experience of ontological uncertainty as women writers in the twenty-first century. Therefore, I pursue these lingering divisions between masculine and feminine, the intellectual and the personal, the actor and the character, through to a more ludic space. The space created by these texts is one in which all categories are at stake; where there is an understanding that the monumental questions and complications raised by the avant-garde work of the twentieth century, through to the feminist theory of the 1990s, cannot be solved; and, significantly, where resolution is not the desired outcome.

These three texts are not in the business of solving the problem of “telling the truth” about women’s experience of the body (Woolf 1931: 240). They are about grappling with the state of feminist identity theory and with the ongoing ontological uncertainty of ‘woman’

that has since made such “truth” impossible. They are determined to uncover and experiment with alternative ways of representing that particular experience of identity. This thesis therefore deploys two theoretical frameworks through which to analyse the specific dilemma of identity and representation as it stands for women writers in the twenty-first century. These frameworks are the grotesque, and relational ontology. The ongoing indeterminacy of this particular moment in feminist history has seen the emergence—or re- emergence—of these concepts because they are capable of parsing and responding to contradictions and paradoxes.

Following the English translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World in 1968, the ancient concept of the grotesque became a framework through which to study the relationship between the social and the literary, especially as it related to the representation of the body. More recently, the grotesque experienced a feminist revival in the mid-1990s following the problematization of the category of ‘woman,’ and, subsequently, ‘women’s writing’ and the role of women’s bodies. The uncertainty over the existence of ‘woman’ as a category in turn prompted a return to theories of sexual difference and materialism. These theories worked to re-centre the reality that identity is conditioned through the body, and that, therefore, ‘woman’ refers to a specific social experience (Fraser and Greco 2005: 16). Within this materialist turn, the grotesque re-emerged for its tendency to focus on “the physical nature of events” and to “involve the human body in quite a direct way” (Thompson 1972: 8). Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies: Towards A Corporeal Feminism (1994), Mary Russo’s The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (1994), and Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994) in particular have been crucial in shaping my understanding of this notoriously slippery concept, and its potential for literary analysis. The grotesque remains relevant to feminism as one of its foremost strengths is its ability to challenge those hierarchies and classificatory principles perceived to be “natural” or “normal” (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 9), many of which have often disadvantaged women (Braidotti 2002: 64).

Relational ontology has also emerged in recent decades across fields including theology, philosophy, psychology and feminist theories on identity. It is evidently a concept with vast applications. Through Judith Butler’s Giving An Account of Oneself (2005), and Adriana Cavarero’s Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (2000) and Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude (2016), I use this concept as a framework with which to understand the possibilities of self-narration. Together, these theorists posit that individualism is an untenable method of approaching identity, as identity is formed communally, as a composite of social and linguistic norms. Further, they argue that the record of identity is impossible in isolation as it requires a mandatory “you” not only to form the “story” but to hear it and to respond to it as well (Butler 2005: 32). Butler and Cavarero’s work also acts as a critique of the commodification of identity that has come to operate through the popularisation of autobiographies from the 1990s onwards.

This dialogical understanding of identity is already closely related to the grotesque, and to Bakhtin’s broader work on the relationship between literature and life. In 1990, Michael Holquist coined the term ‘dialogism’ to encapsulate the field-defying breadth of Bakhtin’s theories and their applications, including his work on the grotesque, emphasising the “dynamic heterogeneity of his achievements” (1990: 15). Holquist continues to explain that dialogism is “always required to go beyond the categories” and that it “refuses to be systematic” (1990: 16). According to Bakhtin, when reading for the grotesque, “the body and bodily life […] refer not to the isolated biological individual, not to the private, egotistic ‘economic man’, but to the collective ancestral body of all the people” (1968: 19). This approach to the grotesque, among other theories, understands it as functioning through a process of mediation and dialogue, therefore strongly aligning it with Butler and Cavarero’s relational ontology, which manifests as a constant play between self and other.

This connection between the grotesque and relational ontology can be further strengthened by acknowledging the influence that Julia Kristeva’s Powers Of Horror (1980) has had on the field of feminist literary and body theory. Kristeva introduced a distinctly gendered dimension to the grotesque body with her work on the abject, and the play between (or before) the linguistic boundaries that separate the self and the other. This work can be

positioned as a predecessor to the relational ontology of the twenty-first century, and demonstrative of the suitability of using these two concepts side by side. The grotesque and relational ontology, together, disrupt the categories of self and other, individual and collective, promoting instead an ongoing dialogue between them. Both the grotesque and relational ontology therefore work to understand identity as something already diffuse and multiple, but nevertheless social and dependent on the body. At many points in this thesis, these concepts overlap because of their own diffuse nature. Crucially, these concepts do not necessarily work to ‘solve’ the various issues that have risen within feminism from the 1990s onwards. Rather, I position them as a set of tools with which to acknowledge and to understand the various methods used by Kraus, Heti, and Nelson to communicate the experiences of an uncertain ontology.

These two concepts can be used to describe narratives that enact a sense of marginality, or uncertainty. Edwards and Graulund state that “grotesque fiction, in a general sense, violates the laws of nature. Here, clear-cut taxonomies, definition and classifications break down,” (2008: 4). As such, the grotesque has “acquir[ed] revolutionary overtones; it is associated with artistic freedom and the overthrow of cramping conventions,” (Clayborough 1967: 13). These descriptions of defiance and resistance to convention are easily applicable to the three texts within this study. Kraus, Heti, and Nelson have each produced texts that work to challenge and even break down the typical methods of classification.

This textual performance of ontological uncertainty, an active experiment in genre disruption, is carried through the narratives themselves, where each author works to defy the typical limits of identity. In this way, the figures of the grotesque that work to disrupt form and fracture ideas of unity and wholeness can be read as establishing a literary representation of relational ontology, where the limits of self and other are made indeterminate. Cavarero (2016: 13) explains that:

in its radical version, which liquidates any residue of individualistic ontology, the relational model does not in fact allow for any symmetry at all, but only for a

continuous interweaving of multiple and singular dependence. At its most extreme, it is exemplified by scenarios in which the protagonists are altogether unbalanced.

This description recalls the avant-garde work of Stein and Woolf, and Stein’s 1933 work The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1990) can once more be considered an early point in the genealogy of these three experimental and relational texts, further discussed in Chapter Two.

The identity models within these three texts defy the typical concept of the individual, reflecting the contemporary state of ontological uncertainty that has followed developments within feminist theories of identity. I read the experimental qualities of these texts as responses to these developments. Though the three texts I am analysing span fifteen years, the theoretical terrain to which they respond has moved glacially. While the evacuation of the category of ‘woman’ and the ensuing uncertainty over the field of women’s writing originated in the early 1990s, the anxiety over the term ‘woman’ and its materialist implications remains unshakable. Moi clarifies her use of the term in 2008, writing that for someone to “count” as a ‘woman writer,’ “all you need to acknowledge is that they have been perceived as women who write, and they also took themselves to be a woman” (2008: 267). More recently, and demonstrating the persistence of this tension between the body, gender and writing, Ahmed (2017: 14) also seeks to clarify her use of the term, writing:

What do I mean by women here? I am referring to all those who travel under the sign women. No feminism worthy of its name would use the sexist idea “women born women” to create the edges of feminist community, to render trans women into “not women,” or “not born women,” or into men. No one is born a woman.

Given this ongoing uncertainty, I argue that the grotesque—which re-emerged in response to this ‘crisis’ more than twenty years ago—continues to offer a useful path of analysis for two reasons. First, because its figures allow the representation of the personal sensation of ontological uncertainty. Common figures include physical instances of “incompletion” or of “excess” (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 2). These figures can be used to represent the

feeling of being both trapped within the category of ‘woman’ and feeling as though the category does not exist at all.

The second reason that the grotesque might have re-emerged is because its study allowed feminist theorists to comment on the state of feminist theory itself. Following the evacuation of the category of ‘woman’, the field of feminism itself became grotesque. While always a diverse and multi-branched field, the 1990s saw the field verge on grotesque “disintegration” (Clayborough 1967: 3). Thompson notes that “the grotesque mode in art and literature tends to be prevalent in societies and eras marked by strife, radical change or disorientation” (1972: 11). Feminism in the early 1990s, as one of these eras, therefore might have experienced a grotesque revival not only because the grotesque is capable of inciting such disorientation, but because it is also able to record it, and even to make sense of it. The grotesque, as a concept comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, thus seems a fitting response to this climate.

McRobbie explains that the evacuation of the category of woman was, in part, a response to the collective ethos of feminism from the 1960s and 1970s which regularly functioned by exclusion, and which the next generation of feminists sought to rectify (2004: 255). This, in turn, led to a “double entanglement” wherein feminism in the 1990s was seen as both neoconservative in its fight for the centrality of an essentialist and ultimately exclusive idea of ‘woman’, and as progressive for its turn to wider yet diffuse ideas of identity (2004: 256). The effect of this dual project for feminism within the academy was that it felt compelled to “dismantle itself” as it interrogated itself to death over the consequences of its own foundations (2004: 257). Susan Bordo describes this climate of internal debate (1993: 216):

Where once the prime objects of academic feminist critiques were the phallocentric narratives of our male-dominated disciplines, now feminist criticism has turned to its own narratives, finding them reductionist, totalising, inadequately nuanced, valorising of gender difference, unconsciously racist, and elitist. Feminism may be

developing a new direction, a new skepticism about the use of gender as analytical category.

Karen Barad, writing a decade later in 2003, explains how this internal division between the feminist generations in effect became a debate between the fields of linguistic constructivism and materialism. She writes (801):

Language has been granted too much power […] it seems that at every turn lately every “thing”—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. The ubiquitous puns on “matter” do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them […]. Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter.

The state of the body under this terminological anxiety is complex. Braidotti noted in 1994 that for many, abandoning the body signalled abandoning the fight for equality and submitting to the self-fulfilling process of female erasure (60). Almost a decade later, she continued to reflect on the instability of the time, and the feeling of being compelled to “undo a subjectivity we have not even historically been entitled to yet” (2002: 15, emphasis original). Leaving the body, which has for so long been central to the project of feminism, feels counter-intuitive to the betterment of not only women’s lives, but the lives of all marginalised subjects.

Grosz, also in 1994, points out that moving beyond such dichotomies like that between the body or language is impossible because “within our intellectual heritage there is no language in which to describe such concepts, no terminology that does not succumb to versions of this polarisation” (21-22). She also points to a well-noted reluctance during this period to counter the evacuation of the category of ‘woman’ by bringing the body and biology to the fore. At this time, most available ‘evidence’, across both natural sciences and philosophical discourses, required feminist theorists play into a system of pejoration in

order to make a claim, and to give oxygen to misogyny even while attempting to defeat it (Grosz 1994: x-xi). Friedman and Fuchs have noted, similarly, that this problem with intellectual heritage has led to the “improbable situation of literary critics proposing that feminine writing has been accomplished mainly by men,” because writing by men is, more often than not, what is at hand (1989: 4). Ahmed, more recently, has noted that this pattern remains relatively unchanged and that those feminist writers located within the university— which more often than not “equals men’s studies” (2017: 111)—must cite the prejudiced theorists that came before them in order to become theorists themselves (2017: 8). “The histories that bring us to feminism are the histories that leave us fragile,” Ahmed concludes (2017: 162).

The state of the body within feminism has remained ontologically uncertain and unformed since the early 1990s because no solution can be reached that does not also damage the project of feminism as a whole. I argue that this understanding of the body can be thought of and represented in a more literal sense as the grotesque body, characterised by “conflict or confrontation based on the notion of incongruity or the juxtaposition of opposites” (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 7). I have already explained how the experimental qualities of Kraus, Heti, and Nelson’s texts at the generic level can be thought of as grotesque.

Further, I argue that the bodies within each text’s narrative are presented according to the figures of the grotesque. One of the most prominent figure of the grotesque is its formlessness. Bakhtin explains in Rabelais and His World that this “grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit,” and that therefore the site of the grotesque is “those parts of the body that are open to the world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world” (1968: 26). This understanding of the body reflects the state of the body within feminism, as a disrupted and dislocated entity that has produced a sense of ontological uncertainty. This body can be traced through the three texts I have selected for this study.

Aliens & Anorexia, published in 2000 and written throughout the late 1990s, is preoccupied with this “open” body. Kraus writes that “things were adding up to one of those moments where you can no longer count on any of the mythologies you’ve believed in and you don’t have any new ones to replace them. Things […] fall apart” (2000: 110). The certainty of sexual difference as a decider for the category of ‘woman’ has been evaporated, yet no new criteria have emerged. Kraus represents this ontological uncertainty by repeated images of body-switching, alien abduction and possession which come to inform her research processes. Kraus conceived of herself as almost non-bodied, as detached from the significance of the material. She writes that the sensation of reading other’s diaries and biographies is a feeling akin to being “no longer yourself, you are also other people” where the subjects she is researching “enter through the porous surface of [her] skin” (2000: 181). She describes the process of trying to re-write these biographies, or to uncover these lives, as though she is “trying to pour pieces of myself into this other person’s body” (2000: 95). This process of writing and research, in a climate of ontological uncertainty, produces grotesque images that work to disrupt the borders of the individual, demonstrating how this model of “porous” or “open” identity can be used to form a representation of relational ontology.

Heti uses similar tactics through How Should A Person Be?. Heti lifts quotes from her friends’ conversations and weaves them into her own writing. The effect is a collective kind of identity where the distinction between herself and her peers is blurred. This mirrors the climate within feminism where there is still uncertainty over the possibility of a collective cause and the ethical implications of a model that must depend on exclusion. Sheila begins to speak for her friends, taking their words and actions out of context in an attempt to form a composite and united image of being. This method offers a caveat to Kraus’s approach: where Kraus conceived of a model of relational ontology through the grotesque “porous” body, Sheila slips into a model that ignores the individuality of those she forces into participating. This erasure haunts Sheila’s dreams throughout the text and manifests as a series of violent images of decapitation and skinlessness. Sheila discovers “Margaux’s head, severed from her body, her eyes open and darting around, scared,” (2012: 238)

shortly after she has been confronted and asked not to include her friend’s words “floating separate from [her] body” (2012: 59-60).

Throughout the text, Heti switches back and forth between script dialogue and prose, creating a carnivalesque sense of disorientation where the ‘rules’ of the text are broken and re-formed again and again. This unsettled sensation captures the state of identity politics in the twenty-first century and offers a reflection of what Murphy and Ahmed have both identified as a side-effect of the ontological statement around the term ‘woman’. Murphy writes that the discursive climate is such that (2012: 5-6):

feminist discourse has come to assume a form wherein […] a lack of social recognition is conceived as the gravest sort of violence - what Judith Butler would call ‘social death’—while at the same time, recognition itself is said to constitute a kind of violence in its own right. […] Recognition is what is sought, but can itself claim no immunity to violence due to a mechanism of exclusion that conditions the emergence and intelligibility of the subject.

Ahmed states similarly in 2016, evidencing the persistence of this ontological stalemate, that (15):

part of the difficulty of the category of woman is what follows residing in that category, as well as what follows not residing in that category because of the body you acquire, the desires you have, the paths you follow or do not follow. There can be violence at stake in being recognised as women; there can be violence at stake in not being recognisable as women.

Heti transmutes this impossible dilemma of ‘woman’ and ‘not-woman’ into one of ‘self’ and ‘not-self’, playing both out alternately to their full gory and grotesque effects. The individual narrator that typically characterises an autobiography is dissolved and figured as a highly grotesque process of being “skinned alive” where “you could not tell one girl from the other […] like animals turned inside out” (Heti 2012: 244). The body, like in Aliens &

Anorexia, manifests as a “porous” form as a means of representing the ontological uncertainty of the state of feminist identity theory and what effect it has had on the personal.

Nelson offers a synthesis of Kraus and Heti’s approaches, working instead to defer a decision between collective or individual identity. This text catalogues the bodily metamorphosis of Maggie’s pregnancy alongside Harry’s mastectomy and the early effects of hormone replacement therapy, describing this time as “the summer of our changing bodies. Me, four months pregnant, you six months on T” (2015: 79). The key figure at play throughout The Argonauts is gestation, or pregnancy, which Parker identifies as the ultimate mode of deferral, “promising even as it contains and postpones” (1987: 15). Pregnancy also falls under the rubric of one of the most recognised figures and tendencies of the grotesque: what Bakhtin identifies as “two bodies in one” (1968: 26), a subset of the “open to the world” figure above. As discussed above, each of these texts focuses on two (or more) lives and therefore their structure can be thought of as an example of ‘two bodies in one’. This is a key figure I trace and expand on throughout each chapter.

Pregnancy operates differently to the more general grotesque body figures because it relies on the female form whose relevance to ‘woman’ remains up for debate. However, throughout the 1990s at least, pregnancy was a core figure of the grotesque resurgence within feminist theory (Grosz 1994: 4; Russo 1994: 12). While I want to emphasise that this ‘two bodies in one’ figure does more than denote literal pregnancy, there is nevertheless a specific alignment between the female body and the grotesque that is embedded in its etymology. Language and the body here have a symbiotic connection, where the originating misnomer of ‘cave’ (or grotto) is positioned as foundational to the grotesque not simply for its alignment with the womb (Russo 1994: 1; Bakhtin 1968: 19), but for the way it implicitly positions the female body as non-normative, or chthonic. This said, Russo reminds us that the “literalisation of the female body as grotesque should not obscure or reduce [its] complex figurations” (1994: 3).

Therefore, in this thesis I read Nelson’s obsession with being both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of bodies, institutions, and identities as a version of the grotesque figure of the ‘cave’. Nelson herself identifies the cave—or womb—as a generative space that is free from the ideals and limitations of society and thus encourages growth in all directions, as well as a space of confinement, or a space outside of society and outside of (or not yet entered into) language. This liminal space offers interesting opportunities to analyse the ‘queer’ position that Nelson has put forward, as an identity both inside and outside of governing structures. This liminal figuration also offers an opportunity to consider ‘woman’ as not so much in a state of ontological “crisis” (Butler 1999: 6), but rather still “in process” (Butler 1990: 43).

While there is a development in approaches to the body across these three texts, there is nevertheless a lingering sense of women’s displacement and a confused ontology. There is still a deep suspicion of the term ‘woman’, not only because it provokes and unsettles understandings of the body, but because it therefore also seems unable to nominate a collective identity around which feminism’s cause is organised. This problematisation of the category of ‘woman’, in conjunction with feminism’s internal debates, has seen a swing away from collective ontology altogether, and towards an individualistic one. With the possibility of ‘woman’ designating a united collective ended, McRobbie explains that “the 1990s saw a shift away from feminist interest in centralised power blocks—e.g., the State, patriarchy, law—to more dispersed sites, events and instance of power” (2004: 257). This shift coincided with the rise of neoliberal individualist identity, and feminism’s status as a collective movement began to transform into an individualist one. McRobbie continues, explaining that (2004: 257):

The body and also the subject [had] come to represent a focal point for feminist interest, nowhere more so than in the work of Butler. The concept of subjectivity and the means by which cultural forms and interpellations (or dominant social processes) call women into being, produce them as subjects whilst ostensibly merely describing them as such, inevitably means that it is a problematically “she,” rather than an unproblematically “we,” which is indicative of a turn to what we

might describe as the emerging politics of post-feminist inquiry (Butler 1990, 1993).

Though the turn away from feminism’s ‘we’ towards an ‘I’ or ‘she’ has been thought most often as a shrugging off of conservative collectivism, it is also evidence of the neoliberal infiltration of the feminist movement, and part of a wider cultural shift towards individualistic understandings of identity. Feminism is, by nature, a collective movement dedicated to equality, and the idea that “an individual woman can bring what blocks her movement to an end” is a “fantasy” (Ahmed 2017: 5). This individualistic feminism has therefore been called post-feminism. This era of post-feminism seems interested in women’s lives only for the various ways in which individuals adapt to competing in a masculine capitalist world, rather than because of any sincere attempt to question the systems that have framed women as different or inferior in the first place. While on the one hand, the evacuation of the category of ‘woman’ led to an ontological crisis where the limits of ‘woman’ have been made impossibly diffuse, on the other hand, it has led to a conservative shoring-up of those same limits under the commodification of identity. Kraus, Heti, and Nelson, participating in both the personal and the intellectual fields at once, are caught in between these two conflicting ideologies.

This shift has been hugely influential on the state of ‘women’s writing’ and has contributed to the increasing popularity of autobiography in general (Saunders 2010: 16). This popularisation, however, has led to what Cavarero describes as the “paradoxical” “modern doctrine” of storytelling (2000: 89). Cavarero explains that the state of the market is such that it appears to be “enthusiastically” in favour of life writing and personal identity, yet it is simultaneously “predisposed to restrict with disdain the category of uniqueness,” (2000: 89). Laurie has also noted this phenomenon, writing that the outpouring of published memoirs is “cashing in on the by now wide support for the representation of difference, a thinly veiled liberal individualism which happily survives by attempting to pass as radical originality” (2000: 3). The rise of identity politics, and the legitimisation of identity as an object of study, quickly became a model that de-incentivised experimentation in favour of capital and control. If identity and life stories are a commodity, they are only valuable when

fixed, individual, and sell-able. When experimentation is barred under this capitalist co- opting, feminist life writing undergoes a political de-clawing and is no longer able to challenge the pre-determined and prescriptive roles that flow through the classificatory logic of genre (Parker 1987: 2).

This shift has, arguably, been a long time coming, as Parker asserts that the autobiography itself emerged from early capitalist methodologies. Spurred by the principle of economic individuality around the Enlightenment, the recording of possessions also served to transform the body into a possession for which one was responsible (Parker 1987: 3). This period saw the rise not only of the novel form, but of philosophies on the condition of the ‘soul’, including the epistemological work of Descartes (Parker 1987: 155). This can further be traced to the rise of religious practices such as confession, which encouraged the individual to keep a sequential record not only of their personal inventory, but their actions as well, in the form of a journal or diary. Parker therefore argues that first-person writing, or the recording of one’s own life, has its origins in systems that inherently support both the Cartesian separation of the mind and body—where the body is treated as a possession, or as something to be ‘accounted’ for—and capitalism. The diary, then, effectively emerged from the practice of keeping ledger-books that catalogued the individual’s ownership of land and of other’s bodies (Parker 1987: 156).

The concept of individualism and its dependence on the separation of self from other—and even the separation of the self into various elements like mind and body—is the product of increased social and religious regulation. This regulation has also disproportionately impacted the lives of women, whose bodies are so often figured as objects for purchase and possession. Kraus in particular argues throughout Aliens & Anorexia that the concept of life writing, particularly biography, is reliant on isolation and alienation and that it inadvertently props up a strictly individualistic ontology that reduces its subjects to small aspects of their lives. She extends this argument to an anti-capitalist one, calling into question the ongoing figuration of the body as a possession, as subjugated to the mind, and as something that the intellectual being must ignore or ‘account’ for.

Over these three texts, this anti-individualisation approach is broadened so that it is not just the body of the protagonist that resists classification as a ‘possession’, but the bodies of others’ as well. Kraus states to Heti that “the epiphany of the individual against the backdrop of other lives […is] so false!” (2013). Her project throughout Aliens & Anorexia is to “decreate” the “I,” after Simone Weil (2000: 52). Heti, in interview with Naimon, also asserts that “I wasn’t trying to just depict me,” (2012: 115). In The Argonauts, Maggie’s partner Harry Dodge reminds her that “the details of my life, our life together, don’t belong to you alone” (Nelson 2015: 47). Life, and the recording of life experiences, is conceptualised across these texts as a strictly collaborative act. This model of identity utilises the figures of the grotesque, positioning the protagonists as “open […] multiple and changing” (Russo 1994: 8), because of their dependence on their peers.

The strategies of the grotesque and of relational ontology that are at play across these three texts are therefore also in response to this commodification of identity and to rising individualism. The figures that I have established as representing the state of ontological uncertainty, such as the open body, or the ‘two bodies in one’ figure, do not only disrupt processes of categorisation. These figures also work to disrupt individualism and the commodification of identity. A critique of the viability of this individualistic ontology is well underway within feminist theory, where the Cartesian division between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ has long been rejected. I argue throughout this thesis that Kraus, Heti, and Nelson are participating in this feminist critique and working instead to centre their communities and their influences.

This relational model is, importantly, not a threat or even strictly in opposition to the personal or the collective. Rather, Cavarero quotes Butler explaining that “it won’t do to say that I am promoting a relational view of the self over an autonomous one or trying to redescribe autonomy in terms of relationality” (Butler qtd. in Cavarero 2016: 13). Cavarero expands this stance, asserting that (2016: 13):

it is not a matter of correcting individualistic ontology by inserting the category of relation into it. It is rather to think of relation itself as originary and constitutive, as

an essential dimension of the human which—far from limiting itself to putting free and autonomous individuals in relation to each other, as the doctrine of the social pact prescribes—calls into question our being creatures who are materially vulnerable and, often in greatly unbalanced circumstances, consigned to one another.

The grotesque breaking of form and identity that appears across the three texts in this thesis is thus not only the representation of ontological uncertainty, but also builds towards an image of relational ontology. These texts critique individualistic ontology on several levels, some of which I have already introduced, such as the dissipation of the traditional singular subject of the autobiography, and the fracturing of genre’s perceived taxonomic structure. As such, these texts can be thought of not only as responses to the state of feminist theory, but as responses to the state of women’s life writing. They are working to address the state of both intellectual and personal fields.

The incompatibility between the body and language—the question of whether ‘woman’ means anything—while not “solved”, is placated under this model of relational ontology. Murphy notes that “many philosophers of identity have moved beyond the suspicion that the discourse of social construction is an assault on the materiality of ‘reality’” by focusing, instead, on the ways in which “identity can be at once socially constructed and real” (2012: 52). This approach is not dissimilar to the early work of Grosz who, in 1994, worked to make a space for conceptualising the body as neither “brute nor passive but […] interwoven with and constitutive of systems of meaning, signification, and representation” (18). Under this relational model, ideas of opposition and primacy in identity are mollified—the focus shifts to consider how language and the body exist in dialogue, and inform one another.

The nature of the representation of relational ontology in life narratives is still somewhat open for debate. Cavarero and Butler conceive of the origin of the subject differently and, as such, conceive of the representation of that subject differently. For Butler, it is the acquisition of language and entry into the social order; for Cavarero, it is birth and the moment at which the subject begins her life as a unique existent (Cavarero 2000: 34). This

offers some flexibility with the concept of relational ontology as it can function across both the corporeal and the lingual spheres, and can be used to make sense of the subject both in relation to her peers, and in relation to the genre conventions she has inherited.

For Butler, the story of the self must always come from the subject who, though they may take on a third person stance to “go outside” of the self, is nevertheless prisoner to “certain historically established prescriptive codes [that compel] a certain kind of subject formation” (Foucault, qtd. in Butler 2005: 17). As such, the subject is formed according to the systems within which she is raised, and “no account takes place outside the structures of address” (2005: 36). For example, the genre norms that decide textual classification, while capable of being resisted or broken, are nevertheless always present in the description of the text. Our exposure to these norms and frames of reference is therefore both useful, for they allow us to recognise and be recognised as a subject within society—what Butler calls “implied reciprocity” (2005: 26)—and also limiting for the ways in which certain identities are curtailed (2005: 29). The story of the self is therefore the record of taking up and of refuting these norms through which the self—or the text—was formed.

Similarly, the grotesque’s dependence on norms is both useful and limiting. It is dependent on the breaking of norms in order to achieve its effect. These norms are prone to shift over time—social or literary norms once perceived as strict are often not permanent—and so the grotesque too must work to evolve as well (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 12). Further, what is read as grotesque for one audience may not be read as grotesque for another (Thompson 1972: 26). This evolutionary response to norms over time contributes to the longevity of the grotesque, and allows it to stay open-ended and unresolved (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 7; Thompson 1972: 21), which is, ultimately, what allows its figures to work towards representing a relational ontology that functions by dialogue, and through irresolution.

Cavarero, in contrast to Butler, argues that the narration of the self must always come from, or be addressed to, an already-outside other, in what she calls the “dyadic encounter” (Cavarero, qtd. in Butler 2005: 32). This, Kottman notes in the translator’s introduction to Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (Cavarero 2000), is a direct challenge to the

philosophical autonomy of autobiography (xiv), signalling that, for Cavarero at least, the idea of an autobiography as an individual project is always untenable. We develop in relation to others, taking on their influences to varying degrees, and therefore each subject’s life and life story irrevocably retains the traces of others’ unique narratives.

Despite this theoretical difference, the resulting ‘relational’ narratives that Cavarero and Butler each propose are, formally, not that dissimilar. Cavarero states that due to the process of recognition and interaction that is required to uncover the self, the narrative is therefore always “fragmented” and “polyphonic” (2000: 12). Butler writes that, because one’s account of the self is conditioned and blinded by an ethical and normative relationship to the other, it is therefore always belated, partial, and in medias res (2005: 39). Neither accept the traditional single-authored autobiographical text as representative of the self. The narratives they each describe instead work to bear witness to the experience of living both inside and outside of the self, a condition made mandatory once subjects recognise that they are “constitutively social and interdependent” (Butler 2009: 31). This understanding of life narratives does not recognise individualistic ontologies.

Importantly, neither of their approaches return to the collectivism of feminism past. Butler and Cavarero evoke the possibility of what Murphy describes as an ontology with a scope that is broad and concerned with the social conditions of subject formation, but not prone to the collective ethos that functions by exclusion, nor blind to the unique embodied differences of each subject (2011: 578-79). They do so through the shared belief that each subject’s story is always unique: “your story is never my story,” Butler writes (2005: 34), while Cavarero states that although some life-stories are similar, they are nevertheless always “new, insubstitutable, and unexpected, from beginning to end” (2000: 2). Both suggest that, despite the mediation of shared language and social norms, there are aspects of the self that must remain hidden, and thus subjects are irreplaceable and non-substitutable.

Given this climate wherein women writers feel both inside and outside of their bodies, it is not surprising that experimental texts that deploy these particular figures have appeared now, coinciding with Cavarero and Butler’s work. Kraus, Heti, and Nelson are each

immersed in this climate and these texts evidence their experience of identity as something diffuse, ambiguous, multiple, and incompatible with the commodification of identity that is taking place. This commodification of identity relies on discrete boundaries, and therefore the framework of identity and identity politics we have inherited under the influence of Cartesian and capitalist neoliberalism reveals its limits when certain bodies move to exist across borders, to invert hierarchies, and to write outside of the fixed genre models.

Chapter One uses the frameworks of the grotesque and relational ontology to analyse Aliens & Anorexia (2000). Kraus explains, through case studies on the biographies and work of Paul Thek and Simone Weil, how separation between self and other cements a reliance on ‘difference’ and produces alienation. She intertwines these studies with an account of her own life, switching between subjects often, and reproducing textually the sensation of fragmentation and isolation that she is describing in the lives of her subjects and herself. This effect is temporal, spatial, and subjective disorientation. Carroll has described this distinctive quality of Kraus’s prose as “cuts and jumps that more closely resemble the language of film than the conventions of realism” (2015: 26). I analyse this effect through Kraus’s use of parataxis, a technique which she explains originates in the medieval period, and which has been a defining practice of the postmodern era (Hayles 1990: 418). Kraus peppers this text with references to the medieval, including traditional religious practices like hagiographies and reliquaries, positioning these two periods—the medieval and the postmodern—as intimately linked. My reading therefore draws parallels between the medieval understanding of bodies as utterly open and connected to their environments (Green 2012: 5-6), and between the contemporary state of women’s ontology. This medieval approach is highly grotesque, and works in conjunction with Kraus’s overt anti- capitalist message to represent an uncertain ontology that cannot be commodified or confined.

Chapter Two continues this exploration of uncertain ontology and also considers some of its limitations. Heti, in How Should A Person Be? (2012), confronts the sensation of confinement within genre and the pressure to subscribe to idealised and fixed forms or roles—roles to which she often succumbs, and which I read through the both the concept of

the carnivalesque and Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as a Masquerade” (1929). I argue that this text is a reflection on the state of identity politics under post-feminism and confronts the terrain of women’s writing in which the subscription to the role of ‘woman’ signals a kind of confinement and erasure of identity. Heti’s comic and horrifying ‘masquerade’ becomes a deeply philosophical topic in this text, though her intellectual contributions to this topic have been overlooked. Heti constructs what can be read as a philosophical dilemma concerning the ‘masquerade’ as either unique or anonymous (or both). This provides the terrain for Heti’s exploration of identity, individuality, and the ethical limits of mimicry.

Chapter Three analyses Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015). Where Chapter One argues for the dissolution of the individual and the potential of collectivism, and Chapter Two argues for the importance of maintaining ‘unique’ identities, Chapter Three proposes a third position. Nelson argues that identity is neither utterly open, nor individual, but inconclusively somewhere in-between. She takes up this position of ‘in-between’ and considers its “politically maddening” side effects (Nelson 2015: 9). This text examines what it is like to live both a public and private life, and to be both recognised and unrecognised for one's identity. Her strategy of deferring identity contrasts with both Kraus and Heti who each work, in different ways, to inhabit many identities at once. Nelson suggests that the state of being both inside and outside of dominant institutions such as the academy, marriage, and the family unit, is a ‘queer’ position that, rather than resulting in “structural antagonism” (Menon 2015: 122), instead allows her to take up a position of “ontological indeterminacy” (Nelson 2015: 15). Nelson works to replicate such indeterminacy in her life writing by playing with the form and formlessness of genre taxonomy, combining and refusing queer poetics and the theoretical (Donegal 2015). The Argonauts works to re-define the ontology of its protagonists through their relationships rather than according to the borders of categories like ‘woman’, ‘queer’, or ‘mother’.

Kraus, Heti, and Nelson are all fixated on identity, the body, categories and indeterminacy, working to disintegrate the borders between the formal properties of one genre and another, between self and other, and between character and actor. They achieve this by using figures

of the grotesque to establish a representation of relational ontology. They do this in order to confront the paradoxical situation of the twenty-first century and attempt to represent the experience of being a woman, when ‘woman’ doesn’t exist, when the body is dislocated and identity is increasingly commodified. These women feel both pushed out of their identities and trapped within them, compelled to name themselves and to un-name themselves at once. This is a violent and grotesque situation, but also one that offers the possibility of re-connection. Despite these monumental shifts in the field, experimentation and combination is still a powerful method for conveying the experience of being a ‘woman’—whatever that might mean in the twenty-first century.

Chapter One

Porous Skin: Neo-Medieval Bodies and their Paratactic Dis/Continuities in Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia (2000)

Countdown on the millennium clock at 34th Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan, a grid of twitching light-dots advancing into numbers, ringed by brightly-colored logos of its sponsors burned into the plastichrome—TCBY Yogurt, Roy Rogers, Staples and Kentucky Fried Chicken—a neo-medieval message from our sponsors, instructing us that time is fluid but Capital is here to stay.

468 days, 11 hours, 43 minutes, 16 seconds to go

Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia opens with a countdown to the new millennium (2000: 23). First published in 2000, its description of the “neo-medieval messages from our sponsors” flashing alongside the ominous clock immediately places this text in two times, both before and after the turn of the century, both out of date and future-facing. Distorted chronology characterises this text. Aliens & Anorexia incessantly jumps between multiple timelines, recounting and reflecting upon not only the life of the protagonist, Chris, but also the lives of other artists and philosophers. Chris is not the centre of this text. This is a text in which many genres and many identities are cohabiting. As these simultaneous narratives collide and overlap, any sense of individual identity, and any ontological security, are thoroughly destabilised.

Kraus dismantles the limits of life writing, not just the autobiographical tradition, but the biographical as well. She examines and critiques the conventions of life writing that have modified, ignored, and erased those subjects who refuse to—or are unable to—fit within these generic borders. Kraus is passionately and politically invested in exploding these categories not only for herself, but also as part of a reclamation project to recover the full life stories of those who have had to make themselves partial and fragmented in order to

speak at all. In doing so, she entangles herself in the history of queer and women’s literature, art, and philosophy.

I read this text as an exercise in anti-individualism, and as a response to the neoliberal rise of individualistic ontologies throughout the late twentieth century, which resulted in an increasing reluctance to discuss identity in collective terms—like ‘woman’—for fear it would limit individuality or agency (Budgeon 2013: 286). Kraus uses the fluidity of time to distort chronologies and rupture the singularity of the individual not only within the narrative structures of life writing, but also as a political comment on this increasing pressure to individualise. She takes up a deliberately uncertain ontological position between autobiographical and biographical genres—genres that focus on the self and the other respectively—in order to escape the isolation of individualism. As such, this text is dedicated to breaking down the idea of the individual that typically accompanies life writing (Saunders 2010: 11). This text’s primary achievements are these distorted and discontinuous identities which act as an investigation into the possibilities of an anti- individualist life writing.

This chapter unfolds across four interconnected sections: parataxis, collectivity, anorexia, and porosity. The first section analyses Kraus’s use of parataxis, which I identify as the key technique with which she challenges and questions the state of life writing. With this technique, Kraus fragments and blurs the distinction between autobiographical and biographical life writing until the self and other overlap. This section will examine three key aspects of Kraus’s use of parataxis. First, as a technique that conveys a sense of simultaneous fragmentation and combination. This works not only at the level of the sentence, but transfers to the characters as well, allowing their identities to combine and overlap. Second, I will explore how this technique is associated with the grotesque’s revolutionary overtones, and how it has been used to disrupt hierarchies within postmodern queer-feminist literature. Parataxis has been linked with the avant-garde, Dadaist collage (Kraus 2000: 53), the ‘new sentence’ of New Narrative (Perelman 1993: 313), and even with the ‘anti-heroic’ storytelling traditions of the medieval period (Kraus 2006: 82). Third, I argue that parataxis evokes a medieval ontology, emphasising Kraus’s play across

temporalities. This medieval ontology is powerful not only for its ability to challenge individualism, but also for its ability to challenge contemporary understandings of the body. The second section of this chapter compares two contrasting passages from the text. Each passage represents, in alternate ways, the possibilities and dangers of collectivism and what relationship that collectivism has—or could have—to individualism. In section three I examine Kraus’s re-reading of anorexia, and consider how the refusal of food can be understood as an active political withdrawal from, and de-creation of, the ‘I’. Section four concludes this chapter and positions ‘porosity’ as a figure through which Kraus’s play across genre and gender ‘gaps’ can be read as a feminist critique of hierarchical—yet ultimately inescapable—literary and social structures.

Kraus’s political beliefs are foundational to understanding her investment in genre and identity disruption, and in anti-individualism. As such, in order to argue that she is representing an uncertain ontology as a result of developments in feminist theory in the 1990s, and to consider the specific ways in which her writing is forcing theory to encounter life, it is necessary to position her work, and her politics, in relation to that period. Coinciding with the “feminist contentions of the 1990s”, which thoroughly disturbed the limits of ‘woman’ (Murphy 2012: 5), Kraus was closely involved with the publishing company Semiotext(e). In 2001, just one year after the first print of Aliens & Anorexia, Semiotext(e) published a retrospective reader of collated excerpts from their previous titles. This reader is titled Hatred of Capitalism and asserts the centrality of this ideology to the press’s ethos, and to Kraus’s own practice. This anti-capitalist ideology informs my understanding of Aliens & Anorexia, and supports my argument that Kraus is an early responder to the neoliberal post-feminist swing towards individualism. Kraus’s practice constitutes a politically active withdrawal from the genre restrictions that encourage ideas of the individual under capitalism as isolated, in competition with others, and alienated from their community.

The reader opens with a transcribed conversation between Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer, the press’s founder, recounting the history of the project. They discuss, between recounting dreams and introducing the essays in the reader, that “hatred of capitalism” is a kind of

madness, or at least perceived as a kind of madness for the forms it must take to escape those aspects of life that are “so ingrained now we don’t even question it” (2001: 11). Kraus offers, as examples, professional competition and consumer culture which represent the individual’s aspiration to climb a social hierarchy through achievement or through possession. This hierarchy is, through capitalism, built into our social fabric and relies upon the isolation of the individual. Kraus and Lotringer suggest that this isolation is not limited to the humans who inhabit this system, but has been extended through to the ways in which all things interact with one another, including genres, so that each subject or genre must be defined against what it is not (2001: 11). All entities, corporeal and conceptual, must have their borders increasingly defined for the purpose of classification and commodification.

The project of Semiotext(e), Lotringer states, is therefore to collapse this genre division and hierarchy as part of an anti-capitalist activism, to “surround” theory, which is typically elevated, “with other stuff” like recounted dreams, the confessional, fiction, and anything else, until it becomes “part of something more fluid and [can no longer be] isolated,” and to create work “with no more centre, no more edge” (Kraus and Lotringer 2001: 11, 13). Aliens & Anorexia is obsessed with this “war of language” and wonders whether it is possible to use “direct action to escape from the self-conscious claustrophobia of arrogant, objectifying discourse” (Kraus 2000: 37).

“Direct action” therefore manifests (in a literary sense) in Kraus’s prose as the paratactic rupturing of the borders between not only genres, but between protagonists, times, and spaces, which work together to encourage an anti-hierarchical, anti-capitalistic, anti- individualistic understanding of identity. This ideological approach is foundational to reading Kraus’s methodology throughout Aliens & Anorexia. Here, her use of parataxis allows not only the combination of genres, but, through that combination, creates a text within which the isolating and individualising tendencies of autobiographical and biographical writing are actively overcome.

Kraus has repeatedly reaffirmed her commitment to this politically motivated use of parataxis. “Association,” Kraus explains to Heti in an interview for Believer Magazine (2013)

brings you into the larger world of other people and things. Not having that is a kind of prison, a prison of such a limited consciousness, of such a limited frame of reference […]. I guess for me the greatest injustice is to see people robbed of that interiority and process of association.

The association of parataxis is used throughout Aliens & Anorexia as a way out of the prison of “I”— association becomes a way to escape the “madness” of individualism, isolation, and alienation brought about by the neoliberal capitalist co-opting of feminism. “Without association there’s no interiority. There’s no inner life,” Kraus concludes (2013). The interiority of a person is comprised of their external associations, existing in dialogue, so that there can be no certain distinction between the two.

Since 1990, Kraus has run her own imprint under Semiotext(e): Native Agents, a play on Lotringer’s own imprint, Foreign Agents, which often published European philosophy, notably work by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault. Native Agents was conceived as a project that might step into the widening gap between life writing and theory genres. Further, this imprint sought to apply the anti-capitalist ideologies of Semiotext(e)’s primary material to women’s writing in particular, and, in doing so, sought to deliberately complicate the process by which women’s writing is constructed, categorised, marketed, and read. Key authors published under this imprint include Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, and Dodie Bellamy, whose own experimental writing has notably influenced not only Kraus, but Heti and Nelson as well.

