What the pursuit of the false problem has unearthed that is valid nevertheless can be easily represented under the theoretical rubrics of the constitution of woman as transhistorical subject and woman as historical object.
But the truth embodied in the ideological strategy as I have outlined it should be as axiomatic for the poststructuralists as the Saussurian postulate, ‘The sign is arbitrary’ was axiomatic for the structuralist enterprise against which the array of poststructuralist positions arose in dialogue: ‘The subject is transhistorical.’ For that is only another way of saying that the subject is fallible: it can, and will, make mistakes.
The transhistoricity of the subject is, of course, an illusion; but it is an inescapable illusion, without which there is no subject. (It is, indeed, the ego’s belief in itself.) To offer perhaps a somewhat strained analogy: cinema is an illusion constituted of successive frames of light projected on a screen. But without the light or a screen, there is no cinema—no illusion. The subject is a similar illusion, constituted of a sequence of historical responses projected within the sentient body. But without either history or the sentient body, there is no subject—no illusion. Needless to say, the relation between ‘successive’ historical responses is far more complex than that between the frames of a film; and at that syntactic level of complexity of relation and at the neurological level of complexity of the body in which these relations register, we have a human system quite complex enough for, and capable of, true freedom. (Determinism or indeterminism? No, that is not where the ‘illusion’ lies.) The historical question is, then, what makes women (or men) experience themselves as transhistorical at one point in history; what makes them experience themselves as transhistorical at another point. And the structure of oppression is as constitutive of that illusion as the organization of strengths. Historically, these things change for women, for men.
To assert that the subject is always transhistorical (and thus an illusion) is in no way one with the assertion that the historical process of the subject’s constitution must (therefore) remain totally opaque and beyond all research and theory. It is simply to say that researchers and theoreticians alike must be careful—and on the watch for errors.
Nor do I mean that progress cannot (or has not) been made under the theoretical program of ‘historical subjects’—which, in this society, are traditionally male—and its inescapable implication of a transhistorical object, always desired (by whom?), always absent (from what?), an eternally missing factor from the male dominated version of history save as the signifier of desire—the phallus, which woman (supposedly) is, but by which she is, the moment she threatens to appear in the Imaginary, displaced by and replaced with a male image, which results in her repression from the Symbolic order through a conspiracy of signs suspiciously similar to, if not identical with, the program by which her productions in society (Imaginary, Symbolic, and—pace Lacan—political), as well as all their rewards, are appropriated by, revalued by, and renamed by men, a program both men and women can recognize as exploitative and oppressive. I mean, rather, that such a verbal theoretical expression centering around the retrieval of ‘historical subjects’ does not stabilize the progress made under its rubric. The progress is made—but it tends to be forgotten very quickly, because it is already infiltrated by, and therefore soon dispersed by, the subject myths of patriarchal history with which, unless it remains insistently and programmatically critical of the theory that stabilizes them, it is so intimately entailed.
Counterstabilization, at this point, is necessary.
15. ‘What is the Modular Calculus?’ a reader writes.
The modular calculus began as a science fictional notion that turns out to be somewhat related to the famous Finagle Factor (that illusive constant sought by all researchers, by which the wrong answer is adjusted to get the right one).
Quine has talked about ‘fitting grammars’ and ‘guiding grammars.’ In more informal terms, there can be perfectly accurate descriptions of systems, of situations, or even of machines, which, while they tell us what these systems, situations, and machines look like, how they move, how they function (that is, tell us how they might work) nevertheless do not indicate how they do work. Similarly, there are explanations that tell us, accurately and precisely, how something actually does work, so that we can both recognize and (potentially) construct an object that works in the same way—though often those explanations will not let us recognize the initial object from which the grammar was derived (it doesn’t necessarily tell us whether it was a green one or a red one, if its being green or red is not part of its workings) should we stumble over it in life. The first is, more or less, a fitting grammar. The second is, more or less, a guiding grammar. (And a description rich in both fitting and guiding elements is what anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls a ‘thick description.’)
The modular calculus is an algorithm or set of algorithms (a set of fixed operations) that can be applied to any fitting grammar to adjust it into a guiding grammar.
A limit case, however, strongly suggests such an algorithm is a total fantasy:
‘There is a large red box with a button on one end and a light on the other. When you press the button, sometimes the light goes on; sometimes it does not.’ The description might go on to include a possible circuit that would cause the described switch-and-light operations to occur. There is our fitting grammatical description of an object.
The modular calculus, if such a thing existed, would be a fixed set of algorithms one could apply to this description that would then produce a template of the actual circuitry inside the box, i.e. would give the guiding grammar for the situation.
