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An Erotics of Language in Contemporary American Fiction Flore Chevailier

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An Erotics of Language in Contemporary American Fiction Flore Chevailier Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2008 The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Language in Contemporary American Fiction Flore Chevailier Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THE BODY OF WRITING: AN EROTICS OF LANGUAGE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION By FLORE CHEVAILLIER A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2008 Copyright © 2008 Flore Chevaillier All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Flore Chevaillier defended on May 28th 2008. ______________________________ R.M. Berry Professor Directing Dissertation ______________________________ Antoine Cazé Professor Co-Directing Dissertation ______________________________ Lauren Weingarden Outside Committee Member ______________________________ Mathieu Duplay Committee Member ______________________________ Andrew Epstein Committee Member ______________________________ S.E. Gontarski Committee Member ______________________________ François Happe Committee Member ______________________________ Claire Maniez Committee Member Approved: _____________________________________________ R.M. Berry Chair, Department of English The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank R.M. Berry for his guidance, insights, and encouragement during this project and throughout my graduate career. I will miss our conversations. I would also like to acknowledge Antoine Cazé, who introduced me to American experimental fiction. I am grateful for his time, direction, and support during the development of this dissertation and over the course of my undergraduate and graduate studies at the Université d’Orléans. I must also thank Mathieu Duplay, Andrew Epstein, S.E. Gontarski, François Happe, Claire Maniez, and Lauren Weingarden, for their participation in this project. I am grateful to a Research grant from FSU, FSU Congress of Graduate Student conference funding, the English Department conference funding, and the Bryant family’s financial support for subsidizing my research. I wish to extend a warm thank you to Joseph McElroy for his support, subtle insights, and friendship. I would like to express my gratitude to Carole Maso, and Steve Tomasula for our conversations and correspondence, and for their enthusiasm for my project. A special thank you to Christopher Shinn, who was always generous with time, advice, and with suggestions on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s work. I am greatly indebted to Nick Allin, who has always cared about my work, and passed along sensitive comments and encouragement. Joanna Beall, Matthew Hobson, and Rebecca Pennell deserve thanks for their interest in my work and for sharpening my prose. Simten Gurac was an invaluable listener, and I thank her for her friendship. I am much indebted, furthermore, to Bruno, Arlette, Maud, and Luc Chevaillier’s support and feedback throughout much of this process. And last, but certainly not least, I owe a tremendous thank you to Fabien Corbillon for his stimulating feedback, continuous guidance, emotional support, and attention. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT vi INTRODUCTION 1 1. EROTIC ETUDES: THEORY OF THE SELF AND LANGUAGE 19 2. SEMIOTICS AND EROTICS IN JOSEPH MCELROY’S PLUS 43 3. “A CERTAIN PULSING”: THE EROTIC PAGE IN CAROLE MASO’S 72 AVA 4. EROTICS AND CORPOREALITY IN THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA’S 96 DICTEE 5. BODILY AND LITERARY MODIFICATIONS IN STEVE TOMASULA 121 AND STEPHEN FARRELL’S VAS: AN OPERA IN FLATLAND CONCLUSION 156 APPENDIX 162 REFERENCES 169 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 181 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Tomasula, Steve and Stephen Farrell. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. 37 (c) 2004 Steve Tomasula. The University of Chicago Press. Figure 2. Tomasula, Steve and Stephen Farrell. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. 41 (c) 2004 Steve Tomasula. The University of Chicago Press. Figure 3. Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. DICTEE (c) 2001 The Regents of the 113 University of California. The University of California Press. Figure 4. Tomasula, Steve and Stephen Farrell. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. 130 (c) 2004 Steve Tomasula. The University of Chicago Press. Figure 5. Tomasula, Steve and Stephen Farrell. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. 134 (c) 2004 Steve Tomasula. The University of Chicago Press. Figure 6. Tomasula, Steve and Stephen Farrell. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. 135 (c) 2004 Steve Tomasula. The University of Chicago Press. Figure 7. Tomasula, Steve and Stephen Farrell. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. 