Native Agents’s specific refusal of genre classifications should therefore be read as a politically active refusal of the commodification of identity. Kraus has stated in a recent essay for the Sydney Review of Books (2014) that though Native Agents presents a united collection of works, “we haven’t yet found the words to describe our aesthetic coherently

[…] more conceptual than experimental, more warm than cold, more discursive than lyrical, often queer, never conventionally […] autobiographical.” As such, Gunport explains, “what united the Native Agent authors was the way their work combined elements of theory, fiction, and biography, explicitly refusing to identify absolutely with any single genre” (2012). This description is easily applicable to Kraus’s work, who is published under her own imprint. In 1997, in I Love Dick, Kraus quotes Lotringer’s description of her own style as “some new kind of literary form” (258) that blends criticism and fiction. Kraus’s project is, I argue, explicitly participating in genre resistance, or genre innovation, as a means of questioning the division between life writing and theoretical writing, between the corporal and disembodied gender codifications that follow these genres, and the limitations that this division has continued to place upon women’s life writing.

Further, Kraus’s intention with Native Agents was to bring the legitimacy afforded to the translations of the European male philosophers that Foreign Agents typically published, to the work of intellectual women who preferred to write in a candid, first-person style. This undertaking evidences Kraus’s awareness of and involvement with the project of women’s personal relationships to theory throughout the 1990s. This complex terrain, established in the introduction to this thesis, is the terrain within which Kraus was working while she produced Aliens & Anorexia. I argue that this understanding of the relationship between genre and gender, and the various hierarchies implicit in each, is the foundation from which Kraus is able to navigate and confront the political difficulties of women’s life writing at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Kraus’s first text, I Love Dick (1997), and third text, Torpor (2006), round out what she describes as a loose trilogy, with Aliens & Anorexia at the centre. In conversation with Heti for Believer Magazine (2013), Kraus states that:

the book was more than anything an attempt to analyse the social conditions surrounding my personal failure. […] I felt like, “I’ve covered this subject as well as I can at this moment.” Actually, once I started writing I Love Dick, I knew there

would be three books: I Love Dick, Aliens, Torpor. It would be a trilogy. I knew it would take three books to really cover what I needed to talk about.

Though all three texts bear the genre-resistant qualities of the Native Agents texts, the interdisciplinarity of Aliens & Anorexia in particular is striking. The text performs its own instability as the centre transitional work between the more confessional I Love Dick, and the more fictionalised Torpor. The idea of “personal failure” is crucial for my argument that Kraus is responding to the state of feminism in the late 1990s. As mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, this period saw the rise of a post-feminism that trades on the belief that systemic inequality is the result of personal failure (Ahmed 2017: 5; McRobbie 2004: 257). This is the heart of individualistic ontology against which theorists such as Cavarero, Butler, and Murphy are working. To feel as though one is personally responsible for the “immense” “obstacles” that women encounter when attempting to record the experience of their lives (Woolf 1931: 240) is read, in post-feminism, as symptomatic of a failure to “perform” the role of woman (Budgeon 2013: 286). Throughout Aliens & Anorexia, that failure becomes increasingly deliberate—active rather than passive—and acts as a politically motivated demonstration of Kraus’s resistance to homogenising and restrictive categories of identity that are enforced through the policing of textual structures (Parker 1987: 2).

Kraus’s uneasiness with the evolution of feminism through the 1990s, and its turn towards the individual, is made clear in the text. In a chapter set in 1993-1994, Sylvère, Kraus’s husband at the time, urges her to identify as a feminist to improve her chances of securing funding for her film. She recounts (2000: 103):

Sylvere-the-pragmatist kept telling me I’d have better luck if I called myself a ‘feminist’ but I just couldn’t do it […]. I could not believe in a merely personal salvation […]. Why should women settle to think and talk about just femaleness when men were constantly transcending gender?

This passage firmly establishes the moment at which Kraus is writing. Feminism, in Kraus’s eyes, has begun its shift towards a personal movement rather than a collective one. This passage also recalls some of the debates concerning the field of ‘women’s writing’ and whether or not identifying as such works to establish a women’s tradition or, instead, works to prop up feelings of division and alienation (Moi 2008: 265).

On the surface, Kraus’s investment in ‘personal failure’ offers an insight into some biographical details of her life. Raised and educated in New Zealand, Kraus worked as a journalist before immigrating to New York in her early twenties to attempt to break into the art scene. Her work, primarily performance art and experimental video, was heavily influenced by continental philosophy, feminism and emergent queer theories. Her video work did not, at the time, receive much critical attention. These works are currently experiencing a slow revival, however Kraus has stated that “these films have nothing to do with me now […], it is a practice I am no longer involved in” (Kraus, in Real Fine Arts, 2011). Following this work, she turned her attention to art criticism and cultural commentary, publishing a collection of her essays from the 1990s that examine the role of high-profile art institutions in dictating the emergence and success of artists (Video Green, 2004). The overall thesis of this collection is that an artist cannot succeed without the backing of a major art education institution, entry to which is prohibitively expensive—thus signalling the profit-driven stranglehold on the contemporary productive of arts and culture. This diverse career and her interest in the role of institutional control can be read as strong motivators for her paratactic literary style.

Kraus’s interest in video and film led her to write and direct a “normal” feature-length film in the mid 1990s, the production of which forms the bulk of the narrative of Aliens & Anorexia (123). The film, Gravity & Grace (1996), is the key ‘failure’ to which Kraus refers above. At the time, the film was rejected by distributors and has only recently been screened widely on the back of her literary success. Aliens & Anorexia traces the tumultuous production of the film, from conception to filming to the final cut in temporally and spatially distorted prose. Jumping from the life of philosopher Simone Weil, whose work Gravity and Grace (2002), first published in 1947, inspired the film, to the filming

process in New Zealand in the mid-1990s, to New York’s art scene in the 1970s and the life and work of artist Paul Thek, this is a disorienting text. It works to replicate the key philosophy of the film at its centre, and is described by Kraus as being “driven harder by philosophy than plot or character” (2000: 27).

At a generic level, Kraus incorporates art and philosophical analysis into her life writing, demonstrating how the more theoretical genres can play a role in shaping the personal. The theory and art Kraus consumes is presented as the material of her life, and her interpretation of art and theory dictates and expands her understanding of the limits of her identity. Early in Aliens & Anorexia Kraus is given a cardboard box brimming with assorted books— including Weil’s Gravity and Grace (2002) and a reader on Dadaism—that turned out to contain “everything I’d work on for the next 15 years” (59). This sets up the idea that the texts Kraus consumes are immense forces on her life—the material of her life. This plays out as a fracturing or expanding of the limits of identity; Kraus’s identity also includes these other works. More than intertextual, this is an ontological re-figuration that positions these other identities as integral to, and inseparable from, Kraus’s own identity.

Aliens & Anorexia begins with its ending, disrupting its own chronology from the first page. Gravity & Grace has at last been completed and Kraus, exhausted and disenchanted after the ordeal, arrives in Berlin. She is there to attempt, one final time, to sell the “unappealing… amateur intellectual’s home video” (2000: 28) to a festival circuit, any festival circuit, and recoup some of the losses to her personal finances and pride. With the success of the film riding on Kraus’s ability to network, the text cements its interest in disconnection, alienation, and failure. “This,” Kraus thinks upon realising that no one will see her film, “is where it ends” (Kraus’s italics, 2000: 33). The start of the text, the bleak film festival, pre-empts its own cinematic finale; the text closes with a third-person prose retelling of the failed film, seemingly detached from the first portion. However, much like the paratactic prose that characterises this text, the two sections are much more connected than their separation would suggest.

This twisting of chronology characterises Kraus’s body of work and suggests not only the inversion and incongruity of the grotesque, or the “madness” required to escape capitalist individualism (Kraus and Lotinger 2001: 11), it also serves to bolster the distorting and disorienting effects of parataxis. Throughout Aliens & Anorexia there is no conventional sense of organising structure other than a progressive descent into chaotic information overload, represented as the increase of paratactic jumps from topic to topic, as Kraus tries desperately to make sense of her ‘personal failure’. The earlier parts of the text feature sustained inquests into the lives of artists, philosophers, and political activists, particularly Weil and Thek, with whom Kraus constructs a loose collective, referring to them as a network of “underground intellectuals” (2000: 25). These are intellectuals who operated in opposition to the dominant institutions of their time, who have slipped under the radar, and who have not been granted the attention and celebration that their achievements deserve. She describes this group as people who “never met but […] their histories crossed” (2000: 90).

By placing these biographic studies alongside her own autobiographical writing, Kraus implies a connection between these subjects and herself; by combining these genres, Kraus is blurring the distinction between self and other as a means of de-individualising herself. Slowly, a common thread emerges: Kraus is reframing, or reclaiming, works or actions that had, in their own time, been deemed ‘failures’. The text therefore functions as a kind of revival project where, amongst the personal record of her own life, Kraus takes up the queer-feminist project of resurrecting those lives and works that patriarchal frameworks had marked as irrelevant in their own time. She is placing these subjects alongside or within her own life writing, using ‘failure’ and isolation as a point of connection. As she does this, she questions and critiques the syntaxes, genres, and attitudes embedded within the language structures that have made the “archaic and elitist attitudes […] that [have] limited women’s self-knowledge and expression” possible (Jones 1981: 261).

As the text progresses, the voice of Kraus becomes indistinguishable from the voice of Weil, or Thek, or the characters and crew from her “completely uncontrollable” film (2000: 127). There is a frantic sense of collapse. The prose swings more and more unpredictably

between a dozen timelines and topics. Though there is no explicit connection drawn between, for instance, the autopsy of Ulrike Meinhof and snapshots of life in rural New Zealand, or the theatrical legacy of Andy Warhol and the death of Lily, the family dog, Kraus’s arrangement of information nevertheless implies a strong connection between the collected vignettes. Towards the end, the delineation of episodes becomes less distinct until stories are crowded onto the same page, and the same paragraph. Kraus, having decided to “stop making art” until she understands her perceived failure (2000: 182), seems to lose hold of a distinct sense of self, succumbing to the “madness” of trying to outrun the capitalist conception of success as coterminous with profit (Kraus and Lotringer 2001: 11). She tries to maintain a sense of structure by reminding herself that “crazy women hardly get to speak, let alone make movies,” (2000: 126). The first section of the text culminates in a swathe of contextless quotes, from Deleuze to William Burroughs, grocery-lists, and the return of the ominous countdown to the new millennium (2000: 181-83):

As the sky turned black to gray I had this vivid sense that we were not alone; that at this moment there were other little groups like ours at other places in the world, and that just by being there together we could reach them. The temporary sense that you’re no longer just yourself, you are also other people […]. The empty spaces in each person turn into receptors allowing Aliens to enter through the porous surface of your skin. And later Sylvère told me it was on that night, some 14,000 miles away, that David Rattray died after slipping into a coma.

Two years ago […] I had a near death experience on a fishing boat in the Arctic Ocean […]. And as we sat there huddled in our parkas I felt strangely calm and giddy, imagining what my two best friends were doing at that moment. Their lives passed before my eyes. I saw them very clearly. And there was something mildly hilarious about this, this simultaneity […]. That always at each moment there are all these other lives.

No one bought Gravity & Grace that February in Berlin.

[…] It lacked beauty, criticality and narrative resolution […]. And it confused me, wondering why intelligence and courage were considered negative attributes in female filmmaking. So I decided to stop making art until I found an answer.

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze got anorexia right […].

“Those aliens,” writes William Burroughs, “nourish themselves on photosynthesis […]. The whole fucking planet is built on eating…”

Millennial countdown: 377 days to go.

Synchronicity shudders faster than the speed of light around the world.

Strawberry shortcake, mashed potatoes.

This passage is indicative of the sensation of being flooded with information that characterises this text. Ben Ehrenreich describes Aliens & Anorexia, fittingly, as having “more ideas on every page […] than in most books published in the last year” (2001). The focus in this passage is overwhelmingly on collectivity and transcendent encounters with environmental forces, expressed through a blend of her own voice and the voices of others. This wildly unpredictable chronology facilitates Kraus’s use of simultaneous narratives as a means of breaking down individuality. This passage demonstrates the various levels at which Kraus uses parataxis throughout Aliens & Anorexia, from the more conventional example of the final line “Strawberry shortcake, mashed potato,” to the expanded examples where short paragraphs on anorexia, photosynthesis, and her own film sit side by side. This brings us to section one:

1. Parataxis

The scene above, along with this chapter’s epigraph, firmly establish Kraus’s reliance on parataxis and its ability to fragment preconceived notions of linearity. Katherine Hayles

notes that uncertainty and contradiction are “symptomatic of the parataxic mode of being” (1990: 408), asserting the suitability of this technique for conveying the uncertain ontology of women’s life writing following the developments of the 1990s within feminist identity politics.

Parataxis works in many ways throughout this text. The first operation I analyse is the most dominant, and most complex. I argue that paratactic prose not only disrupts and combines multiple genres and perspectives, but that, in doing so, it disrupts and combines the identities within the text. This is the primary achievement of Aliens & Anorexia; it extends the operation of parataxis to its characters, presenting them alongside and inseparable from one another. This collective identity at the heart of the text is Kraus’s attempt to represent a relational ontology, and challenge the conventions of not only autobiography, but of biography as well. Parataxis allows Kraus to jump between disparate times and locations creating the effect that many lives are, despite their separation, occurring simultaneously.

Through parataxis Kraus critiques and plays with the conventions of life writing as an individual practice, building to a critique of what she calls the “hagiographic” tendency of the life writing genres (2000: 92). While the disruption of the limits of life writing is not exclusive to the twenty-first century, Kraus’ use of parataxis to create a “hybrid combination” of the personal and the critical aspects of her life positions this work as a key example of the academic life writing boom which, as Gilmore argues, arose in response to the shifting “identity-based movements” of the late-twentieth-century (2001: 1, 17).

Kraus explains that ‘hagiographic’ here means the process by which the “uncontainable” artist—that is, an artist whose practice spans many fields, or topics, or whose practice is collaborative in nature—is confined by their biographers, and by the biographic genre, in order to make their lives more singular, linear, and consumable. The result is that the artist’s “contemporaries” and influences are cut out from their life, leaving them individualised, isolated, and alienated. Because experimental life writing brings together both the “subjective” record of life and the “objective” patina of theory (Gilmore 2001: 11- 12), the authoritative façade of ‘hagiographic’ writing is immediately fractured. This

particular combination complicates the text’s relationship to truth and invites readers to reassess the author’s intent. In this case, Kraus invites readers to reassess why Thek’s hagiographic biographies are so myopic when his practice and community were so varied.

Further, this extended use of parataxis functions as an acting out of the “schizophrenic” state of women writers (Moi 2008: 264), trapped inside and outside of themselves. This schizophrenic duality is an idea that Kraus has previously associated with the contradictory experience of being a woman, trapped among conflicting social norms that demand both visibility and self-erasure (1997: 241). This idea of multiple states is replicated in Aliens & Anorexia as Kraus plays with temporal and spatial overlap, crafting scenes that feel at once like ‘madness’ and also like liberation from the linear and singular narrative structures that mandate an individual understanding of identity. The passage above, combined with the technique of parataxis, encourages an idea of the body as something open to the world that surrounds it, that is, a body that does not end at the borders of its skin, that bears the traces of the structures that have shaped and continue to shape it, that is both inside and outside of itself.

This is what parataxis acts out: a collection of individuals—whether people or phrases— that, when located alongside one another, can no longer be separated in their purpose or meaning. Their meaning, their identity, is multiplied over and over. Kraus’s paratactic juxtaposition of various literary genres, combined with her ricocheting temporalities, suggest a shared voice and an abstraction of singular identity. By recognising herself in the biographies of others, particularly of Weil and Thek, Kraus’s collage-like prose comes to suggest an interweaving of identities. This performance immediately “indicts” an “ontology of discrete identity” (Murphy 2011: 587), mirroring the twenty-first-century shift towards relational understandings of being, in response to the rising threat of individualistic ontologies.

The events and feelings that Kraus seeks to reproduce textually do not match with—and would be erased by—the commonly held perception that life writing, particularly autobiography, is an individual activity rather than always intertextual, and therefore

always “a self-undoing project” (Saunders 2010: 11, 10). She therefore emphasises the blurred nature of the genre by fracturing the typical linearity and individuality of life writing through parataxis. In doing so, Kraus produces an approximation of the sensation of feeling outside of oneself, or of slipping out of a system that one had hoped would provide structure and stability. Kraus identifies this effect as the result of a kind of parataxis in this passage from Torpor (2006: 82):

Parataxis is a strange literary form, born at the beginning of the Middle Ages. […] Flashing back and sideways, holding back the outcome of events, these tellers fracture old familiar and heroic tales into contradictory, multiple perspectives. It becomes impossible to move the story forward without returning to the past, and so the past both predicts the future and withholds it.

Parataxis represents a shrugging off of the conventions that support linearity and individuality typically carried through the “heroic” tale. Often defined as the absence of the conjunction that joins two phrases, parataxis has more recently been used by cultural theorists to describe texts that present a series of scenes or ideas alongside one another, like a literary collage.

Parataxis is more than a cumulative device. Kraus sets up a methodology where the refusal to participate in organising structures, on a literary level, translates as the refusal to participate on a social and political level. The paratactic rejection of conjunctions, linearity, singularity, and resolution function in this text as the rejection of “heroic” narrative conventions and encourage an uncertain ontology, where there is no central hero, and no central plot. This rejection of singularity and linearity emphasises the key function of Kraus’s paratactic prose: the creation of a record of her life where past and present exist simultaneously, where there is little distinction between the lives of those she reads, and her own experiences. In particular, Weil’s and Thek’s lives and careers are presented as occurring alongside Kraus’s. Kraus quotes their work and journals, using their words to contextualise and to comment on her own life. In an interview with Denise Frimer, where Kraus’s work is described as “confessional,” Kraus rejoins, “‘Confessional’ of what?

Personal confession? […] There’s a great line from a book we [Semiotext(e)] published by Deleuze: Life is not personal. The word ‘confessional’ is not a good descriptor of my work” (2005, emphasis original). In Aliens & Anorexia, Kraus recounts her life only in relation to those her around her. Her identity is only available as part of a collective that works, over the course of the text, to disintegrate the idea of individual identity. Kraus’s use of parataxis sees the conventional ‘I’ of life writing entangled with the ‘I’s of those she references and is influenced by, to the degree that she becomes a collection of ‘selves’.

The second way that parataxis works is to evoke the grotesque, and its anti-hierarchical applications. The effect produced by this technique relies upon core features of the grotesque such as disruption, incompleteness, and the defeat of audience expectations (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 2, 7, 12; Thompson 1972: 21). More than intertextual, paratactic prose succeeds in resisting the dominant narrative and political structures of its time and has long been celebrated, much like the grotesque, as an anti-hierarchical political tool (Clayborough 1967: 13). It challenges not only the linear logic of the theoretical, it also challenges what life writing—typically thought of as an individual project—should look like, allowing incongruent styles to sit side by side.

The refusal to participate in the conventional autobiographical and biographical individualism here becomes a method of questioning the control of homogenising forces at play within genre categorisation. Hayles writes (1990: 419):

From the paratactic discontinuities that define us [we must recuperate] a project of human liberation that does not depend on negating our stratified histories. For the paratactic mode of being is not necessarily bad. Displacing the subordinating hierarchies of hypotaxis, it leaves open possibilities for emancipatory projects that use its instabilities to intervene constructively in postmodern culture, exposing the play of power and suggesting opportunities for chance.

Kraus achieves a work of productive instability that challenges life writing’s proclivity towards “stratified” individuals. Her reliance on parataxis in the text is an attempt to expose

the hand of social and literary frameworks that have dictated the success and failure of the lives they record. In particular, Kraus questions the individualising nature of artist biographies—that she describes as hagiographic—and works to expose the academic—and particularly psychoanalytic—readings of women’s bodies that continue to influence and dictate the interpretation of their work, especially when that work enters into theoretical genres like philosophy.

Kraus’s use of parataxis throughout Aliens & Anorexia is everywhere evident, producing the distortion of chronology, the collapse of clear character delineation and the rejection of typical narrative structures that lead to closure. The key to this technique is that the absence of a conjunction creates a collection of phrases and sentences that have no hierarchical relationship to one another. Because of this, it is a device with well-noted critical potential, especially for contesting the ways in which certain genres—life writing and theory—and their gender codification, have historically exercised control over subjects’ ability to tell their own life stories. Hayles explains that parataxis has the ability to disrupt hierarchies because the absence of conjunction is not read as some missing component, but rather it is perceived as a different kind of information conduit (1990: 395). She goes on to explain that parataxis is therefore comprised of two elements, “on the one hand, there is embodiment, materiality, replication” in the form of the words on the page, the clauses, the punctuation, and “on the other, decontextualisation, ephemerality, information” where the conjunction typically sits. “When the two come together,” Hayles writes (1990: 398):

the result is an explosive mixture with implications beyond the metaphorical. […] Parataxis does not necessarily mean there is no relation between the terms put into juxtaposition. Rather the reaction, unspecified except for proximity, is polysemous and unstable. Lacking a coordinating structure, it is subject to appropriation, interpretation, and re-inscription into different modalities.

This definition is strikingly similar to the operations of the grotesque, which also works, through its various figures, to prioritise the varied and unstable flow between an entity and that entity’s surroundings. The paratactic clause, like the grotesque body, is “open to the

world” that surrounds it (Bakhtin 1968: 26), taking its shape and meaning not from its own borders, but existing in a state of ontological and epistemological uncertainty. This relationship between inside and outside privileges neither, forming a dialogic “relation of simultaneity,” that “play[s] with ratios of same and different in space and time” (Holquist 1990: 19). Parataxis, though it operates by fragmentation and disconnection, operates dialogically; like the grotesque body, it disbars total isolation and alienation.

Both parataxis and the grotesque body are marked not only by this dual sense of incompletion and excess, but also, by nature of this dual state, a sense of infinite resurrection and re-readability (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 7; Thompson 1972: 21). Parataxis can be read as grotesque precisely because, as Hayles notes, it defeats the “paradigm” of the binary model, containing both embodiment and information (1990: 396). Perelman, similarly, asserts that parataxis cannot be “subordinated to a larger narrative frame” and resists “larger narrative, expository, and ideological unities” (1993: 313, 317). Parataxis can thus be considered as a politically active form of critique, where the disruption of the typical flow of narration represents the subversion of those binary- dependent thinking patterns that characterise the binomials of man-reason and women-body and their literary alignments with the theoretical and life writing.

Though Kraus locates parataxis as a “strange literary form” from the “beginning of the Middle Ages” (2006: 82), it has appeared in several more contemporary movements. Hayles describes parataxis as a distinctly postmodern rhetorical figure that rose to popularity in the late twentieth century because of its ability to challenge “the categories of traditional classification [that] have not kept pace with postmodern technologies” (1990: 418). Both ancient, and distinctly postmodern, its intermediaries are the Dada movement’s literary collages, and Stein’s avant-garde poetry. This is a technique with longevity that appears again and again at the forefront of experimental movements.

Its most contemporary iteration was in New Narrative, the postmodern queer-feminist movement. New Narrative, typically first-person, also used collage to combine found materials and life writing. This “hybrid aesthetic” (Glück 2004: 26) worked to establish

self-reflection as a destabilising narrative device, and intended to use its paratactic qualities to disrupt the “dead end” of language poetry (Glück 2004: 29). This prose style was called the ‘new sentence’. Perelman explains that the ‘new sentence’ is a term coined by Ron Silliman, a forerunner in the New Narrative movement, and that its value in literary terms is equivalent to the inventions of postmodern architecture and television (1993: 321). According to Perelman, the ‘new sentence’ is “more or less ordinary itself but [it] gains its effect by being placed next to another sentence to which it has tangential relevance” (1993: 313). This highlights the ways in which parataxis is able to emphasise the significance of context in meaning-making, rather than relying on the meaning contained internally within the sentence. Perelman goes on to explain that, because the ‘new sentence’ was “developed in a climate where the hegemony of the American military and multinational capitalism was manifest […], writing in fragments might have kept one from being contaminated by the larger narratives of power” (1993: 315). This is key to my reading of Aliens & Anorexia and how its formal approach to genre, and genre-resistance, translates as commentary on— and resistance to— the late twentieth-century evolution of individualism under capitalist control. Parataxis’ instability and irresolution awards it natural resistance to these “narratives” of control and can be read as the literary performance of the “madness” needed to escape such ubiquitous systems.

Though parataxis has been described as “one of the marks of the post-modern” (Perelman 1993: 313), it is not without criticism. Notably, Fredric Jameson has described parataxis and the ‘new sentence’ as depthless, reductive, and prone to falling into the conservative habit of transforming “schizophrenic art” into a “set of elements which entertain separations from one another,” turning active interaction into passive coexistence (1991: 28, 31). He argues that the presumption of the rigidity of conventionality is used as the motivation for transgression, when in reality no such rigidity exists or, if it does, it is only being propped up by these acts of resistance (Perelman 1993: 314). What counts as literary transgression or genre resistance, and what counts as inadvertent submission to the conventions of categorisation, is difficult to define and up for debate. Though we understand what parataxis is on a technical level, its effects are slippery, diffuse, evolving, and dependant not only on the perceived rigidity of non-paratactic prose, but on the opinion

of the reader, which may shift over time. Some consider parataxis to be a device that fragments and destabilises, while others have thought of this technique as a method of facilitating connection. This conflict, Perelman ultimately concludes, shows us that parataxis “from one perspective may look like a sign of medical disconnection and may from another be a gesture of continuity” (1993: 314). This dual reading produces further irresolution and supports the alignment between the operations of parataxis and those of the grotesque, as well as the dialogic back-and-forth that characterises relational ontology.

This slipperiness is part of the power of parataxis, and works in Kraus’s favour. This dual- interpretation is what Kraus is playing with when she uses and misuses strict conventions, particularly citation, as a means of situating herself inside and outside of both the theoretical and life writing fields. Aliens & Anorexia, from one perspective, seems to seek out alienation, isolation, and the loss of community, indulging in fractured and misplaced life stories. But, from another perspective, this text seems to be performing the collapse of the structures that catalysed that alienation in the first place, and working instead to foster a communal, overlapping, and simultaneous sense of identity.

In line with this, Kraus hints that her own use of parataxis is a method of escaping the baggage of life writing conventions, and the weight of the meaning hidden in these inherited genre structures, like its inherent approval of individualism. She notes that the only way to escape this is to reject the conventional structures, to adopt a new structure, that works to expose the invisible outlines of conscious and subconscious social norms that are carried through literary norms. Tucked between a passage on warning signs for the plague from the 1400s and the story of a lost hitchhiker in New Zealand, Kraus explains her praxis and its precedence (2000: 53):

In Zurich, 1917, Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara made a nonsense poem of glossolalia. They were trying, Ball’s Dada manifesto said, “to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language.” In New York during the early 1960s, John Cage and Fluxus members made random compositions out of sound and gesture. In London at the Empress Hotel, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs and Ian Sommerville invented

“cut-up” text and movies, their intuition forced like tulip bulbs to reveal the hidden message in what we hear and see.

These men were crocodiles in club chairs, conductors of controlled experiments in chaos […]. Girls, on the other hand, are less reptilian.

The rejection of the fixity and stability of artistic and literary conventions represents in turn a rejection of the social limits enforced through them. However, Kraus draws out a significant difference between the experimentation of men and that of women. Men, able to dissect form for the sake of dissecting form, are able to separate their lives in “club chairs” from the “chaos” they create. Men are protected by their “non-porous skin” (2000: 53). The distance and control they are afforded is not extended towards their women contemporaries. The implications of playing with literary forms shaped under a patriarchal culture means that women cannot dissect those forms without also confronting the dissection of their own bodies and identities.

To demonstrate this prejudiced alignment between women’s bodies and their work, consider David Rimanelli’s now infamous initial review of Kraus’s first text I Love Dick (1997), where he panned her work as “not so much written as secreted” (Jamison 2015). Rimanelli’s comment is indicative of the dismissive critical responses that intimate, experimental women’s life writing garners when the body of women continues to be tied to their use or misuse of certain genres. It reveals the critics’ misrecognition not only of agency and labour, but also refuses any sustained consideration of the complexity of Kraus’s literary achievements. Additionally, “secreted” immediately recalls the female body of the author in a disdainful and passive light. This demonstrates the ongoing threat of the alignment between ‘woman’ and ‘body’, and the historical negativity and denial of agency directed at women and their bodies, especially if those bodies (textual or material) are unconfined and thus ‘grotesque’. This example shows how systemic prejudices work against women’s experimentation, forcing an alignment between their work and their body, so that one cannot be dissected without also implicating the other.

Illuminating and unpicking the ways in which the perceived rigidity of genre aligns itself with and favours the masculine—thus, as in this example, controlling the bodies of women—is not a simple task. It has posed a continual question for feminist theorists for at least a century. This relationship between the body and the text can be thought of as one of the “obstacles” that Woolf describes in 1931 that are “immensely powerful—and yet […] very difficult to define” (240). Responses have often taken the path of arguing that the morphology of women, as biologically more “open” and “dilatory” than the “pointed” male (Parker 1987: 15, 9), is more suited to the experimental, formless, “chaotic” or “porous” shape that experimental, genre-breaking writing takes. This understanding cannot suffice in the twenty-first century, where ‘woman’ does not equate to biology.

This passage, instead, offers a glimpse of Kraus’s understanding of this ongoing alignment between gender and genre, where the “less reptilian” women are trapped in a framework that must either read their gender as integral to their work, or, dismiss the significance of their work altogether. Women are not afforded the luxury of separating their lives from their practice, or, rather, history is not able to interpret a woman’s work as the product of her humanity; women’s writing continues to be read as a product of gendered experience whether or not the author intends it as such. This is, as discussed in the introduction to this thesis, part of the ongoing challenge of defining (or not defining) ‘women’s writing’ as a distinct category of literature.

Kraus’s turn to “porosity”—while certainly about bodies, and designed to evoke the lived experience of women—need not be read exclusively as a morphological understanding of women’s experience. Rather, I understand porosity to evoke the experience of life on the margins, both inside and outside of dominant institutions, and, further, to create the effect of uncertainty ontology that has characterised the increasingly un-defined or undefinable borders of ‘woman’ and women’s experience at the turn of the century.

Recalling the passage from Torpor above, Kraus explicitly connects parataxis to the Middle Ages, which works to evoke an ontology that predates the immense philosophical changes that played out in the late-medieval and Enlightenment period. The effect is to connect

Kraus’s early use of the phrase “neo-medieval”, alongside the recording of various advertisements (2000: 23), to the kind of ontology that Kraus evokes through parataxis throughout Aliens & Anorexia. This porous and collective identity matches with the medieval era’s understanding of the body.

This is the third way that parataxis works in this text: it incites a medieval ontology which directly contrasts the individualistic ontologies that are carried through and encouraged within capitalist structures. Medieval ideas of being and selfhood conceive of the relationship between the individual and their environment in different, more connected terms. This argument is supported by Kraus’s adoption of a practice frequently seen in what she calls “medieval story painting” (1997: 203), where the subject of the painting or story is represented multiple times in the same image, and where many key moments of the subject’s life are represented as occurring simultaneously. Medieval ontology plays with time and space in a way unfamiliar to contemporary individualistic ontologies. This kind of ‘simultaneous narrative’ is performed literally in this text, throughout which a collection of subjects are represented multiple times, and across distorted chronologies. This strange narrative pattern is enhanced by the paratactic jumping between these many timelines. Not only does this grotesquely distort the confines of the individual, it also produces a text that, while predominantly autobiographical and biographical, defeats the individualising and isolating principles that typically characterise these genres of life writing.

To demonstrate what I mean by the ‘medieval’ ontology carried through Kraus’s body of work, consider this example from I Love Dick, where she describes R. B. Kitaj’s painting of John Ford and establishes a methodology of ‘simultaneous narratives’ commonly associated with early Christian art. “There’re several separate scenes within this painting,” she writes, and Ford is “sitting up presiding over his own deathbed” (1997: 202). The chronology of conventional linear and singular life narrative is immediately distorted, as is the principle of individuality that is typically associated with portraiture, where the subject of the painting is represented only once. She goes on to explain that “these scenes are dissonant, but not strategically oppositional. The painting is a chronicle of a life’s events,

like the Medieval story paintings, […] these events are splayed like life, chaotic and abstract” (1997: 202-3).

The medieval practice of simultaneous narrative, a practice that offers some insight into the understanding of medieval ontology, strongly parallels the operations of parataxis where the joining of two phrases without conjunction has the potential to replicate this sense of multiplicity and simultaneity without hierarchy. The collapse of temporal boundaries and the interplay of separate events suggests a multiplicity and fluidity of identity, or an identity not yet confined to a fixed idea of individuality. References to the medieval appear often across Kraus’s body of work—significantly, a period that is thought to have produced the first autobiographical writing: The Book of Margery Kempe—however, it is most evident in Aliens & Anorexia due to the thematic focus on medieval religious practices such as hagiographies, reliquaries, and the fasting of the mystics.

Kraus defies the autobiographical and biographical tendency to alienate and isolate through individualisation by repeatedly evoking the medieval period. Many of the structural obstacles that work to encourage this individual understanding of identity have their origin in the Enlightenment era. “One body, one self,” is an idea that “dates from the Renaissance, and was consolidated in the Enlightenment,” Fraser and Greco write (2005: 12). Many feminist scholars of the body note the particular influence of Descartes’ epistemological work, coinciding with this period. The result of these shifts has been the ongoing isolation of the ‘soul’, preserved or trapped with the individual body (Parker 1987: 155). This understanding of being continues to disadvantage women, and to position their bodies as objects for possession, and thus its relevance to contemporary feminist theory is ongoing. By evoking the medieval period and medieval understandings of ontology—which pre-date the Cartesian understanding, and position the body as open and connected to its surroundings (Bernau 2010: 100)—Kraus raises the possibility of identity as something other than the individual, capital-driven entity that we know in the twenty-first century.

The sustained use of parataxis is, in effect, a performance of a kind of medieval ontology, and one that emphasises the connection of the subject to their various contexts. Carolyn

Dinshaw writes that though the Middle Ages are often considered to be far removed and “absolutely other” from our own time, the attitudes of the medieval period are highly applicable to present causes (1999: 19). This medieval understanding of the body predates many of the normalised social restrictions of contemporary society and, most significantly, predates the widespread Cartesian convention of separating the mind and body and the tendency to view them as incompatible, or opposing (Fraser and Greco 2005: 6). Kraus’s hints towards medieval ontology, that is, an understanding of the body as connected to and inseparable from its surrounding environment and community, can be used throughout the text to infer an understanding of identity that is counter to the individualistic forces of the Cartesian understanding of being that treats the body as a discrete object and possession.

This “neo-medieval” body plays out on many levels throughout Aliens & Anorexia. Kraus’s interest in different kinds of collective living, that is, lifestyles where the individual’s identity is given over to a collective one, is a major unifying theme of the text. Aliens & Anorexia is searching from its opening pages for “a place where they can live and work, where they can dissolve and realign the boundaries between their collective daily life and their performances” (2000: 25). This text firmly establishes its dissatisfaction with the separation of work and life, or the separation of the theoretical and life writing genres, and invests itself in shifting those boundaries by exploring alternative ontological frameworks, especially those that do not submit to the mandatory borders of neoliberal capitalist individualism.

As mentioned above, this individualistic conception of the body and self is an historically located event. Parker specifically identifies Descartes role in the “invention” of the isolated subject (1987: 155). Norbert Elias, quoted by Fraser and Greco in their introduction to The Body (2005: 11), identifies a correlation between these

long-term social-structural changes related to the process of state formation on the one hand and, on the other hand, the rise of a particular form of self-perception typical of modern individuals. This perception is precisely that of an irremediable contrast between self and society, and between society and nature.

Elias elaborates, stating that this shift in society gave rise to the body-as-society metaphor that has shaped our political systems, wherein each individual must be seen to be fulfilling their role in the service of the running of the community. Parker asserts that this conception of bodies has shaped the structural norms of discourse, where the text is often divided up “like a body, into ‘members’,” so that it can be better controlled (1987: 14). This metaphor has not only worked to control bodies and texts, it has also been used to support the Cartesian separation of internal and external identity, and is “increasingly accompanied by the feeling in individuals that in order to maintain their social positions in the human network they must allow their true nature to wither” (Fraser and Greco 2005: 11). Individuals became increasingly self-alienated, and could only conceive of themselves as existing interiorly, secretly, and in isolation from those who surrounded them.

Prior to this social shift, however, the conception of the body, the role it played in shaping one’s identity, and how it could be represented, was very different. Much of the knowledge of the body gained through the Greek and Roman period was lost, and replaced instead by a reliance on folklore and myth (Bernau 2010: 100). The “profound originality” of these folkloric understandings of being was, according to Holquist, almost entirely unexamined until Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1984: xviii). Folk consciousness, and folk culture are foundational to Bakhtin’s work on the grotesque and to this thesis.

Within this medieval folk culture, spiritual and demonic forces were favoured over more scientific and medical understandings of the body. Christianity and ideas of the ‘soul’ played a large role in controlling ideas of selfhood. A belief in demonic possession or religious transcendence were crucial to, and often interfered with, the idea of self (Kay and Rubin 1994: 6). This led to a different understanding of the limits of the body, and of identity. Green writes that, during this period, “there was no division between the human body, therefore, and the environment in which it existed or the food or air it absorbed,” (2012: 5-6). Bernau extends this formulation to include other forms of sentience, setting up the idea that two or more identities could co-inhabit one body. She writes (2010: 100-101):

Next to the visible, mundane, material world—and certainly not separate from it— was the world of supernatural influence: saints, angels, demons, elves, ghosts. All of these (and more) had to be reckoned with and, respectively, petitioned, appeased, resisted, or avoided. The human body was open and vulnerable to their powers, which were, however, sometimes also actively sought to help the petitioner through illness or misfortune.

This understanding of the body is not only grotesque, in the sense that its borders are both “incomplete” and, subsequently, in “excess” of its physical limits (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 2), it is also distinctly relational. This understanding of being positions the subject as dependent on their connection with both material and immaterial others. The distinction between self and other is not yet totally established. Instead, this medieval “‘self’ is dialogic, a relation” that does not operate as a “binary opposition” nor as an “artificially isolated dualism” (Holquist 1990: 19, emphasis original).

This medieval ontology can be used as the framework for an identity that does not exist in isolation, that does not subscribe to ideas of individuality favoured by contemporary neoliberalism, but rather includes its surrounding and constitutive context. This formulation of the self is similar to several images evoked throughout Aliens & Anorexia, particular ideas of “porous” skin (2000: 45, 84, 181) and “cut-up” texts (53) that combine to establish a sense of the body as grotesquely “open” (Russo 1994: 8) and “not separate from the rest of the world […], not a closed, completed unit” (Bakhtin 1968: 26). As Thompson notes, the radicalism of the grotesque is most effective when it exists “in both substance and presentation: on the subject-matter presented and in the means employed in the presentation” (1972: 28). Just as the medieval subject is inseparable from their surrounding environment, and from the various forces of influence, so too is paratactic prose inseparable from the politically active resistance that has motivated it.

Parataxis is a device that, due to its rejection of hierarchical relationship and resistance to homogenising narrative frames, encourages the forging of new conduits between components that are perceived to be incompatible (Hayles 1990: 296), such as the

relationship between life writing and the theoretical. Weil’s work on metaxy in Gravity and Grace (2002), the key inspiration for Kraus’s film by the same name, can also be read as inspiring Kraus’s literary approach in this text. Weil (2002: 145) offers an image to explain her philosophy for finding connection through separation:

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.

Parataxis performs this scenario and works by finding connection through separation. The wall, or the absent conjunction, becomes a link through which many parts can communicate, associate, and form a relational attachment that exists outside of the individual being or phrase. This can be expanded to include the walls that separate various genres; when the walls are conceived of as a path for association, the play between life writing and the theoretical, for example, reveals the illusory nature of those borders. Genre is one of many classificatory principles that operate through what is often called the Aristotelian Law of the Excluded Middle, where the ambiguous centre points of a spectrum are erased in order to more strongly define the outer edges (Derrida 1980: 65; Parker 1987: 156; Murphy 2012: 52). This operation is challenged in this text, as Kraus plays with and in-between the immateriality of religious spirits, and the corporeality of the flesh that the medieval evokes, using their pre-Cartesian state of connectivity as a means of re-figuring contemporary individuality.

This understanding of the body is at play throughout Aliens & Anorexia, where the idea of extraterrestrial beings entering and taking over one’s body is used repeatedly as a metaphor for feeling connected to one’s external environment. Kraus writes at one point that, “my skin became so porous that the tremor of the cello crept into my body like an Alien” (2000: 45). This is an image that Kraus borrows from Weil’s writing, replacing Weil’s belief in God entering her body with the figure of the alien. Kraus writes (2000: 40):

The wartime notebook writings of the philosopher Simone Weil, published posthumously in a book called Gravity and Grace, are chronicles of her will to wait for God. In the movie Gravity & Grace, a group of earnest lunatics wait for Aliens to rescue them from a New Zealand suburban yard.

Mid-Century, late-century. When any of my friend-competitors in New York asked about the film I said, “I’m working on a little movie about God.”

This substitutability between ‘God’ and ‘Aliens’ is carried throughout the text and sets up the shared methodological aim of Kraus and Weil, to find a state in which there is “no longer any separation between [Weil’s] life and her thought” (2000: 153). This goal, again, recalls the “schizophrenic” position women continue to find themselves in, having to make a choice between the “forced elimination from […] gendered subjectivity[, or] forced imprisonment in it,” (Beauvoir 1949, qtd. in Moi 2008: 265). Kraus views this separation and contradiction not only as an obstacle, but also as a potential conduit through which to destabilise the idea of individual identity. The boundaries between gender and humanity, between the genres of life writing and theory, between the self and the other are here made to work dialogically and used to create a space of uncertain ontology.

Throughout Aliens & Anorexia, however, Weil and her work act as the Alien that enters Kraus. Kraus, recounting Weil’s life, writes that friends of Simone “affectionately called her an Alien. Her nickname was ‘the Martian’” (2000: 49). Kraus collides with Weil, and begins to overlap their lives. Weil, the ‘Alien,’ like the “supernatural [...] saints” from the medieval period, is able to enter into Kraus’s “open and vulnerable” body (Bernau 2010: 100). Both women are outsiders, connected in their desire to escape the limitations imposed by an ideology that favours individualism over community.

Kraus writes that Simone Weil “felt the suffering of others in her body, and found a language system for it. Value, she decided, exists only in the joining of two previously separate things. […] there aren’t any boundaries between who you are and what you see,” (48) In this senses, collectivity might be conceived of as representative of the medieval

body, where the close proximity of two or more individuals lends itself to the image of a shared identity, or a representation of the ways in which context and community are crucial to the understanding of identity. Kraus’s anti-individualism, in association with Weil’s altruistic philosophy, begins to resemble a collective identity.

