Matter that matters:

Towards an embodied world literature

Brooke Ellen Maree Boland

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

UNSW AUSTRALIA

School of the Arts and Media

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

19 May 2017

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How do contemporary women writers figure the female embodiment? How do they represent the world? To answer these questions, this thesis applies a transnational feminist framework to world literature to read the isomorphism between body and world. This research reflects a current need for further gender analysis in world literature as, at the same time this discourse has appeared as a viable approach and way of reading the production and reception of texts in the twenty-first century, critical theory has flourished in key areas such as new materialisms and transnational feminisms. Yet little work in the field of world literature brings these concepts to bear on questions of representation, transnational women’s writing and embodiment. By bringing these theoretical frameworks together, a new approach to reading corporeality in transnational women’s writing is possible. I position the materiality of the female body as an important site of close reading in this framework, as is evident in my analysis of texts by three authors, Caroline Bergvall, Yoko Tawada and Nuala Ní

Dhomhnaill. Importantly, even though there are variations between the production of these authors texts, each text shares representational strategies in the figuration of the female body that relate to the global processes of production and translation in world literary space.

Other considerations that inform this research on the body in women’s writing include intersectionality, genre and writing identity politics. The recent shift from the nation to the transnational in literary criticism and the increase in multilingual writing and translation practice suggests a change in the shape of social space and also new challenges for the category of literature. As identity politics become increasingly porous, we are experiencing a moment where concepts such as exophonic writing and born-translated literature necessitates the analysis of new language games and alternative forms of writing that complicate traditional modes of literary analysis.

Therefore I situate the short form as a genre with increasing circulation and new relevance in our digital age and as a form that raises particular questions for gender analysis in world literature. Consequently, the intersection of gender and genre offers a point of intervention in the field of world literature studies that highlights a need for this research on embodiment and the representation of women’s bodies in short texts by contemporary women writers.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my family, especially my parents who have always offered their encouragement and support during my studies. A very special thank you also to my husband, Daniel Rasitti, for his unwavering care and patience.

This thesis would not have been possible without the kind advice of my supervisor, Dr.

Fiona Morrison who offered invaluable insight and understanding. Her direction over the years helped me to think critically and find my own way through the material.

I would also like to thank my co-supervisor Prof. Ronan McDonald and Dr. Laetitia

Nanquette for reading early drafts of this thesis. And thank you to my dear friend,

Jasmin Kelaita whose encouragement never ceased. I feel very fortunate to have such a large network of support.

I would like to dedicate this thesis in memory of my grandmother, Marie Therese

White. Table of contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. 66

Transnational Women Writers and World Literature: Updating the conversation on gender and genre

Chapter 2. 107

“Copying typing out stamping quoting taking on carrying in one’s body”: Citational writing and the politics of gender in Caroline Bergvall’s conceptual poetry

Chapter 3. 148

“A translation for which no original exists”: Exophony as comparison literature in Yoko

Tawada’s English translations

Chapter 4. 200

“To be educated out of one’s mother tongue”: Local spaces and transnational subjects in

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Irish language poetry

Conclusion 244

Works Cited 251

Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Introduction

“The human, it seems, must become strange to itself, even monstrous, to reachieve the human on another plane. This human will not be “one,” indeed, will have no ultimate form, but it will be one that is constantly negotiating sexual difference in a way that has no natural or necessary consequences for the social organization of sexuality. By insisting that this will be a persistent and open question, I mean to suggest that we make no decision on what sexual difference is but leave that question open, troubling, unresolved, propitious.” - Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (2004), pp. 191-192

“Materiality is always something more than “mere” matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.” - Diana Coole and Samantha Frost New Materialisms (2010), p. 9

The texts analysed in this thesis reveal a specific connection in the way gendered identity is negotiated in relation to language and translation in the twenty-first century.

This negotiation occurs at both a material level (as translated texts that circulate in

English) and at the level of close reading, evident in theme and narrative. What is especially interesting, however, is how female embodiment emerges at the centre of this negotiation between gendered identity and language. For each of the texts analysed in this thesis by Caroline Bergvall, Yoko Tawada and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, the representation of the female body is a recurring trope where lived experience and corporeality is negotiated as the female body is performed through and constructed by language and ideology. This body doesn’t exist in a vacuum; rather it is configured through a relation to the ‘world’. Thus, for this thesis, world and body are mutual registers where meaning is generated - mutual because together they cooperate in shaping representations of female embodiment and embodied experience in the texts analysed in this thesis. Simone de Beauvoir refers to this relationship between body and world in The Second Sex, “The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project” (de Beauvoir 1949`, 68). As Rosi Braidotti also

1 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature writes much later, “the notion of bodily materialism and of the embodied or enfleshed subject…highlights the bodily structure of subjectivity and consequently also issues of sexuality and sexual difference” (Braidotti 2011`, 15). The body, here, is recognised as a site where its materiality is of central importance, as is its surroundings and experiences and how it is read and perceived by others accordingly. Braidotti refers to this as the

“embodied and embedded” subject, a phrase that reflects the relationship between the materiality of bodies and the social relations in which they are ‘embedded’ in the world.

To facilitate this conversation further, recent articulations of a transnational literary culture, which spans the world and takes up the name ‘world literature’, needs to engage with the subject of gender and the materiality of the body or else miss entirely the analysis of texts by women writers and the intersection of gender with discourses of race, class and sexuality. In turn, this intersection causes us to re-evaluate the definitional categories of these discourses. To achieve this, new frameworks that recognise gender at a foundational level (rather than an afterthought) need to be established in world literature. The recent shift from the nation to the transnational in literary criticism and the increase in multilingual writing and translation practice suggests a change in the shape of social space and also new challenges for the category of literature that speak to this focus on the representation of corporeality in contemporary women’s writing. As identity politics become increasingly porous, we are experiencing a moment where concepts such as exophonic writing and born-translated literature (both discussed in the following chapters) necessitate the analysis of new language games and alternative forms of writing that complicate traditional modes of literary analysis. Therefore I situate the short form as a genre with increasing circulation

2 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature and new relevance in our digital age and as a form that raises particular questions for gender analysis in world literature. Consequently, the intersection of gender and genre offers a point of intervention in the field of world literature studies that highlights a need for this research on the representation of women’s bodies in short texts by women writers.

Changes wrought by globalisation have not only altered the way in which we interpret the structure of global relations, but have also raised these changes as a concern for subjectivity and identity in the twenty-first century. To this end, not only are texts moving across larger geographies and at faster speeds, but so too are people. This research explores new figurations of subjectivity and gendered identity further by analysing corporeality in short texts by transnational women writers whose position in world literature, I argue, complicate the spatialisation of this literary space due to the way their works shift the structures of periphery and centre. As Braidotti states, “one of the features of our present historical condition is the shifting grounds on which periphery and center confront each other, with a new level of complexity that defies dualistic or oppositional thinking… to account for these, we need to look at the internal forms of thought that privilege processes rather than essences and transformations” (Braidotti 2011`, 8-10). These changes are not only reflected in the way the texts analysed in this thesis are written and circulate, but also in the way subjectivity is performed, as it is embedded within the sociocultural situations that are themselves varied. As Rosi Braidotti argues, the “shifting grounds” of our present moment highlight the position of migrant and nomadic authors anew, such as Bergvall,

Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill. Braidotti argues: “It is the thinkers located at the center of

3 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature past or present empires who are actively deconstructing the power of the center - thus contributing to the discursive proliferation and consumption of former “negative” others” (Braidotti 2011`, 9). However, at the same time it is important to note that there is a privileging of authors who write from these positions, from “the center of past of present empires” (Braidotti 2011`, 9). Furthermore, it is also important to recognise that each of the writers analysed in this thesis are privileged in their access to technology, literacy, etc.1 “As Vandana Shiva points out, within globalisation we must distinguish between different modes of mobility” (Braidotti 2011`, 7). As Braidotti explains further, these changes in social space are influencing the fabric of sociocultural society, resulting in a transformation of the ways in which subjects are representing themselves

– constructing “a nonunitary vision of the subject” in this representation (Braidotti

2011`, 10).

In this critical context, world literature raises certain questions on ontology and bodies - the body of the author, the bodies that emerge through close reading, and the ontological status of translation and writing. I take my definition of ontology from the way the term is applied in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s introduction to New Materialisms:

Ontology, Agency and Politics, in which ontology is not simply the “nature of being” but is part of the relational situations that configure the subject (Coole and Frost, New

Materialisms, 2010, 5). Coole and Frost write of a “new ontology” that upholds the insistence on active processes of materialisation that informs their new materialists approach. New ontology is “a project that is in turn consistent with the productive,

1 While this research is interested in the reconfiguration and representation of the female body that occurs within the deconstruction of the center from within the center (through translation into English in the case of Ni Dhomhnaill), another direction for future research could be to examine writers who work outside these ‘centers’. 4 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature inventive capacities [new materialists] ascribe to materiality itself. The prevailing ethos of new materialist ontology is consequently more positive and constructive than critical or negative” (8). At this moment the varied use of world literature as a mode of reading does not articulate questions of ontology and corporeality on its own terms, especially when it comes to women’s bodies. Embodiment remains a hidden mechanism that shapes the reception and production of texts, but the transient character of ontology in our current moment means it necessarily cannot be located as such. I find the beginning of a discussion on ontology and corporeality in world literature is evident in the move towards specificity in recent debates, as well as new articulations of relationality and becoming in posthumanist and feminist theory.2 Combining these discourses generates a framework for reading that is suited to the analysis of corporeality in contemporary women’s writing and, furthermore, articulates the importance of gendered identity and embodiment as a structuring principle in transnational systems of literary value. By articulating such a feminist world literature, the tension between ‘world’ and ‘literature’ that arises suggests this relationship between materiality and representation that I focus on, where the body as matter and the body as sociological construct influence the politics of literary value and hence the production and reception of texts.

As Rebecca Walkowitz argues, “literature makes worlds as well as enters them” (Walkowitz 2013`, 172). The mutual act of writing and reading, then, is a world- making activity where the connection between the symbolic and the political is evident.3

2 See, for example, Rosi Braidotti’s book Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (2011) and her article "Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology" (2006).

3 Benedict Anderson’s work on the nation in Imagined Communities also suggests this connection between the symbolic and the political (1983). 5 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

This thesis posits a new transnational foray into these debates via the position of the contemporary woman writer and the representation of the body in short texts. I ask how do transnational contemporary women writers figure the female body? How do they represent the world? These two questions form the focus of this research which revolves around the isomorphism of world and body in works by three women writers: Bergvall,

Tawada, and Ní Dhomhnaill. These are not new questions, by any means, as feminist literary history and criticism have often interrogated the representational politics of writing by women. However, the topic of gender and world literature is a new area of study that requires a crossed category analytical framework that I delineate further in this analysis of embodiment, contemporary women’s writing and world literature. My argument that the materiality of the body is a process that in turn shapes our ideas about what literature is and the worlds they create facilitates a feminist intervention in renewed debates on world literature. I argue that each of the texts I analyse represent the world by starting with and returning to varied representation of the body. Thus, while

Braidotti argues that we lack “a social imaginary that adequately reflects the social realities we already experience” (Braidotti 2011`, 261), I argue that the texts analysed in this thesis offer new reflections on gendered identity and embodiment that do, in fact, reflect contemporary experience and engender new figurations of subjectivity. In other words, this thesis is interested in materialism, gendered embodiment and the literary expression of these processes in figuring the female body.

The texts that will be analysed in the following author-specific chapters include The

Fifty Minute Mermaid by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (Ní Dhomhnaill 2007), Where Europe

Begins by Yoko Tawada (Tawada 2002), and Fig: Goan Atom 2 by Caroline Bergvall

6 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

(Bergvall 2005). As Bergvall’s work often spans different mediums, other recorded

versions of her work will be examined in conjunction with the printed text. Both The

Fifty Minute Mermaid and Where Europe Begins can be viewed as “born-translated” texts, a concept deployed by Rebecca Walkowitz (2009) and which I will discuss further in this introduction, while Bergvall’s texts explore translation as part of her practice as a performance poet. All of these texts are mobile, evident as translated texts and also in the cross-cultural representations they engender. These translational qualities differ across each writer’s work, but at times there are specific characteristics shared between them. For example, while format, language use, and narrative are different, representational strategies that figure the female body are similar in some ways, particularly in the way each writer revises cultural narratives and folklore, but this is not a rule. As translations they also raise questions on ontological and cultural integrity that relate to further debates on their place in national and world literary frames. Close analysis of these texts examines key thematic and physical attributes evident in each individual book that draw attention to, or adopt, translation. However, this doesn’t only result in close reading, but also incorporates a materialist approach that examines how each of these texts circulate in world literary space and engage in translational activities, ranging from dual language publication and exophonic writing to second language translation and the use of translation as a poetic vocabulary for the twenty-first century.

This materialist approach is further positioned in debates on world literature, genre and feminist theory as discussed in chapter one.

I apply a reading of materiality and embodiment to these works and contextualise this reading within the challenge these writers create to the authority of national genealogies

7 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature and traditional literary frameworks. Tawada is a migrant writer who moved to Berlin and regularly writes in German, and Bergvall is French-Norwegian born, lives in

London and writes in English. Ní Dhomhnaill also occupies an interesting position in the Irish literary landscape as an Irish language writer who was born to Irish parents in

England and moved to Ireland at the age of five. As Sneja Gunew has discussed in her work on cosmopolitanism, migrant writing, and postmulticulturalism: “Post- multicultural writers need to be given critical recognition as mediating figures that facilitate new relations between national cultures and the global” (Gunew 2015`, 81).

Therefore I argue that each of these writers’ start with and return to the body, and it is through embodiment that I identify new relations between the nation and the world. I have therefore positioned this analysis of the body in contemporary women’s writing in

‘world literature’ due to what I see as an important connection between women’s writing and transnational considerations of literary value, production and reception.

While this introduction explains the argument I make for the analysis of the body, chapter one examines the production and reception of contemporary work by women writers in world literary space with specific attention to the intersection of gender and genre. This focus on the body is thus situated within a further consideration of the relationship between subjectivity, corporeality, identity and representation in literature and, as such, is more interested in the processes of representation than a history of world literature. To facilitate further understanding of the way in which contemporary women’s writing circulates in world literature, this research situates world literature in relation to the representation of the female body and the way texts by contemporary women writers are written. In other words, the types of representations they engender and how these texts travel thematically. A reading of literary worlds in contemporary

8 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature women’s writing reveals an embodied world in which the specificity of the female body, in particular, is an important site.

The aim of this research is twofold; first, it analyses how gender influences world literature by examining the production, reception and translation of texts by contemporary women writers; and second, it adopts a new materialist framework to reinterpret translated texts according to what I see as a shared metaphorics that are gendered and intimately connected to the representation of the female body. This research will ask questions about the types of networks that are established by these texts in world literary space, how the texts negotiate and engage with different national genealogies of literature, how the multilingualism of a text can affect assumed hierarchies in literary analysis that rely on the national singularity of a work, and will discuss the visibility of translation. One of the issues that this research acknowledges and seeks to address is the limited analysis of the body and its varied representations in world literature. In considering translation and world literature, and how these interconnect with one another as discourses that structure and are structured by the materiality of the body, a gendered ontological discourse that upholds cultural assumptions of authorship, authenticity and originality is also evidenced. In line with this research on the ontological status of translation, the body emerges as a trope that situates the same question of ontology but realigns this with the representation of the female body. Interestingly, ‘translation’ becomes a connecting theme that bridges close reading and the larger sociological analysis of translation in the twenty-first century many of the texts I analyse adopt translation as a representational category. The

9 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature thematisation of translation brings into relief its problematic relationship to traditional conceptions of female gender and the cultural ontology of texts.

This research began its life quite differently as a thesis on world poetry. However, its trajectory was irrevocably influenced by the recognition of women writers as an important area in need of further study in world literature; as Debra Castillo asks, “if we fully accept the implications of the fact that the world is 51% female and 10 percent

LGBT, and Caucasian men are a distinct minority everywhere, how would one theorise a world literature written from this perspective?” (Castillo 2012`, 394). To begin with, further attention to how gender is a structuring principle in world literary space, in the way gender discourse inscribes literary value and often marginalises works by women, is crucial to theorising world literature. This approach centralises gender, but a reading of gender difference needs to be further problematised in this transnational context.

However, I also recognise that to adopt ‘women’ as the focus of analysis is deeply problematic. Past use of the term has sometimes led to essentialising frameworks that situate woman as a singular subject. Yet as many feminist theorists have pointed out, the term ‘women’ has also provided a useful mobilising principle for scholarly work on women’s literature and to deny it entirely can lead to a limitation for the analysis of gender and potentially repeat the exclusion of women from literary history. In light of this, it is important to problematise the singularity of the term and to open it up further to new modes of interpretation. As Barbara Shollar and Marian Arkin have highlighted, gender identity itself is fluid: “The definition of gender is no longer a single, unified field. It is not a monolithic category into which women must fit themselves or their art… [instead gender is a] polysystem, a multiplicity of ideas and ways of being that

10 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature constitute the female” (Arkin 1989`, xxxiv). This means a single gendered world literature is impossible as ‘women writers’ is a composite body that evades categorisation as it is politically invested in multiplicity.4 Furthermore, as a feminist politics of location stipulates, the aim is to deconstruct any essentialist application of the term ‘women’. The aim, then, is to centralise gender but also to establish self-reflexivity in this debate within a transnational framework.

In this transnational and intersectional frame of reading applying the ‘women’ in women writers to open up the term beyond a binary opposition is possible. As DuPlessis states, “It’s plausible that a focus on “women” instead of “gender” allows actually for greater attention to intersectionality, multiple mediating factors of the socio-political and social location” (DuPlessis 2007`, 11-12). This claim arouses a certain interest in how the term ‘women’ can be applied in literary studies today, without reducing our analysis to monolithic identity politics or singular female literary traditions that can be exclusionary. In recognising this, my research questions shift from, ‘How do contemporary women writers figure the female body? How do they represent the world?’ To: how can this analysis reflect the varied ways women writers challenge the construct of gender? Why do many women writers negotiate the body as the site of this encounter between perception and experience of the world? This change reflects further complexity in this analysis that is designed to facilitate multiple answers to these questions rather than one, which would over simplify the space of women’s writing. To answer these questions, I’ve adopted an interdisciplinary framework that combines

4 To perform this multiplicity, the three writers chosen for this thesis, Bergvall, Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill, are significantly different from one another in crucial ways, such as location, language, identity, genre, and their approach to writing. That embodiment (and the representation of different bodies) is a shared trope across each writer’s body of work points to the significance and importance of analysing embodiment and gender within the transnational framework this thesis proposes. 11 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature gender and feminist theory with literary studies. This framework positions this thesis in feminist literary theory, which is the central framework for the study of contemporary women’s writing that is the focus of the following chapters. However, it also borrows quite often from social theory on gender and embodiment, and contemporary transnational frameworks in literary studies such as translation studies and world literature. I offer an overview of this intersection in the following pages of the introduction to formulate the specific subject of analysis: translation and the female body. To this end, the combination of world literatures and transnational feminisms has proved useful in emphasising the openness and multiplicity necessary for my focus on women writers and transnational frameworks.

This research focus on the body came later when it became clear that the three authors

I’ve chosen for this research, Caroline Bergvall, Yoko Tawada and Nuala Ní

Dhomhnaill (as well as many others who could not be included), situate the body as an important site of representation in their writing. I was initially hesitant to focus on the body as I did not want to reproduce an essentialist framework that ties woman to body; my concern was that a focus on the body in literature by women could be read as essentialising their work, in the sense that carrying out this analysis would redeploy a biological determinism that is unfortunately seen as readily applicable to women’s writing across literary history. This led to further consideration of embodiment in literary studies, which led me to understand that to ignore the body and the corporeality expressed by these writings would be considerably worse. I realised my initial disregard for the importance of the body was a result of my situation in a field that, outside of critical work on the body in feminist literary theory and postcolonial studies, has often

12 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature dismissed it as insignificant: “The status of the body within the dominant Western intellectual tradition has largely been one of absence or dismissal” (Price 1999`, 1).

From this realisation, it became clear there was a need for the scholarly research that is the focus of this thesis, on world literature, on women writers, on the body - or risk perpetuating the exclusion of which I myself was critical.

From this focus on gender and the body, debates on specificity and the transnational in world literature are further complicated. This analysis of the body in contemporary women’s writing privileges specificity in two interconnected ways; first, feminism has shown us that specificity demonstrates an engagement with gender difference when applied through an intersectional approach that is deeply embodied and social; second, specificity in this research also refers to the close reading of a text in literary studies. It is in this space of close textual analysis that the body is offered up in all its difficulty to the reader, but more importantly it is a combination of close analysis, feminist theory, and the transnational register of world literature that allows me to construct a reading practice appropriate for reading the body in transnational women’s writing in the twenty-first century. In accordance with Susan Stanford Friedman, “I want to argue for a global and polycentric framework for thinking about women’s writing, one that does not deny the Anglo-American significance but that puts that particular body of writing within a global epistemology which recognises multiple centers, transnational circulation, and agencies, and radically different agendas depending on geohistorical standpoints” (Cvetkovich 2010 et al., 253). Further to this, I want to put the body in writing to explore how materiality shapes the particular space of literature.

13 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Another aspect of this research on transnational women’s writing focuses on translation.

There is a significant gap in literary criticism that requires the study of contemporary literature in response to translated texts; one that does not assume ontological integrity and instead questions invested discourses of originality.5 To facilitate an understanding of short texts in translation, beyond these assumptions of ontology, this thesis will examine poetry and short stories by Bergvall, Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill that circulate through translation and will analyse the processes through which this occurs with attention to genre and gender as structuring principles. By choosing to analyse these translated collections of short texts this thesis will avoid adhering to traditional relationships between the ‘original’ and the ‘translation’ that sometimes influence approaches to world literature studies. By focusing on the body it became clear that herein lies an interesting connection between translation and gender that is relative to further discussions of the ontology, materiality and embodiment, which has provoked a connection between materialist frameworks of literary production in the twenty-first century in the concept of “born translated” literature and the body of the female author

(Walkowitz 2009). The subject of originality, translation and gendered identity is discussed further in chapter three, in my reading of Caroline Bergvall’s performance poetry that examines female identity and writing. Identity is posed as a question in each of Bergvall’s texts, which anticipates a writing project beyond the dialectic of

5 Scholars are pursuing this line of enquiry through an analysis of ‘unoriginality’. For example, Rebecca Walkowitz’ essay “Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New World Literature” analyses the representation of translation. This reading of gender and translation also builds from work in feminist literary studies on the subject of translation and women’s writing. See page 44 for further discussion of this field. 14 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature originality and authorship, copy and translation, that are themselves categorical markers that uphold gender norms.6

In my close analysis of the female body in texts by Bergvall, Tawada and Ní

Dhomhnaill, I have found a common thread in the centrality of the body as a trope that is also relative to each writer’s careful consideration of the languages in which they write. In texts by Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill, the female body becomes a site where cultural (and national) politics of language are witnessed as problematically gendered.

The representation of the body and language is inseparable in these works. Close analysis of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry and Tawada’s short stories reveals a shared consideration of language, often in response to its gendered, social politics that is intimately connected to the representation of the female body. Tawada’s short stories, in particular, readily engender embodied representations that are performed through an engagement with the metaphorics of translation, which is deeply connected to her relationship with the language she chooses to write in (and the emphasis on choice is key here). Translation isn’t only a factor in the sense that they are translated texts, as is the case for works by Ní Dhomhnaill and Tawada, but also in the way that translation becomes a gesture and a theme to writing as is evident in Bergvall’s poetry where she adapts translated texts and ‘sutures’ them together. The inclusion of Bergvall’s poems

(who incorporates translation into her practice as a performance poet and is the only writer who chooses to write in English) broadens my approach to translation within the

6 Furthermore, the focus on the short form (as discussed in chapter one) also identifies a new space for the gendered analysis of genre in world literature and raises key sociological questions on the production and reception of short texts by women writers.

15 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature rubric of world literature by allowing this research to examine experimental forms of writing and how language inhabits the body more closely.

Redefining world literature in the twenty-first century

World literature is an area of study that has experienced resurgence in recent years and reframes the analysis of literature within a transnational context. As a transnational approach to literature, it can reveal what a national paradigm can make harder to see

(Ramazani 2009`, 39). In this regard, world literature can be adopted as a space in which to carry out the analysis of contemporary literature in response to changes in the fabric of social space in the twenty-first century, influenced by the migration of people, the movement of literary culture and languages across national and linguistic borders, the subsequent rise of multilingualism, and the influence of new media. I find each of these factors as relevant to texts by Bergvall, Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill. Thus, as I will discuss further, I adopt world literature as a framework that is particularly attuned to questions surrounding the mobility of literature as cultural objects through sociological analysis of the production and reception of texts accordingly.

As it stands today, world literature does not have a single definition that can be used to describe it and its application varies, depending on whether critics decide to use it as a framework for reading, or as a discrete canon of literary objects that highlight processes of literary exchange. Familiar concepts, such as hybridity and multilingualism, have appeared in recent years as if a realisation of a world literature that is (historically and currently) still unfolding. This realisation of world literature is not only evident in the

16 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature ways texts move and circulate, but also in how literary forms evolve and take on new shapes (a subject of recent interest to contemporary literary criticism where ‘mobility’ is a popular term). David Damrosch, a leading scholar in world literature, defines it to this end. He argues that world literature is not an “infinite canon”, but rather “a mode of circulation and of reading” (Damrosch 2003`, 5). This mode is applicable to larger materialist frameworks as well as the analysis of single literary works, a national literature or an author’s oeuvre. Although many people still seek a single definition of world literature, its variability can be considered a positive characteristic due to the multiplicity this openness has generated for analytical frameworks and new methodologies. However, to suggest that leaving the term ‘world literature’ open to various methods equates to less restriction is naïve and often leads to a situation where it is either sociological analysis of markets or close reading in some form, with the latter closely mirroring comparative literature studies, whereas I would combine both.

As this research is on transnational women’s writing, the way in which world literature has been adopted as a framework that overcomes the limitations of national categories in the context of globalisation is of particular interest. In a presentation he gave at the

American Comparative Literature Conference in 2011, Damrosch argued that the role of world literature studies is to “shake comparative literature out of its dogmatic slumber, to critique its nationalist self-involvement and to really push back against the market at every opportunity” (Damrosch 2011`, 463). As such, Damrosch positions world literature in opposition to the nationalist connection exhibited in comparative literature studies. Similarly, Walkowitz has also argued that both national and comparative fields

“trade in national categories and assume the ontological integrity of a given

17 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature text” (Walkowitz 2009`, 568). These arguments reflect the possible contribution world literature studies can make to literary analysis as an approach that can supplement national literary frames and the insularity of national literatures; as a supplement to national literary analysis, world literature asks us to look anew at the status of translation and the ontology of literature that is traditionally reified by the nation state and highlights the connection between the symbolic and the political, and accordingly, how national literatures are constructs used to uphold the borders of nation they help define. The way ‘world’ broadens configurations of the nation raises certain questions for the analysis of transnational women’s writing: How is cultural exclusivity generated and performed by national literary structures to construct traditional genealogies of literature? Are these structures relevant in our transnational age? The dissociation from a static category of nation emphasises the different networks and cross-pollination generated by texts that are mobile.

For example, as I discuss in chapter three, Yoko Tawada’s short story collection Where

Europe Begins (Tawada 2002) complicates a straightforward national frame for analysis. Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960 and later settled in Germany in 1982. She writes in both German and Japanese and, as an English language collection, Where

Europe Begins includes translations from both languages. The network this text creates necessitates a reconsideration of literary frames due to its participation in multiple literary traditions, emphasised by the interesting literal transposition of linguistic codes between Japanese and German languages that occur in Tawada’s short stories. Although her fiction does not adhere to a singular national frame, however, it still participates in both German and Japanese locales and intersects with the literary traditions of these

18 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature nations: Tawada has been well received in both literary circles, she has received the

Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Goethe medal, and was awarded the best book of the year by the Times Literary Supplement in 2005 (Tawada

2006). As such, Tawada’s short stories do not bypass the nation but cause us to reconsider how these two national spaces connect and intersect. The transnational method adopted for this research has allowed an approach that reads the English translation of Tawada’s stories in a way that considers both national and world literary spaces in this regard. This form of reading requires a consideration of translation, as translation is a crucial aspect of the movement, reception, and even thematic concerns of Tawada’s texts that engenders this blurring of national boundaries.

However, applying world literature as a term that identifies itself by the movement of texts is also problematic for literary analysis as it suggests that it is only comprised of works that move beyond a singular culture of origin. Here, the gesture to the canon and national frameworks is obvious and along with it comes a performance of neo-colonial values that continue to structure world literary space and provide a platform for the dominance of English language as a world language. As Stephen Clingman discusses further in his definition of ‘transnational fiction’: there is more than one way to view the movement of literature and we do not have to be limited by the movement of texts through translation as a way to formulate how literature is a world (Clingman 2009). He suggests that “we should distinguish between books that travel as objects – imported across borders, circulating as texts – and those that travel in the way they are written” (Clingman 2009`, 9). I am very interested in this latter definition of transnational fiction, which falls in line with my own aim to examine the translation of

19 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature contemporary works by women writers and the representation of the female body in this research.

There is an interesting conflation between the two terms ‘transnational’ and ‘world’ in this reference to the movement of literary culture that Clingman addresses above. The connection between world and transnational is interesting as it performs, in a way, the problematic shape of world literature as ‘one’ space (in the singular) while

‘transnational’ infers a movement beyond national space and suggests a connection between them. This configuration of translational is both problematic and useful as, on one hand, ‘transnational’ envisions multiplicity in a crisscrossing of world space, but on the other, it clearly relies on the position of the nation-state. Transnational in this sense takes its meaning from Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s definition of the term, which defines transnational as “a space of exchange and participation” recognising it as part of the processes of globalisation (Lionnet 2005`, 5-6). This definition of transnational promotes an engagement with the national that is “inflected by a transnationality” (Lionnet 2005`, 5-6). Lionnet and Shih’s definition resonates with a similar application of transnational in recent feminist theory. As Carole McCann and

Seung-Kyung Kim state, transnational refers to the “the literal movement of people, ideas, and resources across national boundaries. At the same time when used to refer to persons, it evokes the processes and experiences of crossing geopolitical borders and identity boundaries” (McCann 2010`, 3) and identifies a mutual recognition of the transnational as having personal and sociological effects. Contemporary world literature studies (by which I mean work carried out in the last ten years) more closely aligns with the multiplicity opened up by this image of the transnational as Lionnet and Shih

20 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature describe, and which look to complicate ideas of singularity or oneness in world literature.

While world literature clearly resonates with our current global context as a useful transnational framework for literary analysis, the term was first used in the nineteenth century. In 1827 Goethe heralded its arrival: “National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” (Eckermann 1964). Goethe’s reflections on weltliteratur are the earliest examples in literary history, but his use of the term is varied. Broadly speaking, he emphasised a new cultural awareness between countries that he expressed as a system of cultural exchange. In this application of world literature there is a noticeable reliance on national literatures as discrete cultural spaces where nation-states participate in this form of exchange, therefore the concept of world literature is not divorced from the nation entirely but it does reconfigure the singularity of national identity. By the early twentieth century, however, Goethe’s cosmopolitan outlook for world literature remained unrealised and accounts of world literature by literary historians instead described “the literary production of discrete countries from a chronological point of view” (D'haen 2012`, 16). In other words, world literature became an accumulation of national literatures and formed an elite world literature canon that was Eurocentric in outlook, rather than a focus on the cross-pollination and exchange of literary forms that

Goethe had suggested.

A quick overview of English language publications on the subject of world literature evidences a renewal of the term at the turn of the twenty-first century in contemporary

21 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature literary analysis and raises certain methodological considerations that inform the direction of this chapter which looks to place the analysis of gender at its centre. The increase in publications on world literature began in 1994 with Reading World

Literature, edited by Sarah Lawall (Lawall 1994). Damrosch later published his article

“So Much to Read, So Little Time: But isn’t that the point?” (Damrosch 1999), shortly followed by his next article “World Literature Today: From the Old World to the Whole

World” (Damrosch 2000). In the same year Franco Moretti published “Conjectures on

World Literature” (Moretti 2000) in the New Left Review, which instigated a dialogue that directly involved key scholars Christopher Prendergast (Prendergast 2001),

Jonathan Arac (Arac 2002), and Emily Apter (Apter 2003), among others, locating the discussion on world literature within American comparative literature departments. In

2001 Wai Chee Dimock published her article “Literature for the Planet” (Dimock 2001), a precursor to her book Through Other Continents (Dimock 2006). Pascale Casanova’s influential work The World Republic of Letters added fuel to the debate (Casanova

2004). The influx of these publications began an influential conversation on the hermeneutics of world literature, one that still reverberates within discussions on the

‘how’ of world literature. As Moretti wrote, “the question is not really what we should do – the question is how. What does it mean, studying world literature?” (Moretti 2000).

I raise the methodological question posed at this time to highlight the lack of gender analysis from this period of scholarship.7

This research does not adopt the same method of analysis that critical works such as

Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters offer (2004), which specifically traces the

7 In response to the lack of gender analysis, this chapter offers transnational feminist theory as a new intervention in the field. 22 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature circulation of literary texts within the context of national dominance in world space. In

Casanova’s book, world literary space is constructed according to a model of periphery and centre, where France and America (or more specifically, Paris and New York) are the centres of literary capital, which I have found limiting for my own analysis. The construction of world space in this model maintains a reliance on the nation in determining the structures of circulation and dominance, in accordance with Emmanuel

Wallerstein’s world-systems approach that Casanova adopts in her analysis of literary culture. This method has been criticised due to the generalisation that occurs in the supposition of a single historical setting for literature. Not only is this method problematic for the temporal setting it situates, but classic world-system theory has also been criticised at length for representing monolithic groups rather than the multiply constituted. For example, “gender is often left out or oversimplified not only in

Wallerstein’s analysis but in the work of political economists in general” (Grewal 1994`,

10). The adoption of Wallerstein’s model for a world literature brings with it these same problems for the study of literature and continues to evade the politics of gender due to this investment in universals. As Bill Ashcroft argues in his essay titled Transnation,

“the construct of centre and periphery… continues, after Wallerstein, to maintain its hold on our understanding of the structure of global relations” (Ashcroft 2010`, 73). As

Ashcroft argues, the globalism of the twenty-first century undermines a centre and periphery model in preference for fluidity that takes the nation as an “open cultural site” and I am particularly interested in new formulations of the nation that are receptive to changes in the circulation and reception of texts in the twenty-first century (Ashcroft

2010`, 73).

23 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

My approach to contemporary women’s writing is influenced not only by contemporary feminist theory and what I recognise as a lack of critical engagement with gender and the subject of women writers in contemporary world literature studies, but also by recent changes in the critical approach to world literature that recognise the inadequacies and problems literary criticism is faced with when attempting such large scale ‘world’ analysis. World literature is a contested site in this regard as critics have rightly argued that a general world literature does not adequately situate the breadth that constitutes world literature. In a departure from the centre and periphery model alternative formulations of a world literature influenced by postcolonial and transnational studies have emerged. In answer to Moretti’s question on the ‘how’ of world literature, these new formulations demonstrate a shift away from the large-scale principles that founded the world-system of literary inequality and have instead focused on the position of marginalised literatures and writers, adding depth and a critique of the neo-colonial hegemony of the west within an articulation of world literary space. As

Firat Oruc argues, “globality, transnationality, and comparativity in literary studies can hardly be achieved by simply arranging texts from different parts of the world on a linear plane” (Oruc 2011`, 51). Instead of a singular system, or ‘world’, critics have adopted a pluralistic attitude that is evident in their critical vocabulary on the subject.

In temporary answer to this, some scholars have focused on formulating a pluralised

‘world literatures’ that is able to denote the ‘particular’ in order to resolve this inadequacy. For example, in 2003 Damrosch suggested “literature in general and world literature in particular” when discussing the three different approaches that he argues can be used in the study of world literature (Damrosch 2003`, 9); John Pizer also refers

24 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature to the ‘particular’ in his discussion of pedagogics in 2007, in which he raised a dialogue between the universal and the particular as an important principle in teaching world literature to undergraduates so that they may understand the two possible interpretive extremes available to them, the universal that “homogenizes literature”, or the particular that allows “recognition of alterity” (Pizer 2007`, 22-23); In 2010, Wang Ning argued

“we should have both world literature in general and world literatures in particular”, resulting in the interesting pluralisation that Ning adopts as a relativist attitude toward literatures from all countries (Wang 2010). As Ning suggests, mentioning world literatures in the plural allows for “different representations, including translations, of literatures from all countries” (4). Unfortunately, Ning does not take this any further and instead focuses on the singular world literature, which to her refers to a universal criterion that evaluates literature of the “greatest world significance” (Wang 2010).

This shift towards the particular navigates the difficult tension between universalism and cultural relativism. World, in this articulation of the plural world literatures, becomes the geographical map that various literatures occupy, a symptom of a literary culture still defined by single nation genealogies. At the same time, the complexities of world are highlighted in this new articulation of its spatialised metaphor. This internalisation of the particular is an important dimension of world literatures that demonstrates a plurality that has become invested in discussions in recent years, emerging from early questions on a methodology of world literature at the start of the twenty-first century, as I have mentioned, that largely focused on a world literature in

‘general’ terms and build from world-systems theory. As Oruc states, these conceptions of world literature “do not address the ways in which world literature is also about

25 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature representing individual or collective subjects actively engaged in imagining their being- in-the-world” (Oruc 2011`, 52). This representation of the individual or collective subject ‘being-in-the-world’ is where the focus on close reading of works by women writers and how they represent the world offers further intervention in the field of world literature. This research, therefore, borrows from a new approach that re-centralises close reading within world literature that departs from the centre and periphery model that was popular at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Recent approaches to world literature often seek to augment this world methodology by creating a combination of micro and macro, close and distant, readings in response to the ongoing struggle against western hegemony in world literature studies and read outside a canonical and imperial view of literature. I believe that the critical texts I have outlined so far draw attention to the translation and reception of literary texts as they highlight the multiple reading positions available to critics within world literary space.

Other interpretive methods this research draws from include comparative work in the analysis of multiple translations that exist in different locations, and the reception of these texts. More interestingly, those critics that de-emphasise the ontological integrity of the ‘original’ language text, confront the construct of the term ‘literature’, and who find ways to situate close reading within global frameworks offer a new perspective on world as a category for literature. I apply this as a way to examine transnational women’s writing and to analyse the representation of corporeality.

Necessitated by the need for a reappraisal of world literatures limitations and its utopian gesture towards the universal, new interpretations of world literature are required. These

26 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature interpretative frameworks called for new outlooks on old terms - ‘world’, being one of them, ‘literature’ being the other. They also took issue with the premise of distance that many studies of a singular world literature implied. It is more promising, as Emily Apter suggests in her article “Global Translatio”, to find a method with a sustainable global reach that still enables a textual closeness (Apter 2003). Close reading in this sense would enable the researcher to trace the movement of influence beyond the analysis of markets, and to instead approach the exchange of ideas that Goethe’s Weltliteratur first described. This results in an analysis that is better equipped to address the limitations of world literature, as it would encompass reciprocal exchange between countries rather than an unequal account of world space.

In his essay “The Dimensionality of World Literature”, Haun Saussy criticises the spatial configuration of world literature studies. He argues: the renewed field is largely two-dimensional in its approach to literature. “The conversation about world literature is threatened, to a literary mind, by one thing: platitude… the supposition that literature can be mapped in two dimensions, or that nothing more than a plane surface is required to capture what matters most about literature” (Saussy 2011`, 289). In other words, the field does not adequately engage with the text through close reading which offers an alternative register through which to approach ‘world’. World literature becomes precarious as a method of literary analysis as it evokes a global perspective through the term ‘world’, which demonstrates a breadth that no single scholar can claim for themselves. Further to this point, the risk of omission far outweighs the breadth a methodology such as distance offers. Scholars who apply the term to identify an international canon or a single world literary history ignore the very fabric of literature.

27 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

As Saussy points out, “it ignores something that literature says, repetitively and obsessively, about itself under all skies and climates: namely, that literary experience negates determinate space and time… “World literature” here utterly fails to recompose as the equivalent of “literary worlds” (Saussy 2011`, 292). In this context, the text itself remains a neglected register in world literature studies as the term “literature” becomes the “historical, sociological, or geographical subordinate of the “world” (Saussy 2011`,

294).

