LITERARY CRITICISM/WOMEN'S STUDIES nnn 11n•=11 1nn1, Lfl The Pink Guitar is as much a work of art as a book of feminist criticism. Noted critic and poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis here fuses meditation and passion, an extensive critical understanding of n1n16. AMMON' modernism, and the intensive rhythms of art. DuPlessis is concerned with the depiction of women and the uses to which culture has put the female figure; at the same time she asks how a woman artist can make a place for herself among these gender-intensive representations. She treats the work of William Carlos Williams and Marcel Duchamp as paradigmatic of the most innovative of male modernists, finding their tactics compromised by Writing as their gender ideologies, which she explores with nuance. Feminist Practice DuPlessis turns to a number of modern and contemporary women writers (notably H.D. and Virginia Woolf, as well as Susan Howe and Beverly Dahlen) to explore the possibilities of finding a language, and a set of cultural stances, which would rupture the most deeply held assumptions about gender. The whole tradition of the writing of poetry and fiction DuPlessis argues, has colonized female figures, yet women writers have considerable force: the woman writer is a RACHEL BLAU DuPLESSIS power in her own work, but an artifact in the traditions of meaning on which she draws. Making of representation itself a site of struggle, DuPlessis's own porous, self-questioning text presents itself as an example of the cultural disturbance she evokes. The Pink Guitar includes the influential and moving essay "For the Etruscans," along with other work on the gendering of writing practices. RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS is Professor of English at Temple Uni- versity. She is the author of Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth Century Women Writers, and H.D.: The Career of That Struggle. ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK • LONDON SUN' - UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES ALBANY, NY 12222 156 Otherhow THE PINK GUITAR Wandering stars and little mercies, space so empty, notched each moment. Tufted white nut rising who or which is "I" is "yo" the parade feather tit mouse, did she see her first real bird? Made from hearing the deep insides of language, language inside the language; made from pick-scabbing the odd natural wounds of language outside, unspecial dump of language everywhere here. 1. The torso, the turban, the turned-away face of Ingres' 1808 painting "Paradoxically the only way to position oneself outside of called La Baigneuse de Valpincon or The Large Bather reappear, amid that hegemonic discourse is to displace oneself within it— to some clutter of bodies, in his later orientalized paintings: the Harem refuse the question as formulated, or to answer deviously Interior (1828) and the Turkish Bath (1863): The Turkish Bath has, in (though in its words), even to quote (but against the its great circle, over 20 female figures, two black, two brown, all nudes, grain)."' most erotic in conventional gesture, some overtly sexual: playful, lubri- my father said my mother never had any talent cious, languid, narcissistic, preening, posturing for the viewer, fiddling how to acknowledge alterity the marginality and speak from with themselves. Whatever all those words mean. That foregrounded its back-turned torso, the hidden, inward face of The Large Bather were historically, personally wounding presence without clearly iconic for Ingres, and mysteriously so, for in its interiorized, so that she never did anything; implied, they had discussed non-frontal "purity" it withdraws as much as is exposed in the tarted- it up meat-markets of the later works. In his final use of this image, in come to the conclusion, some people just have it some don't. The Turkish Bath, Ingres has given the female something to do. She is how to acknowledge anonymous (ourselves) but compel the playing a hidden instrument, perhaps a mandolin. Her mandolin as structures and tones, the social ocean of language to babble hidden as her face. burble, to speak real talent, he said, would have found a way, this These well-known images by Ingres, themselves palimpsests of each conversation does not go on too long, shifts to "blacks" other, were further over-written in Man Ray's tampered photo (1924) of course. of Kiki of Montparnasse (a.k.a. a woman artist, Alice Prin). 