The Nonsovereign Subject and Sexual Violence in Contemporary North American and Russian Culture
by
Irina Sadovina
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto
© Copyright by Irina Sadovina 2018
The Nonsovereign Subject and Sexual Violence in Contemporary North American and Russian Culture
Irina Sadovina
Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto
2018
Abstract
Through stories about sexual violence, societies confront the condition of nonsovereignty that underlies the reality of suffering, self- and other-inflicted, in the lives of sexed beings. Analyzing theoretical, fictional, and popular media texts, written in the United States, Canada, and Russia from the 1980s to the 2010s, this dissertation formulates a structural approach to narratives about sexual violence and nonsovereignty. This approach avoids naturalizing the opposition between the “progressive” West and “traditional” Russia, enabling more informed discussions of cultural narratives about sexual violence and a more critical use of the discursive tools available for dealing with it.
I identify three modes of approaching the problem of sexual violence: reparative, radical and prosaic. These modes shape subject positions and patterns of power relations. Each chapter analyzes the structure of a particular mode, its manifestations in cultural myths and in specific texts, and ultimately, its limitations. Chapter 1 discusses the reparative mode, which aims to heal the subject or the world, and its manifestations: the Western speakout model in Sapphire’s Push
(1996) and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999), and the Russian ideal of kenosis in Viktor
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Astafiev’s “Lyudochka” (1989) and Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (2015).
Reparative projects can be totalizing and easily appropriated by neoliberalism and conservative nationalism. The radical mode, discussed in Chapter 2, seeks to avoid appropriation by foregrounding identification with trauma. I analyze its manifestations in North American discourses of feminist and queer negativity and the Russian “literature of evil.” Reading Kate
Zambreno’s Green Girl (2011) and Vladimir Sorokin’s Marina’s Thirtieth Love (1987), I argue that the radical mode reinscribes abjection as a source of empowerment and supports identity politics and structures of inequality. Chapter 3 formulates the prosaic mode, which focuses on processes of adaptation and survival without resolution or liberation. Reading Lyudmila
Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night (1992) and Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead (2012), I articulate a prosaic vision of the subject as headquarters for self-maintenance in a world both sustaining and hostile. Understanding the three modes as at once fundamental and mutable, I argue for their critical and pragmatic use in debates about sexual violence.
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Acknowledgments
This project was generously supported by the Jackman Humanities Institute, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the University of Toronto.
The road to submission has been long and eventful, and I was fortunate to share it with Eva-Lynn Jagoe, my supervisor. I want to thank her for her friendship and high expectations, for being excited about ambitious insights whenever they arose, and for not sparing me when I tried to cut corners.
The thesis benefited greatly from the input of my committee. I am grateful for their commitment and care. Ann Komaromi referred me, time and again, to game-changing scholarship in Russian studies that I had somehow missed. Barbara Havercroft encouraged me to attend to the literary texts with much more precision – a task that caused me much anxiety at the time, but made an incomparably better reader. Rebecca Comay’s well-placed comments pushed me to engage deeply with the assumptions behind the project.
I thank Eliot Borenstein and Kate Holland for participating in the defense and for asking substantive questions that I cannot stop thinking about.
The Centre for Comparative Literature has seen me through all the joys and agonies of graduate school. I would like to thank Bao Nguyen and Aphrodite Gardner for their support in administrative matters and well beyond them. I thank Jill Ross for the many productive meetings and for her engagement with my second chapter. Linda Hutcheon has taken me under her wing in more ways than one, and I am deeply grateful for her mentorship. The friendships and collaborations with my colleagues at the Centre have kept me encouraged, challenged and entertained, and I am thankful for all of them.
Over the years, I have found a second academic home at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Donna Orwin’s advice was always timely and wise, and the opportunities she pushed me to pursue were interesting and unexpected. Julia Mikhailova witnessed many a pedagogical crisis while I was finding my footing as a teacher, and rescued me with her endless supply of ideas. Dragana Obradović’s door was always open for me; our hurried lunches in- between seminars were full of insight and joy.
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Much of this thesis was conceived while I was a Junior Fellow at Massey College. I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Amela Marin, Hugh Segal, and John Fraser, as well as to the fellow Fellows whose friendships and thoughts have pushed the project forward. The thesis was finished when I was a Graduate Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, and I want to thank my JHI colleagues, particularly Erag Ramizi, Erin Soros, and Letha Victor, for talking with me about violence and suffering with all the seriousness and humour the subject demands.
This thesis is a direct product of the walks and conversations I have had with Anastasiya Astapova, Erin Brosey, Kate Pride Brown, Amy Coté, Élise Couture-Grondin, Andréanne Dion, Nicole Grimaldi, Natasha Hay, Evangeline Holtz, Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard, Julia Lewis, Chloe Brault MacKinnon, Emily Macrae, Rachel Mazzara, Noor Naga, Lindsay Reeve, Sean Seeger, and Fan Wu.
Thank you to Anna Balázs and Ana Koncul for the life we have shared in the ruins of empires. To André Forget, for friendship and love. To my family: Elvira and Igor, Anna and Anastasia.
I dedicate this thesis to Lidia, and to the memory of Tatiana.
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Note on Transliteration and Translation
In the transliteration of Russian names and words, I have followed the Library of Congress system without diacritical marks and ligatures, with the exception of commonly used English forms. Translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments...... iv
Note on Transliteration and Translation ...... vi
Table of Contents ...... vii
Introduction ...... 1
0.0 Rape Stories ...... 1
0.1 Sexual Violence as a Crisis of Subjectivity, Ethics and Politics ...... 7
0.2 Theoretical Background ...... 9
0.3 The Three Modes ...... 12
0.1.1 The Reparative Mode ...... 12
0.1.2 The Radical Mode ...... 14
0.1.3 The Reparative/Radical Loop ...... 15
0.1.4 The Prosaic Mode ...... 16
0.4 The Comparative Approach ...... 17
0.5 The Corpus ...... 19
0.6 Chapter Outline ...... 20
Chapter 1. The Reparative Mode in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, Sapphire’s Push, Viktor Astafiev’s Lyudochka and Guzel’ Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes ...... 22
1.1 Introduction ...... 22
1.2 The Reparative Mode ...... 27
1.2.1 North American Feminism and the Speakout ...... 27
1.2.2 Russian Feminism ...... 31
1.2.3 Trauma and the Talking Cure ...... 36
1.3 The Reparative Mode in America: Speaking Out and Inclusion ...... 41
1.3.1 Speech and Survival in Speak ...... 41
1.3.2 Speech and Exclusion in Push ...... 46 vii
1.4 The Clash of Reparative Narratives ...... 50
1.4.1 Resistance to Feminism in Russia...... 50
1.4.2 Speech in Russian Culture ...... 52
1.4.3 Socialist Realism as a Reparative Genre ...... 57
1.5 The Reparative Mode in Russia: Transformation and Transcendence ...... 61
1.5.1 Exposure and Redemption in “Lyudochka” ...... 61
1.5.2 Byt and Bytie ...... 65
1.5.3 Kenosis and Utopia ...... 68
1.6 A Critique of the Reparative Mode ...... 77
1.6.1 Dualism and Separation ...... 77
1.6.2 Inclusion ...... 80
1.6.3 The Role of Speech in Reparation ...... 86
1.7 Conclusion ...... 91
Chapter 2. The Radical Mode in Vladimir Sorokin’s Marina’s Thirtieth Love and Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl ...... 95
2.1 Introduction ...... 95
2.2 The Radical Mode: Failure and Disintegration ...... 97
2.2.1 Shadow Feminism and Queer Failure ...... 98
2.2.2 Lacan’s Split Subject and Edelman’s Sinthomosexual ...... 103
2.2.3 Russian Radical Visions: “Literature of Evil,” Postmodernism and Conceptualism...... 107
2.3 The Radical Mode in the Novels ...... 112
2.3.1 Marina’s Thirtieth Love as a Radical Cautionary Tale ...... 113
2.1.1.1 Introduction to the Novel...... 113
2.1.1.2 Marina as a Bad Survivor ...... 116
2.1.1.3 Marina’s “Monstrous Salvation” ...... 120
2.3.2 Green Girl as a Celebration of Failure ...... 129 viii
2.1.1.4 Introduction to the Novel...... 129
2.1.1.5 Ruth as a Bad Survivor ...... 131
2.1.1.6 Green Girl as a Story of a Flâneuse ...... 137
2.4 Limits of the Radical Mode ...... 139
2.4.1 Lesbian Aesthetics and Queer Poshlost’...... 140
2.4.2 Shit and Mastery ...... 149
2.4.3 Glamour of Failure ...... 153
2.4.4 The Undone Subject of Capitalism ...... 157
2.5 Conclusion ...... 159
Chapter 3. The Prosaic Mode in Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night and Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead ...... 163
3.1 Introduction ...... 163
3.2 The Prosaic Mode and Its Pitfalls ...... 165
3.2.1 Definition of Prosaics ...... 165
3.2.2 Difficulties of Theorizing Prosaically ...... 168
3.2.3 Role of Drama in Prosaics ...... 171
3.2.4 Approaches to Thinking Prosaically ...... 172
3.1.1.1 Listing ...... 173
3.1.1.2 Overstatement ...... 175
3.3 The Flailing Subject in Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night ...... 176
3.3.1 The Time: Night and Its Reception ...... 176
3.3.2 Petrushevskaya’s Prosaic Vision ...... 183
3.1.1.3 The Underground Woman ...... 184
3.1.1.4 Speech of the Crowd: Anna’s Registers ...... 185
3.1.1.5 Anna’s Verbal Scrambling ...... 195
3.3.3 Anna as a Prosaic Subject ...... 198
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3.4 The Learning Subject in Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead...... 201
3.4.1 Maidenhead and Its Reception...... 201
3.4.2 Berger’s Prosaic Vision ...... 206
3.4.2.1 Myra’s Project of Becoming a Slave and Its Limits ...... 207
3.4.2.2 Prosaic Epistemology: Bad Syntax, Condensation and Description .....216
3.4.2.3 The Prosaic Subject in the World of Others ...... 220
3.4.3 The World of Prosaic Subjects in Maidenhead ...... 226
3.5 The Prosaic Subject...... 228
3.5.1 Responsibility and Answerability ...... 229
3.5.2 Locatedness and Noncoincidence ...... 230
3.5.3 Drama and Self-Sustaining Activity ...... 231
3.5.4 Dialogism and Antagonism...... 232
3.6 Conclusion ...... 233
Conclusion ...... 235
4.1 The Work of Critique ...... 235
4.2 The Work of Rereading ...... 236
4.3 The Work of Making Sense and Making Do ...... 238
References ...... 243
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Introduction 0.0 Rape Stories
On September 2, 2014, Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz began carrying a fifty- pound mattress around the campus, in protest of the university’s refusal to take action after she reported having been raped by a fellow student (Da Silva). The incident occurred two years earlier, when Sulkowicz and Paul Nungesser had sex in her dorm room. According to her, what began as consensual sex turned into an assault (Chapman). Sulkowicz went through the university’s official procedure to report the rape, but her case was dismissed, along with two other cases brought against the same student (Trianni). The university did not expel Nungesser. It did, however, lend institutional support to Sulkowicz’s senior project in visual arts, entitled “Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)” (Bazelon).1
Almost immediately, the performance attracted media attention. In less than a month, Sulkowicz appeared on the cover of New York Magazine (Grigoriadis). This resulted in a complicated situation, in which a rape case that was never brought to court (Sulkowicz decided not to press charges) became the center of a nation-wide debate. Details of the reported assault and private text message histories were subject to public scrutiny. As Sulkowicz describes it, “Everyone was suddenly an expert on my rape and whether I was a real rape victim” (Da Silva). The case, described as “one of the messiest campus sexual-assault cases in recent memory” (Bazelon), was not resolved by public exposure: if anything, it was made more complicated, deviating from stereotypical assumptions about stories of rape. In this story, the alleged victim both suffered and benefitted from public exposure, which brought wide recognition to her art and political stance. Meanwhile, the alleged perpetrator, while successfully avoiding conviction, had his reputation and career prospects destroyed by public opinion.
The complexity of the case fueled controversy. Sulkowicz became the target of predictably large amounts of criticism and harassment, both online and offline. On the day after her graduation, the Columbia campus was covered with posters that depicted her face alongside the words “Pretty Little Liar” and “#RAPEHOAX” (Bazelon). Sulkowicz’s critics are often sympathetic
1 The performance ended on May 27, 2015, Sulkowicz and Nungesser’s graduation day (Bazelon).
1 2 towards Nungesser, who has been open about his sense of injustice and the difficulties he has faced since the case went public (Bazelon). Conservative commentators have warned about taking Sulkowicz’s unproven claims at face value, cited her flirtatious messages to Nungesser and her failure to immediately act as a “proper” rape victim (C. Young), dismissed her art as attention-seeking and overly sexualized (K. Smith)2 and accused her of exploiting her “dubious victimhood” (Charen). The controversial writer Camille Paglia saw in Sulkowicz’s project “a parody of the worst aspects of grievance-oriented feminism” (Paglia). These hostile voices, however, appeared in the midst of overwhelming media support. In the context of the unfolding public conversation about campus rape, Sulkowicz became an inspiration to many survivors of sexual assault. Students across the United States joined in on the protest performance, carrying mattresses to raise awareness of rape on their own campuses (Chapman). According to Sulkowicz, strangers began to treat her as a confessor and even a savior, sharing their own experiences of sexual assault and reaching out to touch her in a crowd (Da Silva). Sulkowicz was praised by artist Marina Abramović (Corbett), feminist groups such as the Feminist Majority Foundation and the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women (Chapman), as well as major media outlets such as the New York Times (R. Smith).
Three years after “Mattress Performance” made headlines, self-proclaimed rape experts on the other side of the world assembled around the sixteen-year-old Diana Shurygina, who, like Sulkowicz, drew national attention to her story of sexual violence. On March 31, 2016, Shurygina went to a house party on the outskirts of Ulyanovsk, where she met the twenty-year- old Sergei Semenov. Semenov claims to have had consensual sex with her. Shurygina, however, reports that he locked her in a room, struck her and raped her. After successfully fighting off another young man who tried to have sex with her right after, Shurygina called home. Her parents picked her up from the party, took her to a medical examination and then to the police. Semenov was charged with rape and violent actions of sexual nature, convicted and sentenced to eight years and three months in prison (Ushakov).3
2 “What societal ill couldn’t she highlight by taking off her clothes and getting abused in front of an audience?” asks Kyle Smith in National Review. 3 The sentence was later shortened to three years and three months, and in January 2018 incarceration was replaced with an electronic monitoring tag (“Nasil’nik Shuryginoi snova lishen svobody!”). The second assailant was also accused, but later cleared of charges due to his failure to complete the sexual act (Varsegova).
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In the court of law, Shurygina had more luck than Sulkowicz, but when it came to the media, she was significantly less fortunate. The city of Ulyanovsk was shaken by the trial and its outcome. Semenov’s supporters staged protests, organized an online campaign and harassed Shurygina and her parents. When the Shurygin family appeared on the popular Russian talk show, Pust’ Govoriat (Let Them Talk), it was to speak out against this harassment. The show ended up amplifying the problem on a country-wide scale. The first episode, which aired on January 31, 2017, was a vicious trial by popular opinion, in which participants and “experts” blamed Shurygina and her family for ruining the life of a “good boy” and tried to convince her that the rape has not in fact taken place (“V razgar vecherinki”). Classic rape myths were enlisted: the victim’s promiscuity (confirmed by the existence of previous relationships and flirtatious photos online), her mother’s immorality (evidenced by her decision to let her daughter attend the party), Shurygina’s drinking (which constituted consent to sex), as well as her suspicious behaviour during the rape (why didn’t she defend herself?) and on air (why does she smile instead of weeping?) (Povorazniuk). With the episode’s extremely high ratings and nine million views on YouTube in the first week (Povorazniuk),4 the story was proving to be lucrative for everyone involved, so Shurygina and her family were invited back to the show. In just over a month, they appeared in five hour-long episodes – and the saga keeps unfolding on national television, spilling into other shows on other channels.5 Despite the fact that many controversial details were clarified by an investigator who worked on the case and firmly believed in Semenov’s guilt (Varsegova), many viewers took the side of the accused. Semenov is often represented as a martyr who dreams of getting an education and a good job.6 Vilified by the very media that made her a celebrity, Shurygina is referred to as an attention-seeking liar, a coy seductress, a spoiled child, an evil vamp, a vapid celebrity with an embarrassing claim to fame.7 Blogger careers were
4 The episode is the most popular video on the show’s YouTube channel. As of April 1, 2018, it had over 18,645,864 views. 5 Recent episodes of Pust’ Govoriat featured an appearance by Sergei Semenov and his family, and a fight between Shurygina’s husband (she got married last year to a 29-year-old TV operator [Sushinova]) and the second of her assailants. Shurygina has also recently appeared on the shows Novye russkie sensatsii (New Russian Sensations) on NTV (“Diana Shurygina. Istoriia vserossiiskogo skandala”), and Andrei Malakhov. Priamoi Efir (Andrei Malakhov. Live Broadcast) on channel Rossiia-1 (“Nasil’nik Shuryginoi snova lishen svobody!”). 6 Early on, Semenov recorded a video from prison, in which he earnestly urged Shurygina to “wake up and lead a normal life” (“Nasil’nik Diany Shuryginoi obratilsia k nei” [“Diana Shurygina’s Rapist Has a Message for Her”]). 7 Irina Petrovskaia’s opinion piece for Novaia Gazeta is one example: “Who is Shurygina? … Maybe she invented the cure for cancer? Went to space? Got the Nobel Prize for Literature? Saved people from a fire or a flood? Adopted orphaned children?” (Petrovskaia). In an even more hostile article, Anna Nikolaeva ridicules the teenager for her refusal to reveal whether or not she was a virgin at the time of the rape (Nikolaeva).
4 made in meticulously analyzing Shurygina’s behaviour to prove the falseness of her testimony (Povorazniuk). The family has faced new levels of harassment: the girl’s mother was physically assaulted in the street, her father’s car tires were pierced, and Shurygina herself had to stop attending college to avoid appearing in public (Petrovskaia).
Overwhelming as they have been, these waves of hate and ridicule are only part of the cultural phenomenon that Shurygina’s story became. She has a fair share of supporters and subscribers on social media. The producers of Pust’ Govoriat were criticized for using a traumatized teenager for profit, and the channel has been reprimanded by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media for broadcasting explicit material pertaining to a minor (Vladimirova). Some commentators have linked the scandal to Russia’s victim-blaming culture and the absence of sex education (“Chto ostanetsia ‘na donyshke’”). Alongside these debates, Shurygina’s astounding fame feeds on itself: her facial expressions and memorable phrases have become Internet memes,8 a themed tour of Ulyanovsk is in the works (Dinika) and an online tutorial shows how to replicate her makeup look (Raili).
The two cases described above reflect the heightened visibility of the issue of sexual violence, along with other aspects of gender inequality, in public discussions in North America and in Russia. Social media hashtags related to sexual violence and harassment, such as #BeenRapedNeverReported (2014), #IaNeBoius’Skazat’ (“#I’mNotAfraidToSay,” 2016), #MeToo (2017), #ZhenshchinyVmeste (#WomenTogether, 2018), are trending both in the English- and Russian-language social networks. Media spectacles of justice and injustice, vulnerability and triumph have made sexual violence a hot topic – so hot, in fact, that, as is the case with any popular political discourse, conducting a scholarly project on it is tricky in a particular way. Hot topics invite platitudes. Some of them are naturally more attractive to me than others: as a private citizen, I am appalled and distressed by violently sexist reactions to the two cases. I believe in the importance of developing cultural norms that support people who are harmed by sexual and gendered violence and fail to reward people who perpetrate it. Still, I want to be wary of yielding to rhetoric, even if it aligns with political projects that I support. The effects of cultural approaches to sexual violence may not be as straightforward as they appear:
8 The Russian branch of Burger King even attempted to use a viral image of Shurygina in their advertising campaign, which was quickly shut down (Povorazniuk).
5 they may be highlighting some aspects of the problem to the detriment of others, or playing into larger structures and ideologies in unhelpful ways.
The striking difference between the cases of Sulkowicz and Shurygina lies in the ways they have been interpreted and represented in the media. Framed by discourses of feminism and family values, these interpretations have strongly determined each young woman’s experience of going public with a story of sexual violence. The feminist framework taken up by Sulkowicz’s supporters asserts that women should be believed, calls for ever more nuanced norms for consent, and pushes for policy changes on campus. The emphasis on family values, made by Shurygina’s critics, sustains arguments that advocate for addressing sexual violence by enforcing conservative behaviour through moral education, as well as parental and legal control. The two approaches – feminist and conservative – are not the only possible responses to cases such as these, but they have been prevalent and largely defined against each other, both domestically – in Russia and North America, and internationally, cementing the cultural opposition between Russia and the West. Proposed solutions to sexual violence have political uses: in Russia, conservative media has relied on the rhetoric of family values to stoke anti-Western and pro- government sentiments (Robinson and Milne); liberal America’s confidence in its moral superiority naturalizes U.S.-style democracy as the best possible future and masks the country’s imperialist politics.9
An uncritical embrace of particular solutions blinds us to the complicated histories and shortcomings of Western and Russian approaches to gender, as well as other cultural beliefs, not immediately related to sexual violence, that come into play in such responses. The implication of Western popular feminism in the neoliberal regime is evidenced by how easily it is hijacked, whether by high street fashion brands, with their endless variations on feminist slogans (H&M’s “EMPOWERED” T-shirts, Forever 21’s “FEMINIST” chokers), or by politicians such as the notoriously misogynist U.S. President Donald Trump, who has now issued two proclamations
9 Dan Healey expressed similar reservations about the cross-cultural applications of progressive LGBTQ discourse. In Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (2017), Healey discusses the complexity of applying the term “homophobia” to Russian society. He notes that the Western discourse of LGBT rights is historically specific and liable to what Jasbir Puar described as homonationalism (Puar): nationalist and even chauvinistic attitudes that rest on strategic accusations of rival countries in homophobia (Healey, Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi 4). Healey writes: “At the risk of stating the obvious, there is no single correct path to a ‘post-homophobic’ society and polity, and there is no common starting point in an equally ‘homophobic dark age’” (5).
6 condemning sexual violence (“President Donald J. Trump Proclaims April 2017 as National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month,” “President Donald J. Trump Proclaims April 2018 as National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month”). Meanwhile, the Russian opposition to Western norms is fanned by Vladimir Putin’s government. The anti-Western stance is not just an expression of patriarchy: it draws on historical attitudes to suffering, the good life, the future, the value of speech, the public and the private.10 Anti-feminist sentiment in Russia may point to a general skepticism about Western-specific ways of imagining solutions to problems. Indeed, culturally specific tropes that have informed reactions to the stories of Sulkowicz and Shurygina should not be taken for granted. Sulkowicz’s case has benefitted from the Hollywood plotline of a heroic underdog fighting against the system.11 Meanwhile, the reception of Shurygina’s story was shaped by the mistrust of law and sympathy for its victims: attitudes that scholars have linked with the “legal nihilism” prevalent in Russian culture.12
Critical reflections on the problems of gender and sexuality benefit from cultural specificity. As postcolonial scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Lila Abu-Lughod have argued, Western feminism cannot be unproblematically applied to non-Western societies. It is more productive to view Western feminism not as a universal, or even most advanced, manifestation of feminism, but as a form of theorizing and political action that is shaped by the self-sustaining interplay of neoliberalism and identity politics. To avoid naturalizing predetermined and politically charged differences between the “progressive” West and “traditional” Russia, it is crucial to take stock of the responses to sexual violence available in particular cultural contexts, analyze how these responses work, and consider whether they work as well as they promise. In this thesis, rather than reading the differences in dominant narratives about gender in Russia and North America as signs that one society is “better” than another, I examine local debates and intercultural tensions brought up in narratives about sexual violence, and begin with the
10 After all, resistance to Western feminist ideas is expressed not only by the conservative politician Elena Mizulina (Mizulina), but also by prominent writer Tatyana Tolstaya (Goscilo, Dehexing Sex 99). 11 Isabelle Chapman describes it as “a sort of David and Goliath story, one little voice speaking out against the Ivy League giant” (Chapman). 12 The priority of morality over law in Russian culture was described by the pre-revolutionary legal scholar Pavel Novgorodtsev. Recently, Russia’s “legal nihilism” has been discussed as a result of both deep-set cultural attitudes and contemporary social challenges (Zakhartsev). It could also be linked to the “mythologization of the prison” (Cherkasova 63) and the influence of prison culture on Russian society in general (Hansen 9).
7 assumption that any given solution, however politically useful and carefully crafted, is both helpful and problematic.
0.1 Sexual Violence as a Crisis of Subjectivity, Ethics and Politics
Quite apart from their perceived appropriateness and the specific cultural myths they invoke, responses to Sulkowicz and Shurygina’s stories fulfil the same function. Media controversies around them enabled timely conversations about sexual violence: Bazelon writes that Sulkowicz’s case “reflect[ed] the current moment — a transitional period in the evolution of how universities handle sexual assault” (Bazelon), and several commentators interpret the hype about Shurygina as a useful, though undeniably ugly, way to have a public conversation about the definition of sexual violence and appropriate responses to it (“Chto ostanetsia ‘na donyshke’,” Pliushchev).
Sulkowicz and Shurygina’s cases reveal the frightening ambivalence and undeniable impact of sexual violence. They confront the public with questions about the meaning of sexual violence, the need – and frequent impossibility – to establish its truth, and the urgency and difficulties of speaking out. Responses to the two stories constitute attempts to make sense of the confusing and distressing spectacle of sexual violence, to make the discomfort and horror it causes go away. Various proposed solutions may benefit different kinds of subjects, and be more or less progressive, or more or less viable, but they cannot fully resolve these complexities. Anxiety about the troubling excess left by any explanation fuels panic and outrage in media conversations: how could things have turned this way? why are the outcomes so devastating and long-term? how can this – whatever this is – be prevented?
To tell the story of sexual violence is to tell a story about things not working – not working as well as they could be, or at all. Stories of sexual violence lay bare how societies confront and explain the potential and the reality of suffering, self- and other-inflicted, in the lives of sexed beings. Because of this ability of sexual violence to reveal that something is profoundly wrong, and its peculiar status as an issue that is both personal and political, a study of the stories told about it can illuminate fundamental assumptions about subjectivity, ethics and politics. The realm of sexual abjection, manifesting in many forms and encompassing related phenomena, problematizes the nature of the subject: what am I that I can harm, or be harmed, or desire to be
8 harmed? Building on Lauren Berlant’s description of “the subject as something that is structurally nonsovereign in a way that’s intensified by sex” (Berlant and Edelman 5), I argue that this intensification of nonsovereignty is especially visible when it comes to sexual violence. Sexual violence reveals both the subject’s nonsovereignty over the world – its vulnerability and violability – and its nonsovereignty over itself, which manifest on the intersubjective level as the capacity to violate or choose to be violated without being able to fully account for these choices.
In addition to problematizing the subject, discussions of sexual violence involve ethical considerations: how should we respond to such a failure of personal and interpersonal well- being? How can we act right in the face of vulnerability, harm and violence? These ethical questions translate readily into the political realm.13 Even when not explicitly discussed in political terms, sexual violence poses questions about how to live together and address the glitches and horrors of collective life. Stories about sexual violence thus activate a key question of political thought: how should society be organized well, or at least well enough to avoid such radically dysfunctional moments? This is how I look at narratives of sexual violence: as stories of subjectivity, ethics and politics.14
Solutions to problems like sexual violence both work and fail, and my argument is that they work precisely by both working and failing. Even well-meaning and powerful approaches enable some things and restrict others, getting stuck in impasses that frustrate and dilute political
13 Readily but, of course, not automatically. The history of anti-rape feminism testifies that committed labour is often required to politicize the personal in public discourse. At the same time, the revolutionary connotations of this feminist argument are that the personal is already political, whether or not it is described as such. Even conservative accounts of rape are advocating for a specific way of responding to this problem on a political level. 14 Because this thesis focuses on broader questions that animate solutions to sexual violence, it discusses various negative aspects of sex and sexuality: sexual violence per se (rape or incest), as well as abjection, trauma, and different forms of danger, damage and attendant pleasures that are enabled by the vulnerability and incoherence of sexed subjects. Although my focus is on broader issues of subjectivity, ethics, and politics, my project is indebted to other approaches to the cultural or literary study of sexual violence, especially the insightful emancipatory work done within the feminist tradition. Essays in Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver’s 1991 collection Rape and Representation critique patriarchal or racist representations of sexual violence and offer useful alternatives. Similar critiques are issued in studies that followed, such as Deborah M. Horvitz’s Literary Trauma: Sadism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in American Women’s Fiction (2000) and Sabine Sielke’s Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790-1990 (2002). Postcolonial and anti-racist approaches to representations of sexual violence, such as Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (1990) and Andrea Smith’s Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005), have challenged oppressive representations of marginalized women as “rapable”. Sorcha Gunne and Zoe Brigley Thompson’s Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation (2009) explores diverse representations of rape beyond white or Western contexts.
9 projects. Their manifest content does not account for these structural issues. Discussing the structure of solutions is crucial for understanding the discursive tools available for dealing with sexual violence and other manifestations of nonsovereignty. Structural insights enable more informed discussions of culturally specific manifestations of such solutions.
This thesis analyzes the structure of culturally specific approaches to the problem of sexual violence and to the larger condition of nonsovereignty that it exemplifies. I organize this discussion around three modes of approaching the issue: reparative, radical and prosaic. In their specific contexts, these modes shape subject positions, dominant options for self-expression and particular patterns of power relations. My analysis is grounded in the study of theoretical, fictional and popular media narratives about sexual abjection and violence in the United States, Canada and Russia, from the 1980s to 2010s. I analyze approaches that are available to individuals and communities who experience sexual violence, the aspects of broader cultural mythologies that these approaches involve, how these approaches are articulated and contested, and ultimately, how they work and how they fail. My thesis thus engages the problem of nonsovereignty as manifested in stories of sexual violence, on three levels: the abstract level of reparative, radical, and prosaic modes; the comparative level of cultural myths and assumptions; and finally, the representational level of narratives that articulate these modes with all their implications and complications.
In Chapter 1, I discuss reparative narratives, which imagine sexual violence as a wound that must be healed to restore the subject’s, or society’s, wholeness. In Chapter 2, I look at radical narratives, which embrace the subject’s ability to violate and be violated as a sign of constitutive, irreducible brokenness. The prosaic mode, discussed in Chapter 3, departs from the dramatic nature of the other modes by positing violence as integral to co-existence. Acknowledging the contingencies of our condition, the prosaic mode makes possible a politics of nonsovereign subjectivity.
0.2 Theoretical Background
My thesis draws on several theories that have reflected on the problem of the subject’s nonsovereignty and its consequent vulnerability and incoherence. I am, of course, particularly indebted to theoretical traditions that posit sex as a privileged site of subjectivity, ethics and
10 politics: most immediately, psychoanalysis and feminist theory, two strands of thought that may occasionally be at odds but ultimately foreground the same concerns.
The notion of the “nonsovereign subject,” central to this thesis, is articulated usefully by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman in Sex, or the Unbearable:
. . . “nonsovereignty” . . . invokes the psychoanalytic notion of the subject’s constitutive division that keeps us, as subjects, from fully knowing or being in control of ourselves and that prompts our misrecognition of our own motives and desires. At the same time, nonsovereignty invokes a political idiom and tradition, broadly indicating questions of self-control, autonomy, and the constraints upon them. (viii)
In the quote above, Berlant and Edelman show that the notion of the nonsovereign subject marks the overlap of psychoanalytic insights and political theory. There has, indeed, been a surge of interest in the subject’s nonsovereignty in theoretical discussions of the political. As Rosine Kelz points out, recent debates about globalization discuss nonsovereignty as an unavoidable condition, drawing on a wide range of twentieth-century philosophy that develops this notion (1).15 Many of these debates focus on nonsovereignty as a condition of relationality: the subject’s openness to the outside world and dependence upon others.16
This thesis also foregrounds sexuality as a realm in which the problem of relationality is heightened. In making this link, I follow thinkers influenced by psychoanalysis such as Berlant and Edelman, who write that sex frequently generates moments “when negativity disturbs the presumption of sovereignty by way of ‘an encounter,’ specifically, an encounter with the estrangement and intimacy of being in relation” (viii). Ultimately, my project departs from the question of relationality to focus on the condition of nonsovereignty itself. My discussion of nonsovereignty within the subject is informed by Jacques Lacan’s emphasis on the lack of mastery as a central, and constitutive, problem of subjectivity.17 Additionally, I approach nonsovereignty as lack of mastery over the environment and consequent vulnerability to outside
15 Kelz analyzes the work of Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler and Stanley Cavell. Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the other and Jacques Derrida’s ethics of hospitality have also been highly influential in these conversations. 16 Kelz’s own project, for example, is to show how the ethics of responsibility for others translates into politics. 17 More broadly, this work is informed by the philosophical genealogy of the contorted subject, which Judith Butler traces in The Psychic Life of Power (1997).
11 forces, both structural and random. My thoughts on this aspect of nonsovereignty – more externally oriented and therefore more obviously political – are informed by feminist insights and by scholarship on Soviet subjectivity (such as Oleg Kharkhordin’s The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices [1999]). Finally, my approach to the problem of nonsovereignty is focused on its visibility in moments of crisis, and my thesis analyzes responses to these revelations.18
This thesis can also be read as an investigation of visions of the subject that correspond to the modes I am positing: reparative, radical and prosaic. The tension between reparative and radical modes, central to this thesis, can be mapped onto many debates in the humanities: for example, discussions about universalism and relativism, or progressivism and nihilism. It has affinities with the tension between feminist and postmodernist views of the subject discussed by Wendy Brown in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995). Brown’s vision of politics without the image of a coherent subject, a politics that involves speaking from contingent places in a diverse, power-ridden space, has influenced my conceptualization of the prosaic mode (40). In Sex, or the Unbearable, Berlant and Edelman critique the drive to repair, and model both prosaic (Berlant) and radical (Edelman) responses to nonsovereignty. Writing in 1999 about Russian postmodernism, Mark Lipovetsky describes the postmodernist writer confronting a similar tension:
. . . an unstable balance between, on the one hand, the temptation of universal cultural teleology, a certain metalanguage that could rise above the chaos of multiple simultaneous cultural languages, and, on the other, the fascination with chaos as a supreme manifestation of freedom from any cultural and ontological limitations. (Russian Postmodernist Fiction 35)
Lipovetsky notes that this precarious balancing act is unsustainable, and the author caught in such a bind will need to seek a new path: “The question is, however, What is the direction of this transition?” (35). In a different cultural moment, when postmodernism is no longer a go-to
18 I could be, but am not, asking any number of other important questions that involve the nonsovereignty of the subject, e.g., how is the subject made nonsovereign by external forces? Who gets to claim sovereignty? How is violence organized and how can it be resisted? What is a better (or the best) way to live as a person and to live together?
12 explanatory term, and in response to the different problem of narratives of sexual violence, I ask a similar question: if a balance between the drive to repair and the embrace of radical disintegration is unsustainable, where does one go from there? This thesis is an attempt to consolidate and develop a metalanguage for dwelling with this question.
0.3 The Three Modes
I use the term “mode” to refer to a basic framework of imagining responses to problems that reveal the condition of nonsovereignty, such as sexual violence. Modes combine a specific vision of the subject and its problems with a projection of appropriate action. They enable certain ways forward and out of the unbearable tension presented by violence, but they also have limits. Their tenuous and tense dynamics are reflected in theoretical, fictional and nonfictional texts. My task is to trace these context-specific manifestations.
0.1.1 The Reparative Mode
In the reparative mode, the subject appears as wounded but ultimately reparable. Its general state of nonsovereignty and the specific facts of its violation appear as malfunctioning parts of a larger whole that is in itself at least potentially functional. The exposure of the subject’s suffering points the way to a future resolution, towards a social order more compassionate, victims better healed, survivors more resilient. On the personal level, the reparative mode focuses on individual suffering or trauma; on the political level, it focuses on injustice and social transformation. This drive to repair – to fill the opening, heal the wound or mend the rupture – endows theoretical and political arguments, fictional narratives and personal confessions with rhetorical power.
In the U.S. and Canada, the reparative drive can be seen at play in anti-rape feminism and the therapeutic discourse of trauma. Reparative feminist approaches to sexual violence, embodied in the insistence that personal crises need to be addressed through political change,19 have had significant political impact. They critiqued accepted views of rape as a matter of private shame or an aberration perpetrated by the monstrous few, redefining it as a structural problem that needs addressing. This feminist framing of rape was strengthened by the rise of the therapeutic trauma discourse in the late twentieth century, which reinforced feminist speakouts with the weight of
19 See, for example, Catherine MacKinnon’s Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), p. 119.
13 repressed truth and emphasized the long-lasting effects of sexual violence. Developed within Freudian psychoanalysis, the current notion of trauma was popularized in books like Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1992) and theorized in scholarly works like Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History (1996). Influenced by both discourses, the two American novels I analyze in Chapter 1 – Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and Sapphire’s Push – can be read as “trauma literature” (Whitehead) and as feminist Bildungsromane (Feng).
The feminist slogan “the personal is the political” takes on new meanings in the context of Russian history, where it evokes the intrusion of the Socialist state into individual lives. This history of enforced exposure, combined with the traumatic experience of glasnost and the Soviet Union’s collapse, also prevent an uncomplicated celebration of speaking out in the Russian public sphere. The reparative mode in Russian culture works differently: not through fighting for reparation or inclusion, but by offering the path of transcendence. Drawing on Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky’s influential theory of the dualism of Russian culture, I explore how the higher reality of bytie (spiritual existence) functions as a transcendent solution to the lower reality of byt (everyday life), where problems like sexual violence occur. Relying on Andrei Sinyavsky’s insights into Socialist Realism, I discuss how this ideologically motivated aesthetic program draws on the byt/bytie duality, as well as the Russian Orthodox notion of kenosis, or redemptive suffering. The fictional works I discuss, Viktor Astafiev’s Lyudochka (1989) and Guzel’ Yakhina’s Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza (Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes [2015]), both offer their protagonists reparation through bytie: either as individual kenosis or collective utopia.
In spite of their praiseworthy commitment to addressing suffering, reparative projects are easily appropriated by neoliberal identity politics and conservative nationalism. The commodification of feminist language and trauma discourse in the West reflects the ease with which reparative narratives fit into the neoliberal status quo. In the Russian case, dramatic existential binaries and a celebration of spirituality are equally easily coopted by regimes that seek to control their populations, such as the Soviet state with its family values. These political implications of reparative narratives point to the structural limits of the reparative mode. Because it tends to forego nuance in service of coherence, the reparative mode can fall into simplistic solutions and produce new invisibilities. In the West, reparative narratives limit available interpretative frameworks to culturally acceptable processes of healing or denouncing the social order. They
14 often rely on the assumption of an internally coherent subject that must be able to account for its desire and exhibit evidence of external impact to explain its unhappiness. For this reason, they fail to reflect the complex combination of vulnerability and empowerment, desire and fear, consent and curiosity, self-preservation and self-destructiveness, which often characterizes experiences of sexual violence. In Russia, reparative narratives fetishize spiritual transcendence, purity and morality at the expense of addressing the complex and compromised everyday problems. The reparative mode thus sets up patterns of exclusion, whereby unruly subjects and deviant stories are left out of the process of reparation.
0.1.2 The Radical Mode
Pointing to a way out of the simplifying, melodramatic and totalizing effects of the reparative mode, the radical mode embraces ambiguity at the heart of sexuality and subjectivity, and represents suffering not only as a consequence of external events, but as a constitutive aspect of being alive. In the West, radical visions of the subject’s nonsovereignty have appeared in theoretical and popular discourses of feminist and queer negativity, which seek to preserve and highlight ambiguities and failures. These ideas are informed by various poststructuralist theories, including Lacanian psychoanalysis, in which the subject is conceived as being traumatized by default: it is not so much a whole that is contorted or split as it is itself contortion and absence. According to Lacan, what awaits the subject at the end of the analytic process is not a solution to its problems (or its main problem, which is itself), but an alternative relationship to its own split nature and relief from the compulsion to repair it. Lee Edelman’s “sinthomosexual” is an attempt to imagine such a self-consciously split subject as a radical political presence. In addition to Lacan and Edelman, this chapter discusses the notions of negativity in Jack Halberstam and Jacqueline Rose, vulnerability in Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler and Erinn Gilson, and “negative survivorship” in online activism. It also explores these themes in the figure of the “toxic girl” in Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl (2011).
On the Russian side, I discuss negativity in late Soviet underground literature, which has been identified by Viktor Erofeev as Russian “literature of evil” (30) and, more widely, as Russian postmodernism. Infamous for their shocking representations of sexuality and violence, these works react both against the state’s totalizing discourse and the moralizing stances of its dissident opponents. This moment in Russian literary history is useful for understanding the
15 radical mode because such experimental works affirm the possibility of speaking from the position of total incoherence, from gaps within discourse. As a part of this tradition, Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Tridtsataia Liubov’ Mariny (Marina’s Thirtieth Love [1987]) deconstructs both dissident and official Soviet languages.
Paradoxically, articulations of negativity harbor a sort of optimism. The radical mode in fact produces an inhabitable identity. Self-abjection can be a reasonably attractive goal, because it enables the subject to escape reparative illusions and the debasing and depressing necessity to adapt and thus be compromised. Certain types of undoing – sex, substance abuse, the perils of urban life – can be perceived as glamourous. These signs or sites of abjection seem to hold out a promise that they can be made into something meaningful, something particularly resistant to appropriation, or something one deserves to experience. In this way, the radical mode reinscribes failure and abjection as sources of mastery over a chaotic and incoherent world, and thus enacts a form of repair. Moreover, because the exposure of knowledge about abjection is an activity that presupposes a minimal degree of security and an ability to persist, the radical mode is not egalitarian. Enlisting shame as a source of empowerment, sustaining identity politics and structures of inequality, it extends the reparative project of offering the subject specific ways of being and of narrowing down available paths through and out of suffering.
0.1.3 The Reparative/Radical Loop
The reparative and radical modes derive much of their force from opposing each other, but in effect they form a loop, sharing a fixation on the image of rupture (gap, void, absent centre or wound) in the coherence of the subject and social order. If the reparative mode attempts to fill this void, the radical mode fetishizes it – both, however, promise a superior solution and a possibility of mastery. They satisfy our desire to produce coherent narratives and to produce ourselves as correct subjects: subjects that heal themselves, or the world, in the right way, or subjects that are shattered in aesthetically or theoretically pleasing ways. What the two modes cannot do is attend to their own limits, because they yield strong narratives that operate on a high level of drama.
This reparative/radical loop has both theoretical and political costs. Drama, whether positively or negatively charged, renders invisible the more uncertain and implicated parts of life and politics. Describing the subject’s structure and prescribing the way to master a crisis such as
16 sexual violence, the two modes preclude the possibility of not quite identifying with who one is and of not quite knowing what one is doing, when one tries to do things politically. To embrace a straight dramatic discourse is to collapse the space of the self’s subjectivity and demand the same of others. It is to deny, to stomp out the possibility of the other’s inner space: undefined, mutable, only partially engaged, characterized by specific problems, adaptations, stories, events, lacunas and structures. Even when dramatic discourses are emancipatory and purport to “give voice to the voiceless,” they constitute a denial of the world of subjects that is confusing and irreconcilable. To leave this level of dramatic solutions, we cannot rely on familiar moves of including silenced perspectives or reinvesting the abject with a higher value. Nor is there much use in imagining an abstract synthesis between reparation and radicalism. What we need is to come down onto the prosaic level and locate dramatic narratives in that context.
0.1.4 The Prosaic Mode
Rather than dramatically rushing to solutions or reveling in existential abjection, the prosaic mode foregrounds the continuity of existence, as well as the constant possibility and reality of violence. It normalizes nonsovereignty, as well as its status as a problem, allowing for the imagining of ethical responses that are both more or less appropriate and also never quite right. The prosaic mode posits the subject as a site of varied activity that is sustained over time, and therefore acknowledges its ability to not quite identify with itself. In choosing the term “prosaic,” I follow several scholars who have employed it in reference to similar projects: most notably, Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, who have theorized “prosaics” in relation to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.
To describe the prosaic subject – tentative yet grounded, not fully identifiable but also structurally limited – I borrow and elaborate on Bakhtin’s metaphor of the headquarters. This image helps us imagine the subject not as a sovereign leader but as a site of activity of sustaining oneself. This position is not a secure place to be, but it provides the grounds for processing (learning and feeling out), strategizing (developing survival methods and certain enabling ways of thinking), taking momentary, even unconscious, tactical decisions, as well as the less controlled, more frantic activity of maintaining one’s being, such as Lauren Berlant’s “flailing” (“Big Man”) and Denise Riley’s “awkward navigations to become” (5).
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The focus on activity draws attention away from the question of the subject’s nature and its ethical or political success. The prosaic mode does not naturally lead us towards a clearer or better solution to the problem of violence. What it can do is change how we imagine good politics and the subject of good politics, take us outside of discussions locked in reparative or radical dead ends, pry open our own identifications with dramatic theoretical pleasures, and enable political speech that is less inflated, and therefore more challenging and more flexible.
Importantly, our “awkward navigations” (Riley 5) to articulate prosaic ways of being and solutions to sexual violence do not have to look prosaic. The three modes are not stages of ideological or intellectual development that form a sort of dialectic: they are copresent in our lives and struggles. As I articulate the prosaic mode, I acknowledge that we cannot abstract drama from our conversations about subjectivity, ethics and politics – both because drama is unavoidable and because it is useful. We can embrace reparative or radical modes selectively and in an informed way. A prosaic political struggle acknowledges both the value and the limits of the more spectacular projects of resisting or revolutionizing the status quo and renders visible the projects of rearranging our environment into something more bearable. Whatever our struggle, it is crucial that we continue developing metalanguages for reflecting on our own ethical and political discourse: evolving, nuanced and appropriate tools for wiggling ourselves out of dead ends and binary deadlocks. With this thesis, I want to contribute to the development of such a metalanguage.
0.4 The Comparative Approach
In my approach to comparison, I am taking after the literary scholar Svetlana Boym, who writes that “[a] cultural mythologist has to be a cross-cultural mythologist” (Common Places 24). This method slices across cultural divides to identify assumptions and narrative pleasures at work in texts that appear in different contexts. It asks how these texts can speak to each other. There are both political and theoretical stakes in my choice to theorize comparatively.
Given the history of the Cold War and the present political tensions, Russia and North America – especially, of course, the U.S. – are an eminently comparable pair. Associated with political superpowers, both cultural spheres are rich in grand and even grandiose narratives. I do not, however, want to claim that Russian and U.S. American cultures are unique in being hooked on reparation or in generating visions of negativity. My corpus also includes a Canadian novel, and
18 my reflection on sexual violence in North American popular culture has been shaped by my exposure to Canadian public discourse. Rather than arguing for a comparatist version of exceptionalism, my thesis seeks to show that highly dramatic modes are manifested in many different contexts, even ones that seem deeply at odds.
This comparison is grounded, first of all, in some helpful similarities between late twentieth and early twenty-first century North America and Russia: in both public spheres, sexual violence has come in and out of the public eye, but overall remains a prominent and contested issue. The resultant richness of representations and discussions is helpful in tracing different manifestations of the theoretical modes I investigate. More importantly, this comparative work is motivated by a history of a tense cultural conversation between Russia and “the West,” of self-constitution with reference to the other, and of mutual villainizing and misunderstanding – a tendency recently intensified in the polarizing opposition of liberal and family values, or Western “decadence” and Russian “patriarchy.” Given that Russian and North American narratives of proper solutions regularly come into conflict, laying bare the modes in which they operate may help arrest the incessant replication of these conflicts. The simplicity of my conceptual framework is a strength when it comes to comparison. With its help, I can conduct analysis outside of received genealogies of thought, cutting through assumptions of progressive liberalism or patriarchal intolerance, and discuss structural parallels between ostensibly opposing cultural dynamics, without proclaiming their identity. This approach also deflects the danger of a surface-level cross-cultural feminism, which would merely mask an imposition of Western models onto Russian society.
Like any comparative project, this one aims to contribute to the knowledge of how sexual violence is imagined in both contexts. Comparison highlights cultural assumptions about the nature of the subject, the meaning of suffering, the constitution of the public and the private, and other issues that shape the way societies imagine and respond to sexual violence. This approach is necessary for developing critiques of the status quo from within a particular cultural mythology and repertoire of narratives and for acknowledging the pleasures and gains and the inevitable ambivalence and limits of these critiques. Finally, the comparative approach helps describe the modes of responding to sexual violence in more detail and analyze their manifestations, dynamics and structures, which are shaped by cultural history. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to reflect on and expand the theoretical repertoire available for contemporary
19 investigations of the problem of nonsovereignty and vulnerability, including its forms enabled by our sexed nature.
0.5 The Corpus
The corpus of this thesis includes stories told about sexual violence in North American and Russian literature and culture. I understand “stories” broadly, referring to fictional narratives, theoretical arguments, and narratives circulating in media discussions and online. I take these diverse genres to be equally instructive, because they reveal the ways of being that are imagined as available to individuals and communities affected by sexual violence in specific cultural and political moments.
I look at several influential theories and related cultural narratives: liberal feminism, trauma studies, the notions of Russian dualism and Orthodox kenosis, aesthetic theory of Socialist Realism, queer and feminist negativity, Lacanian psychoanalysis, late Soviet artistic experimentation, affect theory and the work of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Twitter hashtags, blogs and mediated popular culture moments show how these modes operate in the production of identities and political discourses online. I also analyze eight works of fiction: three American novels: Sapphire’s Push (1996), Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999), Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl (2011); one Canadian novel: Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead (2012); two Soviet novels: Vladimir Sorokin’s Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny (Marina’s Thirtieth Love [1987]) and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s Vremia noch’ (The Time: Night [1992]), one Soviet short story: Viktor Astafiev’s Lyudochka (1989), and a post-Soviet Russian novel: Guzel’ Yakhina’s Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza (Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes [2015]).
The fictional stories in this thesis focus on female protagonists who suffer. Their misery is caused by or related to some form of sexual violence or violent sexuality: date rape, incest, domestic violence, damaging desire, psychological and material harm caused by sexual interactions. I choose to focus on female experiences of sexual abjection and violence because they are overrepresented in both Western and Russian cultural imagination, in ways that can admittedly be injurious to real people who are otherwise gendered. For this project, which aims to examine broad layers of cultural mythology, the focus on female-centered narratives is useful.
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The six female authors analyzed in this thesis either express commitment to reflecting women’s experiences, or have been read in this way. By contrast, in the works of the two male authors, representation of female sexual abjection is explicitly subsumed under other agendas: promotion of conservative morals in the case of Astafiev or reflection on the nature of language and power in Sorokin. My choice to include these male authors in a corpus of texts about female experiences is motivated, once again, by the aim of this dissertation. I am interested precisely in the way that narratives of sexual violence engage with larger questions and how they sustain theoretical beliefs and political agendas.
Each of these texts represents the moves, problems, images or pleasures associated with the three modes – often, but not always, in dialogue with the theoretical and popular discourses I mention. Fictional narratives that unfold in time reveal how the abstract modes I posit can work in language. Fiction lays them out, amplifies, questions them. To guide my analysis, I focus on the texts’ representation of the protagonist (the subject affected by sexual abjection or violence), on the trajectory that they lay out for the subject, and on the aesthetic choices used to signal the use of specific modes.
0.6 Chapter Outline
Each chapter of this thesis addresses a particular mode as it manifests in stories of sexual abjection and violence: first, outlining ideas and discourses associated with it in the two contexts, second, analyzing its manifestations in fictional texts, and finally, considering its implications and limits. Chapter 1 examines the reparative mode as it appears in anti-rape feminism and therapeutic trauma discourse, and in Orthodox and Socialist discourses of higher spiritual existence (bytie) and redemption through suffering (kenosis); in four works of fiction: Anderson’s Speak, Sapphire’s Push, Astafiev’s Lyudochka, and Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes; and finally, in Twitter hashtags, online articles, and a feminist zine. In the two contexts, reparative narratives are shaped by cultural assumptions about the power of speech, as well as by culturally significant binaries and moves associated with them: the public/private divide in the West and the attendant move of inclusion, and the opposition between byt (everyday life) and bytie (spiritual existence) in Russia and the move of separation. Finally, I show that the structure of the reparative mode enables deviations from the originally conceived solutions, as evidenced
21 by the uncomfortable links between the feminist speakout and neoliberalism, and the politically conservative effects of the Russian emphasis on redemption.
In Chapter 2, I discuss the character, manifestations and limits of the radical mode by bringing together shadow feminism, queer negativity, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, ethics of vulnerability and late Soviet underground aesthetic experimentation. I also analyze Zambreno’s Green Girl and Sorokin’s Marina’s Thirtieth Love as both articulations and critiques of the radical mode. I trace the influence of the radical mode in the two novels’ depictions of their protagonists (as subjects that deviate from reparative trajectories of speaking out and healing) and in their structures, which foreground ontological and textual uncertainty. I then show how the novels gesture at the limits of the radical mode and highlight its unacknowledged drive to repair.
Chapter 3 formulates the prosaic mode with reference to the theories of Bakhtin, Berlant and Riley, as well as two novels: Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night and Berger’s Maidenhead. I discuss potential problems that prosaic theoretical projects encounter (fetishization of prosaic aesthetics or prosaic theorizing itself), as well as the strategies that the thinkers I discuss use to address them (Bakhtin’s overstatement and Berlant and Riley’s listing). I show how the two novels locate and display the workings of dramatic modes (reparative in Petrushevskaya, radical in Berger) in lived life, showing their narrators to be subjects engaged in the activity of self- maintenance in often hostile circumstances. The novels thus point a way to rearticulating reparative and radical insights on a prosaic plane. Aided by Bakhtin, Berlant and Riley’s insights, I then articulate a model of nonsovereign prosaic subjectivity.
The three-part structure of this dissertation is by no means meant as a static model. It is rather an attempt to describe the space in which debates about sexual violence, and other issues that lay bare the subject’s nonsovereignty, take place. Understanding the three modes as fundamental but mutually influential and unstable, I can position my arguments tenuously and temporarily, and therefore with some humility.
Chapter 1. The Reparative Mode in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, Sapphire’s Push, Viktor Astafiev’s Lyudochka and Guzel’ Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes 1.1 Introduction
The much-publicized #MeToo movement, which started in October 2017 in response to sexual misconduct in the U.S. film industry, has had a significant impact on public conversations worldwide,20 but it is not unprecedented. The past few years have seen a series of social media outcries against sexual harassment and violence. Quite apart from the public scandals of Hollywood, two recent campaigns have focused on ordinary stories of people affected by sexual violence, many of whom felt empowered to speak about their experiences for the first time.
The Twitter hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported was created by journalists Antonia Zerbisias and Sue Montgomery in 2014, in support of women who made allegations of assault against former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi. With the help of the hashtag, this local public scandal gained significant resonance. Zerbisias and Montgomery called on ordinary people to share personal experiences of sexual violence in order to expose both its prevalence and the insufficiency of institutional responses. The campaign went viral immediately, generating eight million responses in twenty-four hours (Gallant). It was picked up in locations as distant as South Korea, South Africa, Colombia, India and Saudi Arabia (Francis).
In Russia and Ukraine, #BeenRapedNeverReported did not make much an impression. But in June 2016, the hashtag #I’mNotAfraidToSay (#IaNeBoius’Skazat’, #IaNeBoius’Skazati), created by Ukrainian social activist Anastasiia Mel’nichenko, took Russian and Ukrainian social networks by storm (Ponomareva). The campaign was unprecedented. It was covered by mainstream news outlets and inspired round tables, opinion pieces, and even a documentary (Ia
20 The phrase “me too.” was first used by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 in organizing a movement for survivors of sexual assault, “particularly young women of color from low wealth communities” (“Me Too”). The phrase was popularized as a hashtag by actress Alyssa Milano’s post on Twitter in October 2017 (Khomami). Within 24 hours, it was tweeted more than 500,000 times (France). Compared to previous social media hashtags related to sexual violence, the impact of #MeToo has been both significantly more widespread and sustained (Ohlheiser).
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Ne Boius’ Skazat’). Many commentators stressed the dire need to develop a better language with which to talk about sexual violence. Sex columnist Tatyana Nikonova expressed this problem perfectly: “Many people laugh at the words ‘viktimbleiming’ and ‘slatsheiming,’ but there are no words for that in Russian. There’s the deep shit, but no words for it” (“Kak zhit’ posle fleshmoba #IaNeBoius’Skazat’”).21
The success of the two campaigns signals a rise in public feminist activity in both North America and Russia. Their affinities are obvious. Both highlight the specific, individual character of every experience, and at the same time, make sexual violence visible as a mass phenomenon. Both campaigns rely on an assumption that the widespread and widely tolerated phenomenon of sexual violence is a failure in the organization of society. Mobilizing the long-standing feminist technique of the speakout, both campaigns link the personal with the political and seek to turn private pain into meaningful knowledge that can be used to create a more hospitable world. In other words, both campaigns respond to the problem of sexual violence by mobilizing the drive towards reparation.
This chapter investigates what I describe as the logic of the reparative mode, which underlies anti-rape Twitter campaigns, as well as other initiatives and narratives that advocate for particular solutions to sexual violence. The reparative mode, I argue, is defined by a specific spatial structure, organized around a break or a gap within a given whole. In the reparative mode, aberrant absences – ruptures in society, glitches in the system, wounds in the metaphorical or physical flesh – can and should be revealed as such. The drive to fill the opening, heal the wound or mend the rupture is what activates the trajectory of reparation, which in turn shapes theoretical and political arguments, as well as fictional narratives and personal confessions, endowing them with rhetorical power. Reparative discourses of sexual violence discussed in this chapter are influenced by a multitude of contextual factors, but all of them share this spatial structure: they interpret the fact of violation, and the general violability of the subject, as malfunctioning parts of a larger whole. The exposure of these gaps points the way to a resolution, towards a social
21 “Многие смеются над словами ‘виктимблейминг’ или ‘слатшейминг’, но в русском языке нет слов для этого. Жопа есть, а слова нет.”
24 order more compassionate and survivors more resilient. Importantly, therefore, the coherence of the subject and its world is assumed as a past reality or a future possibility.
In late twentieth and early twenty-first century North America and Russia, dominant reparative discourses on sexual violence share this common structure, but there are important differences in the manifestations of the reparative mode in the two contexts. They are distinguished by culturally significant binaries: the public/private divide in the West and the opposition between byt (the everyday) and bytie (spiritual existence) in Russia, as well as by the way the relationship between the two terms is imagined in each case: as inclusion or separation. A comparison of cultural assumptions about the role and power of speech reveals differences between the two manifestations. These binary oppositions and movements of inclusion or separation that are associated with them constitute aspects of cultural mythology operative in narratives of sexual violence. In this chapter, I describe these differences in detail and analyze how they structure and inform fictional narratives. I then explain why North American and Russian forms of the reparative mode are often mutually unintelligible and argue for their fundamental affinity. The comparative approach allows me to position the problematic of reparation and the political role of speech in a larger context and to investigate narratives about sexual violence as sites that articulate, or render visible, the power and limits of different forms of reparative desire.
In North American feminism, sexual violence is discussed as a personal problem that can have political impact through the action of speaking out. I begin my discussion of the reparative mode by examining this idea, with reference to Western feminist anti-rape writings and practices, the concept of trauma, and theories of the public sphere. Critical of the society in which it operates, anti-rape feminism is nevertheless a manifestation of a larger political culture, in which speaking out and the inclusion of previously unheard voices plays an important part. The #BeenRapedNeverReported hashtag, and similar ones, such as the 2017 #MeToo, have been immediately successful because they could take advantage of the established genre of the speakout. Of course, they have also received backlash, but their impact and enduring public visibility mark them as mainstream phenomena.
Meanwhile, the success of #I’mNotAfraidToSay in Russia has been overshadowed by a public campaign organized by All-Russian Parents’ Resistance, a conservative group that succeeded in pushing the government to decriminalize the recently criminalized administrative offence of
25 domestic violence (J. Johnson, “Gender Equality Policy” 3).22 Russian society is notoriously hostile to feminist discourse: not only conservative or religious figures, but even women writers and activists are often reluctant to identify as feminist (Goscilo, Dehexing Sex 5). It is tempting to explain the Russian hostility to feminism with the patriarchal backwardness of a country notorious for its President’s exaggeratedly masculine image. This line of thinking, though useful in critiquing the very real problem of patriarchal violence, cannot sustain a more complex engagement either with feminist discourses or with the workings of the reparative mode in general.
In this chapter, I want to do something that may seem counterintuitive: take the Russian hostility to the form of the anti-rape speakout seriously, and use it as a point of departure to argue not only that the reparative mode manifests itself differently in Russia and North America, but that the role of speech in the Russian cultural imagination reveals the limits of its power, which reparative feminist discourses in the West find difficult to recognize. In Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, speech was often similarly invested with power: from the state’s commitment to exposing its hidden enemies to the publishing of banned texts in Soviet unofficial circles and Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or transparency.23 The straightforward image of the brave truth-telling dissident is appealing, but the role of speaking out in Russia has been more complex than that. The discursive regime that late Soviet subjects had to negotiate discouraged unexamined optimism about the power of speech, and Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 denouncement of Stalin’s “cult of personality” articulated, and in many ways institutionalized, these complexities. In this chapter, I argue that insights about the political role of speech that can be gained from the Soviet context are more generally applicable, echoing Kevin Platt’s argument
22 In 2016, a legal reform was proposed that would move several provisions of the Criminal Code, including battery, to the Administrative Code. Activists have succeeded in drawing attention to the issue. With Putin’s support, the legal reform retained the classification of battery as a crime, effectively distinguishing domestic violence as a special form of violence (J. Johnson, “Gender Equality Policy” 2). Conservative groups successfully campaigned against introducing this distinction. 23 Serguei Oushakine points out that English translations of the term as “openness” and “transparency” obscure the connotations of its etymological root: “voice”/“glas”. Glasnost can thus be understood as universal “voicing” or speaking out: as Oushakine puts it, “…to exercise glasnost means to become a subject of public speech or, to put it differently, to conduct one’s activity in the form of a publicly available discourse” (“The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat” 192).
26 that discursive strategies of dealing with historical trauma employed in Khrushchev’s Russia are far from unique.24
In place of the Western emphasis on speech as a transformative force that renders personal experiences political, Russian reparative narratives about sexual violence rely on the cultural emphasis on transcendence and the Russian Orthodox ideal of kenosis as ways out of the shackles of the everyday and into a higher spiritual realm. Understanding the importance of these notions in Russian reparative narratives helps explain, for example, the role of religious discourse in late Soviet feminist writings.25
To develop my definition of the reparative mode, I will discuss Twitter hashtags, a feminist zine, online articles and four literary works: two American novels written in the tradition of feminist trauma fiction (Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak [1999] and Sapphire’s Push [1996]) and two realist texts from Russia (Viktor Astafiev’s short story Lyudochka [1989] and Guzel’ Yakhina’s novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes [2015]). Following the four resilient protagonists on their fictional journeys, I will map out culturally specific manifestations of the impulse to repair in order to confront the limits of its logic.
In Sex, or the Unbearable, Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman voice a strong mistrust of the “wrongheadedness of any reparative politics that turns being undone into a symptom of an illness or a measure of injustice” (Berlant 7). Following Berlant and Edelman, I will explore the limits of fantasies of reparation in narratives of sexual violence, producing my own critique of the reparative mode. My analysis of the fictional texts will show that the drive to fix deviations results in a totalizing tendency to forego nuance in service of a coherent narrative. Among the consequences of this tendency are the uncomfortable links between the feminist speakout and neoliberalism, and the politically conservative effects of the emphasis on redemption.
24 “…the legacies of mass violence in the USSR present in hyperbolic form discursive mechanisms that are operative in all modern societies with regard to historical and structural violence that permeates our lifeworlds and yet evades our institutions of justice and public articulation” (Platt 652). 25 See p. 34.
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1.2 The Reparative Mode
The idea of speaking out is central to reparative visions of sexual violence, whether those of Western feminism, with its tradition of consciousness-raising, or those of the late Soviet policy of glasnost. In both cases, the oppressive patriarchal order, neoliberal or state Socialist, had relied on silence to maintain its power. With the call of North American feminists in the 1970s to see the personal as the political, and with the privatization of the previously state-controlled public sphere in 1990s Russia, those who had been silenced were called to speak in public. Speech appeared in both contexts as an instrument and sign of political transformation. In the following section, I will discuss specific discourses about the power of speech: Western liberal feminism, Russian women’s activism, and therapeutic trauma discourse.
1.2.1 North American Feminism and the Speakout
A strong emphasis on the performative and even revolutionary power of speech is central to North American culture, where freedom of speech is part of the founding ideology, and the public sphere is a space of heated debate. Like other social movements in the West, feminism harnessed this tradition to critique society and advocate for change. In the feminist tradition, silence has consistently appeared as the enemy, and breaking it has been an important political tool, therapeutic goal and literary trope.
Of course, the condemnation of rape is not new to women’s movements. The reparative mode has animated plenty of traditionalist heroic fantasies of outraged fathers and brothers avenging their women. Conservative accounts of rape, both in North America and in Russia, emphasize the victim’s failure to protect him- or herself. The perpetrators in these accounts are pathologized to the point of sensationalism (Bourke 92, Khodyreva 30), and the whole problem of rape is individualized (Petrak 20). In a notable example, Canada’s former Prime Minister Stephen Harper dismissed the need to inquire into the murder of an Indigenous teenager Tina Fontaine by insisting that it was “a crime against innocent people” rather than “a sociological phenomenon” (Kennedy). Harper’s comment amounts to a denial of the structural role of sexual violence in the history of colonization and in the society shaped by it. Recognizing that conservative anti-rape accounts support the status quo, feminist activists and thinkers, such as Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson of the New York Radical Feminists group, Angela Davis, Michelle
28
Wasserman, and Diana Russell, argue that the way rape is classified shapes society’s response to it. Their contribution therefore consists not so much in revealing the existence of rape, already highly visible in Western culture, but in redefining it as a social structure. The interventions of black, Indigenous, postcolonial and queer activists and scholars have refined feminist readings of sexual violence. They have shown that systematically disadvantaged and marginalized subjects were considered to be more “violable” (A. Smith 12) and were therefore more likely to be violated,26 and drawn attention to the contributions of non-white activists to the founding and development of the anti-rape movement.27 In short, the unique contribution of feminism in the late twentieth century was to repoliticize the representation of rape. As Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver write in their introduction to Rape and Representation, “the politics and aesthetics of rape are one” (1). When it comes to sexual violence, the question of representation is always a political one: the stories a culture tells about rape have a direct effect on lived experiences, validating or precluding denunciations of violence. Anti-rape feminists argued that sexual violence must be addressed on the level of social discourse if it is to be eradicated.
This means, first of all, identifying rape myths and replacing them with feminist interpretations (Bevacqua 61). A significant step in that direction was Susan Brownmiller’s influential Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), in which rape was described as an act of institutionalized oppression par excellence.28 Sexual violence was neither a sexual encounter nor a crime of passion, argued Brownmiller, but a practice of ownership and management of women’s sexed bodies by men. Redefining rape as sexual assault, feminist thinkers and activists have expanded the definition to include all unwanted sexual contact (Bevacqua 58), and argued that, despite prevalent beliefs, anyone, regardless of age, attractiveness or class, can rape and be raped. They advocate for educating both potential victims and potential aggressors, teaching
26 Andrea Smith examines the role of state-sanctioned sexual violence against Native women in Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide: “The project of colonial sexual violence establishes the ideology that Native bodies are inherently violable – and by extension, that Native lands are also inherently violable” (12). For more in-depth discussions of the role of patterns of marginalization in experiences of sexual violence see the work of Ann J. Cahill, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Angela Y. Davis. 27 As Danielle L. McGuire argues, speaking out against sexual abuse has long been employed by black women: “Decades before radical feminists in the women’s movement urged rape survivors to ‘speak out,’ African American women’s public protests galvanized local, national, and even international outrage and sparked larger campaigns for racial justice and human dignity” (xix–xx). 28 Brownmiller has been lauded for drawing public attention to the problem of rape but critiqued for her treatment of the problem of race. In Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis shows that Brownmiller’s unquestioned support for white women victims results in a reliance on the racist myth of the black rapist (178).
29 them that sexuality does not equal violence (Bourke 438). In short, feminism reclaims the usage of the term “rape” from powerful men who are uninterested in protecting the bodily autonomy of marginalised subjects. The term is turned instead into a tool of social critique, which could be used strategically by those who are vulnerable to sexual violence.