As Saussy claims, deriving world from literature rather than determining literature by the “world” we situate it within (keeping in mind the subjective application of both categories) would result in an unravelling of worlds rather than a predetermined universal space - leading to multiplicity, rather than platitude (Saussy 2011`, 294).

Platitude is the methodological objection to the scale and scope of world literature as a spatial analysis. This critique of world literature speaks to a broader issue of close reading in contemporary literary studies. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis states, “It’s hard to avoid the observation that much (though not all) critical work [in literary studies] that has a social torque… can be dim or flat on what one might call, in tautological desperation, the textiness of the text. Issues of convention and its torquing, genre and genre mixage, modes of representation, imagery, connotation and denotation in language”, the list of possible considerations for textual analysis goes on” (DuPlessis

2007`, 11-12). When we reapply the question of the text’s position in world literature studies as this thesis does, we reopen the subject of representation in a transnational framework. What does literature tell us about the way we imagine the world and our place in it?

28 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

The centrality of the text and close reading is important for two reasons, firstly its antithesis, distance, has serious conceptual flaws for the study of literature as it subsumes difference within a general system. As Spivak argues in Death of a

Discipline, “the worlds systems theorists upon whom Moretti relies… are…useless for literary study - that must depend on texture” (Spivak 2003`, 108). For Spivak, texture refers to the status of language learning in comparative literature and her avowedly anti- translation stance. While I agree that distance does override the texture of literature that lies in close reading, I would also argue for the importance of close analysis of translated texts as a productive register for world literature scholarship. The close analysis of translated texts remains important because a study of translated texts recognises new anglophone readerships and raises the important sociological question, what gets chosen for translation and why?

Wai Chee Dimock also refers to the loss of the text in her 2006 essay Genre as World

System. She writes, “Unlike close reading, distant reading is meant to track large-scale developments; it is not meant to capture the fine print. Moretti does not worry too much about this. According to him, “if the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases where one can justifiably say, less is more”… Is this really true? Is the loss of the text a price worth paying in order to project literature onto a large canvas?” (Dimock 2006`,

90). In this thesis, the text is the object of analysis (as suggested by its format, with three individual chapters focused on the close reading of texts). Close reading is promising as it offers the possibility of locating larger frames of reading, such as those that encompass networks and constellations that identify transnational connections often

29 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature encompassed by the term distance but though close reading more attention to the local and the “finer” detail is made possible. As Dimock states:

These two - finite parameters and infinite unfolding - go hand in hand. The latter

is embedded in the former, coiled in the former, and can be released only when

the former is broken down into fractional units. For it is only when the scale gets

smaller and the details get finer that previously hidden dimensions can come

swirling out. Scalar opposites here generate a dialectic that makes the global an

effect of the grainy (88-89).

As Dimock argues here, inverting the global scale of world literature to focus on the finer detail offers new possibilities for analysis. She suggests “feedback loops between the very large and the very small”, adapted from fractal geometry, benefit literary studies as it identifies deviation across ‘the large’ that is repeated within the ‘very small’, leading to new ways to interpret the world. I read this as a suggestion of the ways the global can be found in the local and as a caution against situating binary relationship between these two ‘extremes’. The method of close reading employed in this research borrows from Dimock’s attention to detail and reapplies this focus on the specific and the grainy within a transnational feminist framework to analyse gender and the representation of women’s bodies. As I will discuss further in chapter one, transnational feminism examines material and discursive locations of gendered embodiment to figure connection and difference. Also, it raises positionality (as inscribed by a feminist politics of location) as an ethical consideration for the scholar, which enables more reflection on the situation in which criticism is positioned.

30 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

For this research, the materialist mapping of world literary space needs to be situated within this feminist politics of location. As Braidotti argues, a politics of location “refers to a practice of dialogue among many different female-embodied genealogies” (56).

Thus, location plays an important political function in intersectionality in feminist practice and seeks to establish awareness of one’s own embodied location; “a spotlight illuminating aspects of one’s material and discursive conditions that were blind spots before” (16). Grewal and Kaplan also argue that:

A transnational feminist politics of location in the best sense of these terms

refers us to the model of coalition or, to borrow a term from Edward Said, to

affiliation. As a practice of affiliation, a politics of location identifies the

grounds for historically specific differences and similarities between women in

diverse and asymmetrical relations, creating alternative histories, identities, and

possibilities for alliances (Grewal 1994`, 139).

This points to the complexities of a transnational framework for feminism that its self- reflexive approach seeks to address. Its emphasis on location also restates the importance of corporeality. When considering the methodology for this thesis it became clear that formulating an intersectional and open framework was crucial due to the focus on women writers, where gendered identity implied by the term ‘woman’ is fraught with a problematic essentialism. To avoid essentialising women’s literature, it therefore became important to formulate an intersectional methodology that is grounded in specificity, with the local remaining a central register for analysis that allows for a more

31 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature nuanced engagement with difference by incorporating a feminist politics of location. To facilitate this, I apply a transnational feminist framework to world literature to read the isomorphism between body and world.

Transnational feminist practices can help create a space for this conversation in dialogue with contemporary transnational concerns that impact the historical context these texts participate and circulate in. This framework acknowledges the inability of the term

‘woman’ to adequately represent any singularity in literary analysis and centralises an intersectional approach for the study of world literature and gender; as DuPlessis argues the “disaggregation of any overly-totalizing claims and meta-narratives about women or the texts of women is a goal” (2007, 5). Thus a combination of world literature and transnational feminism can inform a productive analysis of women writers in transnational space and also addresses the lack of analysis on gender in world literature studies. It can dislodge many of the problematic methodologies that support traditional value systems that overlook women’s texts, such as universalism. However, the usefulness of this combination is not one sided, as world literature can also potentially reduce the insular narrative of feminist literary studies and encourage further transnational connection for women’s writing and gender analysis as well as encourage new attention to the transnational.

Difference and specificity need to be the outcome and beginning point in this transnational feminist approach. As new accounts of transnational feminisms seeks to

“address the concerns of women around the world in the historicized particularity of their relationship to multiple patriarchies as well as to international economic

32 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature hegemonies” (Grewal 1994, 17) it is well situated to perform this intersectional analysis. Transnational feminist practices suggest politically mobile feminisms that take difference as the methodological prerequisite. As Grewal and Kaplan argue further, transnational feminism consists of a close comparative methodology that can be contrasted to ideas of global feminism that construct a theory of hegemonic oppression:

We seek creative ways to move beyond constructed oppositions without ignoring

the histories that have informed these conflicts or the valid concerns about power

relations that have represented or structures the conflicts up to this point. We need

to articulate the relationship of gender to scattered hegemonies such as global

economic structures, patriarchal nationalisms, “authentic” forms of tradition, local

structures of domination, and legal-juridical oppression on multiple levels

(Grewal 1994, 17).

This transnational approach to feminism has foregrounded the importance of social, cultural and political differences between women (Morton 2007, 124). In this, there is a connection between the aims of transnational feminism to establish a non-essentialist framework and Butler’s consideration of gender that is non-essentialist yet still politically mobile. Butler proposes a way to think through the ontological construction of identity that can be recognised in accounts of transnational feminism and which prove useful in reconceptualising the term ‘woman’ for the analysis of contemporary women’s writing. As Butler states:

33 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Within feminist political practice, a radical rethinking of the ontological

constructions of identity appears to be necessary in order to reformulate a

representational politics that might revive feminism on other grounds… If a stable

notion of gender no longer proves to be the foundational premise of feminist

politics, perhaps a new sort of feminist politics is now desirable to contest the

very reifications of gender and identity, one that will take the variable construction

of identity as both a methodological and normative prerequisite, if not a political

goal (Butler 1999, 8-9).

Both transnational feminism and Butler’s concept of gendered identity, and the ontological construction of this identity, share an interest in developing a framework that is not grounded in a common political identity. This disavowal of the singular would prove useful for any study of world literature that formulates a comparative methodology for the analysis of women’s writing and gender. Transnational feminism perhaps borrows from the early outline of a coalitional feminism as discussed by Butler and applies this to construct a transcultural model that is, most importantly, situated within the local. Furthermore, this opens up a new framework for close analysis that approaches corporeality as a social yet still embodied space by combining ontological experience with poststructuralist interpretation of identity. I draw a parallel between new materialisms and transnational feminisms at this intersection between women’s bodies and sociological space, and the construction of the gendered subject. The combination of the two can achieve the aim Butler suggests as new materialisms performs this radical rethinking of ontology and examines the variability of gendered identity.

34 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

In this argument positionality and materiality become the basis for the literary analysis as they are intimately connected within debates of intersectionality and specificity in feminist theory. It is also critical to explore and expand on this notion of materiality and materialism in literary studies. In this research there are multiple registers within which the material matters, including cultural materialism, the materiality of the signifier, and embodiment. By connecting literature with these alternate frames of materiality, a new methodological question is raised for world literary studies: How can we connect the sociological analysis of literature with close reading? In answer to this, I propose positioning ‘world’ and ‘literature’ beside one another to form a constellation where each term remodels the other, creating a constantly shifting basis for analysis that moves between sociological frames and close reading. In this constellation, meaning is created across materialist and imaginative registers in response to the text, rather than pushing the text into a pre-existing methodology. The shifting structure of analysis still posits openness as an ethical consideration but doesn’t condone a framework that results in homogenisation. Instead it is responsive to context and text, while also considering the location of myself as critic and as such is able to perform the feminist politics of location where awareness of ones own embodied location. Understanding how difference and connection is embodied is key to this intervention in world literature discourse.

The grammar of the female body

35 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Bergvall has often referred to Hans Bellmer’s surrealist photographs of dolls as a visual representation of her performance-writing in the English language, but this connection resonates also with works by Yoko Tawada and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. The violent and sexualised images of Bellmer’s dolls in various degrees of assemblage and disassemblage demonstrates what Bergvall calls a “grammar of the body” (Kinnahan

2011`, 248), meaning they figure the discursive construction of gender and embodiment within patriarchal culture. In these photographs the stability of this body begins to break down. They raise questions about female embodiment and its representation; about codified bodies and the construction of the subject; and about the limits of gendered representation. The corporeal emerges here as the site of inscription; as the ‘material beginning’ of signification within this system. I repeat this example of Bellmer’s dolls here to explain further my approach to the complex interplay of materiality, embodiment, and signification as feminist theory on corporeality has also explored previously.

As Elizabeth Grosz states in Volatile Bodies: “the body must be regarded as a site of social, political, cultural, and geographical inscriptions, production, or constitution. The body is not opposed to culture, a resistant throwback to a natural past; it is itself a cultural, the cultural, product” (Grosz 1994`, 23). Butler has also argued that the reiterative act of gender performativity creates the body: “what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most productive effect” (Butler 1993`, 2).

Not only is this account of the corporeal socially constituted, but it is also active in this

36 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature constitution through its orientation that, in turn, becomes materialised. Sara Ahmed advances this claim further:

Our body takes the shape of this repetition…The work of repetition is not

neutral work; it orients the body in some ways rather than others. The lump on

my finger is a sure sign of an orientation I have taken not just towards the pen-

object or the keyboard but also to the world, as someone who does a certain kind

of work for a living (Ahmed 2010`, 247).

Furthermore, Ahmed suggests that the body’s tendency or inclination towards some objects more than others is not causal (Ahmed 2010`, 247). Thus, lived experience and materiality cannot be ignored. Constructivist and materiality approaches to embodiment are not as divergent as one would initially presume. Rather, both simultaneously configure the body, as lived experience is dependent on social context, and vice versa.

This social context, in turn, is reflected in the varied ways that materiality is produced discursively. Tracing the female body in works by Bergvall, Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill this thesis analyses the connection between embodied representation and world, this idea of the ‘material beginning’ of signification and the system that shapes the female body. It also reappraises recent uses of the term world in literary studies and explores how gender shapes the transnational space of world literature. But, more than this, it argues for the importance of specificity in reading women’s writing within these transnational frameworks. The materiality of women’s bodies becomes even more important for analysis when we realise the significance of intersectionality and

37 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature embodiment, and the structural difference for the transnational framework implied by the category of world in world literature.

This consideration of matter is indebted to recent articulations of new materialism, a theoretical term that reconsiders embodiment and the material world. However, I question the newness of this ‘new’ materialism (as Sara Ahmed has also done) as the direction of my research has come to materiality by way of preceding accounts of the material in feminist theory. As Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price state, “feminism has long seen its own project as intimately connected to the body… what is different between this and dominant malestream approaches is that rather than a thoroughgoing disregard for things corporeal, feminism starts at least from a position of acknowledgement” (Price 1999`, 1). As such, there are many varied, sometimes contradictory, theories of corporeality in feminist theory. This thesis is invested in contemporary discourses on women’s bodies that identify the permeability of identity politics in the twenty-first century that deny binary thinking and reflect on our current trans-cultural situation through a consideration of materiality. This approach rethinks the very materiality of bodies but not according to a Butlerian conception of corporeality as constructed, although it does still draw attention to the ways in which embodiment is constituted socially. As Spivak states in an interview in 1989: “If one thinks of the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such. There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, and I certainly cannot approach it” (Rooney 1989`,

149). As a constituted body its own materiality begins to disappear. Nonetheless, the body is necessarily central to these processes of signification that determine it, calling

38 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature for a “new materialist predilection for a more phenomenological approach to embodiment”, which is where I position this research (Coole 2010`, 19). This approach to materiality is key to answering my two research questions: How do women writers figure embodiment? How do they represent the world? As Jennifer McWeeny also argues, “we need a concept that can admit the interplay of a being’s embodied experience and the ideological and practical systems that seek to define that body. This concept should also be able to account for bodily differences between beings without succumbing to homogenous or essentialist categorisations. It is here where phenomenology becomes particularly useful to feminism” (McWeeny 2014`, 275). I am interested in this deployment of the phenomenological to configure how the materiality of bodies is defined within a system and how this provides a way to incorporate difference. This interest in the varied ways bodies are produced discursively is the starting point for approaching the texts analysed in this thesis. The corporeal does remain outside the processes of signification that determine it, but it is how we understand the body shaped by these processes and how it, in turn, activates them and how materiality becomes an active player in this.

So far I have discussed the way corporeality is cohered by the material world in this reconsideration that new materialism makes on the embodied human and lived experience. As Coole and Frost state: “For critical materialists, society is simultaneously materially real and socially constructed: our material lives are always cultural mediated, but they are not only cultural. As in new materialist ontologies, the challenge here is to give materiality its due while recognizing its plural dimensions and its complex, contingent modes of appearing” (Coole 2010`, 27). In literary criticism,

39 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature this consideration of both material reality and social construction is still a difficult endeavour and the inclination remains to place reality in inverted commas (i.e. ‘the real’) to emphasis the construction of this concept itself. As such, debates on materialism in literary studies are necessarily complex.

I would therefore also like to explore the connection between materialism and close reading in a different way. I am here referring to the two often-opposing methodological approaches in literary studies. The first asserts the value of literature as part of cultural studies – “on its relation to material reality”, as Nilges and Sauri explain, and which they refer to as “thin materialism”:

From globalization studies and sociological approaches to literature, through the

emphasis on multiethnic and comparative race studies indicative of cultural

studies, and to ecological literary criticism, countless commentators have argued

that the relevance of the literary and literary studies lies in the isomorphism

between text and culture, and particularly between the ways in which each

relates to the material world. (Nilges 2013`, 2).

This relates to cultural materialism, often referred to in this thesis through research on the production and reception of texts and attention to the sociological analysis of this materialist construct of transnational literary space. In other words, material reality.

Nilges and Sauri argue that this approach consolidates literature with every other cultural form and does not distinguish it as a discrete object (Nilges 2013`, 2-3). The

40 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature second position literary studies alternatively adopts rejects the first. It instead situates the autonomy of literary form as a way to safeguard the discipline and assure its future.

This safeguarding requires a “return to fundamental concepts of literary studies, and an emphasis on “literary readings” of literature (Nilges 2013`, 3). Nilges and Sauri argue that this defence of literary readings performs a safeguarding of the literary rather than reducing literature to sociological evidence. However, as they also point out, the downside of this is idealism. Both methods are important, yet each often fails to consider the other. However, the trick is to do both without falling into a basic mimetic framework. In response to this problem, Nilges and Sauri look for a third option which this thesis takes up: “The point, to be sure, will not simply be to advocate for one over the other, nor even to argue for a wholesale rejection of both, but rather to determine how we might maintain a commitment to both positions while avoiding the reduction of one to the other” (Nilges 2013`, 4).

I agree that a combination of both positions is useful for literary analysis and, in fact, find it necessary for world literature studies due to the relationship between the circulation of texts and the representations they engender. Furthermore, within a new materialist framework, the radical reappraisal of materiality it calls for requires more attention to how corporeality shapes and is shaped by the symbolic representation of gendered identity in texts (as ideology) and how the reading of these texts is in turn shaped by the body of the author who writes. This combination is especially pertinent to literature that travels and participates in the creation of new understandings of embodied subjectivities and which has the potential to transform and create new figurations in different local contexts. As DuPlessis argues, “It’s been my contention that condensed

41 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature moments of historical debate or the practices of ideology appear in (let’s say) clashes of image in a poem as well as in staged confrontations between allegory-laden characters in a novel” (DuPlessis 2007`, 12). As such, linguistic and formal mediations do not necessarily preclude questions of culture and society. More to the point, the relationship between the two is integral. Duplessis continues:

It has depressed me that the materialist/feminist reading of texts is only pallidly

interested in the materiality of the text itself, the materiality of the signifier.

Language uses (plus convention and structure and genre) are not nice clean

windows to look out of - they are part of what is there, part of the view. They

construct the view! Some would even say that they are the view, that there’s no

outside (DuPlessis 2007`, 12).

This research adopts the same attention to the materiality of the text through close reading. I also include in this close reading an analysis of how these texts by Bergvall,

Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill are translated and circulate as well as the important representation of women’s bodies that are evident. Attention to the short form as a genre with a particular relevance in the twenty-first century, which this thesis discusses in chapter one, also points to the necessary overlap of a materialist reading and the materiality of the text.

A connection between materialist and formal analysis of texts has been the subject of some debate in recent years. In her analysis of capital and subjectivity, Sarah Brouillette argues that the opposition between materialist approaches to literature and literary

42 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature aesthetics is a false dichotomy that overlooks how capital actually shapes this opposition. She argues: “The two approaches partake of a broader contradiction between the aesthetic and capital: literature cannot be reduced to any material determination, and yet its irreducibility is itself a product of the unique ways in which it is materially constituted” (Brouillette 2013`, 108). Indeed, this combined approach is useful in considering the ways authorship is constructed to exclude marginal subjects from categories of the literary and the aesthetic and is used to define genre constraints

(this is discussed further in chapter one of this thesis in an analysis of gender and genre). This same combination is necessitated by this research focus on corporeality, which raises further considerations on the overlap between these materialisms in its adopted frame of ‘body’ and ‘world’. This frame of body and world actually opens up the isomorphism of text and culture that Nilges and Sauri mention to include not only what they identify as ‘thin materialism’ (the sociological approach to literature) but also a corresponding materiality that operates through close reading. In other words, world and body shift between these two approaches to literature that they outline and creates a third approach that situates both through the different yet connected attenuations of materiality. This third approach is particularly evocative in my research as a way to analyse issues of gendered writing identity and the corporeality of the woman writer, which are reflected in the thematic concerns of some of the texts by Bergvall, Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill.

Due to the numerous questions a focus on women’s writing raises in regards to gender and genre I have chosen to focus on the short form - itself an important trigger for further questions on the circulation and production of women’s literature in the twenty-

43 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature first century. I take the short form as a genre that requires further attention in world literature and offers an important juncture in which to debate the rise of the short story in our technological age as a form that is particularly susceptible to digital mobility and is therefore becoming more accessible to contemporary readers. It is also a form that is attuned to the figuration of fragmentation and themes of mobility through the kind of concentrated attention to language it can convey. As such, the short form is a mode of writing that raises particular questions about the intersection of gender and genre for contemporary literature. As the subject is important to the following close reading I apply in each author-specific chapter, I dedicate chapter one to exploring the genre in the context of contemporary women’s writing and discuss how the short form, materiality, embodiment and the transnational are all interconnected.

The gendering of translation

Not only does the short form as an important genre inflect further consideration of the transnational at this current moment, but translation also situates the contemporaneous focus of this research. My approach to translation is invested in criticism that approaches translation in new ways in order to see its generative possibilities for literary analysis. I do not see translation or translated literature as the evil cousin of homogenisation although I am deeply aware of and sympathetic to marginalised literary traditions that experience structural inequality due to the dominance of English in local and transnational contexts (which my chapter on the Irish language poetry by Ní

Dhomhnaill reflects on in more detail). Rather than disregard translation due to these situations of marginalisation and potential erasure of minor languages that is a very real

44 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature threat to many, I see translation as having an even more important role to play in these contexts. Thus a current and effective analysis of English language translation is more important than ever.

This thesis is informed by this recognition of the increase in translation in the twenty- first century and positions itself in line with the new literary forms evident in

‘comparison literature’ in the transnational context of translation, as Walkowitz discusses (Walkowitz 2009). However, while there is an increase in translation practice and interest in translated texts in recent year, particularly evident in the founding of online literary magazines such as Asymptote, Words Without Borders and World

Literature Today, the number of books translated into English is still incredibly low.

Statistical analysis on publishing in the United States point to a 3% average in terms of the number of translated books published in English by US publishers, while a study conducted in the UK and Ireland in 2012 suggests a slightly higher level of translation practice at an average of 4% each year (Donahaye 2012).8 As the website Three

Percent, which tracks the US figures suggests, the number of literary translations within this statistic are even lower:

Unfortunately, only about 3% of all books published in the United States are

works in translation. That is why we have chosen the name Three Percent for

this site. And that 3% figure includes all books in translation—in terms of

literary fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7% ().

8 This average of 4% is the percentage of poetry, fiction and drama that is translation, not the percentage of translated texts overall. The number of literary translations in the UK varies each year and appears to be increasing. For example literary translations in 2007 were 4.37% and in 2008 4.59% (Donahaye 2012). 45 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

The Three Percent project also highlights the gender divide between works translated into English by female and male authors: the project found that only 33.19% of literary works by women were translated into English in the US in 2016. Ní Dhomhnaill and

Tawada, as writers translated by Irish and US Publishers respectively, are among the few women whose works are translated each year. Furthermore, the number of poetry collections to be translated into English only comes to 7.52% in comparison to the translation of fiction (as reflected in the US numbers). For a woman poet, the odds of having your work translated are very low.

In regards to this research on gender and corporeality, critical work in the field of translation studies, such as approaches discussed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and

Lawrence Venuti, have been helpful in understanding issues of cultural specificity.

However, as both Venuti and Spivak often disagree with the close reading of English language translations, this research departs from their work in this respect. However, this research does draw from Sherry Simon’s premise as set out in her book Gender in

Translation (Simon 1996). In this important text Simon combines feminist practice with translation studies and creates a change in perspective: instead of asking how one should translate Simon asks: “what do translations do, how do they circulate in the world and elicit response?” (Simon 1996`, 7). From this critical position, translation becomes the point from which new modes of cultural representation can begin in the target culture.

46 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

The analysis and close reading of translated texts has become a valid possibility for world literature studies and there are many recent publications that discuss translated texts. These publications generate readings of translated literatures in order to determine the mobility of a text (or texts) and to depict the ‘afterlife’ of a work as it moves beyond a single format of publication and begins to exist in multiple locations, or to exist in multiple locations from the outset as a born-translated text. As discussed earlier,

Walkowitz’ work on the subject of translation and world literature has emphasised the need for the analysis of texts in their many translations (Walkowitz 2009). In another of her essays, “Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New World

Literature”, Walkowitz performs an analysis of both the circulation of Ishiguro’s texts in world literary space and the translations through which this occurs (Walkowitz 2007).

It also provides an analysis of the principle of unoriginality that appears in Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go and also in his critical commentary on themes of translation and cultural uniqueness taken from some of his interviews (Walkowitz 2007).

The close reading of translated texts can be done in a way that acknowledges the text as a translation. An example of how a translation can be approached by analysing its existence in a different language can be seen in this reading of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem

“The Language Issue.”

I place my hope on the water

in this little boat

of the language, the way a body might put

an infant

47 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

in a basket of intertwined

iris leaves,

its underside proofed with bitumen and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst

the sedge

and the bulrushes by the edge

of a river

only to have it borne hither and thither,

not knowing where it might end up;

in the lap, perhaps,

of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem, “The Language Issue”, alerts us to the complexity of her multifarious poetics which cross-section national and transnational spaces. The complexity is hinged on several features that appear in the translation, which can be identified as destabilising patriarchal myths of female subjectivity, specifically in this poem that of the female poet. Online, on the pages of The Poetry Foundation website,

“The Language Issue” has been interpreted (in English) as an examination of Ní

Dhomhnaill’s decision to write in Irish, driven by a desire to reconnect the disenfranchised Irish language speaker with the poetics of this tradition. I do not dispute this interpretation, but a reading such as this arrives at its conclusion by acknowledging only the position of the Irish language original and conflates this with the meaning of the translated poem in a way that risks overlooking the obvious: namely, that this is a poem in English translation that reflects on the poet’s hope for Irish

48 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature language writing, a language that English has displaced since the sixteenth century. The translation positions the reader so that they must recognise the issues of translation for

Irish language poetry. This approach reiterates my argument that reading a translated text such as this with attention to the fact of its translation can draw new interpretations from a text.

Translated into English by Medbh McGuckian, the poem adapts the biblical tale of

Moses and his arrival, by basket, at the hands of the Pharaoh’s daughter – the reed- basket an analogy for the Irish language. In the poem Ní Dhomhnaill constructs the author’s position as distinctly feminine, as the mother figure that places her child in the basket. What the Irish language carries in this analogy is the poets “hope” for the future of a poetic aesthetic in Irish. This poem is simultaneously hopeful and uncomfortably ironic in English translation. The lines “only to have it borne hither and thither, / not knowing where it might end up” can be read as a self-conscious reflection on translation, the “hither and thither” a question of production and reception and the unknown site of reading positioned as “in the lap, perhaps, /of some Pharaoh’s daughter”, a subject who is possibly culturally and geographically distant, yet connected through the poem’s reception. An often-cited example of her work, “The Language

Issue” epitomises Ní Dhomhnaill’s technique of redeploying religious and cultural signifiers within a contemporary context and exemplifies her interest in the continuation of poetry in Irish. Reading this poem by way of recognising it as a translated text opens up further interpretation of local and transnational contexts. As Walkowitz states, “the effects of translation will depend on what is being translated and on what happens when

49 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature translated books are read. Moreover, the meaning of these effects will depend on how we evaluate sameness and difference” (Walkowitz 2007`, 216).

This thesis is substantially influenced by Walkowitz’s work on translation and world literature, which was for me the first to explore a connection between changes in the production and translation of literature in the twenty-first century and representational modes of writing, by which she means the types of representations within the text that reflect on themes of translation and language (Walkowitz 2009). Walkowitz has recognised a new complication for traditional models of literary history as what she calls “born-translated” books, or more broadly “comparison literature”, becomes more common in this day and age of multilingual contact and advanced technology. ‘Born- translated’ refers to books or digital works of literature that begin life in multiple languages simultaneously. As a new understanding of how translation occurs, born translated texts drastically reconfigure previous understandings of translation processes and how these translated texts circulate, such as Walter Benjamin’s claim that “a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the same time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life” no longer applies to all translated works of literature in the twenty-first century. As Walkowitz argues: “There are many novels, written by migrants and for an international audience, that exist from the beginning in several places” (Walkowitz 2009`, 573). ‘Comparison literature’ encapsulates this phenomenon and broadens it to encompass how this change in the translation of texts has produced literature that is arguably written for translation and, as such, places emphasis on “narrative over idiom” (Walkowitz 2009`, 573). Walkowitz writes:

50 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

“Comparison literature, then, as I imagine it, does emphasize narrative over idiom, but it uses that emphasis to explore the political history of languages in formal and thematic registers that can survive translation.9 In this way, comparison literature adapts the novel of transnational contact to an age of multilingual circulation” (Walkowitz 2009`,

570). This adaptation of narrative form in the context of multilingual circulation implies a hierarchy within translation practice, where narrative survives but idiom less so, if at all. This doesn’t so much suggest that comparison literature offers alternative narratives, but rather that the author is aware of future translations of her work and uses narrative as a strategy for translation. Walkowitz raises some important questions for contemporary literature: Does the anticipation of translation influence the writing? Are authors demonstrating a move towards formal and thematic registers as a way to write translatable works suited to global circulation? I consider these questions in the close reading of Bergvall, Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill’s texts and find that each writer engages with translation through the figuration of the female body.

As Walkowitz suggests, these sociological questions about gender and writing and the production of texts are not separate to the method of close reading, as formal and thematic registers are becoming increasingly important for writing in the twenty-first century as writers begin to anticipate the translation of their work. I apply this overlap between the sociological and the thematic to the analysis of female embodiment in the following author-specific chapters in two ways. First, the way each writer often introduces a self-reflexive position that engages with the subject of authorship and

9 My focus on theme and narrative as formal aspects that can survive translation is not to say that other strategies aren’t also available to writers. I am specifically interested in how translation becomes a trope that is reflexive of the writer’s position. Other strategies however also include incorporating elements of first-language in the translated text, which is evident in Tawada’s short stories in her use of literal- transposition of words and images from Japanese. 51 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature translation at the level of theme and narrative, and second, how the constructs of canonicity and genre shape the reading habits that form the reception and production of women’s texts. Thus, the foundation of this research, that the production and reception of translated texts are shaped by gender, builds from Walkowitz’s research on comparison literature to centralise gender within these ideas of born-translated texts and formal strategies for writing in the twenty-first century. For example, as I will discuss in chapter three on Tawada’s short story collections, texts by non-western women writers are often chosen for translation precisely for the representation they create as marketable objects suitable for cultural consumption ‘overseas’ (see chapter three on

Yoko Tawada).

For the texts analysed in this thesis, two are translated into English and across all three translation regularly appears at the level of theme, allegory, narrative and language in relation to gendered identity politics. My research shows that ‘world’ and ‘body’ are both highlighted at the intersection of perception and experience in the texts analysed in this thesis, which often borrows from a gendered metaphorics of translation to represent the female body.10 Translation is considered here as a space where meaning is difficult and indeterminate but simultaneously relies on interpretation that is itself an ideological constraint of originality. As Haun Saussy writes, “texts are always trying to escape from their cultures, and when a reader encounters a text from a different culture, the same thing happens in a different way. The flickering of uncertain reference is also the wobbling of the “world,” as a single conceptual framework” (Saussy 2011`, 293). In this age of multilingual contact, translation occupies a position between worlds. When held

10 See chapter three for further discussion of this gendered metaphorics of translation in my reading of Yoko Tawada’s short stories. 52 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature up in relation to one another, world and body reveal certain things about translation and contemporary women’s writing, particularly regarding the representation of the female body, and this thesis explores the connection between them as an ontological

(re)shaping of a kind that speaks to the feminist concept of the lived body.

The typical avoidance of translated texts and its continued relegation to the status of copy is informed by a preoccupation with the ontology of literature, which as David

Damrosch argues, harbors a “romantic obsession with fidelity to the quasi-sacred original” (Damrosch 2012`, 426). However many critics are now analysing translated literatures in a way that usefully acknowledges the fact of their translation and I position this research within what I see as a new attention to translation in contemporary literary theory. Examples include “Transnational Criticism and Asian Immigrant Literature in the U.S.: Reading Yan Geling’s Fusang and it’s English Translation” by Wen Jin (Jin

2006), “A Knock at the Door: On the Role of Translated Literature in Cultural Image

Making” by Ieva Zauberga (Zauberga 2005), and “Writing as Translation: African

Literature and the Challenges of Translation” by Kwaku Addae Gyasi (Gyasi 1999).

Each of these articles discusses the translation of texts in regards to their circulation.

As Edith Grossman argues, “Where literature exists, translation exists. Joined at the hip, they are absolutely inseparable” (Grossman 2011`, 36). Grossman’s argument is not a misplaced claim given the prominence of translational activity in influencing many national literary traditions as shown by postcolonial theories of hybridity, for example, and the oft-cited claim that translation influences receiving cultures by introducing new formal qualities and transforming traditional ones and has gone on to shaped many

53 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature national literatures as a result. Grossman situates translation within a humanist claim however that finds that translation matters for the same reasons that literature matters –

“because it is crucial to our sense of ourselves as humans” (Grossman 2011`, 32).

However, let us unpack this connection that Grossman touches on between literary expression and humanism, as translation’s relationship to this goes a little deeper. As

Braidotti states in her book The Posthuman, “by human we mean that creature familiar to us from the Enlightenment and its legacy: the Cartesian subject of the cogito, the

Kantian community of reasonable beings” (Braidotti 2013`, 1). In the western philosophical tradition humanism, as we know due to this posthumanist reappraisal of the human subject, is an ideology we have inherited. What does this formation of the human subject have in common with translation? Grossman touches on this inherited sense of our own subjectivity as a basic unit of reference for the world and everything else in it when she privileges the human creative capacity and autonomy of individual expression as a way to validate literature and its translation (Grossman 2011). How we value literature, as original, for example, is relative to this sense of ourselves as Human.

The derivative status of translation is supported by this category of the human through its tie to originality (evident in the often dichotomous arrangement of original/ translation) and performs this humanist tradition.

Changes such as the migration and movement of people and languages across national borders and advances in new media and technology, have made literary constructs and methodologies obsolete and constricting in particular ways, especially regarding translation and new hybrid modes of writing that cross over different language groups and cultural contexts. Writing can be seen to push back against many of these traditional

54 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature constructs that have informed, shaped and defined literature to date. National frameworks, for example, can lead problematically to “single-nation genealogies” that overlook the importance of mobility in accounts of contemporary poetry, as Jahan

Ramazani has successfully argued (Ramazani 2006`, 332). The selective representation of women writers in (both national and world) literary canons can also shape our understanding of gender and writing by who is selected and where they are represented according to genre or theme. These specific considerations of women’s writing and canonicity are examined more closely in chapter one. However, issues of inclusivity and gender are reflected across the aims of this thesis and its analysis of the representation of the female body that introduces interesting figurations of translation as an embodied representation of the female subject that questions and undermines the co-option of the female body in national discourses.

If we continue to validate translation according to this reliance on humanism and national frameworks we risk overlooking other aspects of translational activity that are generative rather than relational. Perhaps, in this context, we would be better off reexamining unoriginality to find translation’s value in contemporary literary culture, as

I propose in my reading of Bergvall’s performance poetry in chapter two. As Marjorie

Perloff points out:

There is a significant difference between the function of the “foreign” citations

in The Waste Land and their role a century later in the global context of shifting

national identities, large-scale migration from one language community to

another, and especially the heteroglossia of the Internet. The writing of poetry

55 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

under these circumstances calls for a new set of language games (Perloff 2010`,

124).

At the same time it calls for a new approach to language, it necessitates a new approach to translation.

Further analysis on literary criticism’s reliance on hierarchical arrangements between original and translation have led me to consider the gendered metaphorics that have been traditionally assigned to situate translation as derivative. These metaphorics speak to a more pervasive situation where female embodiment is performed within them and connects the female body to translation in literary history, relying on the same gender binary that positions the female subject as derivative. As Sherry Simon has argued, the

“femininity of translation is a persistent historical trope” that continues to draw from images of inferiority that connect woman and translator and mark both as secondary within a hierarchy that upholds the masculine position of the author (Simon 1996`, 1).

The connection between the feminine subject and translation is furthered across literary history, epitomised by Yevgeny Yevtushenko: “Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful it is not faithful. If it is faithful it is most certainly not beautiful” (Simon

1996`, 1). Fidelity is the most persistent metaphor for translation and its persistence continues in the ongoing hierarchy that positions translation as inferior to the original, and links this symptomatic register of “reproduction” and “secondariness” with masculine and feminine imagery (Simon 1996`, 1). This gendering of the translated text as feminine is elaborated on further in my later discussion of Echo, the female figure for repetition. The recent arrival of feminist translation theory has aimed to identify and

56 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature critique this relegation of inferiority, argues Simon, and attempts to “trouble the structures of authority which have maintained this association” (Simon 1996`, 1).11

Feminist practices in translation have highlighted the performative quality of language that connects translation to these gendered forms of representation and have engaged with this subject since the 1980s. In Gender, Sex, and Translation: The Manipulation of

Identities (2005) Jose Santaemilia suggests that the troubling of authority at the heart of feminist translation theory adapts the idea of “manipulation” rather than “fidelity” as an appropriate metaphor for this type of translation practice: “Both manipulare and translatare share a common lexical ground: an artful adaptation, change, transformation, transmission” (Santaemilia 2005`, 1). These terms are synonymous with transgression, perversion, and subversion and still rely on a secondary position as they remain relative to the original, however, they incite a sense of agency in their playfulness with, or critique of, this relational position (Santaemilia 2005`, 1). As I argue in my chapter on

Bergvall’s poetry, it is from this position of manipulation that repetition with a difference can result.

Manipulation is a useful term for translation, especially feminist translation, since contemporary practices of translation are variously engaged with more troubling and manipulative strategies that depart from a copy/original dialectic. In her article

“Translation, Gender and Otherness” Susan Bassnett comments on a change in how the relationship between the original and the translation is viewed in postcolonial theory:

11 During the late twentieth century, a study of feminist translation developed in Canada where Quebecoise feminists (including Simon) focused on the power dynamics between language and gender. 57 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

“Translation, as a derivative art form, has often been compared with the colony, the derivative of the parent state… as post-colonial literary practice has developed, so also has thinking about translation, and in particular the right of the translator to put the need of the readers before those of the writer” (Bassnett 2005`, 88). Despite the negative valence of terms like manipulation and transgression, these practices have often resulted in a positive distillation of how difference operates in language and representation, and, more importantly, has identified the ways in which translation is a potentially transformative gesture for the representation of gendered and racialised subjects that can be reinterpreted due to its manipulation of the discursive construction of subjectivity. In this context, translators can manipulate a text to highlight new feminist and postcolonial readings that were previously hidden.

As Santaemilia argues further: “Translation seems to me one of the most privileged loci for the (re)production of identities, because it makes them visible or invisible, worthy or unworthy, etc” (Santaemilia, 6). Feminist translation uses a strategy of manipulation that departs from the ideal image of the translator as an invisible mediator and emphasises gender in translation and as a discourse open to these different frameworks of interpretation. I contextualise this research in this way because, as Santaemilia has stated, “behind all manipulation there is always a translating process which necessarily affects identity and which, most likely, starts with identity” (Santaemilia, 5). My aim here is not to suggest that analysing translations is a straightforward approach for literary analysis, but rather to contextualise translations as particular works that require further analysis to understand how they circulate in world literary space and what kinds of representations they engender for readers. In the texts analysed in this thesis,

58 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature translation is evident at a thematic level in connection to female identity and signification.

In the chapters that follow, I will review and extend the discussion of corporeality, gendered representation, and subjectivity that I have outlined in this introduction. Each of the texts by Bergvall, Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill have been published post 1990 and participate in imagining transnationalism in the twenty-first century as significantly embodied and privileges female subjectivity as an important site for this engagement with the transnational. The attention to the transnational and female subject I outline here will be the grounds for the following analysis of representation and embodiment in contemporary women’s writing. The chapters also delineate important social considerations on the production and reception of women’s texts and finds that the separation between representation (evident in close reading) and materialist details such as the translation and circulation of texts by women is a false opposition. This thesis is designed so that it can attend to the specificities of each author’s context and texts and, as a result, each chapter focuses on an individual author. As a practical consideration of this thesis has been how to best articulate difference in a non-essentialist and productive framework, I have decided to write author-specific chapters preceded by one theoretical chapter that contextualises women’s writing in contemporary debates of world literature and feminist literary theory. Each author-specific chapter raises an individual set of questions that resonate with the overall focus on gender and translation and have been tailored to suit the specificities of context and text. Overall, the chapters contribute to an understanding of contemporary women’s writing that is diverse, simultaneously contentious, and yet compatible. Across these author-specific chapters there are shared

59 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature themes and concerns that coalesce within my focus on gender and representation, as well as the position of women writers in the space of international publishing and world literature.