2 Ray posed The sung-half song. his model to evoke the Ingres and drew knowingly upon the progres- sively more overt orientalizing Ingres proposed for the torso, for Kiki If poems are posies what is this? is marked with her turban, her gypsy-like earrings, and the exotic silk To whom? on which she sits, wide-hipped, a great shadow where her buttocks And who am I, then, if it matters? crack at the base of the spine. Her enfolded arms are hidden, her agency thereby removed. Her solid, curved, lush back has, imposed upon it, brilliantly placed sound holes, black f-openings (f-openings!) which der { re recall the f for function in mathematical symbol, force in physics, forte I am a GEN { made by the writing; I am a GEN re der in music, and the abbreviation both for female, and for feminine gender read in the writing. in grammar. She is thereby made sonorous with cultural meanings. Once by Ingres, she becomes, by Man Ray, the Violin d'Ingres, the Jan. 1985/June 1985/Aug. 1985/June 1989 hobby-horse which plays with the representation of women and sexual- A poetics gives permission to ity without altering the fundamental relations of power, proprietorship, continue. and possession so succinctly evoked. 157 158 The Pink Guitar The Pink Guitar 159 Homme-age. I. ngres. These wry and salomesque swirls of veils of other I struggle for a tread. Everything must be reexamined, re-seen, rebuilt. texts. Man. Ray. I am dressed therein. I drape them, they drape over From the beginning, and now. And yet I am playing, I am playing. I am me, they are some of that thru which I see. playing Violon d'Ingres. Violin d'anger. Vial in danger. with a stringed lever. It "just means hobby in French" it "just means that women are his 2. How much insomnia can any one person stand? hobby" "you see, Ingres was really a painter, but he also played the violin" "sort of like our saying 'Sunday painter,' meaning they weren't It was an unbreakable drama of silence, to protect his obsessive and really serious about" incessant speaking. By tag finishings. Polite uninterruptions. No rage. No, or little, spontaneous laughter. No puncture. The seriousness of I am deadly serious. his obsession and its vulnerability were patent. I had been commis- sioned with the unspoken responsibility of guardianship. If I had really It is "had it," I walked away. But that communicated, as it happened, noth- I pick up this guitar. IT a woman! I say ing. Or very little. As far as I know. This whole thing was undiscussable, I am although it occurred for many years. My silence and little spurts o pleasant sound became a canvas, a terrain, a geography he could enter For when I pick it up, how do I "play" the women whom I have been with his words. Irrespective of me. There was no me as me, the only culturally given?' "me" was a necessary, even crucial, occasion ("The Listener"). I cer- tainly was not "attentive," except on the surface of my face. What, And find that the languages, the words, the drives, the genres, the then, was "listening"? and what relation had it to really hearing? By keyboards, the frets, the strings, the holes, the sounding boards, the which, and thru which repeated events much was damaged, and much stops, the sonorities have been filled with representations that depend, was destroyed. And much was learned. in their deepest satisfactions, on gender and sexual trajectories that make claims upon me (and could compromise what I do). But most cannot be said. My pink guitar has gender in its very grain. Its strings are already They speak of bi-focal. Or the metaphor of "bi-lingual" for the multiple vibrating with gender representations. That means unpick everything. negotiations into the different cultural practices in which we are consti- But how to unpick everything and still "pick up" an instrument one tuted. I am bi-silent, tri-silent, am made of dual/duel, trebled/troubled, "picks," or plucks. How to unpick everything, and still make it "for- base/bass and impacted silences. Which test, temper, distort, and sus- mal," "lyric," "coherent," "beautiful," "satisfying," when these are pect fluencies. This blankness is social (silence is social as speech is some of the things that must be unpicked. (Kristeva used the term "the social; silence, says Cora Kaplan,' silence protects others' speech); it is impossible dialectic. 14) The writing therefore becomes unpalatable, gendered (or in relation to hierarchies of power). difficult, opaque, shifty, irresponsible, suspect, and subject to many accusations. It is like the ground of the page. The blankness already filled with words thru which one negotiates. The page paradoxically both open and filled. And could I change the instrument (restring, ref ret, rekey, retool, rehole) These rhythms—of start and stop, the praxis of randomness, the choices of motion over, under, through, small tunnelings and explosive rejec- Invent tions are a socially grounded set of structures. These structures or new sonorities plots of feeling, and the feeling patently evoked (that I want to evoke) new probes correspond to something, some outline of emotions and practices in new combinations the social and familial world—the shapes of the social structures in new instruments relation to the shapes of the art.' 160 The Pink Guitar The Pink Guitar 161 "'Tell me, given the options, where would your anger have taken you— 5.