In addition to producing a different vocabulary for discussing sexual violence, feminism mobilizes speech as personal testimony. At organized speakouts in the 1970s, women shared shameful and painful private experiences and began to interpret them as political problems (Bevacqua 51). The radical feminist practice of consciousness-raising solidified the connection, now commonplace, between the narration of personal experiences of sexual violence and the pursuit of social and political agendas (29). Liberal feminists soon adopted it as well, and speaking has remained a defining trope of feminist discourse on sexual violence.29 The movement was continuously shaped by calls to include more subjects in the discourse of feminism and make more silences speak. Black feminists, for example, produced an early critique of the mainstream feminist movement, faulting it for ignoring class and racial barriers to organizing and for failing to address specific concerns, such as the history of rape accusations against black men (Bevacqua 39). Calls for greater inclusivity continue to be issued in contemporary feminist activism and writing. In the words of bestselling feminist author Roxane Gay, “the right stories are not being told, or we’re not writing enough about the topic of rape in the right ways” (133).
Among the social movements of the sixties, second wave feminism has had the most success in transforming the cultural mainstream (Fraser, “Feminism’s Two Legacies” 699). The discursive critique produced by the feminist movement is an impressive and influential force. It helped transform public opinion, expand legal definitions, inspire scholarly research and effect social change by holding institutions accountable (Bevaqua 58, Herman 31, Petrak 19). The North American feminist movement has influenced global initiatives and has in turn been shaped by
29 The exclusive emphasis on speech is by no means characteristic of the North American feminist movement as a whole. Sharon Marcus’s argument for self-defense and Ann Cahill’s embodiment-centered theory of rape are notable examples. My argument, however, focuses on speech as a dominant and most culturally visible example of a reparative feminist response to sexual violence.
30 postcolonial critique.30 Despite these gains and breakthroughs, the movement failed to effect a total discursive revolution, which is why many rape myths exposed in the 1970s have to be debunked anew by anti-rape activists in the 2010s. Feminist conversations continue to develop, elaborating long-standing issues, such as institutional negligence, and bringing new problems, such as online harassment, into the public eye. Sexual violence is now widely discussed as a problem of discourse, as reflected in titles such as Use the Right Words, the 2015 guide on reporting on sexual violence for Canadian journalists (femifesto and collaborators), and Silence is Violence, a Canadian survivor-led initiative against campus rape (“About Us”).
The importance of “the right words” is highlighted in many campaigns that seek to inform the public of the importance of consent. The slogan “No Means No!” encourages people to explicitly ask for consent and clearly express its absence. Consent becomes a sort of discursive condom.31 Despite the good intentions, the catchy slogan is all too easily perverted, as evidenced by the infamous Yale fraternity chant “No Means Yes, Yes Means Anal” (McDonough). It has also been criticized as limiting and negative, so the alternatives of “Yes Means Yes” and “Consent is Sexy” have been actively promoted on high school and college campuses (Medina). These new slogans reflect the shift from policing harmful sexual behaviour to celebrating sex positivity, which constitutes an important strand of contemporary popular feminism. Articles like Charlotte Shane’s “Dear Pubescent Charlotte, You Are Sexually Powerful” for Bright Magazine and Chris Somerville’s “Safe Sex for Survivors” in the zine Support offer a vision of sex as an empowering practice that can be learned and exercised for the general enhancement of one’s self and quality of life. According to this view, a careful and deliberate practice of “safe sex” can redeem the subject damaged by its bad patriarchal variety. “I am not asking for what I had before, I am asking only for redemption,” declares Sommerville (22). This confidence in the possibility of redemption is echoed in another article in the same zine: it may take time, but “we can unlearn” negative sex dynamics and “even the biggest creeps can change!...” (Anandi 22).
30 Important interventions were made by Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988), Lila Abu-Lughod (1998) and other scholars. 31 This is not just a metaphor: since 2016, Trojan Condoms has partnered with the organization Advocates for Youth for an advertising/awareness campaign on college campuses (“What is The Great American Condom Campaign?”).
31
Importantly, redemption here is not understood as strictly personal. The speakout format links individual testimonials to historical change. The final aim, after all, is not only personal healing or development but the elimination of rape culture and therefore rape: “Our responsibility will also inevitably be to contribute towards the elimination of these crimes from our lives” (Petrak 32). This connection between the personal and the political implies that by developing individual practices of healing and positive sex, we can collectively defeat sexual violence and the harmful structures of patriarchy. Although this connection is one of the guiding assumptions underlying a lot of feminist anti-rape work, the link between speaking about sexual violence and eliminating it is not always self-evident. As I will discuss later in the chapter, it can be perceived as illogical in contexts such as Russia, where dominant cultural assumptions about the political power of speech are different.
1.2.2 Russian Feminism
While anti-rape feminism was gaining ground in North America, the Russian women’s movement was resurfacing in a different sociopolitical landscape, one in which the “woman’s question” has been pronounced resolved, but gender-inflected issues, such as sexual violence, were often ignored in practice. In Russia, feminism re-emerged in the 1970s as part of the diverse late Soviet unofficial culture, but its history goes back to pre-revolutionary women’s movements.
Despite the perception of feminism as a Western phenomenon, widespread in Russia, the country has a rich feminist tradition (Ruthchild 100). This tradition was interrupted after the Revolution, when the new Soviet state denounced pre-revolutionary women’s movements as bourgeois, hijacking some of their political and theoretical achievements and discounting others (Iukina 281). In the Soviet Union, the state generally addressed women’s concerns by pronouncing them resolved: after all, women were liberated, given political rights, encouraged to work, and acknowledged publicly for their accomplishments (Kukhterin 71). The increasingly traditionalist moral norms of the Soviet society, reflected in the 1961 “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism,” shaped expectations of “proper” behavior within the family and the collective.32
32 Kevin Platt and Benjamin Nathans write that the Code “expressed the official belief in a single, unambiguous standard of ethical behavior in private and public life” (311). These behavioural norms included “[h]umane relations
32
Of course, social transformation could not have been achieved merely through declarative means, and people’s lives necessarily deviated from publicly celebrated values.33
The official rhetoric of gender equality did not take root easily in Russian society. While most women welcomed rights and employment opportunities, many remained hostile to what they perceived as a threat to traditional family structure (Kukhterin 76). State ideology increasingly relied on traditional gender roles (Issoupova 31), which were difficult to follow in practice, and therefore problematic and frustrating. Women were expected to tend to the family as wives and mothers, while still working full-time (Ashwin 11). As a result, many “felt crushed by emancipation” (Goscilo, Dehexing Sex 9). Torn between masculine behavioral norms and their actual powerlessness in the public sphere, men would assert themselves by dominating their families, refusing to do housework and perpetrating domestic violence (Kiblitskaya 99). Though rarely acknowledged, sexual coercion, ranging from insistent courtship to gang rape, was a common experience, seen as something ordinary and expected (Zdravomyslova 2). At the same time, the lack of informed conversations about sexuality in Soviet society resulted in widespread ignorance that affected several generations (Kon 171).34
The discrepancy between women’s reality and idealized rhetoric was neverthelessed discussed in the public sphere, especially after Stalin (Ruthchild 103). Working women’s problems were addressed in literature and film, from Natal’ia Baranskaia’s 1969 story “Nedelia kak nedelia” (“A Week Like Any Other”) to the 1980 film Moskva slezam ne verit (Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears). Party leaders and the media acknowledged existing problems but never recognized them as structural: as Rochelle Ruthchild explains, “official explanations variously blamed men (the stubborn persistence of patriarchal custom), women (their continued ‘backwardness’), or the bureaucracy” (103). Ordinary women often chose not to question the state’s provisions, blaming their difficulties on bad conditions (Goscilo, Dehexing Sex 10).
and mutual respect among people,” “[h]onesty and truthfulness, moral purity, simplicity and humility in public and private life,” “mutual respect in the family; care for childrearing’” (“The Moral Code of the Builder of Communism”). 33 See Deborah A. Field on the differences between rhetoric and practices in Soviet divorces. 34 No statistical data on sexual behaviour was collected between 1930-1965 (Kon 173). Later, any social problems related to sexuality were seen as aberrations, likely resulting from harmful Western influence (177).
33
In this context, the problem of sexual violence was addressed through a mix of exposure and blindness. The Soviet legal system had strict anti-rape laws and a strong accusatorial bias which could benefit victims (J. Johnson, Gender Violence in Russia 87). Nevertheless, institutions retained a patriarchal bias (Attwood, Iukina, Kukhterin). Not only did sexual violence remain unrecognized as a widespread problem (Zabelina 19), but it was “practically ignored” (Khodyreva 27). As a result, official responses to sexual violence were “haphazard” (J. Johnson, Gender Violence in Russia 23). Since the Soviet state precluded the discussion of issues that were supposed to have been eradicated, private speech about sexual violence was effectively silenced, and attempts to draw attention to women’s issues were crushed (Iukina 456).
Women’s activism, which started up tentatively and secretly in the late 1970s, proposed an alternative response to these issues: late Soviet feminists “placed the blame squarely on the political leadership and the system, although their exact analyses varied” (Ruthchild 103). The 1979 Leningrad almanac Zhenshchina i Rossiia (Woman and Russia), edited by Tatyana Mamonova, Julia Voznesenskaya, Tatiana Goricheva and Natalia Malakhovskaia, exposed the bleak reality of Soviet women’s lives in a supposedly egalitarian society. Although the editors of Woman and Russia spoke about problems that the state silenced, they did not set out to undermine it. Instead, they sought to explore issues that did not receive enough attention from both the state and the male-dominated dissident mainstream. In the introduction to the English version of the almanac, Tatyana Mamonova explained their dissatisfaction with the male-centric unofficial culture as follows: “The dissident artists present themselves as nonconformists only in their art; in their attitude toward women, they are absolutely conformist” (xiv). Although the journal was not conceived of as strongly anti-Soviet, it was perceived as such, and its editors were persecuted and left the country.
Many Soviet women’s concerns discussed in the almanac aligned with those brought up by North American feminists. The journal sparked interest abroad, and its English edition, entitled Women and Russia, came out in 1984. The editors themselves mostly insisted that their concerns were broadly dissident, rather than specifically feminist (with the notable exception of Mamonova, who strongly identified as a feminist and was influenced by Western feminist thought [Iukina 456-457, Ruthchild 105-106]). Some aspects of the original journal would in turn be unfamiliar to Western readers. Notable was the absence in Soviet women’s writings of
34 psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic discourse, which have been important to Western feminism (Ruthchild 110). The strong presence of religious ideas and the naturalized depiction of gender roles were even more glaring differences (Bridger 513).
Religion was an important point of orientation for these Soviet activists. In the journal Maria, which Goricheva, Malakhovskaya, and Voznesenskaya published in emigration, they turned to Orthodox spirituality to address women’s problems (Ruthchild 106, Iukina 456). Rejecting both the Soviet vision of “equality” and Western feminism, suspicious of rationalism and individualism, these thinkers “sought to develop a uniquely Russian approach to feminism, stressing community and a spiritual-religious transformation” (Ruthchild 106). Ruthchild argues that religion was a significant point of reference for Russian women because it showed a way out of the present and future prescribed by Soviet ideology (114). She also links Maria with the long-standing tradition of intellectuals celebrating Russia’s unique spiritual role (107), which I will discuss later in this chapter. Religious elements in Russian women’s activism highlight the importance of redemptive suffering in Russian reparative narratives of sexual violence.
After the editors of Woman and Russia were arrested or intimidated into emigration, the development of feminism in Russia was curtailed until the perestroika. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost allowed women’s issues – such as contraceptives, hospital conditions, and infant mortality – to move out of the clandestine space of unofficial publications and into the public eye (Buckley 204). In the early 1990s, these conversations were fostered by newly founded feminist organizations, crisis centers and research institutes (Zdravomyslova 316), many of them benefitting from foreign support.
In the new century, the situation shifted. Against the backdrop of the government’s conservative turn and the church-driven promotion of “family values,” many feminist organizations lost funding and public attention (J. Johnson, Gender Violence in Russia 16). The most memorable examples of women’s activism in the 2010s were Russia’s Pussy Riot and Ukraine’s Femen, whose provocative methods (a “punk prayer” at the altar of Moscow’s cathedral and topless attacks of religious and political leaders, respectively) were incomprehensible to ordinary Russians (Garanich). Just as the dissident movements of the sixties were largely limited to metropolitan centers (Voronkov and Wielgohs 108), the feminist discourse in Russia remains unpopular, misunderstood, and seen as a Western import (Ruthchild 100). Liberal academic and
35 cultural circles, such as the Gender Studies program of the European University at St Petersburg, are an exception.
The summer of 2016 may have marked at least a minor resurgence of feminist-informed public discussions of women’s issues. Sociologist Anna Temkina argues that the unprecedented success of the #I’mNotAfraidToSay hashtag reflects the unwillingness on the part of the new generation of Russian citizens to unequivocally submit to the traditionalist norms imposed from above (“Proshchai, nasilie”). The hashtag encouraged a wave of personal stories of sexual violation, which functioned as counternarratives to the totalizing rhetoric of the conservative mainstream. Emphasizing the devastating impact of sexual violence on individual lives, these stories echo the #BeenRapedNeverReported tweets of the Anglophone Internet. Even though the stories were followed by a wave of vitriolic comments, and coincided with a public backlash against the changes in legislation that decriminalized domestic violence,35 they also encouraged constructive discussions and engagement with rape myths and gender relations in the Russian context.36 The hashtag’s popularity in social media coincided with a new outreach and fundraising campaign for Sestri (Sisters), one of Russia’s oldest rape crisis centres, which had lost much of its foreign funding to the 2012 Foreign Agents Law (Kolotilov).
Feminist anti-rape initiatives in both Russia and North America prioritize personal experiences, often explicitly invoking the concept of trauma. Trauma discourse developed in North America around the same time as the feminist movement, and in many ways in conjunction with it. In Russia, the term “trauma” is less well-known: it is used to treat individuals in psychiatric practice, but its theoretical use is mainly confined to discussing the legacy of the Soviet past by cultural theorists like Alexander Etkind. In North America, by contrast, the popularity of trauma discourse played a key role in the feminist exposure of the long-lasting effects of rape and strengthened the movement’s political force with the weight of repressed truth.
35 See p. 25. 36 See, for example, Aleksandr Alov’s article on the website Disgusting Men (a fairly mainstream men’s website – not, as its title may imply, a misandrist project. It aims to provide engaging content to male readers who are interested in culture rather than consumerism. According to the website’s tongue-in-cheek description, it is the indifference to “watches, cars and tuxedos” that makes their target audience “disgusting”).
36
1.2.3 Trauma and the Talking Cure
With its origins in turn-of-the-century psychiatry and psychoanalysis, the concept of trauma has influenced many academic disciplines, from humanities to neuroscience, as well as the broader public sphere. A rich and diverse field, trauma studies interrogates questions of subjectivity and personal identity, truth and interpretation, and, importantly for feminism and for my argument, the role of silence and speech in individual and collective history.
Developed by Sigmund Freud with reference to shellshock and train accidents, the psychoanalytic notion of trauma refers to an unexpected event that has a lingering impact on a person or society (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 12). Trauma is a rupture of meaning, because it interrupts the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be human in the world (Herman 51). With its etymology tracing to the Greek word for “wound,” trauma literally refers to a gaping hole where the body has been pierced through. The concept of trauma is readily available for reparative narratives, since any wound logically requires healing, even if it is located in the psyche or the fabric of society, instead of the physical body.
One of the most influential cultural theories of trauma was developed by Cathy Caruth. Drawing on Freud and influenced by deconstruction, Caruth describes trauma as an event that has not been experienced at the time of its occurrence but continues to overwhelm the subject: “To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (“Introduction” 4-5). Trauma persists within its bearer as an unrecognized but transformative kernel of truth, uncontaminated by linguistic and social mediation: “in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence,” “a history can be grasped” (7). This extraordinary process of preservation endows trauma with a truth value beyond that offered by ordinary, non-traumatic memory. Even as it defies representation, trauma promises a more direct access to the past. The wound itself is valuable and necessary for the healing to occur, containing within it a promise of a transformed relationship to the past and to others, if not of restoration of pre-traumatic wholeness. This promise aligns well with a hope for political solutions to historical injustices, as well as for a theory that is grounded in a reality beyond language and its games – unlike, for example, some poststructuralist theories that question the subject’s access to reality (Douglass and Vogler 4). The double role of trauma – as a disruptive wound and a source of unique insight necessary for healing – is characteristic of the
37 reparative mode. In it, the drive towards closure and resolution (working through and healing) is sustained by the very presence of wounds to be healed.
The idea of trauma’s privileged relationship to history has its roots in the academic reflection on the Holocaust. In American Holocaust studies, the traumatic past was interpreted as a source of an ethical standpoint. Shoshana Felman, Caruth’s colleague at Yale University, emphasizes the active power of speech as testimony: “To testify – to vow to tell, to promise and produce one’s speech as material evidence for truth – is to accomplish a speech act, rather than to simply formulate a statement” (9). Echoing Felman’s and Caruth’s emphasis on the performative power of speech, Dominick LaCapra argues that preventing the return of repressed violence requires speaking to others in the right way: not “acting out” but “working through” the shattering impact of trauma (42).
In Caruth’s theory and accounts inspired by it, trauma is a wound that speaks. The idea of working through links post-traumatic testimony with the possibility of a “talking cure.”37 This connection is developed in the therapeutic mode of trauma theory, which celebrates storytelling as a healing technique (Klein 136-137) and aligns well with the feminist framework. This affinity made possible important feminist interventions into trauma theory. In their popular Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (1988), Ellen Bass and Laura Davis articulate a feminist critique of Freud, arguing that his interpretation of incest memories as fantasies was a concession to patriarchal society (347). Clinical psychologist Laura Brown argued that defining trauma as an event outside “the range of human experience” disregarded the fact that women often suffered from continuous and normalized, but nonetheless deeply damaging, experiences, such as incest (102). She advocated for a feminist approach to trauma, which would turn “to the lives of girls and women, to the secret, private, hidden experiences of everyday pain” (110). Philosopher Susan Brison’s Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (2002), written after she survived a rape and attempted murder, made another influential contribution to feminist trauma studies, theorizing the notion of a relational self that can disintegrate and be reconstituted in the wake of violence.
37 The famous definition of psychoanalysis as a “talking cure” was given by Bertha Pappenheim (“Anna O”), a patient of Josef Breuer’s whose case was recorded in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria (34).
38
Unlike psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, the historical practice of the feminist speakout does not have healing as its primary aim. Nevertheless, it has, sometimes uneasily, combined a political agenda with a possibility of personal catharsis. While critics have been wary that “the strategy would degenerate into group therapy” (Bevacqua 51), others recognized the power of this affinity between changing the world and personal healing: “the power of speaking the unspeakable” and “the creative energy that is released when the barriers of denial and repression are lifted” (Herman 2). Geoffrey Hartman writes that the process of working through trauma creates “an opening that leads from trauma studies to public, especially mental health issues, an opening with ethical, cultural, and religious implications” (544). This move from deeply personal experience towards larger social issues makes trauma a useful concept for feminist work, since it can endow previously unheard voices with value, so they could be brought together to sustain a critical political vision.38 The discourse of working through trauma unites confession, which “exposes a supposedly hidden truth of the self,” and testimony, which “tells the truth about the past in the hopes that in the process this past will be surmounted and will not be reproduced” (Taylor 188).
This popular discourse of trauma relies on certain elements of Caruth’s theory, such as the emphasis on the ethical value of speaking and the confidence in historical truth. The more deconstructive aspect of her theory, however, is less conducive to specific political agendas. Trauma is a problem of representation that is not easily resolved. The tension between the impossibility to represent it and the ethical or therapeutic imperative to speak about it introduces ambiguity into trauma discourse. Ruth Leys describes this tension as an intertwined coexistence of opposite tendencies: the mimetic and the antimimetic (9-10). The antimimetic approach or, to use Kerwin Lee Klein’s term, the avant-garde mode (137), emphasizes trauma’s resistance to representation). It has affinities with Jacques Lacan’s theorizing of trauma as a quality of the Real, and therefore a structural, rather than historical, phenomenon (Four Fundamental Concepts 55). These approaches to trauma treat it as a rupture that precludes resolution, and are discussed in more detail in Chapter 2. The present chapter focuses on mimetic and therapeutic narratives,
38 Judith Herman, for example, uses the structure of trauma to link the personal and political, transposing the individual “dialectic of trauma” (the psychosomatic experience of dissociation and intrusive memories) onto intellectual and political history (2).
39 which see trauma as a historical event imposed on the subject or community, the repressed memory of which must be accessed.
The drive to uncover hidden truth and the role of narrative in the process of healing make of trauma not simply an interesting topic, but a compelling mode of literary production and experimentation. Whether or not fictional narratives explicitly draw on various aspects of trauma studies, their representations of disruptive events can resemble trauma discourse. Some texts openly engage the problem of representation: if trauma is by definition unavailable to consciousness, how can it be narrated? Representational techniques in depictions of trauma range from the construction of a coherent, realist narrative to the use of experimental aesthetics in order to capture trauma’s unrepresentability.
The emphasis on realism as the properly ethical representational strategy is one important tendency in trauma-informed theory of literature. Many scholars of trauma literature advocate for historicity and realist aesthetics (Tal, J. Young). Fidelity to facts helps uncover disavowed or ignored histories and highlight unequally distributed suffering – for example, that of sexually violated persons and populations. Like feminist narratives of a woman’s journey to consciousness of her oppression (Felski 125), historical trauma fiction relies on firsthand narration and testimony. In Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, for example, the protagonist’s feminist awakening coincides with her growing ability to share her traumatic past in a way that is realistic and believable, proving that it really did happen.
If this particular strand of feminist trauma literature cannot afford to challenge the seriousness of the grave truth of trauma, more experimental narratives take trauma’s paradoxical nature as an opportunity for both aesthetic play and social critique (Whitehead 3). These texts seek to mimic trauma’s “forms and symptoms, so that temporality and chronology collapse, and narratives are characterised by repetition and indirection” (3). In American black women’s novels that engage with sexual violence, such as Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple (1982) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), a consciousness of “their own rhetoricity as well as their intertextual leanings” does not detract from a fidelity to history and a political drive (Sielke 150-152). Sapphire’s Push, written in this tradition, depicts the devastating effects of family violence and race-based exclusion in a white-dominated democracy precisely by problematizing the possibility of straightforward representation of traumatic events. Push depicts its protagonist’s trauma through
40 an inner monologue told in a distinctive poetic voice, shaped both by her limited literacy and the brutality of her experiences.
The broad category of trauma fiction thus includes different narratives that take up the ethical challenge of speaking the unspeakable. Though its origins lie in Western thought, trauma fiction has become a popular genre on the international book market. It is certainly possible to read the structure of trauma into Russian novels about sexual violence, such as Galina Shcherbakova’s To Remember Impossible To Forget (2008), in which the violated protagonist literally goes into a coma (before being awakened by a dashing young doctor). Similarly, it is possible, and not uncommon, to apply other ideas developed in Western discourses about gender to post-glasnost’ Russian literature by women. Tatyana Novikov’s reading of Nina Sadur’s fiction exemplifies such an approach. Novikov uses the language of silence and speech, with its explicitly feminist connotations, to describe Russian fiction as undergoing “the painful process of moving out of silence by challenging its culture’s most deeply rooted beliefs about women” (277) and Sadur’s aim as “giving voice to the silenced” and “subverting clichés about women’s behavior and prescriptive social roles” (278). While drawing on the rich Western tradition of feminist theorizing does produce interesting and valuable readings, such an approach obscures other possible insights. An alternative approach that I propose in this chapter is to examine reparative models that already operate in Russian culture, shaping the way stories of sexual violence are told.
Trauma theory itself has also gained ground in Russian academia, notably in the work of scholars working in or in close contact with Western universities. These scholars have been concerned with historical traumas, such as that of Stalinist terror, a focus justified by the obvious political import of the Soviet history in contemporary Russia. In their introduction to a collected volume on the Soviet legacy, Evgeny Dobrenko and Andrei Shcherbenok argue that Russian culture is characterized by “an underdeveloped and unstable narrative about” its traumatic past (77). The question of memorialization and disavowal of historical tragedies is also prominent in Alexander Etkind’s reflections on post-Stalinist culture in Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (2013) and Serguei Oushakine’s The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (2009), an anthropological study of post-Soviet “communities of loss” (5). Viewing Soviet and post-Soviet culture through this lens, Russian scholars have made important
41 theoretical interventions both on the subject of trauma and, significantly for my project, on the subject of speaking and silence. Kevin Platt’s discussion of the state-directed process of dealing with the trauma of Stalinist purges is especially useful in understanding how speaking and silence have been figured in the Russian cultural sphere. Thus although sexual violence has not been as extensively theorized in Russia as it has been in the West, the existing Russian scholarship on the role of discourse in relation to historical trauma will benefit my inquiry into the functioning of the reparative mode in Russia.
As this overview of cultural discourses makes clear, the connection between revelation of truth and reparation is therefore present in both North American and Russian narratives of sexual violence. Both contexts have been influenced by emancipatory discourses that emphasize the power of speech (feminism, political exposure) and the discourse of trauma and healing. In the subsequent sections, I will show that revelation and reparation nevertheless take different forms in the two contexts and result in different political trajectories. Manifestations of the reparative mode are shaped by different binary structures: in the West, the opposition between the private sphere of oppression and the public sphere of politics; in Russia, the opposition between the tasteless and immoral byt (everyday existence) and the redemptive higher reality of bytie (spiritual being), which can be accessed through kenosis (“self-emptying”). The comparison of reparative narratives, which makes their differences apparent, reveals aspects of the historical and cultural contexts that produced them. In the next section, I will begin this comparative inquiry by looking at two American novels: Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and Sapphire’s Push to discuss the mechanics of speaking out and inclusion at work in the American reparative imaginary.
1.3 The Reparative Mode in America: Speaking Out and Inclusion
1.3.1 Speech and Survival in Speak
The young adult novel Speak (1999) by Laurie Halse Anderson illustrates the investment of North American culture in the ethical and political power of speech. A bestselling staple of high school reading lists, Speak won multiple national and state-level awards, and was adapted into an independent film in 2004 (“Speak”). The novel’s protagonist Melinda is raped at a party by a popular high school athlete, and subsequently spends her freshman year in depression and social
42 isolation. Speak makes extensive use of trauma aesthetics, emphasizing the simultaneous unavailability and disruptive persistence of Melinda’s memory. Her memory lives within her as a foreign entity, “chewing [her] alive like an infestation of thoughts, shame, mistakes,” impossible to either confront or share (Speak 157). When a recognition of her assailant bursts into the narrative by the end of the first chapter, in a short standalone segment entitled “Nightmare,” it remains unintegrated,39 and Melinda picks up her narration in the second chapter without mentioning it (45). As the novel’s title unambiguously suggests, the solution to the narrator’s predicament is to speak.
Melinda’s move out of silence is gradual. In order to speak her truth, she must go through several failed or incomplete attempts at communication. First, she must be certain of what her truth is. To help establish the facts, her memory emerges as soon as she is able to face it, in a detailed account of the assault, recounted in the chapter called “A Night to Remember” (133-136). Having delved into the space of repressed memory, Melinda can learn to communicate her private truth in a social realm. She feels encouraged to do so by a poster of Maya Angelou: “Maya wants me to tell” (151). With the blessing of the black feminist icon, Melinda tries out the political power of speech in a class report on the suffragette movement. Her sentences burn with the force of personal experience: “Before the suffragettes came along, women were treated like dogs” (154); “They got arrested and thrown in jail, but nothing shut them up” (155). In the report, Melinda attempts to mobilize silence as political resistance, refusing to deliver the report orally. Her fiery rhetoric is written, not spoken: a risky move in a cultural context where speech is valued over silence – a context that the novel shares with many of its North American readers. As Cheryl Glenn argues, speech is historically privileged in human societies because it “continues to signal power, liberation, culture, or civilization itself,” while “silence . . . signals nothingness” (3). In the universe of Speak, silence is not a viable option. The disapproval of Melinda’s friend David communicates as much:
…you got it wrong. The suffragettes were all about speaking up, screaming for their rights. You can’t speak up for your right to be silent. That’s letting the bad guys win. If
39 In the segment, the assailant appears nameless, a neutral placeholder pronoun rendered in capital letters: “I see IT in the hallway. IT goes to Merryweather. IT is walking with Aubrey Cheerleader. IT is my nightmare and I can't wake up. IT sees me. IT smiles and winks. Good thing my lips are stitched together or I’d throw up” (45-46).
43
the suffragettes did that, women wouldn’t be able to vote yet . . . don’t expect to make a difference unless you speak up for yourself. (Speak 159)
With the limits of defiant silence thus laid bare, Melinda must use her growing feminist consciousness to speak up for herself more loudly. She makes a few tentative attempts: an ineffective warning note to a friend (152) and a list of “Guys to Stay Away From” in a school bathroom stall (175). Anonymous, these statements are insufficient. To follow the feminist reparative trajectory through, Melinda must draw on her personal experience to reach her audience and transform the public sphere.
Writing her story down in front of Rachel, a childhood friend who is now dating Melinda’s attacker Andy, Melinda seeks merely to warn her (183), but her words carry too great of a weight. Rachel is not prepared for it. The act of sharing trauma always demands an ethical stance and an active response (Herman, Felman and Laub), neither of which Rachel is initially able to give. Moreover, as Elaine O’Quinn suggests, Rachel’s revulsion is also directed at Melinda’s failure to properly perform adolescent femininity and act as an excited girlfriend, happy for her friend’s romantic success (57). Melinda’s confession disrupts the norms of high school friendship and gender-appropriate behaviour, so Rachel initially responds to it with anger and denial, but eventually believes Melinda and ends her relationship with Andy (Speak 192).
Melinda’s quiet triumph is still not decisive enough for the drama of the speakout to play itself out fully. Melinda may have learned to write persuasive reports, notes and bathroom inscriptions, but before she can tell her story, she gets to confirm it by reliving it. Trapping Melinda in a closet, Andy attacks her again, insisting on his right to access her body and define what happened. This time, however, Melinda is prepared. Her lack of consent is no longer expressed through drunken mumbling but appears as a protracted scream, rendered in the text in capital letters (“NNNOOO!!!”), which is “loud enough to make the whole school crumble” (194). Pushing a broken piece of glass against Andy’s throat, Melinda forces him to confirm her innocence (195). Moreover, the assault is verified on the spot by the entire lacrosse team, a band of merciless furies: “sweaty, angry, their sticks held high” (195). They are the good bystanders, ready for what Herman calls “action, engagement, and remembering” (Herman 7-8). At this point, Melinda’s rape is no longer a confusing, potentially incriminating mess, but a story of
44 triumph and justice. Melinda becomes a good survivor, ready to tell her story, clear her past and turn towards the future.
Melinda’s difficult yet ultimately successful struggle with common, and commonly unspoken, teenage experiences like sexual assault, underage drinking, and high school tribalism has proved to be relatable and inspiring. Many readers identified with the protagonist’s plight and drew strength from Melinda’s journey. Their enthusiastic and personal letters are incorporated in Anderson’s poem Listen, written ten years after the book was published. It is a powerful statement of the role of the novel, and other similar texts, in enabling individuals to articulate their own struggles.
Melinda is a lot like this girl I know No she’s a lot like (me) i am MelindaSarah i am MelindaRogelio i am MelindaMegan, MelindaAmberMelindaStephenTori PhillipNavdiaTiaraMateoKristinaBeth. (“Listen”)
In addition to its success with individual readers, Speak has been enthusiastically received by teachers and scholars of education, who argued that the novel can teach adolescents critical thinking, confidence, empathy and crisis response skills (Alsup, O’Quinn).
The message of Speak is reassuring, but it is also demanding: all will be well, as long as you establish your innocence and tell the story coherently. Melinda sums up her own story on the last page of the novel: “Andy Evans raped me in August when I was drunk and too young to know what was happening. It wasn’t my fault. He hurt me. It wasn’t my fault. And I’m not going to let it kill me. I can grow” (Speak 198). This message – he raped me when I was innocent – provides the basis of a good survivor story that is guaranteed and almost obliged to succeed publicly. In this framework, to expose and eliminate rape, survivors must speak.
While contemporary feminist media critiques the harmful consequences of society’s expectations of innocence on the part of the victim, the more basic underlying assumption behind feminism’s
45 own speakout practices – that a victim’s speech has transformative power – is often accepted as axiomatic. What is the structure of the imagined world in which speech can have such power and rape victims can claim a place in public by drawing on private memories?
In the West, there is a long, if not uncontested, tradition of imagining human existence as divided into two distinctive spheres, with personal issues contained in the private domain and politics unfolding in the public sphere. In Hannah Arendt’s account, the origins of the political realm lie in the Greek polis: a space distinguished precisely by the role of speech. In this community of equals, words were actions, and things were done by talking about them, not by committing violence (Arendt 26). The polis, itself not engaged in material production, sustained itself by outsourcing labour, violence and inequality to those outside it: women and slaves (32). Feminist critics have therefore argued that the humanist ideal of the public sphere relies on “relations of domination and subordination,” banished to the private sphere of naturalized gender inequality (Pateman 11). In a 1992 article, Nancy Fraser contests the assumption that the public sphere is a place of free deliberation among equals. Fraser argues that inequalities persist even if they are declared irrelevant, and it is therefore preferable to “unbracket inequalities in the sense of explicitly thematizing them” (“Rethinking the Public Sphere” 120). Feminist interventions such as hers argue that a democracy can render invisible parts of society visible, and the speech of their inhabitants comprehensible. This can be done through the engagement of what Fraser describes as “subaltern counterpublics.” In this early article, Fraser invokes US feminism as a successful example of such a counterpublic (123).40 These marginalized communities challenge hegemonic domination by expanding the field of discourse. Their emancipatory potential improves the functioning of democracy and maintains social cohesion by enabling public conversation and diffusing separatist and aggressive tendencies.
To introduce different perspectives into the polis, subaltern counterpublics draw on what was previously excluded, in order to produce not just discourse but identities (125). This means that the private is not just a negative space. The excluded realm can only give birth to radical political resistance if the private is imagined to have a positive content. Svetlana Boym’s discussion of
40 Fraser’s optimism is tempered by 2015, in response to the development of U.S. feminism in a neoliberal direction in the 1990s. See “Feminism’s Two Legacies.”
46 privacy reminds us of the crucial role of this assumption about the nature of privacy. Drawing on Philippe Ariès’s History of Private Life (1988), Boym explains that the understanding of privacy that emerged in Europe between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries was a new way of experiencing subjectivity, organizing it legally through property laws and expressing it aesthetically through diaries and literature (Common Places 79). As the locus of subjectivity, the private has since been understood as the authentic realm of the self.
The vision of the private as a site of authenticity is the foundation of identity politics, and it introduces another dimension to the problematic of the speakout: not merely what is being said, but who says it. One is more likely to share traumatic experiences of the private realm if one also reaps the benefits of the private’s positive aspect: in other words, if one has access to a space in which to cultivate oneself and a sense of entitlement and worth. The promise of Speak is not universal: personal empowerment and institutional support are indeed available, but only to subjects who have the opportunity to render their victimization communicable and their stories coherent. To step out of these boundaries is to fall outside the scope of the novel’s guarantee. It is only Melinda’s experience of rape that is temporarily excluded from the realm of the speakable: Melinda herself begins and ends as a legible and legitimate subject. A modern-day suffragette, Melinda can figure out how to speak in the high school polis. This ability to follow the trajectory of the speakout is not available to everyone. Push tells a different story. Its protagonist Precious – a poor, obese, abused black teenager – struggles to be included into the fold, even as the truth of her life of abuse and neglect is all too visible.
1.3.2 Speech and Exclusion in Push
If Melinda’s rape is a shock that interrupts her happy childhood, sexual violation shapes the whole life of the protagonist of Sapphire’s critically acclaimed novel Push (1996). With its focus on the life of an abused black teenager in Harlem, Push deals with particular vulnerabilities of structurally disadvantaged subjects. The novel thus enables a discussion of an important aspect of the Western reparative discourse – the recognition that access to empowerment is unequally distributed, and that greater inclusivity is therefore needed.
47
Sapphire (Ramona Lofton)41 is a best-selling black American novelist and poet whose work has been highly acclaimed and translated into thirteen languages (“Sapphire: Bio”). Her breakthrough novel Push takes up the topic of incest, a common theme in black feminist fiction, to explore the destructive effect of racism on community (Sielke 152). The novel’s treatment of family violence and queer sexuality relate to the author’s position as an openly bisexual black woman and a survivor of childhood abuse. Sapphire herself, however, places greater emphasis on her experience teaching adult literacy in Harlem as a source of material for the novel (“How Author Created Film Character Precious Through Her Own Sexual Abuse”).42
Repeatedly molested by her mother and raped by her father since early childhood, Precious cannot remember a time when she did not know “about pussy and dick” (Sapphire 12). She gets pregnant once, at twelve, and again at sixteen, which causes her to fall behind in her studies and be sent to an alternative school. There, Precious learns to write, has a transformative encounter with a teacher and joins a supportive community. Unlike Melinda, Precious does not repress her memory of sexual abuse, but incorporates it into her understanding of the world. As Monica Michlin puts it, Precious “immediately speaks the unspeakable” in her characteristic “in-your- face” voice (171). Aggressive and full of profanities, her speech delivers a “double shock of voice and theme” (171). Her problem is not denial but a lack of information and resources, compounded with society’s prejudice. Precious herself recognizes the invisibility of poor blacks in a white democratic polis: “They eats, drinks, wear clothes, talks, fucks, and stuff but when you git right down to it they don’t exist” (Sapphire 31). To see herself as visible is an important step in Precious’s journey. Painfully aware of how she is perceived, Precious wishes she could be a skinny white girl on MTV and worries about official files that describe her as unintelligent. She attempts to speak for herself: “I wanna say I am somebody,” but recognizes that her position, determined by race, class and gender, renders her speech irrelevant: “I talk loud but still I don’t exist” (31). The contrast with Anderson’s white and middle-class Melinda is palpable: no team of
41 Lofton’s pen name is a reference to the eponymous character from The Amos ’n’ Andy Show, who embodied the stereotype of a “belligerent black woman” (Pallardy). 42 The misleading title of this Evening Standard article clearly reflects media priorities, stating that a nameless woman wrote a story based on her own sexual victimization. In the article itself, Sapphire explains that Push is not autobiographical.
48 caring adults is hanging on to Precious’s every word. Unlike Melinda, Precious and the kinds of disadvantaged subjects she represents, cannot easily speak themselves into well-being.
Instead, Precious uses writing to express herself. For Anderson’s Melinda, writing serves as a strategy of avoidance, but for Precious it opens up the possibility of assertive and highly personal communication. Her idiosyncratic style immediately moves from illiteracy to poetry, with which she asserts her right to speak about her life on her own terms (90). The reader follows Precious’s increasing literacy, as the writing in her diary entries and poems grows more comprehensible. However, as Michlin points out, the text quickly returns to an oral narrative style, shifting the focus from the specificity of Precious’s poetic voice to the metaphorical significance of literacy as a sign of “her ‘unlearning’ her conditioning by years of sadistic treatment” (174). For Precious, learning to write does not replace speaking out, but enables it.
Sexual violence is the most important personal truth that Precious must learn to recognize and express. The precise character of what Precious has endured gradually becomes apparent. Just like in Speak, the past in Push is revealed in flashbacks that regularly interrupt the narrative. It is only when Precious grows in confidence and begins to be invested in literature, writing and new friendships, that her flashbacks become less frequent and are replaced by conscious and assertive statements about her violation (Michlin 171). Like Speak’s Melinda, Precious makes sense of her experience by turning to the history of anti-oppression movements. She gains important insights from the writing of the African American Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan: “I think what my fahver do is what Farrakhan said the white man did to the black woman” (Sapphire 68). Farrakhan’s politicized view of rape is, however, only partially relevant to her: Precious was raped not by a white man but by her own black father, so she must make sense of her violation on her own.43 As soon as Precious begins to understand what has happened to her, she is able to stand up to her mother and claim her innocence: “Nigger rape me. I not steal shit fat bitch your husband RAPE me RAPE ME!” (74).
43 The novel’s depiction of Precious’s father has attracted criticism for its apparent adherence to the myth of the black male rapist. As Régine Michelle Jean-Charles shows, this controversy certainly reveals the continued significance of rape in black cultural history, but it also highlights a cultural bias in favor of discussing circumstances surrounding a fictional rape rather than its “material and psychological effects” on the survivor. Meanwhile, Sapphire’s novel resists the stereotypical connection between race and incest not by redeeming a male rapist, but by including a depiction of a sexually abusive mother (Jean-Charles 143).
49
At this point, the trajectory of Push deviates from the one outlined in Speak. Public recognition of the reality of sexual violence cannot do away with suffering or danger. Awareness of her situation does not prevent the social services from returning twelve-year-old Precious home to her abusive family from the maternity ward. Her newly acquired literacy does not make people in positions of power pay attention to Precious’s own opinion of her future (118). Even a willingness to listen may hide a darker motivation on the part of others: as one of Precious’s classmates writes, “Everybody like to hear that story. Tell us more tell us more more MORE about being a dope addict and a whore!” (n.p.). Susan Brison suggests that trauma victims can exercise some control over the story “by rejecting the dichotomy between victimization and agency, avoiding sensationalistic accounts, and refraining from appearing on talk shows in which sleaze is valued over truth” (34). Precious and her classmates struggle against misreadings by relying on their own means, through diary entries and poems. Yet ultimately, neither speech nor writing release Precious from the consequences of violence. The HIV diagnosis marks the final limit of the power of speaking, leaving her usually garrulous friends silent: “And all the tongues dead, can’t talk no more” (Sapphire 96). This resistance to an optimistic narrative of healing led Melanie Boyd to describe Push as a post-conventional incest narrative (72).
It is clear that Push is not a hopeful book, but it is not hopeless either. Even at its bleakest, Push asserts the value of care and community: “One thing we got in common, no the thing, is we was rape” (Sapphire 130). The novel’s beginning already expresses both a sense of ambivalence and a commitment to telling the story:
. . . I don’t know how far I’m gonna go with this story, or whether it’s even a story or why I’m talkin’; whether I’m gonna start from the beginning or right from here or two weeks from now. . . But I’m gonna try to make sense and tell the truth, else what’s the fucking use? Ain’ enough lies and shit out there already? (3-4)
Even if hope has limits, it can make survival easier; therefore, it should be both felt and represented. Like Precious herself, who recognizes the value of fictional fairy tale endings (83), the novel affirms the value of speech. Whether spoken or written, speech, in Push, aims at communication: even Precious’s diary entries are written in dialogue with her teacher. It is through speech that the unbearable and destructive status quo begins to change: “…Precious is victimized until she writes herself into being” (Dagbovic-Mullins 435). While its character’s
50 speech does not have a political effect in the fictional world, the text of the novel itself constitutes a sort of speaking out.
In the end, Push questions not the necessity of speaking out but its current limits, highlighting the type of subject (poor, racialized, female) who still waits to be included in the public sphere. Because it puts forward the voice of a poor black teenage girl, the novel could be read as a minority female Bildungsroman (Feng). Like other texts by women of colour (such as Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye), it brings a marginalized perspective into the American literary scene long dominated by Anglo-Saxon women’s fiction (Feng 1). The conformity to this mainstream model of cultural politics partially explains the book’s Hollywood success: the 2009 film Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire won two Academy Awards (“Precious: Awards”).44 Both Speak and Push stage a passage from private silence into the act of speaking in public. The reassuring optimism of Speak and the stubborn insistence of Push on telling the story in one’s own way operate within the same paradigm of speaking out and inclusion. Whether they emphasize resilience or vulnerability, these feminist trauma novels assume that the personal experience of violence can have political and ethical value.
1.4 The Clash of Reparative Narratives
1.4.1 Resistance to Feminism in Russia
This confidence in the power of speech is not universally shared. Moscow district deputy Aleksandra Andreeva’s critique of the #I’mNotAfraidToSay campaign exemplifies the profound skepticism about the efficacy of speakouts in Russian society. In a blogpost, Andreeva judges the campaign to be an overly emotional and aimless fad, which drowns practical suggestions and useful information in the “flow of meaningless pornography” (Andreeva).45 Referencing online comments of unnamed psychologists, she claims that the hashtag caused an epidemic of reinterpreted memories, secondary trauma and depression. These concerns, however, are minor in comparison to the main focal point of her outrage: that the campaign valorizes exposing one’s
44 Sapphire initially refused proposals of film adaptations, concerned that a film would sensationalize the material and reinforce stereotypes about poor blacks. Since the film was made, she has become more optimistic about its ability to inspire empathy and reflection (“Sapphire’s Story”). 45 “…редкие полезные ресурсы тонут в потоке бессмысленной порнографии.”
51 misfortune to the world. Having been raped, she argues, is shameful: like an illness or a phobia, it is better kept private. According to her, a raped woman must share her past with no one but her future husband, who needs to know “whom he takes into his family and makes the mother of his children.”46 The staggeringly sexist nature of this critique should not prevent us from appreciating that its main target is not the public exposure of sexual violence, but the structure of the speakout in general. Andreeva denounces the Western trend of flaunting one’s victimhood as a “stupid European fashion of being proud of weakness”47 that is “savage, strange and highly dangerous to civilization.”48 The plaintive attitude underlying speakouts, argues Andreeva, is a threat to society. It discourages and depresses, instead of proposing solutions and celebrating strength and victories, which, Andreeva claims rather improbably, is what people have done throughout world history. Despite the article’s misogyny and vulgar social Darwinism, it usefully highlights the resistance that Western-style speakouts encounter in the Russian cultural context.
The widespread sexist attitudes in the country and the state’s promotion of conservative values are frequently invoked to explain this failure of imported Western feminist discourse in post- Soviet Russia.49 Reflecting popular opinions, many powerful voices in the Russian public discourse are indeed self-consciously patriarchal. At the same time, Russian prejudice against feminism is a complex cultural attitude (although it often involves the simplistic stereotype of feminists as bitter, man-hating lesbians).50 Helena Goscilo points out that Soviet women writers often shared feminist insights but rejected the label itself (Dehexing Sex 11). She argues that the mistrust of the feminist rhetoric is not always a considered rejection of the movement’s ideas, but the result of decades of Soviet condemnation of liberal feminism as bourgeois, the general disappointment in the shape that women’s empowerment has taken under the Soviet regime, and
46 “Должен же он знать, кого берет в свою семью и делает матерью своих детей.” 47 “…не нужно следовать глупой европейской моде гордиться слабостью.” 48 “Это дикая, странная и крайне опасная для цивилизации тенденция.” 49 See, for example, Janet Elise Johnson’s discussion of the consequences of the withdrawal of foreign funding (Gender Violence in Russia 42). 50 At the time of writing this chapter, my Google search for the word “feministka” returned almost 946,000 results. The first results were predictable: a Wikipedia entry, an online forum discussion, and an article on Postnauka.ru, a website that popularizes academic research. These results were closely followed by a website that explains that feminists are frustrated men who have been reincarnated as women, some news reports on a recent feminist protest and subsequent arrests, and a psychology website claiming that women should embrace their weaker nature and all the limitations imposed on them by society.
52 a lack of reference points with which to interpret feminist theory (7). To Goscilo’s list, I would add another important factor, which has to do with the clash of reparative narratives.
The observation that Russia is patriarchal does not in itself address the question that interests me in this thesis: how does Russian culture respond to sexual violence? How does Russian society, shaped by a particular cultural history, organize its response to the revelation of the subject’s nonsovereignty and the world’s incoherence? Simply identifying Russia as patriarchal, and Russian approaches as failures at reparation, serves as evidence of preexisting beliefs about what a patriarchal society looks like and allows the enlightened Western feminist subject to define itself against a helpfully obvious patriarchal other.51 This attitude reflects an inability of Western feminism to recognize alternative forms of the reparative mode and perceive the contingency of its own forms, such as the speakout and inclusion. The costs of such myopia are not just epistemological: practically, it can render important feminist projects ineffective and even counterproductive. To avoid a premature resolution of the question of proper reparative responses to sexual violence, I propose to read the failure of feminist rhetoric in Russia not just as a failure to address sexual violence effectively, but as a failure of a particular kind of reparative narrative: the Western narrative of social and personal transformation based on speaking out.
1.4.2 Speech in Russian Culture
Before we can consider the possibility and meaning of speaking out about sexual violence in Russian culture, we need a broader understanding of the role of speech therein: its perceived power and its potential to effect tangible social change. In this section, I will discuss the role of speaking out in both official and unofficial spheres in the Soviet Union and Russia. I will begin by situating the skepticism about the political role of speech in contemporary Russia with the reference to the experience of glasnost, in which speech was expected but failed to repair the ills covered over by the state-controlled Soviet discourse. I will then turn to the Soviet society not as
51 This reading obscures the similarities in historical patriarchal attitudes in the West and in Russia, in both cases shaped by Christianity (Polowy 266), as well as the overlaps and mutual support in Russian Orthodox, US evangelical, and other right-wing communities fighting for “family values” in different countries (“The Axis Between Russian Orthodox and American Evangelicals is Intact”).
53 a space of silence, but a space of speech, outlining the complexities of Soviet public discourse after Stalin, which continues to influence the Russian public sphere today (Platt 647).
The Soviet polis was hardly a space of democratic negotiation. It was, on the one hand, dominated by ossified speech devoid of referential meaning, which enforced the state’s total power. On the other hand, as Alexei Yurchak explains in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), the power of the state’s rhetoric was not absolute, and life went on in spite of, around, and even within the official discourse. Some forms of political dissidence sought to bring their critique out of the space of kitchen discussions with like-minded friends and into the state-controlled public sphere (Voronkov and Wielgohs 114). Oushakine writes about “the dissidents’ insistence on open, public, glasnostlike activity, and . . . their appeal to closely follow the rule of law” (“The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat” 197). Still, the limited discursive space restricted the possibility of linking private experiences and political resistance, which shaped possible responses to sexual violence. To escape the private realm, one could not count on transformative social critique. Even when perestroika and glasnost opened up the space for communication, they soon gave way to the post-Soviet crisis. Ultimately, the lack of a public sphere in the Soviet Union resulted in a “lack of information, de-politicisation and a cynical retreat from political life” (Oswald and Voronkov 7), which meant that glasnost failed to mobilize meaningful democratic participation. In Russia, the failure of liberal, Western-inspired feminism was both similar to and roughly coterminous with that of glasnost: after a century of policing, free speech seemed to have immense explosive power, but it did not have predictable ethical and political effects. The possibility of resolving problems by speaking the truth was thus curtailed in the Soviet Union and invalidated during and after the perestroika. This common explanation is rather useful, but its explanatory power is limited because it presupposes and focuses on the absence of speech that would have appropriate political power. Meanwhile, the history of speaking out in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia can provide us with more insights.
The logic of exposure, of which women’s activism was part, was central to both official and unofficial Soviet discourses. Revealing and redefining private truths in a new political light was crucial to the Soviet project of transforming society and improving human nature. Official state discourse made extensive use of the mode of exposure (razoblachenie), which Eliot Borenstein describes as “a tried-and-true Soviet tradition” (13). The injunction to illuminate that which is
54 obscure became an individual duty of every Soviet citizen. In his study of Stalin-era diaries, Jochen Hellbeck explains that “Soviet diarists revealed an urge to write themselves into their social and political order . . . to realize themselves as historical subjects defined by their active adherence to a revolutionary common cause” (4-5).52 In these diaries, the convergence of the private and the public was thematized within individual projects of self-fashioning in the context of collective life. Both Socialism and feminism thus share the view of speech (written or oral) as mediator between the personal and the political. They even have a historical connection: the radical feminist practice of “consciousness raising” was inspired in part by similar practices in the Chinese revolutionary movements (Bevacqua 50). More recently, literary critic and cultural historian Irina Prokhorova pointed out another link between Soviet political history and feminist politics, comparing the wave of #I’mNotAfraidToSay confessions with Nikita Khrushchev’s public denounciation of Stalin’s cult of personality in the 1956 speech “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”: “The very fact of speaking freely was some sort of revolution in consciousness” (“Proshchai, nasilie”).53
Khrushchev’s speech, delivered at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was a quintessential example of speaking about the previously hidden reality of violence in Soviet history (Platt 647). The speech publicly acknowledged and condemned the excesses of Stalin’s rule. It produced reverberations in the Soviet Union and abroad and became an important milestone of the Thaw. However, as Kevin Platt points out, the speech did not constitute a straightforward passage from silence to transparency or a “transformation in knowledge” (667). Instead, it inaugurated a new regime of speaking, which replaced “one highly controlled regime of public expression [with] another” (667): the Stalinist rule of violence with the subtler social coercion of the Khrushchev era (665). Far from being fully denounced and processed, “Stalinist political violence came to be a highly controlled, taboo, and even ritualized subject” (649). Acknowledging previously unspeakable facts, Khrushchev’s speech also drew
52 Hellbeck shows that this process required uniting the personal and the political within one’s own self: “[c]oncentrated in exemplary individuals – writers, critics, ideologues – consciousness was the ability to see the laws of history and comprehend one’s own potential as a subject of historical action who would help chart the road toward a better future . . . The laws of history were laws of social emancipation; hence the fundamentally social orientation of consciousness, which spurred the individual to think and act on behalf of the oppressed masses and thus created an enlarged sense of individual self, filled with purpose, significance, and moral value” (18). 53 “Сам факт говорения свободного – это была какая-то революция в сознании.”
55 new lines around what was, and was not, speakable. The damage done to the collective body of the Soviet nation was attributed to Stalin’s personality cult, but the very real wounds inflicted upon, and by, Soviet citizens, could not be discussed outside of the limits prescribed by the state: “observance of a rule of silence concerning legacies of collective trauma was the price of social belonging” (661). This silence about the reality of Stalinist repressions bound Soviet society in a “collective disavowal” (661). In effect, Khrushchev’s “speakout” mobilized the mode of exposure in a careful and disciplined way, modeling for the Soviet subjects what, and how, to expose. Platt points out that Khrushchev’s speech and its effects were permeated with irony: this was a speakout that concealed crucial aspects of the truth (his own involvement in the Purges, for example); it was delivered in secret but quickly spread through different channels, abroad and domestically; finally, the secret that the speech revealed was already known to everyone involved (664).
The character of Khrushchev’s speech is a telling example of the complexity of Soviet discursive practices. This complexity cannot be accounted for by the stereotype of the heroic dissident speaking out against the criminal state. Similar to the rape survivor standing up to break the silence of systemic sexism, the Socialist dissident was imagined in the Western media as an inspiring figure. In Jonathan Bolton’s words, it “[spoke] to Western dreams and desires – a belief in heroes, a yearning for a clear stand against evil, a hope for more fulfilling forms of political participation” (3). Since the vague term “dissident” had carried the projection of a Western dream, it is no wonder that it ceased to be compelling after the fall of state Socialism in Russia (Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat” 191). Meanwhile, even individuals celebrated as dissidents were frequently uncomfortable with the term (Bolton 3). Unofficial and oppositional circles under state Socialism in fact formed a more complex and diverse landscape than the Western stereotype of heroic anti-state resistance (Komaromi 73, Voronkov and Wielgohs 108). Their relationship to speech was also less straightforward.
Openly denouncing power was not the only option available to nonconformist Soviet citizens. Oleg Kharkhordin points out the importance of “secret, intimate spheres,” where people could pursue extrapolitical life projects (357). Still, speaking out played an important role in Soviet unofficial culture, and dissidents made use of official discourse in their contestations of the state. In “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat,” Oushakine writes: “…the subordinate dissidents
56 focused on the domain of the dominant in an attempt to take part not only in the process of reproduction of the dominant discourse but also in the process of its production” (204). Rather than evaluating state discourse from without, rights activists made use of the existing language of rights, enabled in part by the “discursive break” that was Khrushchev’s speech (209). The significance of Khrushchev’s speech does not therefore end with its instructive failure to transform the social sphere (Platt 661). The speech opened new ways of speaking politically, ways that could be adapted by different actors – not only dissidents, but also state officials and even perestroika-era politicians – to claim their rights, uphold law, or demand transparency (Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat” 209, Platt and Nathans 321).
At the same time, the appeal to legality and rights could be used to break out of the Marxist framework and refer to discursive spheres outside of the Soviet state (Bolton 25). According to Ann Komaromi, the dissident scene was an assemblage of what Nancy Fraser calls “counterpublics” (Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere” 123). These “counterpublics” could foster distinct cultural identities and, sometimes but not always, propose explicit political stances (Komaromi 86). Voronkov and Wielgohs point out that most Soviet movements in the sixties drew on international human rights discourse (102), flexible enough to accommodate the diversity of dissident agendas. Others turned from the discourse of rights altogether and concentrated on more culturally specific strategies of resistance, such as the religious discourse taken up by Soviet women activists.
The Soviet discursive landscape was therefore a complex sphere, which provided its subjects with specific strategies of speech. The state’s own discourse of rights, established during the Khrushchev Thaw, could be used by citizens to call on the state to meet its own standards. At the same time, the international rights discourse was used to appeal to outside norms, and some nonconforming speakers in this context also reached out for discourses that lay completely outside the compromised state rhetoric – such as Orthodox mysticism and philosophy. In all these cases, speech was important in the tasks of articulating political resistance, revealing suppressed truths and promoting political or social solutions. Meanwhile, literature provided another arena in which the possibility of resolving problems by exposing them could be addressed.
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1.4.3 Socialist Realism as a Reparative Genre
If in the West, trauma literature is the quintessential literary genre of the speakout, the Soviet mode of exposure finds its literary embodiment in Socialist Realism. Although the genre is currently obsolete, its commitment to revealing the larger truth of life influenced the realist fiction that followed Socialist Realism’s decline. Reacting against their ideologically rigid predecessors, many late and post-Soviet authors preserved the genre’s commitment to a coherent moral universe. Emphasizing moral goodness, sacrifice and redemption, the two fictional texts that I discuss in this chapter contain traces of this tradition.
Socialist Realism was a political literary genre par excellence (Dobrenko, “Socialist Realism” 99). Its establishment aimed to change both the aesthetic form and the social status of literature. After the term’s first official mention in 1932, the definition of Socialist Realism was fleshed out by Maxim Gorky and other Soviet writers over the following two years (Clark, The Soviet Novel 27), until it was finalized at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 as follows:
Socialist realism is the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism. It demands from the artist a truthful and historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism. (Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei 716)54
Socialist Realist works relied on straightforward representational strategies, promoted clear moral norms, and borrowed epic features from Russian classical literature (Clark, “Russian Epic Novels” 137). As Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) explains in “On Socialist Realism,” the genre was conceived as a development of “the realism of the past” (Tertz 24), practiced by nineteenth- century writers who accurately depicted bourgeois society and its ills. In contrast with Leo
54 “Социалистический реализм, являясь основным методом советской художественной литературы и литературной критики, требует от художника правдивого, исторически-конкретного изображения действительности в ее революционном развитии. При этом правдивость и историческая конкретность художественного изображения действительности должны сочетаться с задачей идейной переделки и воспитания трудящихся в духе социализма.” The passage was translated into English by George Dennis, as a quotation in On Socialist Realism by Andrei Sinyavsky, writing as Abram Tertz (24).
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Tolstoy and Honoré de Balzac, the Socialist Realist approach to narrative and characterization may strike the contemporary reader as highly idealized and unrealistic. The genre was not conceived to accurately record the minutiae of everyday life. Unlike their nineteenth-century counterparts, realist writers in the conditions of victorious Socialism were expected to perceive the truth of a Communist future in the existing realities around them, and point their readers in the right direction. They needed “the ability to seize the revolutionary development and to educate readers in accordance with that development, in the spirit of socialism” (Tertz 149). This “spirit of socialism” was located not in the concrete but in “the typical” (Groys 51). The task was serious: Socialist Realist novels were supposed to open up the hidden meaning of things and to reveal ideologically correct truths even before they were officially articulated (51-52). The characters of Socialist Realist novels therefore have a straightforward relationship to meaning, which appears as pre-existent, universal and therefore generalizable: not constructed but available to be discovered (Lipovetsky, “Literature on the Margins” 8). Sinyavsky identifies this universal meaning with the overwhelmingly teleological nature of the genre: its orientation towards “the splendid Purpose” (Tertz 43).
Evgeny Dobrenko explains that the swift success of the reparative enterprise in Socialist Realist fiction determines the genre’s peculiar temporality. The future that is projected to be repaired is depicted as the lived present: “this is not the future replacing the present, but an attempt to imagine the future as the present” (“Socialist Realism” 110). The realization of desired wholeness is almost immediate: if a gap is discovered in the order of things, reparation at once follows exposure. In the late Soviet and post-Soviet texts I discuss, recovery also requires a sudden and decisive transition into an improved future state (either personal transcendence or collective utopia).
With its commitment to changing the world through representing how things truly are – or about to be, Socialist Realism operated in the reparative mode. In Dobrenko’s words, it aimed at “the production of reality through its aestheticization” (“Socialist Realism” 110, emphasis in original). Thus despite its specific ideological purpose, on the most basic level Socialist Realism shares with the tradition of feminist critique in the West a belief in the power of fictional representations, a didactic drive and a commitment to repair.
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The idealized universe of Socialist Realism can seem a worst example of artificial, politically motivated creative production, but novels written in the genre were not necessarily read this way. Thomas Lahusen has shown that readers did relate to Socialist Realist depictions of the working life (Lahusen 20). Similarly, Dobrenko argues that the moral clarity of the Socialist Realist universe appealed to Soviet readers, many of whom only recently acquired literacy (“Socialist Realism” 100). To dismiss Socialist Realism as politicized pseudoliterature, a mere distraction from the study of dissident and émigré masterpieces, would therefore fail to acknowledge its role in the lives of readers. Such a dismissal would also ignore the genre’s place in the continuous, if very heterogeneous, Russian literary tradition. While Boris Groys does not share Lahusen and Dobrenko’s view of Socialist Realism as a popular genre, he does not dismiss it as thinly veiled propaganda either. Instead, he argues that it was precisely the genre’s complex literary genealogy that made it difficult for the masses to relate to Socialist Realist novels (15).
Despite its reputation for unbelievable, larger-than-life protagonists and antagonists, as well as its commitment to teaching unvarying political lessons, the term “Socialist Realism” does not have to be seen as oxymoronic or ironic. In a 1921 essay “On Realism in Art,” Roman Jakobson argues that the definition of the term “realism” is “extremely relative” (23). It is essentially in the eye of the beholder. Authors and readers have varied expectations of what constitutes verisimilitude. In different contexts and for different subjects, conservative or disruptive representational strategies may seem more realistic. Viewed from this perspective, the idealised and conservative Socialist Realism can be seen as an example of the type identified by Jakobson’s “revolutionary realism” (22). After all, the genre sought to break from Russian modernism and employ new aesthetic strategies precisely to achieve greater verisimilitude. This attempt at a radical break from the past was, of course, itself a modernist move, which supports Groys’s reading of Socialist Realism as a result of the “immanent logic of development of the avant-garde itself” (16).55
55 A major difference between Socialist Realism and the avant-garde, according to Groys, is the attitude to tradition. Unlike the avant-garde, Socialist Realism does not need to invent new forms because it understands itself as a radical break in content. Old aesthetic forms can be reused, as long as they have the right ideological meaning (39, 49).
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With roots in the avant-garde, Socialist Realism was therefore not simply an outlier in the Russian literary tradition. Scholars have commented on its influence on literature that came afterwards and even reacted against it. Groys explains that the rejection of Socialist Realism was a reaction against the triumph of the avant-garde, which is why the genre’s dominance in Soviet literature was followed by a return to traditionalism (71). It is, however, precisely through these “traditionalist” elements that these later texts have preserved aspects of Socialist Realism.56 Mark Lipovetsky shows that the echoes of Socialist Realism persisted in the “returned” literature of the 1970s and 1980s, in war and camp literature, and in village prose, of which Viktor Astafiev’s short story Lyudochka, discussed in this chapter, is one example (“Post-Soviet Literature” 177). Lipovetsky criticized these works as nostalgic and derivative texts that merely inverted Socialist Realist values and fetishized Russia’s nineteenth-century realist tradition (“Literature on the Margins” 5). Groys similarly emphasizes the strict, often Christian, moral values in these works (72), and their replication of the Socialist Realist utopia on a smaller scale (73).
This tradition of realist literature that exposes higher truth about society continues to be compelling. Olga Breininger argues that Russian literature today is dominated by epic historical novels, which depict clear-cut moral universes. This development, she argues, aligns well with the contemporary cultural climate, with its narrowing down of public discourse and the centralization of power. Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s preface to Guzel’ Yakhina’s 2015 novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes confirms the novel’s link to the Soviet literary heritage (5). Yakhina herself admits that she found inspiration in Soviet films about collectivization and that she does not mind comparisons to Socialist Realism, as long as readers love her book (Anisimova). Socialist Realism therefore belongs to a larger tradition of realist representation in service of a reparative narrative, and the texts I read in this chapter are indebted to its depiction of larger-than-life characters and clear moral judgments. Like Socialist Realism, late Soviet village prose and contemporary epic historical novels in Russia are engaged in repairing the semiotic universe. An important part of this tradition is the Orthodox ideal of individual and collective redemption through suffering. The fictional texts I analyze in the next section could be read as literary
56 This image of Russian literary history as marked by radical aesthetic breaks, which nevertheless constitute a form of continuity, is reminiscent of Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky’s reflection on the dualism of Russian culture (see p. 66, pp. 71-72).
61 articulations of conservative or patriarchal beliefs, but I would argue that they also reveal unique cultural models of reparation and a specific understanding of the role of speaking out.
1.5 The Reparative Mode in Russia: Transformation and Transcendence
1.5.1 Exposure and Redemption in “Lyudochka”
In Viktor Astafiev’s 1989 short story “Lyudochka,” the young protagonist moves from her native village to a provincial city. She takes up lodging with an aging woman, Gavrilovna, and becomes an apprentice at her hairdressing salon. Even though Lyudochka stays away from the city’s debauched young men (and even gains respect from some of them), an ex-con, recently arrived in the city, rapes her in the city park. Finding no protection, justice or support, Lyudochka hangs herself. While her mother and landlady are overwhelmed with grief and regret, her foster father, a former labour camp prisoner, sweeps in to avenge her.
The story’s male narrator confesses that he never knew the assaulted girl and does not remember her real name. The epigraph expresses perfectly this sentimental hijacking of female experience: “You fell like a stone. I died underneath it” (“Lyudochka” 364).57 As the narrator ponders the reason for the episode’s persistence in his memory: “Why does this story, quiet and separate from everything else, live within me and burn my heart?” (364),58 his seemingly rhetorical questions point to a specific answer: the story needs to be remembered and told because it is didactic. Its lesson is a model of reparation that requires adherence to gendered patterns of moral behaviour.
Astafiev’s work is representative of the late-Soviet genre of “village prose,” which contrasts contemporary social ills with an idealized vision of the simple people (Balina 161). A child of the Purges (his mother drowned when visiting his repressed father in the camps), Astafiev grew up to join the army in the Second World War (Sakova). Many of his works are set on the frontlines or in poor, criminalized pockets of small-town USSR, reflecting first-hand experience of suffering and deprivation. His brutal depictions of the conditions in the Soviet army during the Great
57 “Ты камнем упала. Я умер под ним. Вл. Соколов.” 58 “Зачем же история эта, тихо и отдельно ото всего, живет во мне и жжет мое сердце?”
