Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

[editor’s note: isn’t it totally shitty that all the reviews of Are You My Mother? are comparing it to Fun Home? I am totally going to do the same thing, but gawd. I wonder if authors feel the same way about this as parents do when grandma compares their Johnny to cousin Jane, or like I did when people are like “OMG! You like lost a ton of wait. U r looking sew good!”] 

In her newest book, Are You My Mother?, Bechdel is still as relentlessly intertextual as she was in Fun Home. As in other academic and journalistic accounts, for Fun Home Bechdel assembled an archive of material and relied on it to inform her telling. Her unique insistence on tracing every newspaper clipping, family photograph, and book passage by hand, and thereby drawing it into this stylized portrait of her experience, literally illustrated that when an author introduces this sort of “objective” evidence for their tale, they are subjectively framing it so it fits their point of view. In other words, Fun Home was as much a “A Family Tragicomic” as a lesson in hermeneutics. Likewise, in Are You My Mother? Bechdel still exercises the same fastidious attention to detail in her drawings as she did in earlier works. In the text she even demonstrates how she “underwrites” the authenticity of her characterizations: by first enacting, photographing, and then drawing each pose in every panel herself.

However, in contrast to Bechdel’s earlier work, Are You My Mother? is more limited in what literature it draws upon to illustrate the narrative and how. In this work, Bechdel mostly relies on psychoanalytic texts to both guide and illustrate what she can infer about herself from the dynamics of her intimate relationships. Though she discusses these ideas at length, and uses them to structure her narrative, Bechdel’s discussion of how she identified the explanatory power of Freud et al. is unsatisfying to say the least. Indeed, she says that following a therapy session she starting investigating the work of Freud, soon after got knocked between the eyes by a board and then developed a pimple between the eyes. The proximity of this trauma to her “third eye” caused her to surmise that “my unconscious was telling me to pay more attention to my unconscious” (49). Funny, yes, but she fails to make a case about why the reader might also consider psychoanalysis to be a compelling analytic framework. Perhaps I found that this lack of methodological grounding detracted from my enjoyment of the book so much because now when I come across a piece of work that looks like it could be autobiographical criticism I expect for it to read like Terry Goldie’s** more disciplined work, queersexlife (how now can I not be leery when I see theory applied without an extensive discussion of how the author identified [with it/it as a useful lens]?).

Notwithstanding the narrative flops (alluded to above and amply discussed elsewhere), Bechdel still demonstrates that she can translate complex ideas effectively, and, indeed, artfully. For instance, in the first section, Bechdel overlays a summary of Winnicot’s theory of object relations over a chart of the significant intimate relationships in her life, and demonstrates to the reader what his theory might elucidate (see below). Additionally, even if her ungrounded theorizing led to some facile characterization, we can still trust Bechdel to present characters with dimension, in this work experimenting with her style by adding shadows, in each panel showing the play of darkness and light.
 
Despite the (not infrequent) twinges of vicarious embarrassment I felt while reading Are You My Mother?, it was for the artistic details, and flashes of inspiration that made still made it a highly enjoyable work to read. They are also why I will eagerly seek out whatever future work Alison Bechdel produces.

 

**"tip o' the nib" to Ferg for suggesting this connection

Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow by Nicholas K. Blomley

Trust Google Images to present something that illustrates the cutting edge of socio-legal theory. Hmm. Or, actually, trust me to hastily argue that a silly picture is worth 111 pages of words. This is, of course, a great underestimation of Blomley's work and I guarantee (if I have any remaining credibility, that is) that arguments like the foregoing--tenuous at best, based on cursory research--are not to be found in the book of which this review takes as its subject. Additionally, and unlike that last sentence, Blomley's writing is lucid. Though his book is about something as pedestrian as, well, the pedestrianist logic that forms the foundation of the sidewalk, he makes his argument interesting and his prose playful.