2. Collectivity

The primary collective throughout this text is, through parataxis, the entire textual makeup of Aliens & Anorexia itself, encompassing not only Kraus but all the artists and philosophers she cites. The porosity of the text therefore enacts a neo-medieval or relational ontology where the work of others’ flows through Kraus’s own writing, disrupting totally the individualistic and capitalist ontology that she is working against. However, for this section, I want to focus on the other collectives included in this text’s narrative, and consider the ways in which they support my claim that Kraus is responding to the uncertain ontology produced by the theoretical developments within feminist theory and the subsequent swing to neoliberal post-feminism at the end of the twentieth century.

There are two kinds of collectives at play in Aliens & Anorexia. The first is the development of Weil and Thek as co-subjects of the text. Kraus achieves this by citing several biographies on each, and including a reference list in the back of the text. The goal of this is to disrupt the hagiographic tendencies of biographies, to re-think Weil and Thek’s lives through multiple lenses and theories, and, in doing so, to uncover aspects of their lives that have been overlooked, minimised, or erased. In creating these multifaceted portraits, Kraus begins to apply the same technique to herself, developing—or uncovering—her own image only in relation to the scattered material she cites. The second kind of collective in this text is more literal: a group of people working together, exploring the line between self and group identity. These examples are presented through anecdotes in the text, and work to challenge the borders of the individual, and the isolation and alienation that those borders promote. In place of individualism, Kraus enthusiastically suggests relational ontology as an alternative.

In Aliens & Anorexia, these examples of collectives typically break down due to the hierarchical privileging of one member, or due to an atmosphere of judgment and exclusion. This is reminiscent of the ways in which collectivity has had a tendency to transform into a kind of violence that functions by exclusion (Murphy 2012: 5). Murphy bases this claim on Butler’s work. Butler begins Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) with a quote from Adorno: “the collective ethos is invariably a conservative one, which postulates a false unity” (4). While these debates between the individual and collective identity dominated feminist theory in the 1990s, no conclusion has been reached and, well into the 2000s, many theorists continue to weigh up the isolation of individualism and the homogenisation of the collective (Murphy 2011: 578). Butler, in 2005, writes that “although the collective ethos has become anachronistic, it has not become past” (4-5). Although the efficacy of collectivism in feminism, at least in its current state, had reached an end point, the significance of collective identity—such as the category of ‘woman’— remained crucial to the political viability of feminism. Though Kraus is arguing against individualistic ontologies, the answer cannot simply be a return to the collectivism of the past, which also posed significant ethical and ontological concerns for feminism.

Kraus’s investigation into the possibility of collectivism as an alternative to individualism proceeds cautiously. She writes, drawing on the experience of Weil, that (2000: 178):

She [Weil] was well aware, and had been since she visited Germany ten years ago, that fascism triumphed largely through its emotional appeal for unity and collectivity. Can we devise another form of collectivity, she wondered, which binds without annihilating the presence and the power of the person? Evil, she believed, occurs more easily when the person is deindividualised.

As such, my analysis of Kraus’s investigation into collectivity also proceeds cautiously. Kraus is, significantly, not interested in taking a side, and for every positive facet of collectivism that she uncovers, there is always a negative that follows. Kraus’s understanding of anti-individualism is more ambiguous, and comes to form a dialogue

between the limitations and potential benefits of collective identity rather than an outright rejection.

Therefore, I will analyse two of the collectives Kraus presents in Aliens & Anorexia, one highly individualistic and exclusive, the other more relational and sustainable. This first example is from her own life. Desperately hoping to be admitted into an unpaid internship under the “foremost theoretician on American experimental theatre,” 20-something-year- old Kraus and a dozen others enrol in an expensive summer course, hoping to be discovered and admitted to an elite program (2000: 80-81):

At that time it seemed everyone believed the ‘self’ is best discovered in a group. The twelve of us move from our dorm rooms into [his] faculty apartment. We form a tribe. No one leaves without permission. We vow to live together, eat together, sleep together so that our dreams will merge into a slice of Jungian unconscious.

[…] the whole concept’s part New Age and part Rousseauian. As if, beneath the onion-skin of personalities, there lies a gleaming uncorrupt Human Soul.

As soon as our dreams have merged sufficiently we plan to stage them. But […] we never get around to this or any other acting. Therefore every moment of our collective life is experienced as part of the audition [he] never holds.

Though this example collapses the divide between personal and professional, and between individual and collective, there is something distinctly exploitative about the events of this scene. The collective ideology that is intended to work against the stratification of individuals within a hierarchy is here undercut at every point. Throughout her stay in this “tribe”, there is persistent deferral to a leader, and a persistent investment in the desire to be “discovered” which speaks to the strength of the individualism that lingers just below the surface of this supposedly collective practice.

Further, Kraus’s reference to Rousseau and the Human Soul recalls the Cartesian split between the body and the mind, or soul. The understanding in this passage is that the participants believe that, by peeling back the “onion-skin” of their personalities—that is, by casting off the parts of themselves that have been formed in relation to their social and cultural context—they will discover a hidden, innate part of themselves. This follows the Cartesian methodology of ‘doubting’ the body, the environment, the material, and instead trusting only one’s interior, the individual in absolute isolation from their material context. This method has been greatly influential to the masculinist tradition of philosophy, and continues to support the binary hierarchy between the mind and the body that has, historically, disadvantaged women by disallowing them the option to cast off the material, leaving men “free to inhabit what they (falsely) believe is a purely conceptual order” (Grosz 1994: 14). The “disembodied philosophical” is thus perceived as more truthful (Kraus 1997: 109), while the corporeality of women is used to ‘doubt’ and dismiss their claims to knowledge (Cavarero 2016: 4).

Kraus continues, writing that because each participant is there to be “discovered” by their leader, and because each participant feels, at every moment, as though they are performing in preparation for an audition, that they succumb to what Kraus calls the “stock repertoire” of performance groups (2000: 87). Members of the collective feel inclined to fall into archetypal performances, like in Commedia Dell’arte, in order to hit upon the desired qualities that will see them stand out. Participation in the collective is a deceptive vehicle for individualisation. The effect, however, is far from the discovery of a “gleaming” individual self. Instead, this collective trades in continual self-obscuration, and self- alienation in service of an oppressive structure that nevertheless pretends to offer a path of escape. Some similarities can be drawn between this collective and the operations of post- feminism. In this example, the power structure is passed off as ‘natural’ or even desired. Further, the failure of the collective is framed as the responsibility of the individual, not the flawed ethos of the collective itself that works to alienate and drive its members out (McRobbie 2004: 257). The existence of an “uncorrupt” individual soul is untenable when who one is able to be is already restricted and dictated under the “inaugurating” power structures and norms of the moment (Butler 2005: 19).

Substitutability is a central concern within theories of relational ontology. Kraus goes on to recall that, mid-“experiment”, a member of their collective was taken to hospital following a schizophrenic episode. Kraus states that no one hears from her again, and no one asks because, “her problems don’t have much to do with us” (2000: 82). Shortly after this, Kraus herself leaves the summer program, allowing someone else to fill her role in the collective and, in doing so, proving that this model of collectivity relies upon an understanding of identity as something substitutable. Relational ontology, on the other hand, depends on the dialogue between self and other, to the point that individualism collapses, yet it also acknowledges that a distinction must remain between each subject as though stories inherently overlap, “your story is never my story” (Butler 2005: 34), and we are each “insubstitutable” (Cavarero 2000: 2). Building on this, Cavarero argues that individualism is in fact a version of universalism that erases identity due to its belief in exchangeable equivalency (Kottman 2000: xi). This erasure, that treats subjects as substitutable, is what is at play in the collective presented above. Because of the ongoing reliance on individuals, when one participant leaves, another can replace them without threatening the stability of the collective as a whole.

Kraus’s fascination with ‘failure’, in this instance her ‘failure’ to see the “experiment” through to the end, therefore should be read as a politically active refusal to continue participating in a structure that depends on such alienation from one’s self and from one’s community. This kind of individualism that thrives on substitutability is incapable of recognising and recording the life of the person who does not conform to the prescribed ethos of their time. This is the kind of individualism at play in the “paradoxical” contemporary life writing market that, as mentioned in the thesis introduction, “restricts with disdain the category of uniqueness” (Cavarero 2000: 89). This life writing exists only as a “thinly veiled liberal individualism” that pretends to pass as “radical originality” (Laurie 2000: 3) while in reality it only works to homogenise, universalise and de- incentivise the experimentation that makes resistance to such social hierarchies possible.

Kraus’s approach therefore does not align totally with Laurie and Cavarero’s analysis of the state of life writing. Instead, this text aligns more closely with Rak and Gilmore’s assessments that the “boom” in life writing might signal a tentative and “emergent interest in community” (Rak 2013: 4) and a deliberate exploration of the paradoxical “cultural moment” wherein subjects are required to be both “unique” and “representative” of a broader group of people (Gilmore 2001: 8). The alienation that Kraus experiences has often served as the inspiration for women’s experimentation within life writing, not purely as a means of recording the individual experience of such alienation, but, as is the case here, as a means of exploring what it might be like to cast off that individualism that has been the cause of alienation to begin with.

Interspersed with this account of her experience as part of a hierarchy-dependent collective, Kraus describes the praxis of The Artist’s Co-Op, a performance collective founded by Paul Thek and active throughout the ‘70s. Their artworks, or performances, often involved live- in installations that collated the practices of each member, and more, into a united and shifting work that would take shape and evolve over the course of their exhibitions. Exemplifying the The Artist's Co-Op’s works, The Precession was an interactive performance-based installation where damaged works of the participating artists were exhibited in the gallery space while being gradually mended, collapsing the division between work and performance, process as product. As a live-in work, like the collective examined above, it also collapsed the division between the corporeal and the conceptual, challenging the Cartesian legacy. Taking place at Easter and featuring across its several rooms an intermingled mess of sentimental religious holiday paraphernalia and ‘borrowed’ works by Van Gogh, The Precession was a highly controversial artwork that transgressed established critical boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ and between classical and contemporary art. Thek describes the process as “many people [doing] many things. At a certain moment, it collides” (2000: 75). Methodologically, Thek’s understanding of collectivity matches with the anti-individualistic ontology that Kraus is working to convey in her own literary practice

Kraus tracks down a rare copy of the artists’ documentation of this work, a catalogue that she describes as functioning “like a time machine” (2000: 76). Her notes from viewing this catalogue mirror its collaged pages and read as a list of images and object, without preposition or conjunction, conveying the overwhelming variety of the space but revealing nothing about how the items were arranged on the page or in the artwork itself. Her notes read (2000: 75-76):

Wallpaper samples—Artpress, survey of contemporary art—Beuys Nauman de Maria—Animal postcards porn working photos living photos snapshots interiors—a harmonica—a few bottle of champagne—aerial view of ashtray—up against the background of the daily papers, sometimes magazines, a New Yorker article on ‘colleges.’ Crow, snapshots of food, silk cord, a playing card, a shoelace, old family photos, tin foil, polaroids of all the artists, fish. Postcards of a giraffe. Reports from Documenta. Christo. Money, shot glasses—

There is a direct link between the use of parataxis and The Artist’s Co-Op performance that Kraus is describing. Each object exists in relation to the next, but that relationship is not defined and therefore does not exist in a hierarchy. This passage is reminiscent of the opening of Kraus’s text—this chapter’s epigraph—where parataxis works to accumulate many disparate artefacts into something new and united. This matches with Kraus’s praxis as a writer who combines theory and life writing, whose work is composed from the information that surrounds her, who defines her life by her context, and by absorbing that material into her being.

Thek’s contribution to The Precession was a re-purposed wax sculpture of his own body. This re-appropriation of work evokes a variant of the ‘two bodies in one’ figure that is so crucial for representing not only the grotesque, but relational ontology as well. This instance, however, shows how a single object can attain multiple meanings through variant interpretations. It suggests that a fluidity of the body and identity can be achieved by considering the changing context as a part of the subject’s ontology. This is, as discussed in the introduction, a key feature of the grotesque: the “socio-historical context in which it

was produced” is as important at the grotesque object itself (Edwards and Graulund year: 12). This is significant, also, for my understanding of Kraus’s composite images of Thek and Weil, created through many biographies; though they are defined and unique beings, by viewing them each through many texts—journals, biographies, their own work, and the work of their community—Kraus is able to create a many-dimensioned image of her subjects.

There is a direct line between this kind of collectivity and medieval ontology. Kraus describes this performance artwork as “an exploded Stations-of-the-Cross” (2000: 78), the most common example of ‘simultaneous narrative’ paintings. In doing so, she re-positions ‘simultaneous narrative’ as a framework that does not distinguish between self and other, and that works both by distorting and folding the chronology of a single subject, or, by distorting and combining many subjects. This simultaneity becomes a radical tool for challenging the hierarchical nature of collectives, disallowing the privileging of certain members based on who was there ‘first’ or who has been there ‘longest.’

Kraus (2000: 78) goes on to describe The Artist’s Co-Op as

extraordinary because it is a collaboration between equals, rather than the vision of one person enacted by his drones […], nothing like a group show. It’s more like a group mind […] designed as a vehicle for self-exploration. […] they were assuming ‘self’ could be discovered best while in a group.

This collective offers a strong contrast to the one above; not only is the hierarchy absent, but the project of self-discovery is inseparable from the group, and the overall artwork. The refrain “‘self’ is best discovered in a group” appears in both descriptions, linking the two collectives, and inviting a comparison. This refrain can be read in two different ways depending on its context. In the first collective, the self is “discovered” alone, with the intention of individual success. In this second collective, however, the self is “discovered” in relation to its environment, as an “exploration”, in relation to those around.

Kraus continues, describing the public and critical reception of the collective’s work. “Like any kind of radical art, The Artist’s Co-Op pieces redefine a genre. What is theatre?” (2000: 82). Their work was rejected in its own time by the “distressed” press who deemed it “museo-masochism” (2000: 75) because the framework within which it existed was unable or assimilate or erase its meaning in totality. Its huge accumulation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, its blending of the performance and the conceptual, of art practice and art product, succeed in fracturing the very hierarchy of the systems that ascribe value. Thompson notes that “the grotesque has the power to eliminate borders; it can reveal how the boundaries between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ are fluid, not fixed,” (1972: 9). The grotesque’s ability to resist prescribed ideas of value and normalcy that run through and support institutions of power is one its key strengths. The Artist’s Co-Op’s praxis clearly follows this method of destablisation.

However, Thompson reminds us that the “confusion of heterogeneous elements” is often met with “indignant rejection” (Thompson 1972: 12). As such, Thek’s influence faded within his own lifetime, and Kraus attributes this to the critical dismissal of his radical, genre-breaking artworks. She described how Thek refused to submit to the restrictive interpretations laid over his work. The system of classification responded to his work by erasing the information that did not fit within (and therefore failed to perpetuate) its own borders. Kraus resists the urge to make a study of Thek’s life in isolation, or to consider him as a single figure who happened to work collectively, rather than as an artist whose entire practice, and entire life, depended on the influence and support of a vanishing community. “To see him as a martyr,” Kraus writes, “is to play into art history’s hand” (2000: 91). Kraus explains further (2000: 92):

When an uncontainable artist’s influence won’t go away, art history compromises by constructing hagiographies. At least that way the vision is contained. But you have to keep reminding yourself of the great dead artist’s situation. That he also had contemporaries. That thoughts are never thought alone […]. Like all hagiographies, the facts are probably mostly true, minus all the doubts and boredom that surrounded them in real time.

Over time, the singular vision that paints the artist as a lone inventor stands in for the truth. Frow explains that certain genres, because of their conventions and expectations, “create effects of reality and truth which are central to the different ways the world is understood” (2007: 19). A key expectation of life writing is that it relates to truth and the real world (Rak 2013: 6), though as discussed in the introduction this relationship is often complicated. Nevertheless, this expectation informs how a text is perceived, and when life writing texts (or texts that purport to record events from the real world) are partial or even falsified, Frow argues that, far from being as simple as a “stylistic” device, this then has the potential to modify “the way in which the world is understood,” (2007: 19). If the reader believes something to be true, or to hold an authoritative relationship to the truth, that can have a real-world effect.

However, and this will be discussed further in the next chapter, life writing is always incapable of capturing the truth; the account is always partial, the relations between events and people always truncated by the limits of the form. Ultimately, the tools with which we record the lives of those we worship, like saints or artists, refuse to or are unable to record or acknowledge the complexity, multiplicity, and connectivity of that person’s life. This is indicative of, and contributes to, the problematic ways in which we think of and record identity as fixed and individual.

Though Thek’s later-life practice became entirely collaborative, Kraus describes his life as trapped under the threat of hagiographic records. The hagiographic ideology behind the autobiographical and biographical text conceives of the subject as an isolated and elevated individual. This refusal to acknowledge connection is a form of policing, erasing, and silencing perpetuated by individualistic understandings of identity. This is a process inbuilt in the life writing genres, which has greatly impacted the ways in which information is organised and preserved, particularly the historical legacy of a person’s identity and experiences. The system can only deal with those elements of life that prop up its investment in individuality; where gaps are created, the information falls away. The

opportunity for a variety of interpretations, and for drawing new and unique connections between now-disparate elements is lost over time.

Kraus paratactic prose is therefore serving two functions. First, it operates as a criticism of hierarchical oppression, in that it does not privilege one element over another, and refuses to participate in those systems that allow and encourage the individual to exist in isolation from their community. Second, it is a re-enactment of the ways in which her research into Thek and Weil has been truncated, and mis-informative, because of the hagiographic tendencies of biographies. Just as the hagiography allows information to fall away, allows connection to vanish, so too does parataxis draw attention to the information that is missing within a text. Once perceived to operate as a kind of metaphor, Hayles instead posits that parataxis is a kind of metonymy where the absence of the conjunction stands in for part of the technique’s meaning (1990: 408). It is the metonymy of parataxis that allows Kraus to both replicate those gaps in knowledge, while simultaneously having those gaps act out the connectivity and relationality she is working towards.

Though Thek’s practice and his work with The Artist’s Co-Op is effectively erased by the dominant methods of recording life, it is the absences that this practice leaves that become the point at which Kraus is able to visualise his life and include him in the subject collage she creates throughout Aliens & Anorexia. Early in the text, Kraus writes that “cavities in each person’s body left by surrendered ego become receptors for group energy, for aliens,” (2000: 40). These “cavities” mark the points at which Thek’s life was cut away from the records, and the points at which Kraus is able to revitalise his project as part of her own neo-medieval ontology.

Kraus works to expose this tendency by arguing that when connections and collaborators are cut away, so is the self. Kraus quotes from Thek’s diaries in which he repeatedly records “checking out my identity in the long mirror [...] checking my identity, checking my physicality [...] The physical identity that I’ve been checking out in the mirror stands a long while” (2000: 93-95, emphasis original). The repetition of “checking” or “checking out,” in addition to situating his body as an object to be observed, reveals a deep anxiety around his

own selfhood. It is like he has been cast out of his own body and needs to be reminded of its existence in time and space to feel attached to his own life. Kraus emphasises Thek’s relationship to his peers and rivals, like Joseph Beuys, described as Thek’s “psychic twin” (2000: 74), and Damien Hirst (2000: 71), and works to re-establish how their works informed and contested one another. Kraus demonstrates the potential of a relational record of life, not only with others but with the self as well, prioritising both positive and negative relationships to conventions and to others over an isolated sense of individuality.

Like Kraus, Thek is presented as someone trapped and isolated within the structures of their own field who then uses this feeling to create their work. Thek’s break-out body of work from the mid ‘60s, collectively titled “Technological Reliquaries” (Kraus 2000: 69), reveals his interest in the body, preservation, religious tropes, and themes of isolation or alienation. Because of its success, it was a focus he became contained by. Referred to throughout Aliens & Anorexia as “meat works”, these sculptures were a series of life-like wax casts of dismembered bodies parts featuring exposed bone, layers of muscle and fat, congealed blood, and hair-like detail, displayed beneath brightly coloured transparent plexiglass boxes. Given the title, and his interest in collective practice, the works can be interpreted as comments on the restrictive structures that cut the body of the ‘saint’ off from the environment, and from their community. The contradiction is clear; the body of the saint is praised for its connectivity, and their life remembered for their transcendent communication, yet it is preserved inside a box where it is obscured through elaborate artifice and cut off from the world.

Kraus describes one of the works and the public reception to Thek’s practice in an extended passage (2000: 70-71):

One of the pieces in this show called Birthday Cake presents a four-tiered pyramid of human flesh adorned with soft-pink birthday candles. Art writers sought to distance the emotional implications of Thek’s work by comparing it to French surrealism, an art movement he despised. Dreams bored him […]. He wanted to be hyper-conscious […]. He wanted to remain alert.

In an interview conducted for Art News in 1966, G.R. Swenson wanted to engage Paul Thek in a psychological reading of his work. Really, Swenson wondered, aren’t you saying that like God, the “individual in art” is dead? “Individualism doesn’t interest me,” Thek answered.

“But yet,” Swenson countered, “I’ve seen your work produce strong subjective states—” “Which I want people to rise above,” Thek said. “I know it’s weird to see a piece of flesh hanging on the wall. I chose this subject matter because it violated my sensibilities, but that’s not the same thing as shock. I work with it to detach myself from it, like a heartbeat.”

Thek, who was ambivalently homosexual, was arguing for a state of decreation, a plateau at which a person might, with all their will and consciousness, become a thing. “The chief element of value in the soul is its impersonality,” wrote Simone Weil […]. They were someplace else, arguing for an alien-state, using subjectivity as a means of breaking out of time and space.

This passage demonstrates Thek’s ideology and how it informed his methodology of using fracturing and decreation as a means of escaping the boundaries of individualism, and of categorisation. Importantly, this passage reminds us that positioning relationalism in opposition to individualism is not enough, and the goal, instead, is to “rise above” the binary paradigm all together. It is not a matter of replacing the individual with a pair, or a collective—as demonstrated above, the collective is not automatically relational—as this approach still supports a binary understanding of self and other. Rather, Butler and Cavarero remind us, we have to eschew individualism altogether and centre the fact that we are materially vulnerable, unbalanced, and co-dependent being from the start (Butler, qtd in Cavarero 2016: 13). Thek’s work seems to pre-empt this philosophical move by half a century. Kraus here begins to make her case for the reclamation and revival of those aspects of artists’ lives—their work outside of their practice—that falls by the wayside through the hagiographic biographic process.

Thek’s use of fragmentation, dismemberment, or disconnection as a means of representing the associative is what Kraus is calling attention to and emulating through parataxis in her own literary practice. Parataxis is a ‘cutting’ of the conventional structures of literature, just as Thek’s “meat works” represent a cutting of the conventional idea of the body as a cage for identity. While this incites the “shock” of a grotesque reaction, and represents the ‘failure’ of the body to some, Thek and Kraus suggest rather that fragmentation is a way to represent the porous nature of the body and signal that identity is not located interiorly, or innately, but rather formed, and continually re-formed, by its external and relational interactions.

However, as a result of those misinterpretations of Thek’s work, Kraus finds it extremely difficult to attain a clear picture of him. Reading Thek’s diary, Kraus realises (2000: 95):

I can hardly picture him at all. […] A body, isolated in the box of his apartment. It hits the walls and bounces up against the boredom of diminished expectations […]. Imagining it now, trying to pour pieces of myself into this other person’s body, feels so contained and trapped. A body, muscular and soft and tense against the heavy molecules of air around it. Queer and alone, sex-soul-energy throbbing up against the boundaries of his skin.

The box of the apartment, and the box of the body, function in parallel to the plexiglass boxes of the “meat works”, where Thek is cut off from the community that he himself feels has shaped his practice and identity. Kraus’s reclamation project is made more powerful because it is a relational project, it is about how the forgotten and perceived ‘failures’ relate to their community, across time, rather than the typical singular elevation of a subject that, in the end, further encourages isolation and individualism. It is a biographic revival that does not perpetuate the hagiographic isolation that contributed to Thek’s later-career obscurity. Kraus’s attempts to come to terms with her own perceived failure culminate forcefully as a radical rejection of the conservative conventions that define success, namely, hierarchy-climbing, capitalist idealism, and individualism.

3. Anorexia

This same reclamation project that centres the context of the subject is applied to Simone Weil and her struggle with anorexia. Weil’s life was also victim to hagiographic limitations that minimised the significance of the ways in which her work played into her life. Kraus writes that (2000: 50):

Until recently, nearly all the secondary texts on Simone Weil treat her philosophical writings as a kind of biographic key. Impossible to conceive a female life that might extend outside itself. Impossible to accept the self-destruction of a woman as strategic. Weil’s advocacy of decreation is read as evidence of her dysfunction, her hatred-of-body, etc.

This evidences a facet of the challenges that women writers continue to face. In this instance, Weil’s philosophical work is read “nearly” always through the lens of her gender, rather than through her humanity. Kraus re-considers this bias towards Weil’s work, and argues that this is why Weil’s self-starvation has been read as anorexia and not, as she sees it, as an extension of Weil’s philosophy. “She was a performative philosopher,” Kraus writes, “her body was her material” (2000: 49). Throughout Aliens & Anorexia, Kraus refuses to draw a line between Weil’s life and Weil’s philosophy. Rather than view her philosophy as the key to her biography, Kraus reworks the documentation of Weil’s life to argue that her life, and her starvation, were a part of—and inseparable from—her philosophical practice.

Weil’s refusal of food is the practice-based manifestation of her philosophical belief in equality and empathy. Kraus’s investment in anti-individualism is hugely inspired by Weil’s work. Weil’s starvation is a politically motivated kind of altruism where she feels inseparable from those around her—much like the ‘simultaneous narratives’ that Kraus offers, or the Medieval understanding of ontology discussed above—and refuses to eat while there are others who cannot. Weil’s anorexia is symptomatic of an intense, emotional

and deeply political “panic of altruism, an empathy so absolute she couldn’t separate the suffering that she witnessed from her own” (2000: 143). Immediately this evokes a relational ontology, where the self cannot be separated from the other. This ‘altruistic’ kind of anorexia is, Samira Ariadad explains, an “anti-desire” that is expressed through an active withdrawal “from industry, whether it is the trade of edible foods or sociality based on exploitation” (2015: 45). The anti-capitalist underpinning of Weil’s actions is clear.

Weil’s withdrawal from food is, like the hagiographies of Thek’s life, misinterpreted under the limitations of the genre within which it was recorded, to the degree that it has erased the intention and significance of her actions. What she intended as a politically active withdrawal from capitalism, and from the rising threat of fascism that she saw carried through the food chain (Kraus 2000: 178), is instead interpreted under a gender-biased and medicalised framework as a failure to introject and perform gendered roles. Her starvation becomes read as a manipulative call for attention, rather than as a holy mystic-like fast (Kraus 2000: 134, 166). Weil’s refusal to eat is dismissed as anorexia—a disease whose deep feminisation has seen its severity ignored for centuries—rather than understood as activism.

Showing the extent of these institutionalised misreadings of the body and identity, Kraus observes (2000: 160) that even

the most polemically feminist analyses of anorexia nervosa interpret it as an adolescent girl’s last stand against the female social role and what it ‘means’ to be a woman. Perversely, all this literature is based on the unshakable belief that the formation of a gender-based identity is still the primary animating goal in the becoming of a person, if that person is a girl.

Though Weil’s refusal of food is grounded in her own philosophical approach to collectivity, and to altruism, it is nevertheless read by biographers as individualistic and gendered. Psychoanalysis in particular has pathologized anorexia as a ‘female disease’ that is symptomatic of a disconnect between materiality and representation. Most

psychoanalytic readings of anorexia, from Freud to contemporary medical journals, are dismissive and mistakenly consider the disease to be a metaphorical rejection of gender and social roles, or, paradoxically, an attempt to submit to them (Kraus 2000: 160). According to early psychoanalysis, the discord between body and self-image stems from the subject’s failure to introject social norms, particularly those coded as gendered (Fenichel 1954: 381). This introjection is said to have ‘failed’ when the subject’s material sense of their (almost always) female body and the representation of female bodies do not align.

Conversely, some readings claim the anorexic subject deliberately fails to conform in an attempt to avoid female responsibilities (Kraus 2000: 161), while others claim that the subject’s desire to imitate the slender female ‘norm’ and thus regain their prescribed self- identity manifests as anorexia; according to Freud, the female’s awareness of being watched “encourages the development of beauty,” equated with thinness, in the “sexual object” (1962: 22). Both readings are overtly dismissive of the agency of the patient and promote a patriarchal view of anorexia justified in the name of ‘natural selection’. These readings, more broadly, enforce the misogynistic idea that women are, ‘naturally’, different and inferior to men, existing purely to satisfy their needs.

Kraus continues, stating that thanks to these widespread readings, “it’s still impossible to imagine girls moving outside themselves and acting through the culture. All these texts are based on the belief that a well-adjusted, boundaried sense of self is the only worthy female goal” (2000: 161). The ramifications of this belief penetrate the organising structures of narrative, influencing not only life writing structures, but the structures of lives themselves. This recalls Parker’s understanding of narrative tradition as working to enforce the confinement of women—where marriage represents not only the end of the text, but the control of the woman’s otherwise-wayward body (1987: 11). The prevailing ontological understanding of bodies or identities as “boundaried” is not only a product of the contemporary turn to individualism, but also a longstanding method of controlling the lives of women.

Recounting Pierre Janet and Jean-Paul Satre’s work on the “manipulative” qualities of female patients’ emotions, Kraus suggests that Weil’s philosophy has been overlooked and dismissed in part because of these psychoanalytic and misogynistic understandings of anorexia that can only view the words of the patient as “inferior” and “irrational”, and “open to ‘interpretation’” (2000: 133, 137). As such, psychoanalytic attempts to ‘solve’ or ‘cure’ anorexia have, according to Kraus, instead encouraged it. She writes (2000: 162):

So long as anorexia is read exclusively in relation to the subject’s feeling towards her body, it can never be conceived of as an active ontological state. […] It’s inconceivable that the female subject might ever simply try to step outside her body, because the only thing that’s irreducible, still, in female life is gender.

Kraus goes on to argue that as long as these readings continue to focus exclusively on the patient individually, to the exclusion of the contextual influences that might incite a refusal to eat, they will fail to grasp the potential and political significance of anorexia as a symbolic tool. “All these readings deny the possibility of a psychic, intellectual equation between a culture’s food and the entire social order,” Kraus writes, in setting up her re- reading of Weil’s life (2000: 161, emphasis original).

Kraus’s argument is that these readings are too simplistic, too reductionist, and, significantly, too individualistic to apply to the specific practices of Weil’s fasting. Kraus repeatedly links Weil’s fasting not to anorexia, but to the practices of religious asceticism that more closely resemble the lives of ascetic medieval women than they do modern dieting (Bynum 1987: 205). For Weil, food is replaced by connectivity, and communication. “The sustenance that collectivity provides has no equivalent in the world,” Kraus writes in Aliens & Anorexia (2000: 179).

Since the early 1990s, feminists have been challenging these limited readings of anorexia. Most notably, anorexia has become a popular Deleuzean-feminist case study (Colebrook 1998: 53), and Kraus, too, draws on Deleuzean theory in her re-reading of Weil’s life. Deleuzean theory posits that fasting, as an eating disorder, can be connected to the

consumption and regurgitation (or ‘writing’) of text. Meuret explains in Writing Size Zero: Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures that self-starvation is, in this Deleuzean sense, a ‘writing disorder’ wherein words are coded as food-like and consumed in place of a meal (2007: 34). Perelman, in his discussion of parataxis, also cites the “Deleuzean notion that to write is to fast” and that this figuration evokes the “link between body and text, body as text, and text as body” (1993: 323). As Weil fasts, Kraus describes her life as “saturated with content,” as she sustains herself textually (2000: 149).

Later, Kraus quotes Weil’s journal, where she states that “our greatest affliction is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat” (2000: 166). Though this association of looking and eating strongly resembles the psychoanalytic formulation posed by theorists such as Freud and Fenichel in their work on scopophilia, Kraus argues it is a more Deleuzean formulation. Fenichel writes that “visual perception cannot be separated from kinaesthetic perception; in seeing, our whole body undergoes a change” (1954: 380) so that the distant object now seems as though it is touching the viewer, alternately entering them and being entered (1954: 376). This reading maintains a dualistic understanding of looking and devouring, whereas the Deleuzean approach understands that the “only way to get outside the dualism […] is to be-between, to pass between,” (Deleuze, qtd in Colebrook 2000: 2). This Deleuzean approach leads Kraus to re-interpret Weil’s anorexia, and she concludes that “the philosopher Gilles Deleuze got anorexia right. […] it isn’t anything to do with ‘lack’ […], the question is: how to escape predetermination” (2000: 182). It is not a question of both looking and eating, but of being between the material and immaterial worlds.

Aliens & Anorexia goes on to consider, in depth, the political significance of Weil’s own experience of anorexia and how it differs from the typical narrative surrounding this illness. This is an extension of Kraus’s queer-feminist reclamation project that runs through Aliens & Anorexia, and a didactic move wherein Kraus reconsiders information and reading patterns that have become entrenched in the Western cultural consciousness. The effect is a reconsideration of not only the information at hand but also of the prejudices embedded in the writing conventions that institutions like the academy favour, which work to present

certain texts as infallible and perpetually citable truths, and others as subjective, single- perspective accounts that are up for debate. This re-reading of anorexia positions it not as the passive and gendered submission to norms, but as the active refusal to participate in the broader social doctrine of individualism and, in this case, the genre limitations it has inspired and continues to enforce, including the hagiographic tradition of bibliography.

In breaking down the hagiographic nature of the interpretation of Weil’s life, Kraus is not only working to re-establish the relationship between her work and life, but to also use that project to disrupt the limits of her own life writing process, and to re-read her own life. “Like her,” Kraus writes, “I had a chronic illness that often made it difficult to eat” (2000: 103). Kraus suffers intermittently throughout Aliens & Anorexia from Crohn’s disease, an auto-immune inflammation of the bowel, triggered by emotional stress, that makes eating extremely painful (2000: 107), and leaves her bedridden and afraid to eat (2000: 168). This experience of anorexia refutes any of the narcissistically-motivated descriptions that tend to define this disease and works to construct Weil and Kraus’s life stories as ‘simultaneous narratives’. Early in the text, Kraus sets up a theme of convergent identities, writing “she’s just like me,” (2000: 30) which bleeds into “could she be me?” (2000: 31, emphasis original). Later, she continues to build on this early connection and brings the body to the fore, noting that while “re-reading Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, I identified with the dead philosopher completely” (2000: 103). Breaking down the hagiographic tradition is also the breaking down of Kraus’s own individuality, and the breaking down of her own body.

Kraus’s re-formulation of anorexia, not just as the rejection of food but as the rejection of a capitalist social order, “is a violent breaking of the chain of desire” (2000: 163). As she re- positions Weil as rejecting the modernist discourse of her time, where de-creation meant cruelty rather than potential transcendence (2000: 151), so too does Kraus refuse elements of the psychoanalytic tradition within feminism. She rejects the familial, unconscious formulations of desire in favour of the communal, altruistic, and actively political. Kraus enacts this rejection in her genre choices, exploding the introspective tendencies of autobiography in favour of an “open” life writing that cannot tell the story of the self

without telling the stories of those that influenced and shaped—across time and space, textually and bodily—the author’s understanding of identity.

For Kraus, food becomes representative of a corrupt and harmful system, and her refusal signals a physical rejection of capitalism and the propagation of restrictive ‘chains of desire’ that artificially dictate how a body should be. Kraus asserts that “cynicism travels through the food chain,” and that “to stop eating is to temporarily withdraw from it” (2000: 173). Kraus’s anorexia is, like Weil’s, a political and emotional response to the state of the world that manifests as an anti-capitalist withdrawal from the “contrived […] flow of capital and waste” (2000: 173), while also constituting a targeted refutation of the artificially linear approach to consumption, production, and identity formation that are carried through those chains.

Kraus finds she can only eat comfortably when she has discovered the source of her food. Kraus recounts a long walk in the French countryside where, stumbling upon an old farm, she and Sylvère are treated to a lesson in cheese-making. “Everything, the cream the shed the farm, combined into a flavour. And this was food” (2000: 172). This line offers a clear example of parataxis as the textual equivalent to connectivity. This short sentence performs its own meaning by accumulating contextual information, un-bordered by conjunction or punctuation. This small example cements the significance of approaching this text and its reliance on parataxis as a kind of translation of the political ideologies behind it. In addition, it demonstrates how the rejection of individualism in life and the rejection of individualism in the hagiographic practices of autobiographical and biographical writing are entwined, and can be both confronted and questioned through parataxis.

This reading of Kraus’s representation of anorexia also offers some insight into the relationship an anti-capitalist rejection of food has to the first person. There is a well-noted connection between the fasting of medieval mystics—as altruistic, rather than selfish or individualistic—and the disruption of the ‘I’, or the sense of individual self that offers some foundation for this relationship. Kraus’s references to the medieval, in association with her dedication to breaking down individualism, can also be read as playing into this pre-

established connection. Bynum writes that in the thirteenth century Saint Margaret of Cortona believed that “one should destroy the ego so completely that the first-person singular would disappear altogether from one’s speech” (1987: 204). Similarly, Richard Rees, quoted in Aliens & Anorexia, writes that “like all the mystics, Simone Weil tells us that it is only by destroying the ‘I’ that it becomes possible to fully believe in, and therefore truly love, the existence of anything outside ourselves” (2000: 162). Weil’s commitment to collectivity and connectivity manifests as the will to ‘decreate’ the ‘I’. Her withdrawal from food is a withdrawal from self-interest, which Kraus extends into an anti-capitalist withdrawal from property and possession. She writes (2000: 50):

There is a medieval tradition which defines the self as ‘a foul stinking lump’ that must be broken down. Weil takes this one step further, as a woman living in the mid-20th century: it isn’t just the second-person self she’s seeking to destroy. She’s starting with the one she knows the best, her own.

“If the ‘I’ is the only thing we truly own, we must destroy it,” she writes in Gravity and Grace. “Use the ‘I’ to break down ‘I’.”

The refusal to consume food is the final manifestation of a refusal to participate in a system that believes in ownership, individualism, and that, in Weil’s lifetime, saw the rise of fascism. Kraus adapts this methodology to the record of her own life, refusing the individualising, hagiographic tendencies of life writing, and in doing so, disrupting the turn to neoliberal individualism that characterised late 1990s feminism. The ‘I’ becomes the weapon with which to destroy the way this individualism operates within language. By fracturing the ‘I’, by stripping it of its singularity, Kraus, through Weil, and through Thek, demonstrates a commitment to collectivity and community and to recording those lives that have been cut away by the limitations of these dominant genres. The ‘I’ in this text is never singular, always part of a ‘simultaneous narrative.’

This multiple and fractured ‘I’ might also be read as a comment on the availability of the ‘I’ to women who, despite the monumental shifts of the 1990s, are still often perceived to be

speaking on behalf of an illusory collective of ‘women’. This is a longstanding and ongoing concern for feminist literary scholars. The status of the ‘I’ is central to both Cavarero and Butler’s approach to relational ontology. This reading of ‘I’ as in a state of decreation aligns with Butler’s argument that one must “go outside” (Kottman 2000: xiv) the self in order to tell the story of the self. In her work on the inauguration of the subject, Butler states that because we must subscribe to certain norms in order to be recognised as a subject, and because those norms both precede and exceed the subject, it is always-already located outside of their own time and space, and therefore lost not only to others, but also themselves. The availability of the ‘I’ appears to be a foreclosed debate. Butler explains (2005: 28):

One is compelled and comported outside oneself; one finds that the only way to know oneself is through a mediation that takes place outside oneself, exterior to oneself, by virtue of a convention or a norm that one did not make, in which one cannot discern oneself as an author or agent of one’s own making […] a vacillation between loss and ecstasy is inevitable.

This temporal and spatial distortion, in conjunction with the necessary absence, recalls some of the qualities of parataxis, such as Hayles’s assertion that it “signifies absence as well as mobility, inertness as well as transcendence” (1990: 395). Certain norms are necessary self-constituting aspects of identity, just as certain genre conventions cannot be eschewed entirely. The ‘I’, in the singular sense, is a fantasy. Further, no matter one’s level of compliance, there are elements of the self that are “irrecoverable” and necessarily lost that cannot be re-captured within narration (Butler 2005: 20). Elements of the self, Butler argues, must fall away and cannot be recorded. In a sense, all life writing falls victim to hagiographic tendencies and can only ever be partial and exterior. The ‘I’ is both never singular, yet never complete.

Alternatively, Butler reminds us that Cavarero has argued that these lost elements of the self are the same elements that “engage the possibility of altruism” (Butler 2005: 31). Cavarero explains that the illusory singularity of the ‘I’ is the one thing that all subjects

have in common and our relation to this ‘opacity’ can become a conduit for a relation to one another (Butler 2005: 32, drawing on Cavarero). Like the metonymy through which parataxis operates, the thing that is missing is the thing that ultimately provides a path for connection.

As established, Aliens & Anorexia is distinctly uninterested in recouping a singular ‘I’, but it is dedicated to re-connecting the subject to their constitutive community, or context, and to using this ‘opacity’ as a conduit. Not only is this the guiding ethos of Kraus’s reclamation project for Thek and Weil, it is also crucial to the film, Gravity & Grace. The text closes with an account of the film, as though Kraus is asking readers to now, finally, with the context of the film’s production firmly established, consider the work not as an isolated product but as the culmination of many people’s work over many years. Within this account, Kraus offers a scene that speaks strongly to the disconnection between subject and context that she has been working to overcome. The film’s protagonist, Gravity, a New Zealander living in New York, is working as an English teacher as she struggles to jumpstart her career as an artist (a semi-autobiography within a semi-autobiography). She stands in front of a class of despondent adults, explaining the difference between the subject and the predicate within a sentence. Gravity asks the class why is it important to be able to distinguish between the two (2000: 247):

Silence. The class regard her curiously. And suddenly this question seems so large it’s practically unanswerable. “It’s important because if you can find the root of the sentence, the heart of the subject, everything else just falls around it and you won’t get so lost—” her eyes mist up, she swallows hard. “When you’re reading.”

The distinction between subject and predicate is described here as almost unanswerable because it doesn’t just concern the structure of a sentence; it implicates the ontology of all subjects. Kraus ties the operation of language, where subject and predicate work together to convey information, to the operation of life, where subject and context cannot be separated. This passage affirms Kraus’s use of parataxis in the opening section of Aliens & Anorexia; though two entities appear separated, or exist under different labels, that separation is a

conduit for connection and represents the possibility of new relationships and new meanings. This is the “form of collectivity” that Weil asked for, “which binds without annihilating the presence and the power of the person,” (Kraus 2000: 178), that needs both sides—individual and collective, subject and predicate, body and context—in order to see the full ontological spectrum of a person. Weil’s life, her philosophies, her practices, cannot be understood in isolation from one another. Kraus re-writes Weil’s biography according to this framework and, in doing so, discovers new conduits where previously there was thought to be absence.