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Patriotic War were decried as unpatriotic but found a loyal readership among veterans (J. Moss 237). His treatment of village life was unusually dark even for village prose (Peterson 247). By the end of his life, Astafiev occupied a firm place in the Russian literary establishment (J. Moss 236), although his moralizing literary style59 and troubling chauvinistic attitudes were subject to critique.60
In “Lyudochka,” Astafiev delves into the darkest aspects of late Soviet society to denounce its moral degradation. The picture he paints of provincial Russia is bleak. The city park where Lyudochka is raped is traversed by a stream of “dirt, fuel oil and soapy water”61 flowing out of a broken pipe of a non-functioning factory (369). Trees do not grow by the boiling waters of this industrial Styx, but objects come to unnatural life: “bottles of different types and shapes were sticking out and humming in the dirty ditch and foam” (369).62 Its banks are also littered with bits of fur and animal carcasses: “puppies, kittens, dead piglets, everything and anything that was excessive, that burdened the human household and life” (370).63 This description evokes the chernukha aesthetic, with its emphasis on corporeality, dirt, animal matter and ubiquitous violence (Graham 9).64 The unkempt and dangerous park, while clearly inimical to humanity, is nevertheless central to the city’s social life. This is where its morally corrupt youth hang out, drink, gamble, fight and sometimes kill each other. The young men themselves are described as animal-like: one has a “narrow snout” (“Lyudochka” 371), another – Lyudochka’s rapist – resembles the longhorn beetle, from which he gets the nickname Strekach. Just as the beetle flies over decaying wood, “tearing at something or someone down there with its long and crispy antennas,” Strekach haunts the crumbling town in search of a victim (375).65 Significantly, Astafiev refers to Strekach’s face as lik, using an older Russian word, confined in contemporary
59 Deming Brown considered “Lyudochka” to be comparatively light on the moralizing, and therefore “the finest thing [Astafiev] has ever written” (88). As will become clear in my reading of the story, I chose it precisely because it makes explicit moralizing attitudes to sexual violence and gendered suffering. 60 See Astafiev’s anti-Semitic response to Natan Eidel’man, published in 1990 in Dauguva (“Iz perepiski N.Y.Eidel’mana s V.P.Astaf’evym”). 61 “…какое-то горячее месиво из грязи, мазута, мыльной воды.” 62 “Из грязной канавы и пены торчали и гудели горлами бутылки разных мастей и форм…” 63 “Всегда тут, в парке, стояла вонь, потому что в канаву бросали щенят, котят, дохлых поросят, все и всякое, что было лишнее, обременяло дом и жизнь человеческую.” 64 See p. 178 for a discussion of chernukha. 65 “Ликом он и в самом деле смахивал на черного узкоглазого жука, летающего по древесной рухляди и что- то там и кого-то там длинными и хрусткими усами терзающего.”
63 language use exclusively to poetic and religious speech. Ironically invoking this high register, Astafiev emphasizes the beastly nature of Strekach, an enemy of tradition and of everything sacred.
The young men’s animality has nothing in common with the natural rhythm of village life, where Lyudochka finds solace in the company of the family cow, and where her foster father jumps into the river with childlike joy. Urban animality is distinctly modern. Strekach’s appearance betrays a corrupt foreign influence. With his rust-coloured blouse, a foreign-made sky-blue jacket, tattoos and flashy jewelry, Strekatch is a decadent modern-day gypsy with a touch of prison chic. This equivalence of foreignness and corruption is a recurring theme in the story. At an orgiastic dance Lyudochka attends in the park, she initially misidentifies a song’s Russian lyrics as foreign.66 Astafiev describes the dance in unambiguous terms: “Supporting the herd in its demonic savagery, the music writhed in convulsions, cracked, buzzed, thundered with drums, moaned, howled.”67 There are no individual young people in this crowd, only a mass of bodies animated by the infernal power of music. Astafiev’s strong wording recalls Soviet media’s moral panic over the corrupting influence of Western popular music. In both cases, music is believed to possess an almost supernatural power to effect a social crisis by transforming young people, potential builders of a better society, into writhing animals.
As for Lyudochka, she remains untouched by corruption. She is a secular female saint, the embodiment of countryside morals. Unlike her landlady’s previous lodgers, rude and adventurous, Lyudochka dreams of becoming a good hard-working wife and echoes Gavrilovna’s judgmental complaints about today’s youth. Lyudochka’s saintliness comes not from bourgeois naiveté (she is “not a little student girl, not a little darling who slept on a crisp little bed” [“Lyudochka” 37]),68 but from a robust peasant familiarity with adult sexuality, which enables her to defend herself against unwelcome advances.69 Lyudochka’s morality is that of
66 The song, meanwhile, is performed by “one person, remotely resembling a woman, almost entirely naked” (“Одна особа, отдаленно похожая на женщину, совсем почти раздетая”). 67 “Музыка, помогая стаду в бесовстве и дикости, билась в судорогах, трещала, гудела, грохотала барабанами, стонала, выла.” 68 “…не гимназистка, не мулечка-крохотулечка из накрахмаленной постельки…” 69 Lyudochka pours iodine on the head of a customer who harasses her, pushes away a would-be “suitor” (“кавалер” [374]) who accosts her at a party, and nurses an unrealised plan to cut off her rapist’s penis.
64 authenticity and knowledge, which means it cannot be corrupted. It can still, however, be mortally endangered by the advance of industrialization and sexual liberalization.
Astafiev’s prose is extremely earnest, and his social critique rather heavy-handed. The occasional ironic use of high literary language to describe base attitudes serves to communicate the author’s black-and-white message about good and evil. This moralizing stance enables Astafiev to expose the Soviet underbelly while preserving the universe of shared cultural meaning intact. It also reflects the worldview characteristic of village prose, which is nostalgic at best and nationalist at worst. Marina Balina points out that these nationalist undertones adversely impact the quality of writing within the genre (164), and Astafiev’s work is no exception. Grating in other contexts, the patriotic morality of village prose aligns well with the dogmatic view of literature as moral education, which has dominated Russian literary criticism even after the Soviet Union’s collapse (Goscilo, Dehexing Sex 70).70
In Astafiev’s short story, exposure does not serve the same political role as speech does in Speak and Push. There is no point in speaking to a wider society that could acknowledge and respond to Lyudochka’s plight. Her mother and landlady understand her suffering all too well, but are long accustomed to sexual violence as part of woman’s lot. The world of the novel confirms Aleksandra Andreeva’s scepticism about making suffering public: in this context, to speak out about one’s experience would indeed be a bizarre choice, self-indulgent, pointless and dangerous. At best, such a story can only exist as an example of the world’s corruption, retold by the sentimental but ineffective male narrator. What kind of place is this dark world, apparently impermeable to the power of speech?
70 Although Helena Goscilo was writing in the early nineties, the values of authenticity and moral goodness remain operative on the Russian mass market literary scene. One example is Ulitskaya’s endorsement of Guzel’ Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes: “[The novel] possesses the main quality of real literature – it hits right in the heart. The tale of the fate of the protagonist, a Tatar peasant woman in the time of collectivization, breathes such authenticity, credibility and charm that are not frequently found in the large stream of contemporary prose of the last decades” (“Он обладает главным качеством настоящей литературы – попадает прямо в сердце. Рассказ о судьбе главной героини, татарской крестьянки времен раскулачивания, дышит такой подлинностью, достоверностью и обаянием, которые не так уж часто встречаются в последние десятилетия в огромном потоке современной прозы” [Ulitskaya 5]).
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1.5.2 Byt and Bytie
Lyudochka’s rape – not quite a stranger attack, but not exactly domestic violence – is, as the narrator tells us, a banal, everyday reality. Western feminists would no doubt concur. Lyudochka is destroyed by masculine aggression and feminine complacency: in other words, by patriarchy. We cannot, however, assume that the space where Lyudochka is raped is equivalent to the private realm in which Melinda and Precious have suffered. Lyudochka’s rape occurs in a different imaginary space: not the “personal” of the feminist slogan but the everyday world of byt.
Like all cultural categories, the Western notions of public and private are not exactly empirical reality but rather “rhetorical labels” (Fraser, “Feminism’s Two Legacies” 131). They entered Russia from abroad in the eighteenth century and played a complicated role in Russian intellectual history. Imported and imposed from above through Peter the Great’s reforms, the ideas of individualism and privacy have been associated with a radical cultural break in Russia’s history. Donna Orwin explains that Russian thinkers both adopted modern individualism and reacted against it: “Raised in a society that privileged the communal over the individual, they could not completely internalize the behavior that they admired and imitated, so they began to observe themselves from a distance, and ironically” (12). For many, the imported idea of privacy carried derogatory connotations of foreignness and inauthenticity (Boym, Common Places 73). It was often understood as part of the hasty modernization that obscured and obstructed people’s connection to Russia’s soul. For the nineteenth-century Slavophile intellectuals, resisting the idea of privacy became a way to assert Russia’s uniqueness and even “chosenness” (74). This hostility to privacy, lauded as a manifestation of the Russian soul, has been used by Slavophiles to justify serfdom and the absence of a legal theory of rights (80). It has also shaped extraordinary visions of community, which informed many literary and political projects in Russian history.
The association between the idea of privacy and the West persists today. The creator of #I’mNotAfraidToSay, Anastasiia Mel’nichenko, criticizes the cultural prejudice against sharing private woes, which, compounded with the unabashed objectification of women in Ukrainian and Russian media, works against victims of sexual violence. Mel’nichenko argues that it is important to turn towards “liberal, or, even though it’s a tired phrase, European values,” in order to appreciate the importance of “every person’s history” – in other words, of privacy
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(Mel’nichenko 2016).71 Mel’nichenko’s intervention makes clear that the appeal to privacy in the Russian public sphere still requires special qualifications: in other words, it does not quite come naturally.
Instead of the opposition between public and private realms, a related set of terms has long been operative in Russian culture: byt (everyday existence) and bytie (spiritual being) (Boym, Common Places 29). Though associated with household tasks and its small joys, byt is no domestic haven, but the realm of deadening and difficult labour, mostly done by women. As Boym explains, “everyday existence has often been precarious for the majority of the population” (2). During the Soviet era, byt was believed to harbour atavistic pre-revolutionary attitudes, which resulted in wife battery and alcoholism. Described in this way, byt seems to map directly onto the feminist description of the private, but its main connotation – that of deadening prosaic banality – would be lost in such a direct translation. “The monster of Russian dailiness” (22) is not simple oppression or domestic slavery, but also poshlost’: “banality, obscenity and bad taste” (34).72 In Russian culture, byt appears not as the invisible support to the public sphere, but as the opposite of bytie, the life of the spirit.
Russian culture’s hatred of byt has a long and well-documented history: Boym describes “an unusually strong, almost Romantic, fear of banality and ‘lack of culture’, of anything that smacks of middlebrow or middle-class values” (2). She links this opposition between the everyday byt and the higher reality of bytie with the binary logic of Russian culture, described by Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky. According to Lotman and Uspensky, the dualism characteristic of Orthodoxy shaped the Russian culture at large (32). In the Russian imagination, they explained, the whole world was divided into the sacred and the profane, with no neutral term to act as a buffer. Byt – “the reign of stagnation and routine, of daily transience without transcendence, whether spiritual, artistic, or revolutionary” – has therefore traditionally threatened to paralyze the Russian intellectual (Boym, Common Places 30).73 Denounced and feared by Symbolists,
71 “Люди стали понимать, что если они хотят быть публичными людьми, то они должны двигаться в сторону либеральных, или (хоть это и заезжено), европейских ценностей. В сторону того, когда история каждого человека важна.” 72 Elsewhere, Boym notes that poshlost’ has connotations of “sexual indecency, artistic triviality, and lack of spirituality” (“The Poetics of Banality” 61). 73 As Boym explains, byt’s moral dangers have specific connotations of poshlost’. She notes that poshlost’, initially a neutral term that referred to something in the past, acquired a negative meaning with the rise of Romanticism, with
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Bolshevik revolutionaries and late Soviet intellectuals alike, byt in the Russian tradition “precludes any illumination,” which makes it not merely marginal, but dangerous to spiritual and political existence (30).
During the Soviet era, byt provided the basis for unofficial practices and discourses, but, as Kharkhordin points out, this unofficial private life was not explicitly political– rather, it encouraged “self-fashioning” and “revealed the presence of a nonmoral self” (358). Because byt has been historically located on the side of the profane, it could provide some reprieve from political pressures, but it could not be made into a source of either philosophical or political interventions. Thus despite its resemblance to the “private” of Western feminism, byt did not become a site from which the dominant political vision could be contested. Unlike privacy, byt could not nourish a rich inner life or provide important truths with which to alter the political sphere. It could only contaminate the realm of the spirit and political action with mortality and ambivalence. Socialist writers and urban dissidents were united in their unwillingness to listen to voices of byt for fear it would speak irrelevant, embarrassing, suffocating, soul-killing poshlost. The moralizing tone of Astafiev’s depictions of provincial youth is an example of a Russian writer’s response to this existential anxiety felt in the face of byt.
Historically, byt was seen as both dangerous and incapable of sustaining a solid identity, on which resistance could be based. As Goscilo points out, this prejudice against byt amplified the tendency to ignore and silence women’s problems, rendering them a priori unimportant (Dehexing Sex 17).74 Where, then, could lie the solution to sexual violence that occurred in this realm? Where does the reparative drive turn? The only way out of byt’s claustrophobia is to turn towards bytie and seek transcendence. Astafiev’s Lyudochka and Guzel’ Yakhina’s Zuleikha
“its aesthetics of originality, authenticity, and individual genius” (“The Poetics of Banality” 60). This history invests poshlost’ (and with it, byt) with failings that are at once moral and aesthetic: “The discourse on banality in the Russian context reveals a quasi-religious discourse on good and evil superimposed on the Romantic discourse on what is original or common...” (61). 74 Boym describes a similar process of feminization of the poshlost’ concept with reference to Sasha Chernyi’s 1910 poem “Poshlost’,” noting “the use of gendered metaphors in aesthetics, and the ways in which femininity, effeminacy, decadence, excessive ornamentation, and cosmopolitanism become entangled with the idea of bad taste” (“The Poetics of Banality” 65). See pp. 146-147.
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Opens Her Eyes stage their protagonists’ passages towards transcendence through moral blamelessness, sacrificial spirituality or dedication to a utopian community.
1.5.3 Kenosis and Utopia
The Orthodox idea of redemption through sacrifice has had a profound influence on the Russian literary tradition. The religious philosopher George Fedotov, whose work in emigration made him an authority on Russian Orthodoxy in the West (Cassedy 10), described the “spirit of voluntary suffering” central to Orthodox culture (Fedotov 102).75 Discussing “sufferers,” “the most paradoxical order of the Russian saints” (104), Fedotov explains that the idea of kenosis, or emptying the self, involved “poverty, humility, and love, in their complete unity as one inseparable whole” (128). It also involved a humble submission to death, which could bring redemption (106).
Another important aspect of the idea of redemptive suffering was “simplicity of heart” (Arseniev 97, emphasis in original). Nicholas Arseniev explains that this “often naïve and primitive simplicity” was associated with closeness to the Gospel (98). It is most obviously embodied in the figure of the holy fool. An important figure of Russian medieval culture, the holy fool was “a male or female person (or a hagiographical figure) often the subject of a saint’s cult, who makes a public display of his lowliness and uncleanliness” and whose “behavior . . . has a militant edge” (Hunt 2). In the eighteenth century, holy foolishness lost legitimacy in the eyes of the state, but its influence on Russian culture has persisted until today (4-5).
Traces of the holy fool are present in Astafiev’s characterization of Lyudochka. As Nadya Peterson points out in her analysis of the story, Lyudochka’s simplicity reveals Astafiev’s thinly disguised reliance on religious themes: “Astaf’ev’s story conceals the mythological dimension of a young woman’s sacrificial death behind a customary format of a realistic village prose narrative” (251). The story turns on the opposition between the profane world and the higher
75 Cassedy explains that although the idea was influential in Russia before, the term kenosis itself was first used by theologian Mikhail Mikhailovich Tareev in 1892 (11). Though Cassedy has reservations about the extent of the kenotic tradition posited by Fedotov, it is clear that in the nineteenth century at least there was an intellectual tradition that explored the spiritual significance of suffering and humility. Both Tareev and Fedotov were influenced by Dostoevsky’s vision of spirituality (Cassedy 153). The idea of redemption through kenosis and sacrifice remained influential outside of the explicitly religious framework: it has, for example, been important in revolutionary discourse (Blanchard, Mazlish, Wolfenstein).
69 plane, and its protagonist is able to accomplish a transition from one to the other precisely because of her “simplicity of heart” (Arseniev 97). The daughter of an alcoholic, Lyudochka grows up weak and sickly. She is close to the natural world and is at home in the countryside. Astafiev describes her as a struggling student: “Lyudochka was an obedient girl, but learning was tough for her” (367).76 Her judgments and needs are simple, and she does not easily take to urban life, with its drinking, profanity and wild sexuality. In short, Lyudochka is a good girl, and although she is not mentally deficient like the violated girls in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Leo Tolstoy’s Father Sergius, her purity marks her as a martyr.
Lyudochka’s reparative journey involves relinquishing her mortal coil in favour of the realm of the spirit. Her otherworldly orientation is apparent early on, in her profound understanding of the nature of compassion, worthy of Tolstoy’s protagonist in Death of Ivan Ilyich. When a fellow hospital patient dies in her arms, Lyudochka intuitively grasps that what usually passes for compassion is nothing but self-congratulatory posturing. It conceals a secret joy of the living in being better off. Lyudochka knows that the dying man expects more of her. Moreover, she expects more of herself, realizing that she can truly support him only by dying as well. She yearns to embody the indomitable self-sacrificial spirit of captive heroes whose stories she read in textbooks: by dying for her neighbour, she, too, would finally know the strength of her soul.
Stuck in the late Soviet dystopia, Lyudochka can find no resolution on this earth. Her rape is not legally prosecuted, and reparation comes only in the form of her foster father’s revengeand in the life lessons drawn out by the narrator for the benefit of the reader.77 As for Lyudochka herself, her saintly nature guarantees her a moral victory over this corrupt world. Lydochka’s character does not enable a psychological investigation into the experience of a violated woman, but rather plays a transparently metaphorical role in Astafiev’s narrative response to the reality of violence. As Peterson puts it, “Astaf’ev grooms his young woman character for the sacrificial role from the very first” (248). Peterson argues that the author relies on the erasure of the feminine to process
76 “Людочка была послушной девушкой, но учение у неё шло туговато.” 77 Restrained and outwardly gentle, the foster father eschews flashy displays of masculinity valued by the local thugs. When it becomes necessary, he shows himself to be a “real, not made-up boss.” He emasculates Lyudochka’s rapist by throwing him “like a Persian princess” into the poisonous boiling water of factory refuse. This quiet power derives from the foster father’s experience in the labour camps, which becomes the source of a new masculine morality in Astafiev and other late Soviet works. See, for example, Alexander Etkind’s discussion of 1980 Academy Award-winning Russian film Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (Warped Mourning 157).
70 the social catastrophe of the Soviet village (246). The presence of such gendered stereotypes in Astafiev’s work is undeniable, but I am interested in illuminating the structures and themes of Russian cultural mythology on which he draws: notably, the opposition of byt and bytie, and the possibility of spiritual transcendence as a solution to the experience of nonsovereignty and violence.
Guzel’ Yakhina’s 2015 historical novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes offers another spiritual path from suffering to redemption, from gendered oppression to the higher truth of bytie. The novel, which received several major awards in Russia, nineteen translation contracts and a contract for a film adaptation, follows the life of a Tatar peasant woman in the early years of Stalinist terror (Anisimova 2016). Zuleikha is based on the life story of the author’s grandmother, complemented with extensive archival research. The protagonist, Zuleikha, is married at fifteen and buries four daughters by the age of thirty. She is physically and psychologically abused by her mother-in-law and her husband, who also rapes her. Consumed with daily survival, Zuleikha has no time to cultivate interiority or claim ownership of the body that is in so many ways not her own. As long as she is trapped in the essentially premodern peasant byt, she can gain no critical distance from her condition. At the end of each long day of hard labour and beatings, she falls asleep “without opening her eyes” (Yakhina 41).78
Just like Astafiev’s Lyudochka, who makes no dent in the reign of sexual terror in her city, Zuleikha does not speak out to change the way of life in her village. Her deliverance comes from without, in the unlikely form of Red Army soldiers. Her husband is killed during a raid, her mother-in-law abandoned in the ransacked house, and Zuleikha herself is arrested and taken to Kazan. From Kazan, she is shipped to Siberia, together with a crowd of diverse characters. As the train moves further into Russia’s Eastern territories, Zuleikha and her new companions experience hunger, fatigue, disease, mistreatment by authorities, and bureaucratic confusion that is often deadly. Severely diminished in numbers, the prisoners finally arrive at their destination, where they are left to fend for themselves during a long Siberian winter. The officer Ignatov, who is left to guard the prisoners, virtually becomes one of them as he joins others in a fight for
78 “Зулейха, не открывая глаз, шлепает на свой сундук, но не замечает этого – она уже крепко спит.”
71 survival.79 Throughout this journey, Zuleikha learns to take a stand, becomes a huntress and gives birth to a healthy son (whose arrival, incidentally, snaps a fellow prisoner out of a long psychotic episode). Zuleikha and Ignatov eventually fall in love, and the novel ends with them looking at each other, somewhat aged but ready to begin a new stage of their lives together.
The novel contains many references to Tatar folklore, which help build up Zuleikha’s unique perspective on well-known historical events. The character speaks in proverbs and sayings, invokes both Allah and local nature spirits, and refers to her mother-in-law as “Ubyrly Karchyk” – in Tatar folklore, a witch possessed by an evil spirit (11). Yakhina’s extensive treatment of Tatar culture is often brought up in the novel’s reviews. The author herself speaks in interviews about the life of her Tatar grandmother (Zuleikha’s prototype), and the famous actress Chulpan Khamatova admits that Zuleikha led her to reconnect with her own Tatar identity (Khamatova and Yakhina). This attention to the perspective of a Tatar peasant woman, a subject that is marginalized in ethnic and gender terms, could lead us to read the novel as a minority female Bildungsroman, which, as Pin-chia Feng argues, is primarily a counternarrative (18). However, Zuleikha does not seek to expose the unjust oppression of the Tatar minority or demand public acknowledgment of the plight of Tatar women. The novel’s political vision has less in common with the identity-based struggle for justice in the style of a Western democracy than it does with the Socialist ideal of the brotherhood of nations and with the folk and Orthodox vision of a utopian community.
Zuleikha’s deportation to Siberia is a spiritual journey, fulfilling what Nicholas Arseniev calls the Russian “nostalgia for space” (21). This yearning, according to Arseniev, is animated by a “curiosity and restiveness,” but also, and more importantly, “a passionate nostalgia for moral balance and spiritual peace” (21). Although nostalgia orients itself to the past, in this case it acquires a utopian dimension. To understand the cultural significance of utopia, we need to return to Lotman and Uspensky, and their binary model. Lotman and Uspensky explain that the dualistic Russian culture is based on a vision of history as a sequence of radical reversals, rather than continuity (33), which makes it possible that the future could constitute a return to the past,
79 Ignatov resembles the positive hero of Socialist Realism, complete with “ideological conviction, courage, intelligence, will power, patriotism, respect for women, self-sacrifice, etc., etc.” (Tertz 48).
72 and therefore a “regeneration of archaic forms” (33, emphasis in original).80 The utopia in Zuleikha embodies this dynamic: it is at once future-bound and nostalgic. Its roots in the distant, even mythical, past are most explicitly revealed in the name given to the labour village by the deported settlers: Semruk. On one level, the name can be deciphered as “sem’ ruk,” or “seven arms” in Russian: the villagers selected it to honour the four people (one missing an arm) whose work was crucial for collective survival during the first winter (Yakhina 340). On another level, the name has a more specific metaphorical meaning, which cements the mythological significance of this final destination of a communal journey. In the Tatar legend Zuleikha recounts to her son, a flock of birds is searching for the magical bird Semrug. On their journey, the birds traverse highly metaphorical places: the Valleys of Searching, Love, Knowledge, Indifference, Unity, Confusion, and Detachment. When they reach the Kingdom of Eternity, they realize that Semrug is none other but themselves, individually and as a collective (399). Like the birds in the legend, the novel’s many characters of various ethnic and class backgrounds are brought together by hunger and cold, Siberia’s two great equalizers, and held together by a sense of common purpose.
The novel’s depiction of a Siberian utopia is influenced by another important concept in the Russian cultural imaginary: sobornost’, which Boym defines as “spiritual gathering and community” (Common Places 87). Conceived as a specific quality of the Russian soul, sobornost’ emerged in the nineteenth century as the Slavophile philosophers’ answer to the foreign idea of privacy (82). Fyodor Dostoevsky, for example, opposed Western individualism to the Russian people’s ability and desire to sacrifice themselves for the community (136). The labor village in Zuleikha is an embodiment of the notion of sobornost’: a space of unity and fulfilment for subjects displaced by the Stalinist Purges.
Abandoned in the wild, deported intellectuals and decollectivized peasants unite to establish a village on the banks of an inhospitable river. The miraculously surviving elderly aristocrats work together with an old pagan Mari woman, a Chuvash fisherman, a Red Army officer, a criminal, and our small Muslim protagonist, pregnant with the first child of utopia’s new generation. This
80 “…повторные смены могли фактически приводить к регенерации архаических форм.” Boym explains that there is a direct link between this utopian dimension and bytie: if the lived present is the everyday routine of byt, bytie must be located in a radically different future (Common Places 289).
73 place is not paradise, of course: the natural conditions remain cruel, the state’s repressive apparatus seeks to regain control of the village, and Zuleikha’s grown son sets off into the wider world, for which he is woefully unprepared. At the same time, this Gulag is no Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago or Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma: it involves miraculous cures from psychosis, French and anatomy lessons, paintings of Montmartre and clandestine art exhibits.81 At this point, even the naturalism of the prose does not detract from the romanticized character of this depiction. The labour village triumphs over harsh natural conditions and state oppression not through incendiary speech and dissident resistance, but through embodying the ideal of an entirely new, classless and multicultural, society.
While the legend of Semrug lends folk overtones to the novel’s depiction of the labour village, and its utopian character evokes “nostalgia for space” and sobornost’, this vision of multicultural equality also recalls a more specifically political ideology: the Soviet ideal of the brotherhood of nations. In the period depicted in Zuleikha, both utopia and community were key elements of the state ideology. Under Stalin’s leadership, Soviet citizens were expected to build a new society, in which history would culminate and be transcended – the apocalyptic kingdom of Socialism (Groys 69).
The novel’s link with Socialist ideology is not accidental. Zuleikha echoes the Romantic side of Socialist Realism and the Soviet project in general.82 Groys describes the characters in Socialist Realist novels as superhuman demiurges (58) who had to be depicted as ordinary people to protect the reader from their awesome and fearsome true form (60). In more subdued language, Hellbeck echoes Groys’s characterization of Socialist Realist heroes: “Literature was to show the new Soviet citizens what they were at essence but did not yet know they were: expressive individuals with endless creative potential” (29). The deportees in Zuleikha possess some of this larger-than-life quality of Socialist Realist heroes. Just like them, Yakhina’s characters accomplish the impossible through sheer strength of will (Groys 58). Their success at building a
81 Abasheva and Abashev read Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes as part of a literary trend they refer to as “Gulag Lite.” In contrast with the heavy autobiographical accounts by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, the new wave of “camp prose” by contemporary Russian writers depicts Stalinist repressions in a more relatable and palatable way (“Kniga kak simptom”). 82 According to Groys, Soviet Marxism had to become Romantic in order to undertake the unexpectedly difficult task of changing people’s consciousness (Groys 56).
74 utopian community in the Gulag could be seen as confirmation of the truth of Stalin’s infamous speech, given in 1935, at the height of the repressions: “Life has improved, comrades. Life has become more joyful” (Stalin 84).
The novel’s optimistic and just moral universe also seems to overlap with that of the Socialist Realist novels, where good is rewarded and evil is punished. Many of the novel’s chapters end with short passages that tie up loose ends: rendered in cursive font, they cover the future of side characters and assure the reader that everyone gets their just deserts. We learn, for example, that the collaborator Mansurka is killed by outraged neighbours whose property he helped collectivize, that Denisov, the militant propagandist of Socialism in the Tatar countryside, becomes a homeless alcoholic and dies in a labour camp, and that the former domestic servant Grunya, who denounces Professor Leibe, dies in childbirth. The novel’s characterization is often black and white. The main antagonist in the latter part of the novel is a saboteur – a staple of Socialist Realist fiction. An ex-con turned informant, he is trying to thwart collective efforts at surviving and thriving in Siberia. The world that Zuleikha sees with her eyes open may be unpleasant and surprising, but it is rarely ambiguous. Marina Abasheva and Vladimir Abashev explicitly compare Zuleikha’s perception of the world to its depiction in Socialist Realist fiction: both see it as “new, transparent, clear, and as though scrubbed clean” (Abasheva and Abashev).83
The novel is certain about its characters’ potential to achieve redemption. In this reparative narrative, Zuleikha does not need to speak. She achieves redemption not through communicating her trauma, but through learning to see the world clearly and becoming worthy of a utopian community at the end of the line. Every time Zuleikha “opens her eyes” (a refrain repeated throughout the novel), she awakens to changing settings, ranging from the horrifying to the merely very difficult. To escape the violence of byt and enter the Gulag utopia, Zuleikha must be worthy of sobornost’, and she earns this right by being morally blameless. Hard-working and modest, she is an unambiguously good girl, oriented towards the community. Early on in her journey, Zuleikha marvels at the use of the word “I” in Russian grammar, which to her seems excessive (Yakhina 155). If Roman Jakobson argued that Russian has no vocabulary for privacy
83 “Зулейха открывает глаза на мир, который, хорош он или (что случается в её судьбе чаще) до невыносимости плох, предстаёт новым, прозрачным, ясным и каким-то умытым.”
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(Boym, Common Places 2), Zuleikha’s Tatar language emphasizes collectivity even more. Its total erasure of the first person pronoun opens up the danger of domestic despotism and prevents Zuleikha from developing a sense of self. Only after entering the wider Soviet world can she achieve self-actualization, romantic love, and, above all, motherhood.84 Unlike Lyudochka, Zuleikha eventually discovers and claims her own sexuality, but it is always restrained and monogamous. Hers is a sexuality untouched by poshlost’, earned by years of modesty, restraint and guilt. It is contrasted with the promiscuity of the emancipated officer Nastasya, who has no qualms having sex in a mosque next to sleeping Muslim prisoners, and with the moral weakness of Grunya, who denounces her neighbour because her lover has his eye on an extra room. For her part, Zuleikha never becomes selfish, even as she develops a sense of self. The moment her duties as a mother seem to suffer, she gives up her romantic involvement with Ignatov. What matters is that she remains self-sacrificing, because sobornost’ requires precisely that: it is this readiness to sacrifice that gains Zuleikha entry into the collective utopia.
Zuleikha’s journey to reparation begins with a departure from the time of the village, the time of folkloric stories and agricultural seasons. Swept up by the Purges, she escapes it by entering the grand movement of history – which cannot fully redeem her either. In Yakhina’s moral universe, the heroine does not escape domestic violence only to perish in the camps: if the Gulag is her destination, it is there that she must find her reward. In the logic of redemption through suffering, a Gulag utopia ceases to be an oxymoron. It is only when she helps create the utopian community in Siberia that Zuleikha is able to escape from both the horrors of byt and arbitrary state violence. The novel’s reparative narrative culminates in the transcendent spiritual utopia of the Gulag village. Reparation in the novel is therefore effected not through the inclusion of individual voices in a democratic deliberation, and certainly not through the improvement of the characters’ material conditions. Instead, individuals pass from prehistorical and historical violence into the realm of myth and spirituality, where they unite in a community of sobornost’.
84 As Ulitskaya describes it, this is a novel “about woman’s strength and woman’s weakness, about sacred motherhood not in an English children’s bedroom, but in a labour camp, a hellish reserve conceived by one of the greatest evildoers of humankind” (“О женской силе и женской слабости, о священном материнстве не на фоне английской детской, а на фоне трудового лагеря, адского заповедника, придуманного одним из величайших злодеев человечества” [Ulitskaya 6]).
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Astafiev’s Lyudochka and Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes produce reparative narratives in which sexual violence can only be resolved by escaping the existing social order altogether: rising above the fallen world or merging with the collective. In this view, simply speaking about an individual sense of injustice and trauma cannot result in a better reality for all. If evil cannot be resolved on the social level, one must be patient and focus on transcendence, not improvement.
In her reading of perestroika-era Russian women’s fiction, Elizabeth Skomp suggests that this reference to a Christian framework of martyrdom demonstrates “that hope may surface from bleak circumstances and that there is a place in society for these martyr figures” (287). For people in unbearable circumstances, the ideal of redemption can make of victimhood an inhabitable subject position, and thus be life-sustaining. On a more general level, I would argue that the emphasis on transcendence may also serve as a liberating discourse, because it introduces the possibility for the subject to not fully identify with its plight. By contrast, the Western reparative regime of giving voice, with its search for proper terms to refer to people who have experienced sexual violence, obscures and negates the possibility of non-identification.85 To silence violated persons and interpret their experience in service of an ideological agenda is oppression, but to negate the subject’s right to not identify is also a form of tyranny. The reparative model of transcendence may be apolitical in a basic sense, but it acknowledges a legitimate aspect of living as a nonsovereign subject in a violent world.
The dualistic model of reparation that is present in these Russian narratives of sexual violence is clearly at odds with the Western confidence that private suffering can change the public realm. The mechanism of inclusion, so central to Western narratives that I have discussed, is conspicuously absent; instead, it is the movement of separation, and the choice between two options, that is foregrounded. I argue that these structural differences in two reparative models account for the mutual incomprehensibility of discourses that rely on them. In the next section, I
85 Transcendence is not entirely absent from Western feminist discussions, but its role is complex. Naomi Goldenberg argues that the notion perpetuates the binaries that feminism seeks to overcome and that it encourages the projection of responsibility onto “some sort of supernatural agency at work outside ourselves” (67). Pamela Dickey Young, by contrast, argues that feminist critique implies a transcendent orientation: “The political and social visions that spur on feminism are transcendent visions, visions that transcend the here and now” (45). I would argue that this affinity between visions of transcendence and projects of social transformation is based on a shared reparative drive.
77 discuss both the differences and the shared features of reparative narratives that rely on these models, and put forward a critique of the reparative mode itself.
1.6 A Critique of the Reparative Mode
However tempting it may be for a Western feminist to view Russian skepticism about speaking out as a sign of pervasive sexism, or for a Russian commentator to consider Western confession- driven and identity-based politics pointless and self-indulgent, such dismissals fail to acknowledge the existence of culturally specific aesthetics of reparation. North American and (post-)Soviet societies have developed different imaginary structures to deal with the presence of sexual violence in their midst, and these structures can be mutually incomprehensible, but they rely on the same reparative drive. Since Western anti-rape feminism is not a definitive model of reparation, but a historically specific development that enables certain ways of speaking and precludes others (Sielke 13), a functioning critique of Russia’s ideological landscape would need to begin with its own categories, rather than the Western speakout framework.
1.6.1 Dualism and Separation
Whether driven by the need to include or the need to separate, reparative narratives do not unproblematically deliver on their promise to restore wholeness. In the case of the dualistic model I traced in the Russian narratives, the problems are obvious. The byt and bytie binary maps all too easily on the opposition between good and evil and on the relationship between the self and the other. As is evident in Astafiev’s outrage about Western music, and more troublingly, in reductive depictions of ethnic minorities in his fiction,86 dualistic thinking leads to chauvinistic hatred of those others who are associated with the realm of the profane.
The separation of aspects of life into the spiritually significant and the everyday devalues experiences that are coded as profane, which often means that women’s concerns, including experiences of sexual violence, are dismissed in advance (Goscilo, Dehexing Sex 17). The paternalistic discourses of the Soviet and Russian states, of twentieth century male dissidents and of twenty-first century female actresses who condemn the North American speakout mania
86 See Natan Eidelman’s critique of Astafiev’s depiction of Jews, Georgians and Mongols in his letter to Astafiev (“Iz perepiski N.Y.Eidel’mana s V.P.Astaf’evym”).
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(Silaeva), all reveal how such a dualism can sustain sexism couched in spiritual or philosophical terms. The vision of gendered martyrdom in particular naturalizes violence against women and prescribes a restrictive role for people affected by it: Lyudochka can be saved, but only if she remains pure, and preferably dies as a martyr. As we have seen in Astafiev’s story, this dualistic model enforces a regime of obligatory saintliness, which provides no way out of the suffering caused by external violence, except through meekness and martyrdom that result in transcendence.
The dualist reparative model also fosters an apolitical stance. The focus on bytie orients people from earthly politics towards kenosis and redemption, neither of which are conducive to pragmatic work on practical improvements of life (Boym, Common Places 83). At worst, this approach can justify nationalist and religious arguments in favour of highly conservative laws. The binary structure of the Russian cultural imaginary limits potential political alternatives to the choice between the totalitarian order and total chaos (240), in which case submitting to a strong leader could seem preferable to complete social disintegration. Ingrid Oswald and Viktor Voronkov argue that this habitual reliance on a tzar figure precludes political involvement: after all, “it is difficult to bargain in practical matters with a saviour” (21). The political consequences of the cultural valorization of kenosis and bytie have a particular relevance in Russia now, with the Orthodox Church a strong political player that influences secular legislation, as in the case of domestic violence law discussed at the beginning of this chapter.87 The Church’s involvement illustrates the political uses of the supposedly apolitical idea of spiritual transcendence.
The notion of individual kenosis complements the ideal of fidelity to the country as a suprapersonal entity whose suffering is more important than that of individuals. We see this dynamic at play in post-Stalinist Russian culture: Platt explains that the discursive regime inaugurated by Khrushchev’s speech displaced the focus from personal trauma to a collective wound in the social body. Healing the Soviet society became everyone’s responsibility, while individual experiences of suffering were left unacknowledged. In Platt’s words, “the traumatic suffering of individuals provided the raw material for a social-disciplinary mechanism” (673). This appeal of collectivity evokes the idea of sobornost’ celebrated in Zuleikha, and reveals its
87 See p. 25.
79 dark side: the idealization of community can feed conservative agendas and promote submission to state power (Boym, Common Places 87). It is not a coincidence that in the increasingly conservative atmosphere in contemporary Russia, literature has recently seen a tendency to emphasize the characters’ inability to resist any larger power and the consequent importance of forbearance (Breininger).
Lotman and Uspensky’s model is invaluable in understanding the cultural mythology that organizes and influences potential responses to the problem of violence. There is, however, a risk inherent in operating with this binary model: the temptation to project it onto the lived reality of a cultural space. Marcus Levitt points out this danger in his introduction to Times of Trouble: Violence in Russian Literature and Culture, acknowledging that the model of Russian dualism, while useful “for understanding the psychology of and philosophical justification for violence, which is typically the product of maximalist ‘yes or no’ thinking,” can also “confuse cultural mythology and ideological projection with objective reality” (7).88 Boym also warns that binary theories, such as the ones common to early semiotics, reify Russia’s national narrative (Common Places 30). The notion that Russians think dualistically and prefer separation to inclusion is also an operative stereotype in negative and exoticizing representations of Russia in the West, in which the country appears as aggressively backward, anti-liberal, and patriarchal. The Russian government’s own heavy reliance on the opposition between Russia and “European values,” of course, does not help. Still, as discussed before, such stereotypes obscure the complexity of cultural dynamics in Russia, the limitations of Western models and the common reparative drive that unites the “irrational” idea of kenosis and the “rational” idea of inclusion.
88 The ambivalence of this framework can be tricky to negotiate, and the difficulties of thinking in dualist terms are manifest in Levitt’s introduction to the collection. The introduction steers clear from reifying “the country’s endemic violence” (3), but in an attempt to retract this initial overstatement, posits a particular “cultural imperative to mythologize violence,” suggesting that Russian culture is singularly obsessed with the question: “For the cultural historian, what seems most conspicuous about political violence in Russia is not so much its existence or scale as the fact that throughout Russian history violence has been acknowledged and articulated as a central problem, whether in the realm of theology, ethics, or politics” (4). For the comparatist, the presence of extensive cultural mythology on the subject of violence is not in itself conspicuous. Rather, what is interesting are the ideas and conceptual moves that structure it. Indeed, the analysis of specific forms of cultural mythology of violence is what Levitt and Novikov’s edited volume does best.
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1.6.2 Inclusion
The connection between victimhood and the politics of ressentiment, as well as, even more uncomfortably, neoliberalism, has long been a problem for Western feminism. The feminist speakout model was criticized from the start for indulging fantasies of victimhood at the expense of responsible and realistic representation. Betty Friedan accused anti-rape feminism of “wallowing in that victim-state” as early as 1981 (362), and the voices of Katie Roiphe (1993) and Laura Kipnis (2015) followed suit. Although their harsh critiques have been controversial, they point to problematic aspects of identity positions produced in the speakout paradigm.
The insistence on victimhood proposes a solution to suffering that involves constructing a particular identity position, asserting a certainty in historical truth and promoting a heroic narrative that links private pain with public transformation. The reparative trauma framework promises a privileged access to truth, which is supposed to ease repetitive, unconscious pain, or even set the subject free from it. The 1990s recovered memory movement, popularized by talk shows and holistic therapy discourse, embodies the idea’s appeal (Ballinger 100). The false memory controversy that followed, in which parents of some traumatized people contested the reliability of memories of abuse, points to its limits. It seems more accurate and practical to focus on the kinds of agency and relief that the trauma framework provides than on its ability to establish factual truth. But even these benefits of trauma discourse are not uncomplicated.
Despite involving the visceral experience of the body, the truth of trauma is mediated through medical, theoretical, and literary languages. As Brison explains, a familiarity with the medical language of trauma is often essential for accessing help: “it would be prudent for a patient – or would-be patient – to get her symptoms to conform to those of a disease meeting the criteria set for ‘serious’ treatment, including insurance coverage” (80). Mastery of the language of trauma can be a practical and empowering tool, but it comes at a price. Drawing new subjects into the existing discourse of trauma may reduce the specificity of their experience and deny them the right to idiosyncratic interpretation. In one extreme but revealing example, the US evangelical influence on international human trafficking laws resulted in the requirement that victims demonstrate helplessness and good morals in order to be “deserving” of help (J. Johnson, Gender Violence in Russia 124). Casting the sufferers as powerless, the imposed standard of victimhood can thus “subjugate and immobilize victims in the very act of recognizing their suffering” (Antze
81 and Lambek xxiv). The traumatized subject is turned towards a central event in the past, which is theoretically identified with the impersonal concept of trauma, but, in the case of sexual violence, is also always embodied in a perpetrator who possesses initiative and agency. Defined by trauma, the subject can only focus on the secondary activity of healing from it, working through it, and speaking about it. The survivor’s agency and even subjectivity are thus derived from the traumatic event.
The problematic connotations of the term “victim” have led activists to advocate for an alternative term – “survivor” (Gupta). Seeking to define survivorship as a more fluid and diverse category, feminists have also contested the connotations of this term. Writing about her experience of a bad relationship that ended in gang rape Roxane Gay assures her readers that one does not have to be strong to be a survivor (144): one can be “a heroine with issues,” “brave but flawed” (146). Nevertheless, the popular identity of a survivor inevitably draws on a specific set of references. During Lady Gaga’s performance of her Oscar-nominated song “Til It Happens To You” at the 2016 Academy Awards, the stage was filled with young people who had phrases like “not your fault,” “unbreakable,” and “survivor” written on their arms.89 The episode shows how “survivor” can become a distinct identity position, complete with cultural references to the 1990s Riot Grrrl movement, a media-friendly narrative of campus rape and the endorsement of the Hollywood establishment.
In contrast with this spectacular crowd of survivors, grassroots initiatives like Support zine highlight a variety of survivor behaviours, aiming for a humbler and more practical approach. Despite its stated resistance to “formulas” and “simple answers,” Support nevertheless targets an imagined community of self-identified survivors who narrate their experience in the languages developed by survivor activism (Crabb, “Intro” 1). The zine’s multiplicity of voices and its recognition of ambivalence are sustained by a single reparative framework of survival. Committed to precision and inclusivity, grassroots initiatives like Support produce detailed behavioural guides to not being raped and not raping. These guides aim to be proscriptive while not being judgmental (an essentially impossible aim, because a degree of judgment is always
89 The song is part of the soundtrack of The Hunting Ground, a 2015 documentary on campus rape. Its music video, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, contains fairly graphic scenes of sexual violence on campus.
82 involved in endorsing a particular, if diverse, vision of the world). Some attempt to do so by shifting focus from security to sexual freedom and sex positivity, but these approaches are also haunted by didacticism. The vision of “good sex” in Charlotte Shane’s “Dear Pubescent Charlotte, You Are Sexually Powerful” (an online article that the author describes as “a letter to my younger self”), is compelling because it reduces available options for behaviour: either one is brainwashed into negative patriarchal sexual attitudes, or one embraces sex positivity and is redeemed: “Your curiosity and lust are natural assets, not character flaws.” This narrative makes it seem that embracing one’s sexuality can liberate sex from patriarchy and return it to its original purpose of empowerment and pleasure. Yet access to healing and liberation through self- knowledge has never been universal.
Much progressive work relies on the assumption that the truth of rape can be revealed and rape culture finally eradicated, if all categories of victim are included and if their suffering is expressed correctly. This logic has resulted in increased insight and a relief of suffering for many, but it has also restricted the repertoire of responses to suffering, prioritizing one particular view of reparation. The Western speakout model privileges dramatic models of resistance: the bold rape survivor who reveals her private pain so as to combat the patriarchal regime, the brave dissident denouncing state crimes in a crowd of collaborationists. This model obscures alternative ways of relating to suffering and injustice, creating “its own silences that are as meaningful as the silences with which dominant culture has veiled sexual violence” (Sielke 13). Even when it is radically inclusive and politically sound, feminist reparative discourse can flatten subtleties (Berlant 7). One example of this simplification is the silencing of the possibility of silence. Western critics of the speakout model suggest that some subjects in some circumstances may prefer not to speak. As Cheryl Glenn explains, undervaluing the political potential of silence leads to a misrecognition of its effects: “. . . silence is too often read as simple passivity in situations where it has actually taken on an expressive power: when it denotes alertness and sensitivity; when it signifies attentiveness or stoicism, and particularly when it allows new voices
83 to be heard” (18).90 Just as forgetting may be necessary to find stability in a post-traumatic existence, so can silence be “a rich site for political and personal transformation” (Lorenzi 24).
Because of this exclusion of alternative possibilities for dealing with what does not work, reparative forms of feminism, when taken into global contexts, can suffer from parochialism – or even cultural imperialism, in the case of Western discourses that benefit from the dominant position of societies in which they originate. Postcolonial scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Lila Abu-Lughod point out that while feminism may be marginalized in Western societies, its self-assured theoretical advance can overlap with imperialist projects. The totalizing potential of feminist discourse becomes painfully obvious if we consider its recent history in Russia. In the 1990s, local activists had help from abroad in the form of financial aid, training, and even language: Russian feminists used translated slogans and terms to talk about violence against women. The Russian word for “gender” – gender – is itself a direct borrowing from English. Feminism already had the unsavoury reputation of something bourgeois; now, this foreign influence made it seem even more alien. Foreign funding reinforced internal divisions, rewarding those initiatives that could be rendered in Western terms and those activists who could speak good English. Russian feminism became visible from abroad, but at home it remained an unpopular movement of an intellectual, Western-oriented minority.
Deflecting the possibility that the ideal of the speakout might itself be a flawed, context-specific way of coping with certain environments, the Western reparative approach instead focuses on the incompleteness of discourse about sexual violence. The discourses at work in feminist reparation (trauma, victimhood, survivorship and even sex positivity) have contributed to figuring rape as “a trope of (identity) politics” (Sielke 149). Having denounced patriarchal views of sexual violence as the victim’s own problem, feminism individualised sexual violence once again, this time in a new, neoliberal, way.
North American feminist activism and trauma discourse exist in the context of the Western neoliberal democracy: a context which they may disavow or reject, but by which they are necessarily shaped. Wendy Brown describes neoliberalism as “an order of normative reason”
90 Chloë Taylor similarly puts forward the option of “autobiographical silence” as an alternative to what she sees as a violent, self-perpetuating and ultimately ineffective practice of confession (12).
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(Undoing the Demos 30) that exceeds its role as a type of economic structure. Its logic is expansive: Brown writes that it “disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities” (31). According to Fraser, feminism was permeated by neoliberal logic in the 1990s, when its demands for social justice were replaced with a focus on personal development (“Feminism’s Two Legacies” 702-703). Fraser argues that this process was not so much a hijacking of a fundamentally socialist movement as a result of “an underlying elective affinity” between feminism and neoliberalism (705). Although feminism can certainly work as an egalitarian and anti-establishment movement, it can also share the neoliberal focus on individualism and on a “critique of traditional authority” (710). Erica Edwards describes this shift from solidarity to individualism within black feminism, when empowering narratives of triumphant black women became widely available for consumption and eclipsed the radical critique of class, race and gender relations (79). A parallel development may be traced in trauma studies: Paul Antze and Michael Lambek write that the therapeutic focus of some trauma discourses contributed to “a shift in moral focus from collective obligations to narratives of individual suffering” (xxiv).
In addition to individualizing political problems, both feminist ideas and neoliberal ideology provide subjects with a sense of empowerment. Speaking out can be a special pleasure. Chloë Taylor describes it as follows: “By speaking about sex with the preconception that one is repressed, one gratifyingly feels that one is acting therapeutically for oneself and that one is being a political agent for a more liberated society in the process” (74). As a recognizable expression of identity, speech gives the individual a feeling of legitimacy and empowerment. Incidentally, empowerment is a key characteristic of Brown’s “neoliberal homo oeconomicus,” defined as “human capital seeking to strengthen its competitive positioning and appreciate its value, rather than as a figure of exchange or interest” (Undoing the Demos 33). Ofra Koffman, Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill provide a useful example of this intersection of feminism and neoliberalism: they link the neoliberalization of the feminist project with “selfie humanitarianism,” in which identity is privileged over justice, and “helping others is intimately connected to entrepreneurial projects of the self, and is increasingly figured less in terms of redistribution or justice than in terms of a makeover of subjectivity for all concerned” (157). The trauma framework can also foster individual empowerment. Michael Kenny argues that the role of a traumatized person allows those who embrace it to feel secure in their innocence and shift
85 all responsibility for unhappiness onto other people and external events (155).91 Identification with persecuted innocence sets in motion the dynamic of ressentiment, which shapes both identity politics and feminist critique, and, as Wendy Brown argues, is fuelled both by an experience of “powerlessness or dispossession” and a sense of moral superiority (States of Injury 46). This paradoxically empowering position of the victim accounts for part of the appeal of the language of trauma, but it does not account for the differences in structural position that determine a given individual’s ability to benefit from identifying as a victim.
The logic of inclusion works as an ever-expanding taxonomy, with new identities and subject positions regularly revealed as having existed in silence and obscurity. Under what Brown describes as “neoliberal rationality” (Undoing the Demos 20), excluded subjects do indeed receive voices, but a voice is not the same thing as total freedom to speak and act. In practical terms, a voice can claim a repertoire of speech actions within an existing political field. The logic of inclusion thereby brings previously excluded subjects into “neoliberal rationality” (20), where the revolutionary joy of changing things is institutionalised and domesticated.
The consequences of this development have included the popularization and commodification of the language and narratives of both feminism and trauma. This generalization of trauma discourse allowed Judith Herman to describe her Trauma and Recovery as “a book about commonalities . . . between the survivors of vast concentration camps created by tyrants who rule nations and the survivors of small, hidden concentration camps created by tyrants who rule their homes” (3). LaCapra argues that such facile parallels between the Holocaust and domestic violence deny historic specificity to instances of trauma and dulls the theory’s political edge (64). According to the logic of “commonalities,” all history becomes a history of trauma and being an individual becomes synonymous with being traumatized (64). As a result, allegations of workplace harassment can draw on the language developed around “truly horrible events” such as the Holocaust (Leys 2). One process related to this overgeneralization is the commodification of the language of trauma, and of specific events and experiences classified as traumatic. Terri Tomsky describes this process as an international “trauma economy, a circuit of movement and
91 A social anthropologist, Kenny compares the conventional image of a trauma survivor to that of a victim of witchcraft, both being beset by unfortunate events perpetrated by a malevolent external agent (152).
86 exchange where traumatic memories ‘travel’ and are valued and revalued along the way” (59). The unequal distribution of media attention given to individual experiences of sexual violence is clearly affected by the trauma economy. In covering stories of campus rape, mainstream media strongly prefer stories about “young white co-eds in trouble” (Baker). Greater inclusivity cannot address this structural problem: Edwards warns, for example, that films about black women’s empowerment, such as the Hollywood adaptation of Push, could enable “self-righteous fetishizations of black deviance and facile celebrations of black survival” (88).
Finally, because the discourse of trauma and empowerment follows the neoliberal logic of inclusion, it is vulnerable to another problem of democracy: it can be employed to articulate any views, including those unpalatable to the liberal milieu in which trauma language originated. In her 1992 article, Nancy Fraser argues that even antidemocratic voices are a necessary side effect in a functioning democracy. What the article does not mention is that anti-egalitarian and xenophobic populist voices are not just an aberration to be tolerated: more troublingly, they make use of the same structure of ressentiment that fuels sexual abuse support groups and feminist politics. This means that the mere act of speaking about one’s trauma does not secure a predetermined ethical meaning or guarantee certain political consequences.
The limits of the speakout model described above are specific to the Western neoliberal democracy, and the emancipatory critiques produced within it. Although I have contrasted this model with the Russian opposition between byt and bytie, the two approaches are linked by the fundamental drive to repair social or individual injuries, either through an orientation towards a higher realm, or through gradual inclusion of injured subjects and refinement of types of injury. In the next section, I will show how a recognition of differences between culturally specific manifestations of reparation, and of the limits of the reparative mode itself, can allow for a more nuanced conversation about the role of speech in projects of reparation.
1.6.3 The Role of Speech in Reparation
At a 1977 roundtable discussion, Michel Foucault argued that the view of rape as sexual violence (as opposed to simply violence) enabled social and political powers to further police and discipline sexuality (Cahill 144). This statement, rightly criticised as masculinist and patriarchal by subsequent feminist commentators (145), nevertheless contains an insight that should not be
87 dismissed and could help us temper reparative optimism. The movement outward from the personal to the political is mirrored by a movement inward. Intimate revelations do not simply facilitate the conquest of the public sphere by private truth, but also render everything that exists in private intelligible to the external gaze of society and the state. Under this gaze, sexuality and subjectivity can be taxonomized and controlled. Speaking out may appear as a liberation of suppressed truth, but Foucault argues that
one has to have an inverted image of power in order to believe that all these voices which have spoken so long in our civilization – repeating the formidable injunction to tell what one is and what one does, what one recollects and what one has forgotten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not thinking – are speaking to us of freedom. (60)
In Foucault’s account, Western societies, starting with the Victorian era, have invested sex with the secret of subjectivity itself, and set out to uncover that secret: “What is peculiar to modern societies [is] that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret” (35). Today, it is sexual violence that plays this role: it is believed to hide truths that can be exposed, down to the smallest detail and subcategory, and mobilized for political change. In a piece called “Frozen Inside,” the editor of Support zine Cindy Crabb calls on her readers to turn inwards and examine their behaviour: “Look at your life for real” (39). The pursuit of sexuality without violence necessarily involves self-interrogation, and the zine includes a detailed list of eighty-three questions that could enable the reader to undertake intense scrutiny of unconscious attitudes. The commitment to diversity and specificity here acquires an almost inquisitorial tone, with questions phrased in stiff politicized language: “74. Are you attracted to people with a certain kind of gender presentation? 75. Have you ever objectified someone’s gender presentation?” (4). While the questionnaire’s investigative powers may be intrusive but ultimately nonviolent, in other circumstances the same demand for self-examination can be used for the explicit exercise of power over bodies.
Chloë Taylor explores the workings of power in such self-revelatory speech in The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault (2008). For Taylor, confession is distinguished from testimony by its orientation inward: speech can be seen as confessional when “the subject finds this hard to say, looks inside herself to say it, and is changed by what she says” (8). The association between confession and healing, she points out, is a specific reading (“a gratifying
88 misunderstanding,” in Taylor’s words) of psychoanalysis, which exaggerates its “immediate medicinal effect” and leaves out Freud’s own reservations about it (108).92 Confession, Taylor argues, actually provides a more reliable benefit: the “narcissistic and erotic pleasure” of revealing one’s shame and guilt (79). Whether experienced as an individual catharsis of the self or an invitation to confess directed towards the other, this confessional desire is fraught: in the former case, it locks us in specific identities and “deprives subjects of pleasures set outside the margins of their particular categories of individualization” (79), in the latter, it is a demand that the other assimilate its alterity into the discursive regime created by the confession.93
The latent violence of confession becomes visible in the totalitarian Soviet state, which certainly considered personal life to be a political question. The case of the Soviet subject, which, to borrow Foucault’s phrase, “confesses – or is forced to confess,” highlights the coercive aspect of the mechanics of truth production (Foucault 59). Under state Socialism, the private sphere harboured much that could be denounced and revealed in the service of a total restructuring of society and subjectivity.
In a study of the history of Soviet discourse Oleg Kharkhordin expands and revises the Foucauldian framework, arguing that we need to look beyond confession to “other practices to transform and work on the self” (7). He explains that the Soviet discursive regime was shaped by the Orthodox tradition, in which confession was both less important than in the West and more closely tied with the state power, and that both the religious tradition of confession and its lay version in psychoanalysis were suppressed by the Revolution (7). According to Kharkhodin, Soviet techniques of truth-production included secular versions of “revelation of sins,
92 Taylor points out that Freud had to confront the therapeutic limits of cathartic speech during the unsuccessful treatment of Anna O (106). 93 Taylor describes the violent nature of the injunction to confess as follows: “. . . the demand that the other confess, or that she reciprocate a confession and counter-confess, is very often a request that she do violence to her alterity. . . when the other resists doing this violence to herself, so great is the desire for confession that she may find herself confessed for, assimilated or ‘translated’ despite herself into the desires of the confessing subject . . .” (168). In place of an uncritical celebration of confession, Taylor advocates for careful use of autobiographical discourses: “We therefore need not simply to speak more, or to speak about and make others speak about what we think is repressed. Rather, we need to choose to speak or to remain silent in ways which cultivate autonomy and subvert the workings of discipline” (196). This conscious approach to speaking would enable “liberating practices of self-care and care for others” (230), among which she includes feminist practices such as “…consciousness raising, as well as women’s self-help groups, therapy, autobiographical writing and image making or art production” (230). Like Taylor, I seek not to devalue the usefulness of the speakout form, but to advocate for its critical understanding and application.
89 admonition to right behavior, and excommunication” (355). This became especially true after Khrushchev’s revision of Stalinist Socialism, when individual responsibility before the collective became an internalized imperative (356). The Soviet discursive regime relied on “a regular review of sainthood of each individual” (359). Kharkhordin highlights the importance of the group in the Soviet version of confession:
…the Western individual was produced by confessing matters of sex, or by some parallel hermeneutic analysis of desire: by confessing to a priest, to a psychoanalyst, to a diary. By contrast, the Russian individual was produced by submitting to consideration by the relevant group that reviewed his or her morality, a procedure rooted in the practices of penance in the public gaze. (356)
This orientation towards the collective was complemented by “a secular technique of self- planning or self-programming, which was superimposed on hero identification following the doctrinal requirements of the Bolshevik discourse” (357). Hellbeck describes this state-fostered process of self-examination as follows:
In the double context of potent revolutionary narratives of self-transformation and a regime of political surveillance that monitored self-expression for what it revealed about individuals’ subjective essence, people could not but be aware of their duty to possess a distinct “biography,” to present it publicly, and to work toward self-perfection. (7)
Soviet citizens were thus expected to examine their inner world and behaviour, and at the same time subject others to scrutiny, in the name of the health and wholeness of the collective. The Soviet subject described by Kharkhordin and Hellbeck, oriented towards the “enlarged life of the collective . . . as the source of true subjecthood” (Hellbeck 10)94 looks significantly different
94 This avowed orientation towards the collective in Soviet diaries examined by Hellbeck does not, of course, mean, that the Soviet subject was a fundamentally non-individual or at least non-individualistic. As Hellbeck points out, official ideology itself emphasized the individual: “The ideal of the Stalinist state was voluntarist; it privileged the individual rather than the collective as the defining basic entity of human behavior; it also rehabilitated the individual soul as the basis of the conscious will. The Stalinist ideological apparatus cultivated individual biographies, emphasizing the making of exceptional personalities rather than the exceptional deeds of inanimate machines” (26). What is important to my argument is not the supposed nature of the subject, Soviet or Western feminist, but the divergencies and echoes in the way the relationship between the personal and the political is imagined in the act of the subject’s speaking.
90 from the Western individualist subject that examines her sexual behaviour, but both share a demand for constant vigilance. This connection reveals the disciplinary potential of the reparative mode. The need for reparation sets in motion the demand for confession, which produces the conditions not only for inclusion and empowerment, but also for policing and oppression.
For alternatives to being stuck in the unrelenting Foucauldian paradox of speech as an instrument of power, I propose looking to the Soviet society once again. Because the efficacy of speaking out was limited by the state, several alternative ways of dealing with hardship emerged and were elaborated: speaking between the lines (Boym, Common Places 1),95 separating empty state rhetoric from sincerely held Socialist ideals (Yurchak, “Soviet Hegemony of Form” 480),96 telling political jokes, fostering informal relationships of mutual favours (Oswald and Voronkov 17) and generally pursuing a livable life outside of political action. None of these approaches are inherently better than Western-style identity politics and survivor speakouts. My point is rather that they constitute specific attitudes, behaviours and identities that emerge in response to the political environment, which they resist even as they are shaped by it. As discussed above, Russian resistance to feminism is not simply a sign of knee-jerk sexism, but also an expression of skepticism about the political power of speech. This chapter has shown that this is not an unreasonable attitude. The political act of speaking out does not just liberate the oppressed: it rearranges the discursive field in a new way.
The value of such skepticism extends beyond societies with state-controlled public discourse. It can also be helpful in considering the uneven history of the feminist speakout in North America. Lacanian cultural theorist Renata Salecl suggested that Eastern Europe can be seen as “a symptom through which the inherent contradictions of liberal democracy became visible” (Spoils of Freedom 77). The failures of the feminist framework in Russia shed light on the structural limits of the North American feminist discourse, and therefore provide insight into its domestic
95 Boym writes that “[t]his peculiar form of communication ‘with halfwords’” means that “the American metaphors for being sincere and authentic – ‘saying what you mean,’ ‘going public,’ and ‘being straightforward’ - do not translate properly into the Soviet and Russian contexts” (Common Places 1). 96 According to Yurchak, the late Soviet discursive regime was shaped by a “heteronymous shift,” in which official Socialist discourse was separated from Soviet ideals and its use became pragmatic (“Soviet Hegemony of Form” 480-481).
91 successes and failures. Even in the West, the feminist movement has experienced setbacks, and the changes for which it advocates take a long time to be put in practice. Some of the movement’s failures have to do with the larger society’s reactionary resistance, but some problems, I would argue, are endemic to the feminist discourse itself. Speaking one’s truth, however much confidence it may inspire, is not necessarily revolutionary; its success is not guaranteed, and its consequences are complex. These consequences are rendered visible by a comparison of clashing reparative discourses.
1.7 Conclusion
Eric Santner’s notion of “narrative fetishism” is a helpful, though not exhaustive, explanation of the limits of reparative approaches. Santner introduces the term “narrative fetishism” to describe a specific strategy of not working through historical trauma, which involves leaving out traumatic elements from the account of history in an effort to preserve a sense of wholeness: “By narrative fetishism I mean the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into being in the first place” (144). Santner contrasts this avoidant approach with the real work of mourning, which involves dealing with anxiety-provoking elements and incorporating them into the story. He cites feminist critique as an example of a theoretical approach that enables real mourning, because of its “willingness or capacity to include the traumatic event in one’s efforts to reformulate and reconstitute identity” (152-153).
In this chapter, I have proposed a more pessimistic view of emancipatory discourses, including feminist ones. In the fictional narratives and theoretical models I discussed, sexual violence appears as a traumatic tear in the fabric of reality. Whether it is seen as a tragedy that tarnishes an individual life or a structural injustice that creates a toxic social order, it is posited as something that should be (or has been) addressed. The reparative mode thus functions not through the disavowal of trauma but through its incorporation into speech, using the process to restore a sense of present wholeness, or a promise of a future one.
In Western narratives about sexual violence, reparation is expected to occur in the public sphere, conceptualized as a place of potential knowledge and justice. In Russian narratives, reparation occurs in a radically different space of spiritual transcendence or utopian community. What
92 unites post-Soviet realism with feminist trauma novels is the ultimate certainty that social and individual problems can be resolved, in theory if not in practice, and that aesthetic forms have political power. In both traditions, the issue of sexual violence is believed to be open to change: if only it can be articulated right, rendered visible and then either eradicated or transcended.
In both contexts, however, this confidence has been questioned. Just as the Russian public had to face the failure of glasnost, the feminist movement now faces the limits of speaking as a political strategy, challenged, for example, in articles and online discussions that argue for survivors’ right to silence. Based on her experience of theorizing trauma while dealing with the consequences of a violent assault, Susan Brison admits that the epistemological satisfaction promised by pursuing a traumatic memory is not guaranteed: “It has been hard for me, as a philosopher, to learn the lesson that knowledge isn’t always desirable, that the truth doesn’t always set you free” (20). The pursuit of the truth of sexual violence leads us into the depths of the private and out into the open space of the polis, but we can neither control what we find there nor be certain what effects our search might have.
The structure and energy of the reparative mode are often invaluable in personal and collective emancipatory projects, which result in a relief of suffering and facilitate flourishing. The satisfaction that reparative models provide helps us move through dark times and get things done. Nevertheless, this drive towards reparation cannot be pre-emptively defined as a success. It is important to recognize that the reparative mode accomplishes things in a particular way, which means that at best, its usefulness is limited, and at worst, it can be a distracting, constraining, or violent force. The solutions it proposes may well be delusional and exclusionary, as it imposes identity categories, behavioural strategies and narrative arcs onto diverse and diversely traumatized subjects.
As discussed in this chapter, the commitment to repair can result in a forcible resolution of problems and ambiguities, such as the Soviet state’s insistence that women’s problems have been extinguished and the North American consent campaigns’ expectations that people know exactly what they want at all times. An unquestioned confidence in the possibility of restoring the world’s wholeness and coherence obscures the complex effects of the two related manifestations of the reparative mode, speaking out and transcendence. Speaking out, staged and problematized in North American trauma fiction, is not universally accessible. Its effects are ambiguous, as it
93 can be both empowering and harmful. Finally, it makes traumatic experiences available for consumption within “trauma economy” and for political use in projects fueled by ressentiment. At the same time, the insistence of Russian realist fiction that redemption and transcendence are available only to the morally blameless tacitly supports the patriarchal status quo, in which some subjects are more sexually vulnerable and structurally exposed to violation. These historical problems point to problems inherent in the very idea of reparation.
What limits the reparative drive that underlies both Western speakouts and Russian hopes of redemption? Why does the impulse to tackle problems head on, reveal the wrongs and come up with solutions, not result in a life that is more livable, rather than simply more well-ordered? At the structural level, the culprit is neither the Soviet government nor the Western entertainment industry. Every political or ethical solution must exist as an aesthetic object: represented in words, imagined in spatial metaphors, and fleshed out with examples that in turn shape the theories they illustrate. In this sense, politics exists as aesthetics. At the same time, contrary to the feminist approach to literary representations of rape, politics and aesthetics are not one. It is this gap between the performative political impulse and its existence in representation, in an aesthetic form, that makes political interventions inherently appropriable. In other words, intention does not determine realization: what has been conceived as socially transformative does not necessarily have a socially transformative effect. Rita Felski writes:
. . . one must realize that the ideological function of aesthetic autonomy in modern Western societies is a fundamentally ambivalent one . . . The text’s relative autonomy, as embodied in its formally mediated relationship to ideology, can be appropriated by both conservative and radical positions, depending upon whether its affirmative/compensatory or its negative/contestatory function is foregrounded. (178)
To rephrase Rita Felski’s argument about feminist literature, there is no link between textual and social subversion. In this context, we could read Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya’s refusal to identify as feminist (Goscilo, Dehexing Sex 5) as a refusal, among other things, of the unquestioned equation of representation (right behaviour, right words, right beliefs, right laws) with political transformation, characteristic of certain kinds of Western feminism and other social justice movements.
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Despite having seemingly little in common, North American anti-rape feminism and post- Stalinist state rhetoric in Russia both rely on assigning the affected person a specific role, which, as I discussed earlier, can have unwanted political and personal consequences. Grounded in victim positions, these narratives can be easily instrumentalized in the politics of ressentiment or conservative nationalist projects. The cures and solutions formulated in the reparative mode rely on collapsing the distinction between aesthetic representation and political intervention. Fictional narratives are well-suited to this work of reparation, since they produce specific descriptions of what can fill gaps and heal wounds caused by sexual violence. Yet this tendency towards closure coexists in the reparative mode with an opposing drive to continuously defer resolution in pursuit of an impossible state of final wholeness. While the reparative mode seeks out new territories within sexual and social relations to illuminate and colonize with discourse, violence and vulnerability remain. With every new solution, the dark, destructive aspects of intersubjective sexuality are pushed into yet another elsewhere. This is why, despite producing coherent narratives of moral fortitude or political change, the reparative mode relies on a never-ending supply of pain and horror. At any moment, the poisonous river described in Astafiev’s “Lyudochka” can exceed its metaphorical function, flood the banks of the reparative narrative, and take over the whole city. If the reparative mode insists that the flow of violence and suffering can be localized and purified or transformed into empowering knowledge, the radical mode, the subject of the next chapter, is based on acknowledging the irreducible and insistent presence of the dark and the violent at the core of human existence.