143 (c) 2004 Steve Tomasula. The University of Chicago Press. Figure 8. Tomasula, Steve and Stephen Farrell. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. 146 (c) 2004 Steve Tomasula. The University of Chicago Press. Figure 9. Tomasula, Steve and Stephen Farrell. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. 149 (c) 2004 Steve Tomasula. The University of Chicago Press. Figure 10. Tomasula, Steve and Stephen Farrell. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. 153 (c) 2004 Steve Tomasula. The University of Chicago Press. v ABSTRACT This study proposes a new interpretive apparatus to examine readers’ experience of sensuality in their engagement with the language of fiction. Postmodern texts explore literature’s ability to signify and materialize experiences, mediating the physical conditions of everyday existence with the physical conditions of reading and writing. In this exploration, avant-garde writers disrupt traditional signifying techniques, emphasizing the materiality of the medium of their texts—print, sound, page, orthography, syntax, etc. This disruption provokes an erotic examination of language and encourages a bodily relationship with the textual medium. I investigate this mode of writing and its political consequences in Joseph McElroy’s Plus (1977), Carol Maso’s AVA (1993), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE (1982), and Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell’s VAS (2002), as they produce examples of both thematic and structural erotics through visual experiments, metaphors, or allegorical representations of theoretical connections between pleasure and language. Informed by feminist theorists Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, film critic Laura Marks, philosopher Georges Bataille, art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, and the writings on avant-garde literature by Roland Barthes, this study clarifies American experimental literature’s ability to counterbalance and demystify contemporary rhetorical apparatuses that foster conservative political agendas. This project thus repositions postmodern texts as feminist practices that call for a political reevaluation of social systems which confine fictional examinations of the body, and their interpretations, to patriarchal paradigms. vi INTRODUCTION In her essay, “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag condemns the practice of interpretation of works of art, claiming that the interpreter provides another text that nonetheless fails in rendering what the work of art really is. For Sontag, interpretation misses the “pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy” of art (9). Instead, Sontag proposes to avoid the overemphasized focus on the content of a work by stressing form and content, which forces readers and viewers to consider their sensory experience. She concludes that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” (14). However, two questions remain unanswered: What specifically is an erotics of art? And, what is at stake in the adoption of an erotics of art? Hélène Cixous’s work provides an answer to these questions. Cixous believes that men have appropriated women’s images, self-representation, and sexuality, so that in re- appropriating their bodies and in challenging sexual economies and rigid sexual definitions, women will destroy this patriarchal domination. Therefore, Cixous’s emphasis on linguistic structures and the body relies on an understanding of literary politics beyond thematic content. Marianne DeKoven clarifies this method when she indicates that “any writer can be anti-patriarchal at the level of linguistic structure: anyone can feel constricted by, and can therefore oppose and remake, the closed, hierarchical, linear, monolinguistic structures of conventional thought-in-language” (xviii). In Cixous’s work, the challenge to traditional models of thought lies in the relationship between écriture féminine and the body. She sees language not only as a mental and social reality, but as part of the bodily realm. Cixous does not equate the body and the text, but she challenges the patriarchal models that create a dichotomy between the mind and the body. Such models embrace Descartes’ insights on the intellect’s control over the body, which have underscored most philosophies from the 17th century to the 20th. Cixous thinks of the Cartesian position as a phallocentric archetype, as she “understands embodied thinking as a form of writing in order to emphasize the productive force of such a thinking” (Bray 7). Indeed, she conceives of writing in relation to physiological activities, emphasizing that “writing is a 1 physical effort” (Rootprint 40). What remains unclear in Cixous’s writing, however, is how exactly the sensual aspect of linguistic practice can challenge the masculine hegemony. Is women’s writing of the body enough? How will it affect society? Julia Kristeva’s work helps us find answers to these questions. In Revolution in Poetic Language,
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