4. Porosity

To conclude this chapter, and to bring the threads of parataxis, anti-individualism, relational ontology, and the grotesque together, I want to emphasise the structural significance of what Kraus calls the “tiny gaps,” or the “porous” structures, that each of these concepts depends upon in order to attain their meaning (2000: 84). It is through these gaps—the metonymy of parataxis, the shared opacity of relational ontology, and the defining incompletion or irresolution of the grotesque—that Kraus is able to make her final argument about the performance not only of identity but more specifically about genre. The genres at the heart of this text are the hagiographic biography and the theoretical or philosophical text. This text is a performance of Kraus’s understanding of the state of women’s writing at the turn of the millennium, so tightly bound by the impossible contradictions put forward by feminist theory. Kraus writes that, “even though the play’s rehearsed and circumscribed, the act of theatre really happens in the tiny gaps between the actors and their roles, a fiction witnessed by the audience,” (2000: 84).

Kraus is manifesting textually the limits of the genres within which she is working. She is taking on the role of actor, and demonstrating how easily the audience can see through the role of biographer, theorist, filmmaker, and critic, and how easily those roles becomes confused and enmeshed. The relational ontology at the heart of this text is found not only between the lives of Thek and Weil and Kraus, but between the numerous roles that Kraus herself juggles throughout.

Kraus repeatedly sets up instances where the “porous” skin (2000: 45, 84, 181) between the actor and the role—that is, between what is on the page, and what is expected based on a genre’s norms—reveals the extent to which a genre’s conventions control the reader’s expectations of what life writing can be, of what information ‘counts’ as too personal, or too theoretical. Frow notes that “our experience of a text is always organised in advance— by expectations about what kind of text it is, if nothing else,” (2007: 27). Rak expands on this, writing that readers expect life writing to deal with elements of truth, memory, and privacy (2013: 6) but, I argue, they do not expect the inclusion of citations—a convention not associated with life writing—which throughout Aliens & Anorexia serve to provoke questions rather than to verify any claim to truth. Kraus is not only testing the limits of life writing, but of theory as well by including lengthy essay-like passages, and by frequently quoting or citing theorists, not only in relation to her research into the lives of Thek and Weil, but as commentary on her own anecdotes. This inclusion of theory as part of her life writing underscores the untenability of separating the two, especially when, in this case, the theory research that Kraus undertakes is constitutive of her life experiences.

Parataxis, as a technique that depends on such “porous” skin to defeat literary expectations, is the ideal tool for performing such genre disruption. Perelman explains that parataxis is, for this reason, a technique with in-built critical potential. He recounts a scene in Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet which, fittingly, Kraus repeatedly imagines herself and Sylvère acting out (Perelman 1993: 322; Kraus 2000: 87, 111), and notes that it is not what the characters are saying, but rather what they are not saying, that alerts readers to a level of irony. These “ironic gaps,” Perelman states, allow us to “read between each assertion [and] reveal the lunatic abyss underlying the pedagogical narrative of organised knowledge” (1993: 322). Like Hayles, who argues for a metonymic reading of parataxis, Perelman here suggests that it is because of the gaps that parataxis requires that it can signal its own critical intent to the reader.

Kraus’s critical intent is levelled at the theoretical and its illusory “disembodied” state (1997: 109)—she forces theory to encounter life. Kraus takes the ‘unreliability’ of the

anorexic patient, projected and enforced through psychoanalytic understandings, and translates it to the textual refusal to faithfully reproduce citations, and to refuse to participate in the lineage of masculine knowledge-production. Kraus’s disruption of citation takes the form of the illusion of conformity, of playing her role, yet her unreliability works to ridicule theoretical formal structures, and to question its position as the site of authority. This is an ideological approach that is, like her anti-capitalist stance, embedded in the praxis of Semiotext(e) itself.

Kraus’s unreliability as a theorist is well noted. In a short essay in the back of the 2006 edition of I Love Dick, Joan Hawkins points out that Kraus, across her first two texts, self- plagiarises by repeating passages and quotes. This is a textual performance of the “decreation” of the ‘I’ (Kraus 2000: 71) to which Weil aspires. This not only destabilises the chronology of the two texts, but, given some of the material Kraus repeats across texts, raises several questions regarding authenticity and identity. In I Love Dick she commends the eponymous character on his work “Aliens and Anorexia” and quotes her favourite passage back to him. That passage reappears 3 years later in Aliens & Anorexia, though it is now attributed to Deleuze, who, though cited in her prose, does not appear in the list of references. The author of the passage is unverifiable, both there and not there, past, present, and future at once.

This ‘auto-cannibalism’ is symptomatic of the inability to get outside of the rigidity of the theory genre, and comes across as a satire of the authority and reverence typically awarded to the theoretical. Kraus’s refusal to play into the masculine knowledge-system is doubled by this kind of strategic mis-quotation, which not only refutes authorial ‘ownership’ but, in doing so, also collapses those conventions that typically work to maintain and strengthen the very borders between distinct identities. The authority and fixity of the conventions are thrown into question. The impact of this self-plagiarism is the introduction of an ironic tone, where the certitude of her more academically focused work dissolves into a playful critique of the conventions she is utilising. The blurring of textual origins and of author asks the reader to second guess what qualities they associate with what kinds of genres, and why. The effect within Aliens & Anorexia is to highlight the porosity of genre norms, and

their fallibility, or their overlapping edges, and, in doing so, to question the perceived taxonomic rigidity that encourages the separation of life writing and theory.

Aliens & Anorexia, in effect, enacts the contradictory state of women writers following the theoretical developments of the 1990s; it is both alienated from and connected to its constitutive contexts. It is alienated because it denies the origin of many of its voices, yet, in doing so, it also enacts its own escape from the conventions that elevate and isolate the individual. Simultaneously, this alienation and discontinuity are part of what allows this text’s use of parataxis to succeed in connecting its multiple subjects. Through its appraisal of ‘failure’ through the case studies of anorexia and hagiographies, this text is a critique of both theory and life writing genres and the limited kinds of ontologies they allow. Kraus’s commitment to parataxis throughout Aliens & Anorexia ensures that the reading she applies to the subjects at hand, particularly Weil and Thek, is in turn applied to the details she offers of her own life.

Where I Love Dick has been described as “formally out of control” (Heti 2013), suggesting a ricocheting between high and low forms, Aliens & Anorexia has been described as “contaminated by craft” (Jamison 2015). Aliens & Anorexia is deliberate in its clutter and obsessively curated to appear eclectic, that even its absences are loaded with meaning. Kraus emphasises performance and craft from the opening pages and therefore the formal properties of Aliens & Anorexia can only be read as extensions of that performance and a significant contribution to the text’s overall meaning. Aliens & Anorexia’s specific formal properties, and the effects they produce, must be read in conjunction with the text’s content as working towards an anti-capitalist project that, in refusing to categorise itself, is committed to a collective practice, and that complicates—or dissolves—the lines that define both ‘failure’ and the ‘individual.’

In utilising parataxis and creating a textual collage that collapses the features of life writing even while it participates in the form, Kraus’s experimental prose enacts the kind of context-dependent identity to which Cavarero and Butler are speaking. Parataxis then, like anorexia or like Thek’s ‘Technological Reliquaries’, does not fragment the perceived unity

of a text (or body) to achieve disconnection or alienation. Rather, it encourages an ontological state of vulnerability and altruism that, in turn, allows a sense of concurrent and connected meanings. Parataxis uses fragmentation to encourage a joining of elements that are perceived to be disparate. The constitutive role of others is emphasised over the prescriptive boundaries of various normative systems like gender and genre. This is, Ariadad writes, a refusal to insist on a division between ‘I’ and the world (2015: 45), and, further, I argue, a rejection of the dualistic and artificial division between body and identity.

Parataxis has repeatedly been used as a reactionary tool, to challenge the prevailing structures of its own time. As Perelman suggests, it is a device that is necessarily already outside of the dominant literary mode because it cannot be contained by the limits of a single category (1993: 313). This understanding of parataxis aligns clearly with Ariadad’s work on the political efficacy of withdrawing from dominate systems of control, such as the food chain. She asks if a “feminist sketch of the self [could] be based on our selves and bodies already being outside” (2015: 50). This connection, further, recalls the neo-medieval ontology wherein the self is not defined by the limits of the body, but instead includes surrounding context as well. This ontology pre-dates, and implicitly dismantles the isolation and individualisation that come with capitalist neoliberal economies.

The use of parataxis to critique the isolating and individualising tendencies of hagiographies and, by extension, of the broader conventions of autobiographical and biographical writing, has profound political implications for re-thinking the relationship that women have to language. Ahmed reminds us that by taking these walls between genders and genres seriously, “as metaphors, but also as more than a metaphor” we are able to identify how the history of language has become concrete and shapes the material realities of our world (2017: 136). Acting out the fracturing of those genres that have dictated the shape of women’s bodies and women’s lives is both metaphorical, and more than a metaphor; the refusal of the conventions of life writing, and biographic research, is also a politically active refusal to participate in systems that dictate the trajectory that certain lives may take. More than the sum of its parts, more than an autobiographical and biographical text, Aliens & Anorexia is a criticism of the ways in which genres continue to

dictate and police the access women have to the theoretical, to erase women’s contributions, and to define the ways in which their lives might be recorded and thus interpreted.

Kraus’s recouping of Weil and Thek’s lives as ‘simultaneous narratives’ is a politically charged stance of demanding a lineage for her own work. It relies on the ‘emancipatory’ project of parataxis (Hayles 1990: 419) and represents the rescue of these life narratives from what Kraus refers to as “the social conditions of failure” (Kraus, qtd in Heti 2013), that is, those structures that have been unable to interpret or record the aspects of creative or philosophical works that are in contradiction to the ideologies they must support. Through ‘simultaneous narrative’ and parataxis, Kraus dismantles the interiority that we expect from autobiographical work, demonstrating a turn away from individualising and alienating models of the self in favour of a “porous” neo-medieval ontology. I continue this enquiry in Chapter Two, where I focus on Sheila Heti’s ‘switching’ between genres and identities. I argue that Heti uses ‘switching’ as a method of questioning and destabilising individualising models of self, and that this ‘switching’ reflects the contemporary ontology of women writers.

Chapter Two

Serious Play: Laughing through the Binary in Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (2012)

You remember the puer aeternus—the eternal child—Peter Pan—the boy who never grows up, who never becomes a man? Or it’s like in The Little Prince—when the prince asks the narrator to draw him a sheep. The narrator tries and tries again, but each time fails to do as well as he wishes. He believes himself to be a great artist and cannot understand why it’s not working. […]. Such people will suddenly tell you they have another plan, and they always do it the moment things start getting difficult. But it’s their everlasting switching that’s the dangerous thing, not what they choose. (Heti 2012: 83-84)

Sheila’s psychotherapist, Ann Yeoman, diagnoses her as a “puer aeternus,” the Jungian archetype characterised by switching, procrastination, and a fear of failure. Through relentless acts of switching, How Should A Person Be? interrogates and rehearses women writers’ contemporary state of ontological uncertainty. Framed by Yeoman as “dangerous” or unsustainable, Heti instead transforms this process of switching between various genre and identity categories, or ‘roles,’ into a study of women’s identity—and women’s relationships with one another—as they exist in the twenty-first century. This genre and identity switching is emphasised through formal play, and Heti’s life writing unfolds as a combination of comic theatrical dialogue, and serious philosophical enquiry into the question of how to ‘be’. Through this ludic switching, this text confronts the contradictory post-feminist pressure to both conform to rigid ideas of what gendered behaviour looks like, while, at the same time, also being encouraged to individualise and commodify one’s own identity. Through this experimentation—this serious play—Heti is able to struggle with and resist the seemingly inescapable binaries that structure life.

Heti draws on Yeoman’s text, Now Or Neverland: Peter Pan and the Myth of Eternal Youth (1998), throughout this text to guide her study of this character type. In Yeoman’s text, she expands the archetype of the puer aeternus beyond its Jungian application, and connects it with the classical mythological figure of the messenger, or psychopomp (1998: 15). This is, traditionally, a figure that moves freely between divine and mortal realms, or, between spiritual and corporeal realms, and it has been linked to both hell and heaven. Within this chapter, I examine this movement between the spiritual and the corporeal through Sheila’s anxiety over the state of her soul, which she feels is masked—or erased— by her external masquerade of various fixed identity roles.

Throughout this chapter, I position Heti’s play across external and internal ideas of identity as an exploration of the ongoing feminist debates that alternately position ‘woman’ as an “essence” or as a “stereotype” (Murphy 2012: 52). This text investigates if identity is something innate, like a soul, or whether identity is something imposed from the outside, a role that women learn how to act. Heti’s exploration incorporates her history as a philosopher and a playwright, and in addition to exploring archetypal character roles, she uses costumes, masks, and dialogue in order to question the truth and fiction of life writing.

Heti began writing How Should A Person Be? in 2005 (Medley 2010). The material she produced would later end up becoming two books: one, a ‘conversational’ philosophical text co-authored with Misha Glouberman, The Chairs Are Where The People Go (2011), and the other this text, first published in 2010. How Should A Person Be? was later reprinted with significant additions and alterations in 2012, and this is the edition I cite throughout this thesis. Heti describes these two texts as “companion pieces” in an interview with Naimon, and confesses that “at different points I thought they were the same book,” (2012: 108). Though this text reads as a partially fictionalised autobiography, elements of the philosophical and theoretical contaminate its pages and Heti does not attempt to keep these distinct genres apart.

The production of this text is marked by doubles and divisions. This binary model of division is repeated many times throughout the text itself as Sheila “switches” continuously

between different genres and different ‘roles,’ creating a confused sense of being. Where Aliens & Anorexia relied on hybridity and simultaneity in its challenge to genre and identity categorisation, How Should A Person Be? instead works by switching between the poles of character and actor, script and diary, truth and fiction. The “tiny gaps” (Kraus 2000: 84) that I explored in Chapter One, which acted as porous conduits for connectivity throughout Aliens & Anorexia, are transformed in this chapter into canyons. Rather than breaking down divisions between genre, or identities, Heti is instead strengthening the partitions in order to show more clearly the play across borders. There is, as a result, an emphasis on exaggeration, theatricality, and dramatisation; throughout this text, casual conversations between friends are presented as scripts with stage directions, and identity is often discussed according to archetype-like roles, such as ‘bride,’ or ‘genius’.

Just as Thek, Weil and Kraus began to blend together in Aliens & Anorexia, it becomes unclear at what points Sheila is masquerading as one of these roles, or being herself. I argue in this chapter that this use of “switching” between truth and fiction, and character and actor is a strategy that Heti is using in order to expose the volatile state of women’s ontology as something bound by the dual neoliberal pressure to both individualise, and to conform. Heti acts out her anxiety over how to ‘be’ by ricocheting between the security of the ‘role’ at hand, and an “ugly” (2012: 22) grotesquely unbordered state of being. Where Chapter One considered the relationship between collectivity and individualism, this chapter considers the relationship between self and other and the ethical implications of collapsing that divide, approaching relational ontology from an alternate angle.

This theatrical focus on costumes, masks, and dialogue has led me to approach Heti’s text through two related concepts: the carnivalesque and the masquerade, both of which are identifiable through Heti’s incessant acts of switching in this text. Through these concepts, I continue to argue that the grotesque and relational ontologies are at play and that Heti is working towards the representation of an uncertain ontology, particularly as it relates to post-feminist understandings of women’s identity.

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Further, this combination of carnivalesque and masquerade lends this text a distinctly satirical quality. The carnivalesque, according to Bakhtin, manifests in literature as Menippean satire (Musgrave 2014: 11), and I argue that this text can be classified as such because, like Menippean satire, it is comprised of a “medley” of genres and forms and it is concerned with “the absurd […] and the contradictory” (Musgrave 2014: 20). Though my focus remains primarily on the carnivalesque—which has often, though incorrectly, been treated as synonymous with Menippean satire (Musgrave 2014: 12)—and masquerade, the role of satire as a fundamentally destabilising tactic in this text cannot be underplayed. Heti’s inventive use of genre and identity, which both ridicules and plays into the life writing tradition, emphasised by the rupturing and fusing of forms, marks this text as grotesque (Musgrave 2014: 16).

Heti’s switching strategy is therefore evident across many facets of this text, including genre, form, and Sheila’s characterisation. Throughout this chapter I theorise this switching as a framework for understanding the oscillation or dialogue between self and other, truth and fiction, and actor and character throughout this text. Section one takes masquerade as its focus. Heti’s switching and performance of ‘roles’ does lend itself to a reading through Butler’s concept of performativity, however, as stated in the introduction, this is not the path that this thesis takes. Given Heti’s clear affinity for psychoanalytic understandings of identity—particularly Jungian theories of archetypes, and Otto Rank’s work on artistic “neurosis” (Naimon 2012: 107)—I read the identity-play in this text through British psychoanalyst Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as a Masquerade” (1929) and to consider how the “mask of womanliness” has evolved in the twenty-first century (Riviere 1929: 303). The various ‘roles’ Sheila takes up throughout this text are presented as able to ‘fix’—both cure, and stabilise—the wayward sense of identity that she feels in her soul. Unlike Kraus and Weil, who believed that “value […] exists only in the joining of two previously separate things” (Kraus 2000: 48), Sheila believes that value is determined by borders, or “fences,” and that a ‘valuable’ identity is therefore the presentation of a united and individual self (Heti 2012: 299). The status of masquerade is therefore confused in this text, both desired and at every point exposed as illusory—a false cure for a false problem.

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Riviere’s work also establishes an intersection at which to consider masquerade as integral to the carnivalesque. Section two explains this connection, and goes on to read specific scenes from How Should A Person Be? as carnivalesque—particularly dream sequences, and the switching between sleep and wakefulness, which further strengthen the carnivalesque’s affinity to the psychoanalytic tradition. The carnivalesque shares many of the features of the grotesque, however, like the puer aeternus that characterises this text, it is defined by its switching. As such, I have chosen to focus on this concept, rather than the grotesque (though Danow points out that the two concepts are potentially convergent, 1995: 31) for this chapter.

Section three considers a crucial aspect of the carnivalesque: laughter. Like in the grotesque, in the carnivalesque the humorous and the horrific combine and operate together to destabilise hierarchies, structures, and borders. In this section I extend my reading of Heti’s combination of comic theatrical dialogue and serious philosophical inquiry to a reading of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ in the life writing genre. Section four takes this switching between truth and fiction, the comic and the serious, and returns to Riviere’s work on “womanliness” and masquerade. In this final section I interrogate why this text has not been read as the serious ontological inquiry that it is. I hypothesise that while, like Rivere’s patient in “Womanliness as Masquerade”, Heti “fulfils the duties of [her] profession at least as well as the average man” (2012: 304), her “anxiety” over her identity—and the status of ‘woman’ in general—has manifested as “a compulsive reversal of her intellectual performance” (2012: 306). Heti’s comic genre play has—despite its seriousness—denied her the ‘masculine’ status of “genius” that she openly desires (2012: 4, 94). I read Heti’s play across borders and between categories as a serious and sustained method of conveying an uncertain ontological experience—a way to deliver a message and to make a point about how identity can be expressed, rather than solely as a symptom of indecision.

1. Masquerade

The premise of How Should A Person Be? is that the text is the record of the process of Heti’s attempt to complete the play that has been commissioned by a “feminist theatre

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company” (2012: 41). Heti’s attempts to conform, to perform her role as playwright, results in a mixture of theatrical dialogue, cobbled together from recorded conversations with her friends, emails, diary-like prose, and recounted dreams. Her procrastination and avoidance—her incessant switching back and forth between the genre in which she is meant to be writing and other genres, and between the role she is meant to be inhabiting and other roles—comes to stand in for the play itself, ultimately fulfilling the single criterion that the feminist theatre company has set: that the work “has to be about women” (Heti 2012: 41). Sheila continues, “I didn’t know anything about women! And yet I hoped I could write it, being a woman myself” (2012: 41). This reveals a central anxiety over what identity is—in particular what ‘woman’ is, as an identity category. Heti sets up a space in which being a woman no longer affords an understanding of that identity, or of how to represent the experience of that identity. This uncertainty and anxiety sets Sheila on her path of second-guessing and switching.

In “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” Riviere writes that “womanliness […] could be assumed and worn as a mask” (1929: 306), a “mask of femininity” (1929: 307), to the extent that the subject would feel as if she “were ‘acting a part’” (1929: 308). I trace this understanding of femininity as a masquerade throughout this section, with particular focus on Sheila’s clear “anxiety” over what ‘woman’ means. The parallels between Riviere’s patient and Sheila are numerous. Riviere explains that this masquerade is evident in a “particular type of intellectual woman” (1929: 304) and that the ‘mask’ of femininity is used, particularly for a male audience, to “hide her technical knowledge” and to downplay her expertise (1929: 307). Transferring this masquerade to genre, I read Heti’s oscillation between the ‘masculinised’ philosophical genre (Ahmed 2017: 111) and the feminised life writing genre (Laurie 2000: 5; Cavarero 2000: 13) as an example of this genre-play. This play is overt throughout the text, as Sheila attempts to resolve her ontological uncertainty by masquerading alternately as the highly feminised and highly masculinised roles of ‘bride’ and ‘genius’.

The text begins by establishing Sheila’s situation: she is a young, emerging playwright living and working in Toronto alongside her close-knit community of creative professionals

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including painters, actors, and other writers. Her recent divorce, however, has left her questioning her identity, and she finds herself unable to write. Paralysed by a sudden sense of ontological uncertainty—where she feels both stripped of her identity and, at the same time, as though she has re-gained it, able to cast off the highly feminised masquerade of ‘bride,’ yet unable to replace it with the masculinised ‘genius’—Sheila is unable to remember how characters are constructed. Are they individuals or are they archetypes? Are they defined by their relationships, or their costumes, or something else entirely?

After consulting with Ann Yeoman—the ‘father’ figure to whom Sheila often turns to assuage her “obsess[ive] need for reassurance” (Riviere 1929: 304)—she reinvents herself as a hairdresser’s apprentice, a simple and satisfying role she is certain she can embody and exemplify (2012: 52). She writes that, as a hairdresser, “every move felt part of a pattern more intelligent than I was, and I merely had to step into the designated place. I knew this was my greatest duty—this was me fulfilling my role” (2012: 42). While in the salon, Sheila continues, “I knew what was expected of me, and I was happy to comply […]. I knew nothing bad could happen […] and nothing out of the ordinary ever did” (2012: 54). Sheila “plays the part” (Riviere 1929: 304)—through costume, and stage-like blocking— and her obedience to this overarching structure in return provides her with a sense of stability and predictability. Her masquerade is a temporary shield from her “anxiety” over her ontological uncertainty.

This need for a role, for confinement, a script, a mask, reveals Sheila’s terror of presenting an “ugly” (2012: 22) or unbordered self-image. Her role as hairdresser’s apprentice transforms her into a meek and invisible person: “I felt like I had been erased, like no one would ever look at me again,” Sheila later admits (2012: 255). Yet, she believes this is better than having no sense of identity at all. The text follows Sheila’s attempts to overcome this weakened sense of self. She struggles to construct the defining traits of the characters in her “impossible” play (2012: 262), and, simultaneously, construct herself. As she masks herself off through this hairdressing role, her attention turns outward to those around her. She purchases a tape recorder (2012: 57) and hopes that by recording and transcribing her conversations with her friends and assessing, almost clinically, how they

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‘act out’ their identities she can learn “why my play was not working, which was maybe the same reason my character was not working, and thus discover how I and the play should be” (2012: 96). The fate of the play, and the fate of Sheila’s identity are linked.

I argue that Heti’s obsession with the stability and predictability of archetypal character roles is the result of the early twenty-first-century neoliberal pressure to present a united and singular identity across all aspects of one’s life. While for Riviere the masquerade of ‘womanliness’ characterised a psychological “type” of women who performed admirably— if anxiously—in both feminine and masculine (that is, domestic and intellectual) spheres of life (1929: 304), the masquerade of ‘womanliness’ now also requires woman to embody singular agency: a coherent and individual brand-like identity. The result of this pressure to be everything, and one thing, to both conform to feminine roles, while exceeding them, has been a “schizophrenic” malaise, where women feel paralysed by identity anxiety (Moi 2008: 264). This phenomenon has been of particular interest to post-feminist scholars following what McRobbie has described as the turn towards “she” rather than “we” within not only feminist circles, but across society more broadly (2004: 257). This phenomenon has also been noted by Budgeon, who describes the ongoing imperative to “successfully” adhere to the role of ‘woman’ (despite the incremental relaxing of what ‘woman’ means over recent decades) or be in danger of somehow “failing” at being yourself (2013: 286- 287).

There is a strange neoliberal paradox at play, where women are encouraged to individualise and stand out while also being compelled to conform to more traditional (or at least slowly evolving) ideas of unassuming ‘womanliness’. Within this paradox, any ‘problem’ with identity is always reflected back onto the individual, who is made to feel responsible for the shortcomings of the very system within which they are attempting to fit. Budgeon, drawing on McRobbie (2004), explains how this paradox has impacted young women—more economically mobile than ever before—in particular. Budgeon writes (2013: 284):

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Young women are often held to be key beneficiaries of a range of socio-economic changes that now characterise Western societies and the neoliberal tropes of freedom and choice are increasingly associated with the category ‘young woman’.

Young women’s identity is increasingly celebrated and perceived as a position of freedom, while, at the same time, being subject to the disciplinary structures—perhaps more intensely, for the perceived threat they ostensibly pose to once-masculine-dominated spheres like work, finance, and education (Budgeon 2013: 284). This is a remarkably similar scenario to the one that Riviere discusses, wherein “women who wish for masculinity,” such as increased access to positions of leadership, feel compelled “to put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men,” thus forcing them into an ontologically unstable position (1929: 303).Young women are both free, and trapped, treated as both economic individuals and tied to their identity as a collective.

When considered alongside the evacuation of the category of ‘woman’ discussed in the previous chapter, there is an immense contradiction at the heart of this social condition. This positions ‘switching’ as a necessary state, where women must both submit to their role as ‘woman’ and challenge that role. Further, whether one chooses (that is, if one is afforded the choice at all) to participate in the masculine capitalist commercialisation of ‘woman,’ or whether one casts off the category altogether, neither choice amounts to any kind of freedom (Budgeon 2013: 287). Women are left paralysed by the uncertain ontology of this contradiction, caught between illusory choices that look good from one angle, and from another, do not. Heti, in interviews, explains that this contradictory pressure to consistently adhere to one’s role, while, at the same time, feeling pressured to stand out as an individual, has resulted in a “neurotic” state that permeates both life and art, and the space between (Derbyshire 2013: 47; Naimon 2012: 108). Uncertain ontology continues to dictate how women are able to behave and to influence how they record their life experiences.

This difficulty with escaping oppositional thinking is a well-identified tendency of operating within a dualistic framework. Butler, in the 1999 preface to the reprint of Gender Trouble, reminds us that “sometimes gender ambiguity can operate precisely to contain or

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deflect non-normative sexual practices and thereby work to keep normative sexualities intact” (37). Rosi Braidotti similarly addresses this phenomenon, calling it “phallocentric gender pluralism” (2012: 38), where despite the multiplication and diversification of gender identities, the frameworks within which they must operate are still hierarchical, still overwhelmingly masculine-dominant, and still inclined to value and recognise fixity over fluidity. As such, Braidotti continues, “normative modes […] act like magnets” (2012: 40). Despite the gender-play, inversion, and subsequent hints of ambiguity and fluidity around gender identity that ‘masquerade’ allows, gender frameworks are still hierarchical, and still rely on authoritative structures that prefer fixed and isolated identities over relational ones.

This reliance on binary structures emerges in the text as Sheila’s uncertainty over the state of her ‘soul’, which she feels is both “cured” of its unbordered “ugliness,” yet also erased by her masquerades. There is a strong distinction between internal and external ideas of identity in this text. The value that Sheila places on the borders of the soul is complicated due to the collaborative nature of her work, and the text itself. Sustained largely by recounting the development of her personal and professional relationship with her best friend, the painter Margaux Williamson, this text is a multi-disciplinary study of the tension between the two women’s contrasting understandings of identity. Where Sheila craves the stability and predictability of archetypal roles, Margaux is described as looking “at the same time like a little girl, a sexy woman, and a man” (2012: 28). Margaux embraces her multiplicity, her confusion, rejecting the singular coherent state of being which Sheila so desperately wants to embody. Despite this opposition, they are inseparable and dependant on one another. “Margaux complements me in interesting ways,” Sheila states. “She paints my picture and I record what she is saying” (2012: 3). Their relationship dictates the contours of the text’s play with genre—across script, email, and prose—and builds itself into a case study on the use of labels and categorisation, and their various freeing and restricting powers.

The narrative tension of the text predominantly occurs around Sheila’s unsuccessful attempts to subscribe entirely to a number of ‘roles’ as she struggles to understand how she should ‘be’. Sheila recounts how, prior to her marriage and divorce, she fixated on the role

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of ‘bride’—the ultimate feminine masquerade—and the relief she imagined it would bring to her life by containing her sense of self. She explains that she believed that (2012: 22):

There was something wrong inside me, something ugly, which I didn’t want anyone to see, which would contaminate everything I would ever do. […] I wanted to be an ideal, and believed marrying would make me into the upright, good-inside person I hoped to show the world. Maybe it would correct my flightiness, confusion, and selfishness, which I despised, and which ever revealed my lack of unity inside.

So I thought about marriage day and night.

The “ideal” role of bride is positioned as a ‘cure’ for the “ugly” and contaminating truth of Sheila’s identity. Like the hairdresser’s apprentice, the bride is here set up in terms that rely heavily on ideas of borders, and containment. It is presented as a tool with which to transform the wayward body—or body of the text, given how closely Sheila associates her failing identity with her failing play—into an upright exemplar (Parker 1987: 11). Held alongside Mary Russo’s explanation of the classical physical “ideal” as that which is “monumental, closed, static, self-contained, symmetrical,” it is apparent that Sheila views herself as the grotesque counterpart, described by Russo as “open protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and changing” (Russo 1994: 8). I read Russo’s marmoreal description of the ideal as an exaggerated or theatrical version of the kind of identity politics which are at play today, where the individual must maintain certain aspects of ‘woman’ or have her identity deemed “unsuccessful” (Budgeon 2013: 287, drawing on Baker 2008, and Rich 2005). Immediately, confinement is positioned as the goal, as the path to unity and singularity, while the openness of a varied and multifaceted identity is presented as “wrong.”

This passage demonstrates the extent to which Sheila has internalised the post-feminist narrative, and the extent to which Heti has made use of her meta-theoretical understanding of the state of ‘woman’ in the twenty-first century. Sheila believes that it is her responsibility to successfully adhere to the role at hand, and that her failure to do so—

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which has been codified in almost moralistic terms as a sign of being a bad person—is therefore an individual failing (Ahmed 2017: 5; McRobbie 2004: 257). The problem is presented in terms of Sheila’s inability to match herself to the “ideal,” when, in reality, the problem is that the ideal’s impossible fixity cannot possibly contain the breadth and variety that characterises real life identities; the archetypal role of ‘bride’ cannot, counter to Sheila’s wishes, cover up the unique subject underneath. In many respects, what is considered a ‘successful’ identity has been expanded in recent decades—for example, ‘woman’ is no longer defined exclusively by the performance of femininity (Budgeon 2013: 286), to the extent that there is no longer such a thing as a pure, or uncomplicated identity (Budgeon 2013: 281). Yet Sheila continues to appeal to this logic, aspiring to a singular coherent identity, and positioning all other identities in necessary opposition.

Sheila goes on to recount an afternoon when she and her then-fiancé wandered through a park together. They stumbled upon a wedding and secretly observed the ceremony. As they observe, the bride begins to cry at the line “for richer or for poorer” in her vows, and Sheila and her fiancé giggle, as though watching a funny or absurd play. Ultimately, they dismiss the bride as “vain, stupid, [and] materialistic” not for crying, but for crying at that particular line (2012: 22-23). However, Sheila continues (2012: 23):

On the day of our wedding […] something happened. As I said the words for richer or for poorer, that bride came up in me. Tears welled in my eyes, just as they had welled in hers. My voice cracked with the same emotion that had cracked her voice, but I felt none of it. It was a copy, a possession, canned. That bride inhabited me at the exact moment I should have been most present. It was like I was not there at all—It was not me.

Sheila is unable to extract herself from the performance, from the ludic (and comic) rehearsal of femininity, from the archetypal role to which she has aspired for so long. Instead, she finds the role subsuming her, and erasing her unique identity. Feeling that unless she is totally the bride, then she is not the bride at all, and will fail to be recognised by her peers, leads to a corruption of identity. Sheila is devastated to discover that the role,

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the masquerade, is not a cure for what she feels is her “ugly” unconfined ‘soul’. Sheila feels not only that she has lost the role of ‘bride’ but that, also, she has lost her sense of self in the process of the masquerade.

Murphy explains how this double effect—the loss of role and the loss of self—is a product of the changing climate of the early twenty-first century (2012: 52):

If the early concerns about essentialism were linked to the postulation of an almost Aristotelian natural essence, the subsequent worry was that a cultural essence or stereotype was being imposed from without whenever an identity was apprehended as such. This in turn lead to a suspicion of identity itself […]. But this suspicion of identity categories as essentialist, oppressive, and tyrannical now increasingly shares the stage with other accounts of identity that instead emphasise one’s experiential investment in them, no less their persistence.

Even as the category of ‘woman’ remains up for debate, women must confront the reality that they live, and are read, as women whether they choose to be or not. This condition has thrown up two possible understandings of women’s identity. First, that the “natural essence” of each person has been masked by this mandatory masquerade of ‘woman’, and second, that there is no such thing as this “natural essence” and the only identity we have ever had is this masquerade which, while not mandatory, is nevertheless “imposed from without” to the degree that some women feel an “investment” in being recognised as such. On one hand, there is a ‘soul’ that is masked by the masquerade, on the other hand, there is only the masquerade.

Heti—unwilling to align herself with either understanding of identity—therefore describes Sheila as ricocheting between, both masquerading while expressing concern for her soul, and declaring that the masquerade is the ‘truth’ and the soul does not exist. Heti is exploring her own ontological uncertainty through case studies into various roles. The role is both desired and yet simultaneously detested for its inability to resolve the status of contradiction (Murphy 2012: 5-6; Ahmed 2017: 15). What Sheila discovers is that how a

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person should ‘be’ is dictated in advance by these “tyrannical” forces, so that even what one thinks is an honest expression of oneself is made to feel like, and to be read as, a false performance. Butler explains further (2005: 22):

What I can ‘be’, quite literally, is constrained in advance by a regime of truth that decides what will and will not be a recognisable form of being […] the regime of truth offers a framework for the scene of recognition, delineating who will qualify as a subject of recognition and offering available norms for the act of recognition.

The recognition that Sheila so desperately seeks in her masquerade of these roles is out of her hands, decided “in advance by a regime of truth” over which she has no control. Whether she is recognised or not as subscribing to the chosen role, or chosen category, will ultimately have no effect on her sense of internal ‘ugliness’, as recognition takes place externally. The question at the heart of this text is therefore whether Sheila should continue to masquerade the ‘role’ at hand—‘playwright’, ‘bride’, ‘woman’, ‘genius’—or if she should attempt to reject the role altogether. Sheila delays her decision until the final pages, like the puer aeternus, switching between exaggerated performance and the wayward self for the majority of the text.

To further explain how this play between soul and masquerade functions throughout this text, I turn to two passages from the text that demonstrate Heti’s dedication to “switching” between internal and external forms of being. This switching is a device that builds to create a sense of uncertainty and with which Heti is able to constantly re-figure Sheila’s sense of self. First, in the opening pages of the text, Sheila states (2012: 2):

I know that personality is just an invention of the news media. I know that character exists from the outside alone. I know that inside the body there’s just temperature. So how do you build your soul? […] How should a person be?

Personality and character are equated with a public masquerade—an external show for the benefit of the “news media” which I read as a nod to the pressure to produce a

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commodifiable identity. Personality is here described as a tool with which to sell one’s own identity. Underneath that masquerade, however, Sheila feels a vacancy, “just temperature” where she expects to find a soul. In this passage, identity is conceived of as a purely external artefact, a masquerade that doesn’t just hide the ‘soul’ but rather subsumes and erases the soul.

Identity functions in this text as a performance according to a ‘type,’ and much like genre when it is used as a classification tool, cannot be separated from capital and the marketplace, Rak writes (2013: 26). Rak asserts that “it is no accident” that the development of, and boom in, life writing coincides with the development of capitalism and “the idea that any individual could […] act on a public stage,” (2013: 32). Life writing, as a “technology” of identity, ensures that identity is tied to capitalism, commercialism, and profit. Life writing is a vehicle for communication and connection, but it is also a commodity that is “manufactured for a market by an industry,” (Rak 2013: 4). This uncomfortable duality between identity and profit is key to Heti’s work as she responds to what Rak describes as “the shameful urge to profit from one’s life story,” (2013 16). I argue that this is one of the key motivators of Heti’s experimental play with concepts of attribution and citation because these are tools that signal truth and identity on one hand, and profit and ownership on the other—often not harmoniously throughout this text.

Very early in the text, Heti has established this conflict between identity as something alternately essential, innate, and interior, or as something performed, learnt, potentially profitable, and external. The Cartesian influence on this formulation is clear; the ‘soul’ remains in opposition to the body, however, in this contemporary situation, the body— masquerade, costume, personality—has priority. The soul has been left to wither. This leads to my second example, which demonstrates the conflict and uncertainty between these two locations of identity. Sheila confesses (2012: 5, emphasis original):

For so many years I have written soul like this: sould. I make no other consistent typo. A girl I met in France once said, Cheer up! Maybe it doesn’t actually mean

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you’ve sold your soul—I was staring unhappily into my beer—but rather that you never had a soul to sell.

Again, Sheila’s sense of internal vacancy, her lack of ‘soul’, comes to the fore. This is the evolution of the Cartesian legacy that continues to underpin our ontological understanding of selfhood, where identity is divided into an external body that acts as a vessel for our internal ‘soul’. This has not always been the case but rather is the by-product of increased social regulation, including the rise of capitalism and the formulation of the body as a “possession” (Parker 1987: 3). As such, it need not be the only way of thinking about the body. While it has been argued that the conception of the body as closed and finite is indicative of civilisation and social order, it has also been argued, as far back as Mary Douglas in 1973, that the separation of soul and body has moved beyond its use. Douglas notes that the distance placed between soul and body somehow came to indicate the extent of societal complexity and progression, so much so that “social intercourse pretends to take place between disembodied spirits” (Douglas, qtd in Fraser and Greco 2005: 10). This conflict between the soul and the body plays out not just in the text itself, but in its specific combination of the philosophical—often conceived of as “disembodied” intellectual (Kraus 1997: 109)—and the comic, which has its folk roots in the body and its “deeply positive character” (Bakhtin 1968: 62).

This reliance on binaries to conceptualise and rationalise the physical self has gradually escalated to the point that the persistent essentialisation of bodies has left them essence- less; our souls have been “sould” off. As the isolation of bodies rose under these increased social regulations, and as the body became more a possession—an accessory, even—the need to “say” something about the self through masquerade and costumes also increased. The result, for Sheila at least, is the feeling that she has given up her soul in order to present a convincing, coherent masquerade of identity. Further, she believes that her masquerade of identity is only successful when it is united, singular, and profitable. This has led to Sheila feeling that because her soul and masquerade do not align—and because she values her masquerade and its curative properties more—that her soul is not only of little value, but that, perhaps, it never existed at all.

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This formulation of identity as something essential but also absent recalls the moment at which Sheila’s masquerade as a ‘bride’ failed. The exact moment at which Sheila recognised the divide between ‘bride’ and herself was the line “for richer or for poorer.” This, combined with Sheila’s repetition of “sould” (2012: 5, 186), reintroduces the role of economic individualism and late capitalism as an influential force on the uncertain state of Heti’s identity, and identity more broadly in the twenty-first century. This is a key concern of the text, and one that is shared by Kraus who, as discussed in Chapter One, wrote that the isolation, competition, and hierarchy of capitalism are so inbuilt into our ideas of being that we no longer know how to question them (2001: 11).

I read Sheila’s obsession with the stability of archetypal roles as a means of controlling and containing her identity, and as an attempt to transform her identity into something commodifiable: the pressure to be singular arises from the pressure to be sellable. Sheila often mentions her desire to be famous throughout this text—“I don’t want anything […] except to be as famous as one can be” (2012: 2)—and wonders why she isn’t already. Life writing, previously reserved for celebrities and public figures, is now a genre in which all people can profit, contributing significantly to its popularity (Rak 2013: 3), but also perhaps falsely promising fame to anyone who tells their story publicly. Sheila copies the behaviours of “semifamous” people (2012: 89), and tallies the cities with the most “important” people living in them, hoping to one day “meet someone important, and thus become important myself” (2012: 190-191). “Semifamous” and “important” people are, to Sheila, people with successful and profitable arts careers—singers and painters who are recognised and written about. Sheila wants to become so important that it “would justify the ugliness inside me” (2012: 189). Sheila believes that to be successful, to be taken seriously, she must dedicate herself to the masquerade of a coherent identity. Should she fail to do so, she will fail to be recognised, and fail to be important.

This pressure to present a singular, united identity, and the pressure to commodify one’s own identity have contributed to the popularity of life writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century (Laurie 2000: 9; Saunders 2010: 3). Though the ‘legitimisation’ of

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identity during this period allowed novels that dissected the experience of ‘different’ identities to rise in popularity, this might not have been the liberating moment it was once perceived to be. As mentioned above, “normative modes […] act like magnets” (Braidotti 2012: 40), and while more diverse stories proliferated, they still had to subscribe to certain kinds of criteria make them sellable.

The masquerade of a united, ‘normative’ and stable ontology is part of what sells the product of life writing, yet this masquerade also undercuts the implicit truth at the heart of the life writing genre. Saunders expands on what this contradiction means for the genre, writing that (2010: 515):

One consequence of considering life-writing as performance is that if you view the self as performative rather than transcendental, the life-writing shifts from the quest to record an essence to an attempt to transcribe a performance.

