Writing the Self In/After the Postmodern: Poppy and Heddyand Me

Volume 25, number 2, October 1998 Margaret Henderson WRITING THE SELF IN/AFTER THE POSTMODERN: POPPY AND HEDDYAND ME Instead of representing a "truth," a "unity" or a "belongingness," a critical use of the self may come to emphasize the "historical conditions" involved in its speaking. Elspeth Probyn, Sexing the Self 28 A supposed "death of the subject" is a central tenet in the postmodern vocabulary of crisis, whether it be a dissolution of subjectivity by technology as in Jean Baudrillard, by consumer capitalism as in Fredric Jameson, or by a restructuring of gender relations as in Arthur Kroker. This essay, however, argues that the crisis may signal an expansion of certain epistemological, representational, and political positions available to women, as counter to postmodemism's subtext of loss. For the corpse is, of course, a particular version of subjectivity. When Foucault, among others, announced the death of "man" in The Order of Things, he was continuing a deconstruction of subjectivity begun by Nietzsche. Under attack is the Cartesian subject of bourgeois humanism- the unified, rational, coherent, and knowledgeable self, which is also assumed to be masculine. Nietzsche's Romantic philosophy which emphasises the irrational, and Freud's "discovery" of the unconscious seriously threatens the bourgeois conception of subjectivity. These early challenges have continued as some of the key theoretical approaches of postmodernism (psychoanalysis, feminism, and post- structuralism) have expanded and grown in influence, so that within the cultural space denoted by postmodernism, traditional humanist notions of subjectivity are problematised and largely discredited: "[t]he postmodern impulse tries to think or speak its way out of the (phallo)logocentric imprisonment of the subject in a hierarchy of encoded oppositions" (Barratt 222). My feminist reading of two recent texts that can be termed "life writing," Poppy by Drusillu Modjeska, and Heddy and Me by Susan Varga, illustrates not only the workings of dominant postmodern subjectivity, but also politicises and redefines its categories. Feminism thus works as political "reality principle," in its focus on gendered relations of power and oppression, for those problematic aspects of postmodernism that I later discuss. As Elspeth Probyn suggests for 01 r%Jc Margaret Henderson, "Writing the Self" feminism, these texts represent a "critical use of the self" in that they emphasise "the historical conditions involved in its speaking" (Sexing 28). Rather than effecting a dissolution of subjectivity, the writers discussed here expand the discursive field to accommodate what Carole Ferrier terms "alternative subjects" (those who don't fit into the category of the white, heterosexual middle-class male ["Resisting" 104]). And while a number of feminists have noted the uneasy and, at times, conflicting relationship of feminism and postmodernism, with conceptualisations of subjectivity there is a degree of overlap. With postmodernism's and feminism's similar attack on the cultural and political authority of the subject of bourgeois individualism (which feminism identifies as masculine), postmodernism's retheorisation of subjectivity offers far more hospitable terrain for women to construct their own version of the self. In their attempt to find an adequate way of representing women's subjectivity, Poppy and Heddy and Me demonstrate writing's role in transforming the expressive/repressive apparatuses of late capitalism and its problematised subjectivity. They take advantage of the cracks in the unified male subject to focus instead on a female subject in process and, on a cultural level, the cracks in the self-identity of "Australia" and also "Britain" (in the case of Poppy). By this I refer to the questioning which postmodern theory has directed towards notions of national (as well as individual) identity, and the gaps this has left for other stories to be told and other political demands to be made of not-so- unified Australian culture. These stories of white women moving toward the self-definition of a speaking position reveal structural and material networks of oppression masquerading behind Descartes' cogito ergo sum. While the conventional generic categories of the experimental novel, autobiography, and biography suit these texts, the evolving (and feminist and postmodern-inspired) category of life-writing seems more. apposite here than continuing the dichotomy between auto/biography and fiction. Life-writing is a preferable term because it is open to certain premises of postmodern and feminist theory, particularly regarding subjectivity, the specifically female use of this form of writing, and the breaking down of boundaries and hierarchy (Whitlock, 245). Life-writing is not strictly a genre, but rather a term which encompasses writing that explores and reflects the shifting boundaries between truth and fiction, self and society, personal and public histories, and conventional genres. 