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Chapter 2. The Radical Mode in Vladimir Sorokin’s Marina’s Thirtieth Love and Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl 2.1 Introduction
The previous chapter distilled the features of the reparative mode by analyzing narratives of sexual violence that are oriented towards resolution. Whether it is imagined as psychological healing, political change or spiritual transcendence, and regardless of its political goals and gains, the reparative mode offers a specific type of response to the problem presented by vulnerability and violence. Unfortunately, as Chapter 1 has shown, such narratives activate a totalizing drive that sets up patterns of exclusion, whereby unruly subjects and deviant stories are left out of the process of reparation.
The radical mode, by contrast, allows for the production of narratives that react against the simplifying, melodramatic and totalizing effects of the search for resolution. Like the reparative mode discussed in the previous chapter, the radical mode makes use of the image of a gap or a wound to represent the subject affected by sexual violence. The difference between them lies in the response to this gap. If reparative narratives attempt to fill it with explanations and solutions, radical ones assume that such attempts are dangerous or impossible. Instead, they insist on representing sexual abjection, violability and violence as elements of the imperfect world in which we live. Vulnerability and ambivalence are posited as the primary reality that constitutes the experience of being a person in the world. In contrast with the reparative mode, which covers it over with totalizing literary narratives or political visions, in the radical mode this reality is acknowledged. Radical narratives, and the logic of the radical mode in general, are the subject of this chapter.
I begin this chapter by discussing cultural and theoretical articulations of the radical mode that are relevant to the problem of sexual violence: shadow feminism, queer negativity, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and late Soviet underground aesthetic experimentation. These theories and ideas share a critical stance towards reparative discourses against which they react, be it popular anti-rape feminism or dissident denunciations of the status quo. In my readings of the novels, I will show how they both engage and challenge such discourses, in order to tease out what is at stake in the radical representations of sexuality and subjectivity.
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The two novels in which I will ground my discussion and critique of the radical mode are Vladimir Sorokin’s Marina’s Thirtieth Love (1987) and Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl (2011). In both texts, the protagonists have formative experiences of sexual violence but deviate from reparative trajectories of healing and transcendence. Moreover, both novels affirm the radical mode on the level of structure, by foregrounding ontological and textual uncertainty. Marina’s Thirtieth Love complicates its representation of incest and rape by dwelling on the protagonist’s pleasure and violent impulses. Marina refuses to heal or affirm her innocence, and thus cannot join a reparative trajectory like the one presented in Viktor Astafiev’s “Lyudochka.” Instead, the unexpected ending of Sorokin’s novel replicates reparative logic with a twist: Marina rejects her dissident lesbian lifestyle in favour of a strict Socialist ideology and ends up disappearing as a character in an increasingly mechanical stream of Soviet clichés. The novel thus demonstrates the danger of indulging in reparative desire. In Zambreno’s Green Girl, the protagonist Ruth is also ambiguously positioned in relation to her experience of sexual violence: she is neither an innocent victim nor an assertive feminist survivor. Green Girl withholds the satisfaction of resolution, but does it not by displaying the shortcomings of reparative desire like Sorokin’s novel. Instead, it dwells on the unfolding catastrophe of a young woman’s daily life, “riddled with violations” (Green Girl 108) both suffered and perpetrated, which does not fit into a reparative trajectory.
Finally, I build on my analysis of the novels and theories of negativity to present a critique of the radical mode, arguing that it remains limited by the central image of the gap, which it shares with the reparative mode. This fixation on the gap gives rise to the radical mode’s paradoxical return to reparation and sustains its implication in oppressive structures which it seeks to escape, such as identity politics, inequality, national myths and other fantasies of mastery. I argue that even as the novels embody the radical mode, both Green Girl and Marina’s Thirtieth Love can be read as its critiques. Sorokin’s novel shows an uncomfortable affinity between the lively discourse of decadent lesbian life and that of totalitarian redemption. Meanwhile, Green Girl establishes and maintains a connection between Ruth’s self-styled abjection and her economic and social vulnerability, showing that consciously inhabiting a negative position does not suspend the problem of inequality and exposure to violence.
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2.2 The Radical Mode: Failure and Disintegration
In the previous chapter, I have discussed the problematic character and consequences of Western discourses that are based on reparative feminist trauma theories. Publicly addressing private sexual disasters is fraught, not only because the speaker might not be heard, but because these experiences are simplified to fit external scenarios. Reparative narratives rely on the assumption of an internally coherent subject that must be able to account for its own desire and exhibit evidence of external impact to explain its unhappiness. These narratives fail to reflect the complex combination of vulnerability and empowerment, desire and fear, consent and curiosity, self-preservation and self-destructiveness, all of which are present in experiences of sexual violence. In this sense, straightforward reparative critiques of the status quo, such as rights-based feminism in the US and conservative Soviet narratives in defense of women, share reductive and totalizing tendencies with the ideologies they seek to undermine. Simplification is a danger on both sides of the War on Rape Culture, appearing in melodramatic spectacles of survivor triumph such as Lady Gaga’s 2015 Academy Awards performance and in concerned voices critical of glorified victimhood by commentators like Laura Kipnis. In order to overcome these limitations and avoid replicating the totalizing reparative structure, narratives of sexual violence need to go beyond the more obvious critiques of the status quo and deal with the contradictions and unwanted effects of reductionist optimism.
The anti-reparative stance has played an important role in feminist and public discussions of sexual violence in North America, drawing on theories of feminist and queer negativity and on the radical impulse present within trauma studies itself. The central elements of the radical mode – ambivalence, vulnerability, uncertainty – are, after all, not foreign to theories of trauma, which I discussed earlier in relation to the reparative mode. On the contrary, the interrupted and incoherent narrative is trauma’s central feature, as conceptualized by key thinkers in the field, from Sigmund Freud to Cathy Caruth. The anti-reparative impulse gives rise to traumatic narratives that are not wedded to the idea of healing and coherence, and therefore not aligned with the goals of therapeutic storytelling (promoted, for example, in Judith Herman’s work). In her discussion of the importance of narrative, Susan Brison qualifies her own earlier emphasis on the value of telling coherent stories of trauma, arguing that survivors need to be able to let go of the need to make a story cohere: “to give it up, in order to retell it” (103). Trauma’s disruptive character, in Brison’s later view, should not result in a story that overcomes interruptions and
98 gaps, but in one that exists despite being torn apart by such interruptions:
Narrative, I now think, facilitates the ability to go on by opening up possibilities for the future through retelling the stories of the past. It does this not by re-establishing the illusions of coherence of the past, control over the present, and predictability of the future, but by making it possible to carry on without these illusions. (104)
The effectiveness of such a narrative, according to Brison, would rest on “acknowledging that life is a story in the telling, in the retelling, and that one can have some control over that” (115). Preserving the gaps and wounds revealed by trauma, a narrative’s incoherence would serve as a testimony to the incoherence of existence itself, as it is revealed to the subject in the moment of trauma. Uncoupled from the injunction to repair, narratives of failure and pain, unlike those of triumph, would avoid the totalizing effect of reparative trauma models, so easily co-opted in service of national ideologies or commercial interests. They could then illuminate alternative and defiant ways of coping, such as forgetting, which queer theorist Jack Halberstam describes as an important strategy of resisting celebratory narratives that “tidy up disorderly histories” in “the heroic and grand logics of recall” (15).
The two novels discussed in this chapter depict their characters living out such “disorderly histories,” thus foregrounding the radical aspect of trauma. They activate reparative trauma discourses only in order to undermine them, presenting a vision of undone subjects whose suffering, self- or other-inflicted, is constitutive of their existence. As I will show, Marina’s Thirtieth Love promises a trauma narrative by using references to Freudian imagery, but these references result neither in healing nor in clear meaning. Meanwhile, Green Girl uses fragmentary and repetitive storytelling associated with trauma but extends the potential meaning of these aesthetic choices from the character’s particular sexual history to the general condition of young women like her and to the very space of the city.
2.2.1 Shadow Feminism and Queer Failure
The radical commitment to describing inner voids and wounds of sexual abjection without rushing to repair them underlies many poststructuralist theories of the subject. These theories paint a picture of the subject as constitutively traumatized, separated from any possible resolution to its existence by an impassable limit. Emphasizing the subject’s internal incoherence
99 and brokenness, discourses of queer and feminist negativity seek to highlight ambiguities and failures within sexuality. They are suspicious of reparative, rights-based feminism with its reductive models and uncomfortable connections to neoliberalism. In late Soviet unofficial culture, a similar opposition exists between the late and post-Soviet radical and anti-humanist critique found in the work of experimental writers, and the more straightforward social critique found in conservative genres such as the village prose. In this section, I will read Euro-American queer and shadow feminism and Russian experimental literature together, as distant but related nodes in a theoretical network that emerged in the twentieth century as a radical critique of power. I will draw on Zambreno and Sorokin’s novels to illuminate aspects of these theories that link them with the radical mode.
In Queer Art of Failure (2011), Halberstam uses the term “shadow feminism” to refer to an “alternative feminist project [that has] nestled in more positivist accounts and unraveled their logics from within” (124). Instead of overcoming adversity and executing clear social transformation, this alternative strand of feminism engages “negation, refusal, passivity, absence, and silence . . . unknowing, failing, and forgetting . . . self-destruction, masochism, an antisocial femininity” (124). These issues – feminism’s shadows – form the focus of Jacqueline Rose’s biographical study Women in Dark Times (2014). In her book, Rose returns to the feminist slogan “the personal is the political” in order to argue that its celebratory interpretation, dominant in popular versions of feminism, obscures the terrifying reality of the private sphere (ix, x). This overwriting of the dark has serious consequences, because it erases the continuous oppression and violence to which women are subjected. Rose advocates instead for “a feminism that will not try to sanitize itself” (x), “a scandalous feminism, one which embraces without inhibition the most painful, outrageous aspects of the human heart” (ix). Women in Dark Times, in which Rose turns to the difficult lives of complicated historical women, is an embodiment of this kind of feminism.
Although, as Halberstam reminds us, feminist thought has always included alternative, more pessimistic, currents (124), it is notable that less optimistic varieties of feminism seem to take specific shape and gain prominence when feminist critique becomes mainstream. The popularity of feminist discourse in the 1990s and 2010s gave rise to public discussions of sexual violence, which both promoted reparative solutions to the problem and opened up conversations in which
100 reparative discourses could be criticized for their failure to account for incoherence, ambivalence and vulnerability. In recent debates about sexual violence, the idea of a clean-cut, coherent subject that can make rational decisions and take full responsibility for its success or failure, has been criticized for being unrealistic and obscuring structural inequality. Advocating for the right to abjection has been an important part of survivor activism. Raising awareness of “negative survivorship” and “unhealthy coping,” bloggers like Emi Koyama and mika insist on people’s right to exist and be visible as broken, rather than as healing, subjects. More contradictory and realistic visions of subjectivity have also appeared in popular discourses of sexual violence, embodied in imperfect feminist figures such as the unapologetically messy Lena Dunham, the self-identified “bad feminist” Roxane Gay, and Marvel’s traumatized superhero Jessica Jones in the eponymous 2015 TV show.
Shadow feminism draws out stories of “unstable girl-wom[e]n” (Green Girl 13), who, regardless of their gender, refuse to work through their traumatic memories, disavow their failures, and make of themselves convincing examples of triumph over adversity. “Suspect memorialization,” enjoins Halberstam, because resistant forgetting can “make room for alternative experiences of hurting and healing” (15). Negative subjects reject the patriarchal logic of reparation,97 defying the need to choose between proving your innocence and confirming your guilt – even though, as Rose reminds us, such defiance may be deadly (Rose 22). Rose’s heroines point to “the limits of enlightenment thinking which believes that we can, with sufficient persistence, drive the cobwebs of unreason away” (xi).
Laying bare the limits of rationality, and therefore of speech as a tool of personal and social transformation, is a crucial aspect of shadow feminism. Halberstam writes: “If speaking for a subject of feminism offers up choices that we . . . are bound to question and refuse, then maybe a homeopathic refusal to speak serves the project of feminism better” (130). Although it rejects the valorization of speech within the liberal order, negative or shadow feminism is not a celebration of silence. Halberstam speaks of the importance of uncovering subjugated knowledges, and Rose
97 Halberstam notes that negative feminist critique rejects the ideal of empowerment as conforming to patriarchal logic: “In a liberal realm where the pursuit of happiness . . . is both desirable and mandatory and where certain formulations of self (as active, voluntaristic, choosing, propulsive) dominate the political sphere, radical passivity may signal another kind of refusal: the refusal quite simply to be” (140).
101 seeks “to draw on women’s ability to tell that other story, to enter that domain and then return to tell the tale” (ix). Speech remains an important concern in feminist literary and political texts that emphasize negativity. According to radical logic, dark aspects of life need to be exposed not so we can immediately incorporate them into clear-cut reparative solutions, but so we can learn about and be affected by them, instead of ignoring or denying them. This willingness to confront darkness will perhaps help us address it more realistically.
As Sabine Sielke points out, feminist trauma fiction in the United States, which encourages identification or proposes reparative political solutions, tends to avoid experimental aesthetics (150). Negative feminist texts, by contrast, aim to disrupt, both aesthetically and politically. Rita Felski explains, “[t]he artistically radical (experimental and innovative) text . . . seeks to challenge the most fundamental assumptions of a patriarchal society as embedded in its codes of representation and structures of discourse” (30). Ellen Berry provides a comprehensive list of features of negative feminist aesthetics, which include a focus on the violent and the extreme, formal innovation and celebration of fragmentation, theoretical engagement, and, finally, privileging outsider perspectives (2). Zambreno’s novel Green Girl has many elements that could be read as symptomatic of traumatic narration and drawing on negative feminist aesthetics: fragmented sentences, alliterative refrains and violent scenes.
Experimental aesthetics are, of course, not exclusive to novels informed by feminism. Felski argues that what renders the “formal openness” of experimental fiction feminist is that it engages feminist ideas (31). Late Soviet works like Marina’s Thirtieth Love share many features of negative feminist aesthetics described by Berry, as well as the presence of political concerns pointed out by Felski – albeit different ones. Igor Smirnov, for example, speaks of Sorokin’s “anti-aesthetics,” which the author uses to produce a broader critique of discourse itself (“Vidimyi i nevidimyi miru iumor”). The lens of negative aesthetics can therefore allow us to consider Sorokin’s and Zambreno’s novels together. Both novels deprive readers of the assurance of their protagonists’ innocence, and both use experimental devices to frustrate expectations of a satisfying reparative narrative of sexual violation.
Moving away from the straightforwardly politicized reparative idea of victimhood, narratives that draw on negative feminism introduce new ethical visions based on vulnerability. For example, Halberstam reinscribes sexual violability as “radical passivity”: “the willingness of the
102 subject to actually come undone, to dramatize unbecoming for the other so that the viewer does not have to witness unbecoming as a function of her own body” (140). In other words, the radically passive subject embodies brokenness and disempowerment, allowing others to project negativity onto her and experience themselves as whole by contrast. The idea that the experience of breaking down can become an ethical resource for a new kind of relationality has given rise to different articulations of the ethics of vulnerability (Gilson 6). Judith Butler’s writing on “precarious life” and Sara Ahmed’s concept of “fragile subjects” point to the need to acknowledge that we are internally incoherent and open to being affected and hurt. Admitting our vulnerability would allow us to forge connections from within our own vulnerable and fragile positions: as Ahmed puts it, “[a] shattering can be an affinity” (“Feminism and Fragility”). Ethics of vulnerability counteracts what Erinn Gilson calls “entrepreneurial subjectivity” (98), a valorization of resilience, in which every subject becomes responsible for its own well-being. There are epistemological benefits to vulnerability as openness to being ignorant, wrong, and uncomfortable, a willingness to forego intellectual understanding in favour of affective knowledge, and an ability to change (95). Similar to negative feminism, the ethics of vulnerability seeks to articulate ways of being together that do not erase the darker aspects of being human.
The epistemological and ethical potential of embracing vulnerability marks an overlap between feminist discourses of negative survivorship and queer theory. Indeed, gay, lesbian and queer writing has played a crucial role in developing more complex discourses of sexual violence and self-destructive sexuality. Queer discourses have sought to depathologize sexual practices of dominance and submission, lifting the requirement of “clean” desire from people who experienced sexual trauma.
In An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003), Ann Cvetkovich suggests that trauma and queer theories overlap in important ways, sharing psychoanalytic origins and a history of pathologization. Both the subjects coded as traumatized and those coded as perverse can have a unique insight into the processes of exclusion and the failures of representation. Cvetkovich argues that lesbian texts and practices can enrich trauma studies, because they “forge creative responses to it that far outstrip even the most utopian of therapeutic and political solutions” (3) and “cut through narratives of innocent victims and
103 therapeutic healing to present something that [i]s raw, confrontational, and even sexy (4).” In particular, she explains how masochism is radically reinterpreted in lesbian writing and butch- femme sexual practices. The lesbian writer Dorothy Allison, for example, was a crucial voice in representing and theorizing unapologetically wayward sexuality in survivors of sexual abuse.
The tension between reparation and radicalism that exists within discourses about sexual violence is mirrored in a similar tension within queer theory. Here, the reparative mode manifests in the impulse to write the excluded gay or lesbian subject into legitimate history (Halberstam 148). This approach is critiqued and complemented by an alternative “antisocial” strand of queer theory (108), which reclaims “the negative potential of the queer” (148). In other words, antisocial queer theory reappropriates the queer’s stigmatized position as inhabitable “by embracing the incoherent, the lonely, the defeated, and the melancholic formulations of selfhood” (148), giving rise to a particular political and ethical position, as well as “a queer aesthetic” (96) of failure. It is from this position of embodying failure that queer theory can assign damaging sexuality a new meaning and challenge dominant frameworks of both sex and success. Leo Bersani, for example, imagines a new relationality on the basis of the gay male practice of cruising. By identifying with the position of the vulnerable and internally divided subject, rather than with the “defensive formation of the self-congratulatory ego,” queer negativity can introduce something entirely new: “a fundamental restructuring of the social” (Bersani 34). In Bersani’s words, “[t]his is the strength, not the weakness, of homosexuality, for the fiction of an inviolable and unified subject has been an important source of human violence” (183). The queer subject of failure can therefore dismantle the myth of coherence that underlies narratives of reparation and expose the violence inherent in all sexuality.
2.2.2 Lacan’s Split Subject and Edelman’s Sinthomosexual
While thinkers like Halberstam and Bersani advocate for certain forms of an ethics of failure, both of them express concern about the political implications of overidentifying with this position. Lee Edelman makes no concessions to such practicalities. His critique of futurity is an extreme example of antisocial queer theory.98 For Edelman, the orientation towards the future,
98 Edelman’s work is by no means representative of queer theory. Halberstam, for example, characterizes it as “a self-enclosed world of cleverness and chiasmus” (107).
104 and children as its symbols, serves to justify totalizing reparative endeavours. He argues that the logic of reparation is violent and short-sighted, because progressive liberal politics always needs someone to represent the limit of inclusivity – a scapegoat. For Edelman, this structural position is often occupied by homosexuals, since they represent the death drive in a culture that celebrates procreation and progress (153). Rather than attempting to escape the position of the scapegoat, which would mean passing it along to another unfortunate group, queers, according to Edelman, should embrace this essential antisocial role. He refers to this choice to embody the death drive as sinthomosexuality. The word is derived from Lacan’s neologism sinthome, which designates the part of the subject’s psychic constitution that holds it together but remains unanalyzable, because it “refuses the Symbolic logic that determines the exchange of signifiers” (Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII 35). Sinthomosexuality, for Edelman, is a way of enacting this refusal on the scale of society: “its value . . . resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself” (Edelman 6).
Edelman’s turn to Lacan is understandable. Lacan’s theories of the split subject and desire are very useful for articulating a vision of sexuality in the radical mode, as something that can never be fixed. If Cathy Caruth’s interpretation of Freudian trauma identifies it with a specific event and locates it in the external environment, Lacanian trauma is a constitutive feature of the subject, more structural than historical. Lacan’s subject is traumatized by default: it is not so much contorted or split as it is itself contortion and absence.99 The lack at the heart of the subject is desire, which, for Lacan, is not a desire for “goods” – socially valued objects and ideals, such as security, justice or even consensual sex. Instead, Lacan understands desire as oriented towards the Thing, an “alien” element at the centre of any object and even the subject itself (Ethics of Psychoanalysis 52): it is “something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me” (71). The Thing’s “dumb reality” is unrepresentable, incomprehensible, destructive, and in that way, inhuman (55). Yet, paradoxically, it is also what we truly seek, and we exist as subjects precisely through lacking and desiring it. This means that it is impossible to encounter the Thing without mediation or detours, if we are to avoid disappearing completely.
99 This turning back on itself is a central feature of post-Cartesian formulations of the subject; see Judith Butler’s Psychic Life of Power on the history of theories that develop this approach to subjectivity.
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This theory of the subject has important implications for discussions of sexual violence. If the subject is split, how can we speak of violation? Renata Salecl argues that in order to protect a person’s bodily integrity, we need to pretend that such a thing exists: “…when we respect the bodily integrity of the subject, this actually means that we avert our gaze from the fact that the subject actually does not have a naturally given bodily integrity…” (Perversions of Love and Hate 149). In the reparative mode, rape is perceived as the violation of integrity par excellence, but in the Lacanian radical model, integrity is simply not a property of the split subject.
Given that in the reparative mode, the traumatized subject must speak to heal, what is the purpose of telling one’s story in the radical mode? Lacan’s understanding of the analytic process offers one answer. For him, analysis is not a conventional healing process that aims to help the subject achieve a stronger ego and sexual maturity. These, according to Lacan, are mere illusions of wholeness (a “strange lullaby” [Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XV 32], an “absurd hymn” [Écrits 245] to genital harmony). By contrast, Lacanian analysis is imagined as a unique procedure that carves a new way through our predicament as humans. As such, it is “unsatisfying,” because it does not provide the subject with what it desires. Instead, analysis allows the subject to realize the particular, highly individual character of its unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire. What awaits the subject at the end of the process is not a solution to its problems (or its main problem, which is itself), but the realization that its desire is deadly and its nature is split. The subject can then develop an alternative relationship to its own split nature and get relief from the compulsion to repair it.
Lacan’s vision of analysis has an ethical dimension. It offers a peculiar “experience of absolute disarray” (Ethics of Psychoanalysis 304), through which we can forge new ways of relating both to our own obscure selves and those of others. Since it is not oriented towards the “good” of conventional morality (195), Lacan’s ethics is not nonviolent but radical and even explicitly anti- reparative. His critique of conventional morality highlights its roots in narcissistic identification and reveals the murderous potential of the reparative mode: the Biblical injunction to love one’s neighbour subsumes the neighbour’s singular nature under one’s own image. By contrast, Lacanian ethics challenges us to confront and affirm the neighbour’s singularity, the “harmful, malignant jouissance” at its heart (188). That alien external presence of a deadly desire within us is, after all, the one thing we all have – or rather lack – in common.
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In Seminar 7, Lacan famously grounds his account of psychoanalytic ethics in the figure of Antigone. In her unrelenting commitment to burying her brother against the laws of the city, Antigone is faithful to a realm beyond of life and death. Hers is “an absolute choice”: “a choice that is motivated by no good” (Ethics of Psychoanalysis 247), one that reflects complete fidelity to the Thing. This, for Lacan, is an accurate reflection of how our desire works, and therefore how we work (284). While Lacan explicitly warns against taking Antigone as an example to emulate,100 using her instead as a philosophical category, others have contemplated the possible relevance of Antigone, and Lacan’s interpretation of her story, to theorizing social and political issues. Judith Butler, for example, mobilizes the figure of Antigone to argue that the social sphere must include impossible insights that are brought back from beyond the limit of the representable – the metaphorical Antigone’s cave (Antigone’s Claim). Edelman, for his part, rejects Butler’s interpretation as too liberal and reparative, arguing that it tones down the radical implications of Lacan’s reading of Antigone. For Edelman, to operationalize the story of Antigone’s experience in the cave for progressive politics constitutes a domestication of what is supposed to be an impossible insight. In Lacan’s words, it would mean “coloniz[ing] the field of Das Ding with imaginary schemes” (Ethics of Psychoanalysis 99) and focusing instead on the good of social inclusion. According to Edelman, Butler’s model, like all models based on inclusion, necessarily excludes what remains truly unrepresentable (105). Edelman also notes that Butler’s vision of transforming the social sphere through including previously unimaginable perspectives is similar to the Symbolic (and, one could say, capitalist) logic of change, which incorporates new material into its own development (106).
Edelman proposes what he sees as a more radical way of adapting Lacanian insights into specific politics. His sinthomosexuals would refuse incorporation into the Symbolic and “insist on the unintelligible’s unintelligibility” (106). The value of queerness, for Edelman, is not its ability to promote a politics of inclusion, but its attitude of pure radical fidelity to the beyond. Although he admits that queerness does not itself lie outside of the Symbolic (like everything else, it is “destined, of course, to be claimed for intelligibility” [107]), he responds by reasserting a refusal of all identity politics, including any kind of “authentic or substantive” queer identity (165). In
100 In this sense, Antigone’s status in Lacan’s text is different from, for example, Rose’s “bad girls,” who also go to dark places beyond the realm of the ordinary and return to tell their tales (or, as the case may be, have others piece their tales together).
107 the end, Edelman not only believes that the position of radical refusal is structurally necessary, but that it is also possible to “make the choice” to agree to occupy it (22). Taking up “the figural burden of queerness,” the sinthomosexual can cling to the position of a difference so radical that it can stand apart from the logic of identity and appropriation (27).
Though Edelman rejects identity politics, he does suggest what a sinthomosexual could look like, referring to various “machine-like men” from literature or film. Leo Bersani’s reinterpretation of barebacking could be read as a complementary example of a real-life practice of sinthomosexuality: it “advertises the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of self-dismissal, of losing sight of the self, and in so doing it proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a mode of ascesis” (30).101 Since the questions of inclusion and stigma are central to the problematic of sexual violence, consciously occupying the position of abjection can allow sexually vulnerable and violated subjects to reject the demand of straightening themselves out by becoming good survivors or martyrs. Just like the queer, the sexually abject can refuse assimilation into reparative narratives of identity politics or the trauma economy.
2.2.3 Russian Radical Visions: “Literature of Evil,” Postmodernism and Conceptualism
In post-Stalinist Russia, reparative narratives dominated the state-controlled cultural sphere. It was only in unofficial culture that the logic of the reparative mode could be explicitly challenged. Thinkers in this milieu could extend their critique from the Soviet regime in particular to the possibility of coherence or wholeness in social life in general. Since sexuality and sexual violence were excluded from official representation alongside other aberrations that could endanger the vision of a wholesome Socialist reality, they became an important theme in creative articulations of resistance to totalizing reparation. In a certain strand of Russian countercultural literature, the exposure of the body in its ugly, excessive, dumb, sexualized existence rose therefore to a political and philosophical statement.
Representations of sexuality, often in its especially brutal manifestations, were part of a general turn to darker themes, which characterized what Viktor Erofeev called the Russian “literature of
101 Bersani builds on Jean Laplanche, not Lacan. He has since tempered his celebration of barebacking, whereas Edelman’s commitment to the idea of sinthomosexuality has remained unwavering.
108 evil” (30). Like shadow feminism in Rose’s description, the short stories collected in Erofeev’s anthology Russkie tsvety zla (Russian Flowers of Evil)102 explore the “darker space of the world, ripping the cover from the illusions through which the most deadly forms of power sustain and congratulate themselves” (Rose ix).103 Ulrich Schmid suggests distinguishing realist and experimental strands of this type of late Soviet literature: the realist strand, which Schmid identifies with Erofeev and Yuri Mamleev, creates shock value through “the bold depiction of taboo themes,” while experimental writers like Sasha Sokolov and Vladimir Sorokin engage the same themes through radical formal innovation (213).
If we are to make sense of the diverse “literature of evil,” Schmid’s stylistic distinction is insufficient, because it fails to account for philosophical attitudes to evil that underlie literary representations. I would argue that the use of brutal aesthetics in these works is significantly shaped by the way they mobilize radical or reparative modes. Astafiev’s “Lyudochka,” included in Erofeev’s anthology, celebrates moral and humanist values in the face of a socioeconomic crisis, which makes it a clear example of the reparative approach. Other writers of the time found such an approach insufficient. Erofeev writes that Astafiev’s short story contains “angry notes of powerlessness,” which reveal the bankruptcy of a moralizing stance (15).104 Writers like Erofeev and Sorokin reacted against the hypermoral ideological narrative of the great Russian literary tradition, which provided the backbone of both Soviet ideology and its critique in the village prose. This ideological critique of moralizing discourses had an aesthetic side: seeking to escape the deadlock of realism, these writers sought new representational strategies, and representations
102 Like Charles Baudelaire’s poetry volume Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), late twentieth century Russian literature, according to Erofeev, fully explored decadence and dark eroticism: “Вспомнив Бодлера, можно сказать, что современная литературная Россия нарвала целый букет fleurs du mal” (Remembering Baudelaire, one might say that contemporary literary Russia picked a whole bouquet of fleurs du mal” [7]). 103 Glasnost marked a dramatic shift in popular representations of sex. Erofeev referred to the more highbrow kinds of literature, but transition-era Russia has also produced a sort of “popular culture of evil.” Kustanovich writes that in many works of the period, sex was either boring or brutal, or both (143). This tendency could be viewed as realist, reflecting the period’s “poverty, crime, the drudgery of everyday struggle for survival, a lot of ideology, and hardly any normal routine” (144). Yet brutality is never simply mimetic, and these cultural representations of sexuality could be pointing to a larger set of concerns: in Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (2008), Eliot Borenstein explores how media representations of sex and violence at the time reflected people’s reactions to the profound changes in their world. 104 “…злобные ноты бессилия, звучащие у Астафьева, свидетельствуют в целом о поражении моралистической пропаганды.”
109 of corporeality and brutality opened up possibilities of aesthetic innovation.105 Challenging rigid philosophical humanism and aesthetic realism, exposure of the unsavoury parts of human existence became characteristic of a certain kind of Russian literature at the time.
In late 1980s and early 1990s, the term “postmodernism” was frequently enlisted to describe these developments: first in scholarship,106 then in popular discussions (Ivanova, “Preodolevshie postmodernizm”). Like its Western counterpart, Russian postmodernism was understood as a response to the crisis of solid identities and narratives of modernity – inflected, of course, with the particularities of Russian and Soviet history.107 Mark Lipovetsky identified key features of postmodernist writing as “the blurring of boundaries between center and periphery, the decentralization of consciousness (expressed in the concept of the ‘death of the author’), and the fragmentation of the modernist model based on the integrity of the creative subject and his or her absolute freedom” (Russian Postmodernist Fiction 235).
Experimental works of Sots Art and Moscow Conceptualism were key elements of the cultural developments that would later be associated with Russian postmodernism (Erjavec 30, Sussman
105 Andrei Sinyavsky, for example, describes the aesthetic dead end of realism in the preface to the short story “Zolotoi Shnurok” (“Golden Shoelace”). 106 A notable example is the 1991 conference “Postmodernizm i my” (“Postmodernism and Us”) at the A.M. Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow (Lipovetsky, Paralogii 7). 107 The use of the term in the Russian context has been controversial, not least because of its uncertain relationship with Western postmodernism. Some have criticized the term as a foreign transplant (Dobrenko, “Utopii vozvrata”), others saw Russian postmodernism as insufficiently postmodern (Perloff, Shneidman). Admitting that Russian postmodernism was different from other varieties, both Western and Eastern (Erjavec 20), Aleš Erjavec argues that the term is still appropriate: “…too many common features link recent Western and Eastern art to make us abandon this common designation” (37). Mikhail Epstein, one of the foremost theorists of Russian postmodernism, has also argued in favour of the term: “if we consider communism an extremist form of modernism – with its utopian emphases, the avant-garde breakup of reality and mania for infallible truth – then Western commentators on postmodernism will find more than a few common features in the postmodern West and postcommunist Russia” (xi). According to Epstein, late Soviet culture has created its own postmodern conditions, which were based on state ideology rather than media discourse, but nevertheless structurally similar to Western ones (97). He explains that features associated with postmodernism emerged in late Soviet culture organically: a cultural space made up of simulacra in the form of “ideology, press, and statistics,” where even the figure of the leader, Brezhnev, was “a postmodern surface object, even a kind of hyperreal object, behind which stands no reality” (94); the immediate deconstruction of ideological texts “in the very process of creation,” whereby texts “that would have an outward visibility of meaning . . . prove devoid of it upon any attempt at definition” (96); the breakdown of logical progression in the overarching ideological narrative of ideology, in which “all the diverse elements appeared as variations of an originating thesis” (96); and finally, a normalization of alienation: “The postmodern is optimistic, at least insofar as everything of one’s own is already alienated, precisely to the extent that all that is alien is made one’s own” (97).
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63).108 As Dirk Uffelmann explains, “a certain ‘elite’ of earlier writers may have anticipated and maybe even prepared and initiated the violation of norms on the larger scale of popular or mass culture” (101). The Sots Art movement famously reworked and deconstructed Socialist Realist clichés and Soviet iconography without any serious moral denunciations of the regime (Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction 181). These writers refused to take an explicit political stance: in Erofeev’s words, they were “a-Soviet” rather than “anti-Soviet” (12). Consequently, in Russia they have often been read as too playful and apolitical (12). Ironically, in the West, late Soviet aesthetic innovations can be seen as too modernist, and therefore almost quaint (Groys 245).
In the late Soviet context, however, textual innovation was neither superficial nor redundant. Soviet ideologues have conceptualized literary aesthetics as an ethical and political battlefield, investing art with world-creating importance and demanding realist depictions – albeit of an imagined, idealized reality.109 In reclaiming modernist aesthetics curtailed by the Soviet state, the artists and writers associated with Russian postmodernism proposed a radically different view of the world. Laying bare the workings of ideology, they problematized (or, in Lipovetsky’s words, “abolished” [14]) the possibility of straightforward mimesis and, by extension, of reparative narratives (224).110
For a time, the term “postmodernism” was ubiquitous, and related terms, stereotypes and poetics were widely recognizable and discussed in Russian literary circles (Lipovetsky, Paralogii 7). Needless to say, the very idea of postmodernism, with its aim of dismantling grand narratives, was seen by many as a cultural threat and was therefore subject to a heated debate.111 Natalia
108 Because of their association with postmodernism, Sots Art and Conceptualism are sometimes used as synonyms (Erjavec 32), though many critics distinguish them (Tamruchi 10, Rudova 62). Ekaterina Bobrinskaia suggests that the key difference between them is that Sots Art focuses on “paradoxical play with ideological emblems” (“парадоксальную игру идеологической эмблематикой”), whereas Conceptualism is interested more broadly in how signs and discourses work (Bobrinskaia). As Vadim Zakharov notes in an introduction to a special issue of the World Art journal on Moscow Conceptualism, the journal’s editors chose to distinguish the two movements, though he also suggests that Komar and Melamid, the founders of Sots Art, could be seen as part of both (Zakharov 8). 109 See pp. 57-61 for a discussion of Socialist Realism. 110 Of course, Western postmodern aesthetics are not apolitical either. According to Sabine Sielke, American Postmodernism repoliticized “predominantly textual” modernist representations of rape, “renegotiating the constructions of identity and difference effected so ‘successfully’ at the turn of the last century” (19-20). 111 “Постмодернизм в контексте русской культурной парадигмы выглядит покушением на ее верховные ценности: Смысл, Идеал, Человечность, Духовность — и на саму Русскую Традицию как таковую” (“In the
111
Ivanova describes a striking example of anti-postmodernism panic, citing the Minister of Internal Affairs, Anatolii Kulikov, who publicly blamed postmodernism for the country’s rising crime rates (“Preodolevshie postmodernizm”). Writing in 1998, Ivanova describes an outcry of neotraditionalist “realists” who actively oppose the “postmodernist” threat. Since then, the controversy around postmodernism has declined, together with the popularity of the term, replaced in the public eye with other kinds of writing, such as “new realism” and “neo- imperialist” historical fiction (Noordenbos 6). The term has also been criticized for its lack of explanatory power: Evgeny Dobrenko argued in 2004 that it was imposed on the literary scene by theorists and critics who privileged aesthetic moves that had already been theorized in the West (Utopii vozvrata 38).
Dobrenko’s critique is fair, and it is important to acknowledge the term’s history and limitations. Its value, however, lies in the ability to describe a particular historical moment, in which literature that was exploring alternatives to existing, reparative, models was interpreted as “Russian postmodernism.” This allows for a tentative periodization, helpful for tracing an aesthetic and critical genealogy of the Russian literary scene. Moreover, although its heyday is past, the influence of Russian postmodernism as a set of aesthetic developments and as a meta- literary discourse must be acknowledged.112 In my own argument in this chapter, this term points to a cluster of ideas that are relevant to my conceptualisation of the radical mode. The writers labelled as Russian postmodernists were seeking not just to expose the evils of the regime but to reveal the failure of the politics and aesthetics of reparation, whether Socialist or otherwise. They posited the problem of living in a world impossible to embrace. Russian postmodernism therefore stands in a similar relation to reparative critiques of Socialist Realism as negative feminism and queer theory do to identity politics in the West.
Keeping in mind the theoretical and cultural discourses discussed above – feminist and queer negativity and Lacanian theories of the subject, on the one hand, and Russian postmodernist
context of the Russian cultural paradigm, postmodernism appears as an attack on its highest values: Meaning, Ideal, Humanity, Spirituality – and on the Russian Tradition itself” [Lipovetsky, Paralogii 7]). 112 Boris Noordenbos notes that postmodernist aesthetics have influenced neotraditionalist prose: “…postmodern tropes and styles have recently been discarded and recycled in favor of sweeping doctrines of collective belonging” (Noordenbos 7). Mark Lipovetsky, meanwhile, has spoken of “late postmodernism” that emerged in the late 1990s- early 2000s, defining it as literature that is concerned with the questions of identity and the problematic of the Other (Paralogii 6).
112 critiques of reparation, on the other – we can now return to the novels and discuss how they employ the radical mode while engaging these broader discourses. I will begin with considering Marina’s Thirtieth Love as a warning about the dangers of reparative desire, and then turn to Green Girl’s depiction of negativity and refusal to heal. Finally, I will reconsider the two novels as critiques of the radical mode, showing how they depict the implication of radical subjects in the reparative contexts of totalitarianism or the capitalist system of exploitation and inequality.
2.3 The Radical Mode in the Novels
With protagonists marked by a history of violations, both Green Girl and Marina’s Thirtieth Love engage the problematic of sexual violence. The centrality of sexuality and memory is established in the novels by specific aesthetic choices associated with representations of trauma. Elements of both texts recall conventions of trauma writing. In Sorokin’s novel, repressed narrative strands that concern Marina’s violation come back in similar situations and recurrent dream motifs. Zambreno’s Green Girl represents dissociation and trauma through metonymy and repetition. Both protagonists are shaped by memories of violent or ambiguous sexual encounters, both sometimes resign themselves to unwanted sex, and both feel a profound lack that sets off an existential crisis. In representing their protagonists’ crises, the novels reference important discourses of reparation discussed in the previous chapter: Green Girl engages with feminist thought, and Marina’s Thirtieth Love with the Russian ideal of redemption and the spiritual existence of bytie.113
Nevertheless, despite its centrality to the narrative, in both novels sexual trauma acts as a false hook for the reader. If in reparative narratives discussed in Chapter 1, sexual violence appears as a central event or condition that can be resolved, in the two novels in question, sexuality is ambiguous, and instances of sexual violence appear as signs of a general abjection. Both novels depart from an orientation towards healing and transcendence, relying instead on non-optimistic views of the subject and the world to tell their stories of sexual violence in the radical mode.
113 Though certainly not explicitly feminist, Marina’s Thirtieth Love has more of a relationship to feminism than Sorokin’s other work. The sexually liberated and economically independent protagonist has all the makings of a feminist icon. The novel’s projected film adaptation has both a female producer (Yulia Mishkinene) and a female director (Angelina Nikonova) (“Opredeleny Pobediteli Letnego Konkursa”).
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The novels critique reparation and advance the radical mode in two ways: by foregrounding subjects that refuse to heal properly and by challenging reparation in their very structure. They defy the reparative requirement of basic, if not complete, innocence, by featuring rogue protagonists who are active in their own misery. In the two novels, the sexually violated subject becomes generalized as the subject of the human condition: unwell, undone, contradictory, implicated, and certainly not headed towards reassuring resolution. On the level of structure, the novels also present alternatives to reparative stories in which protagonists gain healing or redemption, or at least some perspective. Marina’s Thirtieth Love stages a horrifying transcendence, revealing the dark side of reparation, while Green Girl focuses on a young woman’s experience of the city and the diffuse suffering of daily life.
2.3.1 Marina’s Thirtieth Love as a Radical Cautionary Tale 2.1.1.1 Introduction to the Novel
Vladimir Sorokin’s work is frequently invoked as a leading example of the spirit of Russian postmodernism. Influenced by early-twentieth century Russian artistic experiments,114 Western poststructuralism115 and late Soviet conceptualist visual art, Sorokin’s writing is notable both for its use of linguistic play and its ethical and philosophical preoccupation with the limits of the reparative stance and with its possible alternatives.116 Known as Russian postmodernism’s enfant terrible, Sorokin is often attacked for his seemingly amoral and emotionless experimental texts, plentiful in violent and sexual imagery (Erofeev, for example, described Sorokin’s texts as “meat
114 Sorokin was a part of the underground late Soviet art scene, and was influenced by both Conceptualism and Sots Art. In a 1987 interview with Sally Laird, he explains his interest in Conceptualism as follows: “In principle the conceptual artist doesn’t have his own language – he uses only the language of others, as Andy Warhol, for example, used the language of cliché, mass language. This idea seemed to me very natural; it had an obvious relevance to our situation here, to our attitude towards the language of our state, its literary language. I feel acutely that I can’t be inside this language, because to be inside it, to use it as mine, means that I’m inside this state – and that’s something that I’ve always feared, I’ve always felt myself to be out on the edge. What I mean is that, for me, the only kind of freedom there is, is the freedom to choose different languages, make use of them, and remain an outsider in the process” (“Vladimir Sorokin” 149). 115 Vyacheslav Kuritsyn even notes that Sorokin’s texts “illustrate important poststructuralist postulates, such as ‘every text is totalitarian’ and ‘reading is at least no less a physiological process than it is spiritual’” (“Cочинитель, на чьем примере легче всего иллюстрировать такие важные постструктуралистские постулаты как ‘всякий текст тоталитарен’ и ‘чтение есть процесс физиологический по меньшей мере не в меньшей мере, нежели духовный’” (Kuritsyn). 116 It is telling that Lipovetsky chooses to describe Russian postmodernism as a preoccupation with chaos, a word that illustrates postmodernist hostility to reparation even better than Erofeev’s “evil”.
114 that is drained of blood and teeming with worms” [28]).117 His early stories and novels often begin in a recognizable genre: Socialist Realism, the nineteenth-century Russian novel, village or war prose. The conventional text is then invaded by inappropriate and incompatible generic conventions, linguistic nonsense, or depictions of ritualistic violence, often with a scatological twist. This extreme brutality often operates as wordplay118 (the terrifying ritual in Roman ends with the phrase “Roman died,” which can also be translated as “the Novel died”) or as literalization of metaphors (in “Norma,” eating shit is a pledge of fidelity to the state; in Serdtsa cheryrekh [Four Stout Hearts], a character literally fucks with someone’s head). Lipovetsky describes this move as “carnalization” and identifies it as Sorokin’s “master-trope,” used throughout his oeuvre to deconstruct “authoritative discourses, symbols and cultural narratives” (“Fleshing/Flashing Discourse” 27). Sorokin’s depictions of extreme corporeal violence therefore target language itself,119 shocking the reader into reading the story as a text, not a narrative.
Needless to say, some audiences have been scandalized by the content of Sorokin’s works. In 2002, a pro-government youth organization Idushchie Vmeste (Walking Together) filed several lawsuits and staged protests against him (on one occasion, publicly drowning his books in a specially constructed toilet bowl) (Zhuravleva). As Uffelmann argues, it was this scandal that cemented Sorokin’s position in the public eye, moving him firmly from the esoteric literary and artistic circles into popular consciousness (105). Some find Sorokin’s provocative pastiche entertaining but ultimately inconsequential: Erofeev writes, for example, that “the limited nature of the menu and the repetitiveness of the strategies” weakens Sorokin’s work (28-29).120 At the same time, critics are often disappointed when the writer departs from the formula of linguistic innovation and shocking imagery that came to be expected of him. Less experimental novels, such as Marina’s Thirtieth Love and the more recent Ice Trilogy (2005), were therefore met with
117 “Тексты Сорокина похожи на мясо, из которого вытекла кровь и которое кишит червями.” 118 Dirk Uffelmann identifies “materialization of metaphors” as a key tendency in Sorokin’s work: “the ontological presupposition . . . is that nothing exists beyond metaphors (and their materializations), that (textual) reality is created by (destructive) language” (109). 119 “His brand of corporeality is an abstract category, not a suffering, concrete body in texts where protagonists are merely functions of a language of power” (Lipovetsky, “Literature on the Margins” 158). 120 “Впрочем, ограниченность меню, повторяемость приема (ср. с Мамлеевым, которого в известной степени можно назвать учителем Сорокина) постепенно ослабляет первоначальное впечатление.”
115 some confusion and disapproval.121
In his interviews, Sorokin supports the interpretation of his work as purely aesthetic and therefore amoral, insisting that novels are artistic objects and should not be judged on moral grounds.122 Of course, the ethics of Sorokin’s work cannot be directly derived from the brutal beheadings, cannibalism and rapes in his prose, but this does not mean that his works have no ethical import. His aesthetic experiments move into a radical critique of ideology, language and ontology itself, focusing specifically on the problem of violence.123 In the context of this thesis, his ethical stance could be described as radical: in a 1992 interview with Sally Laird, Sorokin admits that he is critical of unexamined reparative desire: “I feel scorn for attempts to find palliatives” (“Vladimir Sorokin” 158). Erofeev describes Sorokin as a “disappointed Romantic who takes vengeance on the world for its ontological monstrosity” (28).124 Compared to Sorokin’s other works, Marina’s Thirtieth Love renders his concerns with politics, ethics and ontology more visible, perhaps because its aesthetics are comparatively toned down.
One of Sorokin’s earliest novels, Marina’s Thirtieth Love was written in 1982-1984. It first appeared in France in 1987, in French translation, and was not published in Russia until 1995 (“Bibliografiia avtora”). Far less controversial than Sorokin’s other work, the novel has received comparatively little attention from scholars and critics. The novel is certainly an outlier in Sorokin’s oeuvre, which is dominated by shocking and violent aesthetics. In Marina’s Thirtieth Love, the author employs his signature move of rapid transition between discourses, but in an unusual way: as critics like Mark Lipovetsky (“Fleshing/Flashing Discourse” 33) and Sally Laird point out, it moves in the reverse direction, “from chaos to pseudo-decorum” (Laird 145). The discourses used in the novel can be read as examples of reparative and radical modes:
121 Mikhail Verbitskii, for example, dismisses Marina’s Thirtieth Love as uninteresting, lacking as it does in “metaphysics” and “atavistic contexts” that characterize “real Sorokin” (“Ни метафизики, ни атавистических контекстов здесь нет, и при всем стилистическом совершенстве эти тексты не сильно интереснее аналогичных опусов Виктора Ерофеева” [“A Bucket of Living Lice”]). See Marina Aptekman on the reception of Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy (675). 122 “…fiction is not an act but, basically, art” (“художественная литература — это не поступок, а, в общем, искусство” [Sorokin, “My vse otravleny literaturoi”]). 123 Maksim Marusenkov explores Sorokin’s ethics in detail in Absurdopediya russkoi zhizni Vladimira Sorokina: zaum’, grotesk i absurd (2012). 124 “Это блюдо, приготовленное разочарованным романтиком, мстящим миру за его онтологическое неблаголепие.”
116 authoritarianism and collectivism on the one hand, and decadent lesbian individualism on the other.
The novel follows Marina, a thirty-year-old music teacher, through her daily routine, numerous dalliances and a major life crisis, over the course of a little more than a week in March 1983. A cynical dissident who loves having sex with women and taking recreational drugs and hates the Soviet state, Marina is a marginal – in fact, illegal – figure in Stagnation-era USSR. She is, however, both socially and sexually empowered. Truly democratic in her choice of lovers (though she only falls in love and climaxes with women), perceptive and pragmatic, Marina is at ease in Moscow’s many social worlds: a concert pianist’s glamorous apartment, the grey crowded subway, the KGB cafeteria, punk parties and the kitchens of the intelligentsia. Her life, however, is interrupted by an existential crisis. Disgusted with her own lifestyle, Marina throws out her latest girlfriend and wanders the city in search of meaning. This journey of individualization leads her to sleep with a diehard Communist and get a job at a factory. At this point, in an ironic twist typical of Sorokin’s work, the lively language of the erotic Bildungsroman turns into hackneyed Socialist Realist prose, which in turn devolves into a string of quotations from Brezhnev-era newspaper articles on foreign and internal Soviet policy.125
2.1.1.2 Marina as a Bad Survivor
Although intertextual references to modernist and dissident literature126 are most obvious in the novel, a less explicit but structurally significant cultural tradition that Sorokin draws on is Freudian: throughout the first part of the novel, we find references to the psychoanalytic theory of trauma.127 Alternating between Marina’s present and her childhood and adolescence, the first part of the novel foregrounds sexuality as the red thread, if not the central arc, of the narrative. The story of Marina’s past, told in flashbacks, concentrates on her sexual awakening and early
125 In the first French translation of Marina, the ending was significantly condensed. When Sorokin confronted the publisher and the translator, he was told that “it would . . . not be understood by French readers” (“Translating Sorokin/Translated Sorokin” 347). Interestingly, Anna Summers makes a similar choice to reduce and condense the ostensibly repetitive passages in her recent translation of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s Vremia noch’, which I discuss in Chapter 3. 126 References to Marina Tsvetaeva, Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal and Alexander Solzhenitsyn are discussed later in the chapter. 127 Sorokin admits to using psychoanalysis creatively: “I think Freud’s ideas – and Jung’s – have to be regarded as metaphors, not as science, and I use these metaphors with pleasure when they seem to me relevant” (“Vladimir Sorokin” 156).
117 traumas. Sorokin toys with the possibility of an airtight Freudian reading: as a child, Marina witnesses the “primal scene” between her mother and a lover;128 at about eleven, she experiences a sexual union with her father; as a teenager, she is raped by a camp counsellor and relives the trauma of incest on a smaller scale. The novel tempts us with such a reading by introducing these sexual encounters as potentially defining points of Marina’s development.
The incest episode in particular could be posited as the novel’s central trauma, and has been read as such – for example, by Natalia Seim (49).129 On a holiday by the sea, Marina’s father, a picture-perfect parent until then, gets drunk, orders Marina to spread her legs and penetrates her (Tridtsataia Liubov’ Mariny 64-65).130 Paralyzed with shame and pleasure, Marina is rocked to sleep by her father’s regular movements. She dreams that a crab has lodged in her vagina: “I need a stick, – Marina thought. – Can’t get it out without a stick…” (65-66).131 Marina pulls the crab out, but it remains attached with a fishing line to something inside her. The dream crab begs to be read as a metaphor of traumatic memory that is not properly processed and remains lodged in the core of the self. The image of the stick seems to have a transparent meaning: earlier, Marina had heard her kindergarten friends describe sex as putting “a stick into a hole” (40).132
The traumatic nature of the memory is underscored by its disappearance both from Marina’s consciousness and the narrative itself. The memory is eclipsed almost immediately by the image of the corpse of her father who drowns himself in remorse. Later, when the teenage Marina is raped at a summer camp, new circumstances clearly recall the event of incest: the camp counsellor is a lesser double of her father, and the rape takes place in a boat (the river here is a smaller version of the sea). Yet during the rape, it is not the disavowed memory of the sexual act with her father, but the images of his corpse that come flooding back into Marina’s consciousness. Notably, these traumatic memories of incestuous rape and her father’s death only appear as flashbacks, after which they quickly recede from the narrative. The adult Marina
128 Freud discusses the primal scene in the “Wolf Man” case (“From the History of an Infantile Neurosis”). 129 “… физическое влечение и оргазм она испытывает только со своим полом, видимо из-за перенесённого в детстве шока от инцеста” (“…she experiences physical attraction and orgasm only with [people of] her own gender, apparently because of the shock of incest survived in childhood”). 130 Later, TLM. 131 “Нужна палочка, – подумала Марина. – Без палочки его не выковырнуть…” 132 “Павочка в дывочку.” At a key point in the novel, the stick Marina needs is wielded by a factory director, who enters her with no more concern for her consent or desire than that shown by her father.
118 excludes sexual violations from the story of her life, and instead measures it in female lovers (the “loves” of the title).
The tripartite Freudian model in Marina’s Thirtieth Love – the primal scene, sex with the father and its repetition – is quickly revealed to be nothing but a string of events that do not in fact form meaningful sequence.133 The causal relationship between Marina’s childhood trauma and her adult psyche is unclear, and the recurring imagery in her dreams never adds up to an interpretation. Incest does not seem to damage Marina unduly but simply inaugurates her into the confusing world of adult sexuality, which she soon begins exploring on her own. As a child, Marina masturbates after her father molests her. When she is raped at camp, she is disturbed but excited, overcome by an “avalanche of sweet torpor” (TLM 94).134 Sexual violence is written into Marina’s story as part of her coming into being as an independent, ambivalent, desiring person. The grown-up Marina is not a guilt-ridden victim but a joyful practitioner of undisciplined sexuality. She has sex with men for material gain, as a sign of friendship or out of boredom, and sleeps with women for pleasure and love. Her relationships exhibit a multiplicity of power dynamics, and some of them incorporate kink: one of her lovers asks Marina to “rape her” (158);135 another teaches her to play “sexual stickup” (160);136 a third exhausts Marina with sadistic, Nazi-themed sexual play (161).
Marina also deviates from a vision of a good survivor because she herself can be a sexual aggressor. A victim of childhood incest, Marina has a hebephilic moment of her own, indulging in a sexual fantasy about her “pathologically stupid” music student, a “twelve-year-old Adonis” (TLM 74). Feeding candy out of her palm to the recoiling boy (78), Marina acts as a stereotypical predator. The scene she imagines is recounted in cloying language: “holding down the chubby
133 These echoes of Freud recall Vladimir Nabokov’s irreverent and disdainful references to psychoanalysis (Durantaye 59), reinforcing the novel’s obvious intertextual link with Lolita. In an interview given to Denis Ioffe, Sorokin mocks the expectation that writing can be interpreted with reference to the writer’s childhood trauma, claiming that he was traumatized as a fetus by the noise of machines at a factory where his mother worked (“Razgovornyi zhanr”). In general, Sorokin engages with psychoanalytic tropes with less explicit vitriol than Nabokov (and with less aggression than he reserves for other discourses, such as Russian nationalism or valorization of Great Literature), but the irreverent attitude is nevertheless present both in Marina’s Thirtieth Love, as well as his later work: in Bro, for example, Sorokin parodies the idea of historical trauma and messianic nationalist fantasies. 134 “…лавина сладкого оцепенения.” 135 “Понасилуй меня…” 136 “…сексуальный гоп-стоп…”
119 little fellow, blushing in alarm, in a dark corner, she would pull down his trousers and underpants and force the little cannon growing out of the plump groin to tense up” (76). Despite this use of diminutives, Marina’s choice of words also asserts her dominance: the child whimpers, her caresses are “threatening,” she “throws him down on a torn leather mat,” her “hand forcefully takes the elastic testicles” (77).137
Even as Marina emerges fully as a subject that refuses to heal, the trauma framework continues to shape the narrative, eventually leading the reader into a deconstruction of the reparative mode. Traumatic memories seem to push Marina to reject the state’s paternalistic authority and perhaps, as Seim suggests, to become unable to achieve an orgasm with men (49). More obviously, trauma resurfaces in Marina’s “sea dreams,” which create a parallel, unconscious, trajectory of Marina’s journey, reinforcing the importance of sexuality in the plot. After her father and the camp counsellor, it is the Communist factory director Sergei who becomes the final embodiment of paternal masculinity. As Irina Samorukova points out, “it is as though the power of the Party gives him the capacity to satisfy Marina” (214).138 The novel’s last sex scene has Marina submit to Sergei with bored resignation, as she floats off into her final “sea dream.” This time, the sea overtakes her and elevates her into an orgasm of an unprecedented power, culminating in a vision of a united choir, as the Soviet anthem plays on the radio. By reliving the experience of being penetrated by the Father, Marina can be liberated from trauma and reborn into transcendent Soviet collectivity.
This last sex scene marks the text’s, and Marina’s, decisive passage from the paradigm of psychosexual development, which echoes Freudian discourse, into the paradigm of spiritual search and the transcendent bytie. The duality of the profane everyday (byt) and higher existence (bytie), important in Russian cultural history,139 is frequently invoked in the novel: notably, in
137 “…улыбаясь, представила, как, зажав в темный угол этого испуганно пылающего бутуза, стянула бы с него штаны с трусами и настойчивыми прикосновениями заставила б напрячься растущую из пухлого паха пушечку… Опустевший школьный спортивный зал гулко разносит Олегово хныканье и Маринин горячий шепот, поднятая ушедшим классом пыль еще висит в воздухе, запертую на швабру дверь дергает шатающийся по коридору лоботряс. Олег смолкает, покоряясь угрожающим ласкам, Марина валит его на рваный кожаный мат, ее губы втягивают в себя терпко пахнущую головку, а рука властно забирает эластичные яички…” 138 “Сила партии как бы дает ему возможность удовлетворить Марину.” 139 See pp. 65-68 for an in-depth discussion of these concepts.
120 references to the dualism of sacred and profane love.140 Marina’s recovery from brokenness is a gradual progression through manifestations of the Russian bytie, but the redemption she achieves is unexpected.
2.1.1.3 Marina’s “Monstrous Salvation”
Formally, her progression replicates the journeys of protagonists of Astafiev’s Lyudochka and, to an extent, Guzel’ Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, discussed in Chapter 1. Marina’s transformation, like theirs, is a form of kenosis. Unlike Lyudochka or Zuleikha, Marina does not have to be purified by death or suffering in order to be redeemed from her complicated sexual history. She does, however, have to disappear – first into the collective, and then into the text itself, as the novel’s prose narrative transforms into newspaper quotations. Crossing the border between subjectivity and bytie, Marina disappears as a subject. The novel thus enacts the reparative ideal of transcendence and identifies it with ideological Soviet discourse, showing redemption to be literally totalitarian. Sorokin’s novel can be read both as a denunciation of historical totalitarianism and a critique of the subject’s search for coherence, a sort of Lacanian cautionary tale. In the latter, more general, sense, Marina’s Thirtieth Love is an illustration of the main assumption of the radical mode: one cannot really be repaired without ceasing to be a subject.
In the beginning of the novel, Marina understands herself in the context of lesbian and dissident subcultures, in a society that put people like her into prisons and madhouses.141 Within the dominant heteronormative Soviet context, Marina starts out “lost,” but her lostness is appealing and lively. She is, to use Dan Healey’s term, a “gender and sexual dissident” in the Soviet state
140 This dualism appears, for example, in a discussion of Beethoven (82), Marina’s dreams about the fate of Russia (183), and her reflection on the esoteric teachings of Daniil Andreev (227-230). 141 After the Revolution, there was a period of relative reprieve from oppression. Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1922 (Healey, Homosexual Desire 122), and space for non-straight lives and discourses was opened up (see letters of early Soviet homosexuals collected and analyzed by Irina Roldugina). However, for the majority of its existence, the Soviet Union took a conservative line on family values, which meant that homosexuality was subject to silencing and persecution (Healey, Homosexual Desire 203). The 1990s brought another opportunity for normalizing homosexual desire, with homosexuality decriminalized once again, in 1993 (Baer 2). Later, the government’s hardened conservative stance resulted in the 2013 law against homosexual propaganda (Federal Law No. 135-FZ, 29.06.2013).
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(Healey, Homosexual Desire 12).142 She can be read as a queer character: not only because of her orgasm patterns, but because her sexuality ensures for her a marginal position that is at once political and private. Her movement through the Soviet urban and social landscape is queer as well: she never fully merges with different spaces nor opposes them, but passes through them sideways or diagonally. Marina does not fight to make society or the state acknowledge her aberrant self; her resistance lies in the choice of a parallel set of values and practices. Her ironic use of Soviet clichés underscores this privately, not openly, defiant stance: for example, she gets her KGB lover to buy groceries, which she gives to her friends as a gift “from the supporters of the dissident movement in the USSR” (TLM 127).143 An active and varied sexual life such as hers is also a form of resistance, precisely because it is a withdrawal into privacy. As Konstantin Kustanovich explains, in the Soviet context, sex was a way of rebelling against the system without openly confronting it: “the Soviet people had only two freedoms left: drinking and sex” (138). Queer sexuality, for Marina, constitutes a private sphere of resistance outside of the logic of the disciplinary state.
In choosing between queer and heterosexual sex, Marina chooses not just whom to fuck, but also which cultural history and lifestyle to embrace. Sex with men, for her, is matter-of-fact and pragmatic, whereas sex with women is a part of the creative exploration of the self, relationships and even world culture. The distinctiveness of this lesbian subculture is embodied in the metaphor of the “Pink Door,” which benevolent older women open for new recruits, inviting them into the community with a shared heritage, language and practices.144 Through the “Pink
142 Brian James Baer distinguishes between Marina’s dissident associations and her lesbian identity: “Her lesbianism is not, as one might expect, associated with political dissidence – her sexual relations with her dissident friends are all heterosexual; rather, it is personal, private, apolitical” (134). I acknowledge that dissidence in Sorokin is linked with Socialist orthodoxy, both being “collectivist discourses of sacrifice” (134), while lesbianism is coded as individualistic. Still, I choose to read Marina’s private sexual life as political and treat her identity as a lesbian and her involvement in dissident circles as mutually constitutive aspects of her countercultural position. Dan Healey’s term “gender and sexual dissent” emphasizes the political nature of non-normative sexuality: “By deliberately adapting the concept of dissent to this sphere, I propose to foreground the agency of those who chose to transgress the dominant sex/gender system. . . . I argue that whatever the biological baseline for same-sex desire and gender transgression, individuals who experienced them did so despite having been socialized within a hegemonic sex/gender system” (Healey, Homosexual Desire 12). 143 “От сочувствующих диссидентскому движению в СССР.” 144 Baer identifies the opposition between red and blue as a key to the novel’s use of colour imagery: “the former representing collectivist public discourse (both official Soviet and dissident), indexed as heterosexual, and the latter, a discourse of personal, private pleasure, associated with Marina’s lesbianism” (135). Marina’s “Rose Love” notebook and the metaphor of the “Pink Door” point to another key opposition: that between the red of the heteronormative Soviet collective and the pink of the lesbian community. In Russian slang, the word “rozovaia”
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Door,” Marina enters a world of cozy apartments and intense relationships with inventive female lovers, a world in which aberrant sexuality (including its darker aspects) is accepted rather than erased.
Despite her apparently radical position, Marina harbors a desire for unity, which proves to be her undoing. Her crisis comes from a sense of alienation, from which she can initially free herself only in brief moments: notably, in her dreams of the sea. What she yearns for is bytie, a higher, more spiritual way of being. The form that Marina’s transcendence finally takes – her conversion to a Soviet Socialist lifestyle – seems shocking in the context of this erotic Bildungsroman. It is, however, already foregrounded in a dream that launches Marina into a crisis: her first encounter with the realm of bytie.
In the dream, a pagan feast celebrating Sapphic love is interrupted by a dissident hero Marina idolizes. The character is only referred to as “HIM,” but his description clearly evokes the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A key figure of Marina’s fantasies, “HE” appears here as a saintly messenger of bytie, dressed like John the Baptist (“humble goatskin,” “humble sandals,” “an oak staff” [TLM 181]),145 and inflamed with righteous anger like Christ in the temple (181). “HIS” speech, rendered in capital letters and full of exclamation points, delivers the final Judgment and weaves together clichéd images of a new, happier, holier world – “CELESTIAL RUSSIA!!!” (183),146 where people joyfully greet the “Sun of Freedom” (124).147 Like a Dostoevskian sinner, Marina “weeps from delight and sweetness, weeps with the tears of tender repentance, joy and love” (184).148 In the dream, “HE” represents a Holy masculine force that can lift Marina to the level of bytie: existence without materiality, corporeality, and individuality. At the end of this first dream, Marina’s world is ruptured: the sky explodes and the earth splits under her feet,
(“pink” or “rose”) refers to lesbians, while “goluboi” (“blue”) refers to gay men. Moreover, as Svetlana Boym points out (drawing on Vera Dunham’s study of Soviet middleclass values [Dunham 41-48]), pink became a fashionable colour in postwar Russian home decorating. With its connotations of “totalitarian kitsch,” pink marked off “the despised coziness of the ‘bourgeois interior’” from the red of the Revolution (Boym, “The Poetics of Banality” 66). 145 “ОН – в полушубке, то есть в простой козьей шкуре, подпоясанной широким кожаным поясом, крепкие ноги обуты в простые сандалии, загорелые руки сжимают дубовый посох, а треугольное лицо со шкиперской бородкой...” 146 “НЕБЕСНАЯ РОССИЯ!!!” 147 “И Солнце Свободы встает, затопляя все своим светом...” 148 “Марина плачет от восторга и сладости, плачет слезами умиленного покаяния, радости и любви…”
123 revealing a “crack, crack, crack…” (185).149 This rift marks Marina’s estrangement from the lesbian dissident world in which she has forged her queer existence.
Yet HIS speech immediately points to the compromised nature of transcendence. It is an unsettlingly natural mix of Orthodox chants, Soviet patriotism, folkloric clichés and esoteric claims in the style of Russian modernist philosophers. “THE GREATNESS OF OUR RUS’”150 is described with a long list of ideologically opposed (high and low, terrible and inspiring) elements of Russian history and culture, such as the Holy Orthodox Church and the Gulag, or self-sacrifice and organized crime (184). “HIS” speech can incorporate these contradictions because it flattens them into signs. The mixture of ideological clichés can be made coherent only if what it represents is discourse itself. Sorokin’s unconventional use of capitalization and punctuation, which makes this prophetic speech into a graphic text, highlights the linguistic nature of this transcendence, and even “HIS” final words of wisdom – a plea to love – is not spoken but written in the sky (185). This means that the ideal of transcendence is far from being outside of history or language: by contrast, it is made of them. Bytie is pure language that rises above all referents.
In this context, Marina’s seemingly counterintuitive passage into Soviet Socialism is in fact a logical development of her crisis. Her savior Sergei may belong to a different political camp, but, more importantly, he looks like “HIM” and speaks like “HIM.” The men are interchangeable placeholders in the story, like two grammatically equivalent homonyms that could be placed anywhere within a sentence, preserving syntactical, if not semantic, coherence. Sergei’s speech in defense of Soviet values also shares the flattened quality of “HIS” impassioned speech about Russian spirituality. The affective charge of Sergei’s words is more important than their manifest content. Logically feeble, his speech does not convince or even make sense.151 Instead of arguments, it offers a string of folksy sayings: “So, Marina Ivanovna, quit playing dumb”
149 “…трещина, трещина, трещина…” 150 “…ВЕЛИЧИЕ РУСИ НАШЕЙ…” Rus’ is the name of the medieval region that covered the territories of Belarus, Ukraine, and some European parts of Russia. When used in reference to contemporary Russia, the name has nostalgic, patriotic and poetic connotations. 151 Especially to someone like Marina, who has had enough personal experiences of Soviet family values and social provisions to not be easily persuaded by Sergei’s praise of them.
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(254),152 a healthy dose of obscenity: “What’s this bullshit, pardon my French?!” (255),153 and tautological “proofs”: “The people cannot be mistaken, that’s why it’s the people” (254-255).154 Sergei cannot back his claims with anything but stuttering professions of absolute faith: “We are… how can I say it… I’m out of words… basically… I just feel in my gut that the truth is on our side! No doubt of it!” (249).155 His faulty argumentation is not a problem, since what he offers Marina is not logic but a chance to join the chain of being in a world free from questions and internal conflict.