Chapter one identifies a renewed interest in the study of women’s writing recently and the persistence of gendered systems of value that shape literary space by focusing on the intersection of gender and genre. This first chapter precedes the close reading in each author-specific chapter as it provides further context for the following close analysis of texts by Bergvall, Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill. Chapter one raises the subject of women’s writing as a question to consider in relation to world literature. Do we need the prefix ‘women’ in literary studies anymore? Is it a reductive and essentialist category? Who cares about ‘women’s writing’ in the twenty-first century? As Dorothee

Wierling wrote in 1994, lets have “no more feminist history after 2000!” (Schabert

2009`, 162). Because our capabilities as critics are now presumably beyond single gender analysis and reading writers who identify with different gender categories alongside one another is a more fruitful, more conceptually sound object of study for

Wierling. However, chapter one addresses these concerns by focusing on the intersection of gender and genre to argue that the subject of ‘women’s writing’ is still necessary in contemporary literary analysis, especially evident in the way that women’s texts continue to be marginalised in transnational frameworks such as world literature.

As Ina Schabert generalises further, “this advice should be taken seriously by literary historians as well, with regard to both national and transnational aspects of literary life... such literary histories would take gender as one of their main organising principles” (Schabert 2009`, 162). I am interested in how gender can be centralised as

60 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Schabert suggests, but I am concerned with how women writers would be positioned in such analysis. If not done properly, the specific circumstances of contemporary women writers could go unexamined and their works could be sidelined as they have been across history to date.

In chapter two I focus on recent publications and recordings of Caroline Bergvall’s poetry. For Bergvall, the question of originality is inseparable from the inscription of the self that occurs in and through language. Her citational poetics deconstruct originality and questions the position of the ‘original’ as a marker of writing identity politics.

Instead, she posits unoriginality and citation as a way of writing through the ways identity is constructed via the material and the discursive. Chapter two analyses the citational poetics of Caroline Bergvall’s poetry within recent debates on post-humanism.

It identifies a connection between post-humanist theory and recent discussions of authorship and originality in world literature. This chapter repositions these debates within a long tradition of writing by women that participates in undoing the ideological underpinnings of language and writing that uphold the writing subject as masculine, including work in feminist literary theory that examines the relational positioning of the female subject in language. I argue that citation, operating within the task of ‘rewriting’ classical texts, is a moment where traditional humanism becomes unstuck, making way for a reconfiguration of the human in creative discourse as uncreative and unoriginal. In particular, this chapter frames ontology as a question that arises from my reading of the performance poem “Via” by Caroline Bergvall. By exploring the embodied and material production of the self through the interrogation of gendered identity politics in writing and language in this poem, the corporeality of the author is reconsidered through a

61 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature unique combination of citation and performance. While the performative iteration that occurs in “Via” situates the materiality of the body within systems of signification that suggest the differential position of the female-author, it doesn’t reconfigure these structures of differentiation, but participates in them, albeit in a playful and unresolved way. Does this poem offer a way to rethink the ontology attached to bodies? Or does it conform to the limits of gendered and racialised representation in language? The questions that arise from the complex inter-disciplinary circumstances of Bergvall’s practices are not resolved in “Via”, but rather, as the title of the poem implies, they are

'worked through'. The chapter also considers how a revised ontological undertaking can also be useful in thinking through women’s writing in a transnational context, adopting

Rosi Braidotti and Jennifer McWeeny’s analysis of the material circumstances of location and identity and their call for a ‘process ontology’ for understanding the embodied subject as situational.12 Bergvall’s poetry makes a similar claim for a new ontological project in line with the intersectional aims of transnational feminism, exploring the embodied and material production of the self by interrogating identity politics in writing and language through her use of citation.

As discussed briefly in this introduction, Sherry Simon’s foundational study on gender and translation reveals how the metaphorics of translation are historically gendered as feminine, epitomised by the French adage “Les belles infidels”: a translation is like a woman, it is either beautiful or faithful, but it cannot be both (Simon 1996`, 10). In her argument Simon draws a parallel between gendered identity and translation,

12 Braidotti applies the term ‘process ontology’ in a post-humanist context to perform a non-dualistic formation on the subject. She writes: Braidotti asks, “what if these unprogrammed-for others were forms of subjectivity that have simply shrugged off the shadow of binary logic and negativity and have moved on?” The term process ontology is adapted from computer science and builds from the post-humanist ethos of her application of the term. 62 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature highlighting their shared ability to deconstruct dominant ideologies by recognising their mutable and performative qualities. Following on from this consideration of performative gender and cultural representation, the third chapter on Yoko Tawada will analyse the meta-fictional representation of translation in Tawada’s short stories as they appear in the English language translations. It will highlight how these representations are a self-reflexive commentary on translation that draws from a shared connection between cultural translation and the female body. In this context, I view Tawada’s short story collection Where Europe Begins (Tawada 2002) as comparison literature as it evidences a thematic and narrative concentration on translation that makes it translatable. This chapter builds from my review of recent literary criticism that has investigated the transnational circulation of texts - their translation, production and reception - within the rubric of world literature in this introduction. Often this has involved a macro (or distant reading) approach to the text or author in question, however more recently, as I have suggested, there has been a critical move to explore other possible modes of close reading within discussions of global circulation. This includes an attention to the various ways that authors are influenced by the prospective transnational circulation of their work and how, from this perspective, contemporary works often demonstrate a self-reflexive engagement with the afterlife of the text. Furthermore, the gendered analysis provides new insight into Tawada’s translated texts and centralises female subjectivity as an important consideration.

The collection analysed in chapter four, The Fifty Minute Mermaid (2007) by Nuala Ní

Dhomhnaill, delves into the post-national imagery of the migrant subject as a text that raises questions on the relationship between nation and woman. It figures this

63 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature subjectivity within a fractured human/animal hybrid body that is invested in the local

Irish folklore tradition but represents this tradition within transnational concerns of migrancy, identity, and nationhood. At this intersection between the local and transnational there is an interesting tension between local folklore and emerging transnational cultural representation of migrancy. Preliminary research on the migrant mermaid figure in Ní Dhomhnaill’s collection The Fifty Minute Mermaid (2007) highlighted a gap in the transnational study of Irish language poetry. In the World

Republic of Letters Casanova provides the case of the Irish literary revival as an example of how literary texts enter world literary space from the margins (discussed further in chapter one). Casanova argues that the space of Irish language writing is

“recognized only in Ireland for literary activity connected with politics,” while the

English language writers “very quickly achieved broad recognition in London literary circles and beyond” (Casanova 2004`, 310). This claim reflects a common assumption about Irish language poetry: that it does not move beyond the borders of Ireland, that it is only about Irish folklore and doesn’t contain any connection to the transnational.

Without reducing the importance of the local and political situation, this chapter argues that Irish language poetry, since the Innti poets of the 1970s, reflects a transnational orientation in many cases, and reads Ní Dhomhnaill’s collection The Fifty Minute

Mermaid within this framework.

As put forward by Walkowitz, “there are many variables in the new world literature, and they press us to consider not only the global production and circulation of texts but also our ways of thinking about cultural and political uniqueness” (Walkowitz 2007`, 216).

One way to consider this is through a materialist approach that recognises how

64 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature materiality is connected to these traditional concepts of cultural and political uniqueness tied to the nation, and the ways contemporary literature situates new figurations for materiality to reflect changes in the way we envision and experience the world. When you place the transnational framework envisaged by world literature alongside a consideration of women’s writing and an analysis of gender in the production and translation of texts in the twenty-first century, as this introduction has outlined, it becomes clear how important female embodiment is: Bring world literature and feminist literary theory together, you find the body of the author as crucial to the subject of women writers and how they are positioned in world space; combine translation studies with gender studies and a focus on how ontology shapes translation at the level of gendered identity is revealed; compare representations of world and body in contemporary women’s writing and female embodiment becomes key to understanding the discursive construct of female subjectivity. At every intersection corporeality is there. How and why this occurs in the subject of the following chapters.

65 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Transnational Women Writers and World Literature:

Updating the conversation on gender and genre

“In many cutting-edge critical discourses… the speed with which women can drop off the map takes my breath away. We may continue to do feminist analysis of what women write about being women or about gender. But our feminist project may begin and end in the assertion of women’s active presence as cultural producers on a planetary landscape, in all areas of human meaning-making.” - Susan Stanford Friedman, “Women as the Sponsoring Category” (1998) p. 242

As Wai Chee Dimock asks in the introduction to the PMLA special issue “Remapping

Genre”, “What would literary studies look like if it were organized by genres in this unfinished sense, with spillovers at front and center? What dividing lines could still be maintained?” (Dimock 2007`, 1378). The unfinished sense she describes suggests the openness and fluidity of generic histories that are subject to change, despite the border policing this classifying system often inscribes in literary studies. She argues: “Far from being a neat catalog of what exists and what is to come, genres are a vexed attempt to deal with material that might or might not fit into that catalog” (Dimock 2007`, 1378).

However, the construct of genre still holds its appeal in the twenty-first century as a way to trace the criss-cross of genre in how certain forms are picked up or adapted, and can lead to a method of mapping or cataloging that can cross borders and therefore exceed national genealogies. This kind of morphology has been evident in world literary studies where genre is taken as the subject of analysis. Franco Moretti’s study of the novel

(2013) is one example of this, however as Firat Oruc argues, Moretti’s interesting mapping of literary form operates along a centre and periphery axis that doesn’t consider the agency of writers located on the periphery (Oruc 2011); The periphery, in

Moretti’s account, remains the site of compromise. This is one of the methodological

66 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature issues facing world literature studies where the object of study becomes so unwieldy that mapping it along a linear plane seems the obvious answer. However, the distance from the text this mapping of genre situates sidelines close reading and leaves certain aspects of literary study unexamined. This distance from the text is what Dimock seeks to combat in her productive take on genre as an unfinished space where formal constructs spill over. How, then, can one approach genre in a way that recognises this fluidity? In answer, this chapter reframes genre as a question of representation for contemporary women’s writing that, in turn, highlights the short form as a site where the varied representation of women’s bodies is evident.

‘Short’, as a broad taxonomy in a sense, brings together forms such as the short story and poetry. As such it suggests a spilling over between them, connected as they are in the condensed and often concise language of shorts. Shorts are becoming increasingly characteristic of contemporary literary culture, thanks in no small part to the new media landscape. Poetry and short stories are one part of this digital influence, where the length suggests suitability for online circulation. This suitability to online space is explicit in situations where shorts proliferate, such as flash fiction, blogs and even haikus designed specifically to fit within the parameters of the 140 character limit on twitter. Shorts, when viewed within the space of digital technologies especially, appear as if designed to circulate and be adapted by online media. It would be straightforward to situate this suitability as a circumstantial connection rather than a genealogy, however, new articulations such as Ed Folsom’s ‘database genre’ describe how the internet is evolving our concept of generic history (Dimock 2007`, 1378). For example,

Caroline Bergvall’s conceptual and performance poetry is difficult to categorise due to

67 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature the performative elements that cross into performance and oral literatures (see chapter two). Add to this her website, where printed texts, audio recordings and images intersect with critical essays, and her work spills over the categorical constraints of genre by way of this electronic database. This identifies genre not as a label, but rather as a process.

If we are to view genre in this light then, as a process rather than a law, how is it shaped by gender? Dimock’s line of questioning with which I began this chapter brings me to reflect on the intersection of gender and genre, which I apply in my approach to transnational women’s writing and attention to the specific and close reading of shorts. I have found that discourses of essentialism and universality, inherently problematic for women’s writing, are prolific at this intersection. I find these discourses are especially clear in the inscription of the ‘female author’ in how texts circulate and are received, as well as what texts are chosen for publication and translation in world literary space.

Furthermore, close reading also reveals how gender operates as a question of representation in how women writers engage with the ideological assumptions that support the nation and national languages and, by doing so, how they disturb the border policing of generic histories that so often inscribe the female body. As I will discuss in this chapter, the corporeality of the woman writer is inscribed within generic histories and at the same time shapes them. Materiality, then, informs a situation where the body of the author still influences the shape and texture of literature and this occurs at two levels. It begins in many cases with the body that writes and the classification of literature according to this body’s social position, and even extends to include the representation of the author subject in the works by Bergvall, Tawada and Ní

Dhomhnaill, which I delineate further in the following chapters. Corporeality here, at

68 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature the level of close reading, responds and complicates traditional assumptions of authority and authorship in representations of the woman writer and performs this through language games that situate further translational and transnational themes and intertextuality. I have found this to be evident in the short texts by the three women writers analysed in the following chapters, which has in turn pointed to the formal qualities of the short as a space where the fragmentation of the female body plays out.

I have found that short texts by Bergvall, Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill share similarities in the way they represent the female body and how they take issue with the national and cultural narratives that situate the woman writer. I see this representational connection as one that feeds back into the short form due to the concentration and condensed imagery, connection to orality and demonstrable interest in the local and the particular that these short texts suggest. That the three women writers whose work is analysed in this thesis adopt these techniques to represent the arrangement of female subjectivity within the context of multilingualism and multiplicity of the female body attests to a connection between the body and shorts that is reflective of our contemporary moment.

As Oruc argues, figuration and representation blends with aesthetic and narrative traditions in new ways in the twenty-first century that are themselves multiply situated.

He writes:

Literature as world writing refers to the modes of representing these

contingencies and is rooted in the consciousness of the multiplicity of cultural,

aesthetic, and narrative traditions emanating from particular subject-positions

and in the remarkable dynamism of the literary recodings and figurations of the

69 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

multivalent dimensions of modern secular existence within the unevenly

developed global space (Oruc 2011`, 56).

This is evident in the close attention to the specific and the local that depart from larger masculinist narratives of the nation and adds further complexity to female subjectivity caught up within questions of female authorship and the co-opting of the female body as a symbolic category. It also reflects a revised understanding that shifts the frame of reference from the imposition of the centre. Thus, I have included this preceding chapter as a necessary interlude into the relationship between authorship and materiality through the intersection of gender and genre in transnational women’s writing. This analysis culminates in a clear understanding that the short in world literature is responding to multifarious yet specific identity politics for women writers when it comes to the representation of the female body that draws on the relationship between corporeality, language and cultural identity politics.

To delineate this argument, I explore three specific yet interrelated points that I see as reflective of a productive transnational pressure on feminist discourse: First, the reception of women’s texts and how the body of the woman writer continues to shape the reception and generic categorisation of contemporary women’s writing; second, how a consideration of genre and transnational women’s writing raises, once again, the issue of universality and essentialism in the construction of literary value in world space for feminist literary criticism; and third, how the short form holds a specific relevance for the analysis of transnational women’s writing in contemporary literary culture that responds to the centrality of the female body in texts by Bergvall, Tawada and Ní

70 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Dhomhnaill. These three points reflect the materiality focus of my research on corporeality and intimates the relationship between representation and genre in transnational women’s writing. I approach this material focus by constructing a framework that combines feminist theory, transnational studies, poststructuralism and world literature to situate specificity and intersectionality as key to this research on transnational women’s writing. I apply this combination to support a transnational feminist framework as a way to understand corporeality as a social yet still embodied construct that combines ontological experience with a poststructuralist examination of identity to argue that the materiality of the body is a process which, in turn, shapes received ideas about literary value and genre.

The recent productive transnational pressure on feminist discourse has the potential to reinvigorate the study of women’s writing because it provides a new vocabulary and space to perform important intersectional work. The renewal of the conversation on women writers today, however, also brings new considerations to bear. To start, the timing of this discussion aligns with an ongoing debate on world literature and transnational frameworks for literary analysis as well as new debates on subjectivity and materiality in the context of globalisation. I argue that a transnational feminist framework can overcome essentialism through the emphasis it places on the specific as, when intersectionality is foregrounded, it is unable to situate any fixed notion of gender or what a ‘woman writer’ (or ‘woman') is. This thesis faces this issue head-on by foregrounding the specificity inherent to materiality, a specificity which I show not only undermines the essentialism that anchors some modes of feminist analysis, but also frames contemporary women’s writing as traversing national borders, thus building a

71 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature new literary space. Specifically, I show how the materiality and embodiment is of critical and unavoidable importance to the study of contemporary women’s writing in a transnational framework. This framework is generated through this claim that materiality manifests its own specificity. Materiality here refers to both the materiality of the body and also the texture of writing it evokes in literary analysis. I therefore argue for transnational feminisms as a new way for feminist literary criticism to renew the analysis of contemporary women’s writing in a productive transnational framework that centralises difference and specificity to undermine and override the essentialism that can occur through the application of the term ‘woman’. In turn, I apply this transnational feminist approach to the specific analysis of genre in this chapter as a formal construct that has evolved in regulation of women’s texts and bodies. Hence, the connection I draw between gender and genre intimates further the relationship between text and body.

Transnational and intersectional

I will first discuss some of the developments in the field of contemporary women’s writing and feminist theory, as these developments raise certain implications for gender analysis as they situate a transnational and intersectional approach for this study. The study of women’s writing has experienced “a sea change” in recent years (Cvetkovich

2010 et al., 240-241). This change is a result of radical transitions in theory that have reshaped the field, moving towards further intersection and plurality that reopens women’s writing as a timely consideration due to recent critical work on

72 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature transnationalism. As Susan Stanford Friedman argues, four of these transitions in theory have influenced the direction of feminist studies recently:

First, the shift from nation to transnational frameworks of interpretation, which

brings with it a host of issues related to empire and imperialism, migration,

diaspora, racialization, capital, modernity, human rights, and multilingualism.

Second there is the rise of bioculture studies, which makes newly porous the

relations between literature and science, between the human and the animal,

posthuman, machine, and environment. Third there is the movement beyond

identity categories to the fluidities of the queer, the hybrid, the transgendered, the

liminal. Fourth, there is the move away from the hegemony of print culture that

challenges the category of literature as we have known it. Rather than regard

these changes as the force for the dissipation of women’s writing as a category for

research and teaching, I see them as potentially reinvigorating the gynocritical

terrain of feminist theory and criticism (Cvetkovich 2010 et al., 240-241).

This critical attention to fluidity, transnationalism and migration is a response to the changing shape of social and geopolitical structures across the globe. In turn, literary criticism is also experiencing what I feel are productive tensions that raise questions for traditional modes of analysis and approaches to texts - the “challenges to the category of literature”, as Friedman calls it (Cvetkovich 2010 et al., 240-241). Each of the four transitions she lists carries a certain internal transnational inflection, as exemplified by her first point that the nation as a framework for interpretation is being replaced by the

73 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature transnational. This transnational shift has consequences for the way we interpret concomitant debates on subjectivity and identity in literary studies.

However, the recent revival of discussions of women writers has followed from a period in which the subject has fallen out of favour in critical theory. Seminal writers such as

Elaine Showalter, Barbara Smith, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar dramatically influenced the recovery of women’s literature in the twentieth century, raising questions about a female literary tradition and poetics as well as challenging the male-dominated literary canon.13 In particular, Barbara Smith’s work on race and sexuality was a forerunner within feminist literary criticism who identified how women of colour were often excluded from the field of enquiry. While in the early 1960s this well-defined feminist literary criticism had established itself as a strong scholarly approach to literature by women, by the end of the twentieth century the subject of women and writing was largely replaced by social and cultural theory on gender and sexuality.

Within this theoretical context ‘women writers’ became critically suspect, as the definitional operation of ‘women’ was, quite rightly, criticised as essentialising literature by women and excluding women writers of colour.

The catalyst for this period where women’s writing faltered was the groundbreaking work carried out under the rubric of poststructuralism. As Toril Moi argues, after the rise of post-structuralism, and following the influence of Judith Butler’s seminal work

13 See "Towards a Feminist Poetics." Women Writing and Writing About Women. Ed. Jacobus, Mary. London: Routledge, 1979 by Elaine Showalter; Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007 by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar; Smith, Barbara. "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" 1978 by Barbara Smith. 74 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Gender Trouble (1980) in particular, there was a lapse in the study of women writers and writing about women. She writes:

With Gender Trouble the vanguard of feminist theory shifted away from literature

and literary criticism… In the course of the 1990s, feminist theorists became far

less invested in discussing aesthetic questions. At the same time it became

difficult to speak of ‘women’ except in inverted commas. By the end of the

decade, the very foundation for developing a theory about women and writing had

disappeared (Moi 2008`, 263).

Butler’s work on gender and sexuality greatly influenced the direction of women’s and gender studies since the publication of Gender Trouble in 1980 as it challenged preconceived definitions of identity and subject formation (Evans 2011`, 607). At the same time, it also caused the study of women’s writing to falter as it came to terms with its reliance on traditional forms of gender identity (although it had proved to be an important mobilising tool early on). Post-structuralism, the death of the author, and

Judith Butler’s dismissal of ‘woman’, drastically changed the theoretical landscape at this time. DuPlessis argues that feminist literary criticism became “a task that was somewhat sidelined or postponed by the intricacies of post-structuralist theorizing”, while Susan Fraiman also states that “it became virtually taboo, or at least sadly retrograde, to write a book, start a journal, or even teach a course with “women” in the title” (Cvetkovich 2010 et al., 238). For literary studies post 1980, “the result [was] a kind of intellectual schizophrenia, in which one half of the brain continue[d] to read women writers, while the other continue[d] to think that the author is dead, and that the

75 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature very word ‘woman’ is theoretically dodgy” (Moi 2008`, 264). Fraiman also argues, the term ““women” was “decried on the one hand by poststructuralists as “essentialist” and on the other (more usefully, in my view) by minority women as a false universal – a term claiming to reference all women while actually excluding many” (Cvetkovich

2010 et al., 237).14 The twin issues that Fraiman identifies here, essentialism and universalism, continued to create definitional issues for the study of women’s writing into the twenty-first century. How can we continue the analysis of writing by women and not fall back into essentialising women’s texts?

Now, emerging from this period of categorical difficulty, women’s writing is becoming an increasingly interesting and important area of research that mobilises several feminist concerns on the circulation of women’s writing in world space. At the same time, advances in the way feminist theory approaches gendered identity in how it adopts an intersectional methodology has brought further critical reflexivity and nuance to this discussion. For the study of women’s writing today, I see a continual need to negotiate the intricacies between postcolonial, feminist and transnational frames to consider how gender influences the entire structure of literary space, not only one part and to further situate women writers of colour is a priority. As Fraiman argues, there are specific challenges and changes to the way critical theory performs the analysis of texts under the rubric of women’s writing today. For one, we now think about identity in far more complex ways and necessarily recognise the category ‘women’ as impermanent and conditional (Cvetkovich 2010 et al., 237-238). As DuPlessis’ also argues, “a second

14 This has obvious resonance with the issues currently facing world literature as a potentially homogenising venture for literary analysis, albeit one that usefully positions a consideration of transnational literary culture in the twenty-first century. At this point, world literature faces similar challenges that women’s writing and feminist theory have been grappling with since the late twentieth century. 76 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature way of seeing the field [contemporary women’s writing] anew would be to acknowledge and discuss the plural array of women’s writing across cultures, languages, and national settings… the goal is notably global and transnational, and the goal is breaking down hierarchic hegemonies of (supposed or putative) value” (DuPlessis 2007, 5). In this context, postcolonial theory on the nation has intimated a further understanding of how power operates in this construction of literary value and offers an important extension for feminist literary theory by situating intersectionality and therefore a more nuanced approach to specificity.

Increased focus on specificity can also be seen in a theoretical move towards intersectionality and an increase in the discussion of race, gender, class and sexuality in world literature, although the depth of engagement with these intersections is not yet adequate (see introduction). This move to intersectionality and the analysis of race in particular is due to the input and critique mobilised by postcolonial and transnational studies in the last ten years that have dramatically altered the direction of world literature studies, encouraging discussions of difference and specificity. 15 As Paul Jay argues, the transnational turn has dramatically transformed literary and cultural studies, complicating national paradigms in favour of “liminal borderlands” (Jay 2010`, 2). This turn is inseparable from globalisation, as well as political and social movements in the

1960s outside of the academy and has directed more attention to the intersection of disciplines in discussions of multiculturalism, gender and postcoloniality (Jay 2010`, 2).

15 See introduction for review of this literature. 77 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

In response to these paradigms, critical works such as Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial

Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace (2007) and Francoise Lionnet and Shu-

Mei Shih’s Minor Transnationalism (2005) have emphasised the position of writers

‘outside’ of what has been previously considered geographical and linguistic centres of world literary space. These contemporary scholars have written about world literature in a way that draws attention to the intersection of race and the geopolitical marginality of authors and literatures outside the west, in particular, and offer a critique that is applicable to world literature as a space that privileges a western perspective and as a renewal of neoimperial systems of value, particularly evident in the dominance of

English language. Furthermore, as Rose Brister argues, the transnational turn has generated a new methodology for the humanities and this has influenced feminist scholars to reconsider the question of gender difference and nationality: “the transnational turn has appropriately encouraged feminist scholars to consider new sites of articulation of the national and of the economics, political, and social possibilities therein” (Brister 2014`, 928). I have found that as transnational feminism centralises intersection and specificity, it offers a way to break down the opposition of feminism and nationalism to generate new critical work on the subject of genre in world literature and ask, once again, how writing exceeds the shape of such formal constructs.

Genre, literary value and the woman writer

The gender of the author plays an integral role in how texts are valued, how they are read, and, even more to the point, in how they are categorised in both national and transnational literary space. In other words, the construct of gender informs the

78 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature production and reception of texts across the world and this draws attention to the way materiality informs literary conventions such as genre. As Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929,

“A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop - everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists” (Woolf 1929`, 67). In her essay A

Room of One’s Own, Woolf identifies how assumptions of literary value extend to characteristics such as theme and narrative to inflect the masculinist narrative that prevails - at her time and, significantly, still today. However, what is most important for this research is how Woolf recognises the materiality to shape this space, how the materiality of the body that writes influences received notions of authorship and the authority of this subject, and how the body of the female author is inscribed within this system. To contextualise this further in the field of new materialisms, Sara Ahmed has explained “what we “do do” affects what we “can do”… the more we work certain parts of the body, the more work they can do. At the same time, the less we work other parts, the less they can do. So if gender shapes what we “do do”, then it shapes what we can do” (Ahmed 2010`, 252). This finding is implicated further by the body of the woman writer, whose orientation within the world coheres around her body. In other words, her orientation towards writing, suggests Ahmed, situates her body as deviant from the masculine norm (Ahmed 2010`, 252). At the same time, however, the productive capabilities of matter informed by the transgression of female authorship also influences world literary space.

As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost argue, “materiality is always something more than

“mere” matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” (Coole 2010`, 9). The productive

79 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature capability of matter can be interpreted through the lens of feminist literary criticism to recognise the position of the transnational woman writer. Mary Eagleton touches on this when she writes about authority as both a claim women writers’ make and something they resist, evident in her reading of the woman author figure in contemporary literature by women (Eagleton 2005). The relationship between materiality and genre generates itself as a question of inclusion that situates the underrepresentation of women in both national and world canons. However, materiality also intimates further consideration of genre as a question of representation in a closer sense, by which I mean how women’s writing can disturb generic constructs by renegotiating interrelated discourses of gender, nation and language that support generic histories. I connect these two points, materiality and representation, by way of the transgression behind female authorship.

For example, in Caroline Bergvall’s poem “Via”, she mobilises this transgression for the genre of poetry, as a form that traditionally inscribes originality, by playfully adapting various translations of Dante’s The Divine Comedy and using these citations to reconfigure this form as a site of unoriginality.

Each of the texts by Bergvall that I analyse in the following chapter, “Via”, “Alyson

Singes” and “The Philomela Project”, negotiate canonicity through this adaptation of canonical texts to create a poetics of unoriginality. Bergvall’s work simultaneously passes over canonicity even as these texts rely on the canonical status of Dante and

Chaucer. This resonates with recent discussions of the post-canon in world literature, which I would repeat here as a question: have we really moved past our reliance on canonicity? As Damrosch argues, “we do live in a post-canonical age but our age is post-canonical in much the same way that it is postindustrial. The rising stars of the

80 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature postindustrial economy, after all, often turn out to look a good deal like the older industries… and many of the established industries have proven to do quite well in our supposedly postindustrial age” (Damrosch 2006`, 44). This connection to postindustrial economy represents, for world literature, the continued reliance on canonical authors while simultaneously, and somewhat preemptively, describing our contemporary moment as one that has passed this reliance. World literature has, in recent years, demonstrated a critical shift that decentralises the western tradition that instigated its earliest conceptualisation and scholars are undeniably directing more attention to subaltern and marginal perspectives, as the Bernheimer report suggests (Damrosch

2006`, 45). However, expanding the parameters of world literature to ‘include’ the

‘marginal’ perspective does not denote an equal playing field and instead uphold the same architecture of literary value that designates canonicity as relative to a western tradition. As Damrosch states, “these perspectives are applied as readily to the major works of the “old” canon as to emergent works of the post-canon” (Damrosch 2006`,

45). Furthermore, as Rey Chow has discussed, “Masterpieces” correspond to “master” nations and “master” cultures. With India, China, and Japan being held as representative of Asia, cultures of lesser prominence in Western reception such as Korea, Taiwan,

Vietnam, Tibet, and others simply fall by the wayside – as marginalized “others” to the

“other” that is the “great” Asian civilizations” (Damrosch 2006`, 41). In these debates, our understanding of literature is still largely subordinated to an understanding of the nation.

In light of this, Damrosch stipulates the emergence of a three-tiered system for world literature:

81 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Our new system has three levels: a hypercanon, a counter canon, and a shadow

canon. The hypercanon is populated by the older "major" authors who have held

their own or even gained ground over the past twenty years. The countercanon is

composed of the subaltern and "contestatory" voices of writers in languages less

commonly taught and in minor literatures within great-power languages… it is

the old "minor" authors who fade increasingly into the background, becoming a

sort of shadow canon (Damrosch 2006`, 45).

The nuance of this description suggests a persistent reliance on canonical works, which reframe our understanding and interpretation of texts (and I include critical canonical texts in this). Its weakness lies in its inability to situate a contemporary writer, like

Bergvall, who works within a western tradition, as a French-Norwegian writer who lives and works in England, and yet is not hypercanonical. Of course, one could attach analysis to her part Norwegian identity and describe her as belonging to a counter canon of marginalised European nations. But I am not convinced by this location as Bergvall has clearly been centrally located as British, anthologised and discussed in journals and books such as Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and The Cambridge

Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women’s Poetry (2011). However,

Bergvall is one of many contemporary writers who adopts English as a space to carry out their interrogation of language politics and the inscription of the woman writer in national and world frames.

82 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Examining the position of contemporary women writers in world literature today asks us to consider once again, what ideologies are at stake here? As Tina Krontiris writes:

To write within the field of imaginative literature was most transgressive, for

authorship of literature was considered a distinctly male activity. The female

writer in the Renaissance, as well as in later times, had to struggle with the idea

prevalent in patriarchal western culture that ‘the text’s author is a father, a

procreator, an aesthetic patriarch.’ According to this idea, creative energy in a

woman is anomalous and freakish (Krontiris 1992`, 18).

Although Krontiris’ research on women writers as literary producers focuses on the

English Renaissance, she situates the woman writer within the prevailing masculinist identity politics evident across literary history. How does her body as both a social and embodied position inform the reception of her work? However, this is not to suggest that the influence only operates in one direction. At the same time as the position of the woman writer denies her access to authorship through persistent principles of literary value and masculinist narratives of literary history that often regulate the reception of a woman’s text (for example, in the application of terms like ‘chick lit’), her writing also shifts these genre constraints, however gradually. The corporeality of the female author is inscribed within this system of value, but this materiality is also productive and can create change in literary space through her transgressive position. The advancement of writing by women in critical theory, and also wider public discourse, has repercussions for world literature today as it centralises the discussion of diversity, inclusivity and

83 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature gender - and makes world frameworks take note. It is, as Cixous hoped, the increase of

“a new insurgent writing” in contemporary literature by women (Cixous 2001).

The gynocritical terrain of feminist literary theory from the twentieth century has continued in more recent discussions of gender and world literature; the renewal of world literature in critical theory has, in turn, renewed the discussion of inclusion for women writers in this transnational space.16 Recent criticism by Lanlan Du, Debra

Castillo, Marian Arkin and Barbara Shollar, and Margaret Higonnet are among the few published works that directly discuss world literature and women writers in connection to one another. Although women’s writing and world literature are usually (and problematically) discussed as discrete fields or frameworks, they are actually deeply connected in recent critical theory on canonicity and the designation of literary value, as these critics attest. Du, Higonnet and Castillo in particular have discussed women’s writing and world literature together by exploring the representation of women writers in world literature anthologies and coursework, rephrased in feminist debates as a question of equality that privileges the western male author. When these critical essays and chapters are viewed together, one can see the connection between women’s writing and world literature as an issue of inclusion that is relative to a revision of the

Eurocentric canon. These critical texts also show how canonisation is a certain reflection of the world and how deconstruct the canon to suggest the persistence of masculinist narratives across literary history. More recent work expands this argument

16 In her article “Narrative and Gender in Literary Histories” Ina Schabert, for example, advocates for a new approach to writing the narrative of literary history according to a gendered model that looks to the relationship between men and women, placing “the difference between the sexes and the construction of masculinity and femininity at the heart of historical questioning” (Schabert 2009`, 152). While this research is not interested in writing a literary history, the same consideration of gender must be given to questions of production and reception. These conversations on genre and literary value intimate a starting point for the understanding of how gender structures world literary space. 84 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature further to include how canon formation in world literature is influenced by the geopolitical position of the nation state. To add more depth to this engagement, the way that canonisation designates a particular world literature also indicates the intersection of gender and genre - an intersection that provides an important background to my following discussion of the short form in the twenty-first century.

The revision of the Eurocentric canon has introduced many women writers into the space of world literature and coincides with the introduction of non-western writers, further destabilising the prominence of the western male author. Higonnet states, “under the impetus of feminist criticism, along with postcolonial theory and Marxist critique…

[Anthologies] reflect a revised understanding of the world, less Eurocentric and focused on social elites than before and no longer exclusively male” (Higonnet 2009`, 232).

However, as Du also argues more recently in “Women’s Writing in the Atlas of World

Literature”, “literary canons have also been considered as patriarchal edifices, absorbing some women writers merely as token while keeping most of the women writers out of this edifice” (Du 2011`, 428). Du states that canon reformation is more than simply the act of including previously excluded marginal authors, “it involves the complex ways of how a particular work gains ‘‘cultural capital’’ in a historical moment” (Du 2011`, 428`,

430).17 As she discusses, the inclusion of women writers in world literature is in turn influenced by the geopolitical position of the nation state and its access to power, adding further dimension to this argument by centralising race and marginalised language groups. Indeed, if we trace this conversation on canonisation and gender to an earlier point in feminist literary theory, the connection between world literature and

17 This relates to an important change from world literature as a canon of works, to world literature as an approach and way of reading works in a transnational context. 85 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature women writers that Du touches on here actually predates the revival of world literature at the end of the twentieth century in American comparative literature departments. For example, the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English

(Gilbert and Gubar, 1985) and the Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women

1875-1975 (Arkin 1989) were early publications that demonstrate the emergence of a women’s literature canon.

The view of world literature this anthology provides is vastly different from publications on world literature that followed in the early twenty-first century. Arguably, it was ahead of its time in two respects: in its intersectional approach, and its emphasis on multiplicity rather than a singular world-system. In the introduction to the Longman

Anthology of World Literature by Women 1875-1975, the editors outline a desire for the establishment of an international canon of women’s literature that remains open and, overall, the selection within the anthology reflects both a conscious attempt to include women from various cultures and languages, as well as a recognition of the various ways women’s literature negotiates local and transnational registers. This move towards inclusion is further supplemented by what I call a reflexive criticism that operates internally and calls out continuing issues around the critics viewpoint as a perspective often situated in the west. What I mean by this is that there is no singular “universal” claim in this anthology. Instead, it reflects various traditions within women’s writing that often contradict one another, such as assuming the position of male authority, or accepting traditional definitions of gender roles. Importantly, the selection acknowledges that the definition of gender is no longer defined in the singular, “it is not a monolithic category into which women must fit themselves or their art. Instead,

86 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature gender is seen as a polysystem, a multiplicity of ideas and ways of being that constitute the female” (Arkin 1989`, xxxiv). This anthology takes up the centralisation of difference with an important emphasis on the ‘diversity’ of female experience as the starting point for inclusion.18 The anthology also begins a conversation on possible connections between women writers from various national, local, and critical traditions

(across different genres), realised through shared characteristics such as language, mythology, subject matter, and theme (Arkin 1989`, xxxiv). It adopts difference as a cornerstone for the canon rather than universality and calls attention to the ways literary value are problematically produced. The intersectional feminist approach this anthology adopts constructs a view of the canon that is vastly different from other accounts of world literature and can be contrasted with the following example of canon formation that Pascale Casanova describes in her centre/periphery model.

In the 2004 translation of The World Republic of Letters (2004) Pascale Casanova provides the Irish literary revival between 1890 and 1930 as an example of a national literature that enters world literature from the margins. I examine this closer to situate how gender and genre intersect in the production of a world canon and how this excludes marginalised literatures, such as Irish language writing. According to

Casanova, this period of Irish writing demonstrates “the set of solutions devised by writers to the problem of overturning the dominant order as well as the structural rivalries with which they are faced” (Casanova 2004, 304). In her proffered paradigm, the national debate on language characterises the Irish revival and is a precursor to the movement of writers away from the ‘national’ and to the ‘world’. Casanova discusses

18 This relates a feminist politics of location and how it (importantly) emphasises structural difference within systems of power, as discussed in the introduction. 87 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature this as a question of literary autonomy where the Irish reappropriation of the English language is a form of subversion. The space of Irish language writing remains, in

Casanova’s account, “recognized only in Ireland for literary activity connected with politics” while the English language writers “very quickly achieved broad recognition in

London literary circles and beyond” (Casanova 2004, 310). According to this claim,

Irish language literature maintains its ties to national politics as a politicised choice that arose from the aims of Conradh na Gaeilge (The Gaelic League) who were committed to nationalist action and used the Irish language at the time as a vehicle for cultural emancipation. In Casanova’s argument Irish language writing does not achieve literary autonomy; and therefore does not move into world literary space. However to complicate and contextualise this further, Ní Dhomhnaill writes “It is often hard for people of my generation to realise that a hundred years ago, when Conradh na Gaeilge was founded, learning Irish was an empowering act for ordinary Irish people…

Nevertheless, by the time my generation came around, something had gone wrong” (Ni

Dhomhnaill 2005`, 125). In the hands of nationalist’s, “book Irish” (as Ní Dhomhnaill refers to the type of Irish taught to school children) was a “sanitised, bowdlerised, air- brushed version… with its emphasis on an idealised rural myth of peasant life in the

West” (Ní Dhomhnaill 2005, 126). Is it any wonder then that so many of her own generation demonstrate dislike for the language and relegate it to the sidelines, asks Ní

Dhomhnaill? Attaching a politicised agenda to the language can be detrimental to the way the language continues to survive, and where it thrives today in the Gaeltacht and in contemporary Irish language writing it is a living language subject to change and evolution.

88 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

To continue relegating Irish language writing within a solely politicised agenda is suggestive of an ongoing assumption that minor and Indigenous literatures are separate from world literary space due to an implied provincialisation in critical discourse, itself a problematic suggestion that privileges universality and subsequently begs the question, whose universe? Damrosch raises the same question in his introduction to

What is World Literature? (Damrosch 2003) In this chapter Damrosch asks, “What does it really mean to speak of a “world literature”? Which literature, whose world?” and goes on to suggest the ongoing relevance of national literatures (2) in the formation of world literature as an “elliptical refraction” of national canons. It is this relationship between the world and the national however that I wish to problematise as the operational category of the Nation is often one of unease for women writers. As Dimock argues, “As a set of temporal and spatial coordinates, the nation is not only too brief, too narrow, but also too predictable in its behavior, its sovereignty uppermost, its borders defended with force if necessary. It is a prefabricated box. Any literature crammed into it is bound to appear more standardized than it is” (Dimock 2003`, 489). She argues that by momentarily suspending the analytic category of nation unexpected details and connections emerge (489). Dimock suggests planetary time as a temporal scale that creates this opportunity, a “bidirectional flow of time” that can overcome the territoriality of the nation-state but still acknowledge it. Viewing world literature as planetary allows for a reconceptualisation of the world with additional depth that provides a space for Indigenous and counter-national literatures.

Feminist literary criticism problematises the critical approach that reads minor and

Indigenous literatures as separate from world literary frames in the attention this critical

89 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature discourse pays to the intersection of gender and race. As discussed in the introduction to this thesis, discourses of international systems of literary value used in world literature are shaped by dominant ideologies dressed up as universalism. Recognising this offers further context for this analysis of The Fifty Minute Mermaid and its translation into

English. Debra Castillo discusses this value system and highlights the importance placed on “political setting and timing” when foreign and Indigenous literatures are read from a western perspective (Castillo 2012). She persuasively argues that this approach in western literary criticism has influenced the rise of certain genres over others.