Through his analysis, Blomley seeks to demonstrate how his choice to conceptualize space in terms of "civic humanism" in his past work "blackboxed" the processes that enabled the oppressive regulation of minorities (among other things). According to Blomley, socio-legal theorists and civil rights rhetoricians conceive of the sidewalk as a part of a Habermasian public sphere in which people should ideally be allowed to exercise their rights of free speech. However, by inquiring into the processes and logics that inform the material construction of the sidewalk (historically, municipally, judicially and legislatively) Blomley finds that its central purpose is to allow pedestrians' free, unobstructed circulation. Thus, sidewalks are constructed by civil engineers with a view to minimizing obstructions (human and non-human alike) to pedestrian flow. Hence, Blomley's provocative article title, "How to Turn a Beggar into a Bus Stop," and the google image of the anthropomorphized sign above; using the logic of pedestrianism, all barriers to foot traffic are equal, and we can objectify beggars, crowds of people waiting at a bus stop, and a street sign marking the bus stop in the same way. Judges and legislators conceive of these spaces similarly, viewing sidewalks' principal purpose as facilitating people's movement; people's right to speech are secondary in this context and should minimally impair people's (constitutionally entrenched, at least in Canada) right to mobility. Moreover, decisionmakers can assure themselves that they are not discriminaing when they pass laws against panhandling or find that people should not be able to sleep on the sidewalk if they are insulating themselves from the cold concrete by laying out newspaper (a.k.a. "a structure"); as anyone, regardless of class, is entitled to freely pass down these municipally tended tracks these decisions are in the public interest. Blomley concludes that human rights activists will continue to be frustrated and disappointed by the regulation of the sidewalk so long as they keep arguing in terms of the public sphere. He closes by suggesting we look beyond arguments about equal rights, by rejecting this idea that we are one people all stumbling around, bumping into, obstructing each other under the blanket of law. He seems to be arguing that instead of looking to the courts to determine how the sidewalk should be administered, justice will be done by having municipalities think more critically about the sidewalk. For Blomley, it's not a question of their bad faith, but the continued reliance on logics that structure human environments and behavioural possibilities that are indifferent and occasionally offensive to social justice.

As you can probably tell from the long summary of its contents, I really enjoyed this book. For one, it was informed by Blomley's work (of course), Riles, Valverde, and ANT. I wrote a paper in which I sought to account for "the how" and the space of Canadian law in one of the more influential graduate courses I took. It was especially exciting to see how someone else employed drew on these sources in their analysis. Second, I have recently been preoccupied by the practical realities and possible political and ethical implications of a street vendor program in Vancouver, so I am happy to have the work of a locally engaged academic from which to draw.

Fin.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

I jump around a bit in this one.

When I was 18 I fell in love with Jeanette Winterson as a character and as the writer of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. I admired the keen sense of irony she demonstrated in what she told her audience but also how she told it. Her fiction, which might have been (and probably still was) confused for her “facts of life” to nineteen, juxtaposed memoir with fairy tale tellings. These transitions felt easy even though, as she observes in "Deuteronomy" (“the last book of the law” in Oranges) that “People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so they know what to believe and what not to believe.” For Winterson, fairy tales, are no less reliable than historical accounts. Save for some generic conventions, history and “stories” are more or less the same in their truthiness; “stories” may even be more trustworthy because they suggest critical reflection by the reader. Though Winterson would rewrite the first five books of the Bible and make a character of the same name the protagonist, she is no omniscient narrator, and also shirks the epistemological authority that the historian would represent:

And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I also believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own.

I loved that her novel was something that queered history in clear and playful language. It became a go-to text for me because it made an argument for a postmodern ethic that wasn’t also hopelessly nihilistic. And I adored Jeanette for her sweetness, eccentricity, brilliance, and earnestness.

26 years after it was first published, Jeanette Winterson returns to Oranges in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?; she wrote the first when she was young, and wrote this most recent book when she was Junger. Funny that. I expect people fresh out of their English Lit degree to be in the midst of a love affair with psychoanalysis, but Winterson started later in life, beginning to study it in 1994 and more recently embracing a psychoanalyst as a romantic partner.

Winterson quotes Oranges and retells parts of it to, I suppose one could say, tell the history of her present: meeting her biological family, learning how to trust her most recent partner to love her, and her most recent experience of emotional devastation.

Curiously, she explicitly identifies that she will not discuss the period from about 1990 to 2007. I wonder what the rationale for that decision was. Was this out of respect for, for instance, the partners she had during these times? On the advice of her lawyers--to write only about people who signed releases / expand on a work published long ago... tested legal territory--to avoid lawsuits?

There are no fairy stories in this text, but there are allusions to Winterson’s perception of voices that are not be intelligible to others. In one sketch (she writes in sketches), she shares,

I often hear voices. I realise that drops me in the crazy category but I don’t much care. If you believe, as I do, that the mind want to heal itself, and that the psyche seeks coherence not disintegration, then it isn’t hard to conclude that the mind will manifest whatever is necessary to work on the job.

We now assume that people who hear voices do terrible things; murderers and psychopaths hear voices, and so do religious fanatics and suicide bombers. But in the past, voices were respectable—desired. The visionary and the prophet, the shaman and the wisewoman. And the poet, obviously. Hearing voices can be a good thing.

Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.

Ronnie Laing, the doctor and psychotherapist who became the trend 1960’s and 70s guru making madness fashionable, understood madness as a process that might lead somewhere. Mostly, though, it is so terrifying for the person inside it, as well as the people outside it, that the only route is drugs or a clinic.

And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.

Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.

Here she is historicizing madness but she is not dismissing, discrediting, or devaluing the experience of madness, nor does she apologize for her own experience. And I love her for showing me an example of how this might be done.