To Sergei, Marina is a person caught in the bourgeois backwardness of byt, with all the social ills and diseases of the soul that it harbours. Sergei shows her that she does not need to “work through” her traumas, repair the crack in the foundation of her world or fill the void inside. In fact, he believes that it is not her who feels the lack. Hopelessly alienated from the people, she herself is the lack, the glaring absence in the “multi-million choir” of the Soviet people (185). The transcendent bytie that Marina seeks lies outside the subject. When she finally achieves it, “filling her spot, which stood empty for so many years” (266),156 she is not just liberated from trauma, but from her own ego. Entering the collective bytie, Marina renounces her personality, her private apartment, her twisted sexual and spiritual history, and finally, her textual existence as a character.
Marina’s Socialist redemption recalls a prominent narrative pattern in the Socialist “educational novel” as described by Andrei Sinyavsky, writing as Abram Tertz, in “On Socialist Realism” (47). These novels, he explains, focus on a person’s psychological development towards the predetermined and clear “Purpose,” a single goal that defines the genre and indeed the Socialist worldview. Such narratives depict “the Communist metamorphosis of individuals and entire communities,” in which characters “fight ‘the traces of the bourgeois past in [their] conscience,’ and re-educate [themselves] under the influence of the Party and of surrounding life” (47). This
152 “Так что, Марина Ивановна, ты кончай ваньку валять.” 153 “Ну что за поебень, извини за выражение?!” 154 “Народ ошибаться не может, на то он и народ.” 155 “Мы — это... как тебе сказать... слов не хватает... в общем... я вот нутром чувствую, что правда на нашей стороне! Как пить дать!” 156 “…Марина уже подалась назад и встала на единственно свободное место в стройной колонне многомиллионного хора, заняла свою ячейку, пустовавшую столькие годы.”
125 kind of transformation, in which an inner awakening is met with external guidance, is precisely how Sorokin depicts Marina’s journey.
Marina’s initiation into Socialism is staged as a death and rebirth: she puts on simple and modest clothes (274) and burns the treasured possessions of her former life: dissident books, lovers’ mementoes and even “HIS” portrait (276-277). Clear, coherent, sparse, Marina’s new reality is the embodiment of the Soviet New Byt, imagined in the 1920s as a totally restructured way of life oriented towards a transcendent Socialist future: essentially, bytie in the form of a lifestyle (Boym, Common Places 33). The morning after her life-changing night with Sergei, even Marina’s apartment is touched by the wholesome simplicity of the new Soviet lifestyle. In the bathroom, Marina finds everything “new, unexpected, surprising” (TLM 269).157 Her lover’s morning routine contrasts with Marina’s own bourgeois habits: he performs the recommended physical exercise while she lounges, eats a calorie-rich working man’s breakfast, and prefers simple tea with milk to Marina’s decadent coffee (270).
To be fully free from byt, Marina moves to a factory dorm. Her complete transformation is confirmed when she exchanges her private bathtub, a site of many a sexual encounter, for the post-work shower at the factory. The controlled running water in the shower is no Aphrodite’s sea foam and does not produce the waves of shame and pleasure associated in the novel with Marina’s sexuality. The shower scene shows us that Marina has undergone a profound change (285). Uncharacteristically free from sexual fantasies, she makes no attempt at seducing her coworkers, brushes off their compliments and instead chats with them about the factory bulletin. She has been officially healed of her wayward desire. “I used to be very-very different not so long ago. I didn’t live, but simply existed,” she says to her new friends, and they gladly confirm it (333).158
The change in Marina’s trajectory is accompanied in the novel by a change in the style of narration. Intertextual play and ironic dissident doublespeak, so important to the first part of the text, disappear. They are replaced with generic clichés of the Socialist Realist industrial novel and bureaucratic rhetoric employed at face value, with not a hint of irony. The prose is overtaken
157 “Все было новое, неожиданное, удивительное…” 158 “Я же совсем недавно была совсем-совсем другой… Не жила, а существовала…”
126 by formulaic expressions with predictable qualifiers: for example, the factory is “spacious and light, full of machines, people, light, sound and smell” (286).159 The repetition of the root “light” (svetlom/sveta) underscores the poverty of prose, and the list of generic qualities (“light, sound and smell”) contrasts with the precise descriptions and metaphors in the first part of the novel.
The role of the narrator, who began by lovingly dwelling on Marina’s appearance, psychological state, and perspective on the world, is now reduced to communicating straightforward motivations and predictable reactions. Once sharply observant and ironic, Marina suddenly finds everything delightful; she is a child in an unthreatening and exciting world. People around her cease to have secret motivations: lecherous old men in taxis and subways are replaced with kindly war veterans and dependable comrades. Even Marina’s relationship with Sergei immediately becomes non-sexual (304). Whereas the early part of the novel was full of diverse and detailed characters, the stylistic shift flattens them out into Socialist Realist tropes. The central conflict in this part of the novel – between the factory collective and a worker who inadvertently slowed down production by accidentally damaging a machine – is, appropriately for Socialist Realist novels that deal with model communities, “a conflict between good and better, model and supermodel” (Tertz, “On Socialist Realism” 50). Marina herself turns into a conscientious Stakhanovite, as she rebukes her colleague, “comrade Zolotarev,” for negligence at a factory meeting (TLM 354).160 Marina becomes the ideal Socialist Realist character described by Sinyavsky: she “firmly knows what is right and what is wrong . . . says plainly ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and does not confuse black with white” (“On Socialist Realism” 49). The incident with a broken machine initiates a further shift into the Socialist ideological discourse: characters lose their first names and distinguishing features, appearing as a group of uniformly hard-working comrades.
As the narratorial gaze abandons psychology, social relations and details of the setting, it turns with a fierce erotic attention to the operation of factory machines. Marina’s reaction to the process of production is explicitly sexualized: “[h]er heart beat joyfully, blood rushed to her cheeks, her lips parted” (292).161 All her senses are involved in observing the process: “her eyes
159 “Они оказались в просторном светлом помещении, полном станков, людей, света, звуков и запахов.” 160 The Stakhanovite movement among Soviet workers encouraged and celebrated outstanding productivity (Shlapentokh). 161 “Ее сердце радостно билось, кровь прилила к щекам, губы раскрылись.”
127 watched greedily, the wonderful music of machines rang in her ears” (284).162 Understanding “the essence of it in her heart,” Marina enters an ecstatic unity with the “wondrous dance of creation” (292).163 What Marina is witnessing is the pinnacle of Socialist Realism, according to Sinyavsky: “[t]his great harmony is the final Purpose of Creation” (“On Socialist Realism” 53).
As the novel draws to the end, its sentences lose even this bare minimum of predictable descriptive detail. Eventually, the narrator completely disappears, replaced by a conversation in which characters function merely as mediums for ideologically sound written discourse: movie reviews, newspaper headlines, and quotations from Lenin and or Marx. Finally, these voices, along with the plot, are drowned out by a stream of newspaper articles. The novel’s shift towards a flattened prose style, and ultimately to pure, transparent and self-identical textuality in the form of newspaper quotations is the realization of complete, uncomplicated unity with the world that Marina had yearned for. Bytie is revealed as a flood of deadening clichés.
Marina’s trajectory clearly begs to be read as a critique of historical totalitarianism. Indeed, Sorokin himself calls the novel “a classic novel of Soviet salvation. . . It is a monstrous salvation, but it was precisely this kind of salvation that was offered to people in the twentieth century. This is a novel about a person’s choice: to remain oneself or to lose oneself” (“My vse otravleny literaturoi”).164 But Sorokin’s critique has a wider ideological target than Soviet Socialism. By drawing a parallel between the dissident Solzhenitsyn-like saint and the Socialist factory director Sergei, he equates Soviet and anti-Soviet visions of Russia’s spiritual greatness, questioning the dangerous attachment to a reparative dream at the heart of Russian national identity.
In addition to the historically specific interpretation, Marina’s story can be read in dialogue with poststructuralist and psychoanalystic insights, as a story of the subject. Unlike Sorokin’s other early works, which tend to avoid psychologism in favour of complex engagements with discourse, Marina’s Thirtieth Love gives the center stage to the personal search for meaning. Lipovetsky writes that totalitarianism appears in the novel as “…the dictatorship of the
162 “… глаза жадно смотрели, в ушах звучала чудесная музыка машин.” 163 “Марина поняла суть своим сердцем, подалась вперед, чтобы не пропустить ни мгновения из чудесного танца созидания.” 164 “…это классический роман о советском спасении. . . . Это чудовищное спасение, но именно такое спасение предлагалось людям в ХХ веке. Это роман о человеческом выборе: остаться самим собой или потерять себя.”
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‘spiritual,’ i.e. incorporeal and impersonal, element over human bodies and their imperfect, but individual lives; as the final triumph of the discursive over the non-discursive, executed in the name of the transcendental” (“Sorokin-Trope”).165 After all, although Marina’s salvation looks Socialist, its ideological content is less important. Hers is not a moral transcendence offered by Astafiev and Yakhina, in which ideals of personal redemption or collective unity are taken seriously. Instead, it is a linguistic transcendence, as evidenced by “HIS” speech, which refers not to any extradiscursive reality but to its nature as spoken and written language. Marina herself understands that salvation lies not in the specific meaning of “HIS” words, but in “something else – something important, very important for her!” (TLM 184).166 This “something else” lacks content: it is the movement of the sliding signifier. Marina’s path to salvation requires her to rise into this world of pure textuality. What is at stake, therefore, is not truth about sexuality or about Russia, but the truth about language and its arbitrary signs.
The transformation of narrative into a subjectless and authorless text is a liberation from subjectivity. Sorokin explains that Marina is saved when she “escapes her own individuality, split self, sexual dissatisfaction, non-traditional orientation” (“Vladimir Sorokin ne khochet byt’ prorokom”).167 In other words, subjectivity is painful, and its disappearance is a logical result of the project of reparation. As Schmid explains, “one has to understand Sorokin’s ‘catastrophes’ as happy endings, because they resolve all painful tensions” (218). According to Arkady Nedel, Marina achieves a state of harmony, in which there is no longer a distinction between the object and the subject, and therefore no desire.168 This allows her to “master objects, belong to the collective body, get rid of the oppressive feeling of alienation from the master” (Nedel).169 In Nedel’s psychoanalytically-informed interpretation, Marina overcomes her own nature as split a subject.
165 “. . . диктатура ‘духовного’, то есть бестелесного и безличного, начала над человеческими телами и их несовершенными, но индивидуальными жизнями; как окончательное торжество дискурсивного над не- дискурсивным, осуществляемое во имя трансцендентного.” 166 “дело совсем не в этом, а в чем-то другом — важном, очень важном для нее!” 167 “Это роман о спасении героя от самого себя. Марина спасается от собственной индивидуальности, раздвоения личности, сексуальной неудовлетворенности, нетрадиционной ориентации.” 168 Recall Sinyavsky’s Socialist Realist hero, who has “no inner doubts and hesitations, no unanswerable questions, and no impenetrable secrets” (Tertz, “On Socialist Realism” 49). 169 “. . . господствовать над предметами, принадлежать коллективному телу, избавляться от гнетущего чувства отчужденности от господина.”
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In this sense, Marina begins as a subject of queer failure, and ends as a failed queer subject: unlike the sinthomosexual imagined by Edelman, she is unable to persist in a crisis and fully embody negativity. Instead, she falls for the siren call of the reparative mode and disappears in the arms of the Symbolic. Her terrifying trajectory from queer byt to Socialist bytie, and from lack to totalitarianism, is a warning to the reader against indulging in the desire for reparation and a critique of political ideologies that make use of this desire.
2.3.2 Green Girl as a Celebration of Failure 2.1.1.4 Introduction to the Novel
Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl also paints a portrait of a woman in an existential crisis, albeit in a very different cultural and political context. Published in 2011 by Emergency Press, the novel received strongly polarized responses: on the one hand, it was praised for its ambition and compared to classics like Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (“Green Girl: A Novel by Kate Zambreno”); on the other, it was derided for its lack of resolution170 and the indecisive, self- sabotaging heroine.171 Despite these negative reviews, the novel was generally critically acclaimed and reprinted by HarperCollins only three years later, with additions and edits (Milks).
The work of Kate Zambreno is exemplary of contemporary fiction animated by the tradition of feminist negativity discussed in this chapter. Though Zambreno admits to not being particularly interested in academia, she is an avid reader of feminist and critical theory (Zambreno, “Heroine Worship”).172 In her genre-bending works, she affirms the feminist stakes in challenging pervasive negative connotations of failure: “I am really beginning in my critical and creative life to be against ideas of mastery, more toward ideas of failure. Something so fascist about craft” (“Interview with Kate Zambreno”). In Green Girl, Zambreno draws on her own experience to explore the vagaries of contemporary young womanhood: “When I am writing about my days as a ‘toxic girl,’ I’m writing about a period of fucking up, of being adrift, a period that was
170 “Ruth finds no meaning in the press of endless days, so why should we?” asks Melody Schreiber in The Washington Post (Schreiber). 171 “…why would anyone want to share more than 10 pages with this woman? Although it seems Ruth is in London to start anew and have adventures, she comes across as a little dim…” (Zimmerman). 172 “I’m not sure I think much about academia, except perhaps as this unconquerable fortress. I pretty much luxuriate in ideas of being illegitimate. I read theory, though. I love theory.”
130 pathologized for me. We should be allowed to be unsympathetic characters, to be screw-ups, without it always being translated for us as mental illness” (“Interview: ‘Heroines’ Author Kate Zambreno”). The “toxic girl” is a negative figure that Zambreno’s feminist gaze recovers and describes. Green Girl’s “spectacle of the unstable girl-woman” (Green Girl 13) posits a form of literary ethics that lays bare the vulnerability and negativity at the heart of subjectivity.
Ruth, the novel’s American protagonist, is adrift in London, working dead-end retail jobs. She is young, beautiful, and sad, obsessed with makeup and French New Wave films, and in mourning over a lost lover. Critics have noted Green Girl’s distinctive narrator, who is at once a consoling and aggressive mother: “Ruth is my doll. I crave to give birth to her and to commit unspeakable acts of violence against her” (Green Girl 162), a future Ruth: “I experience horror at my former self. Is that me? Can’t be me” (57), or perhaps Ruth herself, observing herself as if from a distance: “Sometime[s] she narrates her actions inside her head in third-person” (27).173 The novel is also notable for its kaleidoscopic intertextuality: the narrative is regularly interrupted by epigraphs that reflect on the previous section of the text or prefigure the next one. Quotes from the Bible, poetry, novels, philosophy and film return to key themes of girlhood, urban life, seeing and being seen. The narrator makes frequent references to film history, and the characters seek to emulate the style of French actresses. These film references (notably, to the French New Wave) reinforce the novel’s depiction of abject femininity as a spectacle and locate Ruth in a genealogy of “green girls” of Western culture, who are young and adrift in the city, and are both jaded and vulnerable. The novel’s 2014 edition even ends with the word FIN printed on a separate page in old-fashioned cinematic typography, the decisiveness of this artificial ending contrasting with the narrative’s absence of resolution (275).
That Ruth suffers there is no doubt, but unlike Anderson’s Melinda, she is not easy to rescue – or even to sympathize with, as evidenced by negative critical reactions (Schreiber). Attached to her sexual abjection and capable of violating others, she is not an unambiguously good, picture- perfect survivor. Moreover, the story told in the novel drifts away from a potential path of recovery, instead tracing its protagonist’s movement through scenes that form more of a montage
173 The latter interpretation was pointed out by Carrie Sun for FictionWritersReview.com.
131 of urban life rather than a story of personal healing. Green Girl is a story of a damaged young flâneuse making her way through the generalized misery of the city.
2.1.1.5 Ruth as a Bad Survivor
Ruth is traumatized by a bad affair and refuses to heal. Her feeling of emptiness is counteracted by an overwhelming memory of an ex-lover, endowed with excessive, larger-than-life significance. Like Marina’s dissident hero, Ruth’s lost lover is never named, but appears as a capitalized pronoun “HE”. This absent man “has occupied her mind, colonized her body” (Green Girl 14). Their relationship involved rough sex, which affected Ruth deeply: “The first time we ever had sex you hurt me so badly that I was convinced my appendix had burst” (209, emphasis in original). This memory now has a hold on her, and it sheds light on both Ruth’s sense of being stuck and her self-destructive tendencies. In addition to depicting its character as damaged and fixated on the past, Green Girl makes use of distinctive elements of trauma aesthetics: dissociation, repetition and metonymy, all of which allow the traumatic event to be represented indirectly.
Feeling “a sort of fatality about everything” (106), Ruth finds herself in dangerous or unpleasant situations, uncertain of what to say, doing what she does not want to be doing and submitting to sex she does not really want to be having. She rarely makes efforts to disentangle herself. Her one attempt at protesting – a whispered “No, no, please” to a self-involved roommate forcing her into a threesome – amounts to nothing (146). In most situations, Ruth finds it easier to perform consent and enthusiasm than face her helplessness: she “forgets and pretends to enjoy it” (212), or “lets him even though it hurts and she would rather be at home, in her room, reading fashion magazines” (107). For Ruth, sex is a distraction from a sense of emptiness, “just something else she lets inside of her, like images from TV. She lets anyone, anything inside, to ignore the gnaw of loneliness, which comes anyway” (108). Having sex and watching TV appear as two kinds of mindless consumption, two equally valid strategies of numbing oneself.
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Ruth’s tendency to “vacate the premises” (109) is recognizable from trauma theory as dissociation.174 From the bedroom to the workplace, she repeatedly retreats from the reality of the moment, observing it as if from a distance. Instances of such withdrawal can be found throughout the narrative: Ruth distances herself when her boss tells her off: “She is not really there. Not really there. Best to go blank, to retreat inside” (9), when she enters a tube station: “The violence of life she observes, blankly. She watches it all unfold. She is not there” (70), and when a stranger begins to have sex with her: “But she is not really there. Not really there. She retreats inside her bubble. She deadens herself” (109). The frequent repetitions in these quotations are representative of the rest of the novel. The novel is filled with intratextual echoes: phrases and words like “not there” (43, 70), “not really there” (9, 43, 109, 242), “blank” (4, 9, 20, 21, 65, 83, 85, 99, 166, 249, 266), “blankly” (43, 70, 139) or “blankness” (140, 167, 240). Focusing again and again on a few specific details, the sentences themselves model traumatic effects of dissociation and repetition, even as their incantatory quality suggests a process of self- soothing.
The same mechanism is at play in the description of Ruth’s resistance to joining a threesome with her roommate and a coworker. Here, the account of the events is frequently interrupted with mantra-like repetitions, which replace specific descriptions of what is going on: “Allfunandgamesallfunandgames” (146). The narrator repeatedly zooms in on the small detail of Ruth’s ripped stockings, which metonymically represent the rupture in her protective layer and the invasion of her psychological and bodily integrity: “Her stockings had been ripped. She could just cry about those stockings” (145). And later, again: “Her stockings were ripped. She could just cry about those stockings” (147). The focus on the stockings – or rather, the sentences about the stockings – invokes once again the interplay of traumatic dissociation and repetition as a way of coping. The scene includes a visually spectacular representation of dissociation: “She was on the ceiling, looking at the scene with a sort of horror, like slowing down mesmerized at the intimacy of a car crash, bodies torn, thrown against each other, their blood pooled together”
174 Zambreno’s portrayal of Ruth closely resembles Bessel Van Der Kolk’s description of trauma symptoms in rape victims: “They often continue to dissociate in the face of threat, suffer from profound feelings of helplessness and have difficulty planning effective action. This makes them vulnerable to develop ‘emotion-focused coping,’ a coping style in which the goal is to alter one’s emotional state, rather than the circumstances that give rise to those emotional states” (9).
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(146). This comparison of entangled bodies during sex to mutilated victims of a traffic accident recalls Ruth’s fascination with urban accidents and her morbid fantasy of being killed in a crowd (27).
Employing devices associated with trauma, the narratorial voice in Green Girl at times recalls the observant, self-aware voice of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Melinda in Speak. In a passage describing her encounter with a menacing bartender, the narrator/Ruth assesses her situation in clear and bitter staccato thoughts. Compare Anderson’s “S for silent, for stupid, for scared. S for silly. For shame” (101) with Zambreno’s “R for rape not romance. R for ruin. R for run, Ruth, run” (107). Besides the obvious fact that Ruth does not run away but stays and pretends to feel pleasure, these alliterative passages serve very different aesthetic functions. In Anderson’s novel, the letter S grounds the whole narrative in the act of speaking, which provides the correct interpretation of the letter “S” against all the false meanings, from silence to shame. In Green Girl, the list of R-words opens up the chain of related and seemingly equally valid interpretations: rape, romance, ruin, run. It is part of the lilting poetry of the novel, with its rhythmic repetitions, almost onomatopoeic refrains, and alliterations: “Ruth is hit again with the desire to swallow her tongue, to swallow, swallow her tongue . . . Ruth worries, worries, worries, while her stomach twists, twists, twists” (53). The novel is an echo chamber in which images constantly reappear, none of which holds the key to the protagonist’s trauma, the way the letter S does in Speak.
In their encounters with dangerous men, Ruth and Melinda both imagine themselves as defenseless animals. Anderson’s Melinda freezes at the sight of her rapist: “Little rabbit heart leaps out of my chest and scampers across the paper, leaving bloody footprints . . .” (Speak 160). When she describes herself as a deer and her rapist as a beast, Melinda speaks of terror and not of desire, and these imaginative metaphors prefigure her eventual ability to work creatively through her pain. By contrast, Ruth “prays to be preyed upon” (Green Girl 37). Aware of the dangers of rape, she integrates this knowledge into her experience of herself as someone who submits to unwanted sex. In fact, the novel’s free indirect narration has Ruth resort to the same metaphors as Anderson’s Melinda, but only in order to better inhabit and enjoy the role of victim: “She is a deer standing in the middle of the forest road, knees buckling, begging for a predator. And Bambi has no mommy. The mean hunter has a sexy glint in his eyes” (37). This
134 passage describes a sexual dynamic between an aggressive male and a weaker female who feels awakened and excited by the experience of being pursued.175 It is uncertain whose agency is primary, and where blame could be assigned: “HE used her and abused her and she begs for a repeat of this experience” (37). Notably, the two statements are linked with the conjunction “and,” not contrasted with “but”: in Green Girl, there is nothing contradictory about Ruth’s desire for “a beast,” for “[s]omeone to destroy her” (38).176 Ruth’s longing for a “beast” could be seen as a Lacanian ethical stance. Recognizing that violent sexuality allows her to honour the truth of her lack, or “disappearance” (209), Ruth rejects an affirmative and conventional romantic relationship: “She did not desire to be loved and cherished and caressed . . . She did not want to make love. She wanted to be fucked – over and over again repeating her own disappearance” (209). By embracing abjection, Ruth recognizes the value of violent jouissance.
Of course, in her reminiscences about her relationship with “HIM,” Ruth retains control she has over the story. She can retroactively narrate it as something she wants: a performance of weakness and a fulfillment of desire. Ruth’s London escapades are markedly different from her emotionally charged accounts of the sexual relationship with “HIM.” Unembellished by memory, Ruth’s real-time experiences show greater ambivalence and less satisfaction. These scenes make it more obvious that Ruth’s submission to unwanted and demeaning sex is a consequence of her sense of emptiness and drive to self-destruction.
The scene in which Ruth has sex with a bartender highlights two related aspects of desire: the positive pursuit of the desired object and the condition of lack that sets it off. The narrator highlights this ambivalence by playing on the two meanings of the verb “to want”: “She is willing, a willing victim. If not wanting then willing although she is wanting she has a hole a void and perhaps he has what she needs to fill it” (107). Thus Ruth reaches out to the potential violator not only because of a positive desire to have the experience, but also out of despair. In
175 Here, Zambreno invokes not just the animal itself, with its fairytale connotations of innocence and vulnerability, but a specific cinematic deer – Bambi from Walt Disney’s eponymous animated film. Bambi is an iconic image in popular culture, which has been selling Disney merchandise to generations of viewers. Ruth, therefore, is likened not just to an innocent animal but to a desirable image, a potential commodity. This reference emphasizes one of the central themes of the book: the lived experience of embodying the spectacle of the defenseless woman. 176 This desire is repeated frequently throughout the novel: “She hadn’t known she had desired a beast. Someone to destroy her” (38). “She did not desire to be loved and cherished and caressed. She desired a beast. Someone to destroy her. Her own Jack the Ripper. Her own serial killer. She did not want to make love. She wanted to be fucked – over and over again repeating her own disappearance (208-209).
135 the scene of the threesome, agency and responsibility – and therefore, blame – are also made ambivalent. Ruth does not want to smoke weed or have sex but submits to the desires of others, because “she [does]n’t know how to refuse” (145). She briefly concedes that the responsibility lies in “that nihilist streak inside of herself that she could never understand, that impulse to ruin everything, to grind everything into its death” (145). This acknowledgment of self-directed aggression is quickly disavowed in a move to externalize blame onto her roommate: “Or maybe it was Agnes? Maybe Agnes was the grand instigator of this entire collision? It was easier to blame Agnes. Yes, blame Agnes. Blame Agnes” (145). This brief acknowledgment of one’s own self-destructive agency, before all responsibility is assigned to an external aggressor, complicates reparative accounts of sexual violence and erodes the survivor’s naturalized innocence.
Like Sorokin’s Marina, Ruth is capable of perpetrating violence. But where Sorokin’s language mimics erotic fiction, Zambreno’s description of Ruth’s violent sexual behaviour is as laconic as directions for a movie script, but still evocative and visceral: “He lies there, skinny and vulnerable. She climbs on top of him. Begins to have sex with him. He lets her. He stares into her eyes helplessly” (208). The victim is Rhys, Ruth’s gentle suitor, whose resistance to sex inspired in Ruth a desire to “soil” “something so virginal and pure” (203). Ruth “begs and pleads,” and finally undresses him (208). The immobile Rhys reveals a sight of sad non-violent openness: “a large penis flaring like a gray mushroom,” “[a] flesh tulip surrounded by a cloud of rust-colored hair” (208). Afterwards, Ruth finds Rhys’s gentleness to be a burden, and ends the relationship in “a shiver of revolt” (208).
Ruth is less an innocent victim on the road to healing than she is the constitutively broken subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis. A split subject such as Ruth cannot “mourn her young body riddled with violations” because “[s]he does not know what to mourn” (108). In the novel, “green girls” like Ruth do the work of embodying the dark truth of existence: “…to be beautiful, fresh, young is a horrible fate if one feels empty inside. That is why these ingénues try to soil themselves” (58). This is why a “green girl” such as Ruth could be read in relation to Edelman’s elaboration of the Lacanian lacking subject. “Demeaned, it embraces de-meaning,” writes Edelman of the sinthomosexual (107). Similarly, there is an element of choice in Ruth’s
136 identification with her abjection.177
In Zambreno’s novel, girls and young women appear precisely as “subjects who cannot speak, who refuse to speak” – or at least refuse to speak properly (Halberstam 126). The title of Green Girl refers to a scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which Polonius dismissively addresses Ophelia as “a green girl, unsifted in such perilous circumstance” (Shakespeare, qtd. in Green Girl 49). Improper, immature speech is a distinctive characteristic of the “green girl”: she “is often inarticulate. Speech littered with likes. She cannot translate the depths” (14). Ruth talks “like a girl,” and that is partly what makes her character potentially irritating to the reader. Kari Larsen writes that in the novel, “a lost girl is not an empathetic figure, but a provocation” (Larsen). Another review describes Ruth as “appalling to be around” (“‘Green Girl’ by Kate Zambreno”). In the words of cultural critic Megan Milks, Ruth is “all too familiarly entitled, all too familiarly abject, and thus apparently illegible as a political or philosophical subject” (Milks).
The way in which women’s voices have been dismissed as superficial and irritating is in fact a major concern for Zambreno. Epigraphs in Green Girl reference the research that Zambreno has done for her book Heroines (2012), quoting such figures as Edie Sedgwick, Marilyn Monroe, Zelda Fitzgerald – a whole gallery of celebrity bad girls whose creativity was eclipsed by men and male industries. Speaking is posed as an important problem in the novel, but its importance here is different from its role in reparative narratives such as Anderson’s Speak. The focus is no longer on gaining courage to break the silence in order to be heard, but instead on falling short of the ideal speaking subject, on speaking ineffectively, but speaking nonetheless. While Ruth herself does not rail against her victimization, the narrative speaks for her, revealing the daily life and ordinary suffering of the “green girl” in the middle of her journey.
177 In another passage, Green Girl echoes Lacan’s writing on the mirror stage, during which the subject comes into being when confronted by its apparently whole reflection and perceiving itself, by contrast, as fragmented (“The Mirror Stage”). Zambreno’s Ruth, though no longer an infant, resembles this emergent subject. For her, the mirror is a key object for confronting the problem of existing and being seen: “She looks at the glass. A girl smacks, smiles back. A polished surface. She is airbrushed to perfection. She looks happy” (Green Girl 21). Facing her own perfect reflection, Ruth acutely feels her own insufficiency: “There is some gap in between. Some dark hole in the center of Ruth that is not reflected in this mirror. She mutes this violence and turns it on herself” (58).
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2.1.1.6 Green Girl as a Story of a Flâneuse
Green Girl does not have a clear trajectory of a female Bildungsroman: unlike Melinda in Speak or Precious in Push, Ruth does not learn to express herself better or alter the state of her victimization. While Sorokin uses the personal crisis of his protagonist to deconstruct the reparative mode and show its violent nature, Ruth’s aimless movement through the city has no decisive turning points. It is a string of missed opportunities for productive crisis or tangible development.
Ruth’s experience of sexual violation often pales in comparison with other manifestations of existential negativity: her father’s estrangement, the casual cruelty of social interactions and relationships, humiliating and mind-numbing labor. Caught in the bad infinity of traumatized young womanhood, Ruth tries to make of her life a piece of visual art by moving through the city, where she can be seen. The problematic of being seen, explored in the novel with the help of references to the French New Wave, which I will discuss later, is grounded in Ruth’s identification as a flâneuse.
The image of the flâneur famously originates in Charles Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863). Baudelaire describes this figure as that of an observer, moving in the city at once as a stranger and as part of the living body of the crowd.178 Both Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, who later elaborated on the Baudelairean figure of the flâneur, have contributed to cementing the place of this key figure of modernity in the Western cultural imagination. In her feminist critique of this tradition, Janet Wolff points out that the flâneur inevitably appears as male: “These heroes of modernity . . . share the possibility and the prospect of lone travel, of voluntary up-rooting, of anonymous arrival at a new place. They are, of course, all men” (40). At the time, women had significantly less freedom to move around in the public space. Wolff argues that the cultural dominance of this imaginary male figure has erased women’s experiences of urban modernity.
178 “For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define” (“The Painter of Modern Life” 9).
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In the twenty-first century London depicted in Green Girl, the role of a flâneuse is no longer “non-existent” (Wolff 41) or “impossible” (45), but it is by no means unproblematic. Zambreno, who quotes Benjamin’s mention of Baudelaire in The Arcades Project (Green Girl 28), explores the contemporary experience of a woman as a stranger and observer in the city: as she explains in an interview, she is “resurrecting a flâneuse in a contemporary urban space” (“The Female Flâneur”).179 This flâneuse is not the empowered and joyful stranger described by Baudelaire: however “independent, passionate, impartial” (“The Painter of Modern Life” 9) she might want to be, the city is a dangerous space, where she is vulnerable because she is observed: “The awareness on the train, the fashion show. The men are always looking, always looking with their flirty eyes. One can shop but one does not have to buy” (Green Girl 58). To be a flâneuse is to be on display as a commodity. Ruth’s experience is ambivalent and intense: observing and being stared at, joining the lifeblood of the city and being crushed by the crowd.
Reading Ruth as a flâneuse allows me to reinterpret the literary devices that I have earlier described as associated with trauma. As much as they evoke Ruth’s sexual abjection, they refer to life in a city. Ruth’s sense of inner emptiness is echoed in the daily refrain of her commute, the “Mind the gap” announcement on the London subway. In a later passage, the connection is made explicit: “Mind the gap. The gap between who she was and who everyone thought her to be. The gap between the past and now, between her fiction and her reality” (100). While Ruth is looking to be sexually pursued by a “beast” (208), the city itself is coded as dangerous and predatory: her way into the city is “[t]he perennial return to the center of the beast” (93); after she is assaulted by her roommate and a co-worker, she sets off “[r]oaming up and down the Tottenham Court beast” (151). The device of repetition is frequently used to describe not just Ruth’s traumatized psyche, but urban life itself: a whole page in the novel is devoted to different kinds of “bodies, bodies, bodies,” which essentially forms a standalone poem (101). Ruth’s days are repetitive as well: again and again, we see her on the subway, at work at Harrods department store, shopping on Oxford street. Repetition reflects the daily grind of city life, always just livable enough but not moving to any resolution. London is the site of the everyday life of the “green girl,” with her shallow words, her love of makeup, her toxic friendships – the trappings of
179 In another interview, Zambreno explains that she was drawing on her own experience as a foreigner in England, and explores “the idea of being stared at, of being aware of myself from the outside, of cultivating that . . . what it’s like to be a girl walking down the street” (“The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Kate Zambreno”).
139 femininity that, according to Zambreno, are dismissed both by the male establishment and by second wave feminists (Heroines 269). Zambreno’s depiction of Ruth the flâneuse is a move of shadow feminism: it is about voicing the negativity within ordinary life.
As a flâneuse, Ruth has movement but not a trajectory. In this story of a subject of sexual violence who moves through the city in a string of repetitive days, Zambreno presents suffering as coterminous with Ruth’s existence, not part of a reparative arc that moves towards healing through a high point of resolution. The condition of the “green girl,” like that of the Lacanian subject, is “To want. To lack. To have a hole” (Green Girl 33). Though some critics find this uncertainty frustrating and disappointing, Green Girl draws on the radical mode to construct a politically significant vision of the failure to heal.
Sorokin and Zambreno do not represent their characters as asexualized victims. Marina and Ruth enjoy what they should not enjoy. Both novels further complicate the assignment of blame by having their characters engage in, or at least fantasize about, violating others. By representing its protagonists as “willing victims” whose desire is ambivalent and even as potential or actual sexual aggressors, the novels uncouple the question of innocence from the problem of sexual violence. The impossibility of assigning blame strips narratives of their ability to produce coherence and distinguish right from wrong. The novels also undercut the totalizing drive towards coherence in their very structure, undermining the authority and legitimacy of reparative discourses of trauma and transcendence. Sorokin does this by depicting his protagonist’s redemption as monstrous, while Zambreno depicts suffering not as a unique event, but as part of the woman’s experience in the city. Like the theoretical critiques of reparation that I discussed earlier, these novels can thus be read as examples of the radical mode.
2.4 Limits of the Radical Mode
Theoretical and literary celebrations of failure assume that it is possible and necessary to embrace negativity. They are based on a conviction that a subject can position itself in a way that escapes the logic of reparation. This essentially optimistic assumption is important for prying open banal solutions and articulating an inspiring political intervention: what Halberstam describes as the “queer art of failure” redirects us away from dead ends of the reparative mode towards “other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being” (88). Nevertheless, I propose to put
140 this optimism aside and consider the difference between what the radical approach says it does and what it actually can, and cannot, do.
How does one become a radical subject that embraces its own vulnerable, wounded, and destructive nature? Is it possible, as Edelman suggests, to choose to identify with this position? Can the drive towards reparation and identity be willed away? I believe that it is not enough to admit, with Edelman, that a radical position such as queerness is also an identity that can be appropriated. The mere possibility that the celebration of negativity may be only a fantasy of liberation requires us to rethink radical projects and confront their implications. Marina’s Thirtieth Love and Green Girl dramatize this possibility in different ways, suggesting not only that subjectivity is a state of being undone, but that undone subjectivity can be a solid identity – that of a Sapphic hetaera or a New Wave starlet. In the final section of this chapter, I will first turn to Sorokin’s novel to discuss the use of negativity in identity production, and then move on to consider the tensions between radical abjection and capitalist subjection in Green Girl.
2.4.1 Lesbian Aesthetics and Queer Poshlost’
As I have shown above, Marina’s Thirtieth Love deconstructs the ideal of bytie by taking it to its limit. It shows that a desire for transcendent reparation ends in the subject’s disappearance in a totalitarian ideology. The novel, however, has something else to offer. I would argue that it can be read as a critique of the radical mode itself. Its deconstructive impulse also moves backwards: Marina’s “monstrous salvation” (Sorokin, “My vse otravleny literaturoi”) points to the totalizing coherence already in place within radical discourses of aberrant sexuality and resistant politics. To appreciate this aspect of the novel, we need to move away from the psychoanalytic problematic of the structure of the subject and turn to the issues of identity and representation. Through its depiction of Marina’s sexual and social marginality, the novel questions the very possibility of consciously occupying a radical position.
Sorokin achieves this effect by taking his classic formula of revealing the bankruptcy of language in a unique direction. Unlike his other works, Marina’s Thirtieth Love is not built around an interruption of a formulaic realist narrative with a whirlwind of “meat… teeming with worms” (Erofeev 28). It has no need for flashes of the grotesque. As such, the novel is the clearest example of Sorokin’s interest in description over deconstruction, juxtaposing literary
141 representations in such a way that they essentially deconstruct themselves.180 In Marina’s Thirtieth Love, this self-deconstructing juxtaposition is done through the novel’s return “from the present to the defeated, dead discursive past” (Smirnov, “Vidimyi i nevidimyi miru iumor”).181 The possibility of this return is what makes the novel truly disturbing.
The realist narrative style of the first part of the novel naturalizes the relentless identity production that underlies Marina’s queer existence. In fact, Sorokin’s descriptions of Marina’s everyday life and her lesbian sexuality suggest a reading of Marina’s queerness as identity of the most ossified and conservative kind, or even as banality and bad taste. By linking Marina’s sexual life to overwrought or cutesy bourgeois interiors and decadent literary tropes, Sorokin cements her connection to the Russian and Soviet notion of poshlost’, which encompasses “sexual indecency, artistic triviality, and lack of spirituality’ (Boym, “The Poetics of Banality” 61).182
Marina’s sexual history, which begins with incest, does not erase ambiguity in the name of healing, but it is nevertheless tied to a coherent communal and individual identity. Even the sensitive eroticism of the novel’s sex scenes, which contrasts with the dominance of sadistic sex in the Russian “literature of evil,” shows that the twisted individuality of sexuality is in fact caught in an intertextual grid that is neither authentic nor spontaneous. Lesbian sexuality in the novel appears as an intertextual system, in which references to Russian modernism and Greek antiquity form a cultural genealogy of decadence and creativity, independent from Soviet history.
The most obvious reference point to Russia’s early-twentieth century history is the modernist poet Marina Tsvetaeva. The novel incorporates near-verbatim quotations of her poems,183 and there are strong parallels between Marina the character and the persona of Marina the poet:
180 According to Boris Groys, Sorokin can even be seen as a realist who illuminates already existing connections between seemingly opposing discourses (92-93). 181 “…произведение в целом возвращается по ходу своего развития из настоящего в преодоленное, умершее дискурсивное прошлое. . .” 182 As Svetlana Boym explains, “[t]he struggle against poshlost’ plays a crucial role in Russian cultural history; it is linked to mythologies of social class (a perpetual war between the intelligentsia and the meshchanstvo, or bourgeoisie), attitudes toward material culture and the everyday” (“The Poetics of Banality” 60). 183 See Marina Smirnova on a detailed comparison of excerpts from the novel and Tsvetaeva’s poetry, as well on parallels between the character and the historical poet.
142 assertive independence, passionate love affairs with men and women,184 and the association with the sea and classical Greece.185 Tsvetaeva frequently employed sea imagery, and explicitly identified her poetic persona with the sea, playing on the meaning of her name: “My act is betrayal, my name is Marina, I am the transient sea foam,”186 she wrote in a 1920 poem “Some Made of Stone, Some Made of Clay” (“Kto Sozdan iz Kamnya, Kto Sozdan iz Gliny” [Stikhotvoreniia i poemy 145]). She also dedicated a cycle of poems to Aphrodite (171-173). Sorokin’s Marina, as we have seen, is strongly associated with the sea, both in her dreams and her waking life. With her long pearly nails, the nails of a sea goddess, Marina is out of place in her shabby Soviet surroundings (TLM 7). Her lovers draw on classical Greek and sea-related imagery in their descriptions of her, comparing her to a hetaera (14),187 a nymph (129),188 and Aphrodite (11).189
Marina’s famous namesake is but one link in the intertextual net that links Sorokin’s novel with the literature of the Silver Age. The Silver Age was a period of exceptional cultural flourishing in fin-de-siècle Russia, which allowed for the exploration of same-sex desire in philosophical and literary works such as Mikhail Kuzmin’s Kryl’ia (Wings [1906]), Sophia Parnok’s Rozy Pierii (Roses of Pieria [1922]), and Marina Tsvetaeva’s cycle “Podruga” (“Girlfriend” [1914]). According to Dan Healey, the term “lesbian” itself came into Russian language through literary, rather than scientific or political, circles (Homosexual Desire 12). Diana Lewis Burgin explains that the cultural image of lesbian love in Russia’s Silver Age was influenced by French decadent poets such as Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, who, she writes, “had used sensationalistic
184 Tsvetaeva’s relationship with poet Sophia Parnok in 1914-15 was widely known in St Petersburg and reflected in both Parnok’s and Tsvetaeva’s poetry (Burgin 193). 185 Smirnova draws attention to the doubling of Aphrodite in the life of Sorokin’s Marina. Thus doubling evokes the distinction made in Daniil Andreev’s esoteric work Roza Mira, mentioned in the novel as one of Marina’s favourite books. In her lesbian relationships, Marina appears as the spiritual Aphrodite Urania; in her pragmatic heterosexual couplings, she is the earthly Aphrodite Pandemos (228). 186 “Мне дело – измена, мне имя – Марина, / Я – бренная пена морская.” 187 “Ты профессиональная гетера, я это уже говорил.” 188 As mentioned earlier, the novel’s links with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita are numerous, apart from the obvious theme of incest. Marina is explicitly compared to a nymph who “grew out of the nymphet stage” (“Ну, из нимфеток ты выросла” 129), and the importance of the sea refers to Humbert Humbert’s “Kingdom by the Sea,” itself a reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee. Thematic echoes to Lolita also establish Marina’s Thirtieth Love as a story that is, like Nabokov’s novel, highly intertextual and carefully constructed. 189 During sex, Valentin addresses her as “Venus Swaying” (“Венера Покачивающаяся” [11]).
143 portrayals of Lesbian sexuality as one tool for shocking the bourgeoisie” (181).190 The connotations of transgression and unnaturalness, linked to the refusal to procreate, made of the lesbian woman an inspiring image for decadent artists.
In Russia, the first and most famous example of a literary engagement with this tradition of decadent aesthetic of lesbian love was Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal’s 1907 novella Tridtsat’ tri uroda (Thirty-Three Monsters).191 As the resemblance of the two titles suggests, Zinovieva- Annibal’s novella was an important intertext to Sorokin’s Marina’s Thirtieth Love. The novella tells the story of a young woman who leaves her life with a female lover for a string of affairs with male artists and a career as a life drawing model. Zinovieva-Annibal’s depiction of the lesbian relationship was highly aestheticized and clearly rooted in the French decadent movement. The novella did not reflect the lived experience of same-sex love between women, but it did influence salon culture at the time, which, as Healey explains, “embraced sexual ambiguity within the confines of this aesthetic discourse, and certain salons became stages where these ambiguities might be paraded” (Homosexual Desire 60).192 Healey notes that the relationship between two women takes place in “a cushioned and carpeted interior setting with little that was recognizably Russian” (102). The elements of decadence and aestheticism in the novella were already criticized at the time by Zinovieva-Annibal’s reviewers. Decades of Soviet cultural policy, hostile to bourgeois byt and old-world aesthetics, have cemented the negative connotations of poshlost’ in the world depicted by Zinovieva-Annibal.193 These connotations are strong in Sorokin’s depiction of lesbian love as a mannered and curated identity. Like Zinovieva- Annibal’s novel, Marina’s Thirtieth Love links lesbian identity with stuffy interiors and over-the- top classical allusions.
Both Zinovieva-Annibal and Sorokin create characters who try on imagined classical identities. Zinovieva-Annibal’s narrator describes her lover Vera ordering fabric to make Grecian chitons (141). References to ancient Greece and Rome sound like old-world affectations in the mouths of
190 This association of female homosexuality with foreignness has a sinister echo today, when homophobic discourse in Russia relies on the perception of queerness as foreign and European. 191 I thank Dan Healey for bringing this link to my attention in a comment on my paper delivered at the 2017 convention of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies in Chicago. 192 Zinovieva-Annibal was a well-known salon hostess herself. The creative circles of St Petersburg gathered in the Tower, a salon she held with her husband, Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov (Davidson 111). 193 See pp.66-67 for a discussion of the Soviet cultural war on byt.
144
Valentin and Nina, the most pretentious characters in Marina’s Thirtieth Love.194 Classical references thus acquire a hint of bad taste, or even of poshlost’, with its connotations of moral depravity. Marina’s ex-lover Nina is a particularly clear example of such lesbian poshlost’. She sends her over-the-top translations of erotic poems to an unimpressed Marina (TLM 163) and pompously believes herself to be the new incarnation of famous queer heroines (George Sand, Joan of Arc and Sappho). Her identity as a “historian-lesbian-poet” (162)195 appears somewhat delusional, and she is ridiculed by Marina’s acquaintances as a “philological lesbian obsessed with Akhmatova and Sappho” (163).196 Marina rejects Nina’s excessive intellectualism, yet she herself indulges in flowery classical references, comparing her girlfriend Sashen’ka to Aphrodite (175), and her music student to Adonis, Cupid (74) and Daphnis (76).
The vision of a creative lesbian community with roots in antiquity is fully realized in Marina’s crisis dream. Even before it is destroyed by the intervention of the Solzhenitsyn figure, the splendid feast of sisterhood reveals itself as compromised. Surrounded by Marina’s ex- girlfriends, Nina begins a ritual by reading a poem by Boris Pasternak and claiming it as her own. She flies into a rage when Marina confronts her about it. The sin of this pagan lesbian world is that of plagiarism, which implies a lack of originality and an excessive attachment to the past. Boosted by falsehoods and bad taste, lesbian love in the novel is not a pure means of self- expression and exploration, but a solid, anxiously self-protective and self-aggrandizing identity.
The concrete embodiment of Marina’s lesbian identity is an object that has strong connotations of poshlost’: her scrapbook, entitled “Rose Love,” is lovingly decorated with a picture of Boticelli’s Venus. Preserving photos and keepsakes from her twenty-nine lovers, Marina resembles nineteenth-century ladies who collected their suitors’ poems and drawings in their albums. The practice of keeping albums appeared in Russia at the end of the eighteenth-century (Vatsuro 3) and was popular enough by the 1830s that Alexander Pushkin could make fun of
194 Valentin addresses Marina in affected French and makes highbrow cultural references, indifferent to whether he is impressive or even understandable. His pretentious self-centeredness reflects his alienation from the people. 195 “Историк-лесбиянка-поэт...” 196 “…к своему ужасу Марина узнала, что Нина знакома с Митей, который давно уже тешил всех рассказами о филологической лесбиянке, помешанной на Ахматовой и Сафо.” Nina’s penchant to refer to herself as a Sappho links her to Sophia Parnok, who wrote poetry inspired by Sappho and dedicated to her lover Tsvetaeva (Burgin 192). Unlike Nina in Sorokin’s fictional world, Parnok was a unique voice in Russian literary circles at a time when lesbian love was highly aestheticized: focusing in her writing on the search for a loving relationship and a shared life with a woman, she introduced “a new, anti-decadent perception of Lesbian love” (202).
145 provincial ladies’ albums in Eugene Onegin.197 In the Soviet Union, the practice has continued among young girls, but was viewed with suspicion, as evidenced by Arkady Gaidar’s denunciation of albums as an old-fashioned bourgeois habit, inappropriate in the post- revolutionary world (Gaidar 277). Regardless of the validity of these value judgments, the connotations of this tradition lend Marina’s album the air of self-involved, meticulously curated individuality that is based on citations and replication of old forms. In Marina’s scrapbook, the radical promise of a queer archive is materialized as a collection of sexual relationships that exist as objectified memories, safely kept in an album.
Marina’s aberrant sexual identity is literally domesticated: its poshlost’ is reinforced by the decadent interiors in which it takes place. Her love life unfolds in settings that recall Zinovieva- Annibal’s “darkened, dusty spaces” (143)198 and rooms with decorative masks,199 fireplaces (145),200 carpets and “tender old furniture” (146).201 Sorokin’s novel opens with a scene in Valentin’s large apartment, which is tasteless and gaudy, with its “faux empire interior” (TLM 8)202 and a chandelier that is a “monstrous hybrid of darkened bronze and crystal” (10).203 Marina’s place, though less ostentatious, fits the description of the philistine middle-class lifestyle derided by Soviet propaganda (Boym, Common Places 34). It is a little private world of trinkets, “a fetishistic refuge of bourgeois coziness” (35), over which Marina presides with the distinct pleasure of the owner of private property. It contrasts sharply with the light and harmonious space of the factory, which is appropriate for the highly spiritual existence in bytie.204 Marina’s possessions have no place in this Socialist present: her grandmother’s
197 “A young provincial lady will / Possess an album. You'll have seen / The scrawls with which her girlfriends fill / Each page, first, last and in between. / They’ll scribble out this endless verse / (Their spelling only makes it worse)./ To prove true friendship they’ll distort / A poem, add to it, cut it short” (Pushkin 125). 198 “Вела полутемными, пыльными пространствами…” 199 “Только маски, мерцающие неуютно на транспаранте экрана…” 200 “Это оттого, что за ними в камине мерцали беспокойные огоньки.” 201 “…по глухому ковру металась Вера между ласковою старою мебелью ее матери-монахини.” 202 “…ложно-ампирный интерьер прихожей…” 203 “…чудовищный гибрид потемневшей бронзы и хрусталя…” 204 As Marina enters her crisis, she, too, begins to see all of these objects, people and relationships, which used to embody individuality and authentic sexual connection, as poshlost’.
146 chandelier and piano, an impractical if atmospheric green lamp, a statuette of Cupid and Psyche, dissident art and a photo of Marina’s Solzhenitsyn-like idol (TLM 147).205
This cozy world of lesbian intimacy is also characterized by an excessive use of diminutives: Marina describes an attractive cashier as a “precious,” “sweet little kleptomaniac” (144),206 and her baby talk with Sashen’ka resembles a nursery rhyme: “My little feet, where have you been, where have you come from?”207 – and onomatopoeia: “I love you. – I love you… - Love… - Love…love… - Love-love-love…” (165).208 Mimicking the lovers’ private language, the narrator in this scene begins to freely indulge in diminutives.209 This cloying poshlost’ of domestic and intimate spaces contrasts with the laconic dialogue in the latter part of the novel.
Unlike many contemporary theoretical accounts of queerness, Sorokin’s novel ultimately depicts Marina’s queer existence as neither creative nor politically revolutionary. The stuffy domesticity and mannered literariness of Marina’s love life firmly ground it in connotations of poshlost’. The linking of a female character with poshlost’ is itself a misogynist cultural commonplace: as Boym points out, critiques of poshlost’ are often gendered. Boym discusses a notable example of Sasha Chernyi’s poem, in which an allegorical figure of Poshlost’ appears as “a tacky salon goddess” (“The Poetics of Banality” 63).210 In his deployment of poshlost’ to construct an aestheticized vision of lesbian sexuality, Sorokin seems to follow in Chernyi’s footsteps. His insight is obviously limited by his subject position, and we should certainly not be reading Marina’s Thirtieth Love for insights into queer existence. But the novel’s engagement with language and ideology, quite apart from its representation of femininity and queerness, is helpful in thinking through the workings of the radical mode – which, as I explained earlier, is often
205 Compare these details with the ones evoked in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “O driani” (“On Scum, 1920- 1921), a condemnation of the Soviet petit bourgeoisie: “уютные кабинеты и спаленки . . . пианино[…] . . . самовар[…] . . На стене Маркс. / Рамочка ала” (“cozy offices and little bedrooms . . . piano . . . samovar . . . Marx on the wall. / A crimson frame”) (144-145). See Boym’s discussion of the poem in “The Poetics of Banality” (65). 206 “…эта прелесть… милая клептоманочка…” 207 “Ноженьки мои, где гуляли, откуда пришли?” 208 “— Я люблю тебя...— Я люблю тебя...— Люблю...— Люблю... люблю...— Люблю-люблю-люблю…” 209 The narrator refers to Sasha’s “little curls” (“кудряшки”), “little boots” (“сапожкам” [165]), “little palms” (“ладошки”), “sweet face” (“милого лица”), “little black wings of eyelashes” (“черные крылышки ресниц” [166]), “little ear” (“ушко” [167]) and so on. In this world of sweetness and coddling, even pissing is described with not one, but two diminutives, as a “thin little yellow” (“тоненькая жёлтенькая”) stream (167). 210 In her analysis of the work of post-Soviet women (writer Tatyana Tolstaya, film director Lana Gogoberidze, and painter Larisa Zvezdochetova), Boym has shown that they reinterpret poshlost’ as an ambivalent quality, which can combine “irony and sympathy, distancing and engagement, material and conceptual” (“The Poetics of Banality” 81).
147 employed in certain feminist and queer discourses. Ulike Chernyi or Marina’s Communist saviour Sergei in the novel, Sorokin invokes the negative connotations of poshlost’ not in order to condemn femininity or lesbian sexuality and propose better artistic or moral norms. Rather, he reveals the mutual constitution of poshlost’ and bytie, showing how totalitarian desire permeates different lifestyles, even ones as deliberately non-normative as gender and sexual dissent (Healey, Homosexual Desire).
The chameleonic nature of the novel’s narrator highlights the counterintuitive – and disturbing – equivalence between queer byt and the Socialist bytie by linking the two seemingly inimical prose styles. In the first part of the novel, the narrator visibly mimics Sashen’ka’s diminutives and Valentin’s pretentious references. Even the poetic sentimentality of certain passages gradually appears as artificial. The narrator often ends chapters with lists of descriptive adjectives that trail off into ellipses. For example, the first chapter ends with a reference to Marina’s life: “restless, intoxicating, fierce, ruthless, kind, deceptive and, of course, surprising…” (33).211 Though the sentence trails off, the reader could easily imagine how it might continue. The use of ellipses here seems to signal the failure of rhetoric in the face of strong emotion. As the device is used more frequently, these lists become more arbitrary, contradictory, and imprecise, thus eroding the impression of authenticity. The text itself seems to be taking over from the narrator, producing an effect that falls somewhere between divine inspiration and automatic writing. By overusing ellipses, Sorokin highlights the artificiality of the device, and therefore the text’s constructedness. In the end, the narrator’s mastery of various prose conventions devalues all of them: not only the Socialist Realist pastiche of the novel’s latter half, but its initial realism as well. Words that seemed to paint a meaningful portrait of the character’s political, social and sexual being suddenly reveal their function as nothing but structural elements, arbitrarily strung together in a signifying chain.
Significantly, the link between the ideologically and generically incompatible worlds through which Marina passes is sexuality. Appearing as the crux of Marina’s development as a person
211 “…беспокойная, пьянящая, яростная, беспощадная, добрая, обманчивая, и конечно же – удивительная…” This passage contains yet another echo of Zinovieva-Annibal’s novella, which ends as follows: “Life is fragile and iridescent, like that brook of Vera’s, like their caresses, like my voluptuousness, – it is real, and Vera did not want to accept it” (Жизнь хрупкая и переливчатая, как тот ручей Верин, как их ласки, как мое сладострастие, — она настоящая, и ее Вера не хотела принять” (Zinovieva-Annibal 164).
148 and as a disruptive countercultural force, sexuality leads her through the important moments of her life. Witnessing her mother having sex initiates her into the messy intersubjective reality of human sexuality, the orgasm she has with Sashen’ka (eleventh in a row) leads her to an existential crisis, and the unwanted sex with Sergei – towards a rebirth into a Socialist collective. As Igor Smirnov points out, “The world of the heterosexual orgasm and forgetting oneself in labour is the same as the world of ideological rebellion, sexual perversions and theft” (“Oskorbliaiushchaia nevinnost’”).212 Echoing Foucault’s skepticism about the revolutionary potential of non-normative sexual identity in The History of Sexuality (157), Sorokin questions the idea that sexuality, especially its darker aspects, carries a specific secret to our contorted and unhappy ways of being. To echo the novel’s epigraph, sexuality, like Love or the Holy Spirit, “lives and breathes where it wants” (7):213 in a kindergarten canteen, a nuclear family, a dissident kitchen or a Soviet factory.214 The meaning of sexuality is thus not limited to resistance to totalizing narratives. Sexuality disrupts, but does so however it wants, not in a way that is proscribed by particular ethical or political narratives – be it the reparative narrative of sexual coherence and redemption or the radical narrative of the unruly and ambiguous drive. Sorokin’s depiction of Marina’s lesbian lifestyle as a solid and conservative identity can be read as a general critique of identity production and fetishization of sexuality, and therefore applied to contemporary Western discourses of queerness and even queer negativity.
The two parts of the novel embody different generic conventions, ideological systems, and stances in relation to its protagonist’s inner rupture, but they are united on a deeper level. Radical
212 “Мир гетеросексуального оргазма и трудового самозабвения тот же самый, что и мир идеологического бунта, половых извращений и воровства.” Lipovetsky makes a similar observation: “On the one hand, Marina’s bisexuality appears in this novel as the most palpable bodily manifestation of the freedom that reigned in dissident circles of the 1970s. . . . On the other hand, this very sexuality undermines the dissident discourse” (“С одной стороны, бисексуальность Марины выступает в этом романе в качестве наиболее осязаемой телесной манифестации свободы, царящей в диссидентских кругах 1970-х . . . С другой, та же самая сексуальность подрывает диссидентский дискурс” [“Sorokin-Trope”]). Similarly, Baer notes that the two parts of the novel are not simply mutually exclusive but have “a more complex, mirroring relationship” (188). 213 “…for Love, my friend, like the Holy Spirit, lives and breathes where it wants. MichelMontaigne, from a private conversation” (“…ибо Любовь, мой друг, как и Дух Святой, живёт и дышит там, где хочет. МишельМонтень, из приватной беседы”). 214 Marina’s first erotic dream, in which a teacher abuses and exposes her in front of other children, prefigures her time in the factory (Tridtsataia Liubov’ Mariny 48). The dream is tied to Soviet institutions and the problem of unity with the collective, which appears here as separation from it. At the end of the novel, Marina finds herself in another canteen, where she feels fully accepted by her factory co-workers, bringing the arc of her desire back to its beginnings.
149 or reparative, dissident or Socialist, queer or straight – Marina’s way of being is always a process of identity construction, of closing gaps for the sake of coherence. By the end of the novel, it becomes clear that Marina’s Thirtieth Love is not a defense of the subject’s right to be radical and incoherent in its sexuality. Instead, it arranges various adjacent discourses that function in both reparative and radical modes: the story of a heroine’s development, a narrative of childhood trauma, an erotic novel, a celebration of Russian spirituality, a Socialist Realist fairy-tale and impersonal news reports. The effect of this arrangement of discourses that contain the subject and its story is to reveal their essential equivalence.
2.4.2 Shit and Mastery
One may argue that Marina’s lesbian sexuality is an easy target for critique, because it aligns more closely with an image of a reparative identity than it does with a radical position of “queer failure.” Lesbian practice and culture clearly endow Marina with a strong sense of self, so these aspects of the novel can be read as too obviously reparative to be relevant to discussions of queer negativity. Lee Edelman would certainly not recognize in Sorokin’s protagonist a sinthomosexual figure.
Such a dismissal would perhaps be too hasty: I have shown that Marina’s lesbian sexuality has roots in decadent aesthetics, which used it precisely for its perceived radical potential. The imagery of failure or the death drive, so central to “anti-social” queer theory, is quite reminiscent of that used by decadents, and it is notable that both movements locate the radical power of homosexuality in the refusal to procreate. Sorokin’s novel is useful to my project of analyzing discourses that describe queerness as negativity precisely because it depicts Marina’s sexuality as a textual phenomenon: not just in the world of the readers, where it exists as a text, but also in the world of the novel itself, where it appears as a curated identity composed of cultural references. Sorokin’s engagement with sexuality as discourse, while certainly not helpful in talking about real queer subjects in heteronormative societies, can help us understand how discourses as countercultural and antinormative as decadence and queer negativity can function as aestheticized and limiting visions that close down questions in a suspiciously reparative way.
The novel’s commitment to revealing the reparative desire at the heart of radical discourses is obvious in its depiction of another character who makes a life for himself in the position of
150 radical rejection of reparative narratives. This figure of negativity is a young punk named Govno (“Shit”), whom Marina meets at a house party. With a name that is itself an assault on the idea of identity, Govno performs provocative songs about love and vomit and drinks his own urine. He appears in the novel when Marina is already in crisis, as an example of one way of adapting to the human condition that has become unbearable to Marina.
There is a particular revolutionary energy in the punk subject, precisely because it rejects seriousness and, through making its own self abject, resists the temptation of reductive totalitarian reparation. Stranger to all political programs, Govno chooses provocation for provocation’s sake, insistent and repetitive as the death drive. His position resembles the subject of queer failure in Halberstam’s description: “this refusal of self as an antiliberal act, a revolutionary statement of pure opposition that does not rely upon the liberal gesture of defiance but accesses another lexicon of power and speaks another language of refusal” (139).215
Govno’s name also echoes the position of the analyst in Lacanian theory. The analyst, for Lacan, neither directs the analysand towards a specific goal nor delivers the prize of inner transformation and healing. Instead, the analyst merely guides the subject towards a realization of its own split nature, and at the end of the process, is “rejected like a piece of shit” (The Psychoanalytic Act 183). Within the Lacanian framework, this extreme metaphor of shit strips the analyst of power and authority. Yet for Govno, identifying with shit is precisely a way to acquire mastery.
Govno’s project of negativity is ultimately as ridiculous as Nina’s derivative poetry and self- aggrandizing theories of metempsychosis. Seen through Marina’s disillusioned eyes, his antics are banal, and his fondness for the scandalous film Last Tango in Paris entirely unoriginal (Marina herself had already seen the film seven years earlier). Finding Govno boring rather than provocative, Marina brushes off his advances and, when he persists, slaps him so hard that he is knocked off his feet. Govno is a caricature of the radical subject. Drunk and dumb, high on his
215 With his penchant for senseless provocation and his scatological fixation, Govno could also be a caricature of the conservative critics’ image of Sorokin himself.
151 own abjection, he resembles the “plucky queer as a heroic freedom fighter in a world of puritans” (150) – a position Halberstam warns against.
Govno and the “plucky queer” are not just deviations from the radical agenda: in fact, they embody a certain optimism that is present in radical articulations of negativity. They show that the rhetoric of negativity obscures its own ability to produce an inhabitable identity. When we assert the existence of a radically unassimilable gap within the subject, we cannot take it as a reliable guarantee of incoherence or failure. Instead, foregrounding this gap transforms it from the unspeakable Lacanian Thing into a new kind of good.
By embracing failure, Halberstam’s queer subjects can cultivate a better – “more creative, more cooperative, more surprising” (40) – relationship to success and failure, thus redefining failure as success. Though Edelman rejects conventional ideas of good, he admits that his program promises something “better”: a promise of “absolutely nothing,” where “nothing” is a liberation from the logic of goods (5). Yet such liberation is impossible. The radical subject’s ability to orient itself towards the Thing also works backwards. Just like the playful erotic prose in Marina’s Thirtieth Love can naturally slide into a rigid ideological narrative, programs that foreground radical negativity bring the absent site of the radical gap into the world of fictional narratives, personal identities and political goods.
So while Edelman claims that queers should not shift the responsibility of embodying negativity to other groups, it is equally the case that as soon as the scapegoat position is claimed consciously, radical negativity must itself shift to a different site. The Real, as imagined by Lacan, stays in one place only while it is uncontrollable and emergent. What can be summoned is only its representation. Positions and practices can only exist in the radical mode if they do not actually unleash negativity and failure in the form of a social catastrophe or psychic suicide.
Though it turns away from the idea of wholeness, the radical mode cannot do away with the coherent subject. Seeing and representing the pain of nonsovereignty becomes a way of dealing with it, as the subject of negativity turns its abjection into knowledge. The position of failure can become paradoxically empowering. To quote Lipovetsky, “[t]he deconstruction of the language of power demonstrates still greater power” (“Literature on the Margins” [150-151]). Self- abjection can be a reasonably attractive goal, because it enables the subject to escape reparative
152 illusions and the debasing and depressing necessity to adapt and thus be compromised. Occupied and claimed, the position of negativity is incorporated into a different variation of reparative totality, with failure as its banner.216 The sinthome is turned into an attribute of the self- consciously broken, split, or vulnerable subject. The subject of failure may appear as the antithesis of identification, but it can nevertheless be aspirational. As evidenced by the success of Brene Brown’s popular books on vulnerability, it can even help cultivate a more successful and efficient self as “just another way to develop status and social capital” (Gilson 178). The irony of the radical mode is therefore that it enacts the drive towards reparation with the innocent zeal of disavowal.
Sorokin’s exaggerated parable about a sexually liberated dissident turned Stakhanovite shows that the radical mode relies on identity production, and that the drive for coherence and mastery animates even the most marginal ways of being and the most ambivalent and deviant forms of sexuality. This insight has implications far beyond abstract theorization and the late Soviet political context. The radical mode promises to the subject the freedom not to succeed, not to cohere, and therefore not to be a slave to the world of goods and rigid narratives. At the same time, it accommodates affirmation and mastery. Consequently, it is not immune to the aggressive logic of capital. This is why in developing discourses of sexual violence, we cannot relax into embracing negativity any more than we should unequivocally celebrate reparation.
In contrast with Sorokin’s conceptualist novel, in which the combination of different prose styles amounts to a philosophical argument about the equivalence of different discourses, and by extension, of radical and reparative mode, Zambreno’s Green Girl explores its protagonist’s experience of embodying the position of fragility, failure and refusal to heal. As many reviewers note, the novel’s indulgence in representing Ruth’s messy existence makes readers uncomfortable. I would argue, however, that Green Girl creates an even greater discomfort precisely because it is not a straightforward celebration of negativity. Zambreno does not allow us to rejoice in Ruth’s ability to claim her right to be undone, but confronts us with the underside of popular feminist celebrations of failure and ambivalence: their fetishization and
216 To quote Halberstam’s critique of Edelman, “he succumbs to the law of grammar, the law of logic, the law of abstraction, the law of apolitical formalism, the law of genres” (107).
153 commercialization.
2.4.3 Glamour of Failure
The representation of the capitalist subject as a girl in Zambreno’s novel is reminiscent of the conceptualization of the “Young-Girl” in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (2001) by the French collective Tiqqun. The figure of the Young-Girl is a prototype of subjectivity under capitalism. Zambreno speaks of Green Girl as “a novel that is an essay,” an “attempt at a philosophy of the girl and her ambivalent state,” in which she foregrounds the type of subject often dismissed in “serious” philosophical discussions (“Heroines: A Reading by Kate Zambreno”). Zambreno’s novel shares Tiqqun’s almost anthropological detachment and the tone that is at once fascinated and cruel. Refusing to celebrate the fragile subject, both Green Girl and Preliminary Materials demonstrate its implication in a neoliberal order. The radical subject, whether it appears as a Young-Girl, a “green girl,” a queer failure or a masochistic survivor of sexual violence, belongs in the neoliberal gallery of identities. Just like reparation, radical negation aligns all too well with the logic of capitalism.
When failure is folded into the subject position of the survivor of sexual violence as “a refusal to aspire to be whole” (Ahmed), it becomes acknowledged, celebrated, and eventually transformed into something else – a self-aware display of imperfection. The appeal of fragility is obvious, for example, in Sara Ahmed’s striking and attractive metaphors: “To be a container of damage is to be a damaged container. The feminist killjoy: a leaky container” (Ahmed).217 Being shattered can feel exciting as well as dangerous, and there are types of undoing that have historically been considered especially glamorous. There is, for example, something exciting and sensational about sex, substance abuse, and the perils of urban life. These signs or sites of abjection seem to hold out a promise that they can be made into something meaningful, something particularly resistant to appropriation, or something one deserves to experience.
Failure and negativity can be so easily reinscribed as glamorous in part because the failing female subject has long been a part of popular culture. In epigraphs and references scattered
217 Ahmed’s description of feminism is equally compelling: “Feminism: a history of disagreeable women!” (“Feminism and Fragility”).