Castillo states:

The particular selections in all of these non-western sections [in anthologies of

world literature] implicitly ask us to think about how genre is associated with

race as well as with gender, highlighting, perhaps, more vernacular, more

personally charged, more overtly ideological forms (401).

This is not to ridicule or lessen the importance of race and gender analysis in literary studies, but to identify how this privileges the reception of certain genres, shapes the literature that is chosen for translation according to the target languages aims and interests, and even to an extent problematically excludes these writers from aesthetic categories of literature value and analysis.

Similarly, Margaret Higonnet has also pointed out that a consequence of the dominance of a western literary market and literary criticism is a distinction between extrinsic factors, such as the sex of the author or the gendering of social roles and scripts, and

90 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature intrinsic structures creates a “value-laden distinction” (Higonnet 2009, 138). This distinction permeates literary criticism and reserves the intrinsic modes of reading for western canonical texts, and separates the western from the non-western at the level of critical engagement. Higonnet applies this to gender analysis and the connection between her argument and Castillo’s claim that postcolonial texts are politicised identifies the unequal distribution of frames of reading and the concomitant issue of the distribution of literary value. While the category of universality in world literature has repercussions for Indigenous literature and women’s writing who are often excluded from this form of literary ‘value’ because of the specificity of their gender and political context, these writers are also often hesitant to engage in (or directly hostile towards) the narratives of Nation and Woman that dictate a singular female ‘representativeness’ in literature. As Boehemer states, the issue of “representativeness” is evident in postcolonial women’s writing. The idea of Woman as metaphor and the position of author as “speaking for” a whole community of people is often avoided by women writers as it has been so problematically co-opted by masculinist narratives. She argues:

“male authors are drawn to speak for the nation, while female authors often reflect on the local and personal” (Boehemer 2012). Thus, the materiality of the writing body influences/is influenced by constructed notions of literary value and is therefore situated within conventions of genre as a result.

The intricate and complex ways that gender and genre are intertwined can also been recognised in the reconceptualisation of world literary space by critics and writers who highlight the way literary conventions fall short. As Pheng Cheah argues in What is a world? “contemporary globalization has created a genuinely transcultural zone that

91 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature undermines the territorial borders of cultural and literary production, thereby leading to the emergence of a global consciousness. Accordingly, the units of comparison can no longer be merely national” (Cheah 2016). Cheah presses us to consider world literature in light of these changes to the fabric of social space. As Walkowitz also argues in her essay “Unimaginable Largeness”, “There are many variables in the new world literature, and they press us to consider not only the global production and circulation of texts but also our ways of thinking about cultural and political uniqueness” (216).

Rather than viewing world literature as a spatial category where texts circulate, both

Walkowitz and Cheah recognise the varied representations of the world they engender and how this imaginary category is caught up within the same pressures globalisation exerts on the category of literature (and national literatures in particular). As cultural and political uniqueness changes, so too is the shape of the world and this change is both reflected and created by the literature that represents it. By bringing this consideration from world literature and pairing it with postcolonial feminist criticism, it becomes clear that genre is an area in need of further study to account for this change.

The gendered and racialised identity politics that come to bear on the subject are key to formulating this understanding and while the study of genre in world literature is not a new area, placing gender at the centre of this consideration responds to the current and renewed interest in women’s writing and subsequently asks the question, how are women writing literature in the twenty-first century? And in what form?

As Vilashini Cooppan has also discussed, genre is a system that changes over history and its analysis also offers an interesting “vantage point” from which to understand the views and beliefs held by the culture that defines them. He argues:

92 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

To study genre is to study change. Genres are systems in constant transformation,

always inverting, displacing, or combining earlier genres and, equally, ever in the

process of being themselves remade. As the sites where poetics and history, form

and ideology meet, genres afford a vantage point from which to learn something

about the individual societies that codify and popularize certain genres as the

formal mirrors of conceptual belief. The study of the changing history of literary

genres further stands to teach us something about a larger cultural story of cross-

societal contact, transmission, and hybridization (Cooppan 2001`, 185).

With this in mind, culture has implications for the classification of literary genre and gender is certainly part of this. As we are experiencing transmission and hybridisation anew in the twenty-first century, the rise of certain genres and new forms or writing is also taking place. In line with this, the short form as a genre has a pressing relevance in contemporary literature.

The short form

The novel has received much attention in world literature due to its dominance in literary markets (Moretti 2000). However, shorts also raise interesting questions for analysis due to its development online, the alternative arrangement of world space it situates, and the new representations this form engenders. In the twenty-first century it has a certain relevance due to shifting language politics and evolving postnational identities during this period of increasing migration. For example, the short stories by

93 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Yoko Tawada often describe fleeting and transient moments caught up in themes of mobility that situate the migrant woman. Tawada refashions folktales to create contemporary myths of mobility and transition between cultures and languages. These stories deconstruct ideologies of nation, identity and culture by often bringing together

Japanese and German linguistic and cultural materials. The close attention to language that occurs in the literal transposition of words between German and Japanese and the layering of folktales with contemporary themes of migration lends itself to the short form as a literary space attuned to the compression of imagery and language that

Tawada’s short stories inscribe. It leads one to consider the very textuality of shorts and how this close attention to language and theme is located by this genre. Furthermore, it highlights how short texts by transnational women writers reconfigure the relationship between nation and representation.

The impact of new media on the production of texts has also prioritised the short form; the concentrated attention to language and isolated moments in time that shorts designate along with the rise of the short story online, largely due to the ease with which these shorter texts are adapted and circulate, identifies the short form as an important register for contemporary literature. Short stories in particular have begun to receive more attention and circulation; in 2013 the short story writer Lydia Davis won the Man

Booker International Prize, shortly followed by Alice Munro who won the Nobel Prize

(both, notably, women writers). While previously considered a form that doesn’t perform well in market sales, The Bookseller announced that short story sales rose thirty-five percent in 2013 alone (Baker 2014). As Sam Baker discusses, this increase in the circulation of short stories can be attributed in part to the way the short form melds

94 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature with the advance of mobile technologies, new media and even changes in reading habits: “Thanks to mobile technology, brevity is now an advantage. Far from opening a book on our daily commute, we turn to our phones. We don’t want to lose ourselves – we no longer have time to be lost. For us, the short story is the perfect form” (Baker

2014). Similarly, Thomas Beebee has also recognised the affinity between shorts and new media in the impact the internet has on minor genres and sub-genres, such as the interesting correlation between blogs and diary writing and how the character constraints of twitter lends itself to poetry (Beebee 2012`, 301). These digital circumstances of production and circulation draw a connection between technology and writing, and positions shorts at this intersection as an important space of world literature.

The evolution of the short story has been linked to technology since Walter Benjamin discussed the demise of orality and “living speech” in his essay, “The

Storyteller” (Benjamin 2006). However, his announcement that the death of storytelling coincides with the advance of print technology sits oddly with new evidence that storytelling is alive and well online. He argues: “The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is its essential dependence on the book. The dissemination of the novel became possible only with the invention of printing” (364). In this context, the introduction of printing places the novel and its development in the eighteenth century in opposition to the short story. The short story, however, has continued to demonstrate a connection to orality and folktale in contemporary literature as it often draws from

95 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

“living speech” and “the formal properties of oral tales and the conventions of their performance” both in print and online (Awadalla 2013`, 3). It is at this juncture, between oral literatures and the short story, that I find a new relevance for the short form in world literatures as a site where writers (such as Tawada) often engage and reshape dominant ideologies of nation and gender in writing.

Maggie Awadalla and Paul March-Russell argue that in the postcolonial context orality becomes a resource for the short story and this counters the demise Benjamin suggests in 1936 with the rise of the novel and the development of print culture. The postcolonial short story in particular holds a clear attachment with “the oral roots of folk culture”, and by doing so often participates in the political process of nation-building (Awadalla

2013`, 4-6). Awadalla and March-Russell find oral roots in the attention short stories direct to the momentary and fragmented and they suggest that this formal preoccupation resonates with the experience of the former colonial subject: “The disappearance of communal and intergenerational ties, which Benjamin regards as melancholically beautiful, is for the former colonial subject, whose social condition has often been represented as grotesque or sublime, intensely political” (Awadalla 2013`, 4-6).

This is also evident in poetry, which as Jahan Ramazani argues, is a genre where cross- cultural dynamics are regularly deployed. He argues:

Because poetic compression demands that discrepant idioms and soundscapes,

tropes and subgenres, be forced together with intensity, poetry - pressured and

fractured by this convergence - allows us to examine at close hand how global

96 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

modernity’s cross-cultural vectors sometimes fuse, sometimes jangle, sometimes

vertiginously counterpoint one another. Bringing poetry into critical

conversations about globalisation can thus help focus attention on the creolized

texture of transnational experience as it is formally and imaginatively embodied

(Ramazani 2009`, 4).

Ramazani offers an interpretation of poetry that runs parallel and holds in contra- distinction the provincialisation of the form. He traces the poetic imagination as a literary space where cross-cultural exchange is evident in moments of intense hybridisation and in the context of diaspora and migration. I apply this approach in the following author-specific chapters, however adding genre and gender to this discussion also highlights how, by doing so, these texts disrupt the particular reliance on gendered identity and nation that this transnational experience recognises in texts by Bergvall,

Tawada and Ni Dhohmnaill.

Accounts of gender and the position of the postcolonial woman writer add further complexity to this argument. Awadalla and March-Russell, for example, situate postcolonial women’s writing within the same relative situation that Boddy separately describes. However, they add a consideration of the woman writer’s position as a marginal subject within the nation-building aspects of much postcolonial literature

(Awadalla 2013`, 7). They argue: “Women’s writing sits awkwardly in relation to the political act of nation-building and postcolonial literature’s attempt to describe what

Fredric Jameson once controversially termed, the national allegory” (Awadalla 2013`,

7). As Awadalla and March-Russell claim, women’s paradoxical and ambiguous place in

97 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature colonial and postcolonial society is often explored as subject matter for the short story and situates an alternative relationship to the nation-building project (Awadalla 2013`,

7).19

Interestingly, the nation appears at the intersection between gender and genre, positioning women’s literature in line with personally charged modes of writing and often as an antithesis to national literatures. As Grewal and Kaplan state, nationalism is problematic for feminism as this “construct places women in a symbolic relation to nation” and as a result many women see nationalism as antithetical to their lives

(Grewal 1994`, 22). This problematic relationship between feminism and nationalism creates an opposition between the two and many women writers situate a reflection on the local and the interstitial instead to bypass the nation as category. Overall this is suggestive of the ways in which gender persists as an internalised structuring principle within transnational and national systems of literary value and also points to the short form as a space where this representation is performed. As the short story in particular demonstrates a commitment to the local and the interstitial in many cases, which as

Frank O’Connor argues is often used to represent submerged population groups

(O'Connor 1976). He writes:

In the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the

fringes of society, superimposed sometimes on symbolic figures whom they

19 As other critics have also noted, by virtue of being short, the short story has been suggested as a suitable by women writers who often lack time due to caring responsibilities and the necessity of having to write when they can. This may appear as a generalisation of the reason many women writers choose to write short stories, however some comments from writers have raised this for consideration. For example, Alice Munro once claimed, “I never intended to be a short story writer… I started writing them because I don’t have time to write anything else – I had three children” (Rothstein 1986). 98 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

caricature and echo… I am suggesting strongly that we can see in it an attitude

of mind that is attracted by submerged population groups, whatever these may

be at any given time - tramps, artists, lonely idealists, dreamers, and spoiled

priests (O'Connor 1976`, 87-88).

What are some of the figures in contemporary short stories then? Contemporary figurations of the subject in short stories depart from O’Connor’s summary in many ways. Tawada gives us an anonymous migrant woman who negotiates the complexities of her mobility and how she is perceived by others. Another example can also be seen in

“Mrs. Sen” a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri which takes its name after the central character, a migrant woman from India who has moved to the United States following her husband’s appointment there (Interpreter of Maladies, 1999). These are momentary glimpses offered by the short story in the twenty-first century that reflect on contemporary experiences of migration as attuned to this form. There also remains an illustration of his point in these examples that among the many formal qualities of the short story, the short story writer selects a specific point from which to approach life and where the past, present and future “springs from a single detail” (O'Connor 1976`,

89) and identifies the specific attention the short story gives to the momentary. As Kasia

Boddy also argues, short stories contain characters who are presented in significant and isolated moments of time, where past and future are suggested, but certainty is suspended (Boddy 2010). That the form lends itself to themes of displacement and fragmentation as these critics describe suggests a connection between representation and form in the postcolonial context that hinges on orality and the nation. It also suggests a particular relevance for the short story today as a genre attuned to

99 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature contemporary issues of cultural identity, which I argue also extends to themes of mobility and gendered identity in Tawada’s short stories. As such, I find contemporary short stories, in particular, as sites where there are alternative arrangements between representation and the nation through an inflection of transnational within local and specific instead.

As I have argued, short texts hold a particular resonance with the circulation of texts online and in the context of new media as well as new figurations of shifting identity politics that draw from orality and folklore. As such, the form also points to an interesting and newly evolving connection between digital technologies and oral traditions evident in a new oral culture that is emerging online. Caroline Bergvall, whose work is discussed in the next chapter, draws on this connection in her performance poetry. She adopts audio recordings and technology to perform a kind of

“oralized” literature that she describes as a contemporary reflection and continuation of early oral and literary culture:

They tie in with the past and the early years of the dissemination of literacy.

They also tie in with the future. The fact that we’re experiencing a widespread

interest in reading-listening, through podcasts and audiobooks, will

revolutionize the way we approach, and even teach, texts…all in all, working

through Chaucer is helping me be a writer today (Kinnahan 2011).

The growing prominence of evolving forms of visual and audio media online, as

Bergvall suggests here, asks us to consider the ways storytelling is evolving within the

100 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature new media landscape. The synergy between these digital technologies and the short form is only one aspect of this development, but attention to it highlights what

Damrosch has alternatively described as the postliterary (Damrosch 2013). He writes,

“In speaking of a “postliterary” age, I mean to indicate the ongoing life of the literary in today’s expansive mediascape” (Damrosch 2013).

Bergvall complicates the definitional practice of genre by combining performance with poetry that incites a conceptual model for writing identity politics. What I mean by this is her conceptual mode takes issue with discourses such as authorship and originality that often marginalise women as cultural producers in preference for ideals of male authorship. The arsenal she uses to combat this includes citation, which she deploys as a way to distance the author from the text and undermine the structures of originality that support it - and she inscribes the woman writer in this conceptual move, as I discuss further in the next chapter. Materiality, embodiment and lived experience are evoked in her poems through speech acts. The disruption this causes for the genre of poetry occurs in the way her writing disturbs traditional attachments to national language and romantic ideologies of individual expression. Yet at the same time, as it performs this detachment from the individual author figure, it situates this subject in a new way through a poetics of unoriginality. Hence, I find in Bergvall’s poetry another example of how shorts can suggest a contemporary reflection on the specific that destabilises the nation.

Genre, universality and authorship

101 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Taking issue with originality and authorship, Bergvall’s iterative practice figures embodiment through language and raises materiality as a consideration for conceptual writing. This iterative practice inflects the intersection of gender and genre as I have discussed so far, but positions it within the construct of authorship and the complicated arrangement authorship has for women’s writing. As Dimock argues:

For too long, originality has been held up as the touchstone of creative

authorship, Stallybrass points out. Surely it should not be the only touchstone.

Genres can do much to guide us in the opposite direction, for, not fixated on

originality, they give pride of place instead to the art of receiving, and affirm it

as art: crafty, experimental, even risk-taking (1380).

However, while genre does guide us towards the text rather than the author it still inscribes a particular gendered relationship to writing that is evident in Bergvall’s citational poetics. Bergvall’s citational poetics situate originality as a problem for her writing, and her use of citation playfully acknowledges how gendered identity is constructed (see chapter two). In turn, this acknowledges gender as a construct that regulates women’s bodies as evident in the gendered identity politics of writing and authorship. Hence, I still find that the connection between gender and genre is a material and social one that is not so easily split from discourses of universalism and originality. However, when writers such as Bergvall reference the construction of these discourses, the ideologies that they uphold are destabilised.

102 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

The assumption of universality on behalf of works by male writers suggests the familiar yet clearly persistent phenomenological position of the author subject as masculine. As

Linda Fisher points out, Judith Butler’s argument that “Man is the measure of all things” takes on a heightened significance, as male-defined models, experiences, and ways of being are posited as paradigmatic (Fisher 2000). This masculinist assumption underwrites literature in many ways – influencing the choice of texts that are translated and published, and even reflected in the way readers understand and approach works of literature. As Butler suggests, universality may at first imply an unspecified gender, however, what occurs instead is the interpellation of the male subject in the position of universal subjectivity. She argues:

Devoid of a gender, this subject is presumed to characterise all genders. On the

one hand, this presumption devalues gender as a relevant category in the

description of lived bodily experience. On the other hand, inasmuch as the subject

described resembles a culturally constructed male subject, it consecrates

masculine identity as the model for the human subject, thereby devaluing, not

gender, but women (quoted in Fisher 2000`, 27).

To unpack this further, universalism devalues women’s voices by categorising their lived experience as specific, not to humans, but to women only. In this sense universality, and its humanist representations, is significantly gendered and racialised as

Caucasian, heterosexual and male. Furthermore, to use universalism as a value for literature (as is often the case in world literature) only further supports the traditional authority of the author as masculine. Universalism therefore has obvious implications

103 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature for women writers, but the response to the problematic gendered category of authorship varies from adopting the masculine position to troubling the very conventions of originality and authority that situate the Author.

In his seminal essay, “The Death of the Author”, Roland Barthes writes: “The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’” (Barthes 1977). Barthes identifies writing as the space “where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (Barthes 1977). And yet, we have come back to a consideration of the identity of the body that writes as a continuing concern for world literature, not to reinforce the traditional humanist narrative of authorship or uphold gender binaries, but to capitalise on the poststructuralist death of the author and the possibilities therein for liberation from “universalism and ideological essentialism” that it offers (Wilson 2012`, 3). As

Sarah Wilson argues, the displacement of the authority of the author “should allow subjectivity for those traditionally denied access to identity expression, paradoxically at the same time as identity is destroyed” (Wilson 2012`, 1). However, as feminist engagement with poststructuralism has also suggested, the disavowal of the author has resulted in a moment where the politics of inclusion lose relevance (Wilson 2012`, 1).

Cheryl Walker suggests a solution to this tension between engaging with ongoing issues of inclusivity and troubling the category of authorship: “What we need, instead of a theory of the death of the author, is a new concept of authorship that does not naively assert that the writer is an originating genius (stable and unchanging), creating aesthetic

104 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature objects outside of history, but does not diminish the importance of difference and agency in the responses of women writers to historical formations” (Walker 1990`,

560). In this way, we can recognise the fluidity of gendered identity and yet still acknowledge the effect of gender in the material position of women writers in world literary space. This issue continues to be relevant for contemporary literary culture.

For world literature studies, which often adhere to a problematic value system that claims humanity through access to the category of the universal, developments in critical theory have brought about a reappraisal of its hermeneutics and global parameters. The reliance on universality becomes deeply problematic and implicated further in transnational systems of national literary value that are often used to validate a world literature canon, raising anew the importance of intersectional feminist analysis as a timely intervention in the field. The short texts analysed in this thesis engender an alternative representational politics for the female body that bypasses constructs of nation. These writers adopt the affinity of shorts with the local and the interstitial to create new figurations of female subjectivity and corporeality to avoid and deconstruct this figure as a symbolic category of nation.

The subjects of universality, literary value and the short form in world literature as I have discussed in this chapter further define my approach in the following chapters that examine short texts by Bergvall, Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill. I recognise the renewal of world literature in the twenty-first century as a theoretical framework that does not adequately engage with gender and women’s writing, although recent accounts of world literature draw from postcolonial and transnational theory do create plurality and

105 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature intersectional analysis at its core. Thus, problematic constructs of universality and literary value highlight the inherent issues in the critical approach of world literature, but a transnational feminism that centralises gender can be applied to mitigate this effect. The intersection of gendered identity, language and embodiment situates new approaches to materiality that are reflected in the short stories and poetry examined in this thesis. These findings dictate the approach I take in the following chapters in which

I analyse texts by three contemporary women writers, beginning with Caroline Bergvall.

106 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

“Copying typing out stamping quoting taking on carrying in

one’s body”: Citational writing and the politics of gender in

Caroline Bergvall’s conceptual poetry

“I was unspeakable so I ran into the language of others” Kathy Acker, Bodies of Work (1997) p. 80

“There is a significant difference between the function of the “foreign” citations in The Waste Land and their role a century later in the global context of shifting national identities, large- scale migration from one language community to another, and especially the heteroglossia of the Internet. The writing of poetry under these circumstances calls for a new set of language games.” Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius (2010) p. 124

Caroline Bergvall is a conceptual and performance poet. Born in Germany in 1962 to

French-Norwegian parents, Bergvall grew up in a multilingual household. She has lived primarily in Switzerland, France, and Norway, and is currently based in London and Geneva. English, the language that she works in, is her third language. I stipulate that she works in English rather than suggesting a particular form or genre of writing as her practice is decidedly inter-disciplinary, often existing in multiple forms as gallery installations, live performance, printed books and recordings, either accessible online as a digital file or available on CD. As such, a single work often exists in multiple forms as a repeated text. However, each repetition is also singular. Technology and digital media is therefore an important window through which to approach her poetry and the way her citational poetics and performances inscribe the body of the woman writer. This chapter argues that Bergvall represents the female body through strategies of repetition.

Bergvall adapts texts in order to suggest the iterative identity politics of writing that relate to gender discourse. As Jacob Edmond has identified, Bergvall’s work is an

107 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature example of an iterative poetics, a poetic practice that uses pre-existing material, and a demonstrates a theoretical engagement with iterative models of identity such as Butler’s argument that gender identity is performed through repeated acts (Edmond 2011`, 110).

A poem by Bergvall can be approached as one that repeats and is repeated and this citational practice playfully acknowledges the semantic slippage of cite/site/sight, as this chapter will explore further.

Bergvall’s relationship to language informs her poetic methodology as a performance poet. She works in the inter-disciplinary space of this practice, in which this unstable and exploratory term ‘performance writing’ “attempts to hold in tension both writing and its performance, performance and it’s writing” (Allsopp 1999`, 77). She is an exophonic writer, meaning the language that she works in (English) is not her first language. Although she has written and performed in other languages she describes her poetic work as beginning from the moment she first started writing in English. The appeal of English as a dominant global language that is experiencing great change and hybridisation in this century is evident in her politicised strategies that delve into the languages ideological underpinnings. She writes:

The beauty of working with language, is to find oneself in a very flexible and

variable environment, one that is also architectonically deep and complex. And,

of course, endlessly expansive. It is also a dangerous, a lethal environment, one

of the most infiltrated areas through which power structures regulate, censor,

and shape the social body or the individuated body (Kinnahan 2011`, 238).

108 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

This chapter examines the intersection of language, identity and embodiment in

Bergvall’s poems more closely by examining the way these discourses are reflected in citational practice. As Bergvall discusses, she approaches language as “a complex, historically charged, culturally multilingual and politically postnational system” (Rudy

2011). This system, she argues, “is reflexive of a citizenship that does not yet exist or is not allowed to exist within current parameters of identity and belonging” (Rudy 2011).

As such, her poems explore language use in various ways; through speech, citation, performance, in often poetic engagements with pronunciation, for example, in order to challenge, embrace or break open these parameters that inscribe bodies within a system.

Language in this context is embodied and its materiality and physical presence performs the kinds of nationalist and gendered identity politics Bergvall attempts to overcome and acknowledge.

This chapter will analyse repetition and citation in three works by Bergvall; “Via”, “The

Philomela Project” and “Alyson Singes” to argue that her adaptation of canonical texts create a space where repetition results in difference. The symbolic representation of the female body in language is critical to this analysis, which deploys a feminist critique of language to draw attention to the discursive construction of the subject and the relative position of the female subject in particular. Each of the poems I analyse enacts a process ontology (as discussed by Braidotti, 2006) for the construction of the subject, one that is embedded and embodied.20 Thus, this chapter will examine repetition and citation in these works within a feminist framework that reveals the operation of Bergvall’s

20 I borrow ‘process ontology’ from Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic thought and her figuration of the non- unitary subject as an embedded and embodied subject. In Braidotti’s discussion of process ontology, she applies the term to post-humanist subjectivity, as a way to move beyond dialectics that configure materiality such as nature/culture. See “Posthuman, all too human” (2006). 109 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature citational poetics as a politicised and deeply gendered act. To this end, my theoretical framework combines poststructuralist feminist theory on gender, writing, and language, alongside recent discussions of second language writing and the status of translation in contemporary translation theory (see introduction and chapter one). This framework draws a connection between these discourses through their shared critique of phallocentric order, the consolidation of the masculine caucasian subject this entails, and the position of English language in this structure as a linguistic and cultural space that is performative.

The texts analysed in this chapter do not situate an absence of identity but are completely transformed through a consideration of identity as performative in language.

Situated within this contradiction, acknowledging on one hand the inability of language to instate a unitary subjectivity, but still seeking to explore the material situations of the lived body, Bergvall explores subjectivity and authorship without her works resulting in any sort of identity-based writing. Her practice is unique in that it takes into account an embodied positioning of the subject but does so in a way that acknowledges the discursive and mediated construction of this body without falling back on essentialism.

As she states, “It has been important to me that I try and keep the connections alive between problematising gendered identity and understanding the dynamics of language use and cultural assumptions” (Kinnahan 2011`, 244). As I argue in this analysis, citation is a politically informed practice that arises from Bergvall’s critical engagement with language and gender identity in writing. “My motivation”, she writes, “has been very much to do with gender and very much to do with sexuality. These are very strong motivators which to me are to do with how would you use language to construct or de-

110 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature structure assumptions about gender, about sexuality, about female gender” (Stammers

2003). Recognising the symbolic and structural position of female gender as differential identity politics that are deeply embodied, citation is a problematically gendered space, especially in the performative elements of Bergvall’s practice. This argument recognises the dialectic of original/copy as one reflective of masculine/feminine politics of representation in a phallocentric order. This dialectic is explored further in this analysis through a methodology that combines feminist theory on language with feminist translation studies.

In a brief summary of her essay Middling English on her website, Bergvall asks: “What does it mean to be a second-language writer writing in the medieval digital age?” (Bergvall 2011). This question splits itself in two. What does it mean to be a second language writer? What does it mean to write in the medieval digital age? I include it here, early on, to establish the position from which Bergvall writes and to connect her poetry to the following chapter on Yoko Tawada’s short stories as both exophonic writers work in a second-language. As I have stated, second-language writing is a fraught position that destabilises many of the ideologies that support traditional systems of literary value (national languages and the tightening politics that surround them remain the most obvious of these). That second language writing most often occurs in English, as it does with Bergvall but not Tawada, highlights the persistent dominance of English in much the same way that the uneven distribution of translated texts into English does. Both of these conditions of world literary space demonstrate the prominence of English as a ‘world’ language, such as Latin was once. However,

Bergvall does not draw a parallel between Latin and English through their shared

111 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature history of literacy dominance. Instead, she connects medieval English with our contemporary moment which changes our context for considering writing, moving it from hierarchical systems of dominant linguistic hegemonies (although that still remains an important consideration) to one of change. Evolution, even.

Bergvall’s exploration of Chaucerian English in her collection Meddle English stems from her interest in the origins of the English language (Bergvall 2011). In the introduction to the collection, she reminds the reader that English was always changeable and in flux and so it remains, like all languages, despite moments when its parameters have been policed. She argues: “Chaucer’s decision to write in a spoken

Southern English idiom helped to confirm the richness and versatility of a linguistic region… He made his choices from within the language’s active maelstrom of influences and confluences. Everything about Middle English was a mashup on the rise”

(Bergvall 2011`, 13). In this introduction, Bergvall explores the influence of the new digital landscape on writing culture and discusses how English language usage today resonates with the emergence of English at its earliest conception. Bergvall describes the first instances of writing in English as practiced by Chaucer and then connects this historical moment to the current age of new media, communication technologies and

‘global’ Englishes (including net-glish) through the shared characteristic of change and adaptation. The historical circumstances of English language in medieval time resonates with our current digital and transnational age experiencing its own “mashup”.

112 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

In an interview with Linda Kinnahan, Bergvall further identifies the connection between medieval literary culture and our current moment through a shared commitment to orality, which I touched on in the previous chapter on genre. Bergvall argues:

most of my projects deal with a kind of performative and “oralized” literature.

They tie in with the past and the early years of the dissemination of literacy.

They also tie in with the future. The fact that we’re experiencing a widespread

interest in reading-listening, through podcasts and audiobooks, will

revolutionize the way we approach, and even teach, texts…all in all, working

through Chaucer is helping me be a writer today (Kinnahan 2011`, 246).

By repeating it here, I would like to contextualise the following reading with the tension between the physical and vocal elements of performance arts and the poetics of writing that are at the heart of her practice. For Bergvall, it is how language exists in writing and in the embodied voice that influences the majority of her work, and which is intrinsic to her consideration of language, mobility, identity and translation in the twenty-first century.

Bergvall’s process of ‘working through’ Chaucer and Middle English as an approach to contemporary writing disturbs the temporal boundaries of literary criticism and those of literary form. The lyric, in this context, draws from oral literature but it is routed through technology and new media which turns ‘medieval digital’ from a contradiction into a contemporary context for the English language. Bergvall’s conceptual poetry offers this thesis a different form for the short lyric - as highly experimental poetry on

113 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature one hand, but more importantly perhaps, as one that introduces technology to the conversation. As poetry that is explicitly citational, the poems analysed in this chapter introduce concomitant debates on digital reproduction through recordings and tap into a contemporary ‘oral’ literary context that is currently emerging in our digital age. The contradiction of the medieval digital age is a conflation of two historic moments that one would think could not be further apart, and yet here they are, brought together by/in the words of Caroline Bergvall.

This research finds that second-language writing and the medieval digital age Bergvall describes go hand in hand as the rise of new media and the rapid global connection created by technology has established a reliance on multilingualism that is predicated on a hierarchy that supports the dominance of English and has introduced a new glossary of English words suited to the orality of online media, including netglish and global

Englishes. Changes in writing habits suited to social media and texting - abbreviations, etc - have emerged along with new media platforms such as YouTube, video blogs, and podcasts, which are constantly within easy reach for those with access to mobile technology. Second-language writing in English is part of this digital age as different language communities interact online and require a shared language to facilitate communication. Furthermore, this points to the materiality of English in contemporary communication and how second-language speakers mould for their use accordingly. As

Bergvall writes, “my personal sense of linguistic belonging was not created by showing for the best English I can speak or write, but the most flexible one. To make and irritate

English at its epiderm, and at my own” (Bergvall 2011`, 18).

114 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

In this context, translation has emerged as an increasingly important endeavour in communication and technology. As I have stated in the introduction to this thesis, we are currently experiencing a peak period in translation practice as more texts are being translated at a greater speed than ever before in human history. This peak period is largely influenced by increased mobility in our technological age and new discussions on translation have also renewed the conversation on authorship and originality, especially given new concerns about licence agreements, plagiarism, and copyright.

Writers such as Vanessa Place, Kenneth Goldsmith and, the focus of this chapter,

Caroline Bergvall, have each engaged with the politics of citation in their poetry.21 The politics of unoriginality that inform their work also informs this chapter’s focus on citation and repetition as I consider the poetic and political engagement with translation practice in Bergvall’s work as one that reflects a much-needed gender analysis of this new context for authorship.

Citational writing, and the copy/original dialectic this writing disturbs operates as a gendered discourse when we remember that the gendered subject of literature is masculine. In other words, authorship is structurally associated with a masculine position which posits originality as a figuration of the human subject (also a masculine position), while the copy becomes signified as feminine due to its relational position.

This has been discussed further in various feminist texts that recognise repetition and the copy as symbolic of a feminine position. In light of this, we must consider how

21 While Vanessa Place and Kenneth Goldsmith similarly adapt texts to create their conceptual poetry, they have been heavily criticised for their adaptation of African-American histories and testimonies. For example the controversy around Place’s re-tweeting of Gone with the Wind was due to the re-inscription of that texts racism that occurred. Also controversial was Goldsmith’s work “The Body of Michael Brown,” which is an appropriation of Michael Brown’s autopsy report. Both these texts identify the problematic racialisation of conceptual and avant garde poetry as a space of white privilege and the adaptation of black bodies in these works specifically. Bergvall herself is more aware of the cultural power dynamics evident in citational poetry and performance. 115 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature women writers’ have held a fraught relationship to authorship. Focusing on Caroline

Bergvall’s conceptual poetry, this chapter furthers this discussion to consider how repetition engages with difference as a possible transgression of this symbolic representation of the feminine and argues that citation, operating with the task of

‘rewriting’ classical texts, is a moment where traditional humanism becomes unstuck.

This makes way for a reconfiguration of the human in creative discourse as uncreative and unoriginal. It also debunks the myth of the Author figure as it carries through the additional effect of recognising bodies as socially constructed and departs from the dichotomy of difference and sameness that occurs within the rhetoric of repetition.

“Via” (Bergvall 2005), “The Philomela Project” (Bergvall 2014), and “Alyson

Singes” (Bergvall 2008) are each composed of translated material and deploy direct citation of canonical texts by male authors including Dante, Chaucer, and Ovid. The connection between the three authors Bergvall has adapted is clear: male, canonical, western. This connection cannot be coincidental. The gendered and political gesture behind this choice demonstrates the underlying argument of this chapter in which I view citation as problematically gendered in these texts in order to revisit questions of authorship and identity in writing culture. Citation in this way is an important part of

Bergvall’s practice, as to appropriate other cultural material is to undermine the presumption of an ideal objective image of the author. Acknowledging the dual difficulty of her practice as, on one hand, invested in undoing the authority of the author due to the problematic position of this figure as western and male, and on the other, simultaneously attempting to recognise embodied experience, she asks: “how does one create textual works where the authorial hold over the text is somehow distanced,

116 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature perhaps neutralized, yet where the structural impact of experience, of living, of loving, of knowing, of reading are in fact recognized?” (Bergvall 2012`, 21). This is a very different death of the author to what Barthes suggests; Whereas Barthes describes literature as a space "where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes”, Bergvall’s work is permeated by the body and her consideration of how to imbue the text with lived experience but also distance the authority of the author.

In the poem “Alyson Singes” (2008), Bergvall rewrites the tale The Wife of Bath. This work exhibits a multi-layering of intertextual and citational practices; it adapts the linguistic and thematic concerns of The Wife of Bath and integrates this tale by Chaucer with other narratives, pop culture references, and events. Many characters familiar to a contemporary audience emerge in the conversational prose of the work. As Perloff states, “we seem to be witnessing a poetic turn from the resistance model of the 1980s to dialogue - a dialogue with earlier texts or texts in other media” (Perloff 2010`, 11).

This has two effects, it participates in a larger cultural dialogue by often using popular culture in an intertextual mode and it repeats, most earnestly, originality and authorship as a question. “Alyson Singes” returns us to writing identity in this context of larger dialogues between cultural texts to demonstrate a questioning and explorative poetic through various techniques of intertextuality and citation.

Before the poem begins, a short prologue provides a frame of reference for the adaptation:

117 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Do we let ourselves go back to the ancients, or do they catch up with us? No

matter. An outstretched hand suffices. Lightly they cross over to us, our strange

guests who are like ourselves, writes Christa Wolf in the preface to her Medea.

(lines 1-5).

These prefacing lines contextualise “Alyson Singes” in this dialogue with The Wife of

Bath. However, the lines are themselves a citation of Christa Wolf’s Medea, which, now in addition to The Wife of Bath, places the text in dialogue with another retelling of a classic story from the point-of-view of a female narrator. This is one of the first instances of many intertextual gestures that can be located throughout the poem, which continue to overlap and weave together in the construction of this dense citational work.

Following her reference to Wolf’s Medea, lines 5-9 introduce the problematic practice of critical hindsight: “We hold the key that unlocks all epochs, sometimes we use it shamelessly, darting a hasty glimpse through the crack of the door, keen on quick, ready-made judgments; yet it should also be possible to get closer, a step at a time” (lines 5-9). This self-critical refrain, apparent in the lines “we use it shamelessly” and “ready made judgments,” addresses the reader and disables the author’s authority. It sets up a self-reflexive and sarcastic tone that repeats throughout the text and creates an unstable foundation for the work that continually shifts between registers in a loose erratic dialogue that doesn’t provide any fixed point for the reader, not even in the possibility of the author who is immediately figured as unreliable.

As the term intertextuality implies, the two axes of the text, the horizontal axis identifying the indispensable position of the reader and the vertical axis identifying the

118 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature relation between the text and other texts, is already in operation. Identifying this operation of intertextuality in the poem moves the work from one that is written to one that is read. Not only do I mean by people who read “Alyson Singes”, but actually as a work that envisages its own existence as one of reading: of Bergvall reading The Wife of

Bath. It is as though, in reading “Alyson Singes”, one steps into a fragmented list of references to outside texts that comes from Bergvall’s prior knowledge. In this case,

Bergvall is the reader. This creates conflict as her knowledge interacts and runs counter to the character of Alyson who speaks. As I will explain through close analysis, the dialogue shifts between these registers and places Bergvall as simultaneously character and reader, refusing any authorial hold over the work itself.

As I will discuss in the next chapter on Yoko Tawada, there is a long tradition of rewriting in women’s literature that demonstrates a feminist commitment to reterritorialising cultural mythologies and gendered representation. “Alyson Singes” performs the problematic of representation within these mythologies, but deterritorialises the author and writing as cultural mythology. In this way, both Bergvall and Tawada share a critical awareness of institutionalised languages and ideologies in their work. Susan Rudy usefully described this practice of rewriting in “Alyson Singes” as a “collaboration” between Bergvall and Chaucer, identifying an invitational rhetoric that occurs through a collaboration of authors (Rudy 2011). This collaboration is, of course, not a typical joint effort. Rather, it is an aesthetic collaboration that intertwines

Middle English and Chaucerian vernacular, meter and style, with contemporary popular culture. This aesthetic is underscored by the feminist politics of the text where adaptation becomes a transgressive gesture for the female writer and in this context, the

119 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature work can be read as a critical reflection on the construction of the female writing subject as an intertextual and subjective formation performed through an intertextual reading mode. At the same time, adaptation allows Bergvall to also critique Chaucer from a point of feminist intervention.

Written in first person, the narrator - a woman named “Alyson” - reproduces the feminist rhetoric of The Wife of Bath, this time addressing a contemporary audience.

Hi all I’m Alyson

some people call me Al.

I’m many theyngs to many,

a few thyinge to some &

nothing but an irritant

to socialites and othire

glossing troglodytes

Just don’t call me Alice

I dig conversation

But the only rabbit I ever liked

Is rabbit in prunes of Agen

sauted in duck fat

or a conys in Hoggepotte. (Lines 12-24)

The opening of “Alyson Singes” mirrors the usual narrative move used by Chaucer, with the narrator positioning herself and the audience in relation to the story she is about

120 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature to tell. The change between ‘theyngs’ and ‘thyinge’ displays the visual difference between the words through the various Middle English spellings available and also emphasises the subjective formation of the subject Alyson, who is revealingly performed within these differences. The first stanza also introduces the intertextual play of the text. “Just don’t call me Alice” refers to Alice in Wonderland, which is humorously confirmed in the following lines “the only rabbit I ever liked / Is rabbit in prunes of Agen / sauted in duck fat / or a conys in Hoggepotte.” Agen, referring to the

French town, and Conys in Hoggepotte being a traditional medieval recipe.

The text continues to repeat this combination of medieval and popular cultural reference, wherein lies the temporal conflict that produces a self-conscious rendering of the author in the work. This temporal conflict is further complicated by the thematic concerns of the text that centre on the subject of women, representation and feminist criticism. For example, in lines 14-22:

It’s been a long time, quod she,

some and six hundred.

Everything was different

yet pretty much the same.

Godabove ruled all

& The Franks the rest.

Womenfolk were owned ne trafficked

nor ghosted, and so were

most workfolk enserfed. (Lines 14-22)

121 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

These early lines set up a feminist rhetoric, where “Womenfolk were owned ne trafficked”, that continues to chart a trajectory between the middle ages and our contemporary moment: “Everything was different / yet pretty much the same”, highlighting a connection between The Wife of Bath and “Alyson Singes”, Bergvall and

Chaucer through this temporal conversion.