2 These two examples of women's life-writing allow a number of questions to be raised concerning postmodern subjectivity and women's cultural production. The first is the problem of cognition and articulation. For example, 10 Volume 25, number 2, October 1998 autobiographical writing or, more specifically, the novel of women's self- discovery (Feiski, "Novel" 133), is politically important for oppressed groups because these forms allow the telling of previously silenced stories and the construction of authoritative speaking positions. These forms are therefore a site of consciousness-raising and alternative knowledge. If we accept the discrediting of the Cartesian subject and personal experience, then we are left with the problem of how to know and tell the story of the self, that is, how to create a potentially politicised individual and hence, collective identity. What are the possibilities offered by postmodern theories for my readings of texts of marginalised subjectivities? Do postmodern aesthetic strategies offer a viable politicised cultural practice? Certain political problems and implications are produced by a reconceptualised subjectivity (or lack of subjectivity in extreme cases), related to the question of agency, identity, and self-knowledge. As Elizabeth Wilson points out, political movements need some form of collective aims and identity, which she sees as increasingly difficult to construct within the contemporary framework of fragmented and multiple subjectivities (153). Further, Jane Flax's warning regarding the death of the subject in postmodernism encapsulates feminist concerns: "I am deeply suspicious of the motives of those who would counsel such a position at the same time as women have just begun to re-member their selves and to claim an agentic subjectivity available always before only to a few privileged white men" (Thinking 220). Modjeska and Varga take forms (the Bildungsroman and auto/biography respectively) that are conventionally coded as conservative genres and associated with modernity (Moretti 5), and expand them with postmodern and feminist modes of representing subjectivity. This experimentation proposes an alternative logic of subjectivity to late capitalism in that it denaturalises "becoming a woman" (as in Modjeska), specifies historical forces and dynamics acting upon the subject (for example, Varga), but also suggests how subjectivity might be conceptualised in a manner that is discursive, fragmentary, yet also collective and resistant. They point toward where a textual home might lie for female subjectivity. Searching for Mothers Modjeska's Poppy and Varga's Heddy and Me can be read usefully in terms of the mother-daughter dyad structuring both the textual and subjective production. In an interesting reversal of the birth process, the daughter tries to write or reproduce the mother's life and, in the process, she grows in her own self- knowledge (with this becoming part of the mother's reconstructed self). The subjective and textual relationship is thus symbiotic and relational. 11 Margaret Henderson, "Writing the Self" Poppy and Heddy and Me are based on a politicised notion of identity, that is, identity functions not only as personal but also political category, formed by social relations (often of oppression) and a psychic condition of alterity. By approaching both Heddy and Me and Poppy as allegories, the subjectivities produced and represented function as a parable of the conditions of women, something hinted at by Lalage: "I'd set out to tell Poppy's story, and had concluded by bowing to the story that is told through her" (308). I read Poppy, therefore, as the tale of a white, middle-class woman in postwar Britain (mediated by her daughter), sharing some features of the novel of self- discovery, while Heddy and Me's migrant narrative is also an allegory of twentieth-century Hungary, and more specifically the Holocaust and its after- effects. In both works, the search for the mother is a narrative of collective and individual liberation. But first we must examine how and what subjectivity is constructed, and to what effects. Heddy and Me is working in the increasingly popular and politically important genre of auto/biography, while Poppy is fictionalised auto/biography, a novel that comments on the epistemological uncertainty and fictive strategies of autobiography. 3 Critics have commented on the irony of the growth in popularity of auto/biographical writing at the same time that its core category, the subject, is being radically problematised: Current

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