Well, since there are an infinite number of ‘circuits’ that could bring about these results, some involving mechanical means, some involving electrical means, some involving electronic means, and many, many, many involving combinations of two or all three, obviously no algorithm could specify which particular circuit was necessarily inside the box from only our guiding description.
We can push our limit case a step further. ‘There is a large black box with a button on one end and a light on the other end. When the button is pushed, the light does not go on.’
The modular calculus would, again, allow us to know from only this much what is in the box.
Since this box may contain nothing, or, indeed, any broken circuit ever envisioned, or any number of working circuits that just do other things, or a donkey, or a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the modular calculus seems again reduced to a fantasy at one with a magic that not only lets you see through walls but also assures that you will understand what you see when you do.
If we allow a certain critical margin into the notion of the modular calculus, however, at least we move back to the realm of science fiction:
Clearly descriptions that grow richer in certain directions move closer to accurate functional explanation; certain descriptions as they become enriched in certain ways take on explanatory force. Also, certain descriptions seem to take on explanatory force that they then don’t live up to. Others suggest explanations that turn out simply to be wrong.
Might there be an algorithm or set of algorithms that would tell us how close or how far a given description is from explanation, or that would tell us, from a given description, what kind of explanations may eventually be possible from it, or where the description might be further enriched to achieve explanation? For a limited set of situations, such algorithms might be developed and generalized.
In short, the problem of the modular calculus is: How do we know when we have a model of a situation; and how do we tell what kind of model it is?
16. Clearly the Nevèrÿon series is a model of late twentieth-century (mostly urban) America. The question is, of course: What kind of model is it?
This is not the same question as: Is it accurate or is it inaccurate? Rather: What sort of relation does it bear to the thing modeled?
Rich, eristic, and contestatory (as well as
documentary), I hope.
17. ‘Master, save thyself,’ the well-traveled merchant who had been to Asia and Portugal told his younger brother, the London saddler and narrator of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Years (1722), before going off to join his wife and two children whom he had already evacuated to Bedfordshire.
Yet that strangely faceless, bachelor tradesman (Henry Foe, uncle of Daniel, thirty-five when the Great Plague struck London in 1665 …? Daniel himself was five in the year of the plague and ‘invented’ his well-researched memoir only after news of Marseille’s plague of 1720 reached London and he was over sixty) stayed on in the city, despite his older brother’s advice, out of a combination of self-interest, acedia, and an odd set of religious scruples (that we, certainly, read as a rationalization, or at any rate a stabilization, of the first two motives): while absently turning through his Bible, his finger fell on the Ninety-first Psalm: ‘ … there shall no evil befall thee; neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.’ I say odd, because it makes him cleave to a kind of theological determinism (God has ordained all things) that is one with the Asian religion he has been decrying in the account of his brother only a page or so before.
18. All novelistic narrative, at least from the Richardson/Fielding dialogue on, takes place more or less against the following grid: Imagine an equal number of male and female characters. Now divide both into upper class, middle class, and working class, an equal number of males and females in each. Now, for each class and sex, divide your characters into children, adults, and oldsters. For the more modern tale-teller, the grid can be refined even more. Split each of the resultant groups into equal numbers of heterosexuals and homosexuals. If working class, middle class, and upper class is too gross a division, we can add students, teachers, blue-collar, white-collar, management, manual, service workers, civil servants, and artists, at all levels. A major division must be made along racial lines: for the United States, white, black, Amerindian, Oriental, and Hispanic, with most certainly intermediate groups between all of them. If, similarly, youth, maturity, and age seems too gross a set of divisions, they can be further shattered into children, adolescents, young adults, middle-agers, elderly, and aged. But this chart, this grid must eventually specify every possible racial/social/age/gender/sexual type, all of which become ideally equal through their ideal accessibility on this fictive grid.
Like the novel itself, this chart has nothing to do with the statistical prevalence of any one group in our society. (The Victorian novel would lead one to believe that most middle-class unmarried women worked as governesses, while at the same time there were almost no prostitutes in London—whereas in fact there were remarkably few such governesses [probably under two hundred in any one year] and possibly in excess of eighty thousand prostitutes in the city.) It is an ideal chart of possibilities.
Immediately on this imaginary chart we must be able to locate the sixty-four-year-old upper-class homosexual Hispanic woman comic-book artist as easily as the twenty-eight-year-old heterosexual lower-middle-class white male private detective.
Next, we must consider a set of novelistic relations: Friendship; sexual love; enmity; economic antagonism; religious approval; etc. Another generation of the grid must be set up where any and all the ‘characters’ can relate to any and all of the others (including characters of their own type) by any one of the possible novelistic relations.