154 throughout Green Girl, Zambreno invokes historical women who have been dismissed as unhinged hysterics, in order to reclaim women’s right to come undone. Ruth, her character, draws on these references as well, but in a distinctly different way. While Zambreno depicts broken subjectivity in her writing, Ruth, crucially, is not yet a writer - so she produces brokenness as her own identity.218 Like Edelman’s sinthomosexual, Ruth occupies the position of negativity in an essentially hostile culture that has its own uses for negativity.
Neither alone nor extraordinary in her abjection, Ruth represents a type – “the type of green girls to model themselves on La Nouvelle Vague, they are new and they are vague” (Green Girl 22). Despite being a bad friend, her roommate Agnes shares Ruth’s obsession with the production of her own self. London’s stores and streets are full of Ruth’s doubles: in one scene, she enviously watches a blonde shop assistant who “seems to have fashioned herself entirely out of a film from the French New Wave” (31). The distinctions between “green girls” are taxonomic: “Some green girls very in vogue wear cigarette jeans, but girls like Agnes and Ruth only smoke cigarettes” (22).
Throughout the novel, “green girls” are frequently described as actresses or film heroines. Being an actress means producing a character with your own self and body as material. Inspired by film and celebrity culture, “green girls” are actively involved in a similar process: “Green girls and their costumes, their trying on of brazen identities” (22). There is, of course, an irony in this self- curation, which often appears in descriptions of Agnes, whose striving for individuality is hopelessly banal: “For someone like Agnes it was important to have a signature” (23); “a mandated uniform [was] such an insult to Agnes because Agnes is an individual” (123). Film quotations that serve as many of the novel’s epigraphs are attributed neither to screenplay writers nor to the characters, but to the actresses that speak them: like “green girls,” actresses speak in the words of others as their own. The very distinction between character and actress is in fact irrelevant to “green girls,” who, in their daily “costumes” and “brazen identities,” cite not the words of the screenplay but the whole aesthetic effect of the image. The objectifying gaze Ruth directs towards herself is the gaze of a film camera, at once fascinated and unkind. This gaze
218 “She wants to write, really write someday. But she is not fully formed. So she does not write. Not really. Unless attempting to live is a form of attempting to write. The agony of becoming” (Green Girl 74).
155 appears in epigraphs, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints” (137), in the narrator’s compassion and cruelty: “I make my green girl kneel. I am the harsh director. She begs and pleads: Please don’t make me do it but there is a clause in her contract” (161-162) – and, crucially, in Ruth’s own constant self- monitoring: “The green girl likes to watch herself suffer” (83). Directed by this external and internal gaze, Ruth turns her body and life into a site of visible aestheticized abjection.
The abject identity that Ruth produces by “playing herself” allows her to enjoy a sense of mastery in dangerous situations. Familiar with rape stereotypes, she can both perform the role of a victim and ironize about it: “She has agreed to meet him in the equivalent of a dark alley. And here she is” (106). She is able to perceive herself, in her position of a violated woman, as a spectacle: “She is also curious to see what is going to happen in this film of her life. Will it be a horror film?” (106-107). Like a sinthomosexual, Ruth claims her abject position by choice, relying on images of women from New Wave films and “the covers of men’s magazines” (108), feminine equivalents of Edelman’s fictional “machine-like men” (Edelman 165).219 She imagines herself as “the star moaning into the microphone she is the seductive kitten and HE is standing in the back, behind the crowd, watching her. HE only has eyes for her” (125). Ruth finds empowerment in the position of being watched so closely that she is objectified and being desired so much that she is violated.
The novel’s depiction of Ruth’s performative self-abjection relies on the use of the grotesque. In his influential theory of the grotesque, Mikhail Bakhtin conceives of it as “degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (Rabelais and His World 19-20). Thematically, Bakhtin’s grotesque often involves “the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth” (21). Zambreno describes the effect she is interested in as “the tender grotesque,” which manifests itself in the narrator’s unforgiving gaze directed towards
219 Ruth’s fascination with abject women encompasses older cultural references as well: she imagines being killed by Jack the Ripper: “Whenever Ruth thought about those prostitutes she had to hold her belly, imagining the burn of it being slashed. Then a thrill, a shiver, almost of delight” (130) – and compares sex work to Biblical martyrdom: “She wonders what it would be like to prostitute herself. To be a beautiful young girl fed to the lions. Like a sort of martyr” (37).
156 bodily processes (“Kate Zambreno Interview”). While Bakhtin theorizes the grotesque as a manifestation of joyful collective life that affirms the life of the body against the repressive dominant culture,220 Zambreno’s “tender grotesque” is decidedly more melancholy, though not without elements of humour. It is at work in the shifts in tone that link Ruth’s psychological suffering: “[s]ome dark hole in the center of Ruth that is not reflected in this mirror” (Green Girl 58) – and indigestion: “Peptic. Duodenal. Gastrointestinal. A burning feeling in the stomach area. A gnawing. A hole” (55). Just as her psychological pain is equated with stomach pain, highbrow representations of brokenness are often trivialized in the text. The suffering of “green girls” is often presented ironically, as in a scene where a “dress is giving Ruth an identity crisis” (32). A quote from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet connects Ruth’s plight (her masochistic infatuation with “HIM”) to the history of cult cinema: “I have a part of you with me. You put your disease in me. It helps me. It makes me strong. — Isabella Rossellini in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet” (qtd. in Green Girl 103). In the following section, Agnes references Isabella Rossellini’s character again: but this time, it is not Rossellini’s words but her eye makeup that is quoted (104). The actress/character is one solid image; both her words and her appearance can therefore be cited. The sense of the grotesque is created by shifting between possible levels of engagement with this image: from the reference to Rossellini’s words, which could appear in film criticism and theory, to the recreation of her makeup: a type of citation that belongs in glossy magazines. Via this double reference to Blue Velvet, Ruth’s existential suffering is contaminated by Agnes’s superficiality.
Yet Ruth’s crisis, which revolves around the problem of being seen, is not an affectation. In one of her more obviously authentic self-destructive impulses, Ruth cuts off her hair. The desire to cut one’s hair is a desire to destroy one’s present self and be wiped clean, to become “ugly and true,” “naked to this world,” “a monument to pain” (162).221 Of course, even a monument to pain is an image. Instead of being liberated, Ruth simply becomes a different kind of “green girl.” Agnes compares her to Mia Farrow (168), the controlling narrator describes her as “my Falconetti playing Joan of Arc” (162), and a male passerby invasively identifies her as a Jean
220 See p. 182 for a more detailed discussion of Bakhtin’s grotesque. 221 Sorokin’s Marina also thinks of cutting her hair when she joins the factory, but in her case, there is no need to perform this ritual of death and rebirth. By taking an entirely desexualized shower with her comrades, Marina demonstrates that she has already abandoned her old self.
157
Seberg (170). Ruth’s attempt to escape the trap of identity results in an immediate fall into identity: a conundrum which, as I have argued, is an inevitable part of the radical mode.
In Zambreno’s novel, being undone and playing undone are indistinguishable. This ambiguity is captured in an epigraph from Zelda Fitzgerald: “I believe in the flapper as an artist in her particular field, the art of being — being young, being lovely, being an object…” (qtd. in Green Girl 252). Ruth, insofar as she is a “green girl,” and perhaps insofar as she is a subject, is both an artist and an object. Neither of these mutually exclusive positions can be rejected. Still, it is clear that inhabiting ambiguity and brokenness does not keep Ruth safe from sexual violation, liberate her from herself, or lead her on a satisfying arc of psychological development. Importantly, it also sustains her economic and political subjection.
2.4.4 The Undone Subject of Capitalism
One of the main contributions of the radical mode is the critique of the exclusionary character of the reparative mode, in which not everyone has access to paths to recovery. Yet the inevitable question of who gets to speak is not resolved by a celebration of failure. Because the radical mode itself remains part of the world of identities and the neoliberal economy, the problem of inclusion and exclusion remains central. It resurfaces in a new way: who gets to fail? Who gets to become a flâneuse, able to choose “getting lost over finding [her] way,” and who is too much of a wreck to pursue any “ambulatory journey” (Halberstam 15)? There is also the question of who gets to speak about irreducible darkness and ambiguity: the exposure of women’s knowledge is an activity accessible only to those who are not themselves perishing in its dark caves.
Critical reactions to novels like Green Girl often mask a sexist bias against depictions of unruly femininity, but they also point to a particularly North American discomfort with the insufficient inclusivity of celebrations of ambiguity and failure, especially when it comes to highly publicized topics such as sexual violence. Referring to Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials in her online review of Green Girl, Subashini Navaratnam articulates this concern as follows:
The ideal, desirable white Young-Girl in the first world always has a shadow sister in the third world whose story is not marketable if it doesn’t feed the “neutral” free-market’s vulture-like need for narratives of empowerment or stories about “triumph under
158
adversity” . . . One hopes that as Ruth becomes less green, she is able to scream not only for herself, but for other Young-Girls, as well.
In a given historical context, negative aesthetic and philosophical positions are more available to certain subjects. Sabine Sielke writes that the use of experimental negative aesthetics marks a clear difference between white and black feminist postmodernist fiction in the 1990s: the former exploring the ambiguity of desire and the incoherence of the self, the latter much more focused on making a political argument (150). It is perhaps unsurprising that in practice, it is not the broken but the striving who make radical interventions on behalf of failure.
Acknowledging the importance of this concern, Halberstam argues that we need to expand “the excessively small archive that represents queer negativity” (109). Meanwhile, Edelman is aware that his theory of the radically negative subject may be seen as insufficiently inclusive: apolitical, blind to its own privilege, and curiously free of women’s perspectives (157). Edelman dismisses the concern, urging his readers to focus on the structural argument, lest “the introduction of taxonomic distinctions at the outset dissipate [its] force” (166). Although Edelman and Halberstam disagree, both see exclusion as a potential problem for the radical position. I would argue, however, that the problem of inclusive representation is simply a manifestation of a deeper issue – the radical mode’s internal limit, which marks its overlap with the reparative mode it rejects. These discussions of inclusivity echo the reparative logic, differing only in that they invite subjects into the realm of subversion instead of the realm of triumph. As we have seen, the celebration of negativity is part of the process of identity production. The logic of the radical mode begins with rejecting goods in favour of acknowledging lack, and ends by redefining lack itself as a good. In other words, the radical mode continues the reparative project of offering the subject specific ways of being and narrowing down available paths through and away from suffering.
Ruth’s addiction to the material and phantasmatic conditions of capitalism highlights the dangers of the unconditional trust in the radical mode. Her job at Harrods is to hand out samples of a perfume called Desire. The irony is heavy-handed, and the narrator draws attention to that, using this commentary on consumerism as a springboard for a discussion of subjectivity itself. As Ruth lusts after a prohibitively expensive dress at the Liberty department store, the narrator articulates the essence of a split subject: “Her perpetual list of wants and can’t-haves. To want. To lack. To
159 have a hole. She is enflamed with Desire” (33). Joining existential agonies with the agonies of shopping, Green Girl is not simply a satire of women’s consumerism, but also an exploration of the vagaries of being a person in capitalist society.
The self-maintained identity of a frail ingénue overlaps uncomfortably with the place of the “green girls” within the economy. They are driven by a determination to live as a spectacle, so they participate fully in the fantasies and images of capitalism. “Green girls” adopt the language of the market, with its “advertising jingles and silly catchphrases and slang” (93), and sustain each other’s commitment to this project by mimicking the process of exchange: “They trade in compliments about each other’s daily costume, the false currency for the green girl” (31). At the same time, they remain “part of the demimonde in London, foreigners working humiliating jobs on the high streets where they are ‘girls.’ Shopgirl. Coffeegirl” (25). Renata Salecl writes that capitalism does not require coherent subjects, so embracing incoherence does not automatically take us down a path of resistance: “…capitalism today relies precisely on non-fixed identities. Contemporary capitalism ‘needs’ the subject who constantly questions his or her identity, changes sexual roles, and is above all primarily concerned with making his or her life ‘a work of art’” (Spoils of Freedom 3). Although “green girls” are “artist[s] in [their] particular field” (Fitzgerald 252, qtd. in Green Girl), they still exist in a material economy as hopelessly alienated labourers.
Peddling Desire is dirty work, and the girls are selling what they themselves can never own. Ruth works at one department store but wistfully window-shops at another. With their alienated labour and their insatiable consumption of images and goods, the “green girls” reveal that the radical mode works perfectly well within the system that it claims to undermine. In this sense, the perfume sample of Desire in Ruth’s extended hand is not just an instance of verbal irony but an uncomfortable philosophical statement: the radical force of desire, on which antisocial queer theory bases its idea of resistance, is just a good among others.
2.5 Conclusion
To assert the need for radical resistance is to assert its possibility. This chapter has argued that this project is in fact impossible – and not because, as Edelman believes, it is too radical (27), but because it is compromised. Subversion does not last. Sites of resistance carry disruptive power
160 only temporarily, before solidifying into forms of reparative radicalism. This happens because the ethical and political responses to the problem of sexual violence, examined in this and the previous chapters, operate on an aesthetic level, putting forward an idealized subject position. This imagined subject can be whole or shattered, resilient or vulnerable; it can pursue happiness or cling to the truth of its undoing – but in every case, it still operates as identity and an aesthetic ideal. Radical interventions are haunted by their reparative opposites: banality, appropriation, resolution. Resisting domestication is a futile endeavor.
The paths into domestication that radical interventions take are, of course, contextual. Vladimir Sorokin’s Marina’s Thirtieth Love and Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl connect specific historical and political moments with existential concerns, as both novels explore how reparative and radical modes of being and storytelling operate within two different political systems. In the novels, reparative discourses of trauma and transcendence appear in twisted forms. Their protagonists do not properly heal, either by speaking out or through spiritual redemption. At the same time, the novels reveal the limitations of the radical mode. In Sorokin’s bleak vision, the drive towards identification that underlies political and sexual deviance naturally leads into totalitarianism. Zambreno shows us that the individual reclamation of fragility and the capitalist production of abjection can be one and the same.
The problem of the domestication of radical insight has long plagued movements and theories that seek to expose and embrace incoherence, violence and evil in order to deconstruct dominant frameworks and languages of power.222 Attempts at exploring anti-aesthetics give birth to new literary styles (Smirnov, “Vidimyi i nevidimyi miru iumor”). Queer theory solidifies into an academic discipline (Halberstam 147). The process of domestication is intrinsic to meaning-
222 The dead end I am describing is one that is common to many dramatic theories: from Deleuze’s flow to Lacan’s split subject, from postmodernist disintegration to Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival. Bakhtin describes the carnival as a temporary reprieve from oppressive structures: “The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during carnival…” (Problems 122-123). Bakhtin himself notes that the carnival is not immune to domestication: “Something of the carnival atmosphere is retained, under certain conditions, among the so-called bohemians, but here in most cases we are dealing with the degradation and trivialization of the carnival sense of the world…” (131). My argument in this chapter suggests that the “degradation and trivialization” of radical categories such as the carnival is not an aberration but the norm.
161 making itself, and therefore to the production of intellectual insights, political programs and individual senses of self.
No one form of politics naturally follows the radical view of subjectivity. Leo Bersani articulates this problem when he confronts the uncertain political meaning of his own theories of undoing: “I don’t think of it as a going beyond, or that one can finally get rid of the self. That seemed to be the goal of the “schizophrenic” cultural politics of about twenty years ago, and now that strikes me as naïve and politically irresponsible” (172). These well-justified reservations do not suggest that we should not theorize broken subjects or tell ambivalent stories about sexual violence and other aspects of our highly unstable, vulnerable, and confusing existence. I do not oppose representations of being undone and attempts to articulate an ethics of vulnerability or a politics of abjection, nor is it my aim to silence ambivalent subjects with comparative privilege to make way for more obviously abject subjects (although such interventions are important and often essential).
My concern, instead, is that we do not overinvest the radical mode with revolutionary hope. It is important to acknowledge its limits, even as we draw on it to address the problem of sexual abjection and violence. Failure to cultivate this awareness results in repetitive, self- congratulatory, anxious work, which displays less of a fidelity to the drive than a stubborn commitment to a paradigm. Such short-sighted approaches obscure the fact that both the idea of ambivalence and the idea of reparation operate in the same economy of identity and representation. As this chapter has shown, the radical mode replicates the logic of reparation. Although it explicitly rejects reparative attempts to fill the void at the heart of the subject, it continues to focus on the void itself, reinvesting it with meaning as a void, the image of which can form the basis for identity or politics.
Alternatively, we could think of theorizing as a process. It would require giving up both the satisfaction of closing gaps and the cathartic experience of pure rebellion in favour of incrimination and ambivalence. Instead of identifying with the void at the centre of the subject and endowing it with great explanatory power, we could acknowledge that our theories are domesticated and implicated, and nevertheless work with them to pry open dominant ways of thinking. Within queer theory, this approach has been articulated by thinkers like Halberstam, Cvetkovich, and Berlant, all of whom have declared the importance of “[c]onversation rather
162 than mastery” (Halberstam 12). Late Soviet experimental literature and art, which Groys defines as “postutopian,” shares this deliberately undramatic approach (102). Instead of deconstructing the subject and its world, postutopian thought seeks to remythologize them once again and, to use Lipovetsky’s term, reimagine them as inhabitable chaos – “chaosmos” (Russian Postmodernist Fiction 229). This is a world of messy identities and narratives that do not amount to specific actionable knowledge or trajectory of development.
Zambreno’s Ruth seems to live in such a “chaosmos.” She is not entirely suffocated by the fetishization of undoneness, and does not always seek to present herself as a shadow icon of negativity and ambiguity. She ultimately refuses to identify with Catholic saints, though they, like her, find fulfillment in abjection, masochism and self-abandonment. Ruth’s friend Rhys is a fascinated consumer of such images of radical subjectivity, recalling another observer of Catholic mystics – Lacan, whose quote about Teresa of Avila serves as one of the novel’s epigraphs. Ruth resists this identification, interpreting the saints not as radical vessels of truth but as ordinary embodied beings that can be “gross” (Green Girl 194). Finally, Ruth says “I need I” (201), committing the ultimate faux pas of the radical subject – asserting her need for a self.
What is notable about the “green girl” is not just that she is undone, but that she is not done. She has movement instead of a trajectory: neither healed nor identified with her lack, she remains in the middle of her narrative. A “green girl” can be read as a subject-in-process, embodying the politics of the unfinished. It may be less inspiring or exciting than triumph or resistance, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Crucially, this subject must live not only with its failures, but also with its desire to repair and be repaired, which, as I have shown in this chapter, is not that easy to exorcize. To repurpose Groys’s striking metaphor about utopias, reparative and radical narratives are like rats. They may not be harmless, but they are always going to be there, so instead of chasing them and trying to deconstruct them, we can just live with them (Groys 102). In the next chapter, I will turn to the prosaic mode of living with our problems and our problematic solutions to sexual violence.
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Chapter 3. The Prosaic Mode in Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night and Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead 3.1 Introduction
The two previous chapters of this thesis focused on the structure, manifestations and limits of two modes – reparative and radical – in theories and novels that engage with the problem of the subject’s nonsovereignty and experiences of sexual violence. I have shown that a commitment to total repair and an embrace of total refusal form a loop. The reparative mode enlists a desire for wholeness in a potentially endless process of improvement. The radical mode’s appeal lies in its embrace of abjection and incoherence, but it paradoxically provides the subject with a sense of mastery over a chaotic and incoherent world, and thus enacts a sort of repair. Despite articulating different responses to suffering, both modes yield similar satisfactions. They fulfill our desire to produce ourselves as particular types of correct subjects: subjects that properly heal themselves or the world, or subjects that are shattered in aesthetically or theoretically pleasing ways. The reparative/radical discursive loop has both theoretical and political costs: it makes our theories rigid and monomaniacal, rendering us incapable of thinking alongside the moving parts of life, except through folding them into a predetermined narrative. Because both modes operate on a high level of drama, they render invisible the more uncertain and implicated parts of life and of politics.
In this chapter, I articulate an alternative to the hyperbolic modes of reparation and radicalism with reference to several theoretical attempts to do so in both Russian and Western contexts. Many thinkers and writers have grappled with the inability of these dramatic modes to account for the nuances of lived life, and have proposed visions of subjectivity, ethics and even politics that seek to attend to these nuances in their unresolved and uncertain state. I identify this alternative as the prosaic mode, following several scholars who have used the term in reference to such projects: most notably, Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, who have theorized “prosaics” extensively in relation to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. My investigation is also informed by the work of Lauren Berlant and Denise Riley, who, I argue, work in the prosaic mode without explicitly using the term. Like these thinkers, I want the prose of life to continually invade the space of theory and shape how we think and talk about subjectivity and politics.
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I conceptualize the prosaic mode as an approach that relies on an image of continuity (of both the subject’s existence and the violence it confronts), rather than images of traumatic ruptures or constitutive splits that need to be repaired or embraced. As such, the prosaic approach allows us to confront our own identifications with dramatic theoretical pleasures, enabling political and theoretical speech that is less inflated, and therefore more flexible as well as more demanding. This chapter articulates a prosaic vision of the nonsovereign subject as a process or a site of varied activity that is sustained over time. In the first section, I sketch out a vision of the prosaic mode based on the work of Bakhtin, Berlant and Riley. I discuss potential problems that prosaic projects encounter (the fetishization of prosaic aesthetics and the fetishization of prosaic theory itself), as well as the strategies that the thinkers I discuss use to address them (Bakhtin’s overstatement and Berlant and Riley’s listing). In the subsequent two sections, I turn to novels that explore the subject’s existence in conditions of nonsovereignty in the prosaic mode: Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s The Time:Night (Vremia noch’ [1992])223 and Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead (2012). The novel’s unpleasant narrators enlist reparative and radical discourses to sustain their being, and the texts locate and display the workings of dramatic discourses in lived life, showing their narrators to be subjects that are always in process. Both novels also respond to tensions between reparative and radical discourses in their respective contexts: Petrushevskaya’s The Time:Night engages both the failure of the Soviet reparative narrative and the stubborn persistence of everyday life in the midst of a chronic social crisis. Berger’s Maidenhead explores the interplay of agency and abjection in women’s lives, articulating the tension between competing Western feminist concerns of sexually empowering women and protecting them from patriarchy.
In the last section of the chapter, I will build on my readings of the two novels and my engagement with Bakhtin’s concepts to articulate a prosaic vision of the nonsovereign subject: the subject as headquarters for the activity of self-maintenance in circumstances that do not necessarily enable its life and among potentially antagonistic others. This activity includes processing (learning, feeling out), strategizing (survival methods, enabling ways of thinking), acting tactically (momentary, even unconscious, tactical decisions), and even, to borrow Lauren
223 Several transliterations of Petrushevskaya’s name are used in English. I follow the version used by Sally Laird in an interview with the author in Voices of Russian Literature (“Lyudmila Petrushevskaya”).
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Berlant’s term, “flailing”: “throwing language and gesture and policy and interpretations at a thing to make it stop” (“Big Man”). My aim in this chapter is to consolidate some ideas towards a prosaic theory of the subject, and the headquarters is a valuable metaphor that allows me to focus not on what the subject is, but on how it operates.
3.2 The Prosaic Mode and Its Pitfalls
3.2.1 Definition of Prosaics
The term “prosaics” was used by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson in reference to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. In Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, they define it as “a form of thinking that presumes the importance of the everyday, the ordinary, the ‘prosaic’” (15), or, in other words, “the Philosophy of the Ordinary” (23). Bakhtin may be most known in the West for concepts with revolutionary connotations, such as the carnival and the grotesque,224 but, Morson and Emerson argue, the philosopher’s writing on ethics and his theory of the novel reveal a strong commitment to the “prose of life” as it is lived. Morson explains that Bakhtin’s aim was “to give body and weight to an understanding of the world in which real selves create, exercise choice, take responsibility, and develop unexpectedly while interacting with a social world that is also uncertain” (54). Tracing a Russian tradition of prosaic thinking in which Bakhtin’s work can be located, Morson finds parallels between the philosopher’s ideas and those expressed in the journal Vekhi (Landmarks) (Morson 36).225 The journal’s critique of nihilists and revolutionaries prefigures Bakhtin’s response to the Russian Formalists and the Futurists, who, like the nineteenth-century intelligentsia before them, rejected everyday life in favour of radical interventions into the status quo (22).226 Constructivist writer Sergei Tret’iakov described this
224 Responses to Bakhtin’s work in different contexts were shaped as much by its complexity as by the circumstances in which it became available. As Emerson explains, when Bakhtin was rediscovered in Russia, his readers were seeking “an alternative to power-centered reading” dominant in the Soviet Union (“Introduction” 1). By contrast, Emerson argues, Bakhtin’s initial appeal in the West was rooted in the strong liberatory connotations of terms such as the carnivalesque and the grotesque, which responded to a theoretical desire for radical intensity and a political “hurrah-collectivism” (2). Bringing the prosaic tendency in Bakhtin’s work to the fore, Morson and Emerson’s project was therefore an intervention into this Western tradition of Bakhtin’s reception. 225 Published in 1909 by a group of Russian intellectuals, Landmarks was a critique of radicalized intelligentsia and its attachment to utopian and apocalyptic thinking at the expense of lived life and individual self-understanding. The intelligentsia movement was influenced by the works of Karl Marx, the revolutionary democrat Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and radical critic Dmitry Pisarev and focused on radical social transformation (48). 226 Morson and Emerson describe these radical thinkers and artists as interested in “bohemian romanticism . . . slaps in the face of public taste, dramatic beginnings and endings, crises, the storming of barricades . . . unrequited love and ‘braked’ emotion . . . apocalyptic time and historical leaps” (22-23). This approach, as Morson and Emerson
166 everyday life as the “thick fish of byt” (Tret’iakov 194),227 signaling that it was the primary target of the Futurist iconoclastic activity: “The blow to aesthetic taste was only a part of the planned general assault on byt” (194).228 By contrast, Bakhtin, in his works that Morson and Emerson describe as “prosaic,” considered the everyday more important for ethics than revolutionary pronouncements and dramatic provocations. In “Art and Answerability,” he made his stance clear: “Inspiration that ignores life and is itself ignored by life is not inspiration but a state of possession” (2).229
Bakhtin scholars are not the only ones who are reaching for this vocabulary. Eighteenth-century English drama scholar Alex Hernandez uses the term “prosaic suffering” in opposition to its “heroick” equivalent, arguing that the use of prose in bourgeois tragedy allowed for the representation of such “confessedly ‘ordinary’” feelings (Hernandez 120).230 In Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter and Anticipation (2010), Sara Crangle counteracts what she calls “grand narratives of desire” (4), such as psychoanalytic theories, with her study of “human passions that are emphatically banal, nebulous, and ephemeral, but nevertheless fundamental” – the titular “prosaic desires” – in modernist literature (5).231 Like Morson and Emerson, Hernandez and Crangle are using the term to express a way of discussing things in a way that contrasts with poetry or pathos. Their use of the term “prosaics” can be located in a
explain, resulted in “a denigration of the everyday realm” as “dead, automatized, essentially unconscious, and certainly uncreative” (22). See pp. 66-68 for a discussion of the Russian intellectuals’ rejection of byt. 227 “…плотная вобла быта.” Tret’iakov is referring to the Caspian roach, but I chose a more generic expression in translation for the sake of clarity. 228 “Удар по эстетическому вкусу был лишь деталью общего намечавшегося удара по быту.” 229 “Вдохновенье, которое игнорирует жизнь и само игнорируется жизнью, – не вдохновенье, а одержание” (“Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii” 5-6). Bakhtin is here referring to “the prose of life,” with which he contrasts “art” in an earlier passage: “The poet must remember that it is his poetry which bears the guilt for the vulgar prose of life, whereas the man of everyday life ought to know that the fruitlessness of art is due to his willingness to be unexacting and to the unseriousness of the concerns in his life” (“Art and Answerability” 2; “Поэт должен помнить, что в пошлой прозе жизни виновата его поэзия, а человек жизни пусть знает, что в бесплодности искусства виновата его нетребовательность и несерьезность его жизненных вопросов” [Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii 5]). In the article, Bakhtin is advocating for a unity of life and art, held together by “answerability,” or “responsibility” (“otvetstvennost’”). I will return to this question of answerability later. 230 “Unlike the ‘heroick suffering’ of classical, pathetic, or otherwise ‘high’ tragic forms prevalent at the earlier part of the century, prosaic suffering performed its grief with troubling immediacy and a raw intensity, in ways that were personal and familiar, absorptive rather than theatrical, and provocatively disenchanted in their implications” (Hernandez 120). 231 Crangle refers to Bakhtin’s work on popular laughter (107), but not the texts that exemplify his prosaic thinking.
167 series of past and present attempts to theorize without relying too much on strong narratives and explanatory theories, such as those provided by the reparative and radical modes.
Other thinkers that can be described as “prosaic” raise these concerns under different names. In theories of the subject and of radical democracy, the prosaic mode is often sketched out as a precarious balance between reparative political projects and radical theories, or as an acknowledgment of the need for pragmatic approaches. In States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995), Wendy Brown explores the historical tension between certain emancipatory forms of feminism and postmodernist deconstructions of the subject (37). In response to this tension, Brown proposes a prosaic vision of politics without a strong definition of the subject: a politics of speaking from contingent places in a diverse and power-ridden political space: “Our alternative, in other words, is to struggle within an amoral political habitat for temporally bound and fully contestable vision of who we are and how we ought to live” (48). Judith Butler affirms the need for a practical attitude in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2004), in which she takes up the tension between pursuing political goals with the help of identity-centered discourse and the need for recognizing of the subject’s ambivalence and excess. Butler argues that the intense, affectively rich experience of being (“living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage”) coexists with the need to “present ourselves as bounded beings” for the sake of political gains (24). The space in which both opposites can be held is what I see as the space of prosaic thinking.
The prosaic mode has also been crucial to the development of affect theory. Recognizing the diversity of this field, Marta Figlerowicz proposes that what all of its branches have in common is being “grounded in movements or flashes of mental or somatic activity rather than causal narratives of their origins and end points” (4). In other words, affect theory is concerned with paying attention to and theorizing nuances and aspects of being that could be dismissed as inconsequential by grander theories, without decisively explaining their origins and meaning. In this chapter, I draw on the work of Lauren Berlant and Denise Riley, both of whom have turned to affect in their work, because their visions of non-sovereign subjectivity, neither celebratory nor catastrophic, are useful for imagining a prosaic approach to suffering. Drawing on Bakhtinian “prosaics” on the one hand, and on Berlant and Riley’s ideas on the other, I describe and analyze prosaic approaches to sexual violence.
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The term “prosaics” is useful for another reason: it emphasizes the relationship between the prosaic mode in theory and the genre of the novel. Morson and Emerson understand Bakhtin’s philosophical commitment to “prosaics” as having developed in relation to his theory of the novel (27). The role of prose as a genre in the representation of prosaic aspects of life is also central to Alex Hernandez’s argument that “the emergence of prosaic suffering on the period’s tragic stage helps to imagine modern forms of affliction” (120). Prose and prosaic theory similarly inform each other in my work. Unlike theoretical classifications, on which I myself have relied in this thesis, a fictional prose story extends life in time, during which the nonsovereign subject’s being, its narrative arc, and even, perhaps, the political field in which it exists, can be recognized as unresolved. In the duration of the novel, we often find ourselves in a time frame that provides us with neither of the differently satisfying options of redemption or catastrophe. The novels discussed in this chapter therefore function as points of departure for formulating a prosaic theory of violence and nonsovereign subjectivity. Such a theory can draw on the capacity of novels to shift focus from moments of exposure or disintegration to continuous everyday existence in spaces and times that are not decisive.
As I explore some possibilities for thinking prosaically about violence and nonsovereignty in the genre of theory, I need to acknowledge potential dilemmas and challenges of this approach. Because the prosaic mode is in many ways a challenge to the theoretical, it is not easy to theorise prosaically: we are always in danger of employing intellectual shortcuts that interrupt the prosaic project and negate its benefits. The next section addresses some of these difficulties: fetishizing the aesthetics of the ordinary, fetishizing prosaics itself as a theoretical approach, and, as a special manifestation of this latter problem that is pertinent to my thesis, the temptation to treat prosaics as a dialectical solution to the reparative/radical loop.
3.2.2 Difficulties of Theorizing Prosaically
The first danger is that of fetishizing the everyday and the ordinary as superior and exhaustive sources of ethical or political truths. Such approaches prioritize the content of the prosaic realm, as it is conceived in a particular culture, instead of developing new theoretical and conceptual moves on the basis of prosaic insights. The effects of this attitude are serious: it can naturalize a particular political and social order as “ordinary life,” and thus become a disciplinary tool for containing dissent. Morson draws attention to the danger of conservative prosaics in his
169 discussion of the Landmarks journal. In an article in the volume, philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev argued that the radical intelligentsia was too fixated on social transformation, at the expense of philosophical reflection and the pursuit of truth (Berdiaev 6). Landmarks contributors, by contrast, emphasized moral improvement over political action, reasserting the value of daily life, and the virtues of modesty, adaptation, respect and respectability.232 In his introduction to the journal, Mikhail Gershenzon explained that its otherwise ideologically diverse contributors shared one assumption: “that the individual’s inner life is the sole creative force in human existence, and that this inner life, and not the self-sufficient principles of the political realm, constitutes the only solid basis on which a society can be built” (“Preface to the First Edition” xxxv).233 As Morson points out, the emphasis on personal ethics, especially in the form of “daily decency” (38), made the Landmarks project functionally conservative. Morson suggests that this conservatism was the result of the journal’s fixation on its ideological adversaries, which made its project “primarily negative” (50). By contrast, Morson argues, Bakhtin avoids this pitfall because he “works positively, by trying to offer an alternative to received and reductive visions . . . a broader picture, whose superiority will be self-evident” (51). Morson and Emerson interpret this “broader picture” as an inclusion of both big and small events (36).234 I would argue, however, that thinking in the prosaic mode requires more than expanding one’s focus to include small-scale issues. In themselves, the contents and aesthetics of everyday life have no fixed ethical, political or theoretical meaning. They can be part of any political toolkit: conservative resistance to change, or, as discussed in the previous chapters of my dissertation, reparative agendas and radical ideologies. To develop a prosaic approach to a given problem, we need to acknowledge that simply paying attention to daily life does not constitute a theory or a methodology.
Focusing on theory itself, however, also presents a problem when it comes to the prosaic mode. Self-consciously prosaic approaches may themselves solidify into rigid theoretical frameworks,
232 In prioritizing “wisdom grounded in everyday experience” (Morson 43), the Landmarks contributors positioned themselves as part of a countertradition of intellectuals that was strongly literary, including writers like Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy. 233“…что внутренняя жизнь личности есть единственная творческая сила человеческого бытия и что она, а не самодовлеющие начала политического порядка, является единственно прочным базисом для всякого общественного строительства” (“Predislovie” 4). 234 “At their best, prosaic thinkers do not deny that great events can be important. Rather, they are inclined to ask whether other, much more important events have been overlooked simply because they are not striking” (36).
170 dramatic metatheories of prosaics, thus ceasing to be prosaic in spirit.235 Bakhtin himself was wary of strong theoretical discourses, which he identified with “aesthetic activity” (Toward a Philosophy of the Act 1)236, “theoreticism” (11) or “monologism” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 204).237 He argued that such discourses were necessarily reductive and could not capture the truth of lived life. At the same time, Bakhtin recognized that his own work was not immune to this danger. In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, he acknowledged that his – essentially prosaic – thinking of “the act” as “once-occurrent and never-repeatable, emotional-volitional and concretely individual” can itself become a strong theory: “all this can be transcribed in theoretical terms and expressed as the constant law of the performed act (this can be done owing to the ambiguity of language)” (37).238 In positing Bakhtin’s philosophy as prosaics, Morson and Emerson also recognize this danger: “It is, of course, quite possible to overstate prosaic insights, even to make a system out of renouncing system. . . . The danger lies in making prosaics into a dogma rather than a style of inquiry” (36). Both Bakhtin and his commentators acknowledge that one can speak of prosaic thinking in ways that are exclusive, imposing, even disciplinary. In my articulation of the prosaic mode of responding to the problem of nonsovereignty, I therefore need to address the danger of what Bakhtin described as theoreticism.
In the context of this thesis, this problem manifests most immediately in the dialectical temptation.239 The prosaic mode appears as a third term, following the two modes that I described and critiqued in the previous chapters. This conventional argument structure suggests a dialectical development, in which the prosaic mode appears as a synthesis of reparative and radical stances. The attraction of this simple model of dialectics must be acknowledged. It allows
235 Using the word “dramatic,” I am not referring to the literary genre of drama. My use is more reflective of the second sense given in the Oxford Dictionary of English: “(of an event or circumstance) sudden and striking” (“dramatic.” 531). Two of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of “drama” are also instructive: “A series of actions or course of events having a unity like that of a drama, and leading to a final catastrophe or consummation” and “Dramatic quality or effect; colourfulness, excitement” (“drama, n.”). 236 Later, Philosophy. 237 Later, Problems. 238 “Конечно, все это можно транскрибировать в теоретических терминах и выразить как постоянный закон поступка, двусмысленность языка это позволяет, но мы получим пустую формулу...” (Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii 38). 239 I am grateful to Rebecca Comay for pointing out this possibility.
171 us to complete a thought and delivers us from the difficult position in which a problem remains unresolved.
However, announcing that the prosaic mode is the answer to the problem of nonsovereignty and violence, in which two previous approaches can be reconciled and their limitations transcended, is a form of magical thinking. Bakhtin is critical of dialectics as a reductive monologic approach: “The unified, dialectically evolving spirit, understood in Hegelian terms, can give rise to nothing but a philosophical monologue” (Problems 26). According to Bakhtin, the attraction of dialectics lies not only in its capacity to unify the complex reality at hand, but because it borrows its form from dialogue, which, for Bakhtin, is real. “Dialectics abstracts the dialogic from dialogue” (57), he writes: it turns the process of lived life into a theory. Bakhtin’s critique therefore suggests that dialectics, despite its orientation into the future, arrests the movement of thought and life. Later in this chapter, I will analyze the temptation and limits of such a deployment of the dialectic, as they are problematized in Berger’s Maidenhead.
3.2.3 Role of Drama in Prosaics
In my own project of articulating a prosaic approach, I address this problem by specifying that the prosaic mode is not conceived as a resolution that cancels out the other two modes. In prosaics as I understand it, the two terms are not synthesized or transcended – rather, their status is changed. On their own, reparative and radical drives feed into each other because they share a dramatic vision of the world. As discussed above, any prosaic approach can be fetishized, which means that the prosaic mode itself is not undramatic. This is why the prosaic mode cannot be expected to fully transcend the drama that I critique in radical and reparative modes.
The dramatic character of strong theories is akin to the subject’s identification with a category or a name as it is theorized by Riley. Acknowledging the way that language constrains us and may even endanger our being through the identities it provides us, Riley does not call for escaping identity, which she deems “a vain proposition” (138). Whether we are dealing with personal identity or with theoretical models, language that names things and persons tends towards overstatement.
The good news is that we do not need to purge our theories of drama, even those theories that are self-consciously prosaic. What we can do is think differently about and with drama. The prosaic
172 mode acknowledges the desires for reparation and radicalism and takes them onto new grounds – or rather, onto the ground, locating them in the everyday life of specific subjects. The prosaic mode thus addresses, with reference to modes of response to suffering, the question that Riley asks about language in general: “Given that we can’t choose to speak outside grammar without lapsing into psychosis, how should we best accommodate ourselves to this inescapable deceiver?” (42-43).
In this chapter, I propose a pragmatic attitude to drama, recognizing its practical and theoretical benefits. Precisely because it involves strong investment, drama helps us reinscribe a given political or conceptual field, imagine things differently, move and change situations, break up certainties and consolidate new ones, and stick to visions of the world that are working well enough for the time being. I will discuss the role and uses of drama in my readings of the novels, both of which present narratorial voices that draw on dramatic reparative or radical narratives.
3.2.4 Approaches to Thinking Prosaically
If a degree of fetishization of prosaics as theory is inevitable, we can nevertheless strive for looseness in the way we fetishize. This can be achieved through a multiplicity of methodological approaches. Confronting this process of aestheticization can allow us to be at once more precise and more exploratory about our methodological approaches to theorizing undramatically. In this section, I will discuss how Bakhtin, Berlant, and Riley seek to avoid the immediate ossification of their prosaic projects, focusing on the strategies of listing and overstatement. As discussed above, it is important not to consign the prosaic mode to the idea of including neglected aspects of life. The strategy of listing, employed by Berlant and Riley, breaks out of the logic of inclusion because it allows them to ground their theorizing in open-ended sets of subjects, things, activities, qualities, and aspects of the field or situation they are describing. To address the theoretical temptation to conceive of the prosaic mode as a dialectical resolution, I have suggested that the drama of reparative and radical modes need not be transcended, but can instead be included in the prosaic vision of the subject’s existence in the world. I will discuss Bakhtin’s use of overstatement as a potential response to the dilemma of theoreticism, which acknowledges and explores dramatic insights.
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3.1.1.1 Listing
In her investigation of the role of identification and speech in the subject’s social existence, Riley is interested neither in describing the subject’s structure or prescribing a proper way of being in – or resisting – language. In The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000), she approaches identities as “mutating identifications” (1) and explores different strategies available to the subject as it comes, or speaks itself, into being through available identity categories. While the use of irony is an especially important avenue of inquiry for Riley, she is committed to acknowledging different possible ways and facets of identification, without setting a limit on their number. To that end, Riley produces open-ended lists, their unfinished nature a testament to “a useful provisionality in the categories of social being” (1). For example, when describing potential positions that the subject can occupy within language, Riley lists different ways in which they could be inhabited: “pragmatically, strategically – or resignedly, provisionally – or else sardonically, instrumentally” (32).240 Riley’s lists have an iterative and poetic quality, reflecting her repeated attempts to articulate something or account for the emergent and changing number of possibilities. Complementing Riley’s predilection for metaphor and rhetorical flourishes, lists endow her theoretical investigation with flexibility and openness.
Similarly, Berlant’s interest in the “messy dynamics” of life is reflected in her use of lists (15). Author of several memorable and influential terms, of which “cruel optimism” is best-known, Berlant does not treat them as predefined and static concepts to diagnose social or psychic conditions. Rather, she uses them to name and trace precise patterns, gradations and shifts in life’s livability, elaborating on some of them to show how they produce different ways of being. In her exploratory lists, she dwells on the terms to see what they will yield: when theorizing “genres of historical duration that mark the unfolding activity of the contemporary moment,” she unpacks this cluster in a list that includes “the situation, the episode, the interruption, the aside, the conversation, the travelogue, and the happening” (4). In Cruel Optimism, her chosen method
240 In a discussion of possible responses to being assigned a negative identity from outside, Riley produces another list: “…I could strive to extricate myself in several ways: by quarrelling with the ascription itself, or by querying the motives of my accuser, or by accepting it just long enough to parody it, or by refusing to accept any characterisation and instead insisting on being nothing at all. Each device has its uses as well as its drawbacks” (142).
174 for exploring these and other concepts is often a detailed description of a given situation as it appears in a work of art or in a political moment.241
Berlant and Riley share what could be called a prosaic style of writing theory, which expresses tentative and open-ended interpretations in the form of lists. Lists draw attention to different manifestations of a problem and to the multiplicity of potential explanations, which is why they are able to account for “different styles of managing simultaneous, incoherent narratives of what’s going on and what seems possible and blocked in personal/collective life” (Cruel Optimism 4) – or, in the words of Lee, a character in Maidenhead, “[d]ifferent ways of fucking managing things” (110). In Berger’s novel, Lee often reminds the protagonist Myra of the need to appreciate multiple perspectives, while Myra herself tends to process the world around her through the lens of strong theories. In my discussion of Maidenhead, I will identify Myra’s use of description (employed, for example, in her ekphrasis of porn videos) as a tendency that counteracts her theorizing drive. Methodologically speaking, description is more suited to the production of lists than theoretical models: lists describe rather than analyze.
In my own articulation of the prosaic mode, I draw on the method of listing in my discussion of the subject as headquarters. The notion of headquarters is a lesser known concept of Bakhtin’s, overshadowed by the more spectacular notions, such as the carnival, the grotesque or dialogue. Responding to Bakhtin’s own concern with emphasizing strong concepts to the point of producing monologic theories, I turn to this minor metaphor, which proves useful for a prosaic vision of the subject. Conceived as a headquarters, the subject appears as a centre of varied activity that is neither prescribed nor entirely arbitrary. With its military connotations, this metaphor ensures that the prosaic vision of a non-sovereign subject does not resolve into an idealized picture of its pastoral coexistence with others among the small things of everyday life, instead foregrounding the potentially antagonistic nature of such a coexistence. The last section
241 Berlant’s collaboration with Lee Edelman in Sex, or the Unbearable both enacts and reflects the confrontation between Edelman’s dramatic theory and the self-consciously undramatic alternative proposed by Berlant. While Edelman insists on the power of hyperbole to announce and maintain the space for the possibility of a radically different way of being, Berlant argues that a “dedramatizing” approach helps us avoid reproducing the sweeping tone of the objects of our critique (in this case, the critique of normative sexuality): “only under those conditions of seeing dramas in their ordinariness will the virtue squad not be able to use dramas of threatened sexual security to reproduce the normative good life” (14).
175 of this chapter is a tentative list that aims to describe what such a non-sovereign subject can do and how it can act.
3.1.1.2 Overstatement
Even as Bakhtin is critical of the limits of dramatic theorizing, he does not banish drama from his thinking. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan explains that Bakhtin’s thought is marked by a tension between radical overstatement and measured insight: a “centrifugal” “recognition of the ultimate open-endedness, fluidity and inner diversity of actual human experience” and a “centripetal” “nostalgia for the narrative coherence of subjectivity, for some form of authorial grounding” (14). Bakhtin’s willingness to lean into drama is evidenced, for example, in his rapturous writing on the joyful freedom of the people embodied in the grotesque and the carnival.242 These passages seem at odds with Bakhtin’s arguments about the need to attend to the prosaic business of everyday life and his cautious admissions of the reality of stasis or need for stability.
Morson and Emerson interpret Bakhtin’s overstatements in his writing on the grotesque as a necessary step towards a final, more prosaic, vision. The grotesque, they explain, was for Bakhtin “a temporary means to a new world, whose matrices would not themselves turn out to be grotesque” (437). Although I am less interested in the temporality of the progression of Bakhtin’s thought, I agree with Morson and Emerson that the radical aspects of Bakhtin’s writing have a place within his prosaic vision.
We can see Bakhtin’s oscillation as a prosaic strategy in itself, which locates the inevitable monologism and drama of theory in his emergent process of thinking. This strategy could be seen as acknowledgement of the limitations of theory as a genre, of which Bakhtin was critical but in which he nevertheless worked. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin acknowledges the inevitability and epistemological usefulness of monologic accounts: “there will always continue to exist and expand those spheres of existence, of man and nature, which require precisely objectified and finalizing, that is monological, forms of artistic cognition”
242 Morson and Emerson note that Bakhtin put forth two contrasting visions of the carnival: “humanistic” (“chronotopic”) and “antihumanistic” (“antichronotopic”) (441). While they identify the latter vision with Rabelais and His World, the former vision – “…what we might call ‘responsible carnival,’ carnival still tied down to concrete personalities in a recognizably real space and time” – is articulated in the essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope” (Morson and Emerson 436).
176
(271). In an aside, Bakhtin even acknowledges that his own work on Dostoevsky is a “somewhat monologic survey” (47). We need to read Bakhtin’s sweeping visions and hyperbolic claims in light of these more tempered statements.
In this chapter, I am interested in how Bakhtin, and other thinkers and writers, acknowledge and use drama without rejecting it. In the next section, I pursue this question by analyzing the status of dramatic discourses in Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night. The novel’s protagonist invokes reparative ideals of motherhood and Great Literature, while the novel, as many critics have noted, draws on grotesque aesthetics. I argue that the protagonist’s use of reparative discourses is strategic, often desperate, and therefore markedly prosaic. I also suggest that Petrushevskaya’s prosaic vision of the grotesque significantly departs from Bakhtin’s ecstatic vision.
3.3 The Flailing Subject in Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night
3.3.1 The Time: Night and Its Reception
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s early stories were too bleak for the Soviet literary scene. In 1969, she was rejected by the journal Novy Mir (Laird, “Lyudmila Petrushevskaya” 23) – a rejection made famous both by the writer’s subsequent acclaim and the editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky’s enthusiasm about her work.243 In the mid-1970s, Petrushevskaya turned to playwriting and achieved limited exposure in underground and experimental theatres (23).244 Towards the late 1980s, in the changing political climate, Petrushevskaya returned to prose. Her first novel, The Time: Night, was published in German translation in 1991, followed by the original Russian version in 1992. The novel was shortlisted for the first Russian Booker Prize and underwent several editions in Russian and English (24).
The novel takes the form of a journal – or, more specifically, “Notes from the Edge of the Table” (The Time is Night 3)245 – of an aging Moscow woman, Anna Andrianovna. A verbose narrator,
243 The rejection note stated: “Withhold publication, but don’t lose track of the author” (Laird, “Lyudmila Petrushevskaya” 23) (“От публикации воздержаться, но связи с автором не терять” [DT 179]). Petrushevskaya describes the relationship with Tvardovsky and other people at Novy Mir as consistently supportive (179). 244 Her theatre career began when a Novy Mir colleague referred her to director Mikhail Goriunov (DT 180). 245 “Записки на краю стола” (VN 5).
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Anna is often difficult to tolerate: she is not just unreliable and obsessive but also deeply unpleasant. Her hurried, intense, distractible, plaintive and aggressive voice is prone to interminable sentences peppered with histrionic exclamations. The novel’s world itself is claustrophobic and exhausting. Anna struggles to make ends meet and maintains complicated relationships with her schizophrenic mother and estranged children, with whom she shares the contested terrain of their Moscow apartment. The Time: Night has no explicit scenes of sexual violence,246 but clearly foreground women’s sexual vulnerability as a source of suffering. Three generations of women repeat each other’s mistakes, their lives crippled by damaging affairs and unwanted pregnancies. Men take advantage of women in predictable, repetitive ways, by impregnating and abandoning them (or, worse yet, by joining their households as abusive alcoholic leeches). When men disappear or are driven out, women are left to fend for themselves, their coexistence characterized by manipulation, aggression, intrusion and crushing poverty.
Petrushevskaya’s fiction has provoked strong reactions. Considered one of the great contemporary Russian writers, she has also caused a fair amount of outrage. As Josephine Woll and Helena Goscilo point out, her subject matter – the difficult lives of ordinary people – may be in line with a long Russian literary tradition of the “little person,” but her unflinching portrayal of such lives led some critics to consider Petrushevskaya’s work unbearable (Woll 125, Goscilo, “Speaking Bodies” 137). Accustomed to assuming a straightforward relationship between life and fiction, Russian readers could perceive her depictions of the bleak lives of unpleasant individuals as personal insults. This equation of life and literature was a feature of Soviet and post-Soviet literary culture, but it was heightened, in Petrushevskaya’s case, by gendered assumptions. In a 1993 article, Goscilo describes the situation of Petrushevskaya and her contemporaries as follows: “Reviews in the former Soviet Union of recent women’s fiction have
246 Or at least no unambiguous ones. The description of the loss of virginity in the diary of Anna’s daughter Alena is strikingly violent, despite the character’s romanticized interpretation: “he was getting into the bloody mess, the rags, like he was pumping my blood with a pump, the straw under me was wet, I was squeaking like a rubber toy with a hole in the side, I thought that he must have tried, in one night, everything that he had read about and heard about from others in the dormitory, but I didn’t care about that, I loved him and pitied him like my own son, and I was afraid that he would leave, he was tired” (“Он лез в кровавое месиво, в лоскутья, как насосом качал мою кровь, солома подо мной была мокрая, я пищала вроде резиновой игрушки с дырочкой в боку, я думала, что он все попробовал за одну ночь, о чем читал и слышал в общежитии от других, но это мне было все равно, я его любила и жалела как своего сыночка и боялась, что он уйдет, он устал” [VN 23, emphasis in original]). The passage leaves a strong impression of violence, which allowed Ewa Thompson, for example, to unequivocally characterize it as “bitter memories of the first rape” (Thompson 216).
178 lamented the authors’ sudden adoption of presumably unmotivated frankness in matters of physiology, which has long been considered gender-specific: bold for men but unimaginable for women” (“Speaking Bodies” 137). It was not only Soviet censors and conservative critics who found her bleakness excessive:247 literary scholar Roman Timenchik described her approach as “aesthetic extremism” (398).248 The term chernukha was invented to accommodate Petrushevskaya’s over-the-top aesthetics (Graham 9) and later expanded to describe the dark and pessimistic aesthetics of the perestroika cultural moment. The main features of this broader interpretation of chernukha, as outlined by Eliot Borenstein, perfectly describe Petrushevskaya’s work: “the pessimistic, naturalistic depiction of and obsession with bodily functions, sexuality (usually separate from love), and often sadistic violence, all against a backdrop of poverty, broken families, and unrelenting cynicism” (11). Read as a chernukha account of the misery of life, Petrushevskaya’s prose does not have much to offer except reiterating the point that extreme suffering is part of the current of existence. But unlike chernukha film and fiction, which can be flat and boring (Graham 20), Petrushevskaya’s distressing worlds are rich in intertextual and ethical nuance. Many critics have therefore sought to justify her use of chernukha as being in service of something greater – a critique of injustice, whether it be patriarchy, Soviet society, Russian imperialism, or the wider world. In other words, these interpretations sought to discover and identify a reparative drive behind Petrushevskaya’s chernukha.
Petrushevskaya’s work was part of the perestroika-era and post-Soviet wave of women’s prose that explicitly dealt with gender issues (Sutcliffe 60). As such, it has invited feminist readings. Helena Goscilo writes that the portrayals of the body in the works of Petrushevskaya, as well as Tatiana Tolstaya and Valeriya Narbikova, challenge traditional gender norms established in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture (“Speaking Bodies” 137).249 In The Time: Night, ideals of
247 In Deviatyi tom (later, DT), Petrushevskaya describes an uncomfortable encounter with a German filmmaker who arrived in Moscow to interview the author and expected her to resemble the novel’s protagonist: “He came to catch me in flagrante, directly on the scene. Exotica, Zum Teufel!” (“Приехал меня поймать ‘in flagrante’, прямо на месте действия. Экзотика, цум тойфель!” [308]). Eager to prevent such confusion, Petrushevskaya prefaced the novel’s Russian edition with a framing device that established the story as non-autobiographical (308): a preventive measure only partially successful. 248 “…эстетический экстремизм.” 249 As Goscilo points out, the work of these authors resists the Western feminist framework, because it is culturally specific, reflecting “endlessly complex implication in haloed traditions and the realia of their culture” (“Speaking Bodies” 137). Nevertheless, she expresses a hope that the works’ challenges to traditional ideas of the body and gender can be in line with Western feminist expectations: “Although feminism remains alien (and largely
179 motherhood and family, central to the Russian national myth,250 are revealed in their ugly reality in the claustrophobic space of byt (everyday life), deformed by what Elisabeth Cheauré describes as the novel’s “principle of enclosure and principle of hopelessness.”251 The Time: Night gives the lie to the Soviet myth of gender equality,252 and strikes at the heart of several grand narratives on which the Soviet state relied: the idea of self-sacrificing motherhood, the vision of a well- functioning society, and the notion of progress itself.
Petrushevskaya herself, however, is not eager to couch her work in terms of women’s rights or women’s writing: “Women’s poetics, apparently, exists – it’s easy to recognize it, but I don’t know what it is” (Deviatyi tom 304).253 Her writing turns to women’s difficult lives, but these lives are always historically specific. Some critics, therefore, interpret the thrust of Petrushevskaya’s critique more broadly. Goscilo, for example, draws attention to the fact that women’s writings in the period of perestroika, which diverge from Western feminism in their treatment of gender, articulate broader political critiques (Dehexing Sex 42).254 Indeed, Petrushevskaya’s bleak fiction and plays troubled not just Soviet visions of gender, but the very foundations of Soviet society (Sutcliffe 4). Ewa M. Thompson takes this critique further, reading Petrushevskaya as a feminist postcolonial author performing “the rhetorical dismantling of imperial space” (199). Thompson’s choice to focus on the larger scale of the empire, rather than sexism or even state Socialism, is grounded in her project of articulating a postcolonial approach
incomprehensible) to the former Soviet Union, these writers’ colorful independence from conventional categories and paradigms breeds cautious Western expectations of at least revisionist (detroped) textual bodies” (137). 250 In Dehexing Sex, Goscilo describes the gendered imagery central to Russian national discourse, including Mother Earth (Mat’ Syra Zemlya), the Motherland (Rodina-mat’), and the Mother of God (Bogoroditsa), who, in Orthodox culture, is seen “less as virgin than as mother” (32). She also notes the “stoic patience and forgiving self-abnegation” expected of Soviet women (32). 251 “…принцип[…] замкнутости и принцип[…] безнадёжности.” 252 Benjamin Sutcliffe traces the introduction of byt as a legitimate literary topic into Soviet women’s fiction, such as Natalia Baranskaia’s Nedelia kak nedelia (1969) and I.Grekova’s Vdovii parokhod (1981). During the perestroika, argues Sutcliffe, women writers delved further into the realm of byt, producing bolder and more brutal depictions: “Having long dealt with the idea of everyday crisis, women authors now existed within a context of national upheavals refracted through the prism of the quotidian. Perestroika women’s prose, however, abandoned the staid verisimilitude of Baranskaia and Grekova, who adapted poorly to the new conditions and were all but forgotten by 1991; these authors’ conservative styles and virtuous heroines no longer captivated readers overwhelmed by political and cultural upheaval” (59). Sutcliffe especially notes the shocking quality of Petrushevskaya’s work, noting that her “themes make the rogue’s gallery of irresponsible men in Nedelia kak nedelia seem tame” (61). 253 “Женская поэтика, видимо, существует – узнать ее легко, но что это такое, мне не известно.” 254 “Do these works reproduce stereotypes about femaleness? Yes, to an extent. Do they attribute agency and therefore historical guilt to females? Yes. But they’re innovative because they question Russian history and the Soviet separation of private/public, everyday/historical.”
180 to Russian literature. This approach, however, exemplifies the problem with trying to make Petrushevskaya fit into a specific political emancipatory discourse: it necessarily brackets out the broad existential concerns of her work and its mythological quality. Petrushevskaya’s nonfiction does contain calls for compassion or social change, but this explicit stance remains in tension with her deeply unsettling, stressful prose.
In an attempt to recognize the existential depth of Petrushevskaya’s writing, other critics have emphasized its humanist and even religious significance. As mentioned above, The Time: Night’s depiction of the life of a struggling Soviet woman places it not so much in the tradition of feminist or postcolonial fiction, but in the Russian literary tradition of the “little person,” or “malen’kii chelovek”. This term, first used by critic Vissarion Belinskii,255 referred to a popular character trope in nineteenth-century Russian realist literature – a humble, insignificant, downtrodden person, often mocked and disparaged by others around him. The trope was used powerfully by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky and many others.256 It was later enlisted by the Soviet literary establishment, which put weight on the pedagogical function of literature in cultivating politically prescribed compassion for the “little” people of the earth.257 The humanist impulse is indeed evident in Petrushevskaya’s essays and her prose. Behind the dark naturalism of the novel, critics have seen “an appeal to motherhood as a redemptive possibility” (M. Johnson 98), mysticism, mythology and poetry (Markova 88), and “love for humanity” (Prokhorova 77).
Seeking to reconcile Petrushevskaya’s calls for compassion and her unflinching portrayal of human vice, Naum Leiderman and Mark Lipovetsky argue that Petrushevskaya’s humanism is distinct from its previous versions, whether Socialist or dissident, which have been discredited
255 Belinskii used the term in passing, in the 1840 article “Gore ot uma, sochinenie A.S.Griboedova” (“Woe from Wit by A.S.Griboedov”). In a section on Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector, Belinskii refered to a hypothetical “little person” who would be tyrannized by Gogol’s protagonist, should the latter advance in rank (1: 499). The term proved influential because it captured an emergent tradition in Russian literature. Elsewhere, Belinskii himself traced commonalities between Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s characters, referring to them as “downtrodden beings in our reality” (“забитые существования в нашей действительности,” Peterburgskii sbornik [3: 70]). 256 According to Alexander Tseitlin, over 150 short stories about humble and powerless government officials, inspired by Gogol’s The Overcoat and The Diary of a Madman, were published in the 1840s (7). 257 In a 1929 article “Of ‘Little’ People and Their Great Labour,” Maxim Gorky employs the literary term to refer to the oppressed masses recently liberated by the Revolution. An example of a similar use of the “little person” trope in literary criticism can be found in Grigorii Gukovskii’s Gogol’s Realism (1959), in which The Overcoat is read as a critique of social inequality.
181 by the dismantling of grand narratives (Leiderman and Lipovetsky). According to Leiderman and Lipovetsky, “postrealist” writers like Petrushevskaya were dissatisfied with the textual games of Russian postmodernism258 and instead turned to the texture of life, with “the most elementary ideas: pity, sentimentality, tenderness toward humanity, the search for a sincere tone” (Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction 247).259 Given Petrushevskaya’s brutal aesthetics, her inclusion in the “neohumanist” (Leiderman and Lipovetsky) and even “neosentimentalist” category (Lipovetsky, “Literature on the Margins” 157) may seem surprising. In “Literature on the Margins,” Lipovetsky explains that Russian literature in the 1990s produced a specific kind of neosentimentalism, grounded in the body rather than the soul:
The language of the emotional/psychological tradition, having lost its expressivity, has become effaced. Pain is the only strong feeling still able to stimulate an immediate emotional reaction. Accordingly, sadomasochistic corporeality offers a means of reanimating emotionality in literature and culture as a whole. This explains why corporeality appears as a condition of sentimentalism, and, more precisely, of sadomasochistic sensualism. (159-160)
For Leiderman and Lipovetsky, Petrushevsksaya’s “neohumanism” or “neosentimentalism” provided a “third way” between the more traditional realist aesthetic and postmodernist experimentation (Leiderman and Lipovetsky 156).
Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque has bolstered another strand of interpretations of the profound existential impact of Petrushevskaya’s chernukha writing. In Bakhtin’s work, the grotesque is a mode of joyous ambivalence, in which opposites are united and celebrated.260 Natal’ia Ivanova and Tatyana Markova both draw on the Bakhtinian grotesque to explain Petrushevskaya’s ambivalent fictional worlds, explaining that she integrates “in one moment opposing sides of
258 See pp. 113-116 for a discussion of Russian postmodernism. 259 Lipovetsky writes that postrealist authors “hybridize the poetics of psychological analysis with the aesthetic arsenal of postmodernism, including (but not limited to) intertextuality, poly-stylistics, playful relationships between authors and characters, and the openness of texts to interpretations and variations” (“Post-Soviet Literature Between Realism and Postmodernism” 181). 260 “The essence of the grotesque is precisely to present a contradictory and double-faced fullness of life” (Rabelais and His World 62). “Ведь сущность гротеска именно в том, чтобы выразить противоречивую и двуликую полноту жизни...” (“Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable” 74).
182 being: purity and dirt, joy and despair, pain and pleasure, life and death” (Markova 91),261 and “the old and the new” (Ivanova, “Bakhtin’s Concept of the Grotesque” 29). Both critics emphasize the novel’s circular temporality, in which generations of women repeat each other’s fates.262 Relying on Bakhtin at his most ecstatic, Ivanova and Markova make the notion of the grotesque do all the work of making sense of the difficulties of Petrushevskaya’s text. These readings, I would argue, exemplify the paradoxical development of the radical mode: the grotesque here provides a sort of relief and a fixed sustainable position, allowing Markova to argue that Petrushevskaya elevates the everyday to a higher plane of the “true, essential, existential, high and tragic” (Markova 92), and Ivanova to assert the unity of opposites in Petrushevskaya as ultimately joyful: it “yokes ultimate despair with existentialist hope . . . it is organically linked to a sense of the joyousness of life, its inexhaustible bounties, its fabulous, fairy-tale magic” (“Bakhtin’s Concept of the Grotesque” 24). Both interpretations resolve the demanding complexities of Petrushevskaya’s fiction, downplaying the merciless materiality of her character’s lives in favour of their joyful and liberating aspects.263 Meanwhile, in Petrushevskaya’s work, the paradoxical unity, eternal materiality, and cyclical temporality of the
261 “Своеобразная художественная оптика Петрушевской. . . позволяет ей одномоментно видеть противоположные стороны бытия: чистоту и грязь, радость и отчаяние, боль и наслаждение, жизнь и смерть. В авторском изображении и понимании сама повседневная бытовая жизнь (заурядная, тривиальная, пошлая, банальная) содержит в себе истинное, сущностное, бытийное, высокое, трагедийное” (91). 262 In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin describes the grotesque body as “the collective ancestral body of all the people” that is “continually growing and renewed” (19). As such, it can transcend the imperfect, negative aspects of mortal life. Petrushevskaya’s grotesque body is not fully individualized either, but it is marked by limitation rather than liberation: mothers and daughters flow into and from each other, their lives forming eerie parallels. Moreover, the closed quarters in which they reside render futile any fantasy of the sovereign bourgeois body. 263 The critics seem to be taken in by the narrator’s own ecstatic meditations on the grotesque laws of nature: “Deceptive Nature! O great one! For some reason she needs this suffering, this horror, blood, stench, sweat, slime, convulsions, love, violence, pain, sleepless nights, hard labour – seemingly to make everything right! But no, everything goes wrong again…” (“…О обманщица природа! О великая! Зачем-то ей нужны эти страдания, этот ужас, кровь, вонь, пот, слизь, судороги, любовь, насилие, боль, бессонные ночи, тяжелый труд, вроде чтобы все было хорошо! Ан нет, и все плохо опять …” [VN 32]). This higher perspective does not provide Anna with consolation against the materiality of life. Extreme materialism does not liberate but instead binds and grounds. This list of common, even archetypal, afflictions describes the experience of a body that is alone with its particular ailments. It is also notable that Anna’s vision of the circle of life is often associated with institutional structures. The mysteries of nature are “medical mysteries” (“врачебные тайны” [16]). The laws of nature are carried out by the institution of the hospital: “Medical secrets, medical secrets, what happens under your cover! Birth, violence, torture, pain, crimes against morality, blood, twisted hands, screams, the last despair, death” (“Врачебные тайны, врачебные тайны, что происходит под вашим покровом! Роды, насилие, пытки, боль, преступления против нравственности, кровь, скрученные руки, крики, последнее отчаяние, смерть” [16]). The grotesque fusion of birth and death unfolds into a gory account of a life cycle of a hospital patient. Bolstered by natural laws, this system of institutionalized medicine is not historical but ontological. No transcendence or improvement of this mechanical and tyrannical order is imaginable.
183 grotesque cannot be isolated from the everyday reality of petty narcissism, attachment, aggression, and awkward interactions.264
Even this brief snapshot of Petrushevskaya’s reception makes it clear that the novel has often been discussed with recourse to hyperbole: as a bleak chernukha-style account of late Soviet life, or as strong political critique, or as an embodiment of the boundless joyful spirit of the grotesque. Such hyperbolic approaches rely on Petrushevskaya’s often spectacular and shocking imagery, but, as Goscilo writes, much of what is happening in her work is actually not about imagery: the unique character of her style relies not on descriptions but on the formal aspects of narration (Dehexing Sex 19). Rather than focusing on the imagery of Petrushevskaya’s poetic world and the dark aspects of life she depicts, I read The Time: Night as an account of the speaking subject’s activity, drawing on Petrushevskaya’s insights to propose some ways of prosaic thinking about the subject.
The Time: Night locates the drama of tragedy and suffering in the banality of everyday survival, and presents a compelling, if unpleasant, vision of subjectivity. The novel’s peculiar narrative style can be productively read as an individual process of maintaining an implicated yet separate existence in overwhelming circumstances. It is in Anna Andrianovna’s speech, its blindspots, its transitions between registers, its struggle to attend to changing and simultaneous needs, that we can find Petrushevskaya’s vision of prosaic subject.