Under these conditions, life writing becomes a space no longer characterised by what Laurie described as the “implied contractual agreement between reader and writer that something like the events described actually happened” (2000: 18), but rather, it is a space where the author—the subject—must continue performing for the sake of the commercial value of the text. Rak, quoting Frow, reminds us that “classification is an industrial matter” and that therefore the use of genre as a taxonomic tool, however flawed, cannot be separated from capital and the marketplace (2013: 26). The failure to fit in to the commercial expectations of a genre, like life writing, could mean the commercial failure of the text. Life writing, in this state, becomes unable to comment on its own production, to reveal the realities of women’s lives under late capitalism, or to challenge the status quo of the gendered nature of genre and the ways in which it works to control certain bodies (Parker 1987: 2). Life writing is unable to tell the truth about the experience of being a woman in the twenty-first century, it is only able to recount the masquerade.

Often celebrated as a by-product of the rise of identity politics, Sheila’s use of “sould” (2012: 5, 186) instead highlights the real-world effect of the popularisation of life writing:

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the progressive enclosure of the ‘soul’ as a potential source of financial profit. The ‘soul’ is transformed—erased—by the perpetual need to masquerade for the sake of the market’s temporary investment. This sense of self-erasure characterises the post-feminist moment, and Shiela’s behaviour, where the classification of ‘successful’ is restricted to the normative, the contained, and the self-policing (Budgeon 2013: 286). This confusion around how to ‘be’ is also, therefore, a confusion around how to ascribe value if, in both a literary and social sense, what is ‘good’ is defined by what is bordered and disciplined. What, then, does this then mean for uncertain ontologies and for genre experimentation? Must everything that does not fit neatly within categorical limits be cut away? This anxiety is a core theme throughout Heti’s text, and Sheila plays with, and confuses, the limits of each. Sheila writes (2012: 299-300):

When you have something you value, the next thing you have to do is build a fence around it […]. I told myself, Catalog what you value, then put a fence around these things. Once you have put a fence around something, you know it is something you value.

Value is inseparable from the “fence” that contains it—value is even confused with the symbol of its own disciplined borders. The corruption of the process of ascribing value according to categorisation, which here is a function of capitalism’s need to contain identity in order to sell it off, is made clear in this passage. Sheila inverts the order of operations, alternately stating that value comes before the fence, and that the fence comes before value. It is no longer value that requires protection, but the act of protecting—that is, categorising and subsequently assuring its disciplined borders—that ascribes value.

Sheila tests the stability of these categorisation ‘fences’ as she switches between roles and genres. The division between Sheila and Margaux in particular is undermined and rebuilt over and over. In this formulation, the collapse of division between two subjects is understood as something transgressive, aggressive, even violent. This is counter to the understanding established in Chapter One, where the confusion of subjects was presented as something genial and mutually beneficial in service of a relational ontology. In How

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Should A Person Be?, however, the confusion of subjects, the appropriation of voice, and the sense of shared identity are understood as a threatening and value-stripping action, which I examine through the dual operations of the carnivalesque.

2. Carnivalesque

The carnivalesque is both playful and serious, and has been used to lament the sensation of imprisonment within society and, if only momentarily, “was vividly felt as an escape from the usual official way of life” (Bakhtin 1968: 8). It relies on the operation of switching back and forth between the ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ which, in this chapter, has thus far allowed me to argue that Sheila’s ontological uncertainty has manifested as a series of masquerades that both hide and reveal her identity, as she understands it. This reading has drawn significantly on the writing of Riviere, however now my reading shifts its focus back to the portion of this thesis that analyses the grotesque, and to Bakhtin. The combination of Riviere and Bakhtin may be unconventional, yet it is productive in that it assists my reading of Heti’s serious play as she switches between identities and genres. This kind of switching, in both Riviere and Bakhtin’s work, has been used to conceptualise a challenge to power structures—at the level of gender, and the level of social order respectively—and in this chapter manifests as a challenge to the conventions of repressing identity in the life writing genre. Heti uses masquerade and the carnivalesque to experiment with, satirise, and collapse the individuality she feels must accompany life writing, turning instead to multiple roles, multiple voices, and the incorporation of multiple distinct genres.

Though I argue that this is a dedicated strategy of Heti’s, there is nevertheless and undercurrent of “neurotic” (Naimon 2012: 107) uncertainty that results from the incessant movement across ‘role’ and genre divides throughout How Should A Person Be? Traversing borders like this is a staple of gothic and grotesque literature (Parker 1987: 176) and produces both horror and laughter, that come from such unpredictability and uncertainty. Though this combinatory technique lends itself to a reading through the lens of the grotesque, I read this switching back and forth, and this identity confusion, through the grotesque’s sibling concept: the carnivalesque. Daniel Danow, in The Spirit of the

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Carnival: Magic Realism and the Grotesque (1995), writes that the two concepts were initially convergent, appearing first as the “carnivalesque-grotesque” in Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (Danow 1995: 31). Where the grotesque denotes a divergence from the socio-historic norm, the carnivalesque describes the switching back and forth between the norm and the state of divergence (Danow 1995: 3), or the “official” and “unofficial” (Bakhtin 1968: 72). Danow combines the work of Bakhtin and the work of Carl Jung to offer an updated approach to the carnivalesque and its potential literary functions in post- war literature. Given Heti’s reliance on Jungian analysis throughout How Should A Person Be?, and particularly her use of archetypes, like the puer aeternus, Danow’s work is indispensable to this reading.

Key aspects of the grotesque are still at play in the carnivalesque. Throughout this thesis, the primary identifying feature of the grotesque has been its ability to combine what was thought to be separate, or to fracture what was thought to be confined and whole, and thus challenge ideas of categorisation. The carnivalesque also participates in this strategy, however, it does so on a more social level rather than a physical one. The grotesque is not only a concept concerned with the breaking of form. As it breaks form, it also poses a “conceptual question” about “what it means to be normal,” or to deviate from the norm (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 3, 9). The carnivalesque also promotes these questions, and thus both concepts work to expose categories and norms thought to be fixed as instead fluid and malleable. Throughout this chapter, this bending and questioning of ‘normalcy’ has implications not only for the subjects of How Should A Person Be? but for the genres across which it is written as well.

The parallels between the operations of the carnivalesque, the puer aeternus or psychopomp, and the contemporary uncertainty over women’s ontology, are clear. First, both make use of ‘switching’ as a means of destabilising the state of things, or in order to represent a sense of destabilisation. Second, though the carnivalesque appears at first to present a liberating and exciting moment, its dependency upon strong ideas of opposition in fact work, ultimately, to shore up the borders of binary structures within the social order. Similarly, where many women believed the casting off of the category of ‘woman’ would

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result in a kind of freedom, it has instead resulted in a sense of undoing. Danow points out that the carnivalesque moment offers, on one hand, a kind of “paradise” for some, and a “hell” for others (1995: 6). Much like the puer aeternus or psychopomp, who travels between the realms of the living and the dead, the carnivalesque is defined by its ability to go both ways between heaven and hell, where at any point its fate might be reversed. For the carnivalesque, in getting the chance to momentarily cast off the rigidity and control of the authority of the “official,” there is inherently a risk that in this “inversion of fate” (Danow 1995: 5) that what follows will not progress to the ‘carnival paradise’ wherein those afforded a low status are typically awarded a taste of equal or even high status. Rather, those actions might instead ignite a ‘carnival hell’ where the social instability produced by the lack of authority casts those who are already low on the hierarchical ladder further down. In this section I consider four types of carnivalesque moments gone wrong: two acts of appropriation that challenge the division between self and other, and two dream sequences that confuse the distinction between the carnival ‘hell’ and the carnival ‘heaven’. These readings expose both the serious and playful aspects of the carnivalesque and how they operate to destabilise the life writing genre.

The first occurs when Sheila inadvertently positions Margaux as a ‘role’ to which she can aspire, and she discovers the ethical limits of her identity-switching and obsession with masquerade. While on a trip to Miami Art Basal, the two women “bought the same yellow dress” (2012: 108). The moment is quickly passed over in the text, buried in Sheila’s account of the holiday, filled with celebratory, indulgent detail. The incident is only later revealed to have sparked in Margaux a series of ontological questions on form, appearance, identity and ‘type’. Once the two women are back in Toronto, the dress has become an uncomfortable reminder of Sheila’s transgression and threat to Margaux’s unique identity. Margaux feels the social norms must be restored and Sheila’s act of overstepping the borders of her identity must be rectified. The following chapter, titled “Two Dresses,” contains one of Margaux’s trademark emails to Sheila: a numbered list, like an itemisation of her thoughts, with no capitalisation. It is dated one week after their return to Toronto (2012: 115-116). Margaux writes:

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1. i know i can be intense sometimes […] but i wanted to say that it really startled me in miami when you bought the same yellow dress that i was buying. 2. after we looked at a thousand dresses for you—and the yellow dress being the first dress i was considering […] 3. i suggested you try it on […] 4. i think its pretty standard that you don’t buy the same dress your friend is buying, but i was trying to convince myself that maybe it was okay to buy the same dress your friend is buying. you know, trying to think about it positively […] 5. when you said that you’d only wear it out of town and never in toronto, it sort of seemed reasonable. 6. but not really, since of course we only exist in pictures. 7. i should have been clearer in the store about how it made me uncomfortable, or i just shouldn’t have bought the dress. 8. i really need some of my own identity. and this is pretty simple and good for the head. 9. i’m going to get rid of the dress now, cause it makes me a little sad to look at it. 10. you don’t have to reply to this email.

Sheila does not reply, and they do not speak for several weeks. Sheila is convinced, not for the first time in this text, that their friendship is irreparably damaged and their collaborative artistic practices have come to an end. This sets up a clear limitation to the work established in Chapter One. Collaborative practices, and the acknowledgement of others in the formation of one’s own identity, while foundational for the representation of relational ontology, must be cautious to not overwhelm or erase the ‘uniqueness’ of the individuals within. Margaux decides to “get rid of the dress now” because it has begun to collapse the division between her own sense of self and Sheila’s masquerade.

I read this scene as an example of a carnivalesque moment for several reasons. First, this incident occurs while on a trip to Miami, where the two women are removed, both geographically and socially, from the scenery of Toronto. This switching between two states (ontologically and geographically), where transgression is permissible in one, but not

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in the other, is the key identifier of the carnivalesque. What is most significant about the carnivalesque, and what sets it apart from the grotesque, is that its transgressions are only ever temporary, and it inevitably promises a return to the status quo. The process of the carnivalesque is the switching back and forth between a state of rigid social order, and social flexibility or revolution, and back again.

Secondly, though the carnivalesque is often associated with celebration and revelry, which aligns with Sheila’s description of their time in Miami, Holquist asserts in the prologue to Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World that “carnival must not be confused with mere holiday” (1984: xviii). Rather, within the carnivalesque moment, participants are able to transgress the everyday social boundaries that surround them without having to fear the disciplinary punishments that would typically follow. The carnivalesque relies upon the belief that there is a universal human impulse to revolt against the authority of fixity and stability (Danow 1995: 4)—something secret but ultimately natural that must be periodically allowed ‘out’ (Danow 1995: 31). As such, participants in the carnivalesque moment are permitted to behave in “reversed” or even “revolting” ways (Danow 1995: 4). This recalls the “revolutionary” implications of the grotesque, however, the carnivalesque is often “balance[d] by good humour” (Bakhtin, qtd in Danow 1995: 23), and promises a return to order. So, while on the one hand the carnivalesque represents a celebratory release, on the other hand it appears to support a “far darker predilection” to ‘escape’ the pervasive, prescriptive and moralising norms of the social order that nevertheless most often work to keep people safe (Danow 1995: 31). This scene demonstrates the lengths Sheila is willing to go to in order to present a coherent, united identity—a desire she leans into, despite the risk of violence, while able to pass it off as part of a celebration.

Third, and finally, the carnivalesque is historically dependent on masks and costumes in order to attain its temporary ability to transform the fortune or identity of its participants, to make a “fool, madman, or clown” into a “regent” (Danow 1995: 4). Bakhtin explains how the mask is the most important, and most complex theme of folk culture and the carnivalesque (1968: 40):

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Even more important is the theme of the mask, the most complex theme of folk culture. The mask is connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and with the merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself. The mask is related to transition, metamorphoses, the violation of natural boundaries, to mockery and familiar nicknames. It contains the playful element of life; it is based on a peculiar interrelation of reality and image, characteristic of the most ancient rituals and spectacles

Sheila takes up the ‘mask’ of Margaux and, though she does so with good will, ends up violating the “natural boundaries” of her friend. Sheila’s desire to “reject conformity to oneself”—to cast off her own identity in favour of Margaux’s—forces Margaux, too, to cast off that identity because it has been revealed to be only a mask, a costume, and not truly or innately hers. This carnivalesque reliance on masks recalls one of Riviere’s patient’s dreams. Riviere recounts (1929: 306):

She had had dreams of people putting masks on their faces in order to avert disaster. One of these dreams was of a high tower on a hill and being pushed over and falling down on the inhabitants of a village bellow, but the people put on masks and escaped injury!

This dream details the same motivations that Sheila displays for her various masquerades— they are tools with which she hopes to “avert disaster.” Sheila’s switching between herself, and the mask of Margaux is well-intentioned. However, it is also a dangerous expression of her state of ontological uncertainty, where her desire to “escape injury” results instead in leaving Margaux mask-less. This reading supports the idea that Sheila treats her friends as ‘characters’ who wear ‘costumes’ that she can slip in and out of, appropriating and performing their identity on their behalf. Appearances are treated as a symbol of character, exaggerating the ways in which identity is often extrapolated from what is external, visible, recognisable, and the various associations that certain items of clothing or certain behaviours conjure (Butler 2005: 29-30).

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Its emphasis on clothing and the visual as the location of identity reveals a great deal about the way this text conceives of, and plays with, identity. Identity is only valid in this text when it is recognisable—that is, when it is externalised and able to be capitalised upon. Identity that is secret, invisible, and internal is irrelevant to Sheila. Further, this incident also establishes an ethical quandary around the commodification of identity, and the significance of the unique; if identity is only located in pictures to Sheila, in costumes and masks, and if those costumes and masks are mass-produced and purchasable by anyone— the yellow dresses are surely two of hundreds—then a unique identity is impossible. Sheila wants so desperately to stand out as unique, but, at the same time, she is playing into the structures that forbid her from realising her own idea of what identity is.

Sheila does not learn from, or adapt her behaviour following the Yellow Dress incident. Throughout the text, Sheila has been recording, transcribing, and appropriating the words of Margaux to help her figure out how to fix the play and, through the play, her own sense of identity. This appropriation of words, rather than costumes, functions in a very similar way. As discussed in the introduction, the primary difference between the relational ontologies put forward by Butler and Cavarero are their respective focuses on the physical and the linguistic. Kottman stresses that Cavarero’s reading of vulnerability is “not inconsistent” with Butler’s reading of “linguistic vulnerability” (2000: xviii). Once again, Sheila’s gesture of friendship and relationality becomes one of violence due to this vulnerability (2012: 59-60):

SHEILA

I need some help with the play, and I thought that maybe by talking it over with you—I thought maybe you could help me figure out why it isn’t working. Then I can listen to what we say, and think it over at home, and figure out where I’m going wrong.

Margaux shakes her head.

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[…]

MARGAUX

Don’t you know that what I fear most is my words floating separate from my body? You there with that tape recorder is the scariest thing! […] I don’t know where things end up! Then whatever I happen to say, someone will believe I really said it and meant it? No. No. You there with that tape recorder just looks like my own death.

Sheila uses Margaux’s voice anyway, and the text is filled with the evidence of that transgression. Margaux understands the violent implications of this act, equating it with her own death. This, again, poses a threat to Margaux’s sense of unique identity. Sheila continues attempting to use elements of her best friend’s identity to solve or patch the flaws that she finds in her own. The effect is a monstrous collage of words and characters which, while a successful depiction of an uncertain ontology, leaves Margaux upset and afraid.

The truth is distorted, identities melded by incorrect or partial attribution—an effect that Margaux equates with death. Some critics, like Larson and Rak, would argue that this distortion is what marks life writing as “genius” and what suggests its ability (or attempt) to escape “market forces” and be “put to previously unheard of uses,” (Larson 2007: 188, qt in Rak 2013: 34, 17). Others, like Butler and Cavarero would argue that this violates the reciprocity required for a relational ontology (Butler 2005: 26), where Sheila is allowed to create connections, flesh out her identity, and come to life but only at the cost of disallowing Margaux to do the same.

Together, these two examples demonstrate the ‘hell’ of the carnivalesque, where the celebratory costumes and masks become devices of destabilisation, which prompt a re- thinking of relational ontology. Though I still read this text through the theoretical framework of relational ontology, the result is very different to what was established in Chapter One. This text considers how even gestures of friendship, with the intention of

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collapsing oppositional binaries and working towards unity, can have unintended consequences that work instead to solidify those divides. Citing Simone de Beauvoir, Murphy notes that “the terms of intersubjective encounter—whether affectionate or antagonistic—are produced performatively, or existentially, that is, in a manner that cannot be purged of violence” (2012: 7). The limits of individualism and collectivism are a longstanding concern for feminist theorists, and one that has become more pressing in the twenty-first century under the neoliberal impetus to individualise.

This ongoing study of intersubjectivity has led to the “deconstruction of friendship and enmity” which has formed something of a “critical trend” in the twenty-first century (Murphy 2012: 47), perhaps because of the neoliberal pressure to solidify one’s own individuality. This is a trend in which Heti is enthusiastically participating, though this fear of violence has resulted, in some cases, in a reluctance to participate totally in relational ontologies. Murphy continues that this critique is (2012: 47)

as often as not rendered in such a way that an attempt at empathy might be read as a violent and appropriative gesture that lays false claims to another’s experience [and has led to an] increasing acknowledgement of the normative violence at play in recognition. The amalgam of these critical trends yields a theoretical landscape in which the possibility of thinking identity without violence comes dangerously close to being foreclosed.

This understanding of violence—as an automatic element in the exchange on which friendship is built—has immense implications for the state of identity and, again, for life writing, which is reliant on intertextuality. If, as Murphy suggests, it is not possible to ‘appropriate’ the life of others without risking violence or erasure, how then is it possible to tell one’s own life story? Further, what implications does this understanding of relationality-as-violence have for Butler’s concept of “implied reciprocity” where “the ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation” (2005: 26, 8), or for Cavarero’s “dyadic encounter” wherein the self-narrative must be polyphonic and told by another (2000: 12). This trend seems to foreclose not only the chance of an ethical and non-

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violent life writing, but, also, to suggest that relational ontologies are inherently violent and that the ethical choice is, therefore, to attempt to tell one’s life story in as individualistic terms as possible. Even gestures of friendship and kindness are able to be interpreted as gestures of restriction, malice, and even violence.

Impersonating or acting as a clear archetype, a bride, for example, is one thing, but to act as a friend and collaborative peer is an entirely different matter and one that threatens to transform a gesture of friendship into one of violence. As a collaborative pair, the two women already exist in a risky state; they each use the other’s appearance or words to make the art-work they desire, which both connects them and makes them vulnerable to one another. Their shared vulnerability has, to this point, inspired a sense of care for one another, however, Sheila’s appropriative gesture crosses a subtle line and can be read as violent. It is not an aggressive violence, but a violence of erasure and fragmentation. Sheila takes something from Margaux and, in doing so, changes its value.

This vulnerability is “one of the primary forms of social relation” (Kottman xviii), stemming from the realisation that the world precedes and exceeds our own existence and control. Confronting this vulnerability is a mandatory aspect of existing in relation to other subjects. Synthesising the work of Cavarero and Butler, Murphy points out that “vulnerability is at one an ontological truism and an ethical provocation” (2011: 589). Vulnerability is constitutive, however, this should not mean we accept as a given and unchangeable fact that some subjects are more vulnerable than others, or that vulnerability necessarily leads to violence, either physical or otherwise.

Though Sheila believed that writing her play (or any text) with the words of Margaux would “fix” it, and, in turn, ‘fix’ in place her unconfined identity, it has instead made it more partial, and more combinatory. Too late, Sheila realises her error (2012: 179-180).

I had come too close and hurt her—killed whatever in Margaux made art […]. I knew why and how it had happened. Instead of sitting down and writing my play with my words—using my imagination, pulling up the words from the solitude and

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privacy of my soul—I had used her words, stolen what was hers. I had plagiarised her being and mixed it up with the ugliness that was mine! Then she had looked into it and, like looking into a funhouse mirror, believed the decadent, narcissistic person she saw was her—when really it was me. Unwilling to be naked, I had made her naked instead.

The vulnerability of collaboration has again turned to violence. Sheila not only forces Margaux to give up the yellow dress, and to give up her own words, but to give up on her art-making as her ‘soul’ has been taken from her by this transgression. Margaux, who had always been content to have an unconfined ‘ugly’ identity, now sees her multifaceted qualities not as an excess, or as part of what makes her unique, but as a kind of incompletion. This passage links the appropriation of dialogue to the appropriation of clothing, or costume, showing that the events with the yellow dress and the tape recorder, while minor enough in themselves, both function together to build an image of Sheila as a thief. The mention of a funhouse mirror evokes a carnivalesque sense of identity—a temporarily twisted version of the truth, equally comical and horrific. Margaux feels as though her identity has been replaced by Sheila’s, as though the two women have switched places.

Sheila tries to downplay the implications of her actions but, ultimately, her unconscious exposes the ethical complication around this scenario. A series of horrific dreams follow Sheila’s transgressions with the yellow dress and the tape recorder. Danow connects dreams to the carnivalesque (1995: 5); both operate by switching back and forth between a trance where the normal rules do not apply and the status quo, a kind of sleeping and waking. Dreaming represents a fractured state, or an in-between state of being, and Sheila embraces the psychoanalytic tradition of taking dreams seriously, as important aspects of life that reveal the truth of identity. Further, Sheila’s diagnosis as the puer aeternus or the psychopomp—the result of her chronic uncertainty—sees that she is destined to return, again and again, to this nightmare. This is the first of two dreams that I will consider, yet the text contains many more; it is a ‘hell’ to which Sheila cannot help but return (2012: 237-8):

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I dreamed I was sailing on a boat in water, and coming to land, I got off and climbed a grassy mountain, at the top of which lay a massive graveyard. I looked about me for my task. Then I saw it—an ivory box. [...] The box had a funny weight to it, at once light and heavy [...].

I knelt down and started digging at the ground with my nails—but then I paused and stopped. I went to another site and started digging there. But again I felt I might be digging in the entirely wrong place, so I got up and began digging elsewhere, here and there [...]. I was running out of time [...], so I dug a small hole and reached behind me for the box. Then I opened it. Glancing up at me was Margaux’s head, severed from her body, her eyes open and darting around, scared.

I felt a horror so deep [...]. I had not the will or courage to bury her whole body. I had desecrated her.

This head is recognisable as Margaux’s, but it has been made horrifically partial. I interpret this dream as a direct response to Margaux’s discomfort in being perpetually recorded by Sheila, and the violence of that action. The borrowing of her voice and the creation of a false dialogue is presented as akin to her death and this horrifying manifestation of Margaux’s grotesque “incompletion” follows (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 2).

The headless body is a powerful figure. It undeniably falls within the field of the grotesque and also raises important questions about recognition, identity, and the masquerade. As Butler points out, the reading of faces, and maintaining a legible face of one’s own, is a highly conditioned social aspect of our lives, and one that determines various forms of humanisation and dehumanisation (and why masks are so often terrifying) (2005: 29-30). It is through our faces, and our voices, that the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ can recognise one another and interact. The figure of the headless person—or the masked person—therefore raises questions not only about recognition but, more importantly, about ‘intactness,’ and anonymity.

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Susan Stewart explains how quotation—like Sheila’s quotation of Margaux in the example above—has been thought of as a kind of heedlessness, and what implications this has for identity, authority and authorship. She writes (1984:19):

In detaching the utterance from its context of origin, the quotation mark textualises the utterance, giving it both integrity and boundary and opening it to interpretation. The quotation appears as a severed head, a voice whose authority is grounded in itself, and therein lies its power and its limits. For although the quotation now speaks with the voice of history and tradition, a voice ‘for all times and places’, it has been severed from its context of origin and of original interpretation, a context which gave it authenticity. Once quoted, the utterance enters the area of social conflict: it is manipulatable, examinable within its now-fixed borders; it now plays within the ambivalent shades of varying contexts. It is no longer the possession of its author; it has only the authority of use. At the same time, the quotation serves to lend the original an authenticity it itself has lost to a surrounding context. The quotation mark points not only inwards but outwards as well. What stands outside the quotation mark is seen as spontaneous and original; hence our generic conventions of speaking from the heart, from the body, from nature.

Margaux’s terror at her “words floating separate from my body” (Heti 2012: 59) is a terror of being made partial, of being fragmented, of losing her integrity. The quotation is, Stewart writes, “now fixed” yet susceptible to “manipulation”; as Sheila uses Margaux’s words to gain a sense of coherence over her own identity and her own work, her uncertainty and ugliness is passed on to Margaux. Sheila robs Margaux of her own authority.

This parallel reveals the “headlessness” of the masquerades to which Sheila has been aspiring, which have lost their own spontaneity and originality and have become, instead, anonymous with no authority over themselves. This headlessness is inherently grotesque for the way it distorts and fragments the body, however, this reading also suggests a discarding of logic and rationality, given that the head is the part of the body that most

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represents the mind. This alignment between ‘headlessness’ and the lack of logic is explored briefly by Edwards and Graulund as a common philosophical pitfall, first identified by David Hume. A lack of logic or order is often what provokes the horror or humour of the grotesque (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 6). They explain that Hume “criticizes those writers who make normative claims about what ‘ought’ to be based on positive premises about what ‘is’” (2008: 10). We can transfer this to the use of quotations, whereby a writer uses the words of another with the intent to support and bring authority to a claim of what ought to be. The disparity between the descriptive statement (is) and the prescriptive statement (ought) incites ideas of normativity and value. ‘Ought’ is often rendered “dubious” in its validity when it is not clear how it emerged from ‘is’, and therefore (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 10)

one cannot make a normative claim based on facts about the world, implying that normative claims cannot be the conclusions of reason. This complete severing of ‘is’ from ‘ought’ has been given the gory designation of Hume’s Guillotine and illustrates the removal of the head from many ethical arguments about what it means to be ‘normal’.

How Should A Person Be?, in its very title, signals its interest in not only ontological questions, but also in the prescriptive norms and values that often accompany those questions. Its preoccupation with value emerges from its tendency, however theatrically or ironically, to swing between and submit to various categories (rather than hybridising). ‘Should’ operates even more directly than ‘ought’ and designates not only the aspirational position of the fixed and united identity Sheila craves, but implies a punishment for those that do not meet the criteria. This fixity and categorisation work to dictate a morally prescriptive kind of ‘value’, where a body or text is only ‘good’ if it is successfully obeying and thus reproducing those norms and structures that in turn produce a profit.

However, by considering Stewart’s remarks alongside Edwards and Graulund’s, it is clear that using an external quotation to support one’s own claim represents an automatic grotesque-ification of the text. The textual body has become multiple, the inside and

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outside are fractured, and the assumed (but always illusory) authority of the quotation is revealed to be a logical misstep and not a claim to prescriptive ‘normality’. The head of the argument, and the head of the source that lends it authority, are both severed. What Hume metaphorises as the removal of the head, the literal acting out of Cartesian operations, where the mind is cut off from the body, comes to signal the lifeless collapse of the masquerade and the illusory fixity and value to which it is tied.

Sheila experiences a second nightmare that emphasises this reading. This dream reveals that the masquerader is not only headless because they have lost their “authenticity”, but headless because they are now anonymous, and unrecognisable—wearing a mask. The anonymity of the masquerade leads to this gruesome dream where bodies undergo horrific mutilations while the perpetrators remain faceless and unrecognised (2012: 243-245):

As I slept that night I saw a room on the twelfth floor of a building with a courtyard in the centre, and in this building lived young people [...] lots of people. And into a room at the top there came deliveries of sharp, long knives, short knives, twisted knives, all sorts of knives, guns, ropes, and huge shipments of drugs. Razors were sent there, picks, files, cuffs, scissors, things to pull with, things to clamp with, and chains, everything like that, so that no one who saw the shipment and loved their sister could leave her there in that room with those boys, and yet someone did. Lots of people did [...]. The social worker went up, but it was too late because more boys had gone up with all their frightening clothes on, all their paint, all the things they dressed up in regularly to scare people. [...] the room got more and more crowded [...]. The room was small, but it held all the women you could think of and all the men you were ever scared of in your whole life, passing on the street or just imagining, and all the men you loved the most. That is when the party started [...]. That is where it began in no innocence at all, but compared to what was to come, it began in innocence. There were knives and girls skinned alive and kept alive, and one woman screaming but trying to laugh it off. [...] all the things that can be done to a person including the pulling and ripping of everything that we don’t even know we love about a person—their intactness, their perfect intactness—and all the things

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that seem to us the person—they were destroyed, ripped away, so that you could not tell one girl from the other [...], like animals turned inside out. And in the courtyard, and in the balconies surrounding all twelve floors of the courtyard was the whole audience; rowdy, unhappy guys who were waving their flags and watching and waiting, so that at every floor they had their paint—orange, yellow, purple, blue— and [...] they dropped each girl, one by one, to her terror, thrown from the room, twelve floors down to the concrete floor of the courtyard, blood falling off her body as she fell—no skin no face, but kept alive—then from the balconies came the colours flung, and she would fall through eleven floors of thick paint, [...] burning at her skin that was no longer skin—a nice bright green, a happy yellow, orange, purple, red, a rainbow.

Each of Sheila’s nightmares throughout the text occur directly after a fight with Margaux, showing the immediate psychological impact of losing her association—her reassurance (Riviere 1929: 304)—and partitioning herself from context and community. The significance of this passage, however, stands out for its graphic and unsettling extreme violence. It is a terrifying scene of a carnival moment gone wrong, where the participants are revealed as anonymous and exempt from punishment.

The signs of a celebratory environment are unmistakable; it is described as a “party” where the men are “dressed up” which recalls the traditional carnival use of costumes and masks, and bright, festive coloured paint is thrown, like streamers and confetti at a parade. Immediately, the scene is marked as theatrical, in that the boys’ actions are presented to an audience. The costumes during the carnival moment serve to remove their accountability and allow them to subvert the authority of social norms. These ‘costumes’ are described as being worn “regularly,” which suggests that this is an activity that, like the carnival, takes place periodically. This is a brief moment, but one that repeats itself often, wherein the instability of social order has not resulted in an inversion—has not progressed to the carnivalesque ‘paradise—but has instead resulted in a widening of the gap, and a carnivalesque ‘hell’.

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The celebration of the body has become the destruction of the body. The carnivalesque is noted for its ability to transform the moral purity of the spiritual, abstract, and ideal into something corporeal, unbound, and impure (Danow 1995: 3). This feature is inevitably a divisive one, given that the carnival is so closely tied with the comic and jovial. While some view this as a garish denigration of core moral values, others celebrate the immense equalising power of this transformation, where the sometimes oppressive disciplinary structures that control bodies are temporarily dissolved. Though it provides a release, its temporary nature means that the carnivalesque often acts as blindfold to larger structural inequalities within society rather than seeking to critique the structure itself. Bakhtin notes, to this effect, that (qtd in Danow 1995: 12):

all the images of carnival are dualistic; they unite within themselves both poles of change and crisis: birth and death […] blessing and curse […] praise and abuse, youth and old age, top and bottom, face and backside, stupidity and wisdom.

The carnivalesque is the play between the ‘fixed’ and the ugly, between the disciplined and the dangerous, that reveals their distinction but is unable to dismantle their opposition. The intent of the carnivalesque is to allow the assessment of social norms that dictate, among other things, dress, speech, and action. However, when accountability is reduced, when the individual becomes anonymous, the fear of punishment for transgression is suspended. When the carnival moment is prolonged, violence follows. The anonymity afforded the men in this dream removes their need for external validation and recognition within the wider social order. They temporarily relinquish their identities and are able to become anonymous in their extreme transgression. Their ‘headlessness’, in this sense, does not kill them, and does not subdue them through discipline, but rather protects them.

This scenario, like others throughout How Should A Person Be?, demonstrates why it is important to clarify how relational ontology and individualistic ontology each confront ideas of the unique and the anonymous, and how relational ontology responds to the inherent threat of violence that comes with both. Relational ontology relies upon various vulnerabilities of identity, like collaborative practice. Vulnerability, Murphy reminds us, is

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an inherently ambiguous state that can inspire care, on the one hand, and violence, as we have seen, on the other (2011: 579). The yellow dress, something so innocuous at first, followed by Sheila’s appropriation of Margaux’s voice, and finally these dreams, each mark a significant moment in Heti’s contribution to discussions of identity and ontology, and the risk that relationality runs of threatening the individual borders of the self. Over the course of this text, a clear counterpoint to the blended collectivism of Aliens & Anorexia emerges, and, though the carnivalesque, offers a productive framework through which to access relational ontology while being conscious of its limits.

3. Laughter

Though this second dream, discussed above, contains intense and graphic descriptions of violence, what strikes me as the most horrific element is that the women who are being tortured are described as laughing. This moment nods to the subversive dual-face of the grotesque, where the line between the horrific and humorous is blurred (Edward and Graulund 2008: 5; Thompson 1972: 25). Additionally, this recalls Thompson’s discussion on the polarity of carnivalesque images, and how laughter is a sign of both joy and discomfort (1972: 25). Danow identifies the role of humour to be the primary distinction historically between the kind of grotesque common in the Renaissance period, and that common in the Romantic period (1995: 39). Bakhtin also centres laughter in his work on the carnivalesque and grotesque (1968: 62), and Musgrave identifies “grotesque imagery” and “carnival imagery” as central tendencies of Menippean satire (2014: 10). This critical consensus cements laughter as a fundamental element of these concepts, and an aspect that has evolved and grown along with the grotesque. While all three texts discussed in this thesis make use of humour, particularly in the form of satire and parody, How Should A Person Be? is the most self-consciously humorous, and depends on laughter in order to execute its ‘switching’ strategy. Heti uses the comic to contrast with and destabilise the seriousness of her ontological enquiry.

Danow, further, states that nervous, passive laughter “as a response to horror and a means for survival, is […] deeply rooted in a literary tradition preoccupied with both terror and

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surmounting its effects” (1995: 12). In the dream quoted above, the women’s prioritisation of the masquerade of femininity—of deferring to the men on the question of their own survival, of “acting a part” in order to “avert […] the retribution feared from men” (Riviere 1929: 308, 303), and of submitting to their fate—is terrifying. The emphasis is on the visual adherence to feminine qualities, as bright colours mask their terrible wounds, presenting a sickening twist on the perceived superficiality of femininity. This recalls the countless anecdotal stories we are told, warning vulnerable women to submit, and nervously, passively, laugh along with a joke to avoid more serious harm.

Contrary to this, laughter also has a strong history as a highly active form of disarming those with social power. Bakhtin writes that “fear […] narrow-minded[ness] and stupid seriousness [are] defeated by laughter” (1968: 41). Danow expands on this, writing that “laughter can be traced to the folk tradition, revealing a popular stratagem for overcoming fear (and perhaps, in a moral sense, one’s tormentors), documented as far back as Rabelais” (1995: 37). Laughter is clearly a complex tool, and one of the key strengths of the grotesque and carnivalesque modes. It offers a hinge between what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, between the ‘heaven’ and the ‘hell’ of the carnivalesque, between the ‘seriousness’ of the highly-structured and masculinised philosophical, and the comic qualities of the unpredictable and absurd nature of life experience.

The “comic folk aspect” of the carnivalesque is an important part of the role it plays in society (Bakhtin 1968: 6). Though the carnivalesque is a serious mode of destabilisation, it is also reliant on humour as part of its ritual, which in turn stabilises the social order, re- balancing it and ensuring its peaceful continuation. Bakhtin continues (1968: 6):

Carnival festivities and the comic spectacles and ritual connected with them had an important place in the life of medieval man. [...] ceremonies and rituals took on a comic aspect as clowns and fools, constant participants in these festivals, mimicked serious rituals such as the tribute rendered to the victors at tournaments, the transfer of feudal rights, or the initiation of a knight. Minor occasions were also marked by

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comic protocol, as for instance the election of a king and queen to preside at a banquet ‘for laughter's sake’ (roi pour rire).

In this example we can see that laughter functions in two ways. On one hand, laughter signals submission to and approval of social rituals, whether it is enthusiastic support or passive or forced. It suggests conformity to the prescriptive norms of the moment; laughing is a mode of responding to and acting out one’s social role as a submissive ‘audience’. However, on the other hand, laughter has the powerful ability to turn hierarchy and “serious ritual” into parody, wherein the ludicrous aspects of those everyday acts of submission are made plain. In this later reading, laughter acts as the catalyst for the destabilising power of the carnivalesque. In this sense, laughter is a form of misbehaviour, and of acting outside of one’s prescribed role. Laughter therefore blurs the line between social passivity and social resistance.

Laughter switches between agreement and dismissal, submission and refusal, the ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’. This matches with Heti’s methodological approach within this text where she switches between serious inquiries into ontology and comic moments of resistance. Sheila emphasises the role of laughter and the comic throughout this text, stating that “what you need to know in writing and what you need to know in art,” is simple: “you have to know where the funny is” (2012: 98). Given the power of humour within the grotesque, what this translates to is knowing where and when to collapse the social, literary, and artistic hierarchy—where and when to be passive, and when to resist.

I read the genre-play of this text through this dual-face of laughter. How Should A Person Be? is both a serious and sincere enquiry into the state of women’s ontology in the early twenty-first century, but at the same time it is a comic and irreverent dismantling of both life writing and the novel. She subscribes to some of the conventions of these genres with the specific intention to ridicule them, to break them apart, and to expose their illusory power. For example, though Heti has stated that she “wasn’t modelling this on a novel,” (Naimon 2012: 113), she has also repeatedly called the text a novel. This categorisation becomes humorous as throughout How Should A Person Be? Sheila ridicules the novel as

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an outdated form. “Every era has its art form,” Sheila proclaims. “The nineteenth century, I know, was tops for the novel” (2012: 3). Later, while at a lecture on ‘clowning’, her professor mentions the nineteenth century and Sheila cannot help snickering at the very thought of something so irrelevant to her own life (2012: 139). Signs of Heti’s persistent disregard for traditional and conventional genres and identities, visible through the evaluative strength of laughter, litter this text in both subtle and overt ways.

Humour therefore forms an integral part of the carnivalesque and effectively provides it with its evaluative quality. Laughter becomes a mode of critique that questions conventions and norms. In laughing at the form of her own work, Heti takes up the common fictocritical strategy of self-evaluation and the supply of one’s own modified criteria in order to guide the reader to a positive judgement (Brook 2002: 115). Danow, somewhat radically, proposes that this kind of “evaluative art,” that is, art that reflects upon, judges, and works to modify its creator’s role in the world, could be considered an anthropological constant (1995: 137), an instinctual impulse that is shared across the ‘collective unconscious’ (1995: 149). Certainly this self-evaluative strategy is a tradition in women’s experimental writing. Brook writes, drawing on Dawson, that “the critical skills of evaluation can be employed in the service of one’s own writing. It is here that the craft of writing overlaps with, in fact is enabled by, literary criticism” (2002: 109). Laughter, as an evaluative and critical tool, is able to be deployed to destabilise genre’s perceived taxonomic structure by resisting a given genre’s expectations. This ability has long been noted. Bakhtin writes that laughter remains outside “all official spheres of ideology and outside all official strict forms of social relations” (1968: 73). Through laughter, the “walls between the official and non- official literature were inevitably to crumble” (1968: 72).

Laughter and comic genres are therefore not in opposition to the serious institutional genres of philosophy or theory, but rather extend or subsume them. Bakhtin continues, stating (1968: 92) that:

laughter is not a subjective, individual and biological consciousness of the uninterrupted flow of time. It is the social consciousness of all the people. Man

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experiences this flow of time in the festive marketplace, in the carnival crowd, as he comes into contact with other bodies of varying age and social caste. He is aware of being a member of a continually growing and renewed people. This is why festive folk laughter presents an element of victory not only over supernatural awe, over the sacred, over death; it also means the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and restricts.

Laughter is a device that allows and strengthens relational ontologies; laughter destabilises interpersonal hierarchies while strengthening and ‘renewing’ the community. As such, through its destabilising operation, its evaluative qualities, and the formulation of relational ontologies, laughter asserts itself as a serious philosophical strategy—serious play—that is not only equal to the more accepted traditions of institutionalised theoretical discourse, but that deals with aspects of life that can only be accessed through laughter and play. The ludic space that the comic offers is one in which theory can encounter life, where contradiction can be preserved rather than solved, enjoyed rather than laboriously covered up.

The serious and the comic are complementary, a constant pair throughout the history of literature and social ritual. The grotesque in literature has a history of being deployed in service of humour, particularly satire (Thompson 1972: 4; Bakhtin 1968: 12; Musgrave 2014: 16). It is self-reflexive, appealing to both emotional and intellectual responses, and can achieve an uncanny sense of humour and exaggeration, horror and critique (Thompson 1972: 5). Musgrave writes that this “disjunctional nature”, where many genres or modes come together, is fundamental to identifying the “heuristic” potential of Menippean satire, where a “medley or admixture of genres” produces texts that are “often concerned with the absurd, the irrational and the contradictory” (2014: 20). Braidotti also identifies satire as a genre that is prone, more than others, to this kind of grotesque genre transgression. She notes that the “interconnection of women as monsters with the literary text is particularly significant and rich in genre of satire. In a sense, the satirical text is implicitly monstrous, it is a deviant, an aberration in itself” (1994: 79-80). This interconnection between women, satire and the grotesque is not a surprising one, as women’s writing that is concerned with recording the experience of the body is, in many ways, forced to participate in genre-

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resistance from the start. Moi even implicitly notes that all women’s writing is, in a sense, satirical for the ways it participates in while critiquing masculinist value structures (2008: 268). Friedman and Fuchs have also argued that there is something distinctly feminine to the practice of breaking the categories of patriarchal forms (1989: 3).

This reading of parody and satire cement the experimental and heuristic possibilities of humour, and Heti’s use of these genres creates a sense of the absurd around Sheila’s identity. In the words of Gertrude Stein, “being yourself is funny as you are never really yourself to yourself,” (qtd in Gibbs 2003: 311). Sheila’s attempts to ‘be’ herself are funny and ultimately unsuccessful as she recognises the limits of the genre within which she is working—you are never really yourself in life writing, because the self is never really just one thing; autobiography “preclude[s] the rendering of individuality” (Saunders 2010: 11). How Should A Person Be? is an intense evaluation of the various roles and actions prescribed to young women, and the life writing genre itself, all the while couched in a self- mocking humour. Heti is, in a sense, satirising the project of life writing and the ethical and ontological quandaries that it continues to provoke as a form.