Breaking the fourth wall, the writing subject then addresses the reader in a direct critique of Bergvall’s ability to represent her story:

Byways please nat let what weedy

poet Caroline Bergman or outher

represent me. Ha means well but won’t go the whole hog

too bloody well-educated makes her

circumflexed all these books

and still hey doesn’t finish her sentence/s.

She just doesn’t have a big front, far too creeped out

Books used to be me forbidden,

& writing them, unfinkable. (202-210).

Some things best women not

understand, affirmed Juvenal

Or was that Furnivall.

Language cropped back to a minimum,

for fear I might speak,

122 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

like Eve did

who, spoke, St Bernard sayn,

but once and threw the world into disorder. (Lines 211-218).

This stanza situates the issue of representation in writing; Bergvall (misspelt as

Bergman) “circumflexed all these books”. She is “too bloody well-educated” to represent a medieval woman for whom books were “forbidden”. Removing the illusion of Bergvall’s objective narration, the writing subject highlights the illiteracy of the narrator from the middle ages, for whom “Books used to be me forbidden” (line 209).

The narrator’s illiteracy is contextualised within the history of unequal access to education experienced by women. In recognising this, the continual display of misspelt words becomes a self-conscious choice.

In light of the illiteracy of the middle ages and its gendered inequality, the narrator also calls attention to the illogical inclusion of textual references in the poem, such as “This stuff’s been filling their pages ever since / quote Simone de Beaver at great length” (line

237, sic) and “these are the laws of the foreigner, quod Cixous” (line 303). These textual references are where Bergvall’s situation shifts and while, on one level, it is these inclusions that depart furthest from The Wife of Bath, it is actually their inclusion that brings us back to this text as the intertextual references are the residual reading of The

Wife of Bath by Bergvall. What I mean by this is, they are the result of the horizontal and vertical axes of reading the original tale and display one structuration of The Wife of

Bath.

123 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

The narrator again addresses the reader:

I’m not who you

think I am now am

I who you think I

should be nor in truth

am I who I’d hoped

I’d be my fear

is great for years. (Lines 262-268).

Each line break here fractures the subject according to the unstable terrain of perception and subjectification, charting the problematic of representation in literature and raising the issue of identity in writing. Who speaks? And, for whom? The line paraphrases Rene

Descartes, “I think; therefore I am”, and draws out the enlightenment ideal of the

Human subject that lies within this statement of selfhood - the ‘I.’ However, in this line the female subject is not situated as such. The ‘I’ is fractured, mediated by reading, with the emphasis placed on perception and draws from a feminist claim that the Cartesian subject is an illusion. As Marysia Zalewski further situates within the politics of post- modern feminism, feminists now “prefer to ask “How do women become or get said?”” (Zalewski 2000`, 24). This line of questioning is evident in “Alyson Singes” as the text departs from any interest in situating a defined female subject, rather the text is more interested in how this subject becomes through perception.

124 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Other references are woven throughout the text, not only citing critical theorists such as

Cixous, but also works by contemporary writers, artists and musicians. These references operate within the central discourse of authorship and feminist rhetoric in the text:

By God, if women hadde written stories

As clerks han within hire oratories,

They wolde han written of men moore wikkednesse

Than al the mark of Adam may redresse. (Lines 241-244).

After voicing this issue of female representation, the text then folds into works by poet

June Jordan, Patti Smith, Kathy Acker, Helen Castor and Clarice Lispector - an impressive list of female voices and names woven into the prose:

Give me Piss Factory!

Give me the Slim Lady real Slim Lady Jordan!

I’m unspeakable Acker!

Just call me Castor!

what scribe Lispector ’n many otheres

miss Demeanours who namoore axe

how to spell YNOGH

than how to spell

AMOR

Can you see can you see can you see

They just open their pages wide

125 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

and Audree Lordee, they give a good affront!

who kenow how to use books, makin’ me sing

’n they dress so fine n’they look so good

“Piss Factory” refers to the song of the same name by Patti Smith, the “real Slim Lady

Jordan” is a reference to the text “Owed to Eminem”, in which June Jordan adapts the popular rap song, closely followed by the names of writers Acker, Castor and Lispector.

The intertexuality of the poem, and the internal critique of the authority of the author, results in not only a discussion of representation of the female subject across literary history, but also works through an understanding of language as performative. While

Bergvall re-inhabits cultural texts her work does not reinforce these structures, it completely disables them by bringing to the work an understanding of language as performative, not simply representational. Thus, by undermining her authorial control over the text the work is a testament to the impossibility of representation that is largely effected by the intertextual constellation of voices and textual references that unbound the text, moving on from any expectation of a discrete entity to a (often overt) infinite interplay with cultural discourses and texts. Indeed, the work overflows with these quotations and references and is in excess of itself.

It is a text that, as Barthes states for all writing, “is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture…the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original” (Barthes 1977). The undoing of authorial authority is an important dialogue within Bergvall’s work as unmasking the ideological underpinnings of this image breaks the illusion of a unitary subjectivity that is in most cases male and

126 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

European. This illusory subject relates to what Bergvall calls the “existential dilemma” of the female writer, referring to the heteronormative structure of language and the issues this creates for women writers who seek to represent a female subjectivity that is unspeakable due to the regulation of the female body according to patriarchal scripts.

Hélène Cixous writes on this position of the unspeakable: “To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly” (Cixous 2001), situating the poststructuralist critique of language within the feminine of language that is available to both male and female writers. The binary operation of language is undone by this process, its heteronormative structure that delineates the submission of the feminine position as secondary and its consolidation of the masculine position is simultaneously called into question by the woman who writes and often supported by this movement.22

The citational aspects of Bergvall’s work exist in her appropriation of other cultural texts, most of which have developed from an interest in Chaucerian English as this chapter has discussed so far, into which she incorporates popular culture and other instances of contemporary vernacular in her creation of hybrid texts. “Cultural pillaging”, she writes, “provides a poetic trajectory that negates the original authorial voice. The uniqueness of the work is its lack of uniqueness, its negativity. It exists as a model of textual appropriation, a process of shadowing and transference” (Bergvall

2012`, 18). This act of cultural appropriation occurs with political intent - Bergvall appropriates in order to rewrite, yes, but the effect of her appropriation lies in how the rewritten reconceptualises aspects of literary culture, the author figure, of course, but also Literature (with a capital L), translation, and more generally what we mean by

22 As I will discuss shortly, Cixous’ line resonates with Echo’s transgression in Metamorphoses: “fly from me” she states – she doesn’t echo, she doesn’t reply, she doesn’t reflect the subject back onto himself, she transgresses the boundaries imposed upon her. In this context plagiarism and citation, even theft, are each transgressive modes of writing because they depart from a reliance on originality and they relate to questions of gender and writing. 127 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature writing. What do these categorical markers mean? And what is their place in the shifting grounds of the twenty-first century?

In the impasse of representation posed for the differential author, “Via” poses an iterative strategy that uses citation to figure this subject as discursive. It adopts the classical text by Dante, The Divine Comedy as it appears in English by collating the first canto of The Inferno from various English translations. It is entirely constructed from these cited passages, which continually repeat the familiar opening canto followed by the translators surname and year of publication:

Along the journey of our life half way

I found myself again in a dark wood

wherein the straight road no longer lay.

(Dale, 1996) (Lines 1-4).

The second tercet of “Via” again recites Canto 1 from Dante’s Inferno, this time transcribed from the English translation by Patrick Creagh and Robert Hollander, published in 1989.

At the midpoint in the journey of our life

I found myself astray in a dark wood

For the straight path had vanished.

(Creagh and Hollander, 1989) (Lines 5-8).

128 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

The third tercet, this time transcribed from the English translation by George Musgrave and published in 1893, again repeats.

HALF over the wayfaring of our life,

Since missed the right way, through a night-dark wood

Struggling, I found myself.

(Musgrave, 1893) (Lines 9-12).

And so “Via” continues, constantly and repetitively. Forty-seven times to be exact, to correspond with the forty-seven English language translations of The Divine Comedy that are held at the British Library and published before the year 2000. Forty-seven

English translations of this classic text, the first canto of each translation copied down and arranged alphabetically by Bergvall.

As Bergvall states, her task was a simple one at first, but became more laborious as she continued:

My task was mostly and rather simply, or so it seemed at first, to copy each first

tercet as it appeared in each published version of The Inferno. To copy it

accurately. Surprisingly, more than once, I had to go back to the books to

double-check and amend an entry, a publication date, a spelling. Checking each

line, each variation, once, twice… To reproduce each translative gesture. To add

my voice to this chorus, to this recitation, only by way of this task. Making copy

129 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

explicitly as an act of copy. Understanding translation in it’s erratic seriality

(Bergvall 2005`, 65).

As she suggests, copying out and transcribing each translated tercet adds her voice to this chorus of translations and raises reproduction, translation and originality as a question for the reader to consider. It is important to note that this selection and

‘copying out’ relates quite explicitly to this question of reading and refocuses attention to how reading generates meaning. Without providing an answer, this question remains open. Comparative in its structure and organisation, “Via” is a text that emphasises its materiality; its an assemblage of text, an assemblage of translations; it’s a copy, even a copy of a copy, if one recognises the structural position of translation that appears as derivative across much of literary history. The poem is stripped back to the materiality of language and signification, paired back to the point where the image of the author becomes unstable and, as the author is reticent, the process of language and of writing come to the fore. But there is no progress to this narrative; instead one remains eternally lost in the dark wood.

In this sense “Via” sounds as a warning call, as there is no course or recourse for us as readers. Chronology collapses in onto itself with dates appearing at random due to the alphabetical arrangement that also de-individualises the translators, whose surname appears at the end of each tercet. The tight constraint that informs the work upholds a resonant and lyrical unfolding due to the alphabetical organisation, which adds a sonic register of the text as it gradually changes. As Perloff states in her reading of the work,

“Equalized by the alphabet game and deindividualised by the omission of the

130 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature translator’s first name, these cited tercets (some rhymed aba as in the terza rima, some in free verse or prose) convey the brilliance of the original, whose every word resonates with possible meanings” (Perloff 2010`, 130). The semantics of translation resonate dually as both sound and sight when we read this text. The experience of reading “Via” is enjoyable, as the semantics of language play out visually across the page in the differences apparent between each translation, which also registers aurally as a lyrical process of variation. This isn’t a poem about translation in the way that we might originally imagine, as a kind of transcription of variations between eras. That would imply linearity or progress, which as I have said does not eventuate as there is no leaving the wood, just as there is no leaving the language as it stops and changes and charts a different course through the semantics that is performed between each canto.

On the surface the poem manifests a slow and methodic display of variation between translations, highlighting different language use, grammar, syntax and word choice. For example, in the first line of each stanza, the temporal situation is described as alternatively “half over”, “halfway”, “half-way” or “half way”:

10. In the middle of the journey of our days

I found that I was in a darksome wood

The right road lost and vanished in the maze

(Sibbald, 1884)

11. In the midway of the journey of our life

I found myself within a darkling wood,

131 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Because the rightful pathway had been lost.

(Rosetti, 1865) (Lines 36-43).

Rather than reading the poem as a transcription of translated text, instead direct your attention to the materiality of language through an ongoing process of resignification and slippage. In this way, Bergvall imports an important political dimension that implies a semblance of a linguistic radical democracy through this treatment of language and the dismantling of both English language and a canonical text. The reader, in the perpetual deferment of progress, finds themselves similarly lost in this constantly shifting terrain, and both the writing subject and the reader remain in the wood,

“midway”, with no hope of escape. From this repetition comes startling variations, such as in lines 37 to 43 – “darkling” becomes “darksome”. While the path before the subject can be “the straight way”, “the right road” and “the rightful pathway”. Yet it is the continual deferment of progress and chronology that creates a heightened feeling of insecurity in the text, not only on a symbolic register as the wood motif repeats with no escape, but also for the reader as the emphasis on the materiality of language and the limits of representation exemplifies, on another level, the discursive construction of the subject. In this context, citation takes on a different register according to a Butlerian understanding of citationality as a series of repeated acts that construct the body (Butler,

1993).

While these different choices each translator has made emphasises the individual act of creation, the repetition complicates the implied notion of originality and even authorship. “Via” becomes, in this reading, a voyage into assumptions surrounding the

132 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature status of translation. As readers, we come to The Divine Comedy via a new direction, a detour through the various translations. “Via” is a poem that, as Genevieve Kaplan suggests, emphasises its materiality (Kaplan 2009). The effect of this repeated form is an emphasis placed on the variations evident between each translation of the classic text. These lines are not integrated into a text, nor are they altered, but it is their organisation that incites a new interpretation of the canonical text. As Antoine

Compagnon once wrote, “when I cite, I excise, I mutilate, I extract” referring to the citation as an “amputated limb” (Perloff 2008`, 134). “Via” takes these limbs and grafts them onto one another, impressing on the reader its status as citation, raising the question of originality and authorship as newly relevant to contemporary poetry that uses adaptation and re-writes classical texts, and presents a unique combination of embodied gesture and repetition as a performance work.

As Bergvall is a conceptual, performance poet, “Via” exists in more than one form, as a recorded text rather than only as a poem for the page. Created for performance in 2000 it didn’t appear in published form until 2003 in a special issue of the US journal Chain.

The material circumstances of its production as a performance work has led to its circulation in these two forms. Different from its printed form, the recorded “Via” engages in the materiality of embodied performance through speech. However, while this would suggest an originary subject antithetical to the iterative claims of the work that destabilises this ideal, its status as a recording again reasserts the unoriginality of the text. Upon listening to this recording, one returns to the body only to be reminded of its mediation. Listening to “Via” reveals inconsistencies between printed and recorded texts, as well as the forty-eighth variation that is created from the speaker’s vocal

133 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature fractals. The materiality of the body erupts and interrupts in this form through speech, while the recording also emphasises its materiality as a reproduction. It is both embodied presence and absence in this moment. The recorded “Via” simultaneously erases the body through the process of technological reproduction and re-situates it with each intake of breath, mispronunciation, or drawn out consonant that the listener can hear. The body interrupts and erupts, textuality and embodiment intertwining through the practice of reading and the sound of speech.

At the same time, one can hear the forty-eighth variation that runs throughout. This variation was the result of collaboration between Irish composer Ciarán Maher and

Bergvall. Adapting Bergvall’s vocal fractals from her performance of the work, Maher constructed this random yet carefully calculated aural variation that can only be heard through listening to this particular recording of Bergvall’s voice. As Bergvall explains:

Unlike the graphic causal horror of linear travel, these point by point

interceptions [in “Via”] spin a spiraling musicality, its horror is abstracted, a

build-up of interrupted motion, pulling together into a narrative of structure,

stop-start, each voice trying itself out, nothing looped, yet nothing moving

beyond the first line, never beyond the first song, never beyond the first day, the

forest walls, the city walls, my body walls. Having to look for points of exit,

further in, further down, rather than out (quoted in Perloff 2004`, 39).

The iteration that forms this spiralling architecture only leads inwards, “further in, further down, rather than out”, as Bergvall describes here. This gesture to an interior

134 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature would seem to suggest a kind of ideal inner truth or authenticity within an essentialist ontological understanding of being. However, it never settles there. “Via” demonstrates a relational quality that is deeply embedded and embodied, but this doesn’t mean that the result is somehow limited to an interior echo in its iteration, but actually opens up the meaning of iteration itself to continual processes of resignification, and possibly for transformation. After all, it is within the tight constraint of copying down and reading word for word that leads to a forty-eighth variation that runs through the recording.

Bergvall’s performance of this poem is one where she mediates rather than designates an originary genius for its creation. In a way, it is a very nihilistic act of creation in that there is nothing new here. Instead, the work anticipates itself beyond the dialectics of copy and original as continually in process.

As Jacob Edmond has discussed further, Bergvall places bodily gesture at the centre of her iterative strategies:

Bergvall uses iterative strategies to stage the relationship between individual,

embodied instantiation and system, between original and copy, variation,

translation, adaptation. Yet [Bergvall] does so in a way that emphasises the

embodied gesture of each instantiation or performance, of each pronounced

word – its physical presence in the mouth – as much as its place in a system of

signification (Edmond 2011`, 110).

Bergvall makes a claim to “rethink the ontology attached to bodies by rethinking the discursive and performative functions, which have regulated recent artistic and textual

135 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature forms using the human body” (Bergvall 2003). As a text that uses a combination of citation and performance to destructure the authority of the author by way of playful adaptation, while also emphasising the embodied performance of language through speech, “Via” complicates how we think about bodies in literary criticism. It raises again the dilemma of authorship for women writers and poses an iterative strategy to suggest the figuration of the differential signification of authors in this system.

I would connect the same dilemma of authorship evident in “Via” with Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak’s work on the figure Echo in Metamorphoses by Ovid (Spivak

1993). The imitative performance of Echo’s voice is a specific rendering of female subjectivity that is problematically caught up within the dualism of copy and original, sameness and difference that I find in “Via”. In this early essay Spivak revisits the myth of Narcissus and redirects the readers attention to Echo, the wood-nymph in the story, who has played a somewhat subsidiary role in the reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to date. In the story, Juno punishes Echo by removing her voice. Only able to repeat the words of others, she flees into the woods where later she meets and falls in love with

Narcissus. Spivak’s essay adds a distinctly gendered and political reflection on the subject of repetition in the copy that occurs through her ethical consideration of difference in this context, which relates to the representation of the female subject and is an important reference for this analysis of repetition as deeply gendered. It also articulates the ability for the ‘copy’ to expand its boundaries and to contain difference.

Spivak’s reading of Echo focuses on the imitative performance of her voice as an echo, in which “imitation opens the possibility of a mimicry that contains difference, or a repetition whose meaning cannot be appropriated by that which it repeats” (Hiddleston

136 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

2007`, 627). In this way, to echo or repeat with a difference is a potentially powerful act of subversion.

In her essay Spivak highlights the pivotal moment when Echo repeats Narcissus’ question, “why do you fly from me” (24-25). She argues that at this moment Echo repeats as she is doomed to for eternity, but this time her repetition is different: In the original text Ovid writes that Echo repeats back the words, covering her speech with description (Spivak 1993`, 24-25). However, Spivak points out that in the English language translation Echo says “Fly from me” and it is here that Spivak identifies a slip in the translation and argues that Ovid covers over Echo’s reply because it would allow

Echo to speak in her own voice by resounding as an imperative verb (Spivak 1993`,

24-25). In other words, “Fly from me” becomes “fly from me!” and repeats as a warning to Narcissus (Spivak 1993`, 24-25). The result is repetition with a difference, as in Echo we see “the possibility of difference within self-representation, of alterity within the copy” (Hiddleston 2007`, 627-628).

Spivak does not suggest that Echo is representative of all feminine subject position, as it would be too simplistic to suggest a corresponding tenor between Echo’s repetition and the feminine position as relation. Instead, Spivak advances her argument further to explore in more detail the complexities of intentionality in speech as represented by

Echo. She re-situates this question within an ethical consideration of language and, more specifically, she suggests that language is integral to the issues surrounding self- representation in a patriarchal society that supports gender and racial inequality. In this way, her essay is a reflection on representation, similar to her famous essay “Can the

137 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak 2010) that considers representation as re-presentation, as echo, and argues for the possibility for the voice of the other to emerge within this repetition.23 Spivak’s reading of Echo is routed within the problematic structure of language and representation as it stands for the other, especially considering the postcolonial female subject who experiences the double-bind of race and gender through the impossibility of self-representation within a cultural system that is unable to speak this subject. She states, “the homeopathic double bind of feminism in decolonisation, seeking in the new state to cure the poison of patriarchy with the poison of the legacy of colonialism, can read it as an instantiation of an ethical dilemma: choice in no choice, attendant upon particular articulation of narcissism, ready to await the sounds to which she may give back her own words” (Spivak 1993`, own emphasis 37).

I would apply Spivak’s reading of intentionality and the transgressive act of repeating with a difference to “Via”. As a text that uses citation and performance as a way to speak from an embodied position and still recognises this body’s place in the system of signification that inscribes it, “Via” charts this terrain in our technological age. Spivak’s reading of repetition as a gendered and racialised space aligns with my reading of “Via” as a work that repeats in order to suggest the gendered position of authorship. As

Cheryl Walker has argued, “What we need, instead of a theory of the death of the author, is a new concept of authorship that does not naively assert that the writer is an originating genius… but does not diminish the importance of difference and agency in the responses of women writers to historical formations” (Walker 1990`, 560). The process of signification prescribed within the combination of citation and performance

23 In Echo, however, her examples do not refer to subaltern subjectivity. 138 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature in “Via” is a reflection of this aim as it draws from the embodied position of the female- author and the symbolic register that are each informed by the other. It does not assert an originating genius, yet it does not diminish the embodied position of gendered identity within its articulation of the writing subject.

Referring to her writing as cultural pillaging, Bergvall situates textual plagiarism and the negation of the original authorial voice as a way for the unspeakable subject - the abject subject - to escape silence: She writes, “Thieving denaturizes what it steals”, referring to the authority of the author in the traditional sense, which becomes displaced in the crisis of originality that plagiarism and theft imply (Bergvall 2012`, 18). This appropriation resonates with our postcolonial understanding of ‘writing back’,

“capturing and remoulding the language [of the dominant ideology] to new uses” (Ashcroft 1989`, 38). However, the resonance is different as it is situated within the context of migration and cultural identity. Citation, whether considered as plagiarism or appropriation, unmasks originality, revealing the presumed hierarchy that dictates the structures of authorship and originality - themselves consolidated by the architecture of our social lives. As Bergvall states this unmasking of originality is important for the minoritarian or differential writer: “Textual plagiarism provides here a way out of a societal status quo that must silence or symptomatize the female minoritarian or differential writer” (Bergvall 2012`, 18). It is not so much a process of writing back that “Via” implies, but rather a process of writing or traveling through, with the dominant language that one finds oneself in as the repeating woodlands.

139 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

In “The Philomela Project” Bergvall also returns to Ovid’s Metamorphoses to create a work that investigates women’s voice and representation in writing. “The Philomela

Project” is a work that, like “Via” and “Alyson Singes”, is adapted from a translation.

Bergvall uses Chaucer’s translation of the myth, which appeared in his book The

Legend of Good Women (1394). Philomela is an Athenian princess who is brutally raped by her brother-in-law, the Thracian, Tereus. Bergvall’s adaptation of the myth is a work in progress; the only published work that is part of “The Philomela Project” are a series of drawings which appeared in 2014 in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art

(Bergvall 2014).

Philomela (line 2328).

These drawings are a visual representation of the moment Philomela’s tongue is cut out by her rapist, a further act of violence carried out on Philomela’s body so that she is rendered mute and therefore cannot reveal Tereus’ crime. She is then trapped and hidden

140 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature in the forest, but makes the crime visible by weaving a tapestry of the scene and sending it to her sister.

Various writers and translators have translated this myth into the English language.

However, it is interesting to note that the translations of this work often remove

Philomela’s speech and cover over her voice with description, in a way similar to what

Spivak recognised as Ovid’s covering of Echo’s speech in the Narcissus myth. Further investigation into the various translations of this myth reveals that Chaucer’s translation is one of few that allow Philomela to speak at all in the story. As Saburo Oka argues in his essay Chaucer’s Transformation of ‘The Legend of Philomela’, most translations of the tale follow Ovid’s retelling and cover her speech with description:

As for the words of Philomela at this moment, both Chaucer and Gower change

the Ovidian indirect discourse to the direct discourse: first, the Ovidian ‘obi sit

germans’ is changed to the Chaucerian ‘Where is my sister, brother Tereus?’,

and in Gower it is omitted; secondly, the Ovidian ‘frusta clamato saepe parents,

saepe sorore sua, magnis super omni a divis’ is changed in Chaucer to ‘She

cryeth “Syster!” with flu loud a stevene, And “Fader dere!” and “Help me, God

in hevene! (Oka 1990`, 95).

The lines “She cryeth, Syster”, “Father dere”, “Help me, God in heven”, are lines from

Chaucer’s translation in which Philomela speaks. Bergvall’s drawings of this text visualise a dragging and tearing away of speech through the fading and violent streaks

141 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature of ink that spill out, bringing gesture and voice together in an embodied image of the moment when Philomela is raped and has her tongue cut out24 - her voice removed.

Philomela (line 2329).

As a visual text, the work is pushed into the arena of concrete poetry as it uses similar modes of representation that combine the visual and the written. Like Philomela’s tapestry, in the absence of voice, the visual representation of the event becomes paramount. This representation brings an aural register, as we are asked to visualise the final cries of Philomela’s voice.

24 In the myth, Tereus cuts Philomela’s tongue out as she threatens to tell others of his rape. Her voice becomes a threat to Tereus and so he cruelly mutilates her tongue so that she cannot speak. To reveal her rapist, Philomela weaves a tapestry of the scene and sends it to her sister, Tereus’ wife Procne. 142 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

“The Philomela Project” explores gesture at the moment of Philomela’s inability to speak – “the brutal point of cut, on the violent tearing from speech and articulacy, on the last uttered cry” (Bergvall 2014`, 18). This work is a study of speech and gesture, on how to create embodied representation in moments of silence and suppression. Bergvall anticipates that these initial drawings will lead to a live performance or installed form, which she imagines, at this stage, as an aria for a woven female voice (Bergvall 2014`,

18). “Noise that reveals a voice and its voicing… The work is both sounding and sounded, live and recorded/installed, because it is this second aspect that carries the trail of the voice and helps generate a new language” (Bergvall 2014`, 18). As Bergvall suggests here, in its recorded and installed form, the work will complicate the assumed singularity of live performance and the new language will be one that situates unoriginality at its centre. In other words, a new language founded within a speechlessness that inscribes presence in absence, and absence in presence.

It is this final point on presence and absence that draws together the three works analysed in this chapter. They each refuse this dichotomy and we can recognise absence as a strategy that recognises ideological constraints on writing in the performance of gender identity. Each poem exists in the interstices of this confusing dialogue between performance and writing. It is in the combination of performance, writing, and citation that they being to slip between cite/site/sight, as I identified at the start of this chapter.

As I have argued, they each demonstrate a critical reflection on authorship and gender through the addition of canonical texts. “Via”, in particular, introduces the complex interplay between the body and processes of signification through citation, but each text

143 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature repeats and cites in various ways, either by acts of copy or through looser modes of adaptation that adopt theme, style and narrative. They all share an investment in making writing itself visible through the manipulation carried out on an ‘original’ text. To contextualise this reading further, this chapter will conclude with how the technique of manipulation relates to feminist translation practices, which challenge and reconfigure the derivative position of translation. This framework helps to elucidate the strong connection to identity and translation in the three poems I’ve analysed in this chapter.

Translation is often positioned as derivative to an original, which has led to a metaphorics of translation that relies on the same gender binary that positions the female subject as derivative. As Sherry Simon has argued, the “femininity of translation is a persistent historical trope” that continues to draw from images of inferiority that connect woman and translator and mark both as secondary within a hierarchy that upholds the masculine position of the author (Simon 1996`, 1). As I mentioned in the introduction, the connection between the feminine subject and translation is furthered across literary history, epitomised by Yevgeny Yevtushenko: “Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful it is not faithful. If it is faithful it is most certainly not beautiful” (Simon 1996`, 1). Fidelity is the most persistent metaphor for translation and its persistence continues in the ongoing hierarchy that positions translation as inferior to the original, and links this symptomatic register of “reproduction” and “secondariness” with masculine and feminine imagery (Simon 1996`, 1). The gendering of the translated text as feminine connects to my earlier discussion of Echo, the female figure for repetition. The recent arrival of feminist translation theory has aimed to identify and

144 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature critique this relegation of inferiority, argues Simon, and attempts to “trouble the structures of authority which have maintained this association” (Simon 1996`, 1).

Feminist practices in translation have highlighted the performative quality of language that connects to representation, influenced by feminist literary criticism, and have engaged with this subject since the 1980s. Jose Santaemilia suggests that the troubling of authority, at the heart of feminist translation theory, adapts the idea of “manipulation” rather than “fidelity” as an appropriate metaphor for this type of translation practice:

“Both manipulare and translatare share a common lexical ground: an artful adaptation, change, transformation, transmission” (Santaemilia 2005`, 1). These terms are synonymous with transgression, perversion, and subversion and still rely on a secondary position as they remain relative to the original. However, this also incites a sense of agency in the playfulness with, or critique of, this relational position they inscribe. In many cases, it is from this position of manipulation that repetition with a difference can result.

Manipulation is a useful term for translation especially feminist translation as contemporary practices of translation are variously engaged with the more troubling and manipulative strategies. In her article “Translation, Gender and Otherness” Susan

Bassnett comments on a change in how the relationship between the original and the translation is viewed in postcolonial theory: “Translation, as a derivative art form, has often been compared with the colony, the derivative of the parent state… as post- colonial literary practice has developed, so also has thinking about translation, and in particular the right of the translator to put the need of the readers before those of the

145 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature writer” (Bassnett 2005`, 88). Despite the negative valence of terms like manipulation and transgression, these practices have often resulted in a positive distillation of how difference operates in language and representation, and, more importantly, has identified the ways in which translation is a potentially transformative gesture for the representation of gendered and racialised subjects that can be reinterpreted due to its manipulation of the discursive construction of subjectivity.

As Santaemilia has argued further: “Translation seems to me one of the most privileged loci for the (re) production of identities, because it makes them visible or invisible, worthy or unworthy, etc” (Santaemilia 2005`, 6). Feminist translation uses a strategy of manipulation that departs from the ideal image of the translator as an invisible mediator and emphasises gender discourse in the text through the translation process. From this perspective, the poems discussed in this chapter are parallel to the feminist politics behind this interpretive method of translation. I contextualise Bergvall’s poems in this way because, as Santaemilia has stated, “behind all manipulation there is always a translating process which necessarily affects identity and which, most likely, starts with identity” (Santaemilia 2005`, 5). As these works are about female identity and writing, as I have argued, identity is posed as a question in each of these texts, which anticipate a writing project beyond the dialectics of originality and authorship, copy and translation, that are themselves categorical markers that uphold gender norms and inscribe the female body.

Bergvall has noted that her interest in bilingualism and cultural identity has created a need “to rethink the ontology attached to bodies by rethinking the discursive and

146 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature performative functions which have regulated recent artistic and textual forms using the human body” (Bergvall 2003). Bodywork, as a performance poet, is a way for Bergvall to work through the complicated ideas surrounding the representation of race and gender in an interrogation of subjectivity. In the same gesture, translation work informs this engagement with ontology and representation as the materiality of language and text uncover any objective view of writing and asserts the identity politics inherent in these. Thus, figuration of embodiment and subjectivity becomes an important site for productive moves in the representation of marginalised subjects. As Braidotti writes,

“Figurations are not figurative ways of thinking, but rather materialistic mappings of situated, i.e., embedded and embodied, social positions” (Braidotti 2011`, 4). In other words, the figuration of the body is not the body, rather it is a social position. Further to this point, however, the question of how ontology shapes this social position is evident yet remains unresolved. In the three poems discussed in this chapter by Bergvall, citation is a space for this unresolvedness to remain in order to recognise gender as the construct we know it to be, but not to reduce the experience of this identity as one that is lived. As Alyson Singes says, “Thyngges change…sometimes copying typing out stamping quoting taking / on carrying in one’s body the burden of otheres pain, / otheres codex skin as ones work” (lines 282−291). Just don’t call her Alice.

147 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

“A translation for which no original exists”: Exophony as

comparison literature in Yoko Tawada’s English translations

When asked about her position as a transnational writer, the contemporary short story writer Yoko Tawada stated the following: “All interesting literature is born in that moment when you are not sure if you are in one place with one culture… I don’t think I am exceptional: I’m in a special situation, but it’s a very literary, poetic situation” (quoted in Grimes 2014). The ‘special literary situation’ Tawada describes can be identified as one of a Japanese migrant writer living in Germany, and she draws on this position in her writing by combining local material from Germany and Japan such as folklore and cultural imagery. She also writes in both languages, notably two languages of the previous axis alliance, and her writing practice brings these two nations together in a collision of cultural and linguistic material that departs from any straightforward dualism between them. The effect of this is a denial of the category of

‘nation’ in favour of a macaronic mix of language and cultural imagery. In Tawada’s short stories translation is both a theme and a process of representation of the female body that inflects this transnational position.

The situation that Tawada describes as indeterminate and unfixed is resonant with the cosmopolitan alternative, which is held in contrast to a national outlook and draws attention to those aspects of Tawada’s short stories where linguistic and cultural borders are blurred and become fluid. As Ulrich Beck explains further:

148 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

The cosmopolitan outlook, by contrast, breaks with the seductive insularity of

national consciousness by opening itself up to the world of others…In this

playing with boundaries which the cosmopolitan outlook practices and perfects

as a shifting of perspectives the cosmopolitan worldview becomes an imagining

of alternative paths within and between different cultures and modernities (Beck

2006`, 79).

Not being sure of one’s own position identifies this cosmopolitan outlook in the confluence of cultural space and language. The geographical, ideological and temporal conversion that occurs at the various points of intersection performs the shifting of perspective that I highlight in the following close analysis of Tawada’s short stories, which overrides the singularity of the nation. As I will discuss in this chapter, the translation of her work into English language by notable translators, such as Susan

Bernofsky and Yumi Selden, among others, adds yet another transnational dimension to her writing.

Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960 and migrated to Germany in 1982 where she completed most of her adult education. She graduated with a masters in contemporary

German literature from the University of Hamburg, and later with a PhD from the

University of Zurich. After living and working in Hamburg for a number of years,

Tawada relocated to Berlin in 2006 and has remained a permanent resident there since.

The first of Tawada’s short stories to appear in English language translation is the short story collection The Bridegroom Was a Dog, published by Kodansha International in

1998 with translations by Margaret Mitsutani (Tawada 1998). Since this publication,

149 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature three other works by Tawada have been published in English by independent United

States publishing house New Directions. These include two additional collections of short stories, Where Europe Begins translated by Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden

(Tawada 2002), and Facing the Bridge translated by Margaret Mitsutani (Tawada 2007).

In 2012 New Directions re-released the title story from her first collection The

Bridegroom Was a Dog as a short stand-alone publication (Tawada 2012).25 These translations into English have instigated an increase in critical scholarship on Tawada’s short stories in English, influenced in turn by the experimental relationship these texts have to language and translation. This is epitomised by the latest translation of Tawada’s short story Portrait of a Tongue (Tawada 2013), an experimental translation by Chantal

Wright that creatively engages with the original language text by adopting a parallel annotation that includes extensive subjective commentary on the translation process itself by Wright. The translation of Tawada’s short stories into English language has also established a strong connection to the United States; on many occasions Tawada has been the writer-in-residence at various US institutions and has given numerous readings throughout the USA. For example, in 1999 she was a resident at M.I.T in

Boston for four months, in April 2004 she was a resident at the University of Kentucky, and later in the same year she was a resident at Deutsches Haus of New York

University. Other residencies include Washington University of St. Louis from March-

April in 2008, Stanford University in February 2009 and Cornell University in April

2009. Tawada’s many US based residencies point to the geopolitical power dynamics that underpin her career and her translation into English language. All in all, the translation of Tawada’s short stories from German and Japanese into English has created

25 New Directions has also published Tawada’s first novel The Naked Eye (2009) and will release the forthcoming translation Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016) in November. 150 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature a triangulation of cultural exchange that extends between Japan, Germany, and the

United States in which I find the category of the experimental and the dynamic of second language writing and exophony in the twenty-first century is key.

Before entering into the space of English language via translation, Tawada’s collections of short stories were well received in both German and Japanese literary contexts. The various awards she has received from institutions in both countries attest to this dual reception, cementing her place in both literary contexts. These include the Japanese

Gunzo Prize for New Writers, awarded in 1991 for her short story “Missing Heels” and the Akutagawa Prize for her short story “The Bridegroom Was a Dog”, awarded in

1993. The Akutagawa Prize is, arguably, one of the most sought after literary prizes in

Japan and is renown as a platform for rising Japanese authors, with many recipients going on to be widely translated. The two German awards Tawada has also received demonstrate the cultural appeal of her work within the context of migrant literature in

Germany as well. In 1996, Tawada was awarded the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Prize, a

German award that recognises a foreign writer’s contribution to German culture and in

2005 she was presented with a Goethe medal, an annual award that is “an official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany [awarded to] foreign personalities who have performed outstanding service for the German language and international cultural relations” (Goethe-Institut 2013). Awarding Tawada the Goethe medal in 2005 places her work in the context of global cultural relations that the award identifies. The wording of the Goethe medal (awarded for service to the “German language and international cultural relations”) identifies the context of global relations in which national space holds a privileged position as it is connected to and reified by the literary

151 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature products of that nation. These prizes identify Tawada as an important contemporary writer whose work contributes to both German and Japanese literary cultures and also highlight the relationship between international relations, translation and the formation of national literatures as the Goethe medal in particular suggests.26

Notwithstanding the many important German and Japanese language publications by

Tawada, the translation of her stories into English and the questions these stories raise on embodiment and the mobility of literary culture form the central concern of this chapter. This chapter argues that the meta-fictional representation of translation in

Tawada’s short stories reconceptualise translation within an embodied model that is self-reflexive, one that ruminates on the circumstances of translation in the twenty-first century and the position of the translated text in world literature. This representation, however, is not essentialist but is deployed via a post-structuralist feminist critique of essentialism. Here the body is, as Braidotti states, “to be understood as neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather as a point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic and the material social conditions… the body is then an interface, a threshold, a field of intersecting material and symbolic forces, it is a surface where multiple codes (race, sex, class, age, etc.) are inscribed” (Braidotti 2001`, 3). On one hand, each story tests and explores the way national imaginaries are inscribed on the female body and, as this chapter argues, suggests an alternate biological model as a metaphorics for translation in our transnational age. Tawada’s interest in the

26 The Goethe award is named after the philosopher now widely recognised as the earliest proponent of world literature. It is also interesting to note that an earlier awardee of the Goethe medal is the cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose work has been utilised by scholars of world literature to great effect in recent years, demonstrating yet again the cultural ties between these discourses on world literature and transnational circulation that have occupied a prominent place in Germany. As an exophonic writer, Tawada’s work has often been received in association with the transnational context of global relations between the two nations of Germany and Japan. 152 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature intersection, or collision rather, of Japanese and German cultures and languages also speaks to her own social position as a Japanese born writer now located in Germany and regularly writing in the German language. As Tawada’s short stories are often narrated by a Japanese migrant women living in an unnamed western country many critics have recognised her work as semi-autobiographical. Thus, analysis of embodiment is situated within a further consideration of the complex overlap between subjectivity, corporeality, identity and representation in Tawada’s short stories. I also situate Tawada’s position as a migrant and second language writer within a second consideration of the translation of her short story collections into English and argue that the politics of international relations shape this production of her texts. I conclude this chapter with a reading of the cell as a certain kind of reflection on translation in the short story “Storytellers Without

Souls” that confirms the connection between translation and female embodiment that I trace across Tawada’s other short stories.

After going over the many critical responses to Tawada’s short stories in English language criticism, it became clear that there is a somewhat contradictory rhetoric surrounding the category of ‘transnational’ and how it is applied to her writing. On one hand, the transnational is applied to Tawada’s writing through the description of

“crossing” national borders and cultural boundaries. For example, in a New York Times review Charles Wilson argues that the representation of ‘butchery’ (which appears in a few scenes in the short story “Where Europe Begins”) is a “literal representation of the more abstract condition of being torn from one culture and transplanted into another” (Wilson 2002). In an example such as this, where critics use ‘border-crossing’ and ‘transplanting’ as a metaphor for Tawada’s writing, they suggest a separation of

153 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature cultures rather than taking into consideration the effect of Tawada’s work that creates hybrid arrangements through the responsive site of story telling. As Edouard Glissant theorised, “cultures are not monadic entities or bounded spaces tracing national borders…the creolization of cultures occurs not because pure cultural entities have come into contact with each other, but because cultures are always already hybrid and relational as a result of sometimes unexpected and sometimes violent processes” (quoted inLionnet 2005`, 8-9). This relational aspect of culture and language is explored in many of Tawada’s stories, such as “The Bath” and “Storytellers Without

Souls” (Tawada 2002) and is a more accurate reading of Tawada’s work than any over- simplified border-crossing metaphor. Other critics, have also identified this quality in her work and have therefore aligned a reading of Tawada’s stories with what I acknowledge as a Glissantian association that defines the “border-crossing” elements of these texts in a different manner, where-in lies the conflict regarding Tawada’s reception in English language criticism. For example, in his review in The Japan Times, David

Cozy writes that Tawada “has herself crossed national and linguistic borders” (Cozy

2007). However, he then goes on to problematise the solidity of said borders by identifying them as imaginary lines: “Tawada produces texts that cannot be placed neatly on this side or that of any number of generic boundaries and, in so doing, elegantly illustrates, in the forms of her tales, the disjunctions with which she is concerned” (Cozy 2007). These disjunctions in Tawada’s short stories perform a transnational poetics that is hybrid and relational, and which draws on themes of translation to do so.