3.3.2 Petrushevskaya’s Prosaic Vision
On a very basic level, the narrator’s writing functions as a method of achieving catharsis. The nightly ritual of purging words onto the page sustains the self in a world of pressures and impossible contradictions: “Now I’ve woken up in the middle of the night, my time, night, a meeting with the stars and with God, a time for talking, I write everything down” (Vremia noch’ 173).265 For the reader, Anna Andrianovna’s writing serves as an exposition of her process of
264 Other readings of Petrushevskaya acknowledge the particularity of her use of the grotesque: Goscilo (Dehexing Sex 141) and Sutcliffe (62) write that Petrushevskaya’s grotesque is more depressing than Bakhtin’s, while Lipovetsky argues that it is the novel’s circular structure, not its content, which is dark and ambivalent, that positions it within the genre of the idyll, also theorized by Bakhtin (“Literature on the Margins” 160). 265 Later, VN. “Теперь я проснулась среди ночи, мое время, ночь, свидание со звездами и с Богом, время разговора, все записываю.”
184 being a subject. Her narration reveals the messy process of subjective self-constitution, which is explored in The Time: Night in painful, mortifying detail.
3.1.1.3 The Underground Woman
In building up her characters, Petrushevskaya relies on the device of skaz – narration that imitates oral speech. This has led critics to note her resemblance to the Underground Man from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, a comparison amplified by the unpleasant nature of both narrators. In his amendment of Boris Eikhenbaum’s classic account of skaz,266 Bakhtin argues that Eikhenbaum’s emphasis on oral speech is insufficient on its own. The most important thing about skaz, according to Bakhtin, is that it is dialogic: it is “above all an orientation toward someone else’s speech” (Problems 191). In the Underground Man, writes Bakhtin, this orientation towards the other is “extremely intense” (205). Oppressed by the imagined power of outsiders to define him, Dostoevsky’s hero strives to describe himself as worse than anyone else’s potential opinion of him, in “an ultimate desperate effort to free oneself from the power of the other’s consciousness and to break through to one’s self for the self alone…” (232). Like the Underground Man, Anna issues an insistent account of herself as an attempt to escape external definitions, but the driving force behind her account is different.
In contrast to the Underground Man, Anna is not in thrall of the dream of being fully independent. As Emerson notes, this Underground Woman is not physically isolated but has to live in the world of others.267 Building on Emerson’s observation, I argue that what distinguishes
266 In a 1927 article, Eikhenbaum defined skaz as “the form of narrative prose which, through its vocabulary, its syntax, and the choice of intonations points towards the oral speech of the narrator” (Gery 131, trans. Gery; “форм[a] повествовательной прозы, которая в своей лексике, синтаксисе и подборе интонаций обнаруживает установку на устную речь рассказчика” [“Leskov i sovremennaia proza” 413]). In an earlier discussion of skaz in the 1919 article “Kak sdelana ‘Shinel’’ Gogolia” (“The Structure of Gogol’s The Overcoat”), Eikhenbaum drew attention to the formal aspects of Gogol’s novella, as opposed to the problem of social inequality that was emphasized in Soviet readings of the novel (I thank Ann Komaromi for pointing this out). In my reading of The Time: Night, focusing on skaz will similarly allow me to shift attention from the sociopolitical readings of the novel (for example, as a text giving voice to women’s experiences), and instead investigate the nature of this voice. 267 Emerson sees Anna’s misery as material, as opposed to the abstract problems of Dostoevsky’s character: “As so often is the case in Dostoevsky, life is used to illustrate an idea. Petrushevskaya gives us no abstract philosophy as such. Real people are still trying to live down there” (Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature 234). This means that while the Underground Man is a privately tortured hero, the Underground Woman is part of a community of intimately connected others who are trying to survive: “. . . the Underground Man hurts most of all himself . . . Underground women can hurt themselves too, of course, but given the range of their family duties (and cramped living quarters) in the Soviet context, usually they hurt others first, and far more effectively” (233).
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Anna from the Underground Man is not simply her enmeshment in the materiality of daily life (and certainly not just her gender, though her material existence is obviously gendered). Their main difference lies rather in the way they narrate themselves into being – a difference that is obscured by a focus on their shared paranoia and unpleasant personalities. Unlike the Underground Man, Anna is not caught in the loop of proving her depravity in advance in order to meet the world on her own terms. In fact, she is rarely open about her misdeeds with herself or imagined readers. She is concerned, above all, with aligning herself with the position of knowledge, competence, normality and therefore of power. Being implicated in the world of others, she uses the words of others to position her optimally in that world.
3.1.1.4 Speech of the Crowd: Anna’s Registers
Much has been said about the collective, folk roots of the speech of Petrushevskaya’s narrators, which is full of rumours, clichés, snappy obscenities and grammatical errors. In line with her reading of Petrushevskaya’s work as grotesque, Ivanova interprets her narrative voices as instances of the Bakhtinian carnivalization of speech: “deliberately nonsensical verbal utterances that grotesquely expand various sounds into words and words into phrases” (“Bakhtin’s Concept of the Grotesque” 31).268 Petrushevskaya does draw on folk genres, and there is much humour in her writing, but her narrators certainly do not engage in “verbal play in the form of riddles” (31). To read her novels as embodiments of the voice of people, to deindividualize the characters and interpret them as merging in a sort of carnival, is to miss the precise relationship between the individual subject and the crowd that is crucial to Petrushevskaya as a thinker and a writer.
Petrushevskaya is no collectivist. She often insists on the value of the individual: “A person is more ethical and higher than people [as] a crowd” (DT 278).269 The importance of the crowd for her is precisely that it is comprised of individuals, each of which has a particular life and “cosmos,” a particular kind of suffering and a unique right to exist (181).270 The speech of Anna
268“Drawing on the devices of comic folk genres, she creates deliberately nonsensical verbal utterances that grotesquely expand various sounds into words and words into phrases . . . With the fundamental breakdown in a hierarchical world view and a renewed sense of words and concepts long rendered meaningless in our language, this carnivalization of speech frees us from one-sided gloomy solemnity” (Ivanova, “Bakhtin’s Concept of the Grotesque” 31). 269 “Человек нравственней и выше народа, толпы.” 270 “…when you get used to it over the years, look closely, get to know it, it turns out that there is no crowd. There are people. Each on their own. Each person with a specific history and family life, each with a special cosmos, each
186 and Petrushevskaya’s other narrators is spontaneous and emerges out of the lived life in a community. It is neither ecstatic nor chaotic – it is a meaningful expression of the existence of a specific consciousness. In The Time: Night, language may be the language of the crowd, but it is the individual who uses it.
Anna’s uncanny ability to switch registers helps her establish legitimacy as a speaking being and assert her knowing control of the environment. She moves quickly between various genres that are necessary for survival, casting herself as a noble beggar in virtuous poverty, a still-beautiful seductress, a loving grandmother, or a snobbish intellectual.271 She consciously mixes high and low cultural registers. Her speech is full of references and echoes, but three main registers predominate: poetic and sentimental discourse, profane everyday speech, and official or institutional language. Anna’s use of poetic tropes to represent her inner life and family dynamics seems to be undercut by the coarse language with which she abuses her daughter, and by her reliance on bureaucratic tropes to intimidate others. This contrast, I will argue, does not simply represent a particular character’s hypocrisy, but rather embodies Petrushevskaya’s vision of subjectivity as a process of maintaining one’s existence in the world of constant challenges and various discourses that are only relatively sustaining.
Anna most frequently draws on poetic discourse through regular sentimental digressions about motherhood and maternal love. In contrast with the actual conversations she has with her children, Anna’s imagined addresses to them are always melodramatic: “Oh Alena, my distant daughter. I believe that the most important thing in life is love. But how did I deserve all this, when I loved her madly! I loved Andriusha madly! Infinitely” (VN 13).272 Anna’s monologues about motherhood are over-the-top; dreamy visions totter on the edge of discomfort, from her children’s sleep: “O their childhood! My bliss, my love for those two little birds, when they
one deserves life, deserves love, all were tender infants and will become old and feeble” (“…когда притерпишься с годами, присмотришься, познакомишься, окажется, что толпы нет. Есть люди. Каждый сам по себе. Человек со своей историей и жизнью своего рода, каждый со своим космосом, каждый достоин жизни, достоин любви, все были нежными младенцами, станут немощными стариками”). 271 This quick adaptability, reflected in her expressions and even syntax, earned Anna the comparison with Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, Gogol’s entrepreneurial aristocrat in Dead Souls (Doak 176). The comparison is not particularly flattering. Anna’s self-serving changes of register account at least partly for why the character has been met with so much dislike and even outrage on the part of readers both in Russia and abroad. 272 “Ау, Алена, моя далекая дочь. Я считаю, что самое главное в жизни — это любовь. Но за что мне все это, я же безумно ее любила! Безумно любила Андрюшу! Бесконечно.”
187 slept, their little heads on pillows, quiet warmth in my room…”273 (78) – to her grandson’s piss: “When he was tiny I would take out his chamber pot and I would always tell myself that his urine smells like a chamomile meadow” (14).274 These speeches run smoothest when they stay abstract, and they seem to serve Anna’s self-identification as an all-sacrificing, all-loving mother.275 As a matriarch, Anna looks upon her family situation and describes it as a “Greek tragedy” (54).276 She refers to her children as “sufferers” (43, 44, 50)277 and, preserving for herself the role of an oracle who “implores” (54), a Penelope who is “knitting lace” as she waits for her “two beloved beings” (53).278
These extravagant digressions are the only occasions when Anna talks of the family as a unit. Usually, she represents it as a war zone with competing parties, and has no qualms describing her daughter Alena as a “shrill, busty broad” (18),279 Andrei as a “coward” (82)280 who “was eating [her] brain and drinking [her] blood” (84),281 and little Timochka as “squealing like a piglet” (18).282 In Anna’s mouth, poetic celebrations of maternal love are revealed as hollow, as her own motherhood devolves into resentment and jealousy of her daughter, and drives her son to seek an escape from this destructive combination of control and idealization.
273 “О их детство! Мое блаженство, моя любовь к этим двум птенчикам, когда они спали, их головушки на подушках, тихое тепло в моей комнате…” 274 “Когда я его крошечного выносила горшочек, всегда говорила себе, что его моча пахнет ромашковым лугом.” 275 The theme of motherhood, and the image of a suffering mother are also central to Akhmatova’s Requiem, which plays a crucial role in Anna Andrianovna’s self-presentation. 276 “Greek tragedy! Andrei, you will have to stay strong, Andrei, I implored in my heart, they will put you behind bars again!” (“Греческая трагедия! Андрей, ты должен будешь держаться, Андрей, в душе заклинала я, они тебя опять посадят!” [54]). 277 “After all, I don’t know what my beloved, my only sufferer, brought home with him” (“Я же не знаю, с чем пришел домой мой страдалец любимый и единственный” [43]). “…my sufferer, my eternal pain, my Alena” (“…моя страдалица, моя вечная боль, моя Алена” [44]). “To talk like that about your own brother, a sufferer who protected eight friends with his own body!” (“Так о своем брате, о страдальце, заслонившем грудью восемь друзей!” [50]). 278: “Still, what a mystery it is, these dreams of mine in the midst of tragedies! I could be knitting lace in a heap of ashes, on the eve of the arrival of two beloved beings, Timka and Andrei!” (“Вот какая все-таки загадка эти мои мечты в разгар трагедий! Мне на пепелище вязать кружево, в преддверии прихода двух любимых существ, Тимки и Андрея!” [53]) 279 “…грудастая крикливая тетка…” 280 “…Андрей сам трус.” 281 “…ел мой мозг и пил мою кровь…” 282 “…Тимка визжит как поросенок…”
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This contrast between Anna’s poetic asides and her targeted, unrestrained attacks forces onto the reader a sense of distancing and even disgust. Boris Kuz’minskii calls Anna Andrianovna’s poetic asides the “vilest” aspect of the novel (Kuz’minskii) and Goscilo points out that they “acquire almost obscene overtones” (“Speaking Bodies” 146). Anna’s hypocritical use of the high discourses of motherhood and poetry could be interpreted as a way of devaluing them, which would encourage a reading of the novel as a critique of Great Literature and of the Soviet cult of motherhood. I would argue, however, that Anna’s use of high discourse does not serve simply to degrade the idea of family tragedy or self-sacrificing motherhood.283 Nor do I follow Markova’s interpretation that these uncomfortable parallels with classics elevate the world of byt to a higher spiritual and cultural level (Markova 96). Something else is going on here: literature fails to redeem not because it offers false redemption but because it exists in real life. The functions of literature in the lived world of the characters are “mediocre, trivial, vulgar, banal” (91).284 High poetic language functions in the novel solely as part of the narrator’s subjectivity, enlisted in an attempt to sustain herself and control her environment.
References to high cultural values and a corresponding manner of speaking allow the narrator to position herself as someone special, someone who lives the unbearable. This function of Anna’s poetic allusions is especially visible in her identification with the modernist poet Anna Akhmatova. From early lyrical poetry in Evening (Vecher [1912]) to powerful condemnations of political violence in Requiem (Rekviem [1963]) and later poetic experiments in Poem Without A Hero (Poema bez geroia [1960-1965]), Akhmatova’s work has a cult status in Russian culture. In addition to a shared first name, the two Annas have nearly equivalent patronymics: “Andrianovna” echoes Akhmatova’s “Andreevna.” Anna Andrianovna sees this tenuous connection with her “mystical namesake” (VN 13)285 as “a sign from above” (96).286 This
283 Compare, for example, Petrusevskaya’s invocations of Akhmatova to Vladimir Sorokin’s more obvious deconstructions of the Great Literary Tradition in his references to Tsvetaeva in Marina’s Thirtieth Love or to Akhmatova in Blue Lard (1999), where the poet’s clone mechanically produces stylized poems (49-57). 284 “…заурядная, тривиальная, пошлая, банальная…” 285 “…мистические тезки.” 286 “Funny, you know, I am almost a namesake of a great poet… It's like a sign from above” (“Смешно, знаете, я ведь почти тезка великому поэту. . . Это как высший знак” [96]).
189 identification affords her some borrowed dignity, which she emphasizes by repeating Anna Akhmatova’s famous insistence on being called a “poet” rather than a “poetess” (13).287
As Tatyana Prokhorova explains, the connection with Akhmatova helps Anna Andrianovna “draw attention to herself, and in this way come up for air, at least briefly, from the horrible swamp of routine in which she is submerged.”288 Citing Akhmatova’s poems, Anna elevates her life to the level of a literary tragedy. The central reference in the novel is to Akhmatova’s poem cycle Requiem – a powerful denunciation of the Stalinist Purges, notable for its presentation of large-scale historical trauma from the woman’s perspective. Anna specifically references the following lines: “Husband buried, then to see / Son arrested… Pray for me” (“Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem, 1935-1940” [306]).289 She references the lines numerous times, adapting them to her own, distinctly less noble condition: “senile mother, then to see son arrested, pray for me, to quote the genius” (VN 93).290 Given Anna Andrianovna’s realities, the quotes are often inappropriate. As the reader finds out, Anna deliberately sent her mother to the hospital to die in miserable conditions. Meanwhile, her beloved son Andrei is a thief and a violent alcoholic.291 Elsewhere, Anna describes Andrei as “looking like a hero” (42) who has been tormented in “that terrible human hell” (56),292 making yet another reference to the Gulag system293 so as to endow her son’s banal life of crime with a sense of nobility and saintliness.294
287 “Я поэт. Некоторые любят слово ‘поэтесса’, но смотрите, что нам говорит Марина или та же Анна, с которой мы почти что мистические тезки, несколько букв разницы: она Анна Андреевна, я тоже, но Андриановна.” (“I’m a poet. Some like the word ‘poetess’, but look what we are told by Marina or the aforementioned Anna, who is almost my mystical namesake, a few letters’ difference: she is Anna Andreevna, so am I, but Andrianovna.”) 288 “‘Мистическая связь’ с Ахматовой необходима Анне Андриановне как способ обратить на себя внимание и таким образом хотя бы ненадолго вынырнуть из страшного болота обыденности, в которое она погружена.” 289 Translated by Robin Kemball. “Муж в могиле, сын в тюрьме, / Помолитесь обо мне” (Sobranie sochinenii 441). 290 “…мать в маразме, сын в тюрьме, помолитесь обо мне, как писала гениальная.” 291Another example of an inappropriate citation is Anna’s echoing of a line from an early Akhmatova love poem (“How can I forget? He walked out, staggering…” “Как забуду? Он вышел, шатаясь…” [Sobranie sochinenii 44]) to describe little Tima’s distress: “I’ll never forget how he stood, barely staying on his feet, a small child, staggering from grief” (“Никогда не забуду, как он стоял, еле держась на ногах, малый ребенок, шатаясь от горя” [VN 18]). 292 “…ту страшную человеческую преисподнюю…” 293 The image of the Gulag as hell or the underworld is common in literary and popular texts about it: for example, in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel V kruge pervom (In the First Circle, 1968), and Gennady Beglov’s 1989 film Ad, ili Dos’e na samogo sebia (Hell, or One’s Own Personal File). 294 “Вид героя, исхудалый, я присела на пятки и стала снимать с него ботинки.”
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Anna is self-conscious about her active construction of herself in response to the situation at hand.295 She describes herself as slipping into lamentation when she needs to elicit pity and material help: “I recite . . . a full list of my miseries like a beggar on a train” (128).296 In a conversation with a hospital nurse, she adapts her performance to her audience, positioning herself as an ordinary Soviet woman with overwhelming problems: “dissident son in prison, falsely accused, daughter had a baby practically without a husband, two students without stipends on my hands, and now a grandson was born, ah, oh, shoes, diapers!” (85).297 Here, she lets go of the specific form of the Akhmatovian lines – the needs of a particular situation take precedence over maintaining faithfulness to the original – but she retains their structure of a list of woes. Anna uses such lists strategically: for example, in one of her particularly successful schemes, to acquire second-hand baby clothes. Anna knows her talents: “I got everything calculated on first glance. Like a chess player. I am a poet” (13).298 When she boasts that she is skilled at manipulating situations and immediately announces that she is a poet, this is not an incongruity. She is a poet insofar as she is a survivor and a strategist.
This capacity to combine literariness and cynicism means that Anna’s affinity for poetry also has a dark side. Anna uses high language to distinguish herself and psychologically dominate others. As Kuz’minskii points out, in the novel even the capacity to think metaphorically ultimately serves as a weapon in the fight for survival (Kuz’minskii). On the way to read her poems at a children’s camp, Anna meets another performer and immediately sizes her up as “the lowest category” (VN 125).299 She still feels threatened, however, and enters a barely concealed struggle
295 Anna’s self-awareness is further evident in instances when the references she makes are not just inappropriate but consciously irreverent. In one case, she echoes Marina Tsvetaeva’s metaphor of writing as drawing one’s blood: “Irreversibly, unstoppably, / Irreparably, poetry is gushing” (“Невозвратно, неостановимо, / Невосстановимо хлещет стих” [Stikhotvoreniia, poemy, izbrannaia proza 216]). Anna uses a similar incantatory sequence of rhyming adverbs to describe her own love of bread: “more than anything, irresistibly, irresistibly I love bread” (“…больше всего люблю неудержимо, неудержимо люблю хлеб” [VN 131]). Elsewhere, Anna obliquely invokes Akhmatova when faced with the aging, overweight body of an acquaintance: “Oh my friends, even in an old person’s body flickers the fire of the mind! Take the example of my great almost-namesake” (“Ах, друзья мои, и в старческом теле мерцает огонь ума! Брать хотя бы пример моей великой почти что тезки” [133]). Akhmatova was a waif in her youth but gained weight in her later years, and Anna’s invocation of Akhmatova’s bodily existence is unexpectedly crass. 296 “…перечисляю, как нищий в электричке.” 297 “…сын-диссидент в тюрьме по ложному обвинению, дочь почти без мужа родила, два студента без стипендии на руках и родился внук, ах, ох, ботинки, пеленки!” 298 “– у меня все просчитано в уме при первом же взгляде. Как у шахматистки. Я поэт.” 299 “Низшая категория.”
191 for dominance: “Who are you, I’m a poet, – I say, to identify my specialization . . . It’s funny, you know, I’m almost a namesake of a great poet . . . It’s like a sign from above” (125).300 Anna’s association with Akhmatova is a trusty weapon in her psychological arsenal: she uses it to set herself apart not only on the creative professional ladder, but on the higher plane of art.
When the situation calls for it (and equally often, when unprovoked), Anna shifts from pompous rhetoric to the low language of verbal abuse. She often does this when talking to Alena: “Money from them! You should have thought about this when you spread your legs for them! And you took from us! Whore…” (152).301 Her advice to the pregnant Alena – that she should “go and scrape it out” (152)302 – produces a grating contrast with Anna’s frequent meditations on motherhood. Yet, as distasteful and shocking as her words may seem, they are contextually appropriate in terms of their function: Anna enlists profanity and abuse in domestic warfare. She casts her relationships as an ongoing war, in which she needs to “maintain her defenses, although the daughter strikes from time to time” (37).303 The apartment is a frontline, and, since the exiled Alena rarely makes it any further than the door, it is the hallway that turns into a battleground (115).304 In this war, Anna seeks to assert her dominance by reverting to the basest accusations and crassest words.
By humiliating Alena, Anna affirms the kind of life that she knows well, which, for all its cruelty, can sustain one’s being. She degrades her daughter to stamp out her naiveté, which Anna, not incorrectly, perceives as dangerous: “the males feel her feminine weakness and ability to just flap on her back from happiness” (33).305 Alena does seem naïve: she gets into damaging affairs with an unchanging level of fatalistic idealism.306 In an effort to distance herself from
300 “Вы кто, я поэт, – говорю я, чтобы обозначить специализацию. . . Смешно, знаете, я ведь почти тезка великому поэту. . . Это как высший знак.” 301 “Деньги с них! Надо было думать, когда ложилась под них! А ты брала с нас! Плять…” 302 “…пошла и выскоблила.” 303 “Я держу оборону, хотя дочь время от времени наносит удары…” 304 “…плацдарм боевых действий.” 305 “…кобели чувствуют в ней ее женскую слабость и способность раз и хлопнуться на спину от счастья.” 306 In her diary, Alena describes being seduced by a workplace superior, who eventually gets her pregnant and abandons her, in precisely such a fatalistic and idealistic way: “Maybe I was too forward when I said that I will stay at his place for the night, maybe I shouldn’t have said that, but I said exactly that, with a sort of self-sacrificing feeling, that I give myself to him fully, what an idiot! . . . I didn’t care at all anymore. It’s not that I lost control over myself, I knew from the very start that I will follow this man and do anything for him.” (“Может быть, я слишком прямо сказала, что останусь у него на ночь, может быть, этого нельзя было говорить, но я именно это сказала с каким-то самоотверженным чувством, что отдаю ему всю себя, дура! . . . мне уже было
192 such naiveté, Anna minimizes her daughter’s pain and vigorously denies her own vulnerability: “Me, for example, no man has hurt me, yes! What’s all this suffering, all an illusion!” (32).307 Of course, readers know that this is not the case. Anna regularly trusts men who take advantage of her: her husband leaves her alone with children to raise, her son steals from her and endangers her well-being with his criminal connections, and a stranger on the street gets her to buy drugs for him. Anna is not free of delusion, but she consciously prioritizes a mode of survival that hinges on cynicism and quick thinking. She can enlist both aggression and vulnerability as part of her survival toolkit. This outlook allows her to recognize other people’s strategic uses of performed affect: acquaintances play good cop/bad cop to make her leave,308 hospital workers have been overexposed to “human refuse”309 and “learned in spite of themselves” to be immune to people’s grief (170),310 and Alena’s lover dresses up their affair in romantic terms to avoid material responsibilities (37).311 Anna’s verbal abuse of Alena is therefore not simply sadistic. She enlists the “refreshing power of insults” (100)312 to affirm the truth of this world as she perceives it, to pass on to Alena the lessons of survival.313
The third pillar of Anna’s discursive repertoire is official and even bureaucratic language. Soviet-speak becomes relevant when Anna needs to act in an institutional setting or call upon institutional authority to assert dominance over an unfolding situation. Anna is far from being a dedicated Communist; she invokes the state discourse to patch up holes in her own lived reality as she goes. Acting as a moral authority, threatening to call or actually calling the police, and skillfully navigating the institutional landscape, Anna is often successful. To retain control over
совершенно всё равно. Я не то что потеряла контроль над собой, я с самого начала знала, что пойду за этим человеком и сделаю для него всё” [19-20]). Alena’s devotion to her lovers is immediate and uncontrollable, almost automatic, but her sentimentality also makes sense. For her, giving herself up to men could provide momentary relief from a difficult life, and also allow her to briefly escape the suffocating women’s world at home. 307 “Мне, например, ни один мужчина не сделал больно, да! Чего там, какие страдания, все иллюзия!” 308 “…и Маша входит с печалью на лице как человек, сделавший доброе дело и совершенно напрасно. За ней идет Владимир с физиономией гориллы.” (“…and Masha enters with a look of sorrow on her face, like someone who has done a good deed completely in vain. She is followed by Vladimir with the face of a gorilla” [11]). 309 “…человеческих отбросов.” 310 “Они поневоле научились.” 311 “Love with such people is always sublime and platonic, which means they’ll not be paying for anything.” (“Любовь у таких людей всегда возвышенная и платоническая, то есть платить ни за что они не будут” [37]). 312 “…o освежающая сила оскорблений!” 313 Anna herself reflects on abuse as a form of care: berating Alena for her hygiene routine, Anna seeks to “refresh her, shock” (“взбодрить ее, шокировать” [93]) and distract her from grandmother’s loss of mind. Unlikely as it is to improve Alena’s mood, this strategy certainly helps Anna to feel that she is being helpful.
193 her household when it gets out of hand, she uses official language to chase away intruders – namely, Alena’s friends, who eat all the food in the fridge: “…I was steadfast and regularly orchestrated scandals with phone calls to the police, protesting the residence in my apartment of unauthorized persons after 11 pm!” (54).314 Sometimes, however, her interventions are inefficient and out of touch with reality, her inflated language strikingly out of place. When she accuses a fellow tram passenger of pedophilia because he is too affectionate with his daughter, the man himself and the onlookers are infuriated by Anna’s intrusive and far-fetched judgment. Just like this attempt to discipline a stranger, calling the police after hearing a woman’s screams allows Anna to feel that she is in control of the situation. Her triumphant celebration suggests as much: “I always save everyone! I alone in the whole city in our neighbourhood listen at night to hear if someone screams!” (118).315 We never learn whether the intervention was successful.
The facility with which Anna speaks the language of the institution is remarkable. She successfully threatens to publicly expose the young man who had impregnated her daughter and forces him to marry Alena. Anna describes her actions in fragmentary and lively, but unmistakably official language: “I – you must know this – I took appropriate action, and the girls from her year came forth as witnesses, what happened in the hayloft and how she was washing the blood off her shirt, in September” (66).316 Here, Anna describes taking “appropriate action” and enlisting her daughter’s friends as “witnesses,” but incorporates these formal fragments into everyday speech, with interrupted phrases and orphaned clauses (“…came forth as witnesses, what happened in the hayloft…”). The odd syntax here reflects Anna’s mastery both of the institutional language and of the flexible everyday grammar of folk speech. In Sorokin’s Marina’s Thirtieth Love, we saw the protagonist literally dissolve in Soviet ideological formulas. Anna’s vernacular use of Soviet language is different: she appropriates it to her own realities.
In addition to her use of the Soviet officialese, Anna has no qualms calling on apolitical or even anti-Soviet vocabulary, pretending to be an indebted alcoholic to provoke fellow-feeling in her
314 “Я держалась стойко и регулярно устраивала скандалы со звонками в милицию, протестуя против проживания у меня в квартире посторонних лиц после 23 часов!” 315 “Я все время всех спасаю! Я одна во всем городе в нашем микрорайоне слушаю по ночам, не закричит ли кто!” 316 “Я, пусть ты знаешь это, я приняла меры, и девочки из ее группы выступили свидетелями на сеновале что произошло и как она отстирывала кровь от майки, в сентябре.”
194 boss (104),317 or using dissident discourse to exonerate Andrei. Moreover, she is skilled at avoiding the clutches of Soviet bureaucracy when it is necessary. Anna tries to circumvent the hospital decision to move her mother into another facility with even worse conditions. She refuses to sign hospital papers (124), knowing that a signature is her only bargaining power, and tries to manipulate the hospital staff and sabotage the system. Anna’s use of politicized language or the Soviet rhetoric of public morality therefore aims neither to pay homage to the state nor to mock and denounce it. Her fidelity and her rebellion are small-scale and situational, and so her use of the state language does not just degrade Soviet ideals or denounce their falsity. Instead, it shows what it might look like to live with the language of state power, and to use it for survival.
Anna’s speech is full of dramatic contrasts and sudden shifts: from the sentimental highs of her discourse on motherhood to the crass use of profanity to attack or shock her family, from the appeal to the moral authority of dissidence and Akhmatovian laments to the self-serving deployment of Soviet official tropes to intimidate others. These contrasts suggest hypocrisy, if not split consciousness. I have shown, however, that Anna is neither a cold-blooded strategist nor a sociopathic alien who changes masks at will. Her shifting registers reflect a strategic use of language in domestic warfare and in the dangerous world outside. These registers also structure her way of being in language on a more existential level. Anna uses discourses to demarcate her field of existence; to organize and give shape to her being in situations and over time. With the example of her schizophrenic mother before her, Anna is doing her best to hold on to life: the constant stream of speech helps her remain a subject whose words are powerful both as poetry and as verbal attack, and a social actor who is connected to and needed by her family. She draws on spoken language, with the diverse discourses it animates, to make herself into a being both competent and special enough to deserve living. Her narration is characterized by desperation, slippage and error. More often than not, Anna scrambles to continue functioning – and moreover, to continue her life – through her speech.
317 “He didn’t understand anything else: childbirth, illnesses, prison, all of that he hated and did not react to such words. Drink and money for drink – that he could sympathize with. The grim truth of my life was inconvenient for him…” (“Остальное он не воспринимал – роды, болезни, тюрьма, все это он ненавидел и на такие слова не реагировал. Выпить и деньги на выпить – этому он сочувствовал. Лихая правда моей жизни была ему неудобна…”).
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3.1.1.5 Anna’s Verbal Scrambling
Anna’s linguistic activity is not always a tightly controlled series of strategic shifts. In moments of tension and crisis, her speech slips into another domain – that of the personal psychoanalytic unconscious. Shifts from euphemisms to curse words undermine Anna’s orchestration of polished appearance, amounting to involuntary self-incrimination, admissions of crude reality within and without. I read these slippages not as manifestations of trauma or repressed material undermining her conscious actions, but as small-scale tactical activity in the unconscious work of sustaining the self when the pressures of life make it difficult to maintain her being.
In an early scene, when Anna is conned by a drug addict, she narrates the incident in a manner that is at once self-deceiving and self-incriminating. Flattered by the young man’s attention, Anna rushes to buy him pills, ostensibly meant for a dying horse. When she sees the man immediately share them with another stranger, Anna articulates her doubts in highly poetic and old-fashioned literary language: “And indeed, was it the horse for whom these pathetic pills, snatched from me, were destined? Could this be deception?” (21).318 Here, Anna executes a dramatic leap of register into poetic heights to avoid confronting the possibility that she is being swindled in a banal way. The story clashes with Anna’s frequent insistence on her own invulnerability to men and her selfless dedication to family. These inconsistencies can be seen as self-serving deception, but also as a result of a compartmentalization of the psyche around hurtful content that would take too much energy to integrate. As Goscilo explains, words “stream forth in an effort to camouflage or to deter confrontation with what is most crucial and, usually, most painful” (Dehexing Sex 19). When Anna speaks, she is scrambling to make a situation livable for herself, making quick decisions, reaching for familiar and available positions.
We can read Anna’s failures through the lens of Berlant’s “cruel optimism”: an attachment to ways of being that fail to sustain her, such as her compulsion to perform and invite aggression when she wants to express and receive love.319 The cruelty of Anna’s condition is more specific:
318 “И коню ли предназначались эти жалкие таблетки, выуженные у меня? Не обман ли сие?” 319 In Cruel Optimism, Berlant reads European and American cultural texts that have appeared since the 1990s as reactions to the failure of postwar expectations of democratic progress. Because her definition of “cruel optimism” is structural, it is capacious enough to illuminate Anna Andrianovna’s attachment to survival strategies such as aggression and self-aggrandizement: “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an
196 it is not strictly about pursuing a thing that hurts her, but about pursuing the impossible task of always getting the register right. When Anna acts cynical or naïve at the wrong time, she is choosing an inappropriate tool from her discursive arsenal. When she reverts to her trusty Akhmatovian lament at the hospital, it fails to move her disillusioned audience (VN 161). Anna’s strategic deployment of language is, in this sense, cruel: it does not always work. Anna keeps trying to remain in control even as her own speech and her own being get away from her, making it impossible to appropriately interact with her dangerous and complicated world.
The fact that Anna’s speech constitutes the activity of remaining afloat is especially obvious when the ordinary crisis that characterizes her life suddenly turns acute and catastrophic. A change in hospital policy means Anna has to move her mother Sima from the hospital or leave her to be relocated to a facility outside of town. Losing Sima’s place in the hospital means losing her pension, which is an important source of family income. This presents a big practical problem that demands putting sentimentality aside. Anna thinks quickly, “feverishly,”320 even, attempting to retain control, remain an actor in the external world, and not let the actions and agendas of others destroy her. In crisis, however, her activity no longer aims to hold together who she is and impose her dominance on others. Instead, she talks so she can get things done, even as her own sense of self, confidence in her decisions and general ontological security are disintegrating. Practical strategizing and spontaneous expressions of feeling get more and more compressed. As the crisis enfolds Anna, the character of her narration changes. The role of quotations and situation-appropriate clichés recedes, as she falls into a deeper layer of her own being and memory. Her speech turns into a stream of consciousness, exposing a less censored mode of processing things, expressing pain and the impossible desire for things to be well.
We can read Anna’s breathless narration as what Berlant describes as “genre flailing,” which helps subjects remain afloat when life defies more controlled strategies for handling it:
In a crisis we improvise like crazy, where ‘like crazy’ is a little too non-metaphorical. Plus, when crisis is ordinary, flailing – throwing language and gesture and policy and
obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project” (Cruel Optimism 1). 320 “…лихорадочно…” (123).
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interpretations at a thing to make it stop – can be fabulously unimaginative, a litany of lists of things to do, to pay attention to, say, to stop saying, to discipline and sanction. (“Big Man”)
Anna’s habitual shifts of register could be seen as “throwing language and gesture and policy and interpretation” at the confusing or threatening things around her. This becomes especially obvious at the hospital. As discussed above, Anna is a master of lists, and here she is putting all her tricks to work, including a customized litany of woes, in an attempt to influence the nurses. This time, however, she can no longer sustain one type of performance for long enough to position herself well, to attack others or to get things done. She begins by telling the nurses about her work as a poet, in order to make herself seem more legitimate, but immediately undermines herself:
…I’m publishing a book of poems
with poems, ooh, we’ll start living, I am, you know, a poet, and poets are beggar people and not of this world, they end life in oblivion, ah, if only there was a way, if it wasn’t for need, there’s be nothing to say... (VN 162)321
In the moment, Anna cannot suppress her own awareness of the uselessness of poetry and the inescapability and misery of material need. She does not have time to cover things up and present a coherent picture of herself.
This is why the time of crisis is also when Anna approaches some clarity, and that clarity catches her off guard. She knows shame, guilt and unromanticized grief to be sources of weakness, so she usually tries to repress or bracket them out. In this moment of flailing, they sneak up on her. She faces with horror her own selfishness: “Who, who gives up her own mother to the mental hospital? Me, oh Lord” (141)322 – and her secret hope that her mother is taken away, so she doesn’t have to deal with it: “how will I get her home, if they haven’t already taken her away
321 “…у меня выходит книга стихов / со стихами, у, заживем, я ведь, знаете, поэт а поэты нищий народ и не от мира сего, кончают жизнь в забвении, ах, если бы была такая возможность, если бы не нужда, о чем бы было говорить…” 322 “Кто, кто отдает свою мать в психбольницу? Я, о Господи.”
198 after all, oh, you’re hoping they have, you bitch, you lowly soul…” (159).323 This is also the moment when Anna can let go of an outdated vision of her youth and beauty and recognize that she herself is an aging person who, like Sima, is too old to live among the living.324 Crucially, these revelations are not final plot twists in which the narrator faces the truth, but passing moments in which previously obscured things are illuminated. These moments show that Anna’s narration is not just manipulative self-positioning, but also a way of processing things and extending her existence in unbearable circumstances.
3.3.3 Anna as a Prosaic Subject
In Anna Andrianovna, Petrushevskaya has created a memorable character whose attributes invite outright rejection from some Russian readers325 and sociocultural interpretations in the West.326 If, however, we read Anna not as a culturally specific type but as a strategizing and flailing narrator, we can begin to describe Petrushevskaya’s generalizable and powerful view of the subject. An analysis of Anna’s breathless prose highlights the features of her self-narration that can be described as aspects of prosaic subjectivity. Her speech combines strategic assertions of identities, which are more or less developed stances that she takes in the world, with quick tactical decisions and instances of reflexive sliding between registers, as well as flailing, as
323 “…как я буду ее везти, если все-таки ее не увезли, а, надеешься на это, плять, низкая душа...” 324 If at first Anna is concerned that her senile mother will “get up to put the kettle on and set the house on fire” (“она встанет поставить чай и подожжет дом”), she immediately realizes that she herself may “forget to turn off the stove and will burn down the house” (“…забуду выключить газ и сожгу дом…” [142.]). 325 Evgeny Ovanesian’s reaction is representative of the negative reception of Petrushevskaya’s work, which blamed the author for her characters’ difficult lives and personalities. He accuses the writer of “revealing her own world, which is characterized by a ruthless indifference to people, and violently projecting this very world onto the characters, because she does not wish to see them differently, does not know other feelings” (“…автор раскрывает именно свой мир, которому присуще безжалостное равнодушие к людям, и именно его, этот мир, насильно проецирует на действующих лиц, потому что другими их видеть не желает, других чувств не ведает” [256]). 326 For example, John Shreffler ends his short 1994 review of the novel by emphasizing its Russian setting: “…Petrushevskaya proffers a bleak portrait of Russian society and of the burdens carried by its women” (2024). According to Petrushevskaya herself, the Western inclination to read her work as fiction about Russia can also result in absurd exoticism. In DT, Petrushevskaya describes the reception of her work by Western audiences on her trips abroad with other Russian writers in the 1980s: “…they interpreted my things purely as Russian exotics. So there are Chinese eyes, salty Mongol tea with lard, Korean dog food, Eskimos who live in the snow, shamans who whirl and howl. And there’s Petrushevskaya, also singing something. Hard Russian living, tra la la, don’t worry, it has nothing to do with you! This is about the exceptionally hard lot of Russian women.” (“Кстати, а мои вещи они воспринимали чисто как русскую экзотику. Ну существуют китайские глазки, монгольский соленый чай с салом, корейская еда собаки, эскимосы вообще живут в снегу, шаманы крутятся и воют. Ну и Петрушевская тоже чего-то поет. Тяжелая русская трали-вали житуха, не пугайтесь, это не имеет к нам никакого отношения! Это про исключительно тяжелую долю русских женщин” [DT 315]).
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Berlant defines it: “throwing language and gesture and policy and interpretations at a thing to make it stop” (“Big Man”).
The warzone in which Anna Andrianovna exists is specific to her, but Petrushevskaya’s depiction of her struggle can be useful in our attempts to formulate a prosaic theory of the subject. The Time: Night invites us to think of the subject as a process of trying to exist in an indifferent or hostile world. This prosaic subject engages in strategic and tactical decision- making, as well as occasional flailing. Strategies, as consciously chosen and relatively fixed orientations outward, provide forms of being into which the subject can relax as it advances. Embracing dramatic reparative or radical narratives could be a strategic activity. Tactics, by contrast, allow for quick decisions in response to what is happening in the present moment.327 In The Time: Night, this process of sustaining one’s being is rendered visible through the story its protagonist tells, a story that is itself a narrated activity of strategizing and flailing. Sally Laird suggests that Petrushevskaya shows that “[a]ll narratives . . . are in some sense fiction – attempts, on the part of the narrator, to make arrangements of chaos, to find a meaning, to reassert control” (27). In other words, she is touching on a general human drive to self-narrate in response to nonsovereignty.
Self-narration is not guaranteed to be a successful approach: Petrushevskaya’s narrators who compulsively engage in it consistently undercut their own programs of self-presentation.328 As
327 My definitions of strategy and tactics echo but do not replicate the distinction between the two made by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life. For De Certeau, strategies are used by subjects that possess power and with it, an identifiable location: “I call a ‘strategy’ the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an ‘environment.’ A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it…” (xix). De Certeau enlists the term “tactics” in opposition to the strategic activity of an identifiable center of power. Tactics are available to subjects who operate in the space of others: “A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances. The ‘proper’ is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time – it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing’” (xix). In my own discussion, I share de Certeau’s understanding of strategy as a more sustained, solid, and inflexible form of activity, in contrast with the more responsive and situational activity of tactics. However, I understand both strategy and tactics as defining aspects of the non- sovereign subject, which is permeable and mutable, but also inevitably located, albeit tentatively, within itself (here, my thinking is informed with Bakhtin’s emphasis on the subject’s unique location in being). My use of the terms is therefore less interested in subject’s relationship to power as it is in the subject’s activity of self-maintenance. 328 Bakhtin describes this quality specifically in relation to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man (Problems 53), with whom Petrushevskaya’s Anna is often compared (see p. 189).
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Laird puts it, these narrators sabotage their own drive to control everything, and inadvertently reveal other aspects of the self: “Such assertions frequently backfire: in the ‘monologues’ we see how the narrators contradict themselves – deny an admission only just made, or betray, between the lines, some quite other motive they will not admit to at all” (“Lyudmila Petrushevskaya” 27). In Anna’s case, we cannot read such self-incrimination as evidence that she is a liar; for Petrushevskaya, such slippages are natural and constitutive of how people actually speak:
A person can never get at his [sic] own secret – never. He will create himself in a certain image one moment but ten minutes later that image will start to double and triple and eventually disappear altogether – and something quite different will replace it. It’s the most mysterious thing, the way a person defines himself – or rather, the way he lacks any firm internal portrait of himself. (Petrushevskaya, “Lyudmila Petrushevskaya” 42)
Anna’s unreliability as a narrator can therefore be read as an exaggerated case of ordinary human blindness. The unpleasant character of her actions and revelations, noted by critics, should not prevent us from recognizing Petrushevskaya’s generalizable insights: Anna’s deceptive and self- deceptive narration reflects how we are as subjects. A prosaic understanding of the subject that sustains itself through speaking would need to accommodate this aspect of speech – its surprising, never fully controllable quality. Speaking itself into being, the subject cannot cover all its bases: turning one way, it cannot see something else. The speaking subject can only rely on partial vision and an unstable story, which unfolds imperfectly over time.
The subject is not in complete control of its words, but controlling is not all that the subject is about. Speaking is not just about communicating the right thing to others. This prosaic view liberates the subject from needing to fully know what it wants before speaking out. Speech ushers in new or suppressed truths that transform the subject’s own reality. Seen prosaically, the subject is an unfolding process of speaking itself into being out of a specific location, which means that the subject is to a large extent constituted by what is told accidentally. In the prosaic view, the speaking subject talks to make things bearable, and to position itself in the world. It responds to situations as best it can by using imperfectly applicable strategies, and engages in a lot of shifting, scrambling and patching up of holes.
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Petrushevskaya’s Anna draws on literary and poetic discourses to endow her life with coherence and nobility, but this activity is undermined by her own narrative, which focuses the reader’s attention on the compromised and, to use Bakhtin’s term, “unfinalizable” process of being (Problems 58). Through its narrator, The Time: Night stages for the reader a prosaics of the reparative mode. Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead can, in a similar way, be read as an articulation of a prosaics of the radical mode. If Petrushevskaya’s Anna reaches for pompous self-sanctification, which her own narration contradicts, Berger’s Myra embraces abjection, using her identification with the figure of a slave to master her world. The novel itself, however, enables another kind of vision, revealing that its confidently abject narrator does not achieve the final state of full self-consciousness or sublation that she desires. Maidenhead produces a prosaic vision of a learning subject that desires to be a subject-who-knows, but exists in continuous movement – at times tentative, at times confident, through a world that is never fully comprehensible.
3.4 The Learning Subject in Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead
3.4.1 Maidenhead and Its Reception
The Canadian writer Tamara Faith Berger has explored the issues of pornography and sexuality in her fiction since her first novel, Lie With Me (1999), but it was her third novel, Maidenhead, that caused the biggest stir. Published by Toronto’s Coach House Press in 2012, it became the most reviewed book in Canada that year (L. Moss) and received critical acclaim in the United States, where it won the Believer Book Award (“The Believer Book Award”). Critics have praised the novel as “a masterpiece: a richly layered, complexly rendered, rhythmically written, and brilliantly executed meditation on power, desire, and consciousness” (Foad) and “a fascinating, constraint-based experiment” in using elements of porn to create artistic works of depth and value (Huffstutter). It was lauded specifically for skillful engagement with complex issues surrounding adolescence, female sexuality, race and class (Quill).
The novel begins with sixteen-year-old Myra, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, meeting the Tanzanian musician Elijah, who is in his thirties, on her family’s vacation in Key West. Scared but fascinated and flattered by Elijah’s interest, Myra follows him to his hotel, where Elijah masturbates in front of her and pisses on her body. Despite his extravagant behaviour, Myra starts dreaming that Elijah could be her boyfriend. Myra’s girlish dreams are further complicated
202 by Gayl, a self-described “artist from Kentucky” and Elijah’s temperamental partner (Maidenhead 89). During their first confrontation, Gayl slaps Myra’s cheek, leaving a red mark that lasts for weeks. Upon her return to Toronto, Myra learns that Elijah and Gayl have followed her back to Canada. Elijah’s attentions continue, as does Gayl’s sinister involvement in the affair. Increasingly alienated from her family and absorbed in internet porn, Myra begins a sexually and psychologically complicated relationship with her new acquaintances, while losing old friends, gaining new ones, adjusting to her parents’ divorce and reading continental philosophy. Soon enough, it becomes clear that Elijah and Gayl make their living in internet porn and have been grooming Myra to be filmed. The fascinated Myra enthusiastically agrees, but she has much less control over events than she wants to believe.
Berger’s subject – women’s sexuality and involvement in the sex industry – readily invites feminist readings.329 Julia Cooper singled out the protagonist, Myra, as “… one of the most surprising characters we’ve read in a long time . . . in part because she is young, yet incredibly astute . . . and because she is a female who experiences sexual pleasure – intensely and often” (Cooper). In an interview with Berger, Stacey May Fowles describes Berger’s work as “a perhaps unwitting standard for accurate depictions of rabid female desire” in the face of “extreme conservative hand-wringing and the hyper-moralization of female sexual expression” (Berger, “Tamara Faith Berger”). Other readers, however, find Berger’s writing insufficiently empowering, its characters undeveloped and politics dubious. Visibly annoyed by Berger’s protagonists, Michael Weingrad infers from their apathy the author’s own lack of politicization: “…Berger treats the protagonist’s sexuality as a kind of gnostic truth, separate from and unrelated to the world around her” (Weingrad). The novel has been decried as badly written, its protagonist as one-dimensional, its descriptions as sparse and unengaging.330
329 In this sense, Maidenhead can be read alongside other fictional texts that explore the fraught relationship between female agency and abjection, such as Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973), Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997), and marie calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life (2013). 330 Here is a sample of such critiques: “The book’s flat characterizations and unconvincing dialogue, though true to classic porno style, prove a disagreeable distraction. And the lack of sumptuous description likewise fails to engage the reader’s senses in any vicarious way” (Guz). “The three novels have essentially the same protagonist, named Mira in The Way of the Whore and Myra in Maidenhead and left nameless in Lie With Me. This is unfortunate, because this character can be stiflingly one-dimensional, even by teenage standards in the case of the sixteen year old Myra” (Weingrad). “She’s a construct for discussion, and not by any stretch a fully fleshed-out character. No
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These negative reactions can be partly explained by the novel’s scandalous appearance in the context of Canada’s fairly reserved literary scene: Berger’s characters seem too comfortable with their abject sexual explorations.331 These reactions are not just a sign of prudery or pervasive anti-pornography sentiments. The critique of porn as an instrument of violent patriarchal subjugation, issued by Catherine MacKinnon and other radical feminists in late 1970s and early 1980s, is today far from mainstream (Williams, “Porn Studies” 1).332 We could read Berger in the context of pro-sex feminist responses to radical feminist views, which were criticized as paternalistic, simplistic, and politically conservative.333 As Jennifer Nash explains, anti- censorship feminist activism has fueled pro-sex, or sex-radical, feminism, which sees porn neither as oppressive nor as straightforwardly liberatory,334 but rather explores “…how arousal, pleasure, subordination, and dominance are co-constitutive, and emphasized the contingent and complex meanings inherent to each pornographic text” (16). Sex-radical scholars, performers, filmmakers and activists are also interested in making better porn – more feminist, more queer – to “challenge the dominant pornographic aesthetic from inside the parameters of the genre” (16).335
Like these pro-sex feminists, Berger is concerned with women’s pleasure and with the cultural messages that women receive.336 In her view, porn provides fertile ground for exploration of
one in Maidenhead, as a matter of fact, qualifies as anything more than an idea used to sell a thesis that sadly never comes together” (Wilmot). 331 “Berger’s text, the first literary porn in Canada, challenged the country’s more traditional, sexually-hesitant literary culture” (Guz). 332 The anti-porn stance was taken by prominent feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin, Dorchen Leidholdt, Helen Longino, Gloria Steinem and Monique Wittig. Catherine MacKinnon’s argument is exemplary: “Each violation of women – rape, battery, prostitution, child sexual abuse, sexual harassment – is made sexuality, made sexy, fun, and liberating of women’s true nature in the pornography” (Towards a Feminist Theory of the State 138). In discussing the history of feminist approaches to porn, I rely on Linda Williams’ Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1989) and Jennifer Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (2014). 333 Anti-porn feminism was criticised for its naturalization of gender and sexuality (Williams, Hard Core 23), its denial of women’s agency (17), its conflation of sex, fantasy and representation (18), and general ignorance about pornography (Williams, “Porn Studies” 11). Where radical feminists read porn as an act in the real world, the case for anti-censorship, promoted by the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT) in the 1980s, rested on defining porn as speech which needed protection (Nash 14). The early 1990s saw a resurgence in this conversation, Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, and Naomi Wolf opposing what they saw as the celebration of victimhood in feminism (15). 334 In this way, Jennifer Nash argues, “[s]ex-radicalism disrupted the contentious anti-pornography/pro-pornography debate that marked the early 1980s” (16). 335 Influential contributions to this project have been made by Wendy Chapkis, Drucilla Cornell, Vicky Funari, Jill Nagle, and Ann Snitow, as well as Annie Sprinkle and Candida Royalle. 336In an interview, Berger unambiguously states that gender equality, specifically in relation to access to sexual pleasure and practices, are important questions for her: “I’m going to descend into reductive gender essentialisms
204 female sexuality,337 and she speaks of porn writing as a personally empowering experience.338 In her writing, Berger seeks to subvert the sexist mainstream of porn writing by prioritizing the “getting-fucked female voice” (Phillips) – the narrative voice of the usually silenced porn girl, “that female character who had been stifled – all she had been doing was moaning” (Betker).
Not all readers approve of Berger’s depiction of this voice. What seems to provoke reviewers’ discomfort is not the subject matter but Berger’s writing itself. Savannah Schroll Guz describes an earlier Berger novel, A Woman Alone at Night, as a work with “little emotional sustenance or sexual strength for female readers,” in which “[a]lmost nothing is done to overturn conventional sexual customs” (Guz).339 The charge that Berger is not “empowering” enough betrays an expectation that feminism is an individual-centered project, and that the liberation of women’s desire must have concrete and overwhelmingly positive effects.340 This expectation reveals a desire that pornographic portrayals of abject sexuality ultimately feed into reparative projects. What is remarkable about Berger’s fiction is not that she depicts women enjoying kinky sex and thus insists on women’s right to abjection, turning radical energy into reparative certainty. It would be as reductive to interpret Berger as “empowering” and feminist as it would be to dismiss her work as unredeemable smut.
The novel is divisive because Berger does not give her readers an easy political message, which would make explicit sex scenes subservient to “nobler” issues like empowerment or inequality. Berger is not interested in political generalizations. In an interview with the author, Fowles
when I say that I think that the woman (queer or straight) may struggle more with sexual freedom than the man (queer or straight) because a) we can birth children, b) we might take sexual pleasure in activity or passivity, and c) our lot is to work and take care of said children in addition to fucking. Female sexual liberation is a confusing mess of parts. A female shouldn’t have to clean it all up” (“An Interview with Tamara Faith Berger” 2013). 337 “In pornography there are a lot of cutting edge ideas about female sexuality that are held by a lot of female directors in porn. They’re really unafraid to take a look at some of the difficult, harder and darker sides of female sexuality. One of them being the public exposure of one’s sexuality” (“A Conversation with Tamara Faith Berger”). 338 “In my own case, wielding sexual language and being pissed off helps me get a sense of freedom in this world” (“An Interview with Tamara Faith Berger” 2013). 339 “There is very little in A Woman Alone at Night to suggest that Berger is an equal opportunity pornographer. . . She manifests a painful, unspoken vulnerability and a kind of soul erosion that may have too much emotional exposure for female readers to find any pleasure in. Very rarely does Mira achieve a sense of empowerment or a positive sense of self other than that which can be found in her physical endowments” (Guz). 340 This expectation is in line with Jennifer Nash’s observation about “pro-pornography feminism,” which she sees as implicated in neoliberal identity production, centered as it is on individual empowerment and choice: “This new epoch, with its fetishization of choice, views the consumption and production of pornography as potentially liberatory and celebrates subjects’ ‘choice’ to consume or produce whatever they enjoy” (15).
205 introduces her work as important for the feminist cause, but notes that Berger herself “confesses she’s not all that familiar with the pro-sex writings of third-wave feminism, an admission that suggests she’s not embedded in a movement but rather writing out of personal necessity” (Fowles in Berger, “Tamara Faith Berger”).341 At least part of that “personal necessity” seems to be an interest in exploring both political and aesthetic aspects of pornography.
Berger’s approach to the genre of pornographic literary fiction342 was shaped by her early work as a porn writer: “I feel like that gave me the language and the tools I needed to then put it into my own work . . . that job politicized me in terms of that realm” (“Tamara Faith Berger”). This politicization came from close engagement with the industry and its generic conventions, which allowed her to begin experimenting with the genre and developing insurgent poetic techniques. She subverted hardcore porn, shocking its male consumers by “slipping emotional terror or maybe just an uncomfortable bit of female reality” – “stuff like abuse, hysteria, emotional outbursts and female domination-style thinking” (“An Interview with Tamara Faith Berger” 2013). Berger’s project could thus be seen in the context of feminist and queer pornography, but it is important to note that her engagement with porn is complex rather than strictly celebratory. Her fiction retains the disruptive potential of pornographic writing, drawing on porn’s ability to challenge readers with grotesque aesthetics (“Tamara Faith Berger”).343 Berger uses porn’s disruptive effects to address broader issues: “Pornography removes so many filters,” she explains. “It enables me to write about class, race and relationships in a completely new way. It’s an alternative perspective on issues that all good literature deals with” (Quill).344 In Maidenhead,
341 “Berger, who defines herself as a feminist without question, is actually quite nonchalant about how powerful and subversive her sex-positivity is in the face of these challenges, seemingly unaware that she is contributing to a vital authentic dialogue via her fearless characterizations of feral wanting” (Fowles in Berger, “Tamara Faith Berger”). 342 Berger seems more comfortable with just calling her work “fiction,” but she also reflects on her work’s complex engagement of its subject, which is characteristic of literary fiction: “I see the books as literary fiction that have explicit sex in them, I guess. I’d say fiction. I don’t usually qualify as literary, I just say it’s fiction. . . . I’m influenced by the genre of pornography, but I wouldn’t necessarily call my work pornographic fiction. It’s also about porn, at the same time, it uses some of the tropes of porn, and the language of porn” (“A Conversation with Tamara Faith Berger”). 343 Berger describes it as follows: “Appeal and repulsion [are] both completely intermixed, you can’t separate them . . . It’s both experiences in one that keeps you watching. That’s an aesthetic quality. The ugliness of it totally intertwined with the intensity of it. The release and surrender of it” (“Tamara Faith Berger”). 344 “The characters in the book are trying to figure out what their pleasure is, and it’s not just a personal journey – there’s a social element to it, and a critical element to that as well. That probably is one of the differences between erotica as a genre and with what I’m doing. In my case, there is a bit more commentary on the messages that we’re all getting, as younger women in our society” (“A Conversation with Tamara Faith Berger”). Berger’s distinction
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Berger draws on porn aesthetics and builds the plot around the porn industry, exploring the pursuit of pleasure and its meaning in a world shaped in twisted ways by race, class, and people’s conflicting projects.
3.4.2 Berger’s Prosaic Vision
Berger’s use of porn aesthetics in her literary fiction problematizes the relationship between representations of sexuality and ideas of empowerment, inequality or abjection. She explores what it would mean to keep the question of this relationship open, without falling into existing (reparative or radical) paradigms. This is why her writing is useful for exploring a prosaic approach to the subject. Her teenage protagonist embodies the larger problematic of subjectivity: while Emily Donaldson notes that Berger deals skillfully with “the dark, ungraceful alchemy of adolescence, its narcissistic, hormone-induced myopia” (Donaldson), I read this myopia as existential. Maidenhead provides insight into what it is to be a nonsovereign person in a world of violence and desire.
Although underage Myra’s participation in a pornography ring is the novel’s most striking aspect, it covers a wider range of potentially or actually traumatizing factors. The Florida vacation exposes her to shocking representations of historical violence in the Key West museum of slavery (Maidenhead 29) and serves as a turning point in her family’s disintegration. Her parents are disappointing in different ways: the father ogles college girls, and the well-meaning mother is absorbed in rediscovering herself to the point of abandoning the family. Myra’s coming of age takes place in this motherless space. Falling out of the family sphere symbolizes a first step through a world that is not safe, the beginning of a process of coming to terms with nonsovereignty, vulnerability, one’s own sexual desire and that of others, physical and sexual violence and other disruptive material.
Myra’s response to these events does not correspond to the reparative narratives of feminism or trauma discussed in Chapter 1. Unlike Melinda in Speak, Myra does not freeze or fall silent, but keeps her eyes open and her words flowing. Her curious and persistent voice provides a
between eroticism and porn here refers to established publishing genres, not to theoretical categories, distinctions between which have been much discussed and contested in scholarship (Papillon 52).
207 commentary on her encounters with things that create ruptures in her life. More than that, she consciously seeks out and identifies with experiences of violence, vulnerability, and abjection. Kaitlin Phillips of Vice writes that Berger’s interest in the “getting-fucked female voice” “makes sense considering Tamara's characters are the definition of ‘fucked’” (Phillips). Maidenhead is the exploration of what it would mean to identify with being fucked, in all senses of the word: to be penetrated, to be a wreck, to be in trouble.
The novel creates a tension between Myra’s attachment to the idea of self-abjection and her gradual cognitive movement through a developmental moment full of critical breaks as well as moments of suspension, or Berlant’s “impasses” (Cruel Optimism 4). In this sense, Maidenhead can be read as a prosaic engagement with the radical mode. While the narrator relies heavily on the radical mode in the story she is telling about herself, the novel itself proposes a vision of the subject that is advancing tentatively, observing and learning, simultaneously coping with something traumatic and using it for self-expansion. Unlike its Hegel-obsessed protagonist, the novel does not allow us to relax into a simple dialectic but explores the theoretical limits and violent effects of trying to turn one’s life into a dialectical progression. Moreover, the prosaic insights of Maidenhead could be found in the moments of suspension and missed connections during Myra’s movement through the world full of others.
To discuss the novel’s engagement of the radical and prosaic modes, I will focus on Myra’s epistemophilia, which sustains her investment in the radical mode, as well as her epistemology of description, which involves bad syntax and open-ended lists of images and highlights the prosaic dimension of her journey. I then turn to the novel’s depiction of consent as a moment in which the subject negotiates potential ways of being that are constituted both by its own agendas and by the voices of others. Finally, I show that in its treatment of the dramatic moment of violence, which Myra interprets as the Hegelian struggle to the death, the novel explores the multiple meanings of this violence and positions it alongside everyday interactions and missed opportunities to communicate or connect.
3.4.2.1 Myra’s Project of Becoming a Slave and Its Limits
In Maidenhead, as in The Time: Night, narration plays a crucial role in exploring the workings of subjectivity. In the following section, I will read the narrator, Myra, as a model of an
208 epistemophiliac subject who is seeks to constitute herself in the radical mode.345 Confronted by sex and violence, Myra identifies what she sees and experiences, and incorporates it into a story she is learning to tell herself about herself. Her own process of learning and becoming a different kind of person is precipitated by external violence: specifically, the double bill of Elijah’s piss and Gayl’s slap. Myra comes to see these violent intrusions as an opening of a path towards self- consciousness. She describes the slap, for example, as a radical break that clarifies things, as an accomplished revolution: “Gayl had smacked me awake and the whole world could see” (Maidenhead 148). Seen this way, Gayl’s slap and Elijah’s piss are less like pieces of shrapnel lodged in a traumatized psyche and more like grains of sand around which the hard pearl of Myra’s vision of the world solidifies. Through learning to see, describe and pre-emptively consent to what is happening, Myra finds a way of being that is reliable, and even expansive, in a world that invades and hurts her. Myra is attracted to the position of a slave because it provides epistemological clarity, as well as a relief from the necessity to be self-identical and coherent.
Myra’s approach to violence is evident in the early scenes, even before she meets Elijah and Gayl. She is frustrated with what she sees as people’s willingness to be content with using predictable words to express widely accepted beliefs. Her mother, although aware of injustice and suffering, runs away from the displays at the museum of slavery overwhelmed; her new friends read Georges Bataille but balk at Myra’s real-life sexual revelations.346 Our protagonist, by contrast, prides herself on her unflinching gaze. She is against the compartmentalization of the field of vision into what can and cannot be seen. She wants to look at things directly, describe them, participate in them, and prove that she understands fully what others can only experience second-hand or fetishize. She wants to be a radical subject who knows.347 At the slavery exhibit,
345 James Strachey uses the term “epistemophilia” as a translation of Freud’s “Wisstreib,” the “instinct for knowledge,” discussed in a 1915 section on the “The Sexual Researches of Childhood” of “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” Freud understands the instinct for knowledge to be constituted by the desire for mastery and the pleasure of watching, or scopophilia (194). Freud suggests that the instinct itself is asexual, but it often originates from and is accompanied by sexual problems (194). Picking up Strachey’s term in Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (1993), Peter Brooks depathologizes it, approaching sexuality itself as closely tied to curiosity: “Sexuality develops as a swerve from mere genital utility, driven by infantile phantasies of satisfaction and loss; it involves a dynamic of curiosity that is possibly the foundation of all intellectual activity, which I describe under the rubric of ‘epistemophilia’” (xiii). 346 Myra’s friend Wils asks her to “[s]hut the fuck up” and sees her as self-involved and toxic: “She’s not curious, Aaron. She just doesn’t know what the fuck she wants so she’s going to fuck over everyone” (Maidenhead 117). 347 In this formulation of Myra’s epistemophiliac goal, I echo Jacques Lacan’s definition of the “subject supposed to know” (“sujet supposé savoir” [Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XV 42]). For Lacan, the notion of such a subject is
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Myra tries to articulate an interpretation that is immediate and unsentimental: “I saw those slaves for what they really were: people caught in a horror show” (33). This statement, though somewhat confusingly worded (Myra’s claims often are: she is still figuring out what she thinks), shows Myra asserting her ability to see things clearly and reflects the importance of the visual to her learning.348
Myra absorbs the shock of her first encounter with porn349 in a similar way: by not looking away and claiming it as hers. She quickly becomes an aficionado and turns what she now refers to as “[m]y porn” (49) into the grounds for a new identity. Seeing things for what they are requires calling them by their right names, even if the names are ugly – and Myra is not fond of euphemism.350 Her willingness to call things what they are that enables her to take quickly to the crude vocabulary of porn, so that by the time Elijah arrives in Toronto, she can greet him with the classic “My pussy is tight” (76, italics in the original) and leave him to wonder bemusedly: “Where’d you learn to talk like that?” (77). The ease with which Myra embraces pornography, as well as a sexual relationship that is in many ways structured by it, is explored in current sociological research of young women’s interaction with porn. The accessibility and popularity of porn (D’Orlando) have meant that its influence has extended to other spheres, resulting in what Susanna Paasonen et al. describe as the “pornification” of everyday life (Paasonen et al.). Maria Gurevich et al. show that in the context of porn’s ubiquity, young women mobilize “a sexual syntax derived from a pornographic lexicon to describe sexual desire, pleasure and agency” in projects of becoming “competent contemporary sexual subject[s]” (576). Gurevich et al. write that the young women they interviewed use porn predominantly not as a space of fantasy but as “a pictogram for action,” “a sexual compass for concrete possibilities” (577). This means that porn can serve not only as a tool of oppression or a path towards self-knowledge, but
an effect of transference: the analyst appears to the analysand as possessing knowledge about the meaning of the analysand’s predicament. This view of the analyst is what initiates the real work of analysis, but it must be eventually relinquished. Unlike the Lacanian analysand, Myra does not so much expect knowledge from Elijah or Gayl as she strives herself to achieve epistemological mastery. This drive to become a subject who knows, like the investment in the analyst as “the subject supposed to know,” is an ambivalent force: it both allows Myra to move forward and limits her vision. 348 Recall the link between scopophilia and epistemophilia in Freud. 349 And it is indeed a shock: “I could barely watch her like that,” she says of the woman on screen (Maidenhead 44). 350 For example, Myra insists on referring to the house cleaner employed by her family as a maid, rejecting her sister’s attempts to dress up the reality of inequality with politically correct language: “[woman who] just helps mom with the housework,” “cleaning lady,” “cleaning woman” (59), “domestic worker” (59-60).
210 as a neoliberal project of producing yourself as a successful subject. In Myra’s case, this production of the self takes a special form, one that does not fit the reparative narrative of sex positive liberation, but is no less driven by the need for mastery and coherence. Myra’s use of porn is channeled through a theoretical discourse in the radical mode.
Opening her body up to be fucked and beaten on camera, Myra explains these corporeal experiences in intellectual terms, after or even before they take place. Abject sexuality in Maidenhead often appears as mediated by theory, and sometimes as itself a theoretical project. In her high school essay, as in her conversations and in her thinking, Myra strives to be honest and look at things directly. Inspired by Georges Bataille, she wants to write in a “language that does not suffer” (153) – in other words, in language that does not become impoverished by leaving out violence: “I wasn’t lying. I had tried in my essay not to lie” (156). Myra’s essay is not so much a confession, as her teachers fear, but a reflection of her use of theory to interpret and even direct her reality, and to cope with things that hurt: “…I’m not suffering. I just have to write it down” (154). The essay serves both to organize disruptive information and experiences and to assert control by subsuming the heterogeneous reality of oppression and by imposing the Hegelian dialectic as a program of self-development.
Myra’s use of the word “slave” that she fleshes out theoretically (even as she seeks to enflesh it in her body) carries out the erasure of diverse experiences and structures of inequality. The essay’s first title – “Sex Slaves: The Modern, the Foreign, the Free” (89) – brings together the drowned raft of Cuban refugees displayed at the slavery museum, the story of Korean comfort women that Myra learned from her mother, and her own exploration of the porn world. The essay title unites these disparate things in an image of a slave, which becomes a historical constant from which Myra isolates an abstract position free of social specifics that is available for identification. Myra’s radical identification with the slave is thus predicated on denying the multiple simultaneous meanings and dynamics of a given situation. The abstract concept of a slave may include variations, but only if they are identified and arranged in a typology (as in Myra’s first essay draft) or another understandable system, such as Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. The dialectic becomes the organizing principle of the essay’s second draft, entitled “The Pornography Liberation Narrative and Sex Slaves: A Synthesis” (132), and provides Myra with a system in which sexual abjection can be contained.
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Myra’s theorizing of porn as a synthesis of “the secret and the domestic, the explicit and the implicit, the master and the slave” (133)351 conceals desires that are rather bourgeois and neoliberal in nature: a new nuclear family with Elijah and Gayl352 and a porn career in Los Angeles.353 The identity of a slave, or a slut, answers Myra’s desire to come into her full being – to be seen and wanted and made concrete: “I wanted to be a slut like those girls in that porno! I did. I swear. I wished I wished I wished I was a slut” (49). Myra’s engagement with porn is not a process of unrestrained kenosis: she experiences herself at once as a porn consumer, its product, and its director.354 She wants to be fucked and filmed, and recognized as a slut, and she also wants to be “the artist’s collaborator in [her] own porn” (137). The idea of porn as synthesis gives her a future-oriented identity, a potential new family and the promise of self-actualization. But unlike just any girl who is using pornography to construct her identity, Myra theorizes her entry into the porn industry with the help of Hegelian dialectics.