This humorous understanding of the self recalls the third patient discussed in Riviere’s paper. This patient is, much like Heti, an intellectual woman in a male-dominated field. This woman feels as though she must emphasise her femininity whenever she is speaking to an audience of men. Riviere writes that “she has to treat the situation of displaying her masculinity [her intelligence] to men as a ‘game’, as something not real, as a ‘joke’. She cannot create herself and her subject seriously, cannot seriously contemplate herself on equal terms with men” (Riviere 1929: 308). This analysis speaks to the heart of Heti’s genre switching between the serious philosophical and the comic or theatrical ‘game’ of the various roles she takes on.

Further, Riviere here associates the comic with the “not real,” much as Stein states that it is “funny” that you are “never yourself.” There is a connection between the fictive and the humorous. Life writing, presumed to be a genre that deals in the truth (Laurie 2000: 18; Novak 2017: 13), is therefore further destabilised by Heti’s use of humour, which we come

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to associate with fiction throughout this text. Heti’s play across genres and discourses is not limited to philosophy and life writing, but extends to her play with the combination of truth and fiction. Questions of ‘truth or fiction’ have dominated the reception of this text, and queries over which scenes really occurred naturally, or which scenes were ‘staged’ have followed Heti. Critics are obsessed with this tension and while it is important to ask these questions, it is also reductive to insist on an answer when the text has diligently built an argument that challenges such clear cut distinctions in service, instead of constructing a representation of uncertain ontology. For example, Heti has admitted to manipulating her friends while writing How Should A Person Be? This means that questions around ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’—if ‘truth’ means it happened and ‘fiction’ means it did not—do not quite cover this text. This confusion over truth and fiction—which is really a confusion over categorisation—led to the inclusion of a subtitle for the 2012 reprint of this text. However the subtitle, “A novel from life”, is far from clarifying and instead works to complicate the status of this text further, affirming its interest in both the fictional and the implicit ‘truth’ of the life writing genre (Laurie 2000: 18; Novak 2017: 13). This switching to the point of conflation cements Heti’s reliance on Jungian concepts of being, where all opposites obtain “so close a bond that no position can be established or even thought without its corresponding negation,” (Danow 1995: 11). There is no fiction in this text without truth, and no play without serious investigation.

There are two examples in particular that demonstrate this breakdown of the distinction between truth and fiction—and which emphasise the interconnection between the serious and the comic aspects of this text. The first concerns the “ugly painting competition” (Heti 2012: 12)—first introduced very early in the text, but not re-addressed until the very end. From the reader’s perspective, this competition performs a clear symbolic function in a text that is about challenging conventional criteria. However, Heti has admitted in interviews to orchestrating this competition among her friends with the secret intention to record their discussions in order to use the transcripts within the text (Naimon 2012109). It happened, but whether it is fiction or truth—whether it defies the category of life writing or not—is less easy to ascertain. This immediately destabilises the legitimacy of any other ‘factual’

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events in the text. I’m not interested in drawing a line between truth and fiction, or actor and character, I’m interested in the idea that, for Heti, these borders are so easily crossed.

The ugly painting competition itself—which is never concluded, no winner is declared— raises several related questions to this challenge to category. Sheila wonders (2012: 304):

was the winner of an Ugly Painting Competition the person who had made the uglier painting […] or was it the person who, though trying just as hard, made a painting that was inadvertently beautiful?

This, along with many of the ethical and ontological questions raised throughout the text, can be applied to Heti’s own methodology and her relationship to truth. Primarily, questions of criteria and of “fences” as the deciders of value come to the front (Heti 2012: 299). When value has been defined throughout the text explicitly as the confirmation of category, for Heti to produce a work whose entire structure works against that claim is one of parodic incongruity. This moment—at which ugly is held up as a thing of value—is the moment at which Heti’s humorous play between individualism and uncertainty is made most clear.

The second example that challenges the line between truth and fiction in writing, and which affirms this reading that Heti is parodying not only the life writing genre but the philosophical as well, occurs while Sheila is deciding whether or not to continue writing the play. She writes (2012: 89-90):

Last night, out at the bars, I learned that Nietzsche wrote on a typewriter. It is unbelievable to me, and I no longer feel that his philosophy has the validity or even the aura of truth that it formerly did. No other detail of his life situating him so squarely in the modern age could have affected me as much as learning this. He typed Zarathustra? Goddamnit, the man had no more connection to the truth than a stenographer!

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The image of an isolated figure sitting at a typewriter shatters Sheila’s understanding of truth in writing. Sheila is an expert in tools of mediation, like costume and mask, that shield the self—the truth—from the outside world. The typewriter here automatically disrupts the author’s connection to the words on the page; the relationship is twisted and muddied. This passage underscores the ‘manufactured’ and ‘constructed’ qualities of a text. Butler argues that there are aspects of the self that are “irrecoverable” and that cannot be recorded in text, let alone thought (2005: 20). Rak similarly argues, after Paul de Man, that attempting to record the self simply “highlights the impossibility of representing the real world in a text” without automatically “disfiguring” the truth (2013: 22). Further, Heti’s specific use of Nietzsche signals her belief that no truth is available in writing—not even in those ‘objective’ genres like theory and philosophy that purport a stronger connection to reality than the more ‘subjective’ genres of life writing and fiction.

Saunders explains that this confusion of truth and fiction within life writing intensified throughout the mid-twentieth century (2010: 528):

Writers increasingly fictionalised their autobiographies not only out of anxiety or despair of selfhood, or of the possibility of expressing selfhood; but also because the shift towards fiction helped them to express it better, and thus to counter anxiety and despair […] writers are consciously and deliberately shifting into the shapes of other subjectivities, and thus revealing the performance involved in the achievements of any subjectivity.

I argue, therefore, that Heti’s erratic or ‘anxious’ character-switching is less a record of her own life, and more a narrative distortion in order to reflect on the sensation of feeling divided and uncertain. Heti is acting out her commentary on how the shifting parameters or expectations of life writing—as something coherent and logical, which is often not what the experience of life is like, especially for women writers in the twenty-first century—do nothing to “counter” such anxiety but rather work to manifest it on the page. The more pressure there is to be one united subject, the more multiple and uncertain one is made to feel, the more one relies upon masquerade and fiction to mask that uncertainty. Heti is

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asserting that the self is a conglomeration of various roles, and not capable of the united individuality that post-feminism celebrates. This text, ultimately, rejects the ‘united’ idea of identity in favour of a unique but still relational identity. As such, I read this text as a sincere theoretical meditation that comments on the state of social identity and women’s ontology in the twenty-first century.

Importantly, this complication of truth and fiction, and the humour it often produces, has long been a feature of women’s life writing—Saunders writes that “ludic formal invention” has often provided women with a space in which to express their subjectivities at times when formal biography and autobiography narrated the lives of men. He continues, “fiction paradoxically becomes an arena for granting female experience an equivalent reality in the public sphere” (2010: 11). Saunders even describes the eighteenth-century tendency towards fictionalised experimentation with life writing as “carnivalesque” (2010: 501). Brook writes that genres are “always historically variable, contagious, and intimately related to how particular cultures reproduce themselves, or don’t” (2002: 113). Women once turned to fiction to record their lives because the genres available to did not suffice, and again women writers are turning to invention and ludic experimentation to capture the particularities of their ontological experiences at this time in history. Saunders, however, affirms the existence of autobiography as a genre, despite its categorical impurity. He writes (2010: 5-6):

Saying an autobiography contains fiction is comparable to saying epics contain history, myth, or indeed fiction. So they do, but that does not mean epic isn’t a genre. As Derrida argued in ‘The Law of Genre’, texts ‘participate’ in genres to which they cannot belong. So it is with autobiography [...]. Life-writing is fundamentally intertextual.

Alternatively, Cavarero argues that this intertextuality, this defiance of category and ensuing questions of truth and fiction, is exactly what life writing is about (2000: 122). She describes the autobiography according to Derrida’s concept of a ‘genre beyond genre’, where the typical distinction between myth and logos breaks down, constituting a radical

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elevation of life writing within the institutional hierarchy, and countering the historical privileging of ostensibly ‘objective’ discourses. In this figuration, life writing comes to subsume, rather than replace, other discourses. Cavarero goes on to suggest that narrative life writing is a “womanly” art (in the sense that it is often viewed as the feminine other of phallogocentric theory) but this is not intended as a retreat to old oppositional tactics. Rather, Cavarero suggests that, like life writing, ‘woman’ is irreducible to a place in a binary and cannot be essentialised as the opposite to any sort of historically male or neuter universal; both exceed and have the potential to subsume the entire structure (2000: 122).

Far from shoring up and offering insight into oneself, autobiography has, therefore, always served to expose the unendingness and illusory nature of ‘I’—to both question its existence as a solitary entity, and to call into question the ability of the ‘I’ to represent itself. Saunders recounts the early history of the autobiography and explains how this fearful policing of the first-person is what, ironically, exposed the naivety of believing that the truth of identity could be tied neatly to the page. He writes that the (2010: 10)

earnestness of autobiography begins to work against it. Autobiography experienced a crisis in the later nineteenth century, partly because its project came to seem impossible. Developments in the form that constantly push towards the limits of self-understanding keep discovering that the self has a perplexing capacity to elude such attempts at description. […] Autobiography was always a self-undoing project.

Historically it was thought of as a more fluid, ambiguous and slippery genre that, far from commodifying identity, provoked a lot of uncertainty. Life writing, when viewed in this light for its potential to contain contradictions, seems the perfect tool for recording the experience of ontological uncertainty—in fact, it seems capable only of recording such a state.

By emphasising and theatricalising this carnivalesque ricocheting between truth and fiction provoked by—or as a means of recording and representing—a sense of illusory identity, Heti is able to make a comment on the state of women’s life writing. If life writing itself is

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so un-bound and divided, so happy to contain multiple and shifting categories within itself, then why must women’s writing remain a discrete genre at the level of the marketplace or as a topic of study? Heti’s challenge to the implicit truth of life writing is not just in response to the ontological uncertainty she feels, but also acts as a way of calling attention to the impermanence of all genre categories.

Danow raises an interesting framework from within which we can consider the relationship between the carnivalesque and this experimentation with truth and fiction in writing. He posits (1995: 24):

if, as the old maxim has it, truth is relative, we may inquire […] how that relativity is realised in literature. A second viable response is to draw upon a common figurative notion of dialogue by suggesting that the carnivalesque affords a certain ‘dialogic exchange’ between the official and unofficial modes of cultural expression.

Given Heti’s reliance on transcripts of dialogue, her roots within theatre, and her formal performance of such exchanges, it is easy to read How Should A Person Be? as a conversation, a back and forth switching between self and other, life writing and theory, humour and seriousness, ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ forms. Danow continues that (1995: 25)

the carnivalesque is designed to allow one extreme to flow into another, to provide for one polarity […] to meet and intermingle with its opposite […], much as individuals engaged in dialogue exchange points of view that may on occasion converge or coalesce into a single perspective.

As such, we can think of the carnivalesque as a way of representing a relational ontology that is conscious of the risk of violence, but also dedicated to the necessity of contesting isolation. The carnivalesque, not unlike parataxis, is dedicated to the representation of shifting and overlapping perspectives and identities, of offering new ways of seeing the world, life, and identity.

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Heti suggests another figure for conceptualising this carnivalesque tactic of switching between truth and fiction. Rather than think of it as a collage, Heti offers this image: Margaux briefly rejects painting and begins to make a film, while Sheila acknowledges the failure of her play and repurposes the notes that document her struggle into this text. Margaux, in describing the process of her film-making, transparently alludes to the tactics of the text. She explains to Sheila (2012: 239):

So I started filming, you know, using everything I had. Next I’ll put the scenes in some sort of instinctual order. I don’t know what it’s going to look like in the end, but I trust that at the centre of the film there is this invisible castle and each of the scenes is like throwing sand on the castle. So wherever the sand touches, those different parts of the castle light up. And at the end you’ll have a sense of the entire castle. But you never actually see the entire castle.

This mirrors Sheila’s method of carnivalesque writing. The passage describes the form of the text wherein the truth only appears in glimpses, and underneath remains a fiction. You never see the whole truth, but you have a sense of it. Together truth and fiction—variously comic and serious—build to show a more complex and lifelike understanding of identity.

4. Genius

How Should A Person Be? undertakes a complex and thorough investigation into the state of women’s identity, yet there are few theorists reading it for its serious contributions or literary achievements. Despite its immense popularity, this text’s reception has been mixed. I can describe this text as grotesque not only for its mixing of genres, but for the conflicting responses of humour and disgust that it has provoked in audiences. Some mark it as a tough read (Fertile 2010), “irritating” (Roiphe 2012), “pretentious navel-gazing” (Kirkus reviews 2012), or an “ungainly […] ugly confessional novel” (Cheuse 2012). Others have described it as an accessible read (Naimon 2012), “delightfully scampish” (Fertile 2010), and “highly self-reflexive […], intensely introspective” (Fertile 2010).

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The polarity is striking. Far from commenting exclusively on the text itself, this range instead indicates the climate in which the text was written and published, and seems to be more focused on judging the character of Sheila—often conflated with Heti (Derbyshire 2013: 47)—rather than the text. These reviews reveal the effects of increasing social pressure to present the self as singular, united, and ready to be commodified—the very thing that I argue this text is questioning. This is evidenced by the prevalence of critics attempting to compare this genre-disruptive text to other texts in order to locate it, which, in addition to dismissing the intellectual achievements of the text itself, encourages a categorisation-based approach to literary review. Several comparisons are particularly popular. References to HBO and Lena Dunham’s Girls (Boesvald 2012, Kirkus Reviews 2012) appear regularly, as does the work of Henry Miller (Cheuse 2012, Fertile 2010, Naimon 2012). Naimon further compares Heti’s subject matter to the work of Miranda July, and even Sophie Calle. Derbyshire aims to compliment Heti’s style with a comparison to Montaigne and the “old essayistic tradition” (2013: 47).

Heti has personally addressed the tone of reviews, stating in an interview with Naimon that she was “disappointed” that the philosophical aspects of the text were not taken more seriously, and were “hardly discussed” given they are “a hugely important part of the book” (2012: 116). Heti’s rigorous inquiry into pressing philosophical feminist concerns have instead been dismissed as “quirky” (Fronk 2012: 17). This deeply gendered reception reveals a critical tendency to minimise, patronise, and dismiss the intellectual achievements of a formally and philosophically inventive text. In retaliation, Heti has suggested that if critics feel compelled to compare her work to others’, they should be comparing How Should A Person Be? to philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche instead. “I didn’t study English literature, I studied philosophy,” Heti states, continuing that these philosophers are “the most important writers to me. […] my interest is in the big questions more than it is in storytelling” (Derbyshire 2013). However, like Kraus, the unconventional blend of life writing and theoretical discourse has—under the ongoing alignment between “woman-body” (Cavarero 2012: 77)—seen critics focus on the personal aspects of the text more than the intellectual.

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I have argued that this is a complex, and intellectually rigorous exploration of an ongoing ontological question, and a challenge to the category of life writing’s dependency on ‘truth.’ However, this text has most often been read as an example of the kinds of vain and self-centred performances that it is working to critique. Naimon writes that “generally, high-concept, big-idea novels are associated with a certain type of male writer,” recalling the “upright man” of philosophy, who oversees the intellectual and comprises the other half of the “woman-body” equation that still, evidently, informs literary reviews (Cavarero 2016: 2; 2012: 77). Naimon continues, “How Should A Person Be? is a big-idea novel that is distinctly feminine and feminist. I wonder if it is being received that way” (2012: 115). This is a distinctly philosophically-inclined text, masquerading as a confessional or self- help book. There is a strong sense of Heti ‘acting’ not only at the level of character within the text, but at the level of genre as well, playing between various roles, changing costumes or masks for greater effect.

Women’s writing is still read as part of a category—despite texts like this participating in the feminist tradition of genre breaking—and women’s writing continues to be dismissed as less intellectual. Heti anticipated the sexist response to the text. Another reading of her ‘flighty’ and ‘confused’ character is that it is a textual strategy used to illustrate, or parody, how young women’s life writing is publicly perceived. Heti uses simple, social, and gossipy language while declaring herself a potential (if overlooked) “genius.” She writes in the opening pages, goading reviewers (2012: 4):

One good thing about being a woman is we haven’t too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me. There is no ideal model for how my mind should be. For the men, it’s pretty clear. That’s the reason you see them trying to talk themselves up all the time. I laugh when they won’t say what they mean so the academics will study them forever. I’m thinking of you Mark Z., and you, Christian B.

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The historical provocation of women claiming ‘genius’ as a title has been discussed in the introduction, but I want to consider this passage more closely here. It reveals a great deal about how Heti perceives herself and her work, and how she expects others to perceive her and her work. This passage presents a direct challenge to the conventional opposition of life writing, still dismissed as feminine, and the ‘upright’ masculinity of intellectual modes of discourse, like theory.

Specifically, this passage tells us where Heti locates herself as a writer. “Mark Z.” and “Christian B.”—or Mark Z. Danielewski and Christian Bök—are two of the most commercially successful contemporary experimental North American writers. Heti positions herself as part of—and in competition with—this field. Looking briefly at these two authors’ critical reception, and their own comments on their place within the field, it is easy to triangulate Heti’s appraisal of her own work. Danielewski’s debut novel, House of Leaves (2000), was highly celebrated. Danielewski nevertheless describes his work as “a satire of academic criticism” (Poole 2000), and remains unsatisfied with the ways in which his deeply intertextual novel has been interpreted and marketed, stating that “genre is a marketing tool” (Wittmershaus 2000). His admonition of the commodification and categorisation of genre is aligned with the ethos of Heti’s practice. Bök’s Eunoia (2001) has been similarly praised for its intellectual achievements. Written entirely in univocals (each chapter uses words which contain only the same vowel), this is an example of extreme and sustained constraint writing. Awarded numerous Canadian literary prizes, and published internationally over the following decade, this book represents a celebration of restraint and consistency. This stands in contrast to Heti’s practice which deals more with excess, and the defiance of genre categorisation. Heti’s assertion that she “laughs” at these writers, who take their genre play seriously, reminds us that genre play is inherently absurd, contradictory, and, when incorporated into life writing, destabilises the coherence of the author. Genre play, Heti tells us, is funny as well as serious, and that humorous qualities should not exclude it from the ‘serious’ attention of the academy.

Heti disagrees with the ways in which these two authors celebrate the potential of experimental writing by reducing its accessibility and not “say[ing] what they mean”. The

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idea of ‘genius’ recurs throughout this text as a role to which Sheila aspires—she is always attempting yet never succeeding to reach this position. Sheila wants to be a genius, to be recognised as a genius, and the only way she believes this can happen is to masquerade using the ill-fitting and out-dated script and mask at hand, one that demands a male actor, not a ‘masculine’ intellectual woman. Like Riviere’s patient, Heti “bitterly resents any assumption that she was not equal to them,” and that her genius—her masculinity—has not been recognised (Riviere 1929: 304). Returning to this chapter’s epigraph, Ann Yeoman writes that the puer aeternus—the person who switches, who masquerades—“never becomes a man” (Heti 2012: 83). To have her genius recognised, she must be a man—to be a man, she must give up switching, and give up on the project of representing the conditions of her life as a woman writer in the twenty-first century. Heti’s exploration of ontological uncertainty and her philosophical contributions are seemingly ineligible for the praise she desires. The criteria for genius are, again, skewed toward the masculine.

Margaux paints a portrait of Sheila and prepares to show her the finished work. Margaux explains, “I wanted to call it The Genius but I’m calling it House for a Head. I don’t believe enough in genius, but I do believe in having a house for a head.” Sheila writes, “I almost cried. I didn’t want to say it, but I felt pretty crummy at being demoted from genius to simply having a house for a head” (2012: 94). Genius is always out of Sheila’s grasp. There is no script for woman genius, she cannot fit into the ‘role,’ and therefore she cannot be recognised.

Though Heti is operating within the same cultural moment and addressing the same ideological concerns as other writers who are awarded the status of ‘genius,’ her work is rarely considered as anything more than semifictional life writing. Her desire for critical success following her exploration of the flexibility and potential of genre, is, arguably, the same as these male writers. She believes that she deserves the same critical praise and intellectual attention that these two authors have garnered. Heti is pointing out something long known to women writers; as Woolf noted in 1931 (239):

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a very common experience with women writers [is that] they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realise or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.

The work of a woman, in other words, is prone to different readings precisely because it is work produced by a woman. Much like a text of a particular genre carries with it a set of expectations that govern the reader’s experience and opinion (Frow 2007: 27), so too do the expectations of gender impact the appraisal of a text where an original work is not “recognisable” because it does not repeat the status quo, and is therefore met with punishment (Rak 2013: 29). This highlights some of the ways that intellectually rigorous contributions to the field of women’s life writing continue to be subject to critical barriers that have more to do with policing the author’s body, and with exerting control, rather than with assessing the radical innovations of the writing itself.

Though many agree that women’s life writing, on the whole, does not differ aesthetically from men’s life writing—with some declaring that “femininity [can] occasionally be found in men’s texts” (Moi 2008: 260) and others stating that the distinction between the two is “completely meaningless” (Sarraute qtd in Moi 2008: 261)—women’s writing continues to be subject to different critical barriers that have had a hand in shaping the professional opportunities of women’s lives. Parker explains that, built into Western narrative tradition, is the idea that the control of women’s bodies signals the control of the text; the goal and thus conclusion of a story is, often, the confinement of the woman’s body through rescue or marriage (1987: 11). It is therefore worth noting how grotesquely un-bordered the three texts under study in this thesis are, with sprawling narratives, characters, and genres, that all defy a sense of closure.

Heti’s persistent switching can be considered not as an aversion to risk but rather a tactical move to critique the conventions of narrative closure and reliance on borders. To delay the ending, to switch indefinitely and refuse to come to the (implicitly masculine) ‘point,’ is an historical trend in women’s storytelling—Parker cites Penelope (1987: 12) and Cavarero

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mentions Scheherazade (2000: 123). Heti enthusiastically participates in this tradition. The effect is the refusal of closure, and the refusal to settle into or take up any one role.

In producing a text structured by switching, Heti criticises the capitalistic practice of assigning value to identity or narrative only when it is contained and “fenced” off (Heti 2012: 299), that is, only when it is closed, finished, permanent, and profitable. Heti masquerades in many roles and many genres, and, in crossing these categorical divides, she escapes the prescriptive social and ideological norms that continue to dominate women’s ontology, and the category of “women’s writing.” Further, she points out the inherently illogical equation of valuing a life story for its fixity or closure when life writing is, necessarily, without closure and always implicitly and grotesquely open ended.

Heti takes this sense of masquerade, fiction, and parody and applies it to the “crisis in ontology” (Butler 1999: 6) that is still at play. Saunders, drawing on Butler, considers how we might recognise and respond to the stranglehold of gender roles, and the commodification of identity as the benchmark of value and success. He writes that the (2010: 513)

alternative is to recognise the performativity of everyday life and to break with the gender script through performing gender roles in new (and often parodic, and often humorous) ways—in the terms of performance art, to engage in a subversion of the script, to disavow the repetitious control of the theatrical text and director, allowing for ‘self-determining’ performance art rather than prefigured roles.

Heti’s self-conscious theatricality, exaggeration, and script-flipping are what characterise this text and make it a valuable study for this thesis. Heti plays along yet always switches out from the ‘prefigured’ role, destabilising the processes of categorisation and stereotyping that often follow. The refusal to be discretely categorised, thematically and structurally, as truth or fiction—even the refusal to present a discrete and unquestioned body, costume, and voice—functions in this text as a successful critique of social norms and literary

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conventions. Heti forces a point of crisis at which the very process of subject formation and text production is called into question.

How Should A Person Be? navigates this turbulent theoretical landscape, demonstrating the impact that the philosophical landscape has on the personal, and on personhood. “Maybe,” Margaux writes in an email to Sheila, “we can be honest and transparent and give away nothing” (2012: 85). We can tell the truth, but it will always approach the fictional; we can work collectively, without succumbing to the threat of violence, without robbing one another; we cannot exist in both places at once, but we can travel between. The carnivalesque allows this methodology of traversing between two places, two ontological understandings, to crystallise into something sustainable. As Bakhtin writes, within the carnival moment (1968: 10):

People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations. These truly human relations were not only a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were experienced. The utopian ideal and the realistic merged in this carnival experience.

Heti’s life writing takes up this hopeful project, and proposes a world where collaboration and relational ontology are possible, and are not always threats to the qualities that make each participant unique.

Chapter One argued for the use of porosity at the level of identity and genre as a means of representing uncertain ontologies, and as a means of destabilising individualism which has, throughout the twenty-first century, increasingly worked to limit the shapes that women and women’s writing can take. This chapter has extended this argument, however, it has focused more on the relationship that the self has to its own inconsistencies (rather than the relationship the self has to its collective) and how those inconsistencies might be recorded rather than ‘masked’ in the life writing process. Switching and serious play have proved powerful tactics for the exploration and representation of uncertain ontology throughout How Should A Person Be?. Heti has utilised comedy as a tool that disrupts. Humour and satire in feminist hands has been used to channel anger, to celebrate survival, and to disturb

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dominant discourses and power structures. Chapter Three continues this investigation into identity and genre disturbances and disorder, shifting the focus from comedy to queer ontology. This provokes the same unsettled and anti-hierarchical ‘slipperiness’ that throughout this thesis has challenged and disrupted the limits of identity and genre. In the final chapter of this thesis, I read Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) and conclude that experimentation within the life writing genre remains a powerful politically active method of challenging and recording what it is to be a woman in the twenty-first century.

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Chapter Three:

Athwart Athwart Athwart! Ontological Irresolution in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015)

The presumptuousness of it all. On the one hand, the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need to put everything into categories—predator, twilight, edible—on the other, the need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live. Becoming […] a becoming in which one never becomes.

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) is preoccupied with the slipperiness of the language of identity (2015: 53). This text relentlessly challenges categories and borders, navigating and negotiating the shifting taxonomies and terminologies of its protagonists and its own genres. Nelson and her trans partner Harry Dodge return again and again throughout The Argonauts to debate the efficacy of specific terminologies and their inability to keep pace with their changing bodies and changing relationship. Nelson catalogues the metamorphosis of her pregnancy alongside Harry’s mastectomy and the early effect of hormone replacement therapy, describing this time as “the summer of our changing bodies. Me, four months pregnant, you six months on T” (2015: 79). Together, the two protagonists persistently return to question and debate whether language and its structures are—or ever were—capable of relaying to the other the personal and subjective experiences of life. Experimenting with the relationship that queer and feminist theory has to her own life, Nelson works to re-open and re-complicate the categories of ‘woman,’ ‘queer,’ and ‘life writing’ in order to promote a state of ontological uncertainty.

Pearl describes The Argonauts as a text that “refuses form in a way that parallels how Maggie’s and Harry’s bodies and identities refuse taxonomy” (2018: 200). Nelson has described this text as “autotheory” (Pearl 2018: 201), an experimental combination of theoretical inquiry and autobiography. This text has elsewhere been described as the resulting mixture of Nelson’s dual investment in academia and queer poetics, “two

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contradictory systems of thought” (Donegal 2015). This particular combination has been described as “so obvious and so rare” and, as this thesis has argued, enables its author to “both (at the same time) blend and refuse genre” (Pearl 2018: 199). The text plays between, across, and around these genres, making it difficult to locate and classify, challenging the taxonomical practices that follow writing as it challenges the identity categories that both burden and elude its own protagonists. This difficulty with taxonomy forms one of the main conflicts of this text, and is the focus of this chapter.

The combination of life writing and theory is similar to both How Should A Person Be? and Aliens & Anorexia, and this text confronts similar questions regarding the separation of these genres, experimentation across boundaries, and the state of women’s life writing in the early twenty-first century. The range of topics covered in this text is also similar to those covered in Heti and Kraus’s texts, establishing a clear field of contemporary experimental women’s life writing that is interested not only in the permeable boundaries of genre and identity categories, but also in themes and concepts including contemporary art, feminist histories, interpersonal connectivity and community building, and the wider political climate of the early twenty-first century. Nelson’s breadth of topics, in conjunction with the breadth of genres, is part of the project of conveying an ontology that challenges or questions the prevailing influences of individualism in the field of life writing, at the level of identity and at the level of the textual body.

However, where Aliens & Anorexia was overlooked in its own time, and where the intellectual achievements of How Should A Person Be? were dismissed, Nelson’s experimental life writing has been widely celebrated. As a result, scholarly work on this text is abundant, not least because Nelson, as a Professor, writes for a scholarly audience who is comfortable with her “elliptical style [which] assumes a great deal of cultural capital” (Stacey 2018: 204). The scholarly work referenced within this text is predominantly queer theory—Butler, Sedgwick, Ahmed—and therefore this text must be read as an experimental queer theory text, as well as an experimental life writing text. Throughout this chapter I locate Nelson as a queer subject, participating in the traditions of both queer theory and women’s experimental life writing, in order to argue that there are

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specific queer methodologies that can assist in my analysis of the contemporary experience of ontological uncertainty.

The Argonauts appears formally as a collection of annotated quotes, notes, conversations, memories and essays, with small partial references in the margins. This formal feature emphasises Nelson’s generic experimentation, where quotes of theorists are inter-spliced with—even seamlessly absorbed into—her own records of her everyday life. The absence of chapters, or ‘parts’ (as used in Aliens & Anorexia), or ‘acts’ (as used in How Should A Person Be?), combined with a disregard for chronology, suggests an element of chance in the arrangement of the text. Pearl points out that Nelson’s strategy here is intimately connected to Barthes’s approach in A Lover’s Discourse, which Nelson cites often, stating “it was necessary to choose an absolutely insignificant order” (2018: 199, emphasis original). The Argonauts revels in this fractured state, composed of many parts written at and about different times. Each segment of text is removed from the hierarchy of order as any passage speaks, almost paratactically, not only to the one beside it, but to all segments of the text.

Questions of slippery taxonomy, of fragmented form, and of evolving identity combine within this text under the titular figure of the ‘Argo.’ The Argo is the ancient ship whose components were replaced gradually so that, at a certain point, though the ship retained its name, it was made of entirely new parts. Like the Argo itself, Maggie and Harry are never settled and always re-making themselves with the materials they collect along the way. This Argo metaphor is also extended to the makeup of the text itself and its composite genres. The Argonauts, like the Argo from which it takes its title, therefore seems made up of small parts acting as a united whole, yet at the same time ready to be remade in infinite combinations. The text, like the bodies within it, offers a new textual model for the ways in which identity can be thought about and represented as relational, changing, and queer.

This chapter begins with the question of taxonomy, and how to classify something that is defined by its inability to be defined, or defined by its state of constant irresolution and evolution. This slippery question has appeared at multiple moments throughout this thesis

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as something of a uniting theme—satire has “no final, refined form” (Musgrave 2014: 16), the grotesque is characterised by its “incompletion” (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 2), the ‘contemporary’ is a “constantly receding” category (Carroll 2015: 19), the ‘experimental’ is perpetually open-ended (Mitchell 2015: 5), life writing is fundamentally unable to adhere to its own generic purity (Saunders 2010: 6), and there is “no correct solution to [the] dilemma” of what ‘woman’ means (Moi 2008: 266). In this section I explore this question of taxonomy in more depth, considering how taxonomies and terminologies interact with life, and how Nelson negotiates this relationship. As part of this study, I have turned to recent developments within queer theory, particularly in the area of queer methodologies, to better understand this turbulent state of indefinite taxonomy and how it relates to the uncertain ontology of women and women’s writing in the early twenty-first century.

This study of taxonomy and how it is disrupted throughout The Argonauts has led me to propose an alternate model for thinking about identity in this text. In section two, rather than attempt to classify the text or its protagonists according to taxonomies which function by defining like according to like, I argue that a ‘family’ model is more appropriate. This model allows for a broad ‘type’ but focuses on relationships and their evolutions. Nelson establishes a relational ontology that I use to position this text as the inheritor of a lineage of queer-feminist genre experimentation without denying its ‘one of a kind’, taxonomically- slippery status.

In section three, I focus this model of family and apply it to Nelson’s experience of motherhood, and her relationship with the various mother-figures in this text. This section confronts the complex relationship between the body and the text. In order to maintain the slippery qualities of The Argonauts, while also examining this important relationship, I read Nelson’s strategy of deferral and resistance to taxonomy as ‘gestational’ writing. Closely related to Sedgwick’s “fat art” (2015: 102), this section reads Nelson’s challenge to ontological stability as a literary performance of excess, delays, deferrals, and promises that never deliver a fixed end result.

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Section four continues this analysis of gestation, reading it through an overlooked figure of the grotesque: the cave. The cave acts as a space of both imprisonment and generation that is not exclusively tied to the morphology of women’s bodies. Through this figure I understand ontological uncertainty as a state of perpetual formation, with no fixed destination and no desired conclusion—a state of constant evolution that escapes the defined boundaries of taxonomy.

1. Taxonomy

The taxonomy of experimental women’s life writing is a complex topic and one that this thesis must address to give a full picture of the state of women’s writing in the twenty-first century, and in particular to understand how Nelson addresses the many contradictions that underpin the process of categorisation. Questions of categorisation, taxonomy, and terminology have often followed life writing, experimental writing, and women’s writing. The latter, especially under the rise of identity politics, has often had to address (or deny) its relationship to categories of gender. Some of the countless responses to these questions have been mentioned throughout this thesis, including Moi’s understanding of the status of women’s writing as not necessary feminine, and not necessarily produced only by women (Moi 2008: 260-261). Further, this thesis has thus far covered some of the innate trouble that comes from classifying ‘life writing’ as a genre when it so often works to dismantle its own limits, to challenge its own criteria, and to distort the record of truth, experience, and identity (Saunders 2010: 3).

This difficulty with taxonomy exceeds the question of genre. It questions the categories of ‘woman,’ ‘contemporary’ and ‘experimental’ as well. The breadth and depth of this taxonomical and terminological debate cannot be exhaustively covered here, however Kaye Mitchell has recently catalogued some of the difficulties surrounding the taxonomical question of ‘experimental’ writing, and how this categorisation functions both as descriptive but also potentially reductive. The experimental text, she writes, goes “beyond known forms, structures, and genres, to test something out, to try or attempt something

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new” (2015: 4). This raises the question of how to refer to the text that defines itself by its newness, by its form breaking structure, and by its challenge to genre.

These questions remain at the forefront of this diverse and heterogeneous field because clear taxonomy has often offered the promise of visibility and recognition. However, recognition through categorisation, as discussed in Chapter Two, cannot be purged of violence (Murphy 2012: 7). A less intimidating formulation of this double bind can be found in Butler’s explanation of the act of self-narration, where in order to put one’s life story into words there must always be a “vacillation between loss and ecstasy,” where recognition is achieved, but only at the cost of those aspects of selfhood that cannot be rendered in language (2005: 38). This section focuses on the process of categorisation and interpellation, inspired by the desire that marginalised subjects often have for recognition, and the difficulties of navigating the accompanying loss. Throughout this section I unpack Nelson’s relationship to questions of taxonomy, and taxonomic questions around contemporary women’s life writing, in three interconnected parts.

To centre Nelson’s work, I will first consider the question of taxonomy through a series of passages from The Argonauts. These passages consider the incentives and risks that come with naming the self, with taking on a fixed form within language. I establish Nelson’s relationship to identity taxonomies, and then consider two passages that establish the core narrative tension of the text, which is the question of whether or not the language of identity—as a fundamentally rigid structure, that is increasingly reliant on “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 1980: 59) across both genre and identity—is capable of recording and communicating the experience of subject, if that subject exists outside of fixed identity categories. This part charts Nelson’s desire to remain un-named and to focus on the formlessness of language, despite always being drawn back into binary frameworks that have, historically, operated as disciplinary structures to control and erase ambiguous or indeterminate ontologies.

With the ever-pressing question of binaries established, I will then explain how queer theories—especially work in the area of queer methodologies—has recently refocused the

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question of taxonomy by challenging the idea of a category defining itself ‘against’ what does not fit within its own borders. This re-defining of taxonomy as not necessarily ‘against’ but rather ‘athwart’ is a longstanding queer methodology that works to destabilise the rigidity of power structures, and can be applied not only to identity categories but to genres as well. In the final part of this section, I consider how Nelson re-complicates this understanding of ‘athwart’ as she applies it to the contemporary experience of queer subjects amid the shifting political agenda. This part of the section examines whether or not ‘athwart’ can retain the political efficacy of ‘against’.

Though The Argonauts is engaged with the specific moment of the early twenty-first century and what is happening within queer and feminist theory, there is a sense throughout the text of Nelson looking back through preceding decades in an attempt to pinpoint the moment at which the use of more diverse identifying terms became so popular, and so rigid. She offers several scenes that demonstrate, often in a university context, instances of self-identification as a moment of fear and potential loss. To begin this analysis, I will consider how The Argonauts approaches questions around specific identity terminologies, how these terms nominate, define, and call the subject into being.

The Argonauts opens by setting up two sides of this multifaceted debate. Maggie “had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained— inexpressibly!—in the expressed” (2015: 3). For Maggie, when it comes to naming identities, or to naming the genres across which she works, having a limited, rigid, or non- specific taxonomical bracket does not present an issue. In fact, she suggests that the ability to slip through the ‘gaps’ between words, to be un-nameable, conveys something closer to the desired meaning than a new phrase ever could. “It is idle to fault a net for having holes,” Maggie repeats (2015: 3, 46, emphasis original), suggesting that these terminological gaps in the pattern of language—where identities, and genres, and hybrids of all kinds continue to go un-named—are what allow them to stay slippery, evolving, and alive (2015: 53). Conversely, Maggie recounts that Harry (2015: 4)

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had spent a lifetime equally devoted to the conviction that words are not good enough. Not only not good enough, but corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow […]. Once we named something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page. I argued along the line of Thomas Jefferson and the churches—for plethora, for kaleidoscopic shifting, for excess. I insisted that words did more than nominate. I read aloud to you from the opening of Philosophical Investigations. Slab, I shouted, slab!

This dialogue cements the major conflict of the text: an impasse between two positions, not concerning the efficacy of specific terms to nominate a subject, but concerning the form and formlessness of taxonomic terms altogether. Maggie argues for “plethora” and “excess”, for the formlessness that surrounds the fixed terms, and the shape of the text follows this path, slipping between numerous fixed labels. Harry, conversely, believes that form cannot coexist with formlessness, and that taxonomies can only work by partition and exclusion, by cutting away what does not fit the specific meaning. The Argonauts presents a nuanced argument around what it means to attempt to convey identity and being through language, and how the language that is available—from the immense and indistinct categories of ‘woman’ and ‘queer’ down to the personal relational terms like ‘wife’ and ‘mother’—might work to shape that identity in return. Nelson questions how thinking differently about identity might manifest itself as different uses of terminology and genre, and how these formed and formless ways of communicating might shape and change the ways we are able to refer to our selves, our work, and our relationships with one another. I will consider two examples from the text that demonstrate the various ways in which taking up—or not taking up—an identity category might work to shape and control the limits of how that identity can be recorded.

The first example Nelson offers is an anecdote of the first time she met Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a student, while attending Sedgwick’s anti-Oedipal seminar. Nelson recalled

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that, “she said she wanted to play a quick get-to-know you game involving totem animals. […] Totem animals? […] The game placed an icy finger on my identity phobia” (2015: 111, emphasis original). This moment can be read two ways. In the first sense, this game is illustrative of the pervasiveness of ideas of internal, mystically ‘true’ selves that stand in contrast to the performed exterior self—reminiscent of the distinction Heti establishes between the masquerade and the ‘soul’—and evidencing the Cartesian relics with which Nelson grapples throughout the text. Maggie’s discomfort in this scene can be read as a shyness around revealing something so personal, or even as an unwillingness to confront the various incongruities of the self that an ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ model of identity necessarily constructs. The other way to read this scene is to argue for Maggie’s desire to remain formless and un-named—to resist and reject the homogenising process of categorisation. Her “identity phobia” emerges from a fear of her own identity, or a fear of thinking of her identity as a fixed and permanent thing. Sedgwick, sensing this discomfort, goes on to say that anyone wishing to keep their “totem animal” secret may select a fake animal instead (2015: 112):

I didn’t have a real or fake animal, and so I just sweated as we went around the room. When it got to me, I burped out otter. Which is a form of true. It was important to me back then to feel, to be wily. To feel small, slick, quick, amphibious, dextrous, capable. I didn’t know then Barthes’s book The Neutral, but if I had, it would have been my anthem—The Neutral being that which, in the face of dogmatism, the menacing pressure to take sides, offers novel responses: to flee, to escape, to demur, to shift or refuse terms, to disengage, to turn away. The otter was thus a complex sort of stand-in, or fake-out, another identity I felt sure I could shimmy out of.

This impulse to ‘shimmy’ out of identity is strikingly reminiscent of Heti’s construction of herself as the puer aeternus archetype in How Should A Person Be?. This archetype describes a person who always has another plan, who always switches tacts or teams, and who feels unable to fit into a ‘type’ (Heti 2012: 83-84). The Neutral and the puer aeternus are both types identified by their typelessness. This is perhaps a way of making sense of the

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contradictions found in one’s identity when forced, under the pressures of individualism, to present a united and consistent self. In this passage, Nelson establishes her preference for remaining un-named, for retaining her ontological uncertainty—or what she refers to as “ontological indeterminacy” (2015: 15)—over the violation and loss of stepping into a category that cannot possible contain the variation and fluidity of the subject. This passage also introduces the possibility of thinking of identity outside of the categories that typically follow.

The second example that demonstrates Nelson’s problem with fixed identity and identity labels shifts the focus from her desired formlessness to an instance where form becomes mandatory. If abstaining from naming or categorising the self creates one kind of problem, she also considers what issues arise when language is tasked with naming every variant, with making visible and recognising every identity, with inventing new taxonomies so that every subject is classified according to type. Nelson recounts how her thesis supervisor, Christina Crosby, who is described as “repulsed” by the idea of the personal (2015: 60), handled a new class of students who had adopted the now-widespread intersectional feminist practice of literally labelling themselves (2015: 59):

A few years ago, she told me the story of a subsequent feminist theory class that threw a kind of coup. They wanted—in keeping with a long feminist tradition—a different kind of pedagogy than that of sitting around a table with an instructor. They were frustrated by the poststructuralist ethos of her teaching, they were tired of dismantling identities, tired of hearing that the most resistance one could muster in a Foucauldian universe was to work the trap one is inevitably in. So they staged a walkout and held class in a private setting, to which they invited Christina as a guest. When people arrived, Christina told me, a student handed everyone an index card and asked them to write ‘how they identified’ on it, then pin it to their lapel.

Christina was mortified. Like Butler, she’s spent a lifetime complicating and deconstructing identity and teaching others to do the same, and now, as if in a tier of hell, she was being handed an index card and a Sharpie and being told to squeeze a

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Homeric epithet onto it. Defeated, she wrote ‘Lover of Babe.’ (Babe was her dog, a mischievous white lab).