154 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Although the transnational context of Tawada’s publications has received much critical attention, the feminist quality of her “avowedly feminist fictions” (Perloff 2007`, viii) has garnered much less notice and very few critical texts discuss how gender is represented in her collections of short stories. The lack of gender analysis is problematic as the construct of national borders is closely aligned with the construct of a gender identity and language in her work. Without an understanding of gender, critical enquiry cannot understand the full implications of the female migrant body in these texts. The majority of research on gender and female subjectivity in Tawada’s short stories has been conducted by postgraduate students. Theses on this subject include, Robin

Tierney’s Japanese Literature as World Literature: Visceral Engagement in the Writings of Tawada Yoko and Shono Yoriko (Tierney 2010) and Christina Kraenzle’s Mobility,

Space and Subjectivity: Yoko Tawada and German-language transnational literature

(Kraenzle 2004). Another key text on gender in Yoko Tawada’s short stories is the chapter “Tawada’s Multilingual Moves: Towards a Transnational Imaginary”, which identifies the postmodern feminist aesthetic evident in Tawada’s collections and explores the transnational element of hybrid languages and gendered subjectivity

(Yildiz 2007).27 As Yasemin Yildiz argues, “In these texts, gender does not just appear as an issue for embodied subjects, but is evoked as the very structuring principle of language and thus is inscribed into the material out of which subjectivities are shaped in the first place” (Yildiz, 2007, 85). The new research offered by this chapter adds to the analysis of gender in Tawada’s short stories, which builds from the critical attention to gender and subjectivity but adds to this the analysis of the metaphorics of the female

27 Yasemin Yildiz has also written Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012). In this book there is another interesting chapter on detaching from the ‘mother tongue’. She writes about new “scapes” of globalisation that bring about unusual couplings of languages and contextualises Tawada’s writing between Japanese and German languages in this (109-142). 155 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature body and translation. I recognise that gender and language are interwoven in Tawada’s stories and expand on this to argue that, in turn, this relationship between them informs the thematisation of translation and becomes crucial in analysing the representation and embodiment of the female subject. The interplay of gender and language then is reminiscent of the poststructuralist claim, “although we may speak through and shape language, it also shapes and speaks through us” (Murfin 2009`, 400). By highlighting the relationship between translation and gender, this chapter builds from these critical text and recognises how Tawada’s writing takes up a postmodern feminist aesthetic through a gendered reinvigoration of transnational discourse and adopts a cosmopolitan outlook in the process.

As Yildiz also states, “In the often playful move beyond the separateness of national languages, Tawada begins to offer a linguistic imagination that invokes realms beyond categories such as the nation” (Yildiz, 2007, 78). This claim can be taken further to suggest that her short stories offer a site that thinks through cultural interaction according to a model of cosmopolitanism as translation (as I will argue further in the following analysis of the character P in “Portrait of a Tongue”) In other words, a new cosmopolitanism in literary criticism has centralised translation as an important consideration due to the transnational connection it describes. As Esperanca Bielsa argues:

Conception of the role of translation in relation to cosmopolitanism are

compelling because they are the product of a view of translation that implies

much more than the linguistic transfer of information from the language of the

156 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

other appealing rather to an experience that mobilises our relationship to the

other as well as our conception of ourselves (Bielsa 2014).

Bielsa highlights how translation has become a central concern in recent accounts of cosmopolitanism due to the global interdependence and the negotiation of difference at play in processes of translation. Translation in this critical context mobilises our relationship to the other and emphasises a multiplicity of perspectives and the interaction between different traditions. Importantly, Bielsa’s paper on translation and cosmopolitanism recognises that the relationship between the source language and the target culture does not ‘transcend’ ethnocentrism, but instead she points to ethnocentrism as a tendency or resistance in any act of translating (Bielsa, 2014, 396).

In light of this Bielsa privileges the foreignisation strategy of translation studies, recognisably connected to Lawrence Venuti’s work on translation, as demonstrating a cosmopolitan commitment to the foreign, and openness to the other. Research on translation through a cosmopolitan lens suggests translation as gain rather than loss, with the potential to provide a capacity for readers to “see oneself from the perspective of cultural others” (Bielsa, 2014, 395). However, the ability to achieve this depends on the approach to translating and could just as easily result in upholding problematic identity constructs.28

Rebecca Walkowitz’ theory of ‘comparison literature’ offers an alternative way to further explore cosmopolitanism and translation in the twenty-first century and also a

28 As Bielsa states, this view of translation as gain builds from earlier criticism in the discipline of Translation Studies that examines how translated texts are received in the target culture and the effect they have there, rather than a comparative approach to the original and translated text that often focuses on what is lost instead. 157 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature way to approach the thematisation of embodied translation in Tawada’s stories.

Comparison literature (also outlined in the introduction of this thesis) is “an emergent genre of transnational fiction, whose preoccupation with comparison is stimulated in part by the historical conditions of the global literary marketplace, and in part by several related developments such as the flourishing of migrant communities, and especially migrant writers, within metropolitan centers throughout the world” (Walkowitz 2009`,

568). This is a situation reflected by Tawada’s position as a migrant Japanese-German writer now living in Berlin. Walkowitz argues that the transnational situation of comparison literature has led to a new phenomenon of literature that is written for translation (Walkowitz, 2009). In other words, marginalised writers from smaller language fields anticipate the translation of their work and, as a result of this expectation, they begin to emphasise narrative and theme over idiom as these registers can survive the translation process. Comparison literature supplements this discussion on cosmopolitanism and translation by adding a new dimension that explores other strategies for translation in the twenty-first century. It acknowledges the author as part of this process who, whether in anticipation of the translation of their work or as a result of the circumstances and location of their writing practice (or a combination of the two), emphasise theme and narrative. In Tawada’s stories the representation of translation is deployed at the level of theme and narrative and, as such, Walkowitz’ theory of

‘comparison literature’ holds a particular relevance for Tawada’s short stories in

English. Comparison literature incites a new genre for the twenty-first century in response to alternative modes of writing and the new speed with which translation is carried out, one that has emerged as a result of the different and often strategic ways many migrant writers in particular choose to write. These different ways of writing is

158 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature evident in an acknowledgment on the writer’s behalf that in our current global literary marketplace their stories will be translated and read in different languages. It is also, in

Walkowitz words, a genre that “joins the renewed effort to imagine transnational and /or cosmopolitan paradigms that offer alternatives to national models of political community” (Walkowitz 2009`, 568). Comparison literature reconfigures translation practice in this materialist context and re-prioritises attention to the themes of Tawada’s work and the way in which she uses a translational writing practice to create meaning.

The dual performance of female subjectivity played out through translation can be seen in Yoko Tawada’s short story Portrait of a Tongue, translated from German by Chantal

Wright. In this story the narrator describes the character P as follows:

I once tried to paint a picture of a woman; it bore the working title “Portrait of a

Lady”…What did this lady look like? Whom did she resemble?… Her name is

Piroschka because, later on, when I asked her what she would like to be called in

a novel, she gave me this name. But maybe I hadn’t heard the name properly

because I couldn’t find it in my dictionary of names. What am I supposed to do?

Maybe I should just say P; P for permanent and provisional, poetic and practical

(Tawada, 2013, 38-40).

There is much that could be said about this short extract. It exemplifies, on one hand the overlap of transnational discourses on translation, female representation, and cultural specificity. Foremost, it suggests the representational politics involved in situating the female subject in and through language. It also highlights the range of

159 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature references that Tawada draws from; the Hungarian name Piroschka, adapted from the

German novel Ich denke oft an Piroschka by Hugo Harting (1954), and the reference to the Henry James novel Portrait of a Lady are both demonstrative of the intertextuality of Tawada’s prose that draws from a wealth of cultural material. The combination of intertextual references such as these, and the dialogue on female representation these references construct compounds the reliance on artifice used to describe the character P in Portrait of a Tongue. P is constructed within the artifice of portraiture, demonstrating a reliance on physical appearance, and her choice of name is taken from another text.

She is relative, only represented in relation to other cultural objects. In this way she becomes ‘unoriginal’, a copy unable to be signified outside of the frames of reference that dictate her identity. Language is implicated in the process of signification in the text, clearly identified as culturally and socially determined when the narrator is unable to locate the name in her dictionary. Piroschka’s name, the only clue the narrator has to gauge her identity, is reliant on the discursive context for meaning. Unable to locate the name, the fractured identity of Piroschka undergoes a transformation at the expense of cultural specificity when she is reduced to the single letter P. This creates a parallel between loss of language and loss of identity through the absence of meaning and the untranslatability of the name, which can also be read as an example of the difficulties in translating texts between different cultures. Tawada’s discursive movement between these registers of identity and meaning cleverly denotes the unravelling of the female subject through language alongside the difficulty of translating, bringing the two discourses of translation and gender together. However, the last line “Permanent and provisional, poetic and practical” complicates a reading of the text as one that suggests translation as a loss. It emphasises this point by referring to the relational operation of

160 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature language that relies on binary opposition in order to construct meaning (38-40). By reducing the name to a single letter, however, Tawada alters this oppositional dialectic as all new terms resonate alongside one another as a kind of unfolding that occurs through the abbreviation of the name as the single letter ‘P’. What was previously a sign of the character’s reduction by the narrator is then reconceptualised to become a sign of multiplicity, however what remains lost is the cultural specificity of the name

Piroschka that identifies the subject as Hungarian.

The issue of cultural specificity evident in this short extract is analogous with world literature scholarship on translation. It is here that we can recognise how Tawada uses translation as a theme to engage with wider discourses on translation in this story. The fine line between reduction and accumulation is often a subject of discussion in debates of world literature that consider the oppositional frames of the universal and the particular, each operating at either the expense or defence of cultural specificity. The problem of world literature is that it potentially reduces the variety and specificity of literary culture, subsuming it within a dominant (Western) canon and mapping literature along a linear plane. I read Portrait of a Tongue as an interesting suggestion of the way that reduction can allow for an unfolding that extends from these parameters in new directions and depths. However, the importance of including cultural specificity remains key; to go bigger, as some scholars suggest, is not necessarily to do better. As I discussed in the introduction of this thesis, Wai Chee Dimock argues in her article on world systems there are alternate ways to ‘do’ world literature that enables a wide framework, whilst allowing space for specificity and close reading. She argues:

161 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Finite parameters and infinite unfolding - go hand in hand. The latter is

embedded in the former, coiled in the former, and can be released only when the

former is broken down into fractional units. For it is only when the scale gets

smaller and the details gets finer [sic] that previously hidden dimensions can

come swirling out (Dimock 2006`, 89).

Dimock’s model favours randomness over coherence for world literature and identifies a similar unfolding that I find in the representation of P. The abbreviation and transformation of Piroschka into ‘P’ is in turn a transformation of context that resonates with translation, highlighting the process of translation itself when the text enters into a different target culture and the way in which subjectivity and in particular the female body is relative to this process. By thematising this in the text the reader is made aware of this. The complex process of translating between cultures is revealed at the level of narrative and the story engages with the interesting subject of translation and representation.

Portrait of a Tongue follows this pattern of cosmopolitan writing that is created from multiple positions and exists between languages in a sense, as do the other collections of stories analysed later in this chapter. The thematic representation of translation in

Tawada’s short stories reflects Walkowitz’ finding and is an example of comparison literature. I read this representation of translation at the level of theme as connected to the production of the English language translation of Tawada’s collections.

Cosmopolitanism as translation, then, encourages the view of translation as gain, as

Bielsa stipulates, as it distinguishes the value of translated texts according to

162 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature translations ability to mobilise the relationship between self and other. This mobilisation of self and other is opposed to ethnocentrism. However, foreignisation is not the only strategy used against ethnocentrism in Tawada’s writing. In the thematisation of translation engendered by Tawada’s short stories, there is an alternative transnational arrangement in the confluence of language groups that have previously been used to establish national singularity. Tawada’s second language writing points to this new literary space.

In contemporary migrant literature language is often explored in relation to national politics, however exophonic literature complicates this. Tawada is a leading practitioner of exophonic writing, “which is to say writing in a second language, a language always other from one’s own” (Perloff 2007`, vii). As such, the term exophonic differentiates between writers who write in the language of their birth and writers who choose to write in a foreign language. As Tawada writes in both German and Japanese, only the texts composed in German are exophonic according to this definition. This involves a keen sense of grammatical and verbal difference between languages and the deployment of xenoglossia that introduces literal transpositions in Tawada’s stories, but it is also much more than this. For one, the many awards Tawada has received from German institutions demonstrate the transnational appeal of Yoko Tawada’s work as a migrant writer and the interest in the category of exophonic. As Chantal Wright has noted, “the existence of these prizes reflects the development of exophony in the German-speaking world in the post-war period” (Tawada 2013). At the core of this cultural exchange lies language. As Marjorie Perloff argues: “If we believe that, as Wittgenstein put it, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world,” then the poet/fiction writers is, as

163 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature here, one who can delineate the clash of alternate worlds” (Perloff 2007). As a migrant and exophonic writer, Tawada’s relationship to language operates in a way that confounds and problematises the traditional national affiliation of literary studies when it comes to the relationship between national borders and the policing of national languages.

The term exophonic is deeply connected to the context and site of contemporary migrant writing. The term migrant has been politically defined as “any person who lives temporarily or permanently in a country where he or she was not born” (UNESCO n.d.).

This term only applies, however, to persons who migrate “freely” and does not include refugees. As Carine Mardorossian has argued, migrant literature emphasises

“movement, rootlessness, and the mixing of cultures, races, and languages” (Mardorossian 2002`, 16). Tawada’s short stories fit into this category as texts that operate within the interstices of Japanese and German languages.

Thematically, the migrant woman who narrates many of Tawada’s short stories exemplifies this mobility and displacement that redefine identity as process. As

Mardorossian argues:

Because of her displacement, the migrant’s identity undergoes radical shifts that

alter her self-perception and often result in her ambivalence towards both her old

and new existence. She can no longer simply or nostalgically remember the past

as a fixed and comforting anchor in her life, since its contours move with the

present rather than in opposition to it. Her identity is no longer to do with being

but with becoming. (Mardorossian 2002`, 16).

164 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

It is not by accident that Mardorossian uses the female pronoun in this description of the migrant. This position of ‘becoming’ and ‘unfixed’ is performed as relative to the female subject position in Tawada’s short stories such as “Canned Foreign” and “The

Bath”. In migrant literature, female subjectivity becomes even further problematised due to the multiplicity of acculturated spaces that are then negotiated through mobility.

As Sandra Ponzanesi also states, the “migrant as a symbolic category…allows the envisioning of trespassing disciplinary boundaries, epistemological categories and nationalistic dogmas. Most important, from a feminist standpoint, the migrant trope helps to envision the intersection of sex, class, race, age and lifestyle as fundamental axis of differentiation” (Ponzanesi 2002`, 207). Evidently, female subjectivity is an important space to consider in transnational and migrant women’s writing. The representation of the migrant woman in “Canned Foreign” and “The Bath” by Tawada is inscribed within different narratives that figure this subject, but she continues to exceed this representation through her own voice which performs the literal transpositions and shapes language to her own use. Marina Camboni adds a cosmopolitan dimension to migrant writing by women through an approach she describes as “cosmopolitan multilingual criticism” (Camboni 2007`, 35). This approach focuses on how writers

“respond to, criticize, or renovate each language’s lexical and structural systems, as well as its monolingual discursive and power practices, from a gendered perspective and in tune with a cosmopolitan world view” (Camboni 2007`, 35).

For Keijiro Suga, exophonic writing also involves xenoglossia in the literal transposition between languages and the use of foreign words that writers, such as

165 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Tawada, exhibit in their use of a language that is not their native tongue (Suga, 2007,

21). Suga’s definition of xenoglossia as “the use of foreign words and literal transpositions in one’s writing” (Slaymaker 2007`, 23) is helpful in understanding exophonic writing as it identifies the movement between languages. However, xenoglossia is originally defined as an unlearned language in that it pertains to the phenomenon of people who speak a language without early contact or any study or training (Griffiths 1986`, 141). In its original sense then, xenoglossia identifies an

‘unnatural’ knowledge of a language learnt through unknown means and has been associated with experiences of possession or reincarnation that were documented in psychiatry papers in the late twentieth century. The application of the term xenoglossia in discussions of exophonic and migrant writing demonstrates the inherent presumption that it is unnatural to write in a language that is not that of your birth and, in turn, highlights the naturalisation of language in literary studies that identifies authors according to language groups. Writers who choose to write in a different language, not necessarily the language in which the national literature is recognised as such, complicate this naturalisation. This history of the term raises, on one hand, the assumption that language is natural, and also, on the other, that perhaps our view of language is changing in the twenty-first century.

Wright discusses exophony further, stating exophony leads to writers “mould[ing] the new language until it becomes suitable for their purposes, in a manner analogous to the strategies of appropriation observed in post-colonial literatures” (Wright 2007`, 22).

Wright observes two common myths inferred in discussions of exophonic writing: first,

“that a language belongs to a certain territory and body of people” and hence identifies

166 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature the consolidation of the nation-state by language; and second, she questions the assumption “that one could write in a language which was not one’s own” (Wright

2007`, 23). She argues:

To write in a language which is not one’s mother tongue means that one has

already made it one’s own and, if it proves unsuitable for one’s purposes, that

one hammers it and bends it and shapes it until it goes where one wants it to go

(Wright 2007`, 23).

For Suga and Wright, exophony acknowledges the writer’s ability to mould language, and simultaneously infers that it is unnatural to do so. The origin of the term xenoglossia and its application to exophonic writing identifies the permeation of the

‘unnatural’ that is inherent in it, identifying the writer as foreign; unnatural, contrary to the ordinary, foreign, in other words, ‘other’ to the ‘norm’. In this way the combining form ‘xen’ or ‘xeno’ can be seen as connected to the discourse of the other that arises from postcolonial theory; xen is derived from the Greek word xenos which means stranger and guest, however xeno also translates to host. The latter identifies the meaning Wright takes in her documentation of the exophonic writer’s ability to mould the language as host. Contemporary uses of the noun ‘xeno’ define the term as a derivative of guest/foreigner rather than host, such as xenophobia or xenograft.

Tawada’s exophonic practice, however, identifies the alternative side of xenoglossia in that it emphasises her position as host, which, in the short story “Canned Foreign” is expressed through the bodily experience of ‘hosting’ the foreign language. The term

167 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature host usefully brings together corporeality and language as a way to think through language and exophony.

The narrator of “Canned Foreign” experiences the foreign language through physically painful sensations.

Every foreign sound, every foreign glance, every foreign taste struck my body as

disagreeable until my body changed. The ö sounds, for example, stabbed too

deeply into my ears and the R sounds scratched my throat. Certain expressions

even gave me goose flesh, for instance “to get on his nerves,” “fed up to here” or

“all washed up.” (87).

This uncomfortable and even violent physical sensation seemingly presumes a connection to the narrator’s first language as a familiar sensation in juxtaposition to the difficulty and discomfort of the new one. However, the story disables this interpretation in the following lines:

At the same time I realised that my native tongue didn’t have words for how I

felt either. It’s just that this never occurred to me until I’d begun to live in a

foreign language. Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues

fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their

language so readily served up to them (87-88).

168 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

The narrator becomes dislocated from both languages, resulting in her own body becoming a foreign object - “my tongue suddenly tasted off” - that envisages a moment where she becomes aware of her body in relation to the foreign language, and also in relation to the native tongue which dictates what to “think and feel” (88). In this fluctuation between subject and object, the user of language and used by language, the narrator’s body becomes a site that can be read, that she recognises is unsettling for the people she encounters who are unable to read her face: “In those days I often found that people became uneasy when they couldn’t read my face like a text. It’s curious the way the expression of a foreigner’s face is often compared to a mask. Does this comparison conceal a wish to discover a familiar face behind a strange one?” (86). In this instance, while commenting on the fact that she is foreign, the narrator also recognises the people around her as foreign. This recognition suggests a homogenising Western gaze applied in the term foreign through the exclusion of difference, and the narrator then parodies this in her returned gaze towards the people she meets. Their inability to read her face is paralleled by the (still) unanswered question, “Does this comparison conceal a wish to discover a familiar face behind a strange one?” (86) which results in a mutual lack of understanding.

In this moment of incomprehension there is a confluence of Oriental and Occidental representation of otherness within the politics of race. This is only one example of this occurrence in Tawada’s stories, but such moments feature regularly through the experience of the migrant who narrates. As Wright also identifies, the stylistics of

Tawada’s German oeuvre, typically “narrated from the perspective of an outsider, usually a Japanese woman, living in a foreign culture, typically but not always

169 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Germany”, engages with both oriental and occidental representations (Wright 2007`, 4).

The female characters negotiate the space between these two sets of cultural markers, described in essentialist terms by the narrator in a way that destabilises the ‘truth’ underlying cultural representation through its “metalinguistic expression” (Wright

2007`, 4). Wright describes this as a parody. She argues: “Tawada parodies the often

Orientalist gaze of the Western anthropological tradition and its “domestications of the exotic” by foreignizing, even exoticizing, the familiar via her “fictitious ethnology” (Wright 2007`, 5) . In her argument, Wright draws on the postcolonial critique of the exotic to construct a parallel between the ethnographic style of Tawada’s texts and the authors own position. I place this claim in dialogue with cultural exchange, as a sociological concern that extends to include the relationship between Japan and the

United States that in turn relates to the production and reception of the English translations The Bridegroom Was a Dog (Tawada 1998) and Where Europe Begins

(Tawada 2002). The translation of these collections into English inflects the cultural politics evident thematically in these stories.

Published in 1998 and translated from Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani, The Bridegroom

Was a Dog contains three of Tawada’s earliest short stories: “The Bridegroom Was a

Dog”, “Missing Heels” and “The Gotthard Railway” (Tawada 1998). This collection charts a trajectory that extends from the local context of Japan, the setting of “The

Bridegroom Was a Dog”, and ends in Germany in the short story “The Gotthard

Railway”. As I will discuss further (in comparison to the later publication Where Europe

Begins) The Bridegroom Was a Dog has strong ties to the context of Japanese publishing and even international relations. If read laterally, the themes across these

170 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature stories evolve into a transnational, cosmopolitan setting and outlook that still remains linked to Japan through the narration of Japanese female characters. This trajectory is not only relevant to the thematic concerns of the collection, but also to Tawada’s reception and work in these physical locations. In the title story, the local cram school teacher Mitsuko Kitamura tells her students a strange tale about a princess who marries her dog:

Once upon a time there was a little princess who was still too young to wipe

herself after she went to the lavatory, and the woman assigned to look after her

was too lazy to do it for her, so she used to call the princess’s favorite black dog

and say, “If you lick her bottom clean, one day she’ll be your bride,” and in time

the princess herself began looking forward to that day. (Tawada 1998`, 14).

The story of the princess and the dog is one of Tawada’s regular intertextual deployments where specific cultural materials are adapted. In this instance the story is an adaptation of animal brides/bridegrooms in folklore. In evidence of this, the narrator

Mitsuko begins the story with a reference to the Japanese tale “The Crane Wife”:

“Maybe the only story you know about a human marrying an animal is ‘The Crane

Wife,’ but there’s another one called ‘The Bridegroom Was a Dog’” (Tawada 1998`, 13) which creates a parallel between the traditional Japanese folktale “The Crane Wife” and the tale “The Bridegroom Was a Dog”. Yamade Yuko’s confirms this in her thesis on migrant women’s writing, in which she argues that “The Bridegroom Was a Dog” is a rewriting of Japanese folklore that interweaves two stories, “Tsuru Nyobo” (The Crane

171 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Wife) and “Inu Muko Iri” (The Dog Husband), each belonging to a tradition of animal bride/bridegroom stories in Japanese oral literature (Yamade 2002`, 47-48).

The rewriting of local folklore and oral tales by women writers has been aligned with a feminist commitment to reterritorialising cultural mythologies. In her seminal study on fairytales Elizabeth Harries confirms a long tradition of women writers who adapt fairytales in order to subvert conventions (Harries 2001`, 163). By working against the ideological constraints embedded within a genre that institutionalises dominant patriarchal values, writers such as Tawada unsettle and confront the stereotypes and cultural assumptions about women that these tales portray. Similarly, Bacchilega notes, it is common in postmodern literature for writers to reproduce fairytales as “intertextual conversation” by engaging with fairytales “metanarratively, playing with their topoi

(symbols, plots, stock characters), and taking readers on complex journeys of re- orientation for individual stories and the genre itself” (Bacchilega, 512). This can be applied to “The Bridegroom Was a Dog” as a contemporary short story that alters the preconceived gender roles assigned to characters in animal bride/bridegroom tales. For example, in the story Taro takes over the domestic duties, cooking and cleaning every day:

If his physical strength was somewhat out of the ordinary, so was the rhythm of

his days, for while the sun was out he’d lie around sleeping, but at six in the

evening he’d be up cleaning the house and making a sumptuous meal, and by the

time he and Mitsuko were finished eating, he would suddenly be full of energy;

ready for lovemaking, after which he always went out alone into the darkness to

172 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

spend half the night running around god knows where, only returning - without a

sound (Tawada 1998`, 27).

Taro’s energy, his strength and his routine become fantastical descriptors of this strange dog-like man. The animal bride stories are also traditionally about a female animal, although occasionally there are male bridegrooms. In these tales it is usually the female animal bride who, through a strange series of events, comes to a man’s home and becomes his wife. In these tales the animal brides are particularly good at female duties such as cooking, cleaning or sewing, etc (Yamade, 51). As Yamade argues, this reversal of gender roles is an example of a post-modern and feminist rewriting of local folklore for a contemporary context.

Arguably, there is a parallel between the rewriting of fairytales and myth in contemporary women’s writing and the hybrid representation of cultures in migrant literature. Both can operate as a subversion of conventional cultural representation and, through rewriting, these texts often create new possibilities for female subjectivity that emphasises transformation or, as Rosi Braidotti refers to it, “nomadic becomings” (Braidotti 2011). Situating this within the second wave feminist movement,

Camboni establishes that “women have become increasingly wary of institutionalised languages, genres, and ideologies” (Camboni 2007`, 34). She argues that contemporary women poets from the last fifteen years have “established their ground on that impermanent place where things change and gendered social, cultural, and political orders are redefined” (Camboni 2007`, 35). In this arrangement of female subjectivity, representational politics of gender can adopt a transformational aesthetic in contrast

173 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

(and in relation to) to static stereotypes. For example, Braidotti has also recognised that, in the late twentieth century, the subject of Woman was aligned with monstrous categories of representation in the shared social imaginary of the late postmodernist context of the West (Braidotti 2001`, 382-383). In this context, hybrid bodies and the destabilisation of the subject that this trope represents became important to the contemporary transnational imagination because of the changes in social and cultural conditions that, to quote Braidotti, is evident in “the context of the historical decline or decentering of Europe (West and East) as a world power” (Braidotti 2001`, 383).

In Tawada’s short story “The Gotthard Railway”, the hybridisation of the Swiss and

Japanese flags creates an exchange between West and East in which metamorphoses demonstrates this form of decentering:

As I stared at the Swiss flag, my vision gradually blurred, and the design began

to change. The blood that was supposed to stay frozen outside the cross started

to run, seeping slowly into the center. The cross drank it in, and turned into a fat

red ball. As it lost its blood, the background grew pale, then finally pure white.

Before I knew it, I was looking at the Japanese flag. Until that moment, I’d

never noticed how closely the two flags resembled each other: the cross of

Christ and the sun of Amaterasu (Tawada The Bridegroom Was a Dog, 138-139).

In this example the exchange between the flags of Japan and Switzerland that results in the metamorphoses that brings the two religious symbols – “the cross of Christ and the sun of Amaterasu” – together. Simultaneously, this performs a cosmopolitan

174 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature deconstruction of the spaces of Japan and Switzerland as separate and unified nations that the flag is supposed to consolidate. Its contamination is described bodily and the disruptive act of drinking blood, itself a religious act in Catholicism epitomised by the drinking of Christ’s blood in holy communion, creates a connection between hybridity and bodily transformation that is also evident in the representation of the female body in her second collection of stories translated into English, Where Europe Begins (2002).

Materially, the production and translation of The Bridegroom Was a Dog has a stronger tie to Japan than indicated by the mobility of its narrators and transnational appeal of its themes. The translation of this collection was funded by The Japan Foundation, a public organisation established in Tokyo in 1972 that is dedicated to promoting cultural and intellectual exchange between Japan and other nations. Tawada, after establishing herself in Germany and receiving the Akutagawa prize at this time, was a prime candidate for the support of The Japan Foundation, which has demonstrated interest in translating Japanese fiction for American audiences since its inception. As early as 1988

The Japan Foundation funded a conference on Japanese-American publishing, inviting five publishing executives from the United States in order to research publishing relations between the two countries. The goal was to facilitate literary exchange, which had been uneven in respect to the amount of Japanese language texts translated and published in English (Fowler 1992`, 1). As Fowler argues, The Japan Foundation’s agenda was clear, they wanted to “interest the American publishers in bringing out more books on Japan, and in particular more translations from the Japanese” (Fowler, 1). The visitors, however, claimed a general disinterest on behalf of the American public toward

Japanese fiction: “you could lead a horse to water, they claimed, but you could not

175 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature make it drink” (Fowler 1992`, 1). This context of international publishing is what led to

The Japan Foundation providing funds to support the translation of Japanese literature into English.

Tawada’s first translation, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, hence travels to its readers through this desire to promote a national Japanese literature on an international stage, in which literary translation plays an important role in promoting cultural and intellectual exchange between nations. In her chapter on modern Japanese literature, Hijiya-

Kirschnereit identifies the support of The Japan Foundation as the harbinger of a “new age” in publishing attitudes towards translating Japanese literature (Hijiya-Kirschnereit

2012). She states:

To Japanologists like myself, a new age seemed to announce itself when the

Japan Foundation launched its new quarterly periodical Japanese Book News in

1993, based on an understanding of the need to “provide a window for Japanese

books that contribute to the reservoir of human knowledge and the advancement

of mutual understanding between Japan and the rest of the world”…As the

introductory paragraph in the inaugural issue put it…This new publication,

together with some other initiatives that were started in the 1990’s, such as

Japanese translation support programs and translation prizes, finally displayed a

proactive stand toward the longstanding vague discomfit with the imbalance in

the flow of information” (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 2012`, 168).

176 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

In her discussion of The Japan Foundation, Hijiya-Kirschnereit identifies the role translation plays in promoting cultural awareness across borders, which she proposes is a potential solution to the unequal distribution of texts between east and west.

Connecting these issues back to the publication of The Bridegroom Was a Dog, one can see how the transnational connection between East and West is bridged by Tawada’s position as an exophonic and migrant writer, as well as the narration of her mobile

Japanese female characters and the foreign settings they find themselves in, relate to the goals of the Japan foundation that aim to overcome the divide between the publishing contexts of Japan and America.

The publisher of The Bridegroom Was a Dog also demonstrated national interests aligned with The Japan Foundation’s goal to promote Japanese literature in different contexts. Published by Kodansha International, a holding owned by the Tokyo publisher Kodansha Ltd, the publisher’s primary aim was to support the international publication of Japanese books, with a focus on publishing in translation. The attempt to to build international relations, supported by the aims of both The Japan Foundation and

Kodansha International, reveals a transnational discourse that surrounds the publication of The Bridegroom Was a Dog, one that actively asserts a social role for translated literature in global relations. The support of The Japan Foundation in funding Tawada’s first English language translation, paired with the publisher Kodansha International’s aim to introduce Japanese writing to an international audience through the medium of

English language, identifies a particular moment in the transnational production of books that aligns with the national interests of Japan.

177 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

In 2011 publishing relations between Japan and English language contexts changed significantly when Kodansha International closed its publishing house in Tokyo. At this time, the American distributor Kodansha America took over the publication of the

English language translations, although this meant that many forthcoming translations on their list were dropped. Before this occurred, however, Tawada’s book The

Bridegroom Was a Dog was re-released by Kodansha in 2003. Kodansha International re-released this title the year after the release of Tawada’s second English language collection, Where Europe Begins (2002) by American independent publisher New

Directions. At this time both publishers, one located in Tokyo and one located in

America, were distributing Tawada’s collections in English.

The experimental category of fiction is of interest to New Directions, renown for publishing new fiction from abroad and at home (in 1977 they were awarded a Carey

Thomas Award special citation for distinguished publishing in experimental poetry and prose). There is a connection evident here between the experimental qualities of

Tawada’s exophonic stories and the translation of her works into English by this

American publisher that highlights the role German language played in Tawada’s english language translations being published by an America publisher. As Heilbron argues:

Once a book is translated into a central language by an authoritative publisher, it

immediately catches the attention of publishers in other parts of the globe. The

simple fact that an American or English publisher will publish an author from a

semi-peripheral language is used extensively by the original publisher, because

178 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

it is the best recommendation for publishers elsewhere to acquire the translation

rights (Heilbron 1999`, 436).

In the case of The Bridegroom Was a Dog, this appears to be true as more of Tawada’s short stories were then translated into English by US publishers. Pascale Casanova argues that the translation of a text is a form of consecration that establishes its literary value, a process she calls “litterisation” (Casanova 2004`, 127). This is a problematic operation of value in world literary space as it is attached to the dominance of English language.

In Casanova’s account of world space she adopts a basic model stating that translation occurs in two ways, either “an impoverished target language” translates texts from the center “as a way of gathering literary resources”, or the “importation of literary texts written in “small” language or ones belonging to neglected literatures serves as a means of annexation, of diverting peripheral and adding them to the stock of central resources”

(Casanova 2004`, 134-135). Looking at the specific production and translation of The

Bridegroom Was a Dog, however, identifies other layers within this system of cultural exchange that are overshadowed by Casanova’s model. Analysis of this text identifies the role of Japanese institutions in translating an emerging ‘Japanese writer’ into

English, the domino effect this created in her recognition in the United States that led to later translations of her work into English, and the role the national interests of Japan played as the catalyst of this process. Also, bringing the popular categories of migrant and experimental literature writing into this discussion confirms the importance German language played in the publication of Where Europe Begins by New Directions.

179 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Where Europe Begins is Tawada’s second collection of short stories to be translated into

English. This text is significantly different from Tawada’s earlier publication The

Bridegroom Was a Dog in two ways; first, it was published by the American independent publisher New Directions; and second, it contains the first of Tawada’s

German language stories in English translation. These two facts do not operate independently of one another. Out of the ten stories in this collection, only two are translated from Japanese while the remaining eight stories are translated from German.

They represent the first of Tawada’s exophonic texts to be translated into English, the experimental category that Tawada is now largely known for. This trajectory into

English asks us then to consider, what is the connection between English language translation and experimental literature? Why are experimental texts chosen for translation into English in our current moment, and how does the representational strategies in these texts play a role in the translation of marginalised literature into a dominant language?

In the international reception of literary texts translation plays a fundamental role; as an activity, translation often constructs a relationship between the transnational and the local. Venuti argues accordingly, concluding that translation is a “localizing practice” (Venuti 2012`, 180). He contends, “every step in the translation process, starting with the selection of a source text, including the development of a discursive strategy to translate it, and continuing with its circulation in a different language and culture, is mediated by values, beliefs, and representations in the receiving situation” (Venuti 2012`, 180). However, in the case of the 1998 edition of The

180 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Bridegroom Was a Dog, it was the source culture (the Japan Foundation) who selected and translated the text according to the international aims of the Japanese organisation the Japan Foundation and Japanese publisher Kodansha International, which were integral to this publication entering into English language. This begs the question, why translate Yoko Tawada? Why this collection of short stories? The production of translations into English language do not always occur in the same way, they do not follow the same flow of activity, nor are they translated for the same reasons in source and target cultures. Sometimes translations are instigated by the target culture, but they can also be instigated by the source culture. Not only does the production of Tawada’s

1998 edition evidence a national impetus in its production but a comparison to later editions published in 2002 and 2012 also reveal that these factors of production are subject to change according to the evolution of the author’s own writing. In other words, Tawada’s exophonic writing in German influenced the translation of later short story collections into English. Examining the production and reception of both The

Bridegroom Was a Dog and Where Europe Begins (each translated and published by different publishers) allows us to consider the differences between the two in a way that highlights the role German language has played in Tawada’s reception in English. I see the category of exophony as pivotal in this. Rather than establishing a straightforward relationship between Japanese literature and its translation into English, these two translations were produced and received through a trajectory that leads from Japan, to

Germany, to America, and into English language.

Scholars have argued that the interest in the literary products of a nation correlates with the nation’s position in international space as an economic power, and that this shapes

181 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature the selection of imported texts (if imported by the target culture) according to the target cultures desired representation of the source culture. David Strauss, for example, argues that conflict over trade and defence issues between Japan and America shaped the selection of these imported texts according to the target cultures desired representation of the source culture. Strauss offers his analysis of the critical discourse on Japan in the

American context in the twentieth century to support this statement. He finds that critics

(on both sides) construct notions of opposition between the two nations by emphasising cultural difference and, specifically, Japanese exceptionalism that undermines any possible commonality. As John Dower argues: “at the very moment Japan has emerged as a more truly international power, we find protagonists on all sides resurrecting

Kipling’s hoary dictum that East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” (quoted in Strauss 1996`, 593).

In light of Strauss’ findings and when viewed within the setting of world literature, a study of cultural representation becomes integral to an understanding of what Japanese texts are chosen for translation for an English language audience. The choice relates to canon formation in English language that, in turn, causes the propagation of cultural stereotypes and unevenly characterises the literary culture of the represented nation.

This is where things become increasingly complex in the translation of Tawada’s short stories as a German/Japanese writer. For example, Yoko Tawada’s combination of storytelling, folklore and cultural alienation, as well as her position as a migrant writer in Germany imports a view of Germany as cosmopolitan destination. At the same time, the mix of surrealism and humour imports a Japan-cool aesthetic that often represents

Japanese culture, particularly the representation of Japanese women. As Venuti argues,

182 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

“translation projects construct uniquely domestic representations of foreign cultures” (Venuti 1998`, 75). This is a claim Venuti makes in relation to the Japan-cool, pop-aesthetic that was (and still is) popularised through the translation of Japanese literature into English, but it can also be seen in the translation of Tawada’s short stories that import an appealing cross-cultural and the author as ‘storyteller’ dynamic that literary fiction publishers have popularised in recent years. Translation practices are therefore central to an imported cultural representation of other countries29 and attention to this importation of representation highlights the relationship between cultural representation and translation practice itself, to draw a connection between representation, translation practice and international relations. This context raises a series of other questions, some of which lie outside the scope of this research30; What types of cultural representation are therefore desired by the target culture? For example, and as I will argue further in my analysis of short stories Where Europe Begins published by New Directions. However, as we know, it was the source culture of Japan, through the work of the Japan Foundation, which instigated the translation of The

Bridegroom Was a Dog into English. This flips the assumption that translation projects construct domestic representations of foreign cultures; source cultures do this too. In this case, we have to instead ask what representation is desired by the source culture?

How did this text align with the goals of The Japan Foundation? As I stated earlier,

29 Across these studies there is clear consensus that translation plays a crucial role in the domestic representation of foreign cultures (Venuti 1998).

30 The sociological line of enquiry I outline here informs my reading of Tawada’s translated short stories. My focus on analysing the representations these texts engender and their cross-cultural themes and images that embody translation runs parallel to the socio-political aims of The Japan Foundation early on in Tawada’s career. I strongly feel that what gets chosen for translation by source and target cultures reflects the social context of the time and that the themes and images of these translated texts are caught up within desired representations. 183 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature many of the themes in Tawada’s short stories align with the Japan Foundation’s aim to overcome the divide between the publishing contexts of Japan and America.