The relevant passage from The Phenomenology of Spirit describes a stage in the development of consciousness in which the self enters a struggle to the death to achieve recognition from the other (Hegel 111-119). Myra’s interpretation of the passage, decontextualized and mediated by Wikipedia,355 may not tell us much about Hegel, but it illustrates her radical approach to interpreting violence and non-sovereignty. The master-slave dialectic becomes a useful and sustaining framework for Myra in her encounters with the sexualized and uncontrollable world,
351 Myra also describes porn as “the liberation narrative that takes us out of the family pen” (133). 352 Weingrad notes this aspect of Myra’s attraction to Elijah and Gayl but assumes that Berger herself is unaware of its importance: “Myra cannot see it, but Elijah and Gayl are her parent-substitutes. She tries to constitute an alternative nuclear family that, in her mind, will be authentic and not tainted by the hypocrisies of bourgeois manners and white privilege . . . Yet the novel is more concerned with the sex between Myra and Elijah, with Myra’s drug-using and fashionably radical white friends, with her attempt to write a high school essay about sex and Hegel’s master-slave dialectic…” (Weingrad). In contrast to Weingrad’s interpretation, I would suggest that the text repeatedly establishes this parallel. Elijah is described as a “a phantasm of [her] father” when he forces Myra watch her father’s porn (Maidenhead 132). Gayl appears a maternal figure who has the power to soothe and punish: “It felt good to hear her say my name” (123); “Gayl had seen me and made me do things that I wanted” (158). Moreover, Myra solidifies her bond with Gayl by offering her “mother-money” (157), a bundle of cash she had received from her mother. 353 Myra has great ambitions: “I was changing up my life, climbing out of the hole of not knowing who I was. I could be anything ‘cause I had porn in my blood!” (144) What she envisions is essentially a family business: “Gayl could be my manager. . . . We would all be together, me, her and him” (144.). 354 Myra’s dream of being a collaborator is finally realized when she films Gayl masturbating – though it is Gayl who sets up the camera, and Myra’s own vision is hazy: “My eyes went blurry behind the camera” (158). 355 “The Master-Slave dialectic describes in narrative form the encounter between two self-conscious beings,’ I read on Wikipedia, ‘who engage in a struggle to the death before one enslaves the other – only to find that this does not give him the control over the world that he sought’” (Maidenhead 100).
212 because it articulates the tension between being acted upon and feeling both powerless and powerful. Hegel’s dialectic stages this tension as a spectacular scene of the confrontation between master and slave and pointing towards a promise of sublation – “cancelling out and preservation” – of opposites (Maidenhead 100). Mapping the Hegelian struggle to the death onto her own experience, Myra can endow her encounters with Elijah and Gayl with philosophical significance.
Myra’s ability to invoke the identity of a slave and radical theoretical discourses enables her to emerge from disruptive experiences with her worldview unscathed. When Gayl beats her up on camera (145), Myra is initially caught off guard, but eventually interprets everything in the framework of liberation through abjection. When Gayl starts hitting her, Myra screams for her to stop, until she begins to see it as a profound experience from which she can learn and the meaning of which she can describe: “I was being slapped and punched into being by a slapped and punched being” (147).356 This revelation suggests a possibility of a meaningful inheritance of violence that awakens people to the truth of life and brings the state of things into clear view. When beaten, Myra can finally see “the world how it was meant to be seen: broken and freaked, full of masters and slaves” (147). Seeing is Myra’s way of processing the world, and Gayl’s violence becomes for her a permission to follow her own desire to see.
The results of Myra’s Wikipedia search also hold out this promise of epistemological superiority: “The slave’s self-consciousness, according to Hegel, not the master’s, sublates into Absolute Knowledge” (100). The process of empowerment through abjection is laid bare in Myra’s highly instrumental reading of Bataille’s Eroticism. Myra quotes Bataille verbatim to give shape to her experimentation and justify her choices: “It was my conscious intention to trespass into a
356 Gayl can be seen as a Myra’s double both in a vocational sense: they are “sex radicals” making “liberation porn” – and in a philosophical sense: they assert their mastery by looking at violence directly. As I have argued, the novel does not unambiguously confirm the happy narrative of self-expression or sexual freedom or any other kind of emancipation. Gayl’s project initially seems truly radical: it is conducted from below, has a revolutionary quality, and is interrupted not by its own failure but by the external intervention of the law. Still, the novel hints at the limits of ideologically motivated liberation porn by positioning Gayl’s agenda in collective and intersubjective life, which is produced not only by structures of inequality, but also by other people’s more ambiguous projects. This is especially notable in the dialogue between “LEE” and “GAYL,” two voices that correspond to the characters of the same names, without being identical to them (see fn. 373). This dialogue reveals that Gayl’s project of “liberation porn” is motivated by anxious assertion of control.
213 forbidden field of behaviour” (Maidenhead 152).357 That this is a conscious intention is key. Myra does not earn her slave position either by risking her life and being defeated, as the slave does in Hegel (Hegel 113-114),358 or even by being simply “slapped” into it by an external force (Maidenhead 147). Moreover, Myra’s interpretation of the figure of the slave departs from Hegel’s model, in which the slave’s defining activity is transformative physical labour (Hegel 11).359 As a preemptively self-conscious slave, Myra is primarily engaged in the production of identity and the orchestration of events with a future in mind, not in physical labour.360 Her identification with the position of a slave is a choice backed by material privilege.
Privilege allows Myra to indulge her project of self-consciousness and, to an extent, direct her own abjection. Even though it is Gayl and Elijah who ensnare Myra, like many other young girls, into their porn ring, Myra objectifies and instrumentalizes her ostensible masters, giving them roles to play in her own story and ignoring the material reality of their lives. She describes them how it suits her, turning Elijah into a divine figure: “naked, a god” (63),361 or repeating, uncritically and uncuriously, their own self-descriptions: Elijah is “Tanzanian,” Gayl is “from Kentucky,” “really smart,” “an artist” (153). Myra’s acceptance of Gayl and Elijah’s words at face value does not point to a fidelity to their otherness any more than explicit idealization does. Rather, both betray her lack of interest in accepting them as fully existing others with whom she must have a relationship, however tense. Myra’s choice to ignore that Gayl and Elijah are using her also means ignoring what they are going through and their potential reasons for acting the
357 The original phrase is “Cruelty and eroticism are conscious intentions in a mind, which has resolved to trespass into a forbidden field of behaviour” (Bataille 80). 358 “Thus the relation of the two self-conscious individuals is such that they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle.” 359 “Through work, however, the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.” 360 Incidentally, this is a problem Gayl cannot identify, because she is similar to Myra in this way. Gayl, too, expects her “liberation porn” (Maidenhead 148) to accomplish something radical and profound. The affinity in their worldviews makes it easy for Myra to integrate Gayl’s ideas and use Gayl’s words to assert her own reading of the situation: “Gayl made this kind of dialectical porn that degraded the oppressors” (165). 361 Befitting his Old Testament name, Elijah often appears to Myra as a biblical prophet or a Saviour who can wash the supplicant Myra’s “virginity away in a flood” (66). He is a striking figure in dreary urban Toronto, “…head to toe pale and billowing in a thin-looking robe…” (73), “his hands in the air like a vapour, an angel” (74). He parts the traffic like the waters of the Red Sea, “holding his arms out to stop the cars. The wind billowed his robe” (74). What gets lost in this deification is Elijah’s Rasta identity. Myra is not interested in the specifics of his spirituality, as long as he plays his role in her fantasy. This results in an unfortunate attempt to feed the vegetarian Elijah a meat-based dinner of spaghetti bolognese.
214 way they do: a history of hard labour, migration, domestic violence, and structural inequality.362 Myra brushes off her friend Lee’s concerns that Gayl and Elijah are using her: “. . . I didn’t [care]. I had money in my pocket. I had a thick envelope of cash” (153). Bolstered by material security and a sense of epistemological mastery, Myra believes that she can afford not to pay attention.363 This confidence enables Myra, when entering Gayl and Elijah’s hotel, where she had been both fucked and beaten, to feel triumphant (155).364 With her financial security and ability to step into the role of the slave, Myra feels successful in reaching both self-consciousness and self-actualization.
The privilege that sustains Myra’s abject experience is especially visible in the novel’s end. When Elijah tries to prevent her from leaving the hotel room and forcibly fingers her, Myra is saved not by her ability to enjoy her own victimization, but by a deus ex machina of reparative forces: a group of police officers who break down the door and deliver Myra back to her father (162). Gayl and Elijah are deported, Myra is put in therapy. This external intervention precludes any possibility of an internal break in Myra’s process of meaning-making. She can once again ignore the confusing and frightening aspects of the scene as tangential, rebel against being read as a stereotypical victim – a “Young Canadian Caught up in African Porn Ring” (162, emphasis in original) – and cling to her own version of events. The novel ends with Myra returning to Florida on another leisure trip, lecturing her friends at a “a huge fancy place with a pool” owned by someone’s parents (165). This last scene recalls Gayl’s sarcastic reference to Myra as “Miss World Traveller” (157) for whom “the world is a playground” (159)365 – although it might be more accurate to say that for Myra, the world is a space to theorize. As her masters and
362 Bakhtin describes such objectification as characteristic of monologic thinking: “With a monologic approach (in its extreme pure form) another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness” (Problems 292-293). 363 On two occasions, Myra uses money to find her way in and out of Gayl and Elijah’s world. At the beginning of the novel, they lock her out of their hotel room in Key West, so she slips the money she received from her father under the door (Maidenhead 39). In one of the final scenes, she is locked inside another hotel room with Gayl, and hands over the money sent by her mother – her “mother-money” (157) – as a way of taking control of her participation in the situation and show her commitment by transferring her financial bonds to a new, self-chosen family. But the money retains a distasteful connotation, suggesting that Myra is buying an admission ticket into Elijah and Gayl’s lives. 364 “I felt tall in my body. I pushed out my chest and smiled. I felt excited to be with her. I was here, consciously, loaded with cash and the desire not to conceal violence. I had concluded my thinking on the slave” (155). 365 Both Gayl and Elijah comment on Myra’s privilege. “Your dad gives you money for trinkets?” asks Elijah on the day they meet (19). Later on, Gayl mocks Myra for wanting to be annihilated but still be “home for dinner” (159).
215 collaborators are silenced and incarcerated, Myra triumphantly recounts their story to her friends, instructing them in the value of embracing abjection and explaining Gayl’s project as a narrative of dialectics.
Though the problem of privilege is foregrounded in the novel, having too much financial security is not the only obstacle to Myra’s becoming a slave. Her project of conscious self-abjection has an internal limit, which I discussed in the chapter on the radical mode: it is precisely abjection itself that enables mastery, and Myra’s self-identification as a slave endows her with a sense of coherence and power. This structural problem of the radical mode is laid bare in Myra’s interaction with Lee, who shakes the Bataillean foundation of Myra’s ideas. Lee points out that Bataille does not believe in Absolute Knowledge: “The whole Hegelian thing was too neat for him. Bataille was all about the cracks…” (154). Quickly recollecting herself, Myra incorporates Lee’s reading of Bataille into her confident epistemological progression by giving the theoretical language a raunchy spin: “…The cracks? Knowledge is cracky? Was it hairy too? . . . Was cracky, hairy, uncertain knowledge the key to getting fucked a thousand times? Or was it the key to making annihilating porn with a violent asshole and an artist? Or was there no key to any of this?” (154). Myra is not just being gratuitously naughty: her questions get at the heart of the radical desire. The image of the crack recurs in radical narratives as the key to imagining the nonsovereign subject: the buttcrack opening to an orifice for nonreproductive sex, the necessary rupture in the solidity of reality, the constitutive split within the self. Radical thinking fetishizes “cracky, hairy, uncertain knowledge” as a key to gaining a clearer vision and interacting more fully with the world. As a committed radical subject, Myra wants to become “cracky” as well: “I’d be more open than a book too. My spine would crack, I’d fall out in halves” (80). Her hyperbolic language of cracks, sex acts measured by thousands and ecstatic annihilation reflects the dramatic character of the radical mode.
In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant argues that an overinvestment in drama has political consequences, distracting from “the hesitancy and recessiveness in ordinary being” (123) and running the danger of representing “something structural and ongoing within ordinariness [as] something that seems shocking and exceptional” (7). For Berlant, this kind of “anti-
216 foundational” discourse is too loud to accommodate shifts and nuances of being (278).366 Myra’s penchant for incorporating such nuances into a unified explanatory system would similarly find no approval with Bakhtin, who is suspicious of the totalizing and reductive effects of “theoreticism” (Philosophy 11) and “monologic discourse” (Problems 204). Both concepts refer to approaches to the world that abstract its unfinalizable complexity into coherent and communicable pictures: “a certain theoretical unity . . . not at all the unique historical unity of [a] life” (Philosophy 4).367 Idealistic philosophy is, for Bakhtin, an example of such a monologic discourse: in it, “consciousness is placed above existence, and . . . the unity of existence is transformed into the unity of consciousness” (Problems 81). In Bakhtin’s terms, Myra’s ideas constitute not her “concretely unique Being,” but a theory of it (8). Even though she is ready to fully embody the position of the slave, her commitment is theoretical, and her reliance on Hegel allows her to fetishize consciousness at the expense of perceiving different aspects of lived life.
Myra runs up against the limits of this project in her own intellectual work: “I couldn’t conclude my essay. I couldn’t bring it all together. I didn’t know how getting fucked a thousand times turned a slave free in Hegel’s dialectic” (Maidenhead 145). The answer to Myra’s predicament is the unfolding narrative of the novel, which treats disruptive events not as radical leaps towards self-consciousness, but as part of the process of learning and moving through the world. Myra’s progression is liable to stalling and interruption. Both the world through which she travels and her own ways of being within it resist her strategies of epistemological mastery and radical identification with the abject position. For these reasons, despite the spectacular nature of the events and its protagonist’s eager embrace of unruly sexuality, Maidenhead is a helpful text with which to theorize the prosaic mode.
3.4.2.2 Prosaic Epistemology: Bad Syntax, Condensation and Description
Charting Myra’s tentative advance through a perilous world, Berger engages aspects of nuance,
366 Referring to “extreme and melodramatic anti-foundational languages of nothingness, shattering, cleavage, and so on” (Cruel Optimism 278), Berlant is responding to several theories I engaged in this thesis: Caruth’s psychoanalysis (of which she is critical in Cruel Optimism) and Edelman’s queer theory (with which she is in dialogue in Sex and the Unbearable), as well as the work of thinkers that she calls “event theorizers”: Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou (278). 367 “Утверждение суждения, как истинного, есть отнесение его в некоторое теоретическое единство, и это единство совсем не есть единственное историческое единство моей жизни” (Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii 9).
217 ambivalence, and change, which are central to Berlant’s concept of the impasse – “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material” (Cruel Optimism 4). To understand Myra’s activity in the impasse, to read her as a prosaic subject, we need to look not at what Myra learns, but at how she learns it. Myra verbalizes her epistomophiliac attempts to put everything into a dialectic, but she is also engaged in a different kind of epistemology, which consists of encountering things and feeling them out, searching for words, experiencing waves of affect and bodily sensations. These ways of being become visible in ungrammatical sentences that reveal half-formed thoughts, and in descriptive passages, which counteract the force of Myra’s theorizing. These strategies of adjustment allow a way out of the reparative duo of trauma and recovery or of the abject mastery of the radical mode. Because of her prosaic activity, Myra is not the radical subject she wants to be, and therefore not the subject who knows. She is the affected, learning, processing subject.
While Myra enacts the radical mode by asserting epistemological dominance, her spoken statements are often fragmentary. Unlike Anna’s syntactical slips in The Time: Night, which serve to position the narrator as an expert at vernacular speech, Myra’s sentences are awkward because they are not thought through. She is prone to sloppy tautological statements and collapsed syntax. Her outrage about the slavery museum, for example, is expressed as a challenge to the makers of the exhibit but communicates nothing they would disagree with: “It was exploitative. I wanted to stencil that on the walls: Slavery is Fucking Exploitation!” (Maidenhead 30). Myra needs to relieve pressure while she is still figuring things out, so she uses words before she can arrange them into complete arguments.
The essay, with its rigid structure, satisfies Myra’s need for a theoretical form, but the process of building a new epistemological system is ugly. Writing bad drafts is part of it, and moments of clarity alternate with moments of murky confusion. Because she does not yet know what her argument is, Myra cannot follow the high school strategy of “working backwards from the conclusion” (90). Her work therefore suffers from bad organization, and her “questions [a]re serpentine, inconclusive” (90). But struggles with organization and unanswered questions, as well as awkward wording and ungrammatical syntax, help to hold Myra in the impasse of learning, stalling the triumphant progress of her dialectics. Diffuse attention and an eye for
218 distracting detail make for bad writing, but they can also be a strength. They enable Myra to register things that fall outside of a premade explanatory framework.
If engaging with others means Myra has to take a confident (if often inarticulate) stance, instances of being confronted with something for the first time, or turning inward to attend to her feelings, require her to describe the as yet unorganized details of her experience. When Myra describes herself as “not a herd mentality,” the crammed syntactical space of the phrase reflects her impatience to leave the received beliefs of her peers behind and plunge into the unknown. Collapsed syntax can also be a sign of confusion: “My life was here. And it was friendless and looking at porn with a phantasm of my father, thinking of Gayl the Artist on a cock-hard lap” (132). In this case, the narrator strings together several striking images – “a phantasm of my father . . . Gayl the Artist . . . cock-hard lap” – with no attention to syntax or agreement: “it was friendless and looking . . . thinking.” This collapsed sentence gives voice to uninvited insights and feelings that circumvent Myra’s tight dialectical system: disappointment, doubt, dissatisfaction, confusion, loneliness.
Compressed ungrammatical sentences lend Myra’s speech a poetic quality, making her descriptions economical and evocative: “The room was humid with messed-up sheets and old sun” (36); “She was laughing, she was so happy and tied” (43). These sentences convey the immediacy of impression by foregrounding not arguments or causal relationships but carefully registered details. Like a flashlight (or a camera), Myra’s gaze is local and limited in its view, it creates shadows and leaves things out – but, unlike her theorizing, it is honest, mobile and attentive to the moment. The spontaneous appearance of description in Myra’s narration usually conveys the shock of seeing something truly new. The sight of Elijah’s erection, for example, is rendered concisely, with a few striking details: “That guy’s low voice, hunched over, his poking- out cock” (25). After Myra gets used to erections and porn videos, she is shaken once again when confronted by her father’s porn tastes, which feature teenage girls and middle-aged men. Watching one of her father’s videos, Myra immediately reverts to meticulous description, both fascinated and tortured: “It looked just like him, puffy eyes and hairy chin. His moss-and-mould- covered skin, naked and hairy like a troll. There was a man like my father and a girl on her hands and knees” (131-132). Description is an appropriate and available strategy for encountering a scene such as this one: surprising, disturbing, not yet explained.
219
The particular idiosyncrasy of Myra’s syntax, its tendency to contract sentences and leave parts of them out, is in tune with the aesthetics of porn.368 The description of a woman “so happy and tied” (43), cited above, comes from Myra’s ekphrastic rendering of the first porn video she watches. Myra’s descriptive abilities enable her to convey effectively the grotesque elements and economical conciseness of porn: “Then, that second girl, her mouth red and wide, looked right at the camera. She was so different than that first girl who’d kept her eyes tightly closed. This girl was actually talking with that penis…” (43). Myra’s description echoes the genre’s emphasis on the activity of bodies and parts of bodies.369 This activity of compartmentalization and recombination of body parts recalls Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s description of fantasy from A Dialogue on Love:
It’s like a closed room with all the air sucked out of it – hence, no gravity – and just a few, diverse objects tumbling around together. And the objects could be anything; they’re in all different registers. Some of them, yes, would be words and phrases, some of them acts, organs, angles. (171)
Porn titles and online keywords are verbal counterparts to the genre’s condensed visual spaces, descriptive sentences “with all the air sucked out,” where elements are compressed and combined at random: “asschick, teenwhore, slutgettingcock” (Maidenhead 57); “Teengirltied, Ballandcunt, Slutinchains” (85). They are extreme examples of both collapsed syntax and of masterfully concise description.370
Myra’s description of bodies often draws on this enlivening compartmentalization that characterizes porn aesthetics. In her vision, bodies exist among bodies, affected and touched,
368 A good sample of recent scholarship on the aesthetics of pornography can be found in Pornographic Art and Aesthetics of Pornography (2013), edited by Hans Maes. Scholars have focused on the role of the obscene in porn’s anti-aesthetics (Falk) and on visual aspects of porn films (Cante and Restivo). In this discussion, I am interested in fragmentation and condensation: two structural moves that are characteristic of the kind of commercial porn that Myra consumes online. I posit a link between the focused and fragmented visual depiction of bodies in porn videos and the condensed keywords used to make the websites easily searchable. 369 In her Foucauldian reading of pornography, Williams explains that the drive for knowledge animated by hard- core porn results in specific aesthetic choices: “to privilege close-ups of body parts over other shots; to overlight easily obscured genitals; to select sexual positions that show the most of bodies and organs; and, later, to create generic conventions, such as the variety of sexual ‘numbers’ or the externally ejaculating penis …” (Hard Core 49). 370 Such keywords, where meaning is at once repetitive and hypercondensed, organize digital porn consumption by enabling consumers to search for the desired type of video (Kammeyer 186).
220 penetrated, responsive. Body parts acquire independent life and are mixed around: Myra’s vagina “smile[s] and glare[s],” as expressive as a face (140); Elijah’s fingers move “up and down like a tarantula” (14), his and Myra’s hands “suck[…] together” (19). Body parts can even move around and be shared by separate individuals: “I felt his cock heavy, hanging down at my neck. It seemed like a necklace, a part of my body; for a second, I thought it was mine” (107). This corporeal reality is not dialectical: the body’s way of being and knowing is about interaction, not about a struggle to the death with clear sides or a development towards self-consciousness.
In Maidenhead, the compartmentalization of bodies, which I have linked to porn aesthetics, is not necessarily linked to objectification. Instead, it provides a more flexible way of seeing the world, which can in fact interrupt the ongoing process of objectification of others and oneself through theoreticism and abstraction. This particular formal aspect of porn contrasts with the mainstream cultural and social significance of its imagery, on which Myra bases her sense of competence. Using porn tropes, as opposed to following the spirit of porn optics, allows Myra to regain mastery over the disruptive material she encounters.
Description, however, locates us not in the narratives of attaining mastery through healing or abjection, but in the ongoing activity of processing the world through observation and adjustment. Maidenhead is a story of crisis, but, to borrow Berlant’s phrase, it is also a story “about navigating what’s overwhelming” (10), a story that enacts “a logic of adjustment within the historical scene” (10). Descriptions, such as Myra’s porn ekphrasis, can serve to deal with challenging new material without immediately subsuming it under a larger explanatory theory. Description introduces softer moments and useful gaps into Myra’s epistemological advance, and therefore enables a prosaic reading of her journey.
3.4.2.3 The Prosaic Subject in the World of Others
In the spirit of the prosaic mode, Maidenhead asks not whether Myra desires the right thing, but how her desiring comes to be, what it does for her and for others, and what her interactions with these others look like. The intersubjective space Myra moves through is a conflict-ridden field, in which desires and positions do not match up to ensure a particular outcome, such as achieving self-consciousness through sublation. The decisive moments where consent is supposed to take place appear as key points in which the meanings of intersubjective interaction, and of violence
221 as its limit case, are revealed as uncertain and mismatched, not entirely rule-bound. Moreover, Myra’s radical program of self-abjection is eroded by the novel’s positioning of the dramatics of violence or sex side by side with ordinary interactions and incomplete connections. Though rich in moments of crisis, the novel thus depicts a world of multiple separate subjects, with their own structures and processes.
As I have shown, Myra asserts her own radical desire to be a slave and interprets instances of violence as realizations of this desire. The idea that one can express consent to violence makes distinguishing between consensual and nonconsensual sex difficult, and presents a problem from a reparative feminist perspective, which in the novel is articulated by Myra’s girlfriend Lee. Lee wants Myra to become empowered in a specific way, encouraging her to ask for what she wants. What Myra decides she wants, however, would make Lee uncomfortable:
You are supposed to ask for what you need, Lee had said. What do I need? . . . I need to be inside the hotel. I need to see my beautiful Elijah, a musician who I met in Key West. I need to be dirty for him on my knees.
I am asking to lose my virginity (81).
Lee does not recognize the legitimacy of Myra’s statements of enthusiastic consent to rough sex, beatings, and anything else that could potentially happen in her involvement with Elijah and Gayl.371 Some of the novel’s reviewers resolve the discomfort caused by Myra’s pronouncements by proclaiming that her ability to demand and experience pleasure is a sign of sexual empowerment (Cooper, Berger, “Tamara Faith Berger”). The problem, however, is not simply that Myra desires things that could be bad for her, but that she only desires them sometimes. Zooming in on moments of suspension or ambivalence, Maidenhead departs from both Myra and Lee’s interpretations and makes possible a prosaic vision of consent.
Moments of hesitation occur throughout Myra’s journey. At some point, she is literally stalled on the threshold of a room, “in that dull dead space at the door unable to move” (Maidenhead 35),
371 Lee has her own reasons to be skeptical: molested as a child, she has needed to believe that her own past willingness to participate in a relationship with her teacher did not override her inability to consent.
222 uncertain of what she wants. In moments like this, Myra experiences emotions that are not part of her program of self-development (into a slave, a porn girl, Elijah’s girlfriend), which relies on her ability to transform the frightening into the known.372 Myra feels fear when situations seems uncontrollable and her role in it is uncertain: she wants “to run and smash into his window like a bird” (22), cannot “keep [her] voice asking for what [she] need[s] strong” (83), doesn’t “feel brave at all anymore” (130). Foregrounding Myra’s unacknowledged emotions, these scenes depict the temporality of consent as a period of hesitation in which multiple influences are concentrated.
The novel provocatively suggests that it is not only the act of having sex that can occur under external compulsion, but that the idea of giving or withholding consent can itself be a product of an injunction from outside. Elijah often expects Myra to want something and to know what she wants, but the expected enthusiasm does not always come forth: “It was like he was waiting for me to say yes. To say yes as if I knew what I wanted” (16). This tension between a man’s desire for a woman and a woman’s responsibility to decide whether to yield or resist resembles a classic scene that informs straightforward narratives of consent, either conservative or feminist. In the novel, however, it suggests a more provocative interpretation of the idea of consent: that its location might be external to the subject. Later on, Myra attempts to express consent the way Lee told her to express it: “I was practicing my practice, Lee’s practice, of saying what I was thinking. Of being succinct, ‘giving it’ to men” (81). Myra’s observation means that speaking one’s mind is not a one-time operation originating from within, but a practice that can be learned or borrowed from someone else. It accommodates several potential sources of desire (Myra, Elijah, or the abstract “men” of patriarchy who, according to Lee, need to be communicated with “succinctly”), and several potential sources of the power to consent (Myra, Lee, or the feminist discourse to which Lee refers).373 Consent, not in its content but in its bare form as a way of
372 Early on, Myra codes fear as something that locates her in her age and gender in a way she does not like. She seeks to distance herself from it: “I was thinking: Girls get scared way too often. Girls get stupidly scared. I was not scared. / Telling myself not to be scared kind of worked” (16). 373 The way in which Myra constitutes herself in relation to the ideas and ways of being of others is suggested in the dialogue between the disembodied voices of “LEE” and “GAYL”, which regularly interrupts Myra’s narration. This dialogue is clearly marked out by its location outside of the story’s action and by the capitalization of the names of its participants (which distinguishes them from the novel’s characters with the same names and opinions). While the characters of Lee and Gayl are objectified in Myra’s narrative of events, “LEE” and “GAYL” enter into a dialogue in which Myra herself is an object. They discuss Myra’s development and debate the meanings of feminism and of trauma and, ultimately, the appropriate way of being in the world. The dialogue could be read as a conversation
223 engaging with others, can be an expression of another will, or the will of particular others.
Intuitively recognizing this intersubjective nature of consent early on, Myra decides that letting others act upon her is a way to become a self-conscious being. Like Hegel in his model of master and slave, Myra comes to prioritize violence as the fullest form of meaningful interaction, interpreting Elijah’s forceful sexual advances and Gayl’s beating as attempts to communicate something important, to get her to see something that she has not recognized. Myra’s radical approach could thus be an attempt to embrace and assert this origin of desire in the other. But this strategy of abandoning one’s will does not work. Try as she might, Myra cannot become a slave whose desire is the desire of the master. She cannot get rid of her own mastery over the words she uses to sustain herself. Ultimately, it is Myra who decides whether she welcomes the desires and actions of the other as factors that shape her world.
The scene in which Elijah and Myra watch her father’s porn shows the alignment of desires between “master” and “slave” break down. In a characteristic mix of reassurance and force, Elijah insists that Myra watch the video: “It’s okay that you like it, it’s okay you like it, that’s okay…” (132). Their interaction – “‘I can’t,’ I said. / ‘You can. You can’” (132) – has functioned in the past as Elijah’s way of helping Myra acknowledge her desire. This time, however, his input is not that welcome. Myra does not need him to tell her what to do, because she is not sure that she likes it. Reflecting on a similar validation of her desires that she has received from Lee, she expresses doubt: “That’s what Lee had said to me too. It’s okay that you want these things to come true. Yeah, well, now everything was true” (132). For Myra, the value of yielding – the notion that the subject’s process of becoming in the world requires the actions of others – becomes a dogma, which brackets out the actual complexity of the world made up of others’ desires through which the subject must move. What Myra is confronting in this scene is a prosaic truth that erodes her radical solution: people do not always want others to tell them what they want. The desire to become – that is, to emerge on the scene of life as a self-aware and
within Myra’s psyche as she is trying to reconcile these perspectives. However, I am inclined to read the two voices as formally distinguished, somewhat abstracted articulations of ways of being that arise out of particular clusters of discourses and experiences. Seen this way, “LEE” and “GAYL” appear as unusually explicit illustrations of Bakhtin’s conception of characters in polyphonic novels, such as Dostoevsky’s: “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels” (Problems 6, emphasis in original).
224 recognizable subject – is an internal experience, and it cannot but occur on the subject’s own terms. This means that following the forceful demands of others does not suspend the subject’s responsibility to act in the world and make meaning out of what the world offers.
As this passage also suggests, to act and interpret things through one’s own decisions and desires is equally impossible. Certainty in one’s choices is not permanent, which is why Myra both invites the desires and projections of others, and, at other times, resists them and affirms her own. The outcomes of decisions are multiple and unexpected, and desires, however strong, have no predetermined shape or guaranteed goal. Myra’s vulnerability to sexual exploitation and her rebellious insistence on her right to decide things for herself stem from the same cause: her desire to emerge in the world as a more fully realized or more self-conscious being. But the novel makes it clear that she cannot rely on any narrative drive, either towards reparation or towards liberation through abjection. Aggression is interactive and its meaning is not clear, which means that violence is not necessarily a ticket to self-consciousness.
Since desire and violence appear as ambivalent and unresolved even in the novel’s dramatic moments, we can depart from the focus on violence as a site of interaction par excellence, and locate experiences of being fucked or beaten up in the same realm as other kinds of interaction.374 In the novel, the body’s openness to contact and interaction is uncontrollable and often unpleasant, but it is not uniquely presented as spectacular sexualized violability. Myra does not only want “to be dirty for [Elijah] on [her] knees” (81), but also longs for other kinds of intimate touch: to “lay down on that lounge chair with [her mother]” (27) or “. . . to sit in the back seat with Lee . . . lay my head on her shoulder in the speed . . . fall and fall asleep” (106). In addition to being meaningfully slapped and pissed on, Myra is sometimes touched ambiguously and without consequence. Olinda the shopkeeper puts a necklace around her neck in a manner at once neutral, maternal and sexualized: “Before I could say no or yes or whatever…She was touching my hair, lifting it up to fasten the clasp. . . fingering the teardrop, then laying it back
374 For the purposes of this chapter, which focuses on Myra’s processing of her life as it unfolds, I am discussing bodily interactions and conversations together, as forms of encounter and communication. Words and touch, even sexual and violent touch, appear in the novel as incomplete or potential moments of interaction of different subjective worlds. I do not address distinctions between bodily and verbal interactions, partly because I am more interested here in how Myra’s adapts to intersubjective reality in general, and partly because bodily interactions in Maidenhead are meticulously described and immediately incorporated into the narrator’s verbalized worldview.
225 down softly on my neck” (47). The depiction of everyday bodily interactions in the novel undercuts Myra’s assumption that meaning resides only in sex or violence, and emphasizes that the meaning of touch, neutral or violent, is uncertain.
This dedramatization of interaction and touch also allows the novel to show what its narrator has difficulty acknowledging: namely, other subjects, with their own processes and worldviews. Frustrated by Myra’s self-absorption, her friend Lee impatiently exclaims: “Other people have a different life from you, Myra. Different pasts, different thoughts. Different ways of fucking managing things” (110). Myra’s blindness has consequences: as another character points out, it prevents her from communicating and allows her worldview to solidify too quickly: “No one will experience your brain unless you learn how to listen to people” (105). Myra is by no means adept at paying attention to other consciousnesses, but she is able to recognize, if only briefly, her mom’s vulnerability375 and Lee’s absorption in her own distinct and perhaps unknowable process.376 Glimpses of the lives and perspectives of others also appear in dropped conversation threads and missed opportunities for recognition. Alternative perspectives flicker in statements and asides that Myra does not notice or cannot properly interpret: Elijah’s contemplation of Myra’s Canadian nationality,377 literary references made by Gayl378 and Olinda.379 Maidenhead uses Myra’s connections with others, whether relatively successful or failed, to introduce other
375 First, Myra realizes that her mother got married very early, when she was the age of “all those girls on Spring Break” (54). Noticing, a few pages later, that her mother might not feel so brave about her adventure in Korea, Myra compares her to “one of those Korean women on her book cover, dressed up and silent and stiff, against a wall of rock” (57). Here Myra evokes the two categories that she has tried to bring together in her theory: sexually available young girls and actual sex slaves. By aligning her mother with these categories, Myra gestures towards a recognition that being like a slave is not always a process of spectacular identification, but often an unremarkable yet defining experience of being constrained by structures of inequality. 376 Myra recognizes Lee in a striking moment of their meeting, which both later mythologize. They describe seeing each other through the crowd and recognizing each other as fitting partners: “The Electrocuted and the Alienated,” in Myra’s words (59). Theirs is a joyful sisterhood, though a broken one. Their mutual understanding is never complete, but something happens for both of them in their dialogue. 377“‘Canada.’ The guy kept repeating ‘Canada’ as we walked away from the sea. ‘Canada is a good country to be born in’” (18). 378 Gayl characteristically expresses preference for dark stories of the American South to gothic English dreamscapes: “‘...The Brontës are bullshit.’ . . . ‘I read Flannery O’Connor back in the day’” (87). 379 Quoting the first lines of Gore Vidal’s 1968 novel Myra Breckinridge: “I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess…” (48), Olinda compares Myra to Vidal’s sexually dominant, larger-than-life transsexual protagonist. The comment places Myra in a literary history that she cannot understand. It is also a playful recognition of Maidenhead’s intertextual affinities with Vidal’s satirical novel, both having been celebrated for challenging conventional gender norms and vilified as pornographic.
226 agendas and ways of being, and draw attention to the difficulties of recognizing the processes of others: a problem no character in the novel can fully transcend.
The subject, in Bakhtin’s view, cannot be considered on its own: a philosophy of being would need to account for the coexistence of multiple subjective worlds. Embodiment and locatedness are central in Bakhtin’s discussion of dialogism in Dostoevsky’s novels: “…logical and semantically referential relationships, in order to become dialogic, must be embodied…” (Problems 184). Dostoevsky’s characters, argues Bakhtin, are not mouthpieces for certain ideological positions, but rather for the processes of living a human life from a specific location. This interaction of different worlds is central in Maidenhead. They are visible in the novel’s prosaic interpretation of consent as a negotiation of many ideas, stances and desires, themselves structured by external conventions. These desires and demands, external to the subject, form the solid reality in which it comes into being. At the same time, they cannot be fully embraced, because their usefulness and relevance are always in question and in flux. Imagined this way, consent is distinctly less useful for distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate sexual interactions, but it becomes a category that expresses something about the experience of being a subject. To consent to interaction is to express a willingness to engage in a world made up of others’ words, actions, and desires. We can accept the reality produced by these others as useful or useless, sustaining or disruptive, because to be a subject is to make use of things or reject them, to be both sustained and disturbed.
3.4.3 The World of Prosaic Subjects in Maidenhead
Berger’s Maidenhead spectacularly uproots the reparative framework of consent and foregrounds Myra’s radical desire to become an abject subject. At the same time, it undercuts potential identification with Myra’s radical abnegation by enabling the reader to interpret it prosaically. Berger does this by revealing the limitations of Myra’s use of the master-slave dialectic to make sense of her world, by drawing attention to irregular syntax and fragmented descriptions as moments that do not fit this dialectical vision, and by exploring interactions between Myra’s experience and the projects and processes of others. As is the case with Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night, the vision of prosaics that we can find in Maidenhead is not drama-free. Its critique of reparation and radicalism is itself not dialecti. It does not, in other words, present prosaics as a decisive solution. After all, Myra does not transcend her epistemophilia and attachment to
227 abjection.
The end of the novel highlights Myra’s identification with the radical mode once again. Although her dialectical project has not exactly come to fruition, Myra continues to make strong claims about it. “‘I’ve been committed to tape,’ I told my friends in Florida. ‘I believe in what I’ve done. I don’t regret a thing. That’s what porn is. It’s sharing yourself’” (Maidenhead 165). Myra insists on a consistent and singular interpretation of the past, overwriting the variety of past states and potential deviations in her journey with a statement of conscious choice and a denial of regret. But this affirmation of the radical mode does not signal Myra’s correctness or her triumph – it just positions her as a specific subject, with specific strategies of being and becoming. In this way, the novel can be read as a narrative that engages radical desire but is told in the prosaic mode.
The presence of friends in the final scene expands the novel’s focus from Myra’s perspective to include the incommensurate world of different subjects. Her friends’ attitude is expressed in Lee’s words that close the novel: “‘Sharing is pleasure is lack of regret,’ said Lee. ‘I think we think we all agree’” (165). Lee’s apparent affirmation of Myra’s words is qualified by a double uncertainty: “I think [that] we think [that] we all agree” (165). If Myra is eager to explain exactly how one becomes a proper self-conscious subject (as well as what porn does, what Gayl did with porn and what Myra herself did through porn), Lee’s words paint a picture of a different world: a world Bakhtin would describe as dialogic, an uneasy shared space held together by assumptions about the thoughts of others and tentative expressions of belief. In this world, things fray, unpredictably explode, are implicated in larger political and economic structures, and sometimes, unbeknownst to Myra, happen for others, who are caught up in their own processes but – and this is crucial – nevertheless available to interact. Maidenhead is not, therefore, a story about a young woman becoming free or realizing herself through “getting fucked a thousand times” (145), or through reading philosophy or using some other method. This is a prosaic story of a subject that is moving through a world of others, relationships with whom cannot be easily mapped out and whose motivations and activity are located firmly in their own being.
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3.5 The Prosaic Subject
Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night and Berger’s Maidenhead have been praised for shedding light on obscured aspects of life (the dreary Soviet everyday, young women’s unruly desire) or underrepresented subjects (the aging Russian woman, the “porn girl”). As I sought to show, it is their form, not their specific content of the imagery, that makes these novels helpful for a theory of prosaics. The form of the novel makes it possible to follow the process of being a subject in the before and after of a critical break. In this chapter’s readings, I have been interested in looking precisely at the continuity of narrative, which functions as the ground for more apparent crises. The protagonists’ narrative voices in the two novels also provide useful insights: narration allows me to trace the activity of sustaining oneself through speech, which I associate with prosaic subjectivity. Finally, the two novels explore the workings of the dramatic ethical modes I have discussed in the dissertation: reparative and radical. Since my vision of prosaics does not presuppose the absence of these modes, I have found the novels useful in their depiction of the role of dramatic reparative and radical desire in everyday life. Anna’s ideals of transcendent suffering, poetic genius and motherhood, as well as Myra’s fascination with abjection and sexual slavery function, however imperfectly, as sustaining ways of being.
This last section follows my discussion of the novels with a proposal of a prosaic way of thinking about the non-sovereign subject. How can we imagine and theorize the nonsovereign subject in a prosaic way? I take Bakhtin’s image of the headquarters as a starting point. Bakhtin applies the term “headquarters” to describe the acting self in Toward a Philosophy of the Act:
I-for-myself constitute the center from which my performed act and my self-activity of affirming and acknowledging any value come forth or issue, for that is the only point where I participate answerably in once-occurrent Being; it is the center of operations, the headquarters of the commander-in-chief directing my possibilities and my ought in the ongoing event of Being. It is only from my own unique place in Being that I can be and must be active (60).380
380 “Я-для-себя - центр исхождения поступка и активности утверждения и признания всякой ценности, ибо это единственная точка, где я ответственно причастен единственному бытию, – оперативный штаб, ставка
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Bakhtin’s metaphor of headquarters is valuable because it allows us to see the subject not as a container of its own truth, whether that truth be trauma that may or may not be healed, or the unbridgeable structural rift at the subject’s core. It is a centre of sorts, but, crucially, a temporary centre, out of which life-sustaining activity is directed. Rather than the more frequently invoked notion of dialogue as interaction between unfinished consciousnesses, this image that appears early in Bakhtin’s thought is useful for my discussion, because it emphasizes the ways in which being a subject is also a matter of relative fixity: we are located in and operate from specific positions. The generative metaphor of the headquarters constellates several important qualities that are useful for imagining the subject prosaically: responsibility (more specifically, Bakhtinian answerability), locatedness and noncoincidence, self-sustaining activity (including strategy, tactics and flailing), and, finally, dialogism and antagonism.
3.5.1 Responsibility and Answerability
A military headquarters is the hub of decision-making, which suggests that the prosaic subject is a centre of gravity for its own being. At once, the metaphor is strained: the headquarters is responsible for its actions before others: the army, the people or the authority of the ruler. This vision of responsibility would mean that the headquarters refers to a sovereign subject with accountability and agency. It recalls Wendy Brown’s argument that the subject’s ability to assume responsibility is a “nominative sign […] of sovereignty: only a moral agent understood as willing its actions can bear responsibility for itself” (Undoing the Demos 133). Brown argues that this recognition of the subject’s “modest autonomy” is perverted by the neoliberal politics of responsibilization, which individualizes structural problems by making the subject answer for its own misery (133).381 I also am wary of naturalizing coherence or sovereignty, and cannot assert the subject’s ontological responsibility for its actions and decisions, as though it is a military
главнокомандующего моим возможным и моим долженствованием в событии бытия, только с моего единственного места я могу быть активен и должен быть активен” (Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii 55). 381 “…when the act of being responsible is linguistically converted into the administered condition of being responsibilized, it departs from the domain of agency and instead governs the subject through an external moral injunction – through demands emanating from an invisible elsewhere. The word ‘responsibilization’ takes a step further this move from a substance-based adjective to a process-based transitive verb, shifting it from an individual capacity to a governance project” (Brown, Undoing the Demos 133).
230 leader fully accountable for the outcome of the campaign. It is more useful to think of the subject’s responsibility (“otvetstvennost’”) as it was conceptualized by Bakhtin.
Vadim Liapunov translates the word “otvetstvennost’” as “answerability,” to capture Bakhtin’s emphasis on the unity and mutual responsiveness of thought and act in the uniqueness of every subject’s being. Contrary to theoretical discourse that abstracts and finalizes existence, “the unity of my once-occurrent answerable life” (Philosophy 5)382 is specific, located, and continuous: “Every thought of mine, along with its content, is an act or deed that I perform – my own individually answerable act or deed [postupok]. It is one of all those acts which make up my whole once-occurrent life as an uninterrupted performing of acts [postuplenie]” (3).383 Understood in this way, responsibility is not a quality of the sovereign subject, but a reference to the subject’s “non-alibi in Being” (40)384 – the unavoidable reality of its unique existence. This uniqueness does not tell us anything about the character of the subject or its successes. Because it does not rely on the idea of sovereignty, it also allows for the recognition of the subject’s noncoincidence with itself.
3.5.2 Locatedness and Noncoincidence
The image of headquarters pries away the who from the where and suspends the question of content: a location is not the ostensibly sovereign leader that occupies it. The metaphor suggests that being a subject does not require self-identity and total self-consciousness. This centre does not coincide with itself. The term “noncoincidence,” softer than the imagery of a split subject that I associate with the radical mode, is also Bakhtin’s (Problems 299). For Bakhtin, noncoincidence, not self-identity, is what constitutes being a person: “A man never coincides with himself” (Problems 59). In his theory, noncoincidence is the key to a person’s unfinalizability because it is generative: Morson describes it as “the source of surprisingness in people” (57). Similarly, Denise Riley celebrates “a certain impersonality or a non-identity,” a “lack of fit between my self-description as a social subject and my presence as a political
382 “…в единстве моей единственной ответственной жизни” (Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii 10). 383 “Каждая мысль моя с ее содержанием есть мой индивидуально ответственный поступок, один из поступков, из которых слагается вся моя единственная жизнь, как сплошное поступление…” (Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii 8). 384 “…не-алиби в бытии…” (Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii 40).
231 subject” (5). For Riley, this “lack of fit” enables a way of being that is not traumatic and is in fact necessary for the subject “to be able to circulate productively at all” and “for there to be mobility, and life, within political thought” (5). In other words, such noncoincidence is “not disappointing but benevolent” (5). In my discussion of prosaics, I am not invoking noncoincidence as a potential tool for striking displays of subversion, but as an explanatory term for why, in Riley’s felicitous phrase, “[our] awkward navigations to become, coupled with [our] constitutional failure to fully be” (5) do not undo us but enable our being. To be noncoinciding with ourselves is not a secure place to be, but it is the grounds of our activity. It allows us to use dramatic narratives strategically, without flattening ourselves into identities and political agendas.
3.5.3 Drama and Self-Sustaining Activity
Activity is central to my understanding of the prosaic subject, because it draws attention away from the questions of the subject’s imperfect nature, ex-centric structure, or its ethical and political success. The definition of headquarters does not require it to be highly functioning (or, conversely, internally divided and contorted); decisions made in the headquarters are not always successful or rational – it may well be a headquarters of “awkward navigations to become” (Riley 5). What matters is that it is a location of activity. We can imagine prosaic subjectivity as a process of making decisions, strategic and tactical, as well as reacting in less structured ways, such as flailing, to an interpersonal world not of its making.
Strategies can be understood as fairly stable positions vis-à-vis the world, which allow for enough coherence to enable continuity. Berger’s Myra presents her identity as a slave and a theoretician of slavehood as a united front with which to meet the world. Petrushveskaya’s Anna has a rotating cast of strategic positions, on which she draws when necessary, invoking high literary references, bureaucratic formulas and profanities. Tactical decisions are more flexible: they are made in the moment, in response to unexpected situations and unincorporated material. Myra’s recourse to description can be seen as tactical activity: it holds her suspended as she feels things out before making them comprehensible. Anna’s reactive and hurried speech relies on shortcuts and half-conscious shifts of tone and persona, as she continues to patch up her disintegrating life, assailed from all directions by conflicts and hardship.
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Though the two characters are attached to different strategies and tactics and different ethical modes (Anna relies on reparative cultural myths, Myra wants to be radical), both are presented in the novels as narrating themselves into being. In the novels, speech is the locus of subjectivity- in-process. This means that subjectivity is not just a strategy dreamed up in the headquarters; as subjects, we cannot choose and commit to a way of being that is fully conscious, completely functional and never embarrassing. What we can do is speak to maintain ourselves. Speech is therefore not only a way to carry out strategic decisions or tactical maneuvering, but also a site of Berlant’s “flailing” (“Big Man”) and Riley’s “awkward navigations to become” (5). Both novels explore this capaciousness of speech by exploring the tension between their protagonists’ insistence on producing narratives of themselves and the world that will protect and empower them in some way, and the frequent moments of confusion or hesitation, in which language loosens and unfiltered material comes through. If narration is key to subjectivity in these novels, it is through narration that the subject confronts its limits. Because Anna deceives herself and others, and because her speech does not protect her from failure, we cannot celebrate her agency and ethical triumph as a survivor. Because Myra is obnoxious and totalizing in her thinking, we cannot fetishize her theoretically justified abjection. I choose to read moments of slippage not as signs of the characters’ trauma, disintegration or failure, but as signs of their activity of maintaining their existence and presence in the world of others. The unreliability, self- centeredness, self-deception, and blindness of our narrators are not deviations but aspects of the process of being a person.
3.5.4 Dialogism and Antagonism
Finally, the military connotations of the headquarters metaphor point to a vision of intersubjective reality that is not free from antagonism. Anna’s apartment, which she describes as a warzone, is an extreme but not inaccurate representation of the social world. In the novels, and in the prosaic vision of the subject that I am developing, interactions with others are not, of course, reducible to conflict. Anna’s speech is strongly oriented towards imagined listeners; the comparison with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Bakhtin’s preferred example of dialogic speech, is in this sense appropriate. Unlike the Underground Man, however, Anna tries to speak her way into the world of other people and be recognized as a legitimate member of the human tribe. Berger’s Myra may feign indifference, but her attempts at distancing herself from her family or peers, her provocations, and, finally, her embrace of violence at the hand of Gayl and
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Elijah are all ways of dealing with the indelible reality of others. What unites these stances and relationships is the uncertainty of mutual recognition, the frequency of missed connections and the ubiquitous mismatch of people’s projects, especially those that involve others.
This picture of a social world of disconnected subjects that do not coincide even with themselves does not have to be apocalyptic. It can in fact help us reimagine consent without the requirement of agreement and connection. Riley argues that а “sympathetic” or “analytic impersonality” towards both oneself and others can in fact be a basis for a “critical solidarity” (138). Such critical solidarity is not a happy merging of subjects and their projects, but a space of aggression, disagreement, and threat – which does not, however, prevent it from functioning.
This critical solidarity maps onto Berger’s revised version of consent. We cannot base a prosaic vision of democracy on the idea of full and informed consent: such a notion is an unrealizable reparative ideal. The reparative version of consent can help build a bureaucracy, a system in which life can take place but which it will always exceed. The prosaic version of consent in Berger’s novel suggests that consent marks one’s entry into a conflicted intersubjective space of negotiation and activity. In this prosaic democracy, conversations between embodied perspectives, such as those imagined in Berger’s dialogue between “LEE” and “GAYL,” do not guarantee resolution. We can see it instead as coexistence and communication of specifically located subjects, who push and prod and catch each other off guard. Prosaics allows us to acknowledge subjects as processes interacting: coming into contact and into conflict, missing each other, informing and affecting each other’s negotiations of ways of being.
3.6 Conclusion
As an alternative way of talking about the subject, the prosaic mode can take us outside of discussions locked in reparative or radical dead ends. It can loosen our identifications with dramatic metaphors and narratives, which are central to the other two modes, suggesting ways of managing ethical or political agendas while recognizing “the hesitancy and recessiveness in ordinary being” (Cruel Optimism 123). Acknowledging disruptive events that confront us with our own nonsovereignty as part of normal life, the prosaic mode does not suspend the need to act and react – our essential answerability, to use Bakhtin’s term. I therefore argue that the prosaic mode is a valuable way of thinking about ethics in a world where subjectivity manifests in
234 variation and instability, nonsovereignty is a given, and violence occurs in patterns that are complex and obscure.
As I discussed early in this chapter, any theoretical pronouncement, including the notion of a prosaic mode, is not immune from solidifying and therefore acquiring a dramatic quality. Bakhtin, Berlant and Riley use strategies of overstatement and listing to accommodate the ever- present potential for “theoreticism” in their own work. I have employed similar strategies in this thesis, making use of the Bakhtinian oscillation between overstatements in the first two chapters that describe the reparative and radical modes, and, in the current chapter, sketching out an open- ended list of prosaic strategies for theorizing in general and for theorizing the subject in particular.
Importantly, the prosaic mode does not negate the reparative and radical ones. Dramatic narratives have their place in political and individual life. They help create communicable narratives and construct theories that can mobilize meaningful action. We need drama because it is strategically useful for making things happen in the world; to reject it is short-sighted and a luxury. The protagonists of Petrushevskaya and Berger’s novels deal with dramatic extremes by leaning into them in order to sustain their own existence over time. Petrushevskaya’s Anna uses reparative discourses to position herself in a way that she herself can endure, and to get help from others. Berger’s Myra confidently interprets what she sees in terms of self-chosen abjection because she finds solace and strength in her ability to produce statements about the world. Neither of the characters are fully “successful”: both are, in different ways, unbearable, and both fail at controlling their environment. But if we are not fixated on success, we can appreciate that some of their strategies work. Anna’s defensive aggressive stance and Myra’s epistemophiliac position are not just pathological: they are functional ways of being in the world.
The prosaic mode is not a recipe for the right balance of commitment to repair and acknowledgment of foundational negativity, nor is it the final goal of a progressive vision of learning from previous stages to advance into a new one. In the prosaic mode, we have a chance to think without resolution. After all, the role of storytellers and thinkers does not have to be the impossible task of uncovering truth, but the more modest task of providing workable suggestions. The prosaic mode therefore promises a vision of the nonsovereign subject that is not prescriptive but generative.
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Conclusion 4.1 The Work of Critique
Sexual violence often appears as a crisis of subjectivity, ethics and politics. Enlisted in response to this crisis, the image of rupture – a crack, a gap, a trauma – sustains the hope that an exceptional event or a profound existential lack can ground one’s existence, explain one’s separation from the good life and point to an imaginable future. But the rupture caused by sexual violence does not, by some fertile magic, produce new life, stronger art, a more accurate sense of self or better politics. The failure of reparative and radical narratives to account for the nuances of existence has led me, in this thesis, to formulate the prosaic mode of approaching the problem of nonsovereignty and the crisis of sexual violence in particular. I have argued that the prosaic mode does not transcend the other approaches but recontextualizes them. Even as my thesis aims to show a way out of the bind of the dramatic discourses of reparation and radical negativity, it acknowledges the vital role they play in sustaining existence and advancing political projects.
In my analysis, I have outlined the features of reparative, radical and prosaic modes and explored their contextual manifestations and their entanglements with different cultural mythologies and histories. To explain each mode’s logic and limitations, I have linked it with specific texts. In so doing, I have treated the modes as discrete patterns that shape different narratives. This approach has conceptual and critical value: it has allowed me to build up the three-mode framework and produce a critique of reparative and radical modes that is based on their unwanted consequences and on their structural limitations.
The first chapter focuses on narratives that promise reparation through healing, inclusion or transcendence. It analyzes works shaped by feminist and trauma discourses, and those influenced by Russian Orthodox spirituality and Socialist Realism. The chapter considers aesthetic choices enlisted to emphasize redemption: the movement of narrative from the silences and oblique metaphors of trauma to the coherent storytelling that signals healing in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak; the poetic idiosyncrasies of Sapphire’s Push, a narrative that imitates – and celebrates – a marginalized subject’s oral and written speech; Viktor Astafiev’s reliance on tropes of sainthood and depravity in Lyudochka; Guzel’ Yakhina’s use of folklore to imagine personal and collective redemption from historical and domestic violence in Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes. In the chapter, I
236 rely on my readings of the novels to locate the Western confidence in the power of speech in a larger neoliberal framework, and discuss the political costs of the emphasis on transcendence that is common in Russian culture.
The radical mode, discussed in the second chapter, sustains the belief that a conscious identification with trauma will resolve the unbearable condition of nonsovereignty. I analyze its manifestations in theories of feminist and queer negativity and discourses of Russian postmodernism, as well as in two novels: Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl and Vladimir Sorokin’s Marina’s Thirtieth Love. The novels bait the reader with tropes of sexual trauma but refuse to arrange them in a reparative trajectory. They also function as critiques of the radical mode: Zambreno shows the implication of abject identity in the commodifying logic of the market, while Sorokin suggests that discourses of aberrant sexuality and radical individuality harbor a totalitarian drive for mastery. Building on my readings of the novels, I argue that the radical fetishization of nonsovereignty is not always an effective or nuanced response, and ultimately functions as a form of reparation.
Defining the prosaic approach against these two modes, the third chapter argues for paying attention to processes of adaptation and survival that do not necessarily promise greater insight or resolution. I read Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night and Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead as “prosaic” texts that lay bare the functioning of reparative and radical modes in their protagonist’s attempts to live with their own nonsovereignty. Ultimately, the chapter argues that a prosaic approach does not cancel out dramatic beliefs and narratives but enables a different relationship to them. This insight calls for revisiting my previous engagement with texts that involve reparative and radical modes. The framework of the three modes is generative and can accommodate alternative approaches, in addition to the one I took in this thesis. One of its possible uses is to illuminate the potential of texts, political projects, and individual lives to involve different modes in response to nonsovereignty and suffering.
4.2 The Work of Rereading
Reparative, radical and prosaic modes can work as interpretative lenses used not to categorize texts but to attend to their different aspects. With this in mind, I can return to the novels I had identified with reparative and radical modes once again, noting their prosaic aspects. The
237 structure of Anderson’s Speak maps its protagonist’s path of healing onto the timeline of the academic year, but, as any institutional timeline, it involves non-teleological movements: false starts and dead time, daily trudging through trauma, watching TV, screaming in the closet, connecting and failing to connect, cutting class, attending class, advancing, retreating. In Sapphire’s Push, important plot points, such as Precious learning to write or forming relationships, form a redemptive arc, but they are interspersed with scenes that are suspended between recovery and disaster. Precious’s diary entries document an idiosyncratic process of finding a more bearable way through life, which culminates in an affirmation of both reparation and negativity, as Precious cradles her infant in the wake of an AIDS diagnosis. In Astafiev’s story, Lyudochka’s death affirms her spiritual triumph over the everyday, but the value of byt is reaffirmed at her funeral: while Gavrilovna, Lyudochka’s neglectful landlady, “renounces worldly matters”385 and lies down to rest, the protagonist’s mother is busy preparing food for the funeral, since “tears [do] not prevent her from taking care of woman’s work” (398).386 Here, in a typical Astafievian black-and-white contrast, the feminized realm of byt appears superior to spiritual talk, because it enables an ethical – and prosaic – movement through tragedy and crisis. In Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, Zuleikha’s ascent into utopia is made up of numerous adventures, tentative stops, temporary homes from which she keeps getting displaced: the jail, the train, the boat, the first deadly winter. The genre of historical fiction itself gives weight to these changing settings, each grounded in specific conflict and elaborated in rich descriptive detail. Their very specificity is an antidote to the novel’s reliance on the great arc of history as an ultimately redemptive force. In Sorokin’s Marina’s Thirtieth Love, the prosaic realm appears in naturalist touches that interrupt the otherwise luxurious depictions of sex, clashing with classical allusions and stuffy Romantic clichés: “the faint smell of excrement, stored in the folds of his dark cherry velvet robe” (7),387 “[A] muffled oboe briefly came to life somewhere in Valentin’s depths. Valentin loudly passed gas” (15).388 In contrast with the scatological metaphysics for which Sorokin became famous, these references to bodily processes are almost tender and seem to escape both Marina’s totalitarian spiritual redemption and Govno’s abject identification with
385 “…отрешилась от мирских дел…” 386 “…слезы не мешали ей править бабьи дела…” 387 “…чуть слышному запаху кала, хранившегося в складках его темно-вишневого бархатного халата.” 388 “Где-то в глубине Валентина ожил на короткое время приглушенный гобой. Валентин громко выпустил газы.”
238 shit. The ending of Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl is full of ecstatic language: we see Ruth dancing in a crowd of Krishna followers, experiencing a momentary sense of redemption: “Such joy, such joy, such joy” (273), which is also a dissolution: “A delirious death” (273). The ending is a high point, but it only a sort of breakthrough, and Ruth’s ecstasy is temporary. It might result in a rearrangement of her life, or it might not.
The characters we have seen in these novels, insofar as they are part of larger discourses, often point to subject positions available in a particular culture. Reading these narratives prosaically provides insight into the vagaries of living with and sometimes within solid identities. “Victim” or “survivor,” “good feminist” or “bad feminist,” “saint” or “hetaera,” “poet” or “slave” – these identity types consolidate replicable features, which become available for performance, empowerment, changing the political status quo or making money. These solid identities, resting on dramatic visions of the subject, are uninhabitable, which is why they can only be instrumentalized. Read prosaically, they can be approached not as types of subjects, but as temporary positions worked out in specific situations and influenced by multiple external factors.
The prosaic mode can help ask the question that is often obscured by strong narratives that prioritize reparation or abjection: how is it possible to speak theoretically and politically about living as such subjects within such a landscape? This question is especially important when it comes to subject positions that go public, becoming culturally significant, positively or negatively charged, and therefore solidified and simplified. People who publicly share their experiences of sexual violence have to make do with positions that are available to them and manage attendant cultural expectations. Returning to the stories of Emma Sulkowicz and Diana Shurygina with which I opened this thesis, I want to conclude by acknowledging how they engage their subject positions in the public eye: working with what they have, making sense of it and making do.
4.3 The Work of Making Sense and Making Do
Since her “Mattress Performance” attracted public attention, Sulkowicz has continued creating art on the theme of sexual violence. By doing so, she affirms her identification as “mattress girl” and as an outspoken survivor (Da Silva), but uses this position to keep working through something, asking questions and making statements. As she explains in an interview, her art is
239 motivated not by a desire to heal, but by the need to be retraumatized in order to keep the pain, and thus the questions, alive (Da Silva). Using her body to create a sexualized visual spectacle, Sulkowicz’s art attracts large amounts of online aggression. She incorporates hate comments by reconceptualizing her position, in a move that I would identify with the radical mode: “I’ve lately been thinking about this idea of empowerment from the position of dispossession. It is very witchy. All of your hatred is going to become a part of my spell” (Cascone). With “Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol” (“This Is Not a Rape,” 2015), Sulkowicz stages this “empowerment from the position of dispossession” in a particularly striking way. The piece is a video that recreates the account she had given of her rape, with Sulkowicz and an actor engaging in sex that first appears consensual and then becomes violent. Casting herself as a character in her own rape story, Sulkowicz invites the viewer to interact with the video, but insists on her own terms. The accompanying text is a challenge:
Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol is not about one night in August, 2012. It’s about your decisions, starting now. It’s only a reenactment if you disregard my words. It’s about you, not him. Do not watch this video if your motives would upset me, my desires are unclear to you, or my nuances are indecipherable . . . If you watch this video without my consent, then I hope you reflect on your reasons for objectifying me and participating in my rape, for, in that case, you were the one who couldn’t resist the urge to make Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol about what you wanted to make it about: rape. (Sulkowicz)
Further on, Sulkowicz includes a list of “questions to help you reflect”: “Are you searching for proof? Proof of what?”, “What do you want from this experience?”, “Do you think I’m the perfect victim or the world’s worst victim?” (Sulkowicz). With questions such as these, Sulkowicz uses her identity as a rape survivor to turn it inside out, placing the viewer at the centre of the questions usually asked of or by the survivor. With Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol and other pieces that problematize representations of gender and of sexual violence,389 Sulkowicz continues making statements from her position as “mattress girl,” adjusts the meanings of this position from within, and implicates viewers in witnessing, affirming and interpreting it.
389 Such as “The Ship Is Sinking” (2017), a performance that uses elements of bondage and submission to question the value of art in the current political moment (Cascone).
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After her appearance on the talk show Pust’ Govoriat and her sudden rise to fame, Diana Shurygina has been figuring out how to live as a TV and Internet celebrity. Her recent wedding was a big media event, with a performance by the 1990s boy band “Na-Na” and a fight between the groom and a hostile blogger who showed up uninvited (Poliakov). In addition to appearing on talk shows and an online reality show run by the former host of Pust’ Govoriat, Shurygina maintains her own social media accounts and a channel on YouTube,390 in which she is negotiating her public image, at once leaning into the scandalous fame and attempting to distance herself from negative associations. A notable example is her video entitled “Moy pervyi raz,” or “My First Time” (Shurygina). The title is obvious clickbait, and the video opens with Shurygina smiling into the camera and saying the words: “Moy pervyi seks” (“My first sex”). The annotation acknowledges that many people have a negative opinion of her, shaped by the talk show and the opinions of bloggers, and affirms that this video does not play into this narrative. It is not, in fact, about “the first time I had sex,” but about “who Diana Shurygina really is, what my first kiss was like, how I earned money for the first time and even more information about me!” (Shurygina). The rest of the video includes stories about a number of “first times”: first job, first love, first kiss, first tattoo. Reminiscing about her time in kindergarten or warning viewers to be careful while crossing the road, Shurygina means to counteract the public image with which she came out of Pust’ Govoriat and establish herself as a voice of a slightly older peer who can be a good influence on young viewers. The video ends with Shurygina saying that her first sexual experience is too private a memory to be shared publicly and urging girls to take the first time they have sex seriously. Shurygina’s approach to revising her public image draws on conservative tropes of a “good girl” (soft pink blouse, sweet childhood memories, sober attitude to sex and tattoos), but the video is hardly a capitulation to family values. Rather, Shurygina seems to be using the legitimating power of “good girl” tropes to insist that she is more than the rape scandal, that she has other experiences, a childhood and a future, the right to have had sex and to decide how she speaks about it. Addressing her followers in social media posts and videos, Shurgyina is working out her position in the public eye, while both acknowledging and pushing against her “rape girl” image.
390 As could be expected given Shurygina’s fame, there are several other channels that claim to be “official” and repost her videos.
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Sulkowicz’s projects have their critics, but they are exhibited in galleries and reviewed in art magazines. They are accepted by professional publics and institutions as part of the tradition of performance art. Shurygina’s curation of her online presence does not have such institutional affirmation: her Instagram posts belong to the popular genre of image production on social media, and her TV appearances are orchestrated by the industry and blatantly geared to achieving high ratings. These differences in genre and content of their work can be set aside if we read the young women’s public activity as prosaic. Like the rest of us, Shurygina and Sulkowicz are working with what they have. They are by no means sovereign directors of their lives and public personas. Judging by the amount of online hostility (Gambino), Sulkowicz’s art is legible largely to those who were already inclined to support it. Shurygina’s story remains available to producers, bloggers and other members of the public, who continue to take advantage of it for material gain or as a boost to their own popularity. The young women’s projects are not perfect successes, but it is not necessary or helpful to valorize them as spunky survivors or pity them as walking trainwrecks. It is more useful and accurate to recognize that, having limited control of their situations, they nevertheless continue acting. In the wake of a catastrophe that is the public spectacle of sexual assault, these young women are scavenging for ways of being.
This brings me back to the apolitical nature of the prosaic mode. It does not distinguish between best ways to be, and therefore does not prescribe a political vision or explain how to eradicate suffering. It does not prioritize resilience or goodness, nor does it celebrate brokenness and failure. In that sense, it does not presuppose a “proper” type of subject. How, then, can the subject be discussed in the prosaic mode? I propose thinking of the prosaic subject as a bit of a theorist and a bit of a scavenger. As I argued in Chapter 3, it can be useful to see subjectivity as a headquarters for the process of moving through the often-inhospitable terrain, which requires epistemological, if not epistemophiliac, engagement. Subjects are not always involved in coming up with theories or making sense of things – there are, no doubt, situations and states that suspend reflection. Still, to speak of subjectivity in crisis is often to speak of the epistemological process of scrambling for knowledge, insight, description, representation. Engaged in scrambling, the subject acts as a scavenger. We are all living in the ruins of some crisis that has just taken place or is still happening. Scavenging is the prosaic activity in such an apocalyptic or postapocalyptic environment. In this setting, reparative and radical dramas can be sustaining,
242 allowing for enough ontological security to keep moving along, and perhaps even to shift the environment into some other arrangement. As a scavenger, the subject is not whole, or healing, or spectacularly abject – it may be fucked and stuck, but it keeps producing itself and living, both in the crisis and in the normality of that condition.
The prosaic view of the subject and its predicaments holds the dramas of reparation or radical negativity at a slight distance, and thus suspends judgments about different ways of inhabiting political positions. We can, and sometimes must, dream big, but we should also use dramatic narratives strategically, without flattening ourselves into identities and political agendas. In the prosaic mode, we can acknowledge the limited and pragmatic nature of our politics, feeling out for a combination of factors that can contribute to different, and perhaps better, outcomes.
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