In the first passage above, Nelson’s fear of loss outweighed the ecstasy of recognition. This passage considered the opposite: the class’s ecstasy of self-naming and self-defining outweighs the fear of loss. Christina’s horror at this practice is clear—as someone characterised by her distrust of the personal, the action of self-categorisation seems a disturbingly public mode of self-violation. Though the class’s goal is the admirable disruption of the power structure implicit within a classroom setting, the path they take instead works to multiply the divisions between each member, rather than unify them. In trying to get ‘out’ of one structure, the class has instead multiplied the ways of being ‘inside’ a repressive structure that dictates understandings of being. Once in this “private setting”, the illusion of choice seems infinite, when, in reality, there is a shift from having the option of formlessness to one of being mandatorily formed, from being un-named, to named.

This desire to self-identify—which is really a desire to individualise—emerges from the same political landscape as post-feminism. The result is the misplaced belief that the individual, now more visible and more recognised under whatever label they desire, can bring about the end of inequality (Ahmed 2017: 5). This phenomenon achieves the opposite. Reducing identity to an index card, like a taxonomical label, is indicative of the broader state of ontology under neoliberal individualism, where formlessness, or ‘labellessness’, is counter to the capitalist goals of “economic individuality” (Parker 1987: 155). The class’s response does nothing to question this process; in fact, it works to shore up the very process it pretends to be resisting. Instead of acting as a critique of the conservative, hierarchical, and limiting identity positions available, and the various prejudices they are laden with, identity is instead transformed—crystallised—and stripped of its ability to contest its own fixity.

This passage is demonstrative of the subtle ways in which this well-meaning practice breeds rather than defeats individualism, and how such individualism is able to masquerade

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as a form of community, collectivity, and agency. This crystallisation can be understood further through the example of how post-feminist ideology has controlled the category of ‘woman.’ On the surface, ‘woman’ has become open, diverse, and no longer necessarily bound to the performance of femininity but rather to “femininities” (Budgeon 2013: 286). This shift arose in response to feminism’s historical problem with ignoring variance, with rejecting trans women, and women of colour (McRobbie 2004: 255). Feminism’s dedication to this history of taxonomic rigidity is arguably part of why the problematisation of the category of ‘woman’ throughout the 1990s, and the ensuing expansion of ‘woman’ as a subject position no longer necessarily tied to morphology, led to a split within the field, where feminist criticism turned in on itself and its own history (Bordo 1993: 216). As such, in more recent decades, the attention to specific identity labels and the deliberate move to ‘account’ for a variety of identities within the taxonomy of ‘woman’, with the explicit intent to make sure that each identity is acknowledged, has characterised twenty-first- century mainstream feminist practices.

Though the intent of this activity appears to be making visible the ways in which multiple facets of identity interact and disrupt the fixity of taxonomies, these passages from The Argonauts instead demonstrate how easy it is for self-identification to become a kind of loss or violence that once more raises the borders around a category and locks people inside (or out of) certain positions. “The answer isn’t just to introduce new words […] and then set out to reify their meanings (though obviously there is power and pragmatism here),” Nelson writes early in the novel (2015: 8).

To further demonstrate, Nelson offers the example of the “developing mainstream narrative” that the term “trans” evokes, where “‘born in the wrong body’ necessitat[es] an orthopaedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations” (2015: 53). The opposition inherent in this conception of “trans” not only carries within it a Cartesian artefact, but further disarms the radical re-formulation of gender and bodies that the trans subject might desire. Part of Nelson’s project of questioning the fixity of specific categories—like ‘trans’, ‘queer’, and ‘woman’—is to interrogate the control that such strict terminological partitions have over the subjects they nominate. Nelson is concerned that the emerging language of

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identities “may work well enough as a shorthand” for some, but remains “useless for others” (2015: 52-53), for the very reason that their specificity plays into ideas of “fixed destinations” that many are attempting to slip out from under. The result is that, as these terms shore up their own borders under the individualism of the twenty-first century, subjects are pushed towards existing either ‘in’ or ‘out’ of these identity categories and are refused the option to exist ambiguously, uncertainly, in-between.

These two passages on totem animals and index cards have established the core complications that Nelson addresses throughout her inquiry into taxonomically indefinite identities. This inquiry is particularly relevant for the twenty-first century and the rise of intersectional feminisms, which have fostered the recognition of more diverse and complicated subjectivities, particularly at those points where gender, sexuality, class and race overlap. One of the effects of this newly granted attention to the intersections of identity categories has been the appearance of increasingly specific terminology for these identities—especially around genders and sexualities that fall outside of the normative binary—as a means of seeking visibility and recognition. This phenomenon quickly implicates the state of life writing as it deals in the language of identity, and raises questions concerning how identity will operate under this prevailing individualism that pushes ambiguous and diffuse subjectivities towards more concrete ‘labels’. Therefore, this shift in identity taxonomies has contributed to the re-shaping of the field of life writing. The rise of identity politics, as discussed in the introduction, has assisted with and strengthened the ‘legitimatisation’ of identity as an object of study, and an object worthy of attention, and continues to contribute to the market desire for life writing that details the experience of life at these intersections. This self-classification, especially in a life writing context, represents the commodification of identity.

Further, there is a clear parallel between this imperative to name one’s specific identity, to mark out its various overlapping contours, to literally “pin it to [one’s] lapel” in some cases (2015: 59), and the “taxonomic exuberance” for which Derrida chides genre studies (1980: 59), and which Novak, more recently, has described as the “proliferation of genre destinations” (2017: 2). For example, where ‘life writing’ and all its diffuse anti-categorical

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implications no longer suffice, terms like ‘autotheory’ and ‘autofiction’ emerge with the intention of offering visibility and recognition to this type of writing, but instead work to re-categorise and subdue the textual experiments that should destabilise the fixity of genre categories.

The act of naming is “an act of love, surely,” Nelson writes, referring to its ability to recognise and grant attention. However, she continues that the act of naming is “also one of irrevocable classification, interpellation,” that strips the subject (or text) of their (sometimes desired) ambiguity (2015: 141). Nelson sits across these two positions, understanding that on the one hand taxonomic specificity might work to garner much-needed visibility and wider recognition for marginalised subjects, but, on the other hand, it might also work to shore up the conservative and oppositional borders that “ontological indeterminacy” (2015: 15) is already radically breaking down. The Argonauts recognises the complexity of this twenty-first-century moment, during which even the anti-normative subject positions— intending to challenge and dissolve the control that certain norms and taxonomic brackets have exercised over the personal—have fallen under the impetus to self-categorise. The result is that, as terminological inventions multiply and become stratified, the differences within communities already on the margins become amplified.

As such, the ‘categories’ of queer, woman, and life writing have come to share a methodological dilemma. Each pivots around the same imperative to refer to something specific while at the same time constantly needing to undo that specificity, to dismantle their own categorical limits, and to re-complicate themselves in order to retain their ability to challenge dominant power structures and, therefore, to retain their political efficacy. This taxonomic mobility has run up against a wall in recent decades. The same forces that have worked to shore up the individual—to isolate and alienate them—have also worked to fix in place these once-slippery or porous categories. Parker quotes Foucault to explain the trajectory of this trend, writing (1987: 157):

it is very probable that this mobility was even greater in the beginnings of language than it is now: today, the analysis is so detailed, the grid [of language] so fine, the

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relations of coordination and subordination are so firmly established, that words scarcely have any opportunity to move from their places.

The contemporary state of taxonomical rigidity, across both identities and genres, is in crisis. As subjects are compelled to specify their identities, to self-name, the categories of identity have experienced a progressive tightening to the degree that uncertain and ambiguous ontological states are being disallowed and erased. This solidification of taxonomic borders is a longstanding tactic of discipline and control, wherein the policing of language structures, genres, and specific words, works to enforce the apparent “stability” and “permanence” of the “proper” where, as discussed in Chapter Two, what is fixed is made to seem ‘natural’ and valuable, and all else is codified as “monstrous” and grotesque (Derrida 1980: 57, 60; Brook 2002: 113). Under these conditions, telling the “truth” about the body—the un-solved and un-solvable task Woolf encountered almost one hundred years ago (1931: 240)—becomes impossible if that body is experienced as diffuse, ambiguous, and ontologically uncertain, as is the case for many subjects who are queer, trans, or women.

Woolf goes on to explain that this “immensely powerful” “obstacle” is “very difficult to define,” a quality that I argue emerges because the same criteria that determines the “truth” and the “proper” are those that assure women’s life experiences will never fit within that category. Women, in effect, cannot tell the truth of their own experiences in the language that is available to them. When ‘truth’ is only afforded to the record of the experience of men, “misogyny is not a hazard,” Braidotti writes, “but rather a structural necessity” (2002: 64). These barriers remain in place. Nick J. Fox writes (2012: 2):

for thousands of years, humans have made assertions about the nature and character of the body and how to represent or ‘tell the truth’ about the body. These claims have sometimes not sat happily together, they have been rivals in cultural efforts to define and, indeed, control the body.

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Fox highlights how ideas of “truth,” on which life writing often appears to depend, and control work together. Language and its structure—its borders, its partitions, and exclusions—have been used to rigidify epistemological understanding. If women’s ontology remain uncertain, and if language and genre remain seen as a “grid” (Foucault, qtd in Parker 1987: 157) which functions as the epistemological signpost for ‘truth,’ then women’s access to ‘truth’ in life writing is at an impasse.

This understanding—where taxonomic structures and the terminologies that accompany them have an intimate relationship to the ‘truth’—echoes another Wittgensteinian axiom: “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (1922: 149). This tension between reality and the linguistic is a long-standing concern for feminism that, as touched upon in this thesis’s introduction, intensified during the 1990s as “every “thing” [… was] turned into a matter of language” (Barad 2003: 801) following Butler’s “intervention” (Russo 1994: 193) and the ensuing “crisis of ontology” (Butler 1999: 6). Feminism now, however, seems reluctant to separate the two and, as Murphy writes, “there is no longer much resistance” to the idea that identity is both a “reality” and “embodied” (2012: 52) while also being shaped by “our experience of theory” (2012: 2). What Nelson takes up, then, is an interrogation of how well truth and theory are able to match to, and evolve with, the experience of embodiment and the everyday. Nelson’s life writing operates at the intersection of the highly ‘gridded’ discourse of theory and the everyday, and, although she does not explicitly confront what relationship her work has to the truth, this specific genre combination works towards dismantling that ‘grid’. Women’s writing that combines life writing and the theoretical, that accounts for the relationship between these two genres, is writing that challenges the patriarchal structures not only by breaking out of taxonomies, but by questioning and redefining what information is able to count as ‘truth.’

Nelson recognises the impasse between her own approach and Harry’s approach—where her approach represents an ongoing belief in the “truth” of language, and where Harry’s approach finds that “truth” not only stifling, but dangerous and unable to bear witness to the lived realities of his life. Nelson doesn’t work to reconcile the two; rather, she allows these

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approaches to sit side by side as her understanding becomes more uncertain. She writes (2015: 4, emphasis original):

I looked anew at unnameable things […] whose essence is flicker, flow […]. I stopped smugly repeating Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly and wondered anew, can everything be thought.

The Argonauts interrogates the role of language in life, and how its structures control the ways in which some people live, while casting others adrift. Nelson’s prose plays between these states, variously authoritative and uncertain. Though the text maintains an indistinct relationship to the truth, to terminology, and to taxonomy—across its genre play, and because of the lives that it is charting—there is inherent in this conception of the language of identity, a persistent return to binaries and to oppositional frameworks. Truth is always met with and countered by fiction, theory is met with and countered by the everyday, and embodiment is met with and countered by the operations of language.

Much later in the text, the irresolvable conflict over language and its various ‘ecstasies’ and ‘losses’ still floating on the surface of the text, Nelson recalls a conversation between herself and Harry. She writes (2015: 82):

We bantered good naturedly, yet somehow allowed ourselves to get polarised into a needless binary […]. While we talked we said words like nonviolence, assimilation, threats to survival, preserving the radical. But when I think about it now I hear only the background buzz of our trying to explain something to each other, to ourselves, about our lived experiences thus far of this peeled, endangered planet. As is so often the case, the intensity of our need to be understood distorted our positions, backed us further into the cage.

Nelson’s dedication to a position in-between—or above—the fixity of language and its malleability, its ability to recognise and its ability to violate and harm, means that this text is constantly having to disentangle itself from this binary formulation. Nelson and Harry

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repeatedly confront the need to be understood, made paradoxical by the need to use words or structures that actively work against the recognition of a subject position that exists outside of those same reductive structures.

Negotiating this tendency towards binaries and oppositions is an endless task. However, recent work in the field of queer methodology has provided alternative models for thinking about identity as not necessarily fixed or oppositional. This begins the second part of this section. Menon reminds us that the apparent ‘success’ of this multiplication and rigidification of language and taxonomies that forfeits mobility and formlessness “is only relatively recent and by no means complete” (2015: 129). Contemporary queer theorists, including Nelson, are working to revive ‘queer’ from its pigeonholed definition of ‘against’. This is a distinct moment in queer theory, and one that responds to a parallel (or ongoing) crisis in queer theory in the 1990s, what Lee Edelman describes as queer theory’s endless curve “towards a realisation that its realisation remains impossible” under this binary and oppositional framework (Wiegman and Wilson 2015: 4, qtd in Homographies 1994). Wiegman and Wilson go on to explain that while Foucault’s rhetorical strategy of “against… against … against” might have sufficed in the past, it has ensured that “queer theory has maintained an attachment to the politics of oppositionality” that has worked to support not only the repressive hypothesis, but also to ensure that norms themselves are positioned as only restricting and exclusive (2015: 11-12), rather than as variously useful and limiting (Butler 2005: 36). Wiegman and Wilson summarise that “the allure of moving against appears to have had greater critical currency than the more intimate and complicit gesture of moving athwart,” and that, because of this, “even the most rigorous queer theoretical reading can find itself sponsoring a politics of oppositionality” (2015: 11, 14).

Queer theory therefore has worked, in some cases, to support the institutional rigidity its anti-normative ethos originally sought to dissolve. As such, the political efficacy of the term ‘queer’ to call into question various normative structures remains up for debate. The use of the term ‘queer’ as an identifier, a collective term, or a theoretical framework has been a contentious subject for decades. As such, it is difficult to reduce this history to a two-sided debate, as it largely appears in this text, with one side in favour of a clear all-

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encompassing term that hopes to define while making space for infinite variance, and the other side against the ethos of a term altogether. The debates themselves are as varied as the application of the term itself, signalling that the term ‘queer’, for now, continues to signify its own taxonomic instability, volatility, and mobility as part of its meaning.

I argue that this position of ‘athwart’, and its inherent rejection of structures of oppositionality, represents a kind of grotesque ontology in the sense that the grotesque is “characterised by its rejection of the ‘natural conditions of organisation’” (Clayborough 1967: 3) that, in turn, reveals “how the boundaries between the ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ are fluid, not fixed” (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 9). Though I will strengthen this connection between the dual ontological state of ‘athwart’ and the grotesque in section four of this chapter, it is worth briefly establishing the connection these two concepts share. The grotesque, and its many intellectual and corporeal iterations, work to destabilise the kinds of binary frameworks that dictate ideas of ‘normalcy’ and establish all else as oppositional. The grotesque—like queer, and ‘athwart’—gains its theoretical application for its ability to contest the norms of its own time, and to expose or destabilise the illusory fixity of those norms, without succumbing to a position of oppositionality. In other words, ‘queer’ and ‘grotesque’ both work by revealing the inherent formlessness that surrounds the formed; the formed is not contested by its equal but opposite partner, it is contested by the dissolution of its own borders.

Perhaps because of this similar operation, the grotesque and ‘queer’ have run up against the same methodological problem. For the grotesque, Edwards and Graulund write that “the table can be over-determined: it [the grotesque text] can mean everything and nothing” (2008: 11). Similarly, the variance at the heart of ‘queer’ has enabled its own instability, and, as a term with intentionally disrupted limits, there is uncertainty over what it means, what it stands for, and how it operates (Wiegman and Wilson 2015: 4-5). These anxieties have intensified in recent years as the social and political landscape has shifted, “orienting queer studies towards an analysis of distinctly queer complicities unspecified, indeed unthinkable, in earlier queer scholarship” (Wiegman and Wilson 2015: 7). Returning ‘queer’ to this slippery and non-oppositional taxonomy and methodology is central to the

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narrative (used loosely) and genre play of The Argonauts. Throughout the text, Nelson envisions queer identity in the Sedgwickian sense, as she explains here (2015: 28-29):

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wanted to make way for ‘queer’ to hold all kinds of resistances and fractures and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation. “Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant,” she wrote. “Keenly, it is relational, and strange.” She wanted the term to be a perpetual excitement, a kind of placeholder—a nominative, like Argo, willing to designate molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip.

The passage that Nelson here references is from Sedgwick’s 1993 text Tendencies. In this original text, Sedgwick defines ‘queer’ etymologically in the foreword. Sedgwick writes, “the word ‘queer’ itself means across—it comes from the Indo-European root— twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), and English athwart” (1993: xii). Nelson returns again and again to Sedgwick’s definition, which, as evident in this passage, works to establish a term that has the ability to nominate without falling into the oppositional trap of fixed definition. Later, Nelson draws on another of Sedgwick’s ‘indefinite’ definitions, writing that ‘queer’ means “more than one, and more than two, but less than infinity” (2015: 62). ‘Athwart’ can therefore be thought of as a specific queer methodology that is experiencing a revival moment in contemporary queer theory and that has application not only within the scope of contemporary identity politics, but, as an extension of that, as a possible framework to re-think the contemporary state of experimental women’s life writing and its recurrent play across genres, across truth and fiction, and across subjectivities. The specific queer history of this kind of writing will be addressed further in section two. The queer methodology of thinking ‘athwart’ rather than ‘against’ provides a framework that can be used to understand identity and genre as participating within specific taxonomies without depriving them of their ability to be across borders, or to challenge borders.

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The final part of this section re-complicates this methodology of ‘athwart’ by applying it to the shifting social landscape. This newly re-opened position of ‘athwart’ is met with the increasing social acceptance of queer subjectivities as a normative position. The double bind of queer subjectivity in the contemporary moment is an echo of the taxonomical impasse between ecstasy and loss discussed above, where acceptance represents visibility and recognition but also signals the political de-clawing of the queer subject’s inherently anti-normative potential. Therefore, with greater acceptance and visibility comes solidification, which has begun to re-complicate ‘queer’ praxis and its ability to be ‘athwart’. “Queerness,” Pearl writes, “is not just a category or a name; it describes the undoing, the fluctuation of parts” (2018: 201). Queer in this sense is a verb, a process during which the very structures within which we locate subjects become slippery. By positioning ‘queer’ as its own category, praxis, or commodity, the process of ‘queering’— of complicating, of undoing, of fluctuating, and transiting—becomes impossible. Ann V. Murphy notes that, “the often unexamined assumption that sexuality is somehow less visible has seemed to enjoy a precarious coexistence with an at times hyperbolic association of sexuality—and queer identities in particular—with visibility” (2012: 58). The state of queer identity is therefore caught in a grotesque paradox: both ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the dominant structures of social and intellectual control, both visible and invisible, formed and formless, accepted within and operating against the norms of its time.

The implications of this methodological issue are significant for the field of queer-feminist life writing and its dedication to ontological uncertainty, and help explain why the three experimental texts at the heart of this thesis have appeared now. In addition to the commodification of feminist identity, queer identity faces similar roadblocks where acts of challenging norms on a social or literary level are construed as, paradoxically, a kind of support. As “civil rights agendas” increasingly turn towards neoliberalism and corporate sponsorship in order to gain state recognition, there is a sense that any questioning of institutional control must take place within the institution (Wiegman and Wilson 2015: 8). This has led to what Nelson describes as the “politically maddening” double-bind of queer identity where, if ‘queer’ simply means ‘against’, it just provokes what Menon calls “structural antagonism” (2015: 122). This is reminiscent of my discussion of parataxis in

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chapter one, where parataxis, in supposing the structures it works against to be all- consuming and fixed, works not as a form of critique but rather to lend power to the thing it challenges (Perelman 193: 314). Far from challenging normative structures, the recognition of queer identity within this framework is reduced to a mandatory binary, where one can be ‘out’ or not, ‘visible’ or not, but never both, never in a state of “ontological indeterminacy” (Nelson 2015: 15).

This operation is also at play at the level of genre. As noted previously, this can be seen in the “taxonomic exuberance” that frequently surrounds genre experimentation (Derrida 1980: 59), but it can also be seen in the state of queer theory. Wiegman and Wilson draw on Halperin to explain that this effect occurs not only at the hands of capitalist neoliberalism, but through the academy as well. Queer inquiry has become a “commodity whose value relie[s] on forfeiting the complexity of gay and lesbian studies in favour of the lure (and lull) of theory’s academic page” (Weigman and Wilson 2015: 4). This process of de- complexification voids ‘queer’ of its significance as a word that is able to nominate without defining.

This process of commodification of various queer identities, not only within the academy but outside it as well—like the commodification of feminism under neoliberal post- feminism—has been called ‘pink-washing’ or ‘rainbow capitalism’ and denotes the capital- driven exploitation of the queer market under the guise of offering social acceptance. This represents a further de-clawing of the political efficacy of ‘queer’ to challenge the oppositional structures embedded within social and literary frameworks. Nelson offers a powerful scene demonstrating the extent of this effect, where even knowledge of the self is subject to these operations of commodification. She explores the “presumptuousness of it all” (2015: 53), quoting Butler’s experience (in italics) in order to reflect on her own position both inside and outside of the academy and its investment in language and identity politics (2015: 53-54, italics original):

It’s painful to me that I wrote a whole book calling into question identity politics, only then to be constituted as a token of lesbian identity. Either people didn’t really

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read the book, or the commodification of identity politics is so strong that whatever you write, even when it's explicitly opposed to that politics, gets taken up by that machinery.

I think Butler is generous to name the diffuse “commodification of identity” as the problem. Less generously, I’d say that the simple fact that she’s a lesbian is so blinding for some, that whatever words come out of her mouth—whatever words come out of the lesbian’s mouth, whatever ideas spout from her head—certain listeners hear only one thing: lesbian, lesbian, lesbian. It’s quick step from there to discussing the lesbian—or, for that matter, anyone who refuses to slip quietly into a “postracial” future that resembles all too closely the racist past and present—as identitarian, when it’s actually the listener who cannot get beyond the identity that he has imputed to the speaker. Calling the speaker identitarian then serves as an efficient excuse not to listen to her, in which case the listener can assume his role as speaker.

Nelson notes here the ways that academic assimilation mandates obedience by absorbing into its structure any position that intends to undermine its authority. In this formulation, the possibility of ‘athwart’ is foreclosed. In speaking out about the myriad ways isolation and alienation are perpetuated through the policing of bodies and identities, the speaker risks further exclusion; in trying to complicate and question the role of identity in the production of theory, the theorist is branded as “identitarian”. This “regime,” Menon writes, “pits the normative against the anti normative because it depends on absolute opposition in order to sustain its own logic” (2015: 134). The machinery of identity politics under neoliberal individualism can only envision marginalisation as “structural antagonism” (Menon 2015: 122), as “against,” and, therefore, paradoxically, as a tool to prop up its own systems of division and oppressions.

Nelson’s passage above can also be used to understand (and illustrate) the double bind that women’s life writing finds itself in in the early twenty-first century. This is a climate in which women are told their identity is irrelevant and the field of feminism is

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“[un]concerned with women and writing,” despite their status as women being used incessantly to determine the meaning and value of their work (Moi 2008: 261, 264). Under this “double entanglement” (McRobbie 2004: 255), where feminism is both conservative and radical, both desired and detested, the identity of women, and its infinite variety, is both recognised and not recognised.

It is in this way that the personal has been excluded from the academy, except when it is being wielded to call for obedience, or to call attention to the body as a policing tool, and to influence, through the control of bodies, the shape that knowledge can take. In this climate identity has become indeterminately formed or formless according to the needs of those in charge. The language of identity is primarily a weapon against those who must use it to distinguish the specifics of their experiences from the presumed norm.

Nelson applies this double bind to her own life, explaining the impossible choices she faces as a queer woman who, in the current political moment, is only offered the choice of ‘against’ or ‘with’—never ‘athwart’. The two examples Nelson provides are marriage and family-making, specifically childbearing. These are two actions that have historically been associated with heterosexuality, and Nelson wonders if her participation in these social rituals constitutes normative or anti-normative behaviour. Maggie and Harry never planned to be married until Proposition 8, which sought to reinstate the constitutional definition of marriage as only between a man and a woman in the state of California, looked like it was about to pass. Not willing to pass up what could potentially be their final opportunity to have their relationship legally recognised, they google the nearest chapel. Nelson reflects on their double bind, stuck both inside and outside of two ideologies, writing, “poor marriage! Off we went to kill it (unforgivable). Or reinforce it (unforgivable)” (2015: 25).

The status of ‘queer’ as ‘against’ or ‘athwart’ becomes more complicated. Queer normalisation represents a significant reduction or a total loss of the ability of ‘queer’ to stand for anything, let alone for ‘queer’ to stand as a politically active term. Surrounded by the collective experience of marginalised subjects that have been persecuted for refusing gender and sexuality ‘norms’, Maggie and Harry find themselves in a society that is

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welcoming its victims into its own “repressive structures” (Nelson 2015: 26). The question then becomes, how does ‘queer’ account for itself if not as oppositional to these repressive structures? How does ‘queer’ remain a politically active force of critique, and not a passive tool to be taken up by these homogenising forces, if being ‘against’ means, paradoxically, a version of support? Nelson explains (2015: 26):

There’s something truly strange about living in a historical moment in which the conservative anxiety and despair about queers bringing down civilisation and its institutions (marriage, most notably) is met by the anxiety and despair so many queers feel about the failure or incapacity of queerness to bring down civilisation and its institutions, and their frustration with the assimilationist, unthinkingly neoliberal bent of the mainstream GLBTQ+ movement, which has spent fine coin begging entrance to two historically repressive structures: marriage, and the military.

The above passage is easily transferable to ideas of genre and academic gatekeeping, where the structures that classify queer or women’s writing as niche still work to determine the value of texts, and of the bodies they (are permitted to) represent. It is still on the terms of the repressive institution and thus no critique has been—or can be—made. After fighting to be ‘in’ various institutions, Nelson realises that there is now significant pressure to fight to be ‘out’ again in order to stall queer ‘assimilation’.

Amidst all this, it occurs to Nelson that although both she and Harry have lived their lives on the margins of heteronormative society, they are moving steadily towards presenting as the nuclear family: a husband, a pregnant wife, and a small child. Nelson describes a large mug given to her by her mother, stamped with a photo of her family, after a friend exclaims “I’ve never seen anything so heteronormative in my life” (2015: 13, emphasis original):

In the photo I’m seven months pregnant with what will become Iggy, wearing a high ponytail and leopard print dress; Harry and his son are wearing matching dark

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suits, looking dashing. We’re standing in front of the mantle at my mother’s house, which has monogrammed stockings hanging from it. We look happy.

They find their progress towards the image of heteronormativity and fixity, to which conservative ideology appeals, emblazoned on a symbol of domesticity, grotesque—both amusing and horrifying, both familiar and strange. It is that same ideology to which they now appear to be subscribing that has prevented them from legally realising their family unit. Nelson makes note of the absurd difficulty (and financial burden) to have Harry recognised legally alongside herself as the parent of Iggy (2015: 137), and for herself to adopt Harry’s son from a previous relationship. Language, particularly laws designed to ‘protect’ conservative heteronormative notions of family, shapes and limits queer lives.

Their apparent absorption into disciplinary institutions that have been the source of a great deal of injustice for the queer community is seen as both a victory and a loss. The Argonauts walks the line between this victory and loss—to change, like the Argo, is to be able to progress, but it is also inevitably to leave something behind; a “vacillation between loss and ecstasy” (Butler 2005: 28). The negotiation of changing norms, and thus the change of self, is the foundation of life writing, which is the catalogue of that process, and must be at the forefront of such taxonomical and terminological inventions and interventions.

While acceptance into these institutions promises recognition, this normalisation and homogenisation also pose the threat of erasure. It is understandable that Nelson’s impulse is, in this text, towards excess and to the maximum exposure of the realities of her life as a queer woman—not for recognition or visibility, but to show how the particularity of an identifier does not act as an ontological partition. “The particular,” Menon writes, “need not equal ontology” (2015: 135); the name or term you travel under can be thought more openly, away from its often oppositional formulation. Nelson works to demonstrate that identifiers, though they may feel important and protective in this individualistic climate, do not eliminate the indeterminate borders of the self.

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2. Family

In attempting to knit together queerness and family-making, Nelson proposes a new relational, or, in this case, familial structure. Instead of thinking of identity or genre according to categorisation, The Argonauts suggests a model of ‘family.’ I argue that this model still allows for a ‘type’—a broad ‘genus’—but those included within the type are not defined by their likeness to one another but rather by their relation. This model makes room for variation, for multiplication, and evolution, allowing identities to overlap within the same person and text. Further, Nelson’s particular experimental method of writing, as both inside and outside academic structures, allows her to demonstrate ‘queer family making’ as an alternate idea of citation, identity and relational ontology.

This section begins by establishing Nelson’s formation of family within the text, and considering how it has contributed not only to the narrative but to the textual makeup of The Argonauts. I then connect this ‘familial’ understanding of identity to relational ontology, and this section concludes with an application of this model. I use this model of ‘family’ to position Nelson and this text as the inheritors of a lineage of queer feminist life writing. This model allows me to recognise the influences that have given this text its shape, without denying The Argonauts it's ‘one of a kind’ status.

Nelson establishes this expanded understanding of and interest in family through an amorphous and expandable collection of writers that she names “the many gendered- mothers of my heart” (2015: 57-58), after the epic poem by Dana Ward of the same name:

What I will do is tell you about the stable of people I have come to think of as my sappy crones (except they aren’t really sappy, and they’re not really crones). You’ve already met some of them. For a while I was calling them my good witches, but that wasn’t quite right. If it weren’t such a length moniker I might call them “the many gendered-mothers of my heart,” which is what poet Dana Ward calls everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Barry Manilow to his father to his grandmother to his childhood neighbour to Winona Ryder’s character in Heathers to Ella Fitzgerald to Jacob Von

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Guten to his bio mom in his amazingly long poem “A Kentucky of Mothers,” which accomplishes the nearly impossible feat of constructing an ecstatic matriarchal cosmology while also defetishising the maternal, even emptying out the category.

This formulation of a team, a family, or a genealogy is a recurrent theme. The implication is that Nelson thinks of those she cites as mother-figures. These writers act as Nelson’s ‘mothers’ throughout The Argonauts; multiple and multiplying, diversely gendered and each contributing in some way to the genetic makeup of the text itself. This idea is one that Maggie borrows not just from Dana Ward, but from Harry as well. Harry, who was adopted at birth (2015: 136), recalls an “almost mystical sense of belonging, […] rather than being from or for an other, you felt you came from the whole world, utterly plural” (2015: 139). The text becomes a record of tracking Maggie’s personal history through the figures who have nurtured her and passed along qualities that have become integrated into her identity. Rather than trace this identity through genes, Nelson traces it through information and understanding, in a move not dissimilar to Kraus’s construction of her community of “underground intellectuals” in Aliens & Anorexia (2000: 25). Rather than confine identity to the innateness of genes (that are too often figured as precluding any fluidity or agency), Nelson offers a dramatically expanded idea of selfhood that privileges all sites of interaction, including textual interaction, as central to one’s material reality.

Nelson’s family is not just Harry and their children, but also the other authors who inhabit this text. Stacey describes this citational process as Nelson’s way of “naming her band of Argonauts […] to protect her on her epic journey” (2018: 204). Pearl writes that Nelson is “making a web of people in the room (as it were)” (2018: 199), continuing that the “marginal mentions in The Argonauts do seem very much like conversations: this is whom I am in dialogue with in thinking on this point or that idea; this is who has inspired this perception, this is whom I must ventriloquise to make my thoughts clear” (2018: 199). This strategy is part of what signifies the experimental qualities of this text—a combination of life writing and the academic practice of citation—but it also offers a model for new ways of thinking of identity away from the taxonomic and towards the familial and relational.

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Relational ontologies and their ability to redefine the status of the individual remain central to this text. Within the narrative itself, Nelson’s primary relation is to her partner, Harry, and the text’s title—in addition to signalling the evolution of terms and bodies—signals the theme of re-making and re-defining the self in accordance with one’s relationships. The particular phrase from which Nelson borrows the title is significant. Nelson quotes Barthes, who claims that the phrase ‘I love you’ is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name” (2015: 5). Just as each of the Argo’s parts must be replaced over time, while the ship is able to retain the same name, Barthes posits that each utterance of the phrase “I love you” renews and remakes its meaning. Nelson states, quoting Barthes, that “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new” (2015: 5). In this sense, the Argo also presents a metaphor for relational ontology, a continuous structural vacillation that nevertheless retains an equilibrium (Cavarero 2016: 6). It implicates the role of language in relational ontology, as a conduit between two (or more) people that is itself infinitely re- makeable and not fixed in place, temporarily formed but always holding within itself the possibility, the inevitability, of formlessness. Further, under this figure, relational ontology is not reserved for the regeneration and evolution of relationships between self and other, but can also be applied to the relationships between what—at times—feels like incongruent, conflicting, or evolving aspects of the self.

The particular use of the phrase ‘I love you’ immediately draws interpersonal relationships to the fore and stresses the role of those close to us in shaping our identities. The operation of language is linked with the personal in the sense that language is, at its core, a tool of interpersonal communication. Language’s reiterative ability to renew connections can be understood as having a real-world, material impact on the lives and identities of not only those who utter these phrases, but those who hear them as well. In this sense, the operation of the ship—carrying cargo back and forth—reflects the operations of dialogue between two, or more, people, where meaning is carried back and forth across a partition (Parker 1987: 13). This figure is not unlike parataxis in its operation, nor is it unlike the back and forth of the carnivalesque. These are a series of figures, techniques, and phenomena that work towards a representation or evocation of the same condition of being ‘athwart’ rather

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than, exclusively, ‘against’. The implication is that the various Argos referenced throughout this text—the body, identity, genre, and specific terms and their meanings—are not only tools for interpersonal recognition, but also constantly in a state of regeneration.

The malleability and mobility of the language of identity is its strength. Nelson describes this belief in interpersonal and fluid identity as deeply relational, as the task of existing “for another, and by virtue of another” (2015: 60, 95, emphasis original). This is a quotation that she repeatedly attributes to Butler, however, Butler’s use of this line occurs as she describes Cavarero’s approach to identity, not her own. Butler recounts Cavarero’s argument (2005: 32):

I exist in an important sense for you, and by virtue of you. If I have lost the conditions of address, if I have no “you” to address, then I have lost “myself”. In her [Cavarero’s] view, one can tell an autobiography only to an other, and one can reference an “I” only in relation to a “you”: without the “you”, my own story becomes impossible.

This understanding of relationality, especially as it relates to self-narratives like life writing, is an example of Nelson’s formulation of the Argo, where meaning is carried back and forth between two or more points and, in doing so, regenerates and evolves over time. In other words, our identity, and the language we use to nominate ourselves, changes over time as we interact with others. This is an image of relational ontology, where the self cannot exist in isolation, but rather is made by—and makes—its community or family.

Here, the distinction between self and other, between the individual body and the world that surrounds them, begins to break down. In its place, we have a sense of the “open” body or the ‘two bodies in one’ figure that characterises the grotesque, and which I have used throughout this thesis to illustrate relational ontologies that challenge individualism in the twenty-first century. Identity as fixed, static, and isolated is disassembled in this Argo moment, replaced instead with a constantly moving, constantly regenerating and evolving

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sense of self. This image of identity is not interested in the oppositional language of ‘against’, but, like ‘queer’, moves instead to exist ‘athwart’ two, or more, subjects.

Nelson’s focus on relationships, and relational ontology, has elsewhere been investigated as a representation of vulnerability. Murphy, who I have used throughout this thesis to read the work of Butler and Cavarero alongside one another, also considers vulnerability as a crucial aspect of relational ontology and a point at which these two theorists intersect. I have considered some of Murphy’s work on vulnerability in Chapter Two, but here, I combine it with Mitchell’s reading of The Argonauts. Mitchell writes that (2018: 194):

The text as a whole presents vulnerability as a necessary condition of both recognition and relationship—any relationship—but particularly as a necessary condition of love. If I open up to you, what do I gain precisely by what I risk, by the boundaries I demolish or disregard?

Nothing is gained if nothing is risked in this text. Nelson’s “openness” can be thought at the level of ontological uncertainty and at the level of genre experimentation, which is itself a “calculated risk” (Mitchell 2015: 4) that must acknowledge that its success is never guaranteed but that, in doing so, is able to push the project of queer feminist life writing forward. This ‘vulnerable’ state is the state of women’s ontology in the twenty-first century as it becomes diffuse, and the state of queer ontology as it is compelled to become more defined by the rigidity of ‘against’. Nelson’s play across categories and borders is a dedicated attempt to preserve vulnerability and uncertainty through relationality, rather than to ‘cure’ it—to identify herself according to her relationships rather than according to her individual sense of self. Butler writes, drawing on Cavarero, that “we are beings who are, of necessity, exposed to one another in our vulnerability and singularity, and […] our political situations consist in part in learning how best to handle—and to honour—this constant and necessary exposure” (2005: 31-32). The contemporary political moment therefore invites a rethinking of selfhood not as something individual and discrete, but as ontologically indeterminate, uncertain, and shaped across time by our ever-changing relationships: familial rather than taxonomic.

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‘Family’, like ‘queer’, is therefore implicitly incompatible with individualism—and implicitly dependent on a recognition of shared vulnerability within its own communities. ‘Queer’ and ‘family’ are strictly relational terms that, in this text, denote a relational ontology that has often been expressed in writing, including life writing, as the combination of or experimentation with genres. While it is not possible to describe every piece of writing that combines multiple genres as ‘queer’ writing, or every piece of writing that uses citation as ‘familial’ writing, there is an understanding in this text at least that Nelson’s participation in and across the discourses of the academic and the everyday—encouraged by her particular focus on their interaction—is an ‘acting out’ of the queer praxis of existing ‘athwart’ normative and anti-normative structures without submitting to oppositionality. This reading is made possible because of the chain of queer-feminist experimentation and play at the limits of theoretical or philosophical genres as a means of challenging prevailing ontologies stretching through the last century. Gibbs notes the distinctly “gendered dimension” of writing such as this, that inhabits the academic and the personal, that both theorises and dramatises the relationship of the body to philosophy (2003: 309), later stating that “feminist writers in particular have sought other relationships to such forms of authority than those of simple submission and unthinking repetition” (2005). This section focuses on Nelson’s formulation of family, and I argue that this lineage of queer experimental life writing at the borders of these genres allows me to identify how this text works to represent Nelson’s shifting and uncertain ontology, without pinning it down as a distinct genre in its own right. The “many gendered-mothers” to whom Nelson refers offer not just a model for her own multiplicities and vulnerabilities, but for the text’s multiplicities and vulnerabilities as well.

Pearl also identifies this focus on lineage and family in her reading of The Argonauts, and draws a particular connection between this text and the history of queer women’s experimentation with life writing. She writes that “there is a legacy of generic autobiographical messiness when it comes to representing lesbian lives” (2018: 200). She goes on to state that (2018: 201):

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Historically, women have never had a straightforward or comfortable relationship with the genre of autobiography […]. There are some obvious historical progenitors, including the life writing of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes.

The legacy of these authors is embedded in The Argonauts (Nelson discusses the complexities of these two authors’ relationships, 2015: 9) and also in this thesis, from its point of conception. I would add to Pearl’s list of Stein and Barnes the distinctly biographical, but also genre defying and ontologically turbulent work of Woolf’s Orlando (1928). Pearl goes on to write that “generic messiness”—which I would extend beyond the realm of genre, to incorporate gender, and even the ontological indistinctness of the author of the text—“associated with lesbian writing is now legible as an anticipation of a queer (or queered) genre” (2018: 201). Themes of inversion, reversal, temporal distortion and replication are threads that run through the life writing works of these authors, just as they run through the works in this thesis.

A genre (or movement) that has a distinctly queer origins and can be positioned as part of this legacy of queer “messiness” and play at the borders of genres is New Narrative. As a text made, and re-made, through the interactions of collected material, both old and new, The Argonauts is reminiscent of New Narrative and undeniably rooted within the same conceptual impulses that drove the movement throughout the 1980s. This connection has been noted by Donegal, who writes that “Nelson is noticeably indebted to the New Narrative” field. Across her body of work, she “likes to write about writing, to make the story of how her books come into the world a part of the project” (2015). The Argonauts and the New Narrative work of the late twentieth century might not be thought of so much as member of the same movement, or category, but certainly they are members of the same family. Donegal continues, writing that:

Believing that genre and the ability to fit into it was a symptom of being legible and acceptable to society at large, the New Narrative writers disobeyed genre conventions in order to create new and more egalitarian forms of autobiographical

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writing. It may be due to their influence that so much thinking about queer writing equates the blending of genres with the queer ontological refusal to conform.

Crossing borders and mixing categories—defying ontological singularity—is a queer praxis that connects it to both the grotesque and relational ontology. Further, this refusal to conform, this dedication to keeping categories ‘open’, can be read as a kind of Argo moment where the text is always in process, and never resolved. This focus on process, where the record of the text’s construction seems to stand in for, or even subsume any sense of the ‘final’ product, is a trademark feature of New Narrative. Harris notes that the formal devices of New Narrative were always intended to “undermine structures of continuity, order and resolution” associated with fiction and, by extension, academic formalism (2009: 806). This dedication to irresolution is central to the grotesque and its ability to resist normalisation (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 10), and to remain perpetually in-between, in Nelson’s case, the queer poetic and the academic genres, between form and formlessness.

Significantly, New Narrative was devised as a way to respond to, and thwart, the rigidity of Language poetry and its “straight male” community (Glück 2004: 27). New Narrative was a queer-led movement in writing, with the specific intent to give space, time, and a voice to experiences that have been historically masked (Harris 2009: 812). Though Nelson does not explicitly mention New Narrative, she is undoubtedly indebted to the movement, citing writers who were closely involved, like Dodie Bellamy (2015: 55), or directly influenced by the movement, like Eileen Myles (2015: 11, 48, 60, 97).