As Fowler also asks, “What, precisely are the criteria, we might ask, for “speaking to” a readership not belonging to the original audience? How is it that certain authors and certain kinds of literary texts get translated more readily than others?” (Fowler 1992`,

2). Considering the cultural representation forged by translated literatures emphasises the reception of literary texts in the target culture. Arguably, the translation of contemporary Japanese fiction that establishes a pop aesthetic, or what Venuti has identified as “Americanized” texts (citing Banana Yoshimoto as an example of a new wave of Japanese literature now being translated) is in response to the establishment of the postwar English language canon of Japanese literature (Venuti 1998`, 82). Fowler describes this canon as constructing a specific representation of Japan as exotic and explains how Japanese literature became synonymous with “delicacy, taciturnity, elusiveness, and languishing melancholy” in English postwar (Fowler 1992`, 10).

Venuti continues this conversation on the stereotype of Japanese literature that was formed in America during the mid twentieth century and highlights the ways in which these stereotypes have been challenged more recently by new Japanese writers in translation, in which Tawada should be included (Venuti 1998`, 82). Venuti also warns how this new wave of translated Japanese fiction “too may harden into a cultural stereotype of Japan” (Venuti 1998`, 82). Translation practice may begin as a ‘noble’ (or at times commercial) endeavour to rewrite a closed canon, but as it becomes successful the rapid translation of similar texts in comparison to the initial successful few it can

184 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature construct new stereotypes of the source cultures literature in the receiving context.

Venuti goes on to argue that this new wave of Japanese fiction is received by the

American context because it “projects the image of a highly Americanized Japanese culture”:

At once youthful and energetic, it can implicitly answer to current American

anxieties about Japan’s competitive strength in the global economy, offering an

explanation that is reassuringly familiar and not a little self-congratulatory: the

image permits Japanese economic power to be seen as an effect of American

cultural domination on a later, postwar generation (Venuti 1998`, 76).

The appeal of Japanese literature in the American context corresponds with the economic position of the nation, and the receiving cultures need for appropriation of that foreign culture – once needed to be exoticised, in this example, and now still needing to be familiarised in its representation as Venuti argues, but according to similarity rather than a politics of extreme distance. This relates to the commercial success of Japanese literature in English, something difficult to trace.

However, the steady publication of Tawada’s English language translations as well as the overall rise in translations from Japanese into English indicates that there is an

English language readership for Japanese language translations. More importantly, however, what representation of Japanese culture is being chosen for this readership, and why? Tawada’s texts are uniquely positioned to this question as, at different times, her collections have been produced by both the target and source cultures respectively,

185 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature so there is something in her writing that both contexts desire in the formation of cultural representation. All signs indicate her transnational position as a migrant and exophonic writer are integral to the reception and production of her texts in English translation. I argue that it is her migrant position and the related aesthetic of her writing that projects the confluence of national identities as a desired literary object in contemporary literature. For example, this relates to the Japanese context in the nation’s desire to be recognised internationally and also relates to interests in the west through the category of experimental literature.

The thematic concerns in Where Europe Begins engage with the same concerns that surround the publication of Tawada’s texts in English translation, such as the connection between the national and transnational. I locate this shared thematic and social concern through the view of translation as a translational activity that coalesces in the translational representation of the female body. In this regard, there is a correlation between the female subject and translation practice. The translation of a text from one language into another not only crosses borders but also becomes problematic in the process due to the cultural appellation that occurs. Similarly, the female body undergoes the same issues of cultural transfer as her body moves from one context to another. In the short story “The Bath” the Japanese narrator has her photograph taken for a travel magazine. After an unsuccessful photo shoot in which the narrator fails to appear in any of the photographs the photographer, Xander, returns:

A few days later, Xander came over again with his camera. “You didn’t come

out in any of the photographs,” he said resentfully. “Why? Was the camera

186 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

broken?” “The camera was fine. The background came out beautifully, but you

aren’t in any of the pictures.” For a little while, neither of us said anything. “It’s

all because you don’t have a strong enough sense of yourself as Japanese,” he

said. I looked at him in surprise… “Would you mind if I tried

makeup?” (Tawada 2002`, 11-12).

Referring to the artifice of cultural representation in this story, Tawada cleverly re- creates the gap between the representation of Japanese women and the narrators own feeling about her body when she doesn’t fit within this gendered space. After applying thick makeup, lipstick, and dying her already black hair black, Xander marks her cheek with an x, stating “When I was a child, I marked everything precious to me with an x, so it would belong to me” (12).

In this story the x becomes a symbol of crucifixion and a mark of ownership by Xander:

“Xander stood me in front of a wall and pressed the shutter release button as casually as if he were pulling a trigger. The x on my cheek dug into my flesh. It stopped the light from playing and crucified the image of a Japanese woman onto the paper” (12).

Earlier in the story the x also represents the unknown denominator in mathematics that confuses the narrator who is unsure how to pronounce the x in Xander, again the x in this scene is one that crucifies as well as silences:

I didn’t know how to pronounce the “X” in “Xander.” Since it was the first

letter of his name, I couldn’t begin to speak at all…My eyes were still crucified

by the X. Until the day I learned Xander was short for Alexander, I was

187 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

tormented by the question I had first encountered in my junior high school math

book: “Find the value of x.” If x was durchein, it meant durcheinander (mixed

up); if it was mitein, then miteinander (together) - but I couldn’t help suspecting

there were even more horrifying words (9).

Playing with the suffix ‘ander’ in german language (which interestingly translates to

‘other’ in English), the narrator creates different words through her interpretation of the

“X” in “Xander”. This is an example of Tawada’s exophonic style that uses language to defamiliarise the reader by taking its representational power to its limits by exposing the process of meaning generated by it. This also creates the subject of Xander as indeterminate as well, placing his subjectivity at the limits of language that define him also. In another passage in which Xander and the narrator discuss skin colour, the appearance of difference becomes a mutual recognition of alterity:

I looked at him in surprise. “Do you really think skin has a color?” Xander

laughed. “Of course. Or do you think it’s the flesh that’s colored?” “How could

flesh possibly have color? There’s color in the play of light on the surface of the

skin. We don’t have colors inside.” Yes, but the light plays on your skin

differently than on ours.” “Light is different on every skin, every person, every

month, every day.” “Each one of us, on the other hand, has a special voice

inside. There is…” “There aren’t any voices inside us. What you hear is air

vibrating outside our bodies.” Xander thought for a little while. (11-12).

188 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

In this scene their bodies and voices become increasingly problematic and unstable. At times, in the dialogue between Xander and the narrator, it becomes unclear who is speaking as their voices become indistinguishable from one another, while, paradoxically their conversation centres on a discussion of racial difference – “the light plays on your skin differently than on ours” (12). In this way the structure of the dialogue actively removes differentiation between the German and Japanese subjects while it raises these concerns within it.

Historically, both female representation and language have been integral to the management of national borders, often allegories of national space and also violently regulated as symbols of cultural purity. Anne McClintock states, for example, “Women are represented as the atavistic and authentic body of national tradition…embodying nationalism’s conservative principle of continuity” (McClintock 1995`, 359). If we consider the female subject in this feminist theoretical context, by becoming the embodiment of conserving nationalism it is recognised as the site of ideological regulation. Hence, cultural images such as the virgin or the mother and the gendering of national identity that become embedded in the cultural representation of women are important to recognise. Ponzanesi also discusses this in relation to multiculturalism and diaspora. She argues:

Gender relations had played a crucial role in the operation of colonization and

also in the rise of nationalist movements, through the use of the strategic role of

women as upholders of collective traditional values, on one hand (therefore

oppressed within their patriarchal society), and as emancipated individualized

189 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

selves (obviously suggested by the colonizer’s model of liberation), on the other

(Ponzanesi 2002`, 210).

In her argument, Ponzanesi points out the dual regulation of the female subject position, an issue which she notes has been resuscitated in the migration from the peripheries to

Europe of late (Ponzanesi 2002`, 210).

Language has a similar history of regulation in the way national language (such as occurred across Europe in the rejection of Latin and the establishment of national languages that were at certain times associated with “purity”) were crucial in the formation of national literatures as a independent cultural base that differentiates the nation state; as Benedict Anderson states, language and national borders go hand in hand, with each consolidating the other (Anderson 1983). Simon also distinguishes how translation is implicated in the “anxieties involved in establishing and maintaining borders” (Simon 1996`, 10). In her argument Simon states that the metaphorics of translation are referenced as female, providing examples such as Thomas Drant’s comment on his method of translating Horace in the sixteenth century, “He refers to

God’s command to the Israelites to shave the heads and pare the nails of captive women they wish to make their wives in order to remove all signs of beauty from them” (Simon

1996`, 10) aligning his translation with the removal of “beauty” and focus on fidelity, another common metaphor for translation. The overlapping concerns of national space with language and the female body are problematised by translation that potentially removes the impulse towards fidelity to the original language text. Simon relates this to the dissolution of the authority of the author and goes on to state:

190 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Attention must shift to those areas of identity where the indeterminate comes

into play. Equivalence in translation, as contemporary translation theory

emphasises, cannot be a one-to-one proposition. The process of translation must

be seen as a fluid production of meaning, similar to other kinds of writing. The

hierarchy of writing roles, like gender identities, is increasingly to be recognised

as mobile and performative (Simon 1996`, 12-13).

In her argument Simon draws a parallel between gendered identities and translation in their shared ability to deconstruct dominant ideologies through the recognition of their mobile and performative qualities. This is important because the transnational activity that occurs through translation becomes thematised in Tawada’s short stories in a way that is caught up within the representation of the female subject. In turn, this instigates a connection between the material production and the translation of these texts within the space of cultural exchange and the category of experimental and migrant literature, with feminist discussions of women writers that focus on embodiment and representation of the female subject in literature. With the introduction of migrancy, the transnational aspects of these theoretical frames are emphasised and their overlapping discourses share a concern with the construction of gender as a culturally determined category in

Tawada’s collections, one that charts the translational experience of mobility that resides within the indeterminacy of representation of the female body.

The short story “The Bath” explores the encoding of the narrator’s body according to its physical and symbolic location. In this story the narrator, a Japanese woman living in

191 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Germany, works as an interpreter, translating between Japanese and German for business clients. Her position as translator is important to the narrative, which begins with her physical experience of translating and explores the interplay of an embodied identity politics for the migrant female subject. Her relationship to language is extrapolated from this position as somewhere unfixed, fluctuating between languages and cultures and her body similarly moves between differing symbolic registers throughout the story. The female body that translates complicates allegories of the national imaginary. Her body is ‘in-appropriated’ by the Japanese businessman in the story in a process of objectification that the narrator describes via a traditional gendered and sexualized metaphorics of translation. This is a reflection, of a certain type, of the way that “language and materiality are fully embedded in each other” (Butler 1993`,

69).

In the following scene the narrator translates a lunch meeting between two companies.

She describes the position of the female interpreter, her own position, according to how she is perceived as follows:

Interpreters are like prostitutes that serve the occupying forces; their own

countrymen hold them in contempt. It’s as if the German entering my ears were

something like spermatic fluid,” she makes eye contact with the president of the

Japanese company, who then asks her: “Why are you living all by yourself in a

place like this? You should go home and get married, or your parents will worry

(Tawada, 2002, 15-16).

192 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

This brief exchange takes up a common infidelity metaphor in translation studies, one that exemplifies the gendered metaphorics of translation that have traditionally positioned it as feminine (see Simon 1996). For Simon, the gendered metaphorics of translation is epitomised, by the French adage “Les belles infidels”: a translation is like a woman, it is either beautiful or faithful, but it cannot be both (Simon 1996`, 10).

Simon argues that this feminine position is a result of the hierarchical authority of the original over its ‘reproduction’ – one that conflates the female subject in patriarchal discourse with the relational position of the translated text to that of the original. This hierarchy operates due to the convention of ‘authorship’ as masculine in the symbolic order, positing the ‘relative’ translation as feminine due to its secondary status. In light of this, the connection between original and translation is a problematically gendered rhetoric. Simon argues: “Translation, as a tangible representation of a secondary or mediated relationship to reality, has come to stand for the difficulty of access to language, of a sense of exclusion from the codes of the powerful” (11). This refers to the use of the term ‘translation’ as a metaphor in cultural studies that is used to describe the embodied experience of marginal subjects, including both migrant and female subjects, in relation to the dominant culture. As Simon points out, in 1603 John Florio similarly described translations as “reputed females” because they are necessarily

“defective” (Simon, 11). Correspondingly, the position of the translator has also occupied a feminine position; In 1991 Nicole Ward Jouve stated that the translator occupies a “(culturally speaking) female position” referring to the status of the translator as relational to the author subject; also in 1991, Susanne de Lotbiniere-

Harwood stated, “I am a translation because I am a woman” (1991).31 These examples

31 Each of these references to Florio, Jouve and de Lotbiniere-Harwood are quoted in Simon (1996, 11). 193 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature identify a connection between the gendered representation of translation and female subjectivity as both similarly relational and secondary.

As I have argued in my reading of “The Bath”, the body of the narrator becomes a site on which the politics of national identity play out according to linguistic fidelity in line with this relational subjectivity. Prevailing nationalist ideologies that support a metaphorics of translation situate the body of the migrant woman who translates as “a prostitute serving the occupying force” (Tawada, 2002, 15). However, the narrator reframes this representation through her own storytelling, calling the validity of this representation into question. She holds the quintessential position of authority over the narrative as the first-person narrator. In this way, she critically engages with the way she is perceived by others and her ability to tell her own story breaks down a passive rendering of the migrant female body as object.

The short story “Storytellers Without Souls” offers an alternative embodied representation of translation, this time through the image of cellular biology. In this story Tawada weaves together different cultural stories and myths, all of which figure the body, into one rumination on translation in the twenty-first century. Beginning with the German word zelle, the narrator establishes a connection between storytelling and the body that then moves into other culturally specific tales and ideologies:

One of the German words I’ve become more and more attached to in recent

years is the word zelle, or “cell”. This word lets me imagine a large number of

tiny spaces alive within my body. Each space contains a voice that is telling a

194 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

story. For this reason these cells can be compared to cells of other sorts:

telephone booths, and the spaces inhabited by prisoners and monks (Tawada

2002`, 101).

The single word “cell” draws together different images in a visual description that reconstructs storytelling from an embodied location. The storytelling spaces Tawada adapts are universally recognisable spaces, such as the telephone booth, translator booth and prison cell. However, while the telephone booth, translator booth and prison cell images that Tawada strings together are common spaces that can be found in different parts of the world she recognises this impartiality only to then disable it through the actions of the bodies who inhabit them and the different stories they tell, infusing these spaces with a sense of cultural and temporal specificity. For example, the phone booth described in the story is specific to Tokyo and the narrator constructs it’s meaning through a negotiation of Japanese folklore and her personal memory of the space:

In the section of Tokyo where I grew up, there was a park full of ginkgo trees. In

one corner of the park stood a phone booth that was very popular with young

girls. From dusk to midnight it was continuously occupied. Probably the girls

could develop their talent for telling stories better in this cell than at home with

their parents. They gripped the receiver firmly and glanced around with lively,

empty eyes, as if they could see the person they were talking to somewhere in

the air…Sometimes the phone booth resembled a transparent tree occupied by a

tree spirit. The Japanese fairytale “The Bamboo Princess” begins with an old

man seeing a luminous bamboo trunk and chopping it down. Inside he discovers

195 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

a newborn baby girl that he raises together with his wife. The tale ends with the

girl, who has become a grown woman, flying back to where she really comes

from: the moon (Tawada 2002`, 101-102).

The tale links the image of the telephone booth with the luminous bamboo trunk of the

Japanese fairy tale, both containing a girl. This demonstrates, once again, the overt intertextual relation that Tawada deploys, which is evident in the smaller narratives and folktales used as a framing device; in this example there are three layers of framing that occurs; the narration of the story; the young Japanese girls in the telephone booth who are also telling a story; and the fairytale that operates as a oral narrative frame.

Later in the story the image of interpretation booths at international congresses are also described as a spectacle, or performance, of telling stories. This scene of translation is a self-conscious dialogue on the multiplying effect of translation:

At international congresses you often see these beautiful transparent booths in

which people stand telling stories: they translate, so actually they are retelling

tales that already exist. The lip movements and gestures of each interpreter and

the way each of them glances about as she speaks are so various it’s difficult to

believe they are all translating a single, shared text. And perhaps it isn’t really a

single, shared text after all, perhaps the translators, by translating, demonstrate

that this text is really many texts at once. The human body, too, contains many

booths in which translations are made. I suspect that these are all translations

for which no original exists. (Tawada 2002`, 104).

196 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

Tawada rejects a traditional understanding of translation in her dismissal of a “single, shared text” (Tawada 2002`, 104). The emphasis is instead on how each translator embodies the text in their “lip movements and gestures” (Henitiuk 2012`, 2012). The bodies and movements of these translators create a performance of translation and their actions are so varied from one another that each creates different texts in their translations. Storytelling as a narrative mode that Tawada creates allows for this unrestricted, unbounded and multiple retelling.

In biology the cell is the smallest unit of life that can replicate independently. The latin root cella roughly translates to ‘small room’ or ‘chamber’ and the scientist Robert

Hooke who discovered the cell in 1665 named it for its resemblance to cells that are inhabited by Christian monks – a linguistic connection that becomes a literal transposition of the term ‘cell’ in “Storytellers without Souls”. Using the resonance of the word cell, the story is shaped by this curious vocabulary that is replete with the homophonous connections between various words and images. This draws attention to the structure of language and its materiality as a form that can be manipulated, misread and re-interpreted in different ways – it is a story that demonstrates transformation within inter-linguistic transfer, but it doesn’t establish a hierarchy to do so. Instead it adopts the cell as a biological model for translation that is quite open, as a unique metaphor for a translation for which no original exists. The connection between translation and cells goes deeper. Both cells and stories transmit information to the next generation and so they come from pre-existing cells – like translations come from pre- existing stories. However, the implication of the cell as a metaphor for translation is

197 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature unique as there is no ‘original’, and so you can’t have a copy, in the traditional sense.

When cell division occurs the DNA is replicated and separates into two different cell nuclei. This process of cell division leads to the creation of two identical cells and, as the process is symmetric, neither of these cells can be categorised as the original.

Tawada’s representation of translation at the level of theme and metaphor in

“Storytellers without Souls” can be read as a self-reflexive comment on writing in the twenty-first century, one that embraces contemporary notions of translations as new stories rather than copies of originals and offers an alternative model for writing in our transnational age. As Walkowitz states in her essay “Comparison Literature”, traditional comparative methodologies often used in recent discussions of world literature “have assumed that books begin in one place and then move out to other places. But there are many novels, written by migrants and for an international audience, that exist from the beginning in several places” (Walkowitz 2009`, 573). Yoko Tawada’s short stories are an example of writing that cannot be situated according to one national language as her multilingual writing practice occurs within the contact between the different languages evoked. So, as Walkowitz asks, “what happens when there is no original language to speak of?” (Walkowitz 2009).

If our preconceived ideas of national singularity and the authority of the original are incomplete and inept, what alternative methodologies can we use? Or, and more important to this analysis, what critical vocabulary can we adopt to imagine these new constellations? Somewhat ironically for our moment of great technological reproduction, Tawada offers us an alternative image in her metaphor of the living cell.

198 Matter that matters: Towards an embodied world literature

By bringing together cosmopolitanism, translation, exophony and gender this chapter has argued for a new approach to reading the metaphorics of translation in the translated texts by Yoko Tawada. Tawada’s narrators are at the centre of this as migrant Japanese women reflecting an ethnocentric gaze back on western European culture, an operation simultaneously operating in the confluence and connection Tawada finds between the language groups of Japanese and German and the cultural tales that are intertwined. It has the effect of a mirror, where the occidentalist and orientalist gaze is reflected into one another and the relationship is mobilised accordingly. Translation becomes a theme in this interaction, a process of perspective that is rendered impotent in the resulting unoriginality Tawada suggests.

199 “To be educated out of one’s mother tongue”: Local spaces

and transnational subjects in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Irish

language poetry

“Of the Gaeltacht, I am not from the Gaeltacht; the existence of an Irish diaspora had made that impossible. Inexorably drawn to the Irish-speaking communities of the Western seaboard, and knowing them intimately, I am still always an outsider, the little cailín Sasanach or English girl that I was then. This fact has cultivated in me what Seamus Heaney, in an article a few years ago in The Irish Times, called ‘a doubleness of focus, a capacity to live in two places at the one time and in two times at the one place’.” - Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays (2005) p. 101

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is a contemporary Irish language poet. Born in 1952 in England to Irish parents, Ní Dhomhnaill moved to Ireland at the age of five. She studied literature at the University College Cork in the 1970s and, after completing her degree,

Ní Dhomhnaill married and moved abroad, first to the Netherlands and later to Turkey where she lived for seven years with her husband and his family. She returned to Ireland in 1980 and now lives in Dublin. On her return to Ireland, three collections of poetry were published in quick succession. The first two were published in Irish language, An

Dealg Droighin (1981), Féar Suaithinseach (1984), while the third publication, the dual language collection Selected Poems: Rogha Danta (1985), was Ní Dhomhnaill's first collection to appear in English translation. Since 1985 she has released six more collections of poetry, four of which are published in a dual language format with facing page translations. The focus of this chapter is The Fifty Minute Mermaid (Ní

Dhomhnaill 2007), which combines the mythic figure of the mermaid with the contemporary context of language, migrancy and the history of colonisation in Ireland.

200 Published in 2007 with English translations by Paul Muldoon, The Fifty Minute

Mermaid remains Ní Dhomhnaill’s most recent dual language collection to date. This collection documents the migration of the mermaid and her kin from ‘Land-Under-

Wave’ and their integration on dry land. Taken as a metaphor, the migration of the mermaid can be read as a translation of this mythic figure into the contemporary time of the twenty-first century. However, the figure is treated more literally in this collection than any metaphor in Ní Dhomhnaill’s repertoire and, as such, this collection of poems reads as a ‘documentation’ of migration and cultural dislocation. In this collection Ní

Dhomhnaill situates the merfolk within the historical trajectory of Ireland and the personal politics surrounding Irish language, as well as transnational discourses of migration; The Fifty Minute Mermaid takes up an interesting transnational/local position in this combination of migrancy and Irish subjectivity as its themes are simultaneously embedded within the local context of Ireland, participating in a continuation of the

Gaelic poetic tradition that incorporates local materials, such as Irish folklore, while also creating a quintessentially transnational subject in the conflation of the mermaid figure and the migrant figure, each respectively figurations from mythic and contemporary temporalities. Importantly, in the English language translation of the poems this subject is gendered as female as well as racialised as Irish and the intersection of gender and race is a key concern of the text that operates in relation to contemporary issues of language and cultural identity.

Helen Kidd has argued that Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill “returns to myth to heighten contemporary experience”, adding that in this temporal conversion there is a “risky, exciting fusion of folk tales and contemporary life” (Kidd 2003`, 37). Ní Dhomhnaill’s

201 poetics operates within the intersection of discourses that Kidd illustrates here as a dichotomous arrangement of myth and contemporary experience that have been

(traditionally and historically) opposed to one another. In early poems such as “Mór

Anguished” and “Mór Hatching”, for example, it is the Sovereignty Goddess Mór of

Munster from Irish folklore who emerges:

I’m telling you,

unruly Mór,

that green snakes

will emanate from your womb

if you stay hatching

out this poisoned kernel

one day more. (Ni Dhomhnaill 1998`, 33).

The figure of Mór who appears here as a uncontrollable feminine force is one of many pre-Christian goddesses who, in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems, exist alongside – sometimes merging with and always changeable – representations of Mother Ireland and the Virgin

Mary that inhabit the Irish national psyche. Ní Dhomhnaill identifies this female presence in the landscape of Ireland, calling on the Gaelic tradition of dinnseanchas, an

Irish term that can be defined in English as the “lore of place-names” (Denvir 2005`,

107). In this Gaelic tradition there is a strong sense in which space, or more specifically the making of place through naming and folklore, is not just historical or cartographical but is deeply connected to the alternate reality of myth. Ní Dhomhnaill writes on dinnseanchas explicitly in her critical works, situating her poetry within this Gaelic oral

202 tradition.32 The dinnseanchas of Corcha Dhuibhne, the area where Ní Dhomhnaill lived from the age of five, contains a female presence still detectable in the landscape and language of this Gaeltacht. This can be recognised in the place-names of the area, as

Corcha Dhuibhne for example translates to “The Land of the Seed of the Goddess

Dovinia”, and other numerous place-names derived from the Sovereignty Goddess Mór of Munster still exist in this region: “Faill Mhóire… Dún Mhóire… Tigh Mhóire, or

Mór’s House in Dunquin” (Ni Dhomhnaill 2005`, 167). Given this presence in her local area, Ní Dhomhnaill writes: “Is it any wonder, then, that when I started writing poetry seriously that these great personages from the oral tradition – Mór, the cailleach or hag and many others like them – walked unannounced into my work?” (Ni Dhomhnaill

2005`, 68).

In this confluence of female subjects from the Irish oral tradition and other prevalent feminine archetypes, further combinations are created that dispose of any straightforward arrangement in the figuration of the female body. As such, Ní

Dhomhnaill’s poems break down social and gendered hierarchies such as maiden/ mother and woman/writer. Thus, the centrality of the female body is evident in the analogous connection this body has to metaphors and symbols of social space.

However, she deconstructs these symbols through a feminist critique of the co-opting of the female body as a symbol for Nation. To perform this, Ní Dhomhnaill brings these representations together to create a macaronic style that builds from the bilingual tradition of Irish and English writing in contemporary Ireland. In these poems the female body is shaped by the confluence of ideological positions and becomes a

32 Ní Dhomhnaill mentions this tradition in her essay "Dinnseanchas: The Naming of High or Holy Places." (Ni Dhomhnaill 2005`, 25-42) 203 complex site of this interaction and a symbolic and newly embodied topoi is constructed that suggests the multiplicity of female subjectivity rather than a static representation.

The form of the dual language collections these poems are published in, with facing page translations, further envisages and produces the macaronic that is represented by these bodies. In other words, as the text thematically transcribes the transnational and the local through the confluence of migrancy and Indigeneity in The Fifty Minute

Mermaid, the form of the dual language translation visually reflects the problematic situation of language and its translation in this context that the themes of the text also speak to.

The poems in The Fifty Minute Mermaid engage in the same postcolonial feminist critique as Ní Dhomhnaill’s earlier works. In her article “Challenges of Writing in Irish in “I-Land”, Mulligan notes Ní Dhomhnaill’s resistance to “the long, socio-poetic history of co-opting and reifying women’s bodies in the Irish Nationalist, Irish language, and the Western English language literary tradition” (Mulligan 2013`,

230-231). She argues that Ní Dhomhnaill engages in a “postcolonial feminist critique of the institutions of the form itself as well as imperialist and nationalist representations of women and their bodies” (Mulligan 2013`, 230-231). Mulligan suggest this in her reading of the poem “Island”, published in Ní Dhomhnaill’s collection Pharaoh’s

Daughter, and compares Ní Dhomhnaill to Adrienne Rich, identifying a transnational connection between the American and Irish women writers who each deploy similar strategies in their shared feminist critique of the representation of women. This raises two things for consideration; first, the representation of the female body in Ní

Dhomhnaill’s poetry; and second, how poetry is a form that has co-opted this

204 representation as part of a national imaginary. In my analysis of the poems in The Fifty

Minute Mermaid, I approach both of these considerations through a feminist lens and argue that Ní Dhomhnaill represents the female body as a multiply located subject that departs from a national imaginary and draws from the intersection of the local and transnational to bypass the Nation.

This chapter draws a connection between the dual language format of the text and the shifting representation of the female body in the poems, which imply a correlation between the materialism of the text and the embodiment of this subject. I argue that Ní

Dhomhnaill’s poetry, as translated by Muldoon, creates a mutual configuration of local and world frames as a transnational constellation of relation. This occurs within the gendered space of female representation as predicated upon the transnational as a category deployed for situated aesthetic and political reasons, which are necessarily local. Transnational, in this sense, is used as it is employed by Francoise Lionnet and

Shu-mei Shih’s in their collection of essays entitled Minor Transnationalism, which views the transnational as “a space of exchange and participation” recognising it as part of the processes of globalisation (Lionnet 2005`, 5-6). This definition promotes an engagement with local space, both imaginary and political, that as Lionnet and Shih argue is “inflected by a transnationality” (Lionnet 2005`, 5-6). I want to problematise this relationship between the transnational and the national further in order to situate the issue of representation that is evident in postcolonial women’s writing, of which The

Fifty Minute Mermaid is a certain kind of reflection. As Paul Keen has observed masculinist narratives are pervasive in Irish culture. He writes:

205 Many women writers have engaged with Irish history by inhabiting these

cultural contradictions rather than by attempting to respond from some originary

position outside of history. In doing so, their poetry becomes a kind of critical

performativity that highlights the extent to which entrenched narratives are

products of often invisible, always highly complex, social relations” (Keen

2000`, 20).

Thus, the connection Ní Dhomhnaill draws between the transnational and the local is a strategic negotiation that bypasses the nation and offers an alternative figuration of the female subject.

The conversation between locally and culturally specific feminisms often contrast or recognise shared ideological concerns operating within other feminisms in different nation states. As Cooppan argues, “Alternative spaces to the territorialized nation-state exist” among which he includes feminism as an identity that crosses national borders

(Cooppan 2009`, 2). For the subject of women’s writing, too often are women grouped together despite their difference (and often only because of a shared national affiliation).

In the case of Ní Dhomhnaill’s Irish language poetry, her writing practice is reflective of an alternative national tradition of Irish writing by women and also a transnational tradition of contemporary women’s writing that share certain ideological concerns, and sometimes strategies, around the representation of women in literature. The mermaid poems in The Fifty Minute Mermaid reflect the same engagement with female subjectivity that is evident in her earlier collections, particularly Selected Poems: Rogha

Danta. But whereas Selected Poems can be understood as having a direct relationship

206 to national space in the form of a counter-nationalism that is recognisably feminist and situated within the twentieth century, this latest collection, however, combines the other

“alternative spaces to the territorialized nation-state” as Cooppan suggests (Cooppan

2009`, 2-3) in the overlap of three alternative spaces. These spaces are, a transnational imaginary, grounding in the local, and a feminist identity that crosses national borders.

Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry demonstrates this decidedly transnational context. This transnationalism operates on two levels, thematically through images of migration and archetypal symbolism evident in the translations of her poetry, which will be explored throughout this chapter, and also in materialist terms, through the translation of her work and the subsequent reception of her poetry in various contexts.33 This chapter traces both local and transnational representations that coalesce in the embodied representation of the mermaid in the dual language translation The Fifty Minute

Mermaid. In his introduction to A Transnational Poetics Jahan Ramazani states that

“because Irish poetry is often assumed to be even more “provincial” and “rooted” than other varieties of contemporary poetry, it deserves special attention in an exploration of what a transnational disciplinary paradigm can reveal and a national paradigm can make harder to see” (Ramazani 2009`, 39).34 Exploring the transnational in The Fifty Minute

Mermaid reveals a new register from which we can approach Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry that inflects the transnational within the local.

33 The key context to note here is America, where she regularly visits and teaches.

34 It is important to note that Ramazani’s work on postcolonial poetry has been criticised for reinforcing literary traditions. See Lucy Van’s essay "Why waste lines on Achille?": Tracing the critical discourse on postcolonial poetry through untimeliness to the present” (2013). However, my focus here is on Ramazani’s recent mention of Irish language poetry specifically and his point that assumptions about the provincialism of this particular local poetic space still persist to suggest that it is cut off from a transnational or world context. My reading of Ni Dhomhnaill’s poetry argues against this disconnection between local and transnational, which Ramazani’s comments also support.

207 The close analysis of these poems in this chapter combines postcolonial, feminist and world literary frameworks to produce a reading of gendered representational strategies that reframe the ‘world’ within the local in a way that bypasses restrictive categories of

‘nation,’ which remains a problematic category for women writers in Ireland. This is a imaginative move that Ivor Indyk has expressed as a positive provincialism which sees

“the large context in one’s own culture” (Indyk 2014). This chapter shares Indyk’s interest in the “compensatory power” of the provincial “when from the vantage point of the periphery, the provincial imagination reaches out to encompass the whole world” (Indyk 2014). This is evident in “The Task”, the first poem in The Fifty Minute

Mermaid.

The Fifty Minute Mermaid is separated into two parts. The first part contains three poems that operate as a forward to part two, which contains all the poems that figure the mermaid. The first poem in part one is “The Task”, a poem that is quite literally strewn with multiple geographic and temporal locations that enact a migratory and nomadic movement. Beginning in the very local place of Kilmainham in Ireland, the poem then jumps from place to place through an accelerated sequence of images that suggest the positive provincialism: “seeing the large context in one’s own culture”. This flurry of activity creates a transnational connection that moves outwards from local registers of space and identity, in a way very similar to what Ramazani describes as ‘travelling poetry’ (Ramazani 2009) but what I rephrase as transnational imaginary, due to the fragmentation that emerges in the confluence of transnational and local.35

35 This is discussed in the edited collection by Dissanayake and Wilson (Dissanayake 1996). 208 Adopting the title from the local landscape of Ireland, Ní Dhomhnaill groups these diverging positions under the title “The Task”, asking the question, what is the task? In this poem translocated space establishes connection between disparate people, times, and places across the globe:

It’s from the massive Norman earthworks I glimpsed through

a curtain of trees

as I drove quickly past,

somewhere near Kilmainham, Country Meath,

that the place took its name. Nobber. From the Irish an obair,

‘the task’.

From that and my dearest friend slowly dying

in the Adelaide Hospital; the photograph deep in my pocket

of us as young women,

taken on a March day, the first day of spring in the Botanic

Gardens in Ankara,

laughing with no sense of what was to come;

the face of the Muslim woman from Algeria I saw in a news-

paper lately

after she was told lately that the throats

of eight of her children had been cut; the major Serbian poet

209 who was the commandant of a major camp; the literary

historian

who enjoyed an off-moment with his friends, playing ball

with a human skull;

my own husband who spent six days in a coma while I

looked out the windows

of the waiting room at the light going down on the bay

between Dun Laoghaire and Howth, at the come and go of

the tide. (Lines 1-25).

Stretching from the Irish landscape “somewhere near Kilmainham, Country

Meath” (line 4), to Australia and the friend “slowly dying / in the Adelaide

Hospital” (lines 7-8), the poem then travels across time and space in this medium of memory and emotion to a photograph of two women taken in Ankara (lines 8-10). This then transforms into the image of a Muslim mother’s face after realising her children have been murdered (lines 13-16). These images connect local place through shared categories of the feminine that link within the narrator’s stream of consciousness. In other words, it establishes a transnational imaginary. Ní Dhomhnaill draws these manifold positions together in a transnational gesture that is intensely local and personal. This is established via the ‘feminine’ as a connected site of representation.

Indeed, each of these subject positions resonate as female identities and relationships, beginning with the female friend (line 7), and then moving to mother (line 13), and then wife (line 21).

210 The second poem in this collection, “Black”, can be contextualised within Ní

Dhomhnaill’s connection to southeast Europe, where she lived for several years with her husband and children in Turkey before returning to Ireland in 1980. Fluent in Turkish, one of her current projects is the translation of a collection of poems by Turkish poet

Nazim Hikmet into Irish and she has also written critically on the relationship between

Irish and Turkish. This transnational connection to southeast Europe emerges in the content of the poem “Black” that describes the aftermath of Genocide in Srebrenica in

1995, in which approximately 8,000 Muslim men were killed. According to Ramazani, postcolonial poets write “out of the disjunctions and layerings of transgeographic experience, even when they have been fiercely attached to the local soil” (Ramazani

2009`, 140) and this enables a transnational extension and engagement that is still importantly situated and historicised. This is particularly suggestive of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem “Black”, which envisages a transgeographic layering. This poem demonstrates her engagement with other spaces outside of Ireland as her transnational imaginary constructs an all encompassing accountability for the devastation of this mass genocide:

A black day this.

The sky is black.

The sea is black

The gardens are black.

The trees are black.

The hills are black.

211 The buses are black.

The cars bringing the kids to school are black. (Lines 1-8).

The colour black, itself a signifier of embodied racial difference, is appropriated to create this oppressive association with accountability. This poem blankets violent oppositions as “Every tribe on the face of the earth this blackest of black / mornings black” (lines 31-32). In this seventh stanza, southeastern European subjectivities

“Croatians” and “Serbs” are joined with one another. These cultural identities are extended from to include alternative religious affiliations that link with other subjects beyond the national borders of Bosnia. The poem contextualises these separate histories of conflict within Ireland’s own history of genocide and religious struggle between

Catholic’s and Protestants. In the poem the “black” covers everything, from shops, windows, and streets, and even differentiated subjectivities - Catholics, Protestants,

Serbs, and Croatians (lines 28-30) - in the seventh stanza:

The Catholics are black.

The Protestants are black.

The Serbs and the Croatians are black.

Every tribe on the face of the earth this blackest of black

mornings black. (Lines 28-32).

In turn, “every tribe” is united by the colour black. In this poem there is a layering of subjects at a transnational level as national borders become destabilised through the atrocities of genocide in a form of transnational comparativism. This occurs initially

212 through the localised removal of difference, but then builds along with the tempo and repetition of the poem, moving beyond the geography of southeast Europe, beyond religious affiliation, to encompass “every tribe on the face of the earth” (line 31). In this poem Ní Dhomhnaill states, “there’s a black mark against all our names” (line 47), creating a transnational accountability that denies any comfortable distance from the genocide in Srebrenica.

The transnational reading I have applied here reveals how “Black” and “The Task” set up a connection between the local and the world. This is a move away from the assumption that provincialises a situated literary space such as Irish poetry. Justinn

Quinn summarises the contention surrounding Irish poetry, arriving at a question of cultural authenticity: “What is ‘Irish poetry’? Is it written in Irish or can it be written in

English too? Must it be about the history, mythology and contemporary life of Ireland, or can it range wider, through Europe, the world, the cosmos?” (Quinn 2008`, 1). His questions express a concern that implicates the connection between representation, identity and the nation in the reception of literature and also acknowledges the role genre plays in this expectation placed on a literary genre such as poetry. Poetry becomes, in his estimation, connected to the question of Irishness, identifying the specific difficulties involved in defining poetry according to national identity politics, the choice between English and Irish as a politicised incentive, and the strain these questions place on the inclusion of Irish history and mythology versus international

213 themes and imagery. The numerous questions Quinn poses remain unanswered, except to say that there is little consensus.36

Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry is not exempt from this line of questioning. Citing an example from early in her career, she was once criticised for using classical mythology in her

Irish language poetry: “I had to fight for the right in so many ways to use non-Irish mythology in Irish” (Sezen 2007`, 129). Before we even begin to try and understand the intersection of world and local, national paradigms of literary studies start to obscure the transnational elements of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry, which, while still important, can neglect the varied and interesting ways local aesthetics and poetic language can engage with the transnational. As is the case with Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry, many important studies of her poetry have approached her work within a national context only, especially regarding the space of Irish language writing as a politically motivated form of writing. This has meant the transnational connection of Ní Dhomhnaill’s work has remained undeveloped and, more broadly, the position of Irish language writing in world space has remained largely unnoticed. It is true, as Quinn states, that

“Nationalism became the motive force in poetry written in Ireland, and although poets would react in different ways to this aesthetic ideology, their work was deeply marked by it” (Quinn 2008`, 1). However, this is not the only motive or ideology inflected by

Irish poetry at this time and the local politics of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry do demonstrate the intersection of transnational themes within this space. This is done through a local

36 Quite often prominent Irish writers have been considered in world literature and transnational studies. Beckett, Heaney, and Joyce are a few key writers whose works have transcended the national boundaries of literature and their unique approaches to language have played a crucial role in this reception. As Casanova states, for example, Joyce created a “Irish reappropriation of the English language” while Beckett’s choice to write in French demonstrates a rejection of the linguistic and national aesthetic he attempted to distance himself from (Casanova, 2004, 315). 214 register that performs and belongs within a counter-national project that has been identified in connection to contemporary women’s writing in Ireland during the twentieth century.