This, of course, only gives us beginning points and end points in possible two-character subplots.
Given any two characters, in any relation, that relation must be seen as having the potential to change into any other. Again, the modern storyteller may always want to complicate this grid further by considering also possible relations between three, or even more, characters, that, in the course of the story, change not between two states, but move through three or more …
That we can, however mistily, conceive of this grid (and I was twenty when I first began to contemplate its multiple intricacies), even as we acknowledge the impossibility of ever completing it in the abstract, much less of actually writing the Great Novel that portrays, with insight, accuracy, and invention, examples of all that grid’s combinations and developments, that conception nevertheless allows us to make some purely qualitative observations about the wealth of bourgeois fictions that take place against it, whether the individual novel privileges a single aging working-class man fishing alone off Cuba in his boat, who barely relates now and again to a young, working-class boy, as in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, or a single elderly working-class woman fishing alone through an absolute chaos of social interrelationships in Canada, as in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook.
This grid—as various novelists begin to impose on it their various economies, for their various conscious and unconscious reasons, picking out this character for a hero, that relationship for development, condensing some while blithely ignoring these, those, and the others—supplies us with the ideological contours of the individual novel as it is foregrounded against any historical or statistical grouping of texts. (‘Why, through the range of post-World War II American fiction, are friendships between women almost entirely absent until the 1960s?’) Yet it also allows us to bracket that ideological weight momentarily because we can at least be secure that every novel has one. (‘Because the return of the male work force from the army made possible the destruction of female solidarity in an economy in which driving women out of work and replacing them with male veterans could be fairly easily stabilized by continuing and developing only slightly a preexistent narrative/language tradition.’ This is an ugly, wholly criticizable, but historically accurate answer—at least in terms of a fitting grammar.)
This grid is what allows us to ask of any fiction: Precisely what does it have to say in excess of its ideological reduction? What does it say in excess of the location of its elements on this grid and the subsequent revelation of vast and overdetermined absences? The deconstructionists have led off this set of new readings and most energetically by asking of certain texts: What do they have to say that specifically undermines and subverts their own ideological array?’ As energetic as the deconstructionist foray has been, we must remember that there are still going to be many texts for which we can expect the answer: ‘Not much.’
19. Guy Davenport’s fictions have given me more pleasure than those of any single writer I’ve read in the past three years. Initially I respond to them with complete emotional bewilderment as to why anyone could want to write the particular tales he does—why anyone would use what of the method as I can divine beneath his web of allusions and reconstructions. (Is it disingenuous of me to say I find tales such as ‘Apples and Pears’ and ‘O Gadjo Niglo’ most interesting when they are at their least homoerotic? Probably. What happens when ‘Het Erewhonisch Sketsboek’ reaches the 18th Brumaire?) Within what describes for me, then, an arena of almost total dispassion, Davenport brings me again and again to breath-lost awe at the beauties he manages to construct in that lucid, glimmering language field.
‘Robot’
‘Dawn in Erewhon’
‘The Death of Picasso’
These stories (with the greatest ‘content’ and thus the greatest accessibility for the reader beginning to enter Davenport’s worlds) are among the most carefully constructed art works I know. (In ‘On Some Lines of Virgil’ I only wish Jonquille could have been anchored to parents, home, landscape, and material life with the same precise, lush, and vivid calculus of writerly invention he lavishes so effortlessly on his boys; but it is an old complaint, an old exclusion.) In my personal pantheon they rank with ‘To Here and the Easle,’ La Princesse de Cleves, ‘The Graveyard Heart,’ ‘The Dead,’ ‘The Second Inquisition,’ ‘The Metamorphosis,’ Le Bal da Compte d’Orgel, ‘The Asian Shore’ or Nightwood. Yet, where one goes after that, amidst Davenport’s constructions, delineates where the unique pleasure of his envisionings will be found.
The effect for me is totally aesthetic and awesomely pleas
urable—or, as I have taken to saying somewhat glibly to my friends: Davenport’s tales are rich in everything I personally love about fiction, and almost wholly devoid of what in fiction, today, bores me.
Frankly, I cannot imagine anyone having that initial response of emotional bewilderment to the impetus behind any of the Nevèrÿon tales, whatever one thinks of their execution. (In at least one very important sense, its rhetorical urgencies make ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals’ the least experimental of the series.) Yet I can imagine a hugely changed world, not a hundred years away, but only ten or twenty hence, where that, indeed, would be precisely the response of the common reader to these stories. That world would be, in many ways, the world I conceive of as a Utopia. In short, I suppose, I write yearning for a world in which all these stories might be merely ‘beautiful.’
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