Therefore, I argue that Nelson’s use of genre combination—specifically her focus on ‘transit’ between the genres, and keeping their relationship unresolved—is already reflecting a contemporary heritage of queer writing, even before the text’s critical content on queer theory and identity politics. Even on a superficial level this text enacts its own “transitive” metamorphosis, shifting genres as it catalogues in-process lives, matching these bodily experiences to its own writing style. In effect, the bodies of the subjects within The Argonauts act on the shape of the text. This is a formal strategy that Nelson has worked with for some time that can be read as historically grounded in the work of other queer

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writers, and, simultaneously, as deeply personal. Nelson is committed to experimenting with what form can add to content, not simply what form can prop up.

If New Narrative connects The Argonauts to its history of queer life writing and genre experimentation, then I argue that fictocriticism can be used to connect this text to its history of women’s life writing and experimentation within the university, or women’s life writing that makes use of theoretical discourses. Given the critical content of the text, in conjunction with its formal features, it is worth drawing a line from Nelson’s practice to the fictocritical movement as well. The main reason I draw attention to fictocriticism is that The Argonauts has an unmistakable academic flavour, that is contrasted with intensely personal passages. Nelson ruminates at length on theories of parenting, picking apart Lacanian and Freudian concepts of identity formation. These tracks of thinking bleed into, support, or are countered by, her understanding of queer theory, queer family making, and queer art. Considering Nelson’s position within academic circles, it is surprising that this connection has not been made alongside the comparisons to New Narrative. While both movements were concerned with some of the same formal questions—particularly an interest in how genre categories work to dictate and control the limits of life writing and knowledge production—fictocriticism is particularly concerned with the incompatibility between the rigid features of academic writing, and the personal, the emotional, and the experiential.

The circular debates of decades past concerning the legitimacy of fictocriticism, and whether or not fictocritical writing “counts” as research (Brook 2002: 113), or is able to offer significant contributions to fields of knowledge, seem to have dissolved. Instead, as we move further into the twenty-first century, the very paradoxes that blocked fictocritical work from legitimacy—such as what constitutes critical work, or personal work, and their illusory boundaries—are the very things that sustain this kind of writing. There is, now, a willingness to sit with the uncertainty of language’s role in our understanding of bodily experience, and to entertain ambiguity not as some kind of problem for feminism to overcome or as a kind of ‘failure’, but rather as a productive and compelling point from

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which to write—a point that has often captivated women writers throughout history, not just since the rise of ontological uncertainty throughout the 1990s.

The Argonauts was awarded the National Book Critics’ Circle Award under the category of ‘criticism’ in 2015, which we can take as evidence of the emergent ‘legitimacy’ of this cross-genre combination of theory and life writing within the institution—not only as a text to study, but as a text that metatheoretically progresses the feminist understanding of genre experimentation. The citation on the award concluded that Nelson’s work “lends critical theory something that it frequently lacks, namely, examples drawn from real life, real art- making, and real bodies” (Als 2016). Not only is the book deeply engaged in unpacking the ideology of family-making practices and queer maternity, but Nelson’s formal experimentation is a critique of the status quo of academic methodology and ways in which we have historically thought it possible to express and record the experience of being. That this achievement has been so strongly validated signals a significant shift in recognising the critical legitimacy of women’s life writing, and, further, the validity of the personal in shaping the theoretical. This is one of the most profound shifts over the past two decades in how critical institutions and the public perceive not only women’s writing, but women’s intellectual contributions to the re-shaping and recording of twenty-first-century ontologies.

The Argonauts has been celebrated for its critical contribution because it makes plain within its own pages its attention to the state of identity politics and the representation of identity in contexts that specifically relate not just to the personal but to the academic and theoretical. Kraus and Heti, though engaged in the philosophical, do not take the reader directly to that site. Nelson does, in a casual, conversational, and inviting way, and therefore her work is able to be read as a study of the relationship between theoretical and life writing in a way that Heti’s and Kraus’s, largely, is not. Where Heti and Kraus sought to step out of the institutionalised academy altogether, Nelson firmly leaves one foot in, striving “to work the trap one is inevitably in” (Nelson, drawing on Foucault 2015: 59). As such, I read The Argonauts as a comment on the state of queer theory and feminism from within the academy, and the influence this specific site has had in shaping Nelson’s life and upholding a division between the professional and the personal.

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By couching herself in the lineage of queer theory and queer creativity, Nelson positions herself as a kind of inheritor of knowledge, thereby giving herself permission to experiment and play with language bodily and intellectually. “There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolise,” Nelson proclaims, “no thing impervious to my alchemy,” (2015: 122-123, emphasis original). The material of her life, both inside and outside of the academy, the queer community, and her family, is absorbed into the body of the text. Donegal (2015) recalls Nelson explaining her technique as “a thoroughly digested way of thinking with other people.” It is not just thinking ‘with’ as in ‘alongside’ others, it is thinking with them as sustenance, absorbed, and recited through the lens of her own body. This formulation of citation as a kind of ‘eating’ or ‘nourishment’ is reminiscent of the ways in which Kraus’s appropriates the work of Weil throughout Aliens & Anorexia. Donegal (2015) explains this tactic further:

Early in The Argonauts, Nelson quotes Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter, a book that argues gender is not only constructed but built out of citations, references to images, movements, and behaviours of the past. (Think of the guy sitting spread- legged on the subway, with his knees pointing toward either end of the car: his unconscious citation is of the bowlegged cowboy — rugged, arrogant, and masculine) [...].

It wouldn’t be a stretch, given the nod to Butler, to read Nelson’s method of citation as a way of constructing her identity as a writer: she cites Wittgenstein or Deleuze when she wants to be a philosopher, Dodie Bellamy or Eileen Myles when she wants to be a punk. That she is ambivalently and imperfectly all of these things is a part of her appeal.

In offering a lineage of debates and theories, Nelson is able to account for her life, without having to reconcile the complexities and contradictions that flow through it. Rather than show how these debates have run through the movement of queer studies, or feminism, she demonstrates how these ideas have run through and shaped her personally. Though she

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draws on the citational practices of her academic foundation, there is a distinct absence of hierarchy. This is, I posit, her answer to the genealogy of masculine, straight, academic writing that monopolises knowledge and knowledge production. Ahmed observes that this masculine genealogy is often used to justify sexism—“x is in what I read, so x is in what I write” (2017: 150)—and that citation reveals itself as a passive action, an excuse, counter to the “upright” (Cavarero 2016: 2) masculinity of “academic virtue” (Ahmed 2017: 150). In this sense, it is easy to position citation as a tool of relationality, dialogue, connectivity, and collaboration rather than as solely hierarchical, exclusive, and ‘pedigree’. Citation can transform from a device that supports hierarchy, alienation, and exclusivity, into one that fosters community and family.

To this end, Nelson states in her interview with Donegal, “I think of citation as a form of family-making” (2015). Donegal continues, stating that Nelson has also stated that “The Argonauts is a project about queer family-making twice over: literally, as it tells the story of Nelson, Harry, and their children, and literarily, in its composition.” It is the story of queer writing, a genealogy of sorts that removes the need to prove pedigree, or to mimic in order to attain value (Ahmed 2017: 8). Nelson writes, “really there is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production” (2015: 143). Rather than setting this up as an admonition of the practice of citation, which so often works to shore-up the exclusivity of the academy (Ahmed 2017: 8), Nelson instead positions her citations as a celebration of the queer-feminist tactic of critiquing structures from within, of speaking against an oppressive force by using its own language to dismantle itself. Citation and experimentation are equally valuable in this text. The text performs its own understanding that there is no way to write about one’s life that does not acknowledge and include (through citation, or other kinds of references) the invaluable and un-erasable presence of those who have come before. Life writing, like academic discourse, is built on the citation that is often disguised as other forms of intertextuality or appropriation. Nelson, in this text, removes that disguise and exposes the overlap between these two often separated genres.

Within this experimental space, Nelson is able to “assert” her knowledge on the topics at hand, to perform the authoritative role, while also dilatorily refusing, and “giving [them]

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the slip” (2015: 29). It is a method of positioning herself at the centre of the debates—as part of a taxonomy, or ‘against’ it—while also removing herself from them, and standing ‘athwart’. The Argonauts is a text concerned with re-complicating queer identity and with re-thinking identity as relational rather than individual. Nelson’s tactic is to linger, to delay, to never reach the moment at which she has to put her foot down on either side of the line. Instead, she is able to stay suspended above indefinitely. This indefinite delay, in conjunction with this formulation of familial relationships as a more “open” type of nomination, leads to section three of this chapter. My focus on family narrows to the specific relationship between mother and child, and the potential of ‘gestation’ as a figure through which to read Nelson’s dilatory writing.

3. Motherhood

Nelson’s long-standing “identity phobia,” discussed in section one of this chapter, might contribute to her methodological attempts to write herself out of the rigidity of the taxonomically discrete genealogy of theory. By writing her critical work inside the record of her life, she slips out from under the fixed category of the philosophical. Pearl describes the effect of Nelson’s refusal to use footnotes as a kind of philosophical writing that is invested in “not having a point: no overarching claim that is being pushed and proved” (2018: 199). This said, Nelson maintains her “academic pedigree” (Pearl 2018: 199), and this interest in lineage combined with a dedication to “no point” recalls Parker’s formulation of dilatory writing and its association with the morphology of women’s bodies (1987: 32). These features work to position Nelson’s work as not only interested in the maternal as a narrative point, but as a rehearsal of ‘gestational’ writing.

Gestational writing is writing that dwells, that is excessive, and that takes up space. Nelson recalls Sedgwick’s enthusiasm for “fat art”, that is, art that submits to profusion and proliferation (2015: 102), shortly before pointing out that “many of the many gendered- mothers of my heart—Schuyler, Ginsberg, Clifton, Sedgwick—are or were or have been corpulent beings” (2015: 105). This interest in ‘fatness’ contrasts the discussion of anorexia in Chapter One, however, both work as a means of reflecting upon the relationship that the

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body has to writing. Bordo writes that “far from paradoxical, the coexistence of anorexia and obesity reveals the instability of contemporary personality construction,” what I have characterised as uncertain ontology (1993: 201). The female body in writing is always, somehow, both too much and not enough, grotesquely incomplete and in excess, invisible and unavoidable. Though Nelson never classifies her own writing as “fat art” or describes her writing as ‘gestational,’ her process of delay and her focus on relational ontology align with this reading. Parker unpacks the association of “fat female bodies” with “female loquacity” and “fatty texts” (1987: 32) and notes that this is not only a grotesque breaking of borders (of the body, of language, and of gendered social norms across each), but a powerful rhetorical strategy of anticipation, and taking up space. While pregnancy is not a necessary condition of fatness, Parker identifies pregnancy as a specific type of fatness or excess, that, textually, signals the ultimate rhetorical delay (1987: 15). Its very condition is a promise, and a postponement which is easily matched with Nelson’s methodological tendency to sit ‘athwart’ opposing fields, states, or topics without approaching any resolution.

This section examines the complicated relationship that the body has to writing, and the implicit Cartesian artefact embedded within their interaction. This interaction is explored throughout Nelson’s text as a combination of dilatory and assertive writing, which continue to be codified as feminine and masculine styles of writing. This section concludes with a discussion of why queerness and motherhood—both of which Nelson formulates as ontologically uncertain states—continue to be thought of as incompatible. Motherhood is an implicit challenge to individuality. Using figures of motherhood and gestation, Nelson challenges the fixity of academic and life writing genres, and the categories of identity. Nelson positions herself as both mother and child, as inheritor and benefactor, emphasising the role that relational identity plays in this text.

Writing and motherhood already have a strong connection—the moment of a text’s completion is often metaphorically framed as a ‘birth’ where the text is the child the author has produced after a period of gestation. On this connection, Nelson writes (2015: 106, emphasis original):

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A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother. I am a writer; I must play with the body of my mother. Schuyler does it; Barthes does it; Conrad does it; Ginsberg does it. Why is it so hard for me to do it? For while I have come to know my own body as a mother, and while I can imagine the bodies of a multitude of strangers as my mother […]. I still have a hard time imagining my mother’s body as my mother. […] I think my mother is beautiful. But her negative feelings about her body can generate a force field that repels any appreciation of it […], she even disparages the way she looks in baby pictures.

Nelson’s genre experimentation might be read as an attempt to circumvent the anti- association “force field” that her own mother has constructed around her life. Nelson locates the source of her mother’s negativity as her “obsession with skinniness as an indicator of physical, moral, and economic fitness” (2015: 105). This evokes the historical alignment between the “upright” of the proper, and the conservative notion that ‘successful’ femininity is small, contained, and silent (Parker 1987: 7). This sets up an analogy for the ways in which women have been denied access to their historical and creative predecessors—always brought up with the male canon, with the male gaze filtering their own lives, and the work of women suppressed or judged according to masculine criteria. The female body, which in this passage is emphatically tied to the construction of a piece of writing—Nelson’s writing—is so heavily critiqued, subsumed by, and disparaged within paternalistic guidelines that it is no longer able to be seen as anything other than what those guidelines dictate. Nelson reveals her inherited discipline, and how overtly this represents the control that the historical privileging of masculinity—fixity, containment, pointedness, assertion—has over women’s bodies and their writing, and the perception of its value.

This disjunction that Nelson uncovers around her relationship to writing—an intellectual pursuit—and her difficult relationship to her mother’s embodiment raise the question of Cartesian dualism and what role it has to play in this text. The perceived incompatibility of

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the body and the intellectual is still strong, and still a topic in which feminist theory is invested as a site of gender inequality. It has been argued that feminism’s “body problem”, that is, the difficulty that women have had in accounting for and representing their bodies, is in fact a “Descartes problem” (Fraser and Greco 2005: 6). I have already mentioned the discomfort Harry shows for the trans narrative of “born in the wrong body” (2015: 53), but this dualism plays out again when Nelson gives a talk as a pregnant academic. She writes (2015: 90-91, emphasis original):

Place me now, like a pregnant cutout doll, at a “prestigious New York university,” giving a talk on my book on cruelty. During the Q&A, a well-known playwright raises his hand and says: I can’t help but notice that you’re with child, which leads me to the question—how did you handle working on all this dark material [sadism, masochism, cruelty, violence, and so on] in your condition?

Ah yes, I think, digging a knee into the podium. Leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady speaker back to her body, so that no one misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregnant woman who thinks. Which is really just a pumped-up version of that more general oxymoron, a woman who thinks.

This is a clear demonstration of the Cartesian legacy of binding a woman to her body, and cauterising it from the mind. The effect is an ongoing distinction between the intellectual, from which women are prohibited, and the corporeal. This is the crux of the problem with ‘women’s writing’: women are forced to live twice, both inside and outside of, in this case, the academy, torn between the academy’s instruction to leave the body, and its incessant need to call women back to it (Moi 2008: 264). This formulation highlights the incalculable influence that Cartesian ideology has had over the structures of philosophical discourses, and the legacy of dividing the self into mind and body, interior and exterior, private and public, and the gender codification that has followed. This Cartesian legacy continues to play out through the belief in the ‘psyche’ and the illusion of ‘interior’ knowledge (Saunders 2010: 525-26).

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This passage immediately sets up the ingrained objectification of women, from the evocation of a “cutout doll” to the idea of a “spectacle.” The binomial “man-reason” and “woman-body” is again at play, here demonstrating its insidious application as a method of control and restriction (Cavarero 2012: 77). Nelson is forced to position herself as ‘against’ or in denial of this codification in order to participate in the institutional structure. She is forced to argue that her body does not impact her work when, as this very text evidences, it does, if only because the “old patrician white guy” feels the urge to point it out, to use it to define, and as a lens through which to read her work. This passage evidences how Nelson feels about this double-state of being both included and excluded; where the ‘gatekeeper’ figures are either oblivious to the luxury of their own presumed authority, or wilfully misogynistic in their understanding of the relationship between women, language, access to knowledge, and to knowledge-production. Though The Argonauts is filled with the evidence of queer women’s intellectual achievements, she is never allowed to forget the material realities of being a pregnant lesbian who, despite her countless accolades, must have her value questioned by others who are working within the same field.

As a result, Nelson is made to feel both in and out of her body. “In the face of such phallocentric gravitas,” she writes, “I find myself drifting into a delinquent, anti- interpretive mood” (2015: 20). Nelson self-identifies this ‘dilatory’ tendency in her own writing—stuck between her identities as a pregnant woman and an academic, confronting the ongoing division between body and intellect, Nelson manifests this ontological uncertainty as a combination of dilatory and assertive writing. She performs uncertainty when not working directly with a theorist, or explicitly utilising critical modes of thinking. This is a feature she self-consciously highlights as her “gendered baggage,” strengthening the association between assertiveness and masculinity. She goes on to add, “Sorry for the delay, Sorry for the confusion, Sorry for whatever” (2015: 98, emphasis original). If academic writing is male-dominated, phallogocentric, and obsessed with coming to a ‘point’, in both a phallic and argumentative sense, then writing that delays answers, that accumulates, that gestates and dilates, would be its counterpart (Parker 1987: 10).

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Nelson’s compulsion to apologise (however sarcastically) for these features of her writing is reminiscent of what Virginia Woolf describes as the first “adventure” of her professional life in 1931: her struggle with and victory over the “Angel in the House.” The Angel figure represents the imaginary presence of feminine ideality that urges Woolf’s pen to “be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive” (Professions for Women, 1974: 238). The effect this feminine presence produces is that her critical opinion is always mediated, modified, and de-clawed according to a hierarchy that favours, protects and elevates the work of men. Though Woolf feels compelled to police her own language, to defer in her reviews to the apparent authority of male writers, she discovers that her pen and her gender are not inseparable; the social norms that dictate her behaviour, though powerful, can be cast off in writing. This moment represents the “killing” of the Angel in the House. This struggle might be thought of as the precursor to more recent debates throughout the latter half of the twentieth century concerning the concept and existence of ‘gendered writing’, and feminism’s paradoxical need to continue to define women’s writing within a theoretical context, while at the same time, undergoing a “disinvestment in aesthetic questions” for fear of enforcing or prescribing femininity (Moi 2008: 259).

These confessions of having “killed” the Angel in the House, or of having edited out “gendered baggage” are defensive speech acts, and signal moments of self-policing and a pre-emptive “response to a provocation” or accusation of ‘writing like a woman’ (Moi 2008: 265). This ‘womanly’ style or approach is something that remains un- or under- valued in critical and theoretical fields for the perception that it refuses to come to that argumentative “point” (Parker 1987: 9; Pearl 2018: 199). This gender codification of writing styles reveals the sexist realities of the state of genre, and how it works to control gendered participation, unchanged in nearly a century. The effect is that Nelson feels compelled to modify and mediate the record of her experience due to its location within her professional discourse. As such, Nelson’s combination of a ‘dilatory’ style and the philosophical represents a radical fracturing of this gender-codification of genres.

While few theorists would argue that these distinct genres truly are representative of distinct genders (Moi 2008: 260-61), this codification does persist. The ideas of

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‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ writing, coded as mimicking biological functions, seem inescapable. The ‘dilatory’ effect that has been produced by Nelson’s “chance” arrangement of the text (Pearl 2018: 199) recalls the association that Parker draws between talkative or ‘dilatory’ women throughout history (1987: 9), and, further, the association of gestation with dilatory behaviour (1987: 16). This alignment between writing that delays and female morphology has been established elsewhere as well (Gibbs 2005; Irigaray 1985: 189). However, I argue that Nelson’s use of delay or uncertainty in The Argonauts serves as a deliberate hesitation or rejection in order to give herself space, to literally take up more room on the page, to flesh out an idea, to transform form into formlessness. It allows Nelson to dwell on the process of the text’s formation, her family’s formation, and her own formation. It is a rhetorical strategy that ensures that Nelson is able to engage both queer poetics and the academy at once, challenging the idea that they are contradictory or oppositional structures (Donegal 2015).

The multiplicity of ‘mothers’ in the text, then, seems a formal way of expressing multiplicity and relational attachments to one’s entire community. They are her mothers, but her text is ‘pregnant’ with them and their work. The Argonauts rehearses a dual state of mother and child, setting up an “implied reciprocity” where every participant is both gestating and being gestated: an image of relational ontology wherein “the action of the one implies the action of the other” (Butler 2005: 26). This understanding of gestation beyond the body—as a figure through which to read Nelson’s genre play and experimental writing more broadly, and a figure for understanding relational ontologies—is the foundation for the final section of this chapter: the cave. The cave, as a gestational space and a space of imprisonment, concludes this chapter and returns to the questions of taxonomy, ecstasy and loss with which it began.

4. The Cave

This alignment between citation and family-making, between the Argo-like regeneration and the ‘dilatory’ tactic of delay all come together under Nelson’s discussion of pregnancy, motherhood, and gestation. The Argonauts raises several crucial analogies between

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gestation and the formation of identity over time as an evolving and formless process: a “becoming in which one never becomes” (Nelson 2015: 53). Late in her pregnancy, Nelson ruminates on why this is an important part of her praxis. Frustrated by the persistence of medical professionals jovially pointing out Iggy’s genitals during ultrasounds, she thinks (2015: 94-95):

Just let him wheel around in his sac for Christ’s sake […]. Let him stay oblivious— for the first and last time, perhaps—to the task of performing a self for others, to the fact that we develop, even in utero, in response to a flow of projections and reflections ricocheting off us. Eventually, we call that snowball a self (Argo).

Though gestation is, here, almost an extension of Nelson’s own “identity phobia” (2015: 111), it is also an image of the never-settled Argo that brings together many figures of the grotesque. Throughout my research into the grotesque, several key figures have emerged time and time again. Many of them are applicable to this re-occurring Argo metaphor, particularly metamorphosis (Astruc 2010: 60), or the idea of constant incompletion, irresolution, or of being-in-process (Edward and Graulund 2008: 7; Thompson 1972: 21). Though the figure of metamorphosis is a well-established grotesque trope and appears strongly at the fore of the Ship of Theseus or Argo thought problem, I think of it in this text and its discussion of bodies as more closely associated with the ‘two bodies in one’ figure, which suggests the ontological uncertainty of multiple identity with which this thesis is deeply engaged.

As established, a key element of The Argonauts is its discussion and rehearsal of gestation or pregnancy. Pregnancy falls under the figure of ‘two bodies in one’, and the history of this figure is particularly relevant to feminism not only for its focus on women’s bodies and the womb, but, as mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, for the way is it implicitly positions women’s bodies as non-normative, chthonic, and contradictory. However, I want to extend this figure beyond its “liberalisation of the female body” which Russo reminds us often works to “obscure or reduce [the grotesque’s] complex figurations” (1994: 3). More broadly, this figure is one that works to challenge individuality, and to represent a dual or

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multiple ontology. As such, I want to take this figure of pregnancy, the womb, and extend it away from a morphological reading and towards an ontological one.

As such, I posit an alternate figure for the final section of this chapter, on that is closely related yet often overlooked: the originating grotto, or cave, in which the ‘grotesque’ images of hybrid animals, humans, plants, and architectures were first found. The cave, while closely associated with the womb, and the ‘two bodies in one’ figure, operates in a less rigid way. Edwards and Graulund (2008: 5) briefly mention the cave’s potential:

Indeed, the grotto is, like a labyrinth or the crypt, a disorienting and threatening place that inflames anxiety and fear. It is also a potential place of spatial internment that echoes the state of being confined with the physical limits of a grotesque body.

This is the only instance of theorists considering the cave itself as a grotesque figure that I have uncovered. The cave’s potential has perhaps been overlooked because, at first, it appears to be a shoring-up of the very structures that the grotesque seeks to dismantle in order to provoke its unsettling effect. The idea of the body as a prison, or being imprisoned itself, subscribes neatly to normative ideas of Cartesian isolation—far cries from the fluidity and collapse of boundaries on which the grotesque thrives. However, the cave also signals the chthonic mystery that the grotesque has never quite lost through its numerous iterations. It is a site of secrets and questions, confusion and contradiction, an invisible place made visible only by entering, that draws on the primary fear of the unknown and the limitlessness of that unknown.

The cave offers a slight variation on the typical grotesque figure, focusing less on a malformed or incomplete body, and more on the sense of excess that comes from the ‘two bodies in one’ figure (Bakhtin 1968: 26). The cave is a version of this ‘two bodies in one’ not simply because of its etymological links with female biology and pregnancy (Russo 1994: 1; Bakhtin 1968: 19), but, more significantly, because it represents two contradicting spaces: a generative space, and a space of internment. Nelson engages with both sides of this complex space, which is at once inside and outside, open to the world and also closed,

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hidden, and fortified. I argue that this cave figure enables a more in-depth exploration of Nelson’s ability to be ‘athwart’ the many power structures she is working to question and dismantle, including heteronormative family-making, academic hierarchies, and the increasingly problematic political imperative for queer subjects to assert their visibility in the public sphere.

This reading represents a new approach to the grotesque by introducing a space that stands for both the sense of internment within restricting social and genre norms, and the sensation of disjunction or ‘escape’ from those same norms. This reading corresponds strongly with the contemporary phenomenon of post-feminism and pink-washing, where this is a dual sense of freedom, or acceptance, combined with a mandatory assimilation or erasure. The cave effectively enables a more context-specific assessment of the body, or the personal, revealing that whether one feels ‘trapped’ or ‘free’ is a result of social or literary structures rather than any inherent shortcomings of the subjects themselves. Being ‘trapped in one's body’ or ‘born in the wrong body’ is therefore revealed to be not necessarily a literal sense of spatial internment, but rather a sense of being trapped within a system of reproduction that affords only two fixed positions and punishes those between, or those that remain formless.

The passage above, on the “snowball” self, allows for an application of this cave figure to Maggie and Harry’s conflicting views of language, discussed at the beginning of this Chapter, and how they then relate to their corporeal experiences. For Harry, the body is undeniably experienced as a kind of identity prison of society’s making, where the materiality of form is experienced as detrimental to formlessness. Maggie notes early on that “your [Harry’s] ability to live in your skin was reaching its peak” (2015: 31). This recalls Harry’s early assertion that language forecloses the chance of ambiguity, that it is “not good enough” to express all experiences (2015: 4). Nelson’s counter is to submerge herself in the accumulative, and the formless, in order to demonstrate the ‘gestational’ and ‘transitive’ aspects of the body. The “cheery way of looking at this snowball,” Maggie writes, “would be to say, subjectivity is keenly relational” (2015: 95). She has an overtly

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relational approach to her own identity as something slippery, and to her use of genre which performs this accumulatory and gestational sense of being.

This process of accumulation has a more literal place in this argument: the accumulation of cells within the womb, “the way a baby literally makes space where there wasn’t space before” (Nelson 2015: 103). This offers a powerful analogy for how Nelson begins to inhabit, and thus make visible, the generative gaps that result from the rigid ways in which we think of genre, gender, and bodies. Further, this formulation ties the cave to the talkativeness and “fat art” discussed above, positioned as implicitly resistant to both gender and genre norms. The act of women taking up space, with their bodies or with their voices, has been encoded as a failure to adhere to feminine norms. The defiance of this is a key element of Nelson’s praxis, and one that touches upon both the personal and the professional. It is personal because it defies her mother’s prizing of thinness, equated with silence (Parker 1987: 7), as the epitome of control. It is professional because it characterises not only the nature of citation, and of accumulating knowledge on the page, but also the talkativeness that epitomises Nelson’s teaching. She confesses, “I feel high on the knowledge that I can talk as much as I want to, as quickly as I want to, in any direction that I want to” (2015: 48). This description matches with her opening arguments for “plethora” and “excess,” for accumulation as a kind of knowledge-making process in contrast to the traditional linearity of the ‘pointed’ theoretical (2015: 4).

Nelson positions herself within the gestational space of the cave in this text. The cave is in effect a metaphor for the gaps that provide the opportunity for excess, and that allow uncertainties to exist within structures that govern language, bodies, gender and genre. It is a site that is inferred by what is around it, only made visible by the rigidity of its walls. This figure, in conjunction with the “net” (2015: 3, 46) that Nelson refers to as representative of the structures of language, and the Argo, hints at Nelson’s approach to language and to bodies by inferring that some things function because of, rather than despite, these gaps and ambiguity.

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Nelson takes a lot of joy in this endless process of acknowledging and evading by deferral and excess, making herself both visible and invisible, both inside and outside the institutions that have shaped her understanding of her identity, and the language around it. Nelson writes, “I collect these moments. I know they hold a key. It doesn’t matter to me if the key must remain perched in a lock, incipient” (2015: 64). Maintaining the sense of suspense, and keeping the crisis of language and bodies and identity on its toes, is one kind of solution. Mitchell, quoting Gilson, understands Nelson’s strategy as one of “epistemic vulnerability” that encourages a state of being where we are, “open to not knowing” (Mitchell 2018: 198). “Sometimes,” Nelson writes, “the shit stays messy” (2015: 53, emphasis original). She continues:

That for some, “transitioning” may mean leaving one gender behind, while for others—like Harry, who is happy to identity as a butch on T—it doesn’t? I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK—desirable, even. […] whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?

There is an unmistakable focus on process, and prolonging that process through excess and deferral, expressed not only through the use of the Argo figure, but through her own pregnancy, Harry’s transition, and the construction of the text itself. In the face of “a culture frantic for resolution,” a culture swept up in the need to be named at an individual level, or to be erased, Nelson and Harry argue that relationality, communication, and an appreciation that formlessness need not progress to ‘form’, might offer more potential. Ontological uncertainty is therefore understood in this text not as an uncomfortable

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‘transitional’ moment between two different “types” of feminism—between thinking ‘woman’ as a category, and whatever will come next—but rather is in itself a destination, but one of permanent gestation and “openness.”

Mitchell identifies this as a “tradition of feminine and feminised self-exposure,” linking this tactic and this text with Kraus, Kathy Acker, and Sophie Calle (among others). She writes, quoting these authors (2018: 197):

Such a primary vulnerability also works against a kind of sovereignty at the level of the self and of the text—hence the foregrounding of a shame that both produces and undoes the self, hence the texts’ formal and other incoherencies (the text itself is “undone”), hence the disruption of any kind of stable narratorial “I”—while exploring qualities of “interdependencies and incompletion.”

What Mitchell frames as vulnerability, I have framed as relational ontology and the grotesque. The effect is the ‘undoing’ of individuality, of hierarchy, and of stability. Overwhelmingly, Nelson works to disrupt ideas of completion. It is not only the bodies within the text that are ‘undone’ and constantly in the process of being formed (but never finally, or permanently formed), it is the text itself. Throughout The Argonauts, the text is presented in several states of incomplete being, referred to at various times as a shared conceptual project between Harry and Maggie (2015: 47), as a completed draft that is being proofread (2015: 46), and as a series of separate works, or works from “alternate universes,” that have yet to find their way into what the reader understands will become The Argonauts (2015: 19). Even as the text is completed, it maintains its state of vulnerability and ‘chance’ formlessness.

What we come to in this re-thinking of genealogy, inheritance, visibility, and recognition, is a sense that what works for one life’s account may not—cannot— work for another. The problem is less how we think of identities, for we are clearly capable of far more nuanced ideas of being than the binaries of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or ‘straight’ and ‘queer’, but more how these experiences may (or may not) relate to textual expressions of identity, and to the

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increasing fixity and anxiety that come with specific terminologies. The problem is how the finitude of language limits the discussion of identity by suggesting a partition that in reality may not exist.

The goal (or one of the goals) of the texts analysed in this thesis is to discover to what extent life writing can disrupt rather than submit to the rise of individualistic ontologies in the twenty-first century. Nelson’s response to this issue has been to reveal identity as engaging in a perpetual Argo-like metamorphosis, a fluid state that assists in delaying indefinitely the locking down of categorical division between one’s inner and outer ideas of self, between a public and private self, between an individual and their constitutive family, lineage, or community. The uncertainty and ambiguity of the cave figure, as a formless space, the ‘gestational’ delay of writing without a fixed destination, and the family model of relational ontology, have been crucial for illustrating this possibility.

The Argonauts is a text concerned with re-complicating the taxonomies of identity and genre, and represents a significant moment in the lineage of experimental women’s life writing. Nelson’s metatheoretical disruption of genre does not seem intent on breaking genre boundaries, rather, it seems to uncover and strengthen the generic malleability inherent in such processes of categorisation. For Kraus, genre experimentation appears as the anti-hierarchical “breaking of the chain” (2000: 163) through parataxis, self- disintegration, and the shattering of organising structures and points of reference. For Heti, the play across genre borders through comic inversion, while destabilising, did not collapse their discrete categories. The genre experimentation in The Argonauts, however, is so thoroughly combined and formless that it can only be understood as in a state of progress, still evolving long after it has been published.

This state of perpetual evolution is the shared project of the grotesque and relational ontology, and one that I have mapped in this thesis through a series of studies into experimental women’s life writing in the early twenty-first century. These are all texts that have resisted conclusion and individualism in various ways, which I have argued represents their authors’ respective uncertain ontologies, however, in the conclusion to this thesis I

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will extend this argument to the state of experimental women’s life writing more broadly as a taxonomically-resistant field that is in a state of constant evolution and irresolution.

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Conclusion

This thesis has investigated the nature and effects of the combination of theory and life writing in three contemporary experimental texts by women. This experimentation has produced exciting results, ranging from comical to critical, and raised crucial questions regarding authenticity, authorship, and knowledge production. My study of Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia, Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be?, and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts has revealed that certain developments within feminist theory, particularly the problematisation of the category of ‘woman’ and the ensuing ontological uncertainty, have had an impact on women’s lives and their life writing. I have argued that these developments are significant for this socio-historical moment, producing subjectivities torn between collective and individualistic ontologies. This thesis sets out to locate these three texts contextually, and to explicate their particular use of genre experimentation, formal play, and disruptive literary techniques to comment on, represent, and complicate the contradictory contemporary ontology of women, and of women writers in particular.

The combination of life writing and theory, two modes of discourse that are typically opposed, is a continuation and expansion of the outpouring of published academic memoirs from the late 1980s onwards that followed the rise of identity politics (Laurie 2000: 3; Saunders 2010: 3). However, these three texts are not the records of life as an academic, but, more broadly, the record of what effects theoretical and political developments within the field of feminism have had on the development of women’s personal identities. Further, these three texts are not simply self-portraits of female intellectuals, but texts dedicated to displaying the interconnection of theory, life, and writing, and to cataloguing the specific conditions of the moment in which these texts were produced. I have identified within these texts evidence of the state of ontological uncertainty that has dominated feminism from the 1990s onwards, and focused on how these texts confront and negotiate this paradoxical situation, in which the body is both central and irrelevant, where identity is both diffuse and increasingly an object for commodification, and how this experience has then been expressed through textual experimentation.

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I have determined that these three texts continue the feminist tradition wherein “the rupturing of traditional forms becomes a political act […] aligned with the feminist project” (Friedman and Fuchs 1989: 4). Historically, women writers have been on the forefront of textual experimentation, breaking from the structures of patriarchal narrative—such as linearity, resolution, and the presence of a central and commanding protagonist—in order to represent something of the experience of life on the margins. While this is still the case for these three texts, I have limited my analysis of experimentation to the interaction between the historically feminine category of life writing and the historically masculine category of theory. This focus has allowed me to consider the ongoing influence of Cartesian understandings of identity and being, and how the subsequent codification of “woman- body” and “man-reason” (Cavarero 2012: 77) continue to dictate the limits of knowledge production, and the limits of life writing. This combination of life writing and theory therefore represents more than a record of the contemporary state of ontological uncertainty, it also constitutes a radical and political destabilisation of gender and genre hierarchies.

This persistent dualism has led me to approach these texts through theoretical frameworks that specialise in the distortion and collapse of such divisions. These frameworks are the grotesque and relational ontology. These frameworks have been deployed in differing ways across each chapter, allowing their respective strengths to bring out the specific forms, narratives, and images within each text. Chapter One argued that Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia uses the technique of parataxis to recall the medieval body, and its accompanying association with morphological and ontological ‘porosity’, as a means of destabilising individuality and hierarchy. This ‘porosity’ centres the grotesque “violat[ion] of the laws of nature” (Edwards and Graulund 2008: 4) where the body of the author and of the text no longer end at the borders of its skin. This porosity allows Kraus’s reading of Paul Thek and Simone Weil’s life and work to be absorbed into her own life writing, creating a sense of ontology dependent on the relationship that Kraus had formed with this community of “underground intellectuals” (2000: 25). I concluded that Kraus’s use of parataxis was a destabilising technique which emphasised intertextuality, creating a text that represents an

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indistinct division between her own state of being, and the beings of those she researched and included in her life writing.

Chapter Two argued that Heti’s How Should A Person Be? exhibits the grotesque’s sibling concept, the carnivalesque, and its reliance on ‘switching’ between the “official” and “non- official” (Bakhtin 1968: 72). This switching allows Heti to combine the prose of life writing with formal aspects of the theatrical, and reflections on philosophy, particularly psychoanalysis. This ‘switching’ extended to Heti’s representation of her own character as she ‘masqueraded’ through various roles, confusing the limits of character and actor, ‘soul’ and performance, and self and other. Her appropriation of Margaux’s words confronts the limits of collaborative practice, manifesting as grotesque images of skinlessness and headlessness that, while offering an example of a relational ontology, provides a warning for the violent threat inherent in such acts of boundary-crossing. I read this text’s engagement with ontological uncertainty as a response to the post-feminist pressure to present a united self-image, in that Sheila’s inability to adhere to this goal produces a multiplicity of identities, with her ‘true’ state of being left unknown.

Chapter Three argued that Nelson’s The Argonauts confronts the rise of individualism and intersectionality, and the accompanying taxonomic inventions that work to pin identity down and deprive it of fluidity and uncertainty. My reading of this text proposed that, in order to allow such ontological uncertainty to continue existing, a model of ‘familial’ definition rather than taxonomic certainty needed to be applied. This model centres the narrative of the text—preoccupied with family, lineage, heritage, and motherhood—and establishes a relational ontology over an individualistic one. This chapter concluded with a study of an overlooked figure of the grotesque: the cave. The cave has strong parallels to the often-misogynistic alignment of women’s morphology with the grotesque. However, this figure allows this space, that represents both interment and generation, to be applied to a more diverse range of bodies and life experiences. I concluded that since identity is in a state of perpetual evolution, taxonomies will always fall short, and identity is always, in some sense, in a state of “ontological indeterminacy” (Nelson 2015: 15).

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These chapters are united by their focus on the destabilisation of binaries and the collapse of borders—not just at the level of genre, but at the level of the author’s own discrete identity as well. This has allowed me to read these texts as the record of a state of ontological uncertainty, and as fostering a sense of collectivity and community over the individualism that post-feminism and neoliberalism have promoted. This reading has been supported by my understanding that the category of life writing itself is unstable and prone to experimentation, intertextuality, and the disruption of the individuality of its own protagonist (Saunders 2010: 5-6). Further, the grotesque and relational ontology, along with the categories of the ‘experimental’ and the ‘contemporary,’ are all defined, in some sense, by their inability to reach conclusion. As such, they have come to have a natural affiliation with one another, working together to strengthen the sense that this project of experimental contemporary women’s life writing is a perpetually evolving and future-facing field.

A limitation to the breadth of this claim is that the authors I have selected for this thesis are all white North American women. Kraus, Heti, and Nelson are each highly educated and in positions of economic and cultural privilege, which has afforded them the opportunity to write and experiment with the material of their own lives. As such, an extended version of this study should consider what impact this ontological uncertainty has had on women writers of different backgrounds, and authors from other continents. This limitation, further, acknowledges the self-selecting nature of the women who are inclined to experiment with this particular combination of genre, so often university-located and dependent on privilege. An extended version of this study might require a lens other than theory in order to discuss more broadly the contemporary experience of gender and the body.

An alternate approach to this topic might be to chart more closely some of the specific developments across the North American political landscape in the twenty-first century, and whether any major events could be said to have further impacted women’s ontological instability and its representation in literature. In particular, one could consider Aliens & Anorexia as an example of post-millennium but pre-9/11 literature, that How Should A Person Be? was published shortly after the Global Financial Crisis, and engage more deeply with The Argonauts’ focus on the political agenda of achieving equal rights for

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queer citizens. Were future studies expanded to include writers from other continents, these events—and others—and their possible ontological impact could be considered on an international scale. Rachel Carroll (2015: 18) notes that:

The contemporary literary culture that is currently dominant can be understood as the product of a specific set of economic, historical, and cultural conditions— conditions that are not necessarily receptive to the fostering of experimental writing.

The influence of post-feminism, neoliberalism and late capitalism encourages the representation of identity as discrete and singular, which has had tremendous implications for the state of experimental life writing. The role of feminist theory on this global stage seems small given that certain political, social, economic, and even environmental events have enormous influence over the support for or rejection of individualism, and for ontological stability or instability in general. Therefore, this relationship between world politics and contemporary experimental women’s life writing is an important one. There is more work to be done with regard to locating these texts—and others in this field—more specifically and not simply as part of a broader body of early twenty-first century women’s life writing.

I mention the temporal aspect of these texts because, as Friedman and Fuchs have identified, experimental women’s writing appears to emerge in a ‘generational’ pattern (1989: 7), with writers like Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein in the first generation, Djuna Barnes in the second, and Kathy Acker in the third. The texts studied in this thesis can perhaps be thought of as part of a fourth generation. They are each a continuation of the tradition of experimental women’s life writing, yet they explore the particular state of women’s ontology in the twenty-first century. The texts studied in this thesis remain on the forefront of literary experimentation and innovation, recording not just what it’s like to be a woman, but what it’s like to ‘be’ in this specific moment.

I conclude this thesis as I opened it: with a quote from Virginia Woolf, who has been a shadow-figure throughout this study. In Woolf’s 1927 essay, “Poetry, Fiction and the

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Future” (also known as “The Narrow Bridge of Art”), she laid out a vision for the future of the novel that resonates with the texts that I have analysed. Woolf wrote (1927: 439):

This unnamed variety of the novel will be written standing back from life, because in that way a larger view is to be obtained of some important features of it; it will be written in prose, because prose, if you free it from the beast of burden work so many novelists lay upon it, of carrying loads of details, bushels of facts—prose thus treated will show itself capable of rising high off the ground, not in one dart, but in sweeps and circles, and of keeping at the same time in touch with the amusements and idiosyncrasies of human character in daily life.

Like this vision, contemporary experimental women’s life writing defies its own taxonomy—named but always exceeding its own category—because it is in a state of constant evolution, rising, falling, and changing in response to its own socio-historical moment. It is dominated by prose but allows itself to slip in and out of other forms as needed, conscious of the material nature of genre as a medium through which to add something to the record of life, rather than a pre-fixed structure to jam life into. In Woolf’s vision, there are no fixed or essential genres, and no genres that cannot be included within the novel. This novel is about life, but it is “standing back” for a “larger view” and making room within its own frame for the factual and the funny, for the combination of life and theory, life and politics, life and community. Women writers—like Woolf, Stein, Kraus, Heti, and Nelson—have often been, and continue to be, at the forefront of experimentation with the forms and possibilities of language, with advancing and expanding the project of life writing, and with challenging the boundaries and understandings of ontology.

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