Full of it

The title of this particular post could refer to many things, including that right now I am very full from Thanksgiving dinner: day 3. The subject might also allude to this blog which is--oh woe--full of neglect. I have not been especially faithful to this site, betraying my commitment to it by attending to the Pivot blog. However, for what it's worth, gentle reader, the Pivot Point I made today was book-informed.

Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England by Mary Poovey

This entry might also be called “Praise Be the Ambleside Book Barn: Part II.” Of course, in line with what Ferg so coherently argued tonight about the conventions surrounding academic article titles, I could also get away with calling it anything, including “Shitting Bricks: The Structure, Function and Epistemic Irregularities of Victorian Discourses in Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments” (if anyone wants to contradict this, they’re going to have to deal with Jerome Bruner’s arguments about the hermeneutic composability of narratives first. Oh, and Ferg. Wouldn’t mess with that one—she’s a smart un).

Silliness aside, have I mentioned that I wish I had read this book last year? No? Well, I wish I had read this book last year when I was trying to hash out the why and how of reading Victorian parliamentary debates.

Poovey’s ambitions for this book were bigger than mapping out the ideology that gave power to and was driven by the workings of Parliament. Indeed, she sought to draw broad conclusions about Victorian society, and consequently based her reading a variety of texts (Hansard transcripts, pamphlets, medical books, literature, training manuals, Royal Commissions) and sites (the controversy over chlorophorm, rise of anaesthesia, divorce, work). More specifically, she sought to demonstrate that society varies the rights and responsibilities it devolves to people based on how it argues they are different.

Poovey argued that, in the case of gender, there seemed to be an ethical consensus that the prevailing distinction between the roles of men and women was correct. However, the logic from which people drew their ethical argument was inadequate. To offer one example, Poovey showed in the first chapter that doctors were unable to justify their authority over women’s bodies with their putative physiological expertise (try as they might in this time when midwives, clergy, and doctors competed for epistemological sovereignty over women’s bodies... I’m sure there was a less pretentious way to say that). Instead, doctors’ arguments hinged on moral points that sounded clerical (not clinical).

Poovey clearly wrote clearly insofar as my puny brain could keep track of her overarching argument as I read her work. Having said that, while I was making my way through the chapters, sometimes I found it hard to connect/remember and follow the many subpoints she made. While outlined her argument well, my lack of familiarity with her knowledge register (e.g., discussions of political economy) made it hard for me to follow it point-by-point at times. But don’t worry, Mary Poovey, it’s ok; I forgive you for my ignorance. Haha.

Another reason I think it was sometimes hard to follow her argument was because she didn’t set out her chapters like a line-drawing, moving down the line of argument to the other, point-by-point. Instead, she began each chapter with an overview of the issue she sought to illustrate, and then in the subchapters she sketched out the particular parts. To use her chapter “David Copperfield and the Professional Writer” as an example, in the first part Poovey began with a close reading of DC in which she laid out evidence suggesting that men were envisioned as dynamic characters who had the sense to make ethical choices. Women were static, but were integral to structuring the kinds of choices men faced. In part II of this chapter, she abruptly shifts from this microethnographic perspective to one that pans the social landscape in which this story was embedded. It was disorienting immediately moving to an analysis of the debates over the book industry and copy right. Nevertheless, her argument for this part concludes with her demonstration that the rhetoric supporting male authors’ compensation for their intellectual property sounded a lot like her reading of the sexual politics in DC (it hinged on the idea that male authors were moral compasses whose work depended on their ability to support their families, because these authors also depended on the support of their families). The way Poovey arranged her evidence is evocative of Plato’s allegory of the cave; one immediately jumps back and twists around from her position watching the shadow play, and finds herself looking at the necessary background. I really like this style because it highlights for the reader that different parts of an author’s arguments depend on different sources, all of which have different limitations. However, I think this particular juxtaposition might have avoided the same level of mental gymnastics had Poovey bridged these discussions with her consideration of Charles Dickens—the intermediary between these sites (I’m sure Poovey appreciates this constructive criticism. I should send her my masters work because it absolutely never, ever, ever had any questionable transitions).

In any case, I le dug this book. It was fascinating for me to see how she put together her work, and very impressive to see how she interrogated so many different texts and sites. It’s not often that I pick up a book and not only am interested but also feel inspired. However, as I went through Poovey’s work, that’s exactly how I felt.

Stella: Unrepentant Madame by Linda Eversole

Among the (many) benefits of having an English Lit major as a frequent companion this summer was that I found myself in the Ambleside Book Barn more than I did at any other time last year. Yes, the two times I went during the last several months represented a massive increase from the zero times I went in otherwise. Now, don’t get me wrong—it’s not that during the other eight months that this particular barn emitted hair curling scents, or was guarded by an intimidatingly stoic, pitch-fork wielding farm couple. No, it’s just that when I usually find myself in Ambleside I am in the company of a beagle who is both impatient (“Bored. Bored. Bored. Bored. Bored.”) and liable to convince herself that the resident Maine Coon would also make a most satisfying main meal.