Today the connection between Irish language and national ideology and politics is shifting. As Quinn argues, “there is a change in attitude towards the Irish language, as it has become independent of nationalist ideology and is viewed now more as an expression of individuality” (Quinn 2008`, 196). A study by Tony Crowley also argues that Irish language has become increasingly de-nationalised (Crowley 2000). According to Crowley, the association of Irish nationalism with the language has gradually dissipated and the linguistic situation is now changing as a result: Emerging from this contemporary context “a select number of writers…[use]…the linguistic wealth of the island to pose and interrogate the question of the language”, argues Crowley (Crowley

2000`, 1). This identifies a shift from language as a political choice to language as a way to interrogate the national politics attached to it.37 Ní Dhomhnaill has also commented herself that her agenda has changed and she finds herself belonging “in the cultural politics which insists on the importance of Irish as well as English” rather than a essentialist connection between Irish language and Irish subjectivity (Sezen 2007`,

128). Overall, “the ebbing of nationalist ideology from Irish culture” has affected its poetry in the way that it demonstrates a poetic engagement with individual experience

(Quinn 2008`, 197). As part of this, much Irish poetry demonstrates a connection with the local as opposed to the national, Ní Dhomhnaill included. I see this as further inflected by the problematising of the representation of female subjectivity and the

37 In his chapter on Irish poetry and translation, Quinn also picks up on this changing landscape stating that the language is “becoming unhitched from nationalist ideology” (Quinn 2008`, 144). 215 category of Nation in women’s writing which results often in new figurations of the female body as a way to deconstruct static gendered representations.

After the 1970s, poetry in Ireland changed dramatically. A key difference in this period was the emergence of women poets who established a female voice, a project in which

Ní Dhomhnaill participated. In their new representations of women, the Irish women writers working in the 1970s and 1980s developed their own feminist project that was at odds with early revivalist articulations of cultural representation. Michael Murray also notes that for Ní Dhomhnaill specifically, who was one of few contemporary women writers in Ireland to work in Irish language, “to take up the cause of the Irish language, she is in a way exchanging one set of cultural shackles for another. With the language goes all the iconography of nationhood, the personification of Mother Ireland, and through the Catholic Church its conflation with the image of the suffering mother, [and] the cult of the virgin” (Murray n.d.). These static representations of female subjectivity are deconstructed in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry as a certain kind of feminist intervention in the way femininity is performed and upheld by religious iconography. He also argues that Ní Dhomhnaill handled “the Gaelic tradition in a more subversive fashion than did

(sic) the English language poets” (Murray n.d.). Ní Dhomhnaill challenged not only the dominance of the English language but also the nationalist representative politics of

Irish language that were profoundly patriarchal and wrote a new space for herself stemming from her position outside both Irish language writing and Irish literature as a woman working in both literary spaces. The statements by Murray demonstrates how Ní

Dhomhnaill was part of neither the Irish nationalist tradition nor the Anglo-Irish

216 tradition, but, like many women writers working in Ireland in the late twentieth century and now, occupied a new space of contemporary Irish women’s writing.

Other Irish women writers such as Medbh McGuckian and Eavan Boland have commented on the issues facing women who write in a literature that has traditionally been the preserve of their male counterparts (seeBoland 1989). McGuckian has remarked on the marginalisation of women’s writing in Ireland, stating that she has been called “a wallpaper poet, a woman who writes about bergonias” (McGuckian 1995).

She argues: “They think that all you are concerned with is the earth. And it is true you are very concerned with the earth, but your earth is this metaphor for this other” (McGuckian 1995). Commenting on this period of women’s writing in Ireland,

Michael Murray also argues, “throughout the 1970s and early 80s the “assault on the traditional encoding of women…by Irish women poets… did a great deal to destabilize conventions” (Murray n.d.). Not only was the encoding of women traditional, but also inherently political as nationalist images such as Cathleen Ni Houlihan attest, and so an assault on the “traditional encoding of women” was necessarily an assault on the national representative politics of Ireland according to which women’s bodies were regulated. The performance of a counter-nationalism arises in these women’s texts as they simultaneously denied the nationalist agenda that was intensely patriarchal and situated a new representation of the female body at odds with previous conceptions of this figure. Thus, as an Irish language poet, Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry is doubly complicated in the intersection of language and gender politics. This process is

217 understandably embedded within the local context where language and translation still remain a contentious issue.38

While the translation of her work from Irish to English can be understood in terms of a movement between a peripheral postcolonial context and a previous imperial centre, the transference from the minor language of Irish into the major world language of English is also an important linguistic and political choice within the national space of Ireland as a bilingual community. For example, in her essay "Why I Choose to Write in Irish, the

Corpse That Sits up and Talks Back" Ní Dhomhnaill states that her choice to be translated is to encourage readership of the originals in Irish in the hope that more disenfranchised Irish speakers will return to the language (Ni Dhomhnaill 2005`,

10-24). A centre-periphery model in this context does not do justice to the macaronic quality of these translations that extend beyond a simple one-to-one correspondence between former stratified geographies of empire. It also does not do justice for a consideration of local context and the shared history of English and Irish language literatures within Ireland, a literary context that has been described as a ‘dual tradition’ (seeKinsella 1995). The translation of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry by renowned anglo-Irish poets such as Paul Muldoon, as well as the self-conscious evocation of the local language and political situation evident in the thematic concerns of poems like

“The Language Issue” (as discussed in the introduction), implicates both traditions as deeply connected. This is not to suggest that the transference between Irish and English in Ireland is equal as the difficulties facing Irish language writers remain substantial:

“the audience is small, and the language itself was impoverished first by the systemic

38 While some women writers who write in Irish have been translated, such as Máire Mhac an tSaoi, the Irish language poet Biddy Jenkinson, prefers not to be translated. 218 marginalization and later by the creolizing influence of Anglicization [sic]” (O'Connor

2010`, 24). However, it is because of this context that Ní Dhomhnaill’s collections are regularly printed in a dual language format with facing page translations. Thus, the historical context of Ireland, the marginalisation of the Irish populace by colonisation that led to the dispossession of the language, informs her decision to be translated and occurs within a local context, rather than a cosmopolitan one as I argues in my chapter on Tawada.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is one poet who has been widely translated and has also, to a large extent, been readily accepted in the transnational space of women’s writing (evident in her inclusion in anthologies such asSage 1999). As Mary Harris observes, the increase in dual language publications in Ireland has actually enabled a break down of traditional barriers between Irish and English literature, which operates on a local level (Harris

1995). Harris argues that dual language publications also hold a particular relevance for

Irish language women writers, as these writers also operate within wider international frames of ‘women’s literature’ (Harris 1995`, 26). In this framework, Ní Dhomhnaill is positioned in both local and transnational literary contexts as a contemporary Irish women poet. As such, a study of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry benefits from an analysis of how the local envisages a transnational framework, and the inclusion of transnational in this thesis creates a new perspective that builds from twentieth century criticism on Ní

Dhomhnaill’s poetry.

The very structure of the dual language texts identifies a bilingual view of the world and can be aligned with the position of the postcolonial writer in English, in what Ashcroft

219 et al have identified as an interpretive position (Ashcroft 1989`, 59-60). As they explain, this position “‘creates’ two audiences and faces two directions, wishing to reconstitute experience through an act of writing which uses the tools of one culture or society and yet seeks to remain faithful to the experience of another” (Ashcroft 1989`, 59). With this dual language format Ní Dhomhnaill looks to support the Irish language she writes by utilising the English language as a way to engage a wider audience. However, the visual representation of the poems in two languages also emphasises the collision and intersection of two traditions, that of Irish and English. This interaction is produced as a mirrored image on the page and does not allow for an assimilation of the originals in

Irish for either an Irish reader who also knows English or an English reader who does not read Irish; For the first, Muldoon’s translations of the poems are very different from

Ní Dhomhnaill’s. For the latter, the poems in Irish are inaccessible and always removed from view for English language readers. As Keen states, “for the English reader, the true poem always remains at one remove, in a language that Ní Dhomhnaill herself associates very explicitly with the genius of a nation” (Keen 2000`, 24). I do not agree that Ní Dhomhnaill explicitly associates Irish with the genius of a nation, as her work explicitly undermines the construct of nation itself and suggests a more complex relationship between Irish and English, but Keen correctly attests to the hierarchical structure that is informed by the dual language format that does not accept the illusion of transparency. In this respect, the visual representation of the poems in Irish still assume an important role in any reading of the English translations by an English reader.

220 The production of Ní Dhomhnaill’s dual language texts also reflects a fundamental connection between the local and the transnational. Despite the localised nature of her translation, Ní Dhomhnaill’s audience has grown internationally and her collections have been published around the world in over nine languages. Ní Dhomhnaill’s expressed intention to write for Irish language readers and to encourage those with little

Irish to practice it through the pedagogical application of the parallel text becomes suspended to a degree in the global reception of her collections by new readerships that are enabled by the translation into English, as well as other languages. However, the translation of Irish into languages other than English does not have the same fraught political status. The transition between English and Irish languages is highly politicised due to the internal conflict between them that result from a troubled colonial history and cultural and religious opposition. This question of reception becomes an important aspect of her work when considering her movement within world literary space and the new interpretations that arise through this international readership, which I argue is a move into the transnational space of contemporary women’s writing. While also partaking in the revitalisation of Irish language and its contemporary literature the dual language publication of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry has the added effect of enabling a transnational increase in her readership in English, and this creates a connection between the production of local literatures and the global reception of translated texts.

However, this does not result in a flat surface for literary analysis with global and local at either end. The way Ní Dhomhnaill combines the transnational and the local in The

Fifty Minute Mermaid complicates this further to suggest how local literary contexts in marginalised languages enact an engagement with the transnational and are part of world literature.

221 In Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry, margins and centres shift in various ways. This occurs on the material level of translation, the discursive level of colonial and post-colonial discourses, and also on a textual level in the construction of the female subjects that feature heavily throughout her poems. Accounts of the movement between margins and centres can be applied to Ní Dhomhnaill’s work as previously dichotomous positions are destabilised in her poetry through the creation of non-dualist and multi-located subjectivities. In this shifting landscape the female body becomes a complex site of interaction. As Kidd states in her essay on the relationship between gender and nationality in Ireland, the “women [in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems] are shape shifters meeting at the point where myth and history intersect, revealing the gaps and inconsistencies of each set of discourses” (Kidd 2003`, 38). Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetics operate from within this gap between discursive powers and utilises the transformative potential of this liminal territory. The points of cross-over in her poems become the sites of interaction on which metanarratives and discourses of power play out and in turn create a bilingual position, which Ní Dhomhnaill has identified as “a capacity to live in two places at the one time and in two times at the one place, a capacity to acknowledge the claims of contradictory truths without having to choose between them” (Ni

Dhomhnaill 2005`, 101). This is a local space, but it is also a reflection of bilingualism and displacement that can be read within global issues of second language politics and migrancy in the second part of The Fifty Minute Mermaid that figures the migrant mermaid subject.

222 The female figure in The Fifty Minute Mermaid is positioned within a collision of temporalities. This can be seen in the title of the collection, which contains a temporal consciousness that precedes and continues throughout the poems in a way that multiple measures of time exist simultaneously. Ní Dhomhnaill’s figuration of a fifty-minute mermaid converges the modern day phenomenon of the fifty-minute hour of psychoanalysis with the mythic figure of the mermaid. The fifty-minute hour becomes the title’s primary temporal referent, one that ‘untimes’ the sixty-minute hour of linear time. Also, the mermaid figure references mythic time, and for this figure time must expand from measurement (hours, minutes) to incorporate this different and archaic temporality. This is not, however, a gesture to the past. Instead the title enacts an extension beyond periodising frames and becomes what Wai Chee Dimock has referred to as “deep time” – a historical depth that extends into far-flung temporal and spatial coordinates (Dimock 2001). This confluence of temporalities as deep time enables a direct relationship between the contemporaneous and the archaic, encompassing both in a way that is non-hierarchical. This all-encompassing periodisation is useful in the post- colonial context as it situates often-excluded temporalities prior to colonial history. In other words, it encompasses a longer duration and disassociates the discourse of progress that pervades the hierarchical structure of time traditionally used to validate colonial enterprise. This process ‘untimes’ periodising frames that conventionally dissociate the mermaid from the psychiatrist’s chair and leave her firmly entrapped

‘outside’ of contemporary time.

As a grotesque hybrid of the human and non-human, the mermaid occupies the same liminal territory as other feminist figurations of hybridity. In the nineties, feminist

223 theory associated itself with a liminal, hybrid subjectivity, and Nina Lykke, for example, characterised feminisms “affinity with monsters” as both a positive and powerful position for feminist debate (Lykke 1996). Donna Haraway also envisioned a “promise of monsters” for feminism, one that embraces the hybridity of technology and biology in the figure of the cyborg. As an archetype, the mermaid has proliferated international consciousness for centuries and can be documented across national borders. Extended subjects of the mermaid include the selkie (half seal, half human), the siren (dangerous mer-figure that lures men to their death with their song), and the merrow (a specific

Celtic version of the mermaid). These figures are derived from varied folklore and mythology. However, I see the mermaid archetype and the Irish mermaid as a conflation that draws attention to the reader’s position and which occurs through translation.

The Irish mermaid has a few specific characteristics that differ from the mermaid archetype. Primarily they are recognisable due to the red cap made from feathers that allows them to swim underwater, a white cloak, and a thin web between their fingers.

In the traditional tale, if the cap or cloak is taken from a mermaid (usually by a man) the mermaid obediently follows the human and becomes his wife. This is complicated in the tale, as should the mermaid ever find the stolen item they will forget their husband and any children they might have and return to the sea. Also, in Irish folklore the mermaid comes from ‘TÌr fo Thóinn, which translates to ‘Land-Under-Wave’ and is a common term used throughout Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems that connects the mermaid to

Ireland through littoral space as it recognises within the textual space of Irish folklore a locality that extends to include ‘Land-Under-Wave’. However, while this littoral zone can be defined as Irish on one level in its inclusion in Irish folklore and hence

224 dinnseanchas, it simultaneously removes a geographical foundation of the merfolk’s origin and situates the subject in a ‘in between’ zone. In the poems, this creates an uneasy position for the mermaid as neither Irish nor non-Irish, a theme Ní Dhomhnaill continually returns to throughout the collection and infuses with postcolonial anxieties of belonging for both Irish and migrant subjects.

The migrant/mermaid figure navigates the contemporary concerns of immigration, settlement, xenophobia, gender difference and cultural dislocation. Simultaneously, and somewhat contradictorily, this subject also draws a parallel with an Irish speaking subjectivity through the inclusion of a imperialist gaze that is evident in the narration of the poems. As such, The Fifty Minute Mermaid “invokes the history of the Irish as a colonised people” positioned as an archetypal Other for British Imperialism (González-

Arias 2009). The collection also explores “present-day” debates on identity in the wake of the Celtic Tiger phenomenon which has saw many newcomers migrate to Ireland

(González-Arias 2009). On one hand, some poems such as “The Assimilated Merfolk”, a poem that documents the merfolk’s physical and mental reactions to migration and the anthropological voice that begins in this poem, leads the reader into a ‘study’ of the species through the third person narration that emerges continually throughout the collection and parodies the colonial gaze of British imperialism and scientific objectivity. In other poems, this mermaid subjectivity is further conflated with the migrant subject on Irish soil. The conflation of the two subject positions, Irish language speaker and migrant, disavows essentialising either subject and draws instead from the complexities of cultural language identity and language shared by each. However, while the subjectivity of migrant and Indigenous collides, there is an essentialist tendency

225 towards the figuration of female subjectivity through the adaptation of goddess allusions. Ni Dhomhnaill draws from the goddess tradition to destabilise contemporary issues surrounding the construct of sexuality and the female body, which draws from themes of transformation and renewal, but this also situates a specifically feminine construct that operates within a strict gender binary.

In “The Assimilated Merfolk” the merfolk’s experience of assimilation on dry land is documented in their physical and mental reactions to migration:

Barely have they put in on this bare rock

than their scales start drying out

and they suffer such skin complaints as windgall and blotching

and get pins-and-needles from the breezes, never mind the zephyrs,

unaccustomed as they were to either

on the underwater plains where they used to wrestle and besport

themselves with the princelings. As far as they’re concerned,

moonstroke

is every bit as serious as too much sun;

they turn blue after moonstroke

and yellow after the sun has laid them low. (Lines 1-11).

Throughout the collection there is an anthropological voice that leads us into a ‘study’ of the species, which is present in the third person narration in this stanza. Apparent from the beginning, the mermaid subject is split between the two categories of migrant

226 and Irish speaking subjects which has the added effect of avoiding a essentialist attachment to an Irish subjectivity while fundamentally complicating the category of national identity through transnational tropes.

In her review of The Fifty Minute Mermaid, April Warman also refers to this anthropological voice. She characterises the braid of voices that narrate the poems as

“unstable, veering between sympathy and scorn…anthropological, seemingly objective, a voice we are inclined to trust…[caught up in] an unpleasant essentialist agenda behind the claim to scientific detachment” (Warman 2008). The third stanza continues in this

‘objective’ voice, as the doctor “reports that the uvula / is displaced in the vast majority of them” (lines 25-26).

The topmost hair

of their heads must either be torn out by the roots or thoroughly

stiffened

with wax before the uvula snaps back.

‘Did you hear the snap?’ the doctor enquires of them

when the cure takes effect. By now they’ve clean forgotten

the dizzying churning of the deep currents (lines 26-32).

The ‘uvula’, part of the human anatomy that enables speech, signifies language dislocation and extends to further issues of memory loss in line 31, connecting cultural memory and language through this dislocation. This reference continues into the last stanza, where the ability to speak ‘correctly’ equals a cultural shattering and memory

227 loss of the “old order of things” (line 65). It becomes a psychological state for the migrant subject in transition imbued with the historical context of colonisation:

The high spring tides leave their mark

on the sea-walls of their minds, the edge of every breaking wave

ragged with flotsam and jetsam and other wreckage,

words carried ashore like the shells of sea-urchins

and left at the high-water mark when they get the head-staggers

at the time of the Saturday moon, words that are still imbued

with the old order of things, phrases like

‘wide-thighs, narrow-waist, hare-brain’. (Lines 52-66)

The words of their language “carried ashore” are left behind in the migration to land and to a new home. The memory of the ocean however, leaves a ‘mark’, a psychological branding of memory-trauma in which spatial frames become a negotiation of cultural dislocation and memory in images of the shore-line which are connected to the “high- water mark” (line 56) and “high-sea walls of their minds” (line 53). Throughout the collection, Ní Dhomhnaill weaves complicated spatial relationships into experiences of subjectivity for the migrant-mermaid subject. The poem ‘maps’ a return to the littoral space of the shoreline where the mermaid leaves behind the “old order of things” (line

65).

In her thesis on the mermaid archetype, Krista Gilbert examines the confluence of bodies that reside in this figure beyond the division of fish and woman, she argues:

228 Although the mermaid archetype is traditionally understood as a divided

creature, it is more accurately understood as a symbolic confluence of human

and fish, of maiden, mother, and crone, and of a unique vision that encompasses

consciousness and unconsciousness as a single perceptual event (Gilbert 2006`,

iii).

This definition extends on a simplified ‘divided female subject’ to include the connotations of this hybrid body within Jungian symbolism: consciousness and unconsciousness. It also includes the maiden, mother, and crone triptych that exists in

Irish mythology in representations of the Goddess. Gilbert confirms this connection in her analysis, stating that the mermaid image in modern consciousness reflects a submerged feminine power and is a descendant of the great Goddess figure of earlier centuries: “a diluted and forgotten manifestation of the Mother Goddess”, the mermaid affirms an extended relationship with the feminine (Gilbert 2006`, 154).

Ní Dhomhnaill takes this feminine symbol and imbues it with a complicated local history. Ní Dhomhnaill discuses the relationship between Irish and mermaid subject positions to this end in her essay “Cé Leis Tú?”. She states:

The poems themselves…attempt to capture a past, a loss, a bemingled present,

intrusive, oppressive and depriving, yet not without beneficence either. Because

the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that to be educated out of one’s

229 mother tongue to have to change language, must be a deep shock to one’s sense

of identity (Ni Dhomhnaill 2005`, p?).

This is evident in the poem “The Mermaid and Certain Words”, where “to be educated out of one’s mother tongue” is framed within post-colonial anxieties surrounding the loss of local language, embodied in the mermaid’s refusal of words that “smacks of the sea” (line 2) as I will discuss. The Mermaid’s denial of the manuscript in this poem references the dichotomous positioning and discrediting of folklore and Irish, against the rationality and progress of science, modernity and English in processes of colonisation.

In the poem “The Mermaid and Certain Words” the mermaid subject resonates with an

Irish speaking subject who replaces Irish language and folklore with English and the teleological time and space of science and modernity.

She hates nothing so much

as being reminded of the underwater life that she led

before she turned over a new leaf on dry land. She totally

denies

that she had the slightest connection with it

at any time. ‘I never had any interest

in those old superstitions, or any of the old traditions.

Fresh air, knowledge, the shining brightness of science

are all I ever hankered after.’

230 I wouldn’t mind one way or the other but I myself have found her out in the deception.

In the Department of Irish Folklore in University College,

Dublin, there is a whole manuscript in the Schools’ Collection that was set down by her, written in water, with the fin of a ray for a pen, on a long scroll of kelp.

In it can be found thirteen long tales and odds and ends of other ones, together with charms, old prayers, riddles and such.

From her father and her grandmother she mostly took them down.

She refuses to accept its existence, and when she does,

‘It was the master who gave it to us as homework, way back in the National

School. We had to do it.

There was no getting out of it.’

She would prefer to suffer a heavy nosebleed rather than admit she ever had a hand in its composition. (Lines 21-50).

231 In this poem there are references to the ‘National School’ and the inclusion of the merfolk’s language and culture in the school curriculum. This parodies Ireland’s history and moves the merfolk into an alignment with a local Irish identity and the history of dispossesion. In Ireland the ‘National School’ was established in 1831, and sought to create social cohesion through interdenominational education. However, according to

Séamas Ó Buachalla, this attempt was largely unsuccessful. In the early twentieth century, explains Ó Buachalla, the “Gaeltacht areas in particular endured even greater educational disability... [as] there was only one secondary school in the Gaeltacht areas… [which] used English as a medium of instruction” (Ó Buachalla 1988`, 45). In

1922 the study of Irish language was introduced into the school curriculum. This became known as ‘book Irish’, something Ní Dhomhnaill separates from her own use of

Irish language as a “kind of revivalist Irish…practiced over the backs of silenced women and children” (Ni Dhomhnaill 2005`, 124-125). Hence, the mermaid’s reluctance to claim Irish language stems from the colonial history and the disregard for

Irish language.

This is problematised further by the visibility of the translation and the doubleness that is created by the dual language format, which mirrors the dualism evident in the prose.

The layering of voices, the evocation of Irish history and colonial imperialism is implicated in the translation into English. This can be identified again in the poem “A

Recovered Memory of Water” in which language becomes both familiar and foreign depending on the reader’s position:

232 Sometimes when the mermaid’s daughter is in the bathroom cleaning her teeth with a thick brush and baking soda she has the sense the room is filling with water…

A terrible sense of stress is part and parcel of these emotions.

At the end of the day she has nothing else to compare it to.

She doesn’t have the vocabulary for any of it.

At her weekly therapy session she has more than enough to be going on with just to describe this strange phenomenon and to express it properly to the psychiatrist.

She doesn’t have the terminology or any of the points of reference or any word at all that would give the slightest suggestion as to what water might be. (Lines 1-6, 21-34).

233 In this poem the mermaid’s daughter, identified as part of the second generation, is unable to articulate the word for “water”. The meaning one takes from the poem, however, depends on which language we read it in. The Irish language reader potentially views the mermaid’s daughter as unable to find the Irish word

‘uisce’ (water), and so it represents to this reader the colonised subject dispossessed from her Indigenous language. The English language reader, however, has a different perspective and the mermaid’s daughter cannot articulate the English word ‘water’ and so represents the migrant subject inability to communicate within the foreign language in which she now lives, representing a different yet still dislocated position. This emphasises how the English translations are very different poems from the original texts requiring their own analysis themselves and also demonstrates how the dual language format creates a split between the subject positions that depend on which language it is read in. Both engage with the same themes of dislocation and trauma but result in different subject positions.

In the Irish language the word for mermaid is either ‘maighdean mhara’ meaning ‘sea virgin’ or ‘maiden of the sea’, or ‘murúach’ which translates to ‘sea singer or siren.’ In an interview with Loretta Qwarnstrom, Ní Dhomhnaill states that her choice of

‘murúach’ over ‘maighdean mhara’ was a preference for the non-gendered, yet feminine term: “I didn’t want the Irish word for mermaid, which would be translated as sea virgin; I wanted a wider definition” (Qwarnström 2004`, 72). However, the choice of murúach as a conscious attempt to explore the identity politics of the female subject without an extraneous gendering of the term is implicated in the translation into

English. The gendering ‘mermaid’ that occurs in the English text emphasises the

234 gendering that potentially occurs in the translation from Irish to English, as murúach is not fixed and translates indeterminately between sea-person, mer-people or mermaid.

The multiplicity in both the Irish and English names, attests to the liminality of the subject as it resides in the threshold between gendered and non-gendered representations. Caught somewhere between sexualised woman and monster, and usually depicted as a virgin, or femme fatale figure, the mermaid in this collection is an exploration of these archetypes alongside alternate subjectivities of Irish and migrant identities.

However, escaping an essentialist relationship to Irish subjectivity, the location of the

Irish subject as mermaid is destabilised across other poems. For example, in “The

Merfolk on Breastfeeding” the anthropological voice asserts:

They refuse point-blank to breastfeed their newborn

but wean them much too early,

sometimes after only a week. (Lines 1-3).

…because of the high rate of infant mortality

(four hundred in every thousand)

the general population has declined. (Lines 12-14).

For, let’s face it, despite their adaptability

and their for fading into the woodwork, like chameleons,

they were water-dwellers before they came on land and,

235 however we might describe

what they’d morphed into, it certainly wasn’t human beings. (Lines 56-60).

In this poem, the speaker ends with a conviction that separates the merfolk from the

Irish, and resembles a colonial distancing of migrant as other. The distancing of the mermaid migrant from a human subjectivity in this poem draws attention to the braid of subjectivities in the collection that form within colonial and post-colonial discourses.

In “Lack of Sympathy” the Mermaid is again referenced as Irish, while simultaneously distanced from this subject position through a mirrored migrant experience of cultural dislocation:

There were some of the merfolk who came up on land

on one particularly blasted and bleak island, surrounded by

precipitous cliffs.

They were always heart-afraid their youngsters

would fall over the edge. Something that happened often

enough.

Since their gills had ceased to function

they drowned, when they weren’t smashed to smithereens on

the razor-rocks.

Such was the case with Peig Sayers on the Great Blasket

Island

236 when her own son fell from a cliff

and the islanders gave them a very wide berth,

not showing up in their usual droves for the wake

or even dropping by to say they were sorry for their trouble.

They were so full of superstition

they said that anyone with so much bad luck and misfortune

following them

must have done something to deserve it.

That’s as much kindness as the merfolk ever saw

from the people among whom they’d fetched up. (Lines 1- 21).

While this poem distinguishes between the merfolk and the islanders as opposing migrant and local subjects, this is complicated by the figure Peig Sayers who is figured as a mermaid. Sayers, who was a prominent Irish storyteller, is figured as a mermaid in this poem. More specifically, Sayers was an Irish oral poet from the Blasket Isles, now uninhabited but previously the site of a well-known Irish speaking community. She was a proponent of Irish oral literature and her inclusion as a mermaid situates the mermaid figure here as not a migrant, but as a Irish speaking subject. Her figuration as a mermaid confuses the boundaries of history and literature, while distancing the mermaid figure from anglo-Irish identity in the poems account of the local peoople “among whom they’d fetched up” (line 21) as the ‘islanders’.

237 The paradoxical element of this text lies in the shifting of the mermaid between Irish speaking representation, migrant representation, and also mythological representation as inhuman. Ní Dhomhnaill’s construction of non-dualist explanations of subjectivity, nationalism, and identity, draws on the multiplicity created in convergences of time and space in a way that illuminates the multivalent qualities of Irish identity in the collection. This analysis has found that the convergence of temporalities and national accounts of space constructs this movement between subjectivities, which subsequently creates polyvalent, and ultimately non-dualist categories of female subjectivity. The mermaid’s body is therefore created within a temporal and spatial fluidity, which translates across migrant and Irish subject positions in a nomadic becoming that focuses on the processes of this subject. This focus on process, in turn, complicates the separation of transnational and local; while the mermaid is a recognisable image across various cultures and has been considered an archetype it is also, irreducibly, a local figure in these poems. Ní Dhomhnaill utilises both registers to interrogate this history and the disenfranchised Irish language community.

In their article “Towing the Line: Migrant Women Writers and the Space of Irish

Writing” Alice Feldman and Anne Mulhall suggest a parallel between twentieth century

Irish women’s writing and contemporary migrant women’s writing in Ireland (Feldman

2012). They argue that both groups (if we can group such varied writing practices together) share similar methods of production and reception, as well as poetics, as the importance of collective writing groups and spaces is evident in both scenes of writing as a source of support and a space for women writers to be heard. Also, both migrant writers and women writers have historically experienced exclusion from the space of

238 Irish writing, which is recognised as a masculine and national tradition (Feldman 2012`,

203). Feldman and Mulhall argue that migrant women writers inevitably reconfigure the

“material and imaginary spaces of “national culture,”…making visible the impossible constraints imposed on the migrant woman writer by totalising constructions of an Irish

“national culture” (Feldman 2012`, 203). This clearly resonates with the rewriting of gendered representation by Irish women poets in the twentieth century and the difficulties Irish women writers still face in light of the ongoing lack of recognition within institutionalised power structures that dictate the politics of inclusion in Irish literary space. The connection between migrant women writers and Irish women writers working in Ireland is evident in their shared negotiation of the dual paradigm of exclusion and negation that each group negotiates to varying degrees. Linked as they are within the construct of a national cultural identity, this is an interesting parallel between these two groups. It is a relationship that is problematically extended on in the representational strategies as the poems in The Fifty Minute Mermaid adapt the symbolic category of migrancy to explore the complex subjectivity of displaced Irish people within the figure of the mermaid, as I have discussed.

In the previous chapter on Tawada I also discussed how the migrant figure occupies a complex position within cultural identity politics and gendered representation. The complexity of migrancy is also evident in The Fifty Minute Mermaid, however, the figuration is deployed in these poems through the local and is intimately tied to the politics of Irish language in Ireland. The representation of the migrant subject is therefore problematic in Ní Dhomhnaill’s transnational imaginary that places contemporary issues of migrancy in this local context. As Ponzanesi argues, migrant

239 subjectivities have sometimes imposed categories of identity under the singular notion of ‘displaced people’ and using the migrant as a symbolic figure may actually “rob… dispossessed people of their language of suffering and loss” (Ponzanesi 2002`, 207).

Does Ní Dhomhnaill problematically adapt the migrant as a symbolic category, or does she provide a new representation for this subject that acknowledges the trauma of migrancy? In The Fifty Minute Mermaid the adoption of the migrant figure as a symbolic category becomes problematic as a register for Irish identity in the way

Ponzanesi implies. However, as Carine Mardorossian states this adaptation of the migrant can be seen as many exiled postcolonial writers have “reconfigured their identity by rejecting the status of exile for that of migrant” and this shift has implications for postcolonial representational politics (Mardorossian 2002`, 15). For

Mardorissian, the shift challenges the binary logic of exile that positions a here/there dichotomy, splitting homeland and foreign context. Instead, migrant emphasises

“movement, rootlessness, and the mixing of cultures, races and languages” (Mardorossian 2002`, 15).

I agree that the term migrant takes on a particular connotation of individual subjectivity that emphasises the process of subjectification that Mardorossian implies through a collision of self and other within self-perception. As a result of this collision moves attention from home/homeland, to the subject, and also implies a corresponding tenor of choice, agency and resilience that are accessible beyond the category of exile, dispossession and trauma, but importantly still engages with these. But what happens when ‘migrant’ becomes a transcribed symbolic category within the local politics of national identity and cultural dislocation for an Indigenous subject? The Fifty Minute

240 Mermaid reflects the world in the local through the adoption of the transnational trope of contemporary migrancy. Using migrant subjectivity as a trope is obviously a highly problematic move and the mermaid figure as local folklore and myth becomes necessarily complex by the symbolic category of migrancy. This move does, however, enable a new register for the local politics of Irish identity and Irish language writing that bypasses the problematic category of the ‘nation’ to inflect the transnational. The nation is bypassed and transnationalism becomes evident in the thematic concerns of the text as I have analysed, but the transnational is also evident in the production and translation of these poems into English, which leads to the inclusion of Ní Dhomhnaill in contemporary women’s writing.

Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry necessitates her inclusion in the current criticism on world literature and the transnational circulation of texts, not only because the translation of her poetry moves her into this arena, but also due to her position within transnational frameworks, such as women’s writing. Feminist criticism since the 1990s has self- reflexively criticised the universalist assumptions earlier (western) feminist movements have projected. As a result, feminism has seen the formation of a internalised plurality within feminist theory as “feminisms” (similar to the pluralisation of world literatures), indicating on one hand a shared concern for, generally speaking, “an emancipatory politics on behalf of women”, and on the other, the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender that inform women’s situations and identities across different cultures (McCann 2010`, 1-5).

241 This analysis has examined The Fifty Minute Mermaid through a transnational frame, shedding new light on the intersection of the transnational and the local in her poems.

Once again this transnational frame is both locally situated and globally implicit and combats the articulation of a singular normative women’s experience and the universal category of ‘Woman’. The importance of local context in women’s writing should not be underestimated, especially when considering the pull towards universal categories in the reception of texts that enter world literary space. I have argued that this collection of poems approaches the local through a transnational imaginary that reaches out to in poems such as “The Task” and “Black” and in the figuration of the mermaid as a migrant subject. In the confluence between the migrant and Irish speaking subjects this figuration constructs, embodiment is a process that emerges as the site where negotiation between these frames takes place. Ní Dhomhnaill deploys this in order to bypass a static national iconography of ‘woman’. Furthermore, the intersection of Irish language writing and transnational frames of women’s writing compounds this relationship between the local and the transnational in The Fifty Minute Mermaid.

242 243 Conclusion

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” - Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) p. 197

In the introduction to this thesis I identified the isomorphism of world and body as a framework to address two research questions: How do contemporary women writers figure the female body? How do they represent the world? The relationship I draw between representation and materiality by holding world and body in tension with one another situates the importance of both registers for the analysis of contemporary women’s writing. I argue that materiality is at the centre of unpacking these questions on representation in texts by Bergvall, Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill evident in the way each text privileges the female body. I delineate this argument on materiality, in which I have drawn from feminist theory and new materialisms, to position my analysis of women’s writing and world literature. This combination has allowed for both the close reading and materialist analysis of short texts by women writers within the context of world literature and situates a reengagement with female subjectivity and embodied representation anew in the circulation and translation of literature in the twenty-first century.

I have found that Bergvall, Tawada and Ní Dhomhnaill each centralise the figuration of the female body in the texts analysed and that, although this is done in varied ways, there is a connection between them in the way they draw from translation as both a theme and a representation strategy to figure the multiply located female subject. In the

244 translational and transnational enactment of this figuration, the texts I have analysed also engage with the global processes of production and reception to revisit the gendered identity politics of writing through female embodiment. The phenomenological underpinnings of this cause us to reconsider literature as a world- making activity, one shaped by experience that centralises the body as a discursive site.

As Wittgenstein writes, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” (quoted in Perloff, 2007, viii), referring to the construction of meaning and how discourse shapes our understanding and experience of the world and therefore its representation.

But, as I have argued, this is also an embodied space shaped by materiality. As a constellation from which to begin thinking about gender, embodiment and women’s writing, the connection between world and body speaks to the way our understanding of each term is shaped by overlapping ideologies where the limitations of language and discourse in the representation of the female subject is recognised. I’ve returned to this idea regularly throughout this research to offer a conceptual grounding the representation of corporeality in transnational women’s writing. This area of research on embodiment and the female subject is feminist terrain, which builds from a post- structuralist critique of gender and feminist literary criticism, and seeks to redefine these discourses within a new materialist and self-reflexive transnational feminist approach that leaves the term ‘woman’ open and unfixed but still centralises embodiment and the specificity of lived experience.

In my analysis of the many female subjects who narrate and appear in the texts by

Bergvall, Tawada, and Ní Dhomhnaill I have shown how the intersection of gender and transnationalism revolves around materiality and representation to centralise

245 embodiment. As I argued in chapter two, Bergvall’s adaptation of texts and intertextual mode uses citation as a form of writing where we can start to recognise a new language game that recalls the gendered positionality that occurs through language and writing.

As evident in my reading of “Via”, this can be as simple as alphabetically arranging a series of translations to distance linearity, or as complex as using this citational practice and collaborating to create a random yet carefully calculated aural variation through the readers vocal fractals. The centrality of corporeality that informs this process is obvious in Bergvall’s practice as one that blends performance with citation, the iterative poetics of which result in repetition with a difference. The outcome is equal parts playful and confrontational as Bergvall begins to play with language at the edges of originality to represent the gendered construct of the Author and yet still situate the materiality of the body in this iterative model.

This focus on world and body has highlighted how discourses of originality and ontology still inform the reception and production of literature by women. A useful way to begin unpacking the subjective arrangement of authorship in the twenty-first century, where much hinges on the status of originality and autonomy, is through understanding the creative market. The contradiction between aesthetic and capital, as Brouillette describes, highlights how concepts such as originality are themselves “a product of the unique ways in which [literature] is materially constituted” (Brouillette 2013`, 108). To suggest this from the perspective of writing identity politics, Bergvall similarly raises the following question for our consideration: “how does one create textual works where the authorial hold over the text is somehow distanced, perhaps neutralized, yet where the structural impact of experience, of living, of loving, of knowing, of reading are in

246 fact recognized?” (21). Bergvall begins with this issue of originality and authorship and its constitution as a masculine position to return to lived experience and embodiment. In this reflexive arrangement between recognising this construction of the subject and acknowledging the materiality of this position, she returns to the body.

If we compare how “Via” uses repetition to dislodge our assumptions of authority and originality to Tawada’s short story Portrait of a Tongue we find a feminist approach to the interstitial in language in both. As I discussed in chapter three, in Portrait of a

Tongue the letter ‘P’ transforms and mutates from a single meaning (Piroshka) to multiple possible meanings. These moments are interstitial in that embodiment is simultaneously situated in language and unfixed: The body sits both inside and outside the system of signification that inscribes it. We can acknowledge this as a move that brings the materiality of language into view. Tawada’s exophonic writing situates language as a interpretive space that again brings us back to the representation of the female body in the confluence of linguistic and cultural materials. The metaphorics of translation as a gendered site of representation are intimately tied to the female body in

Tawada’s short stories and also emphasise the shared materiality of language and embodiment by figuring this body as a text that is read, interpreted and translated. The stories that figure the migrant female subject, in particular, position the female body as a site of translation. Yet, as I argued in chapter three, the short story “Storytellers without

Souls” complicates the hierarchical position of translation through the image of the cell:

“The human body, too, contains many booths in which translations are made. I suspect that these are all translations for which no original exists” (Tawada, 2002, 104). The implication of the cell as a new metaphor for translation is unusual and can be held up

247 in contrast to many of the traditional approaches to translations that create a hierarchical relationship between original and copy. There is no ‘original’ so you can’t have a copy

(in the the usual sense). The process of cell division is symmetric - it is, in a way, a new take on the ‘afterlife’ of a text that can be applied to translated works and is configured via ‘the body’.

The Fifty Minute Mermaid by Ní Dhomhnaill complicates the reception of translated texts and the relationship between source and target language due to the marginalisation of Irish language within the colonial and postcolonial history of Ireland. The inclusion of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry is therefore important as it adds a different relationship to language and translation that imbues it with an important political history and recognises the local production of dual language translation within this context.

Simultaneously, my research on Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry also examines the reterretorialising of myth and folklore and the representation of the female body it engenders. Language is still key to this focus, and the female body (in the figure of the mermaid) is once again a central site in Ní Dhomhnaill’s work. In comparison to

Tawada’s representation of the migrant female subject, the relation between the mermaid to the category of world shifts slightly as an inverted relationship between the transnational and the local.

Each chapter is part of a trajectory (the thesis overall) that reaches towards an undoing.

For example, Bergvall, as a contemporary woman writer sits beside Nuala Ní

Dhomhnaill, although their practice is far different from one another. To place gender at the centre of such analysis and to include women writers as a group is not to suggest

248 sameness on their part. Rather, it is to assert the varied ways transnational women’s writing are engaging with situated and embodied representations of the female subject that align with issues of translation, the woman writer and the production of texts in world space. At the same time, by situating this focus on corporeality within a consideration of gender and world literature, this thesis highlights the materiality of the bodies of women writers and argues that materiality of the writing body informs the reception and production of texts in world literary space. Both of these findings confirm that gender shapes the transnational space of world literature but what is especially interesting is how female embodiment emerges at the centre of these new figurations of identity in our current transnational moment.

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