The first time me and Ferg visited the book shop (BS!) I ended up purchasing a translation of the first volume of “The Novel” (that met with the approval of the Proust scholar standing next to me) and Linda Eversole’s Stella: Unrepentant Madame. I have yet to go the way of the Swann, but—perhaps knowing that time is at a premium with a madame—eagerly started reading Stella soon after I had purchased it.

I was initially very enthusiastic about Stella because I was acquainted with someone who knew the author when it was going in for publication and thought it sounded like an interesting topic, and continue to be interested in the Canadian regulation of vice. However, I think what was most intriguing about this book was that the publisher(?) noted that it was an example of the genre “creative non-fiction.”

From what I can tell from Eversole’s work, creative non-fiction involves the careful study of primary and secondary sources (her book has a bibliography that is separated accordingly). Each chapter also includes a number of endnotes that Eversole uses to point the reader to the particular sources from which she culled information. Unlike the books I have been reading lately (that also tackle history, but are not explicitly classified as “creative” works), Eversole’s text is not interrupted by admissions to gaps in information. Rather, the text is carried by an omniscient narrator. Consider, for example, the narrator’s report on Stella Carroll after she had been busted for running a bawdy house:

[…]Stella sat in jail, her thoughts racing as she massaged the stump of her leg. She would beat this as she had every other time. They don’t send ladies to jail—surely it was just the usual harassment, a small setback, and she’d be back in business by the end of the week. She had to face facts, though: this time it seemed different. The sick, nervous feeling in her stomach wasn’t the aftermath of too much rich food, alcohol and rage. It was what they called a “gut feeling,” and hers was saying there was trouble ahead. (Eversole, 2005, p.16)

Note the particular emotions that the narrator imputes to Stella. This passage is also not followed up by a citation for a journal entry or a personal letter. Perhaps the inclusion of this kind of scene by the author—presumably inspired by Eversole’s impression of how Stella would feel (given Eversole’s understanding of/identification with Stella after twenty years of mulling over sources) is what sets creative non-fiction apart. As in, the author admits that through an analysis of the sources s/he has created a relationship with the subject.

Clearly I find this idea of classifying a book as “creative non-fiction” conceptually very interesting, and compelling. I wish that more books would admit that, no, they are not just repositories of troo fax but represent mediated understandings that can only be further mediated.

Having said this, I really hate omniscient narrators; they just totally rub me the wrong way because I feel like I can’t trust them. More than that, and just so we don’t forget my arrogance, reading things like that makes me anxious that people will be seduced into feeling there is certainty when there is not. In any case, I would welcome the chance to read a creative non-fiction book in which the author made the narrator explicitly unreliable and began the book with a note on method.

The Grouse Grind as told by Liz Cave and Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers

So if this were not a literature blog I could write entries about, for instance, my harrowing experience completing the Grouse Grind with the Livy on Tuesday. She suggested that I could rightfully blog about it if I discussed it as a text. Indeed, I could... for instance, the experience was interrupted by two apparently unreliable narrators... one which marked hikers’ progress up the trail in orange spray paint and the other that communicated through official-looking signs. Other themes included peoples’ apparent jealousy of my jeans, and the Liv character’s tremendous foresight for bringing buns apart from her God-given ones. While this experience may not have been strictly literary, my ultimate justification for posting these observations is that this experience was occasionally litterey, and surely the two being almost homonyms makes them pretty well synonymous. See, no difference, only différance.

To salvage this entry to a topic that is more literally literature, I just finished Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye. I think Liv described the McCullers as “sensitive but not sentimental.” This is evinced in the narrator’s preoccupation with the relational dynamics between characters that seem to inform their actions, over certain gruesome “symptoms” of those relationships (like a character cutting off her nipples with garden shears).

I observed many parallels between this work and the film American Beauty. It contains a male military officer who hates/identifies/loves someone who in many ways seems detached from “The System” and who kills him in a murder suicide. A mysterious and socially unattached young man who becomes enamoured by a woman. A character who contemplates “a scrap of newspaper fluttering in the wind” which seems an awful lot like the plastic bag. A woman who is treated as though she is mad. Most of the characters seem to feel empty, or unfulfilled. I would not be surprised if Alan Ball is a Carson McCullers fan.

Of course, what American beauty lacks is a character like Anacleto who, wile preparing a tray for an inordinate amount of time, “kept up a soft and vivacious chattering to himself. The Major caught something about Mr. Rudolf Serkin and about a cat which was walking around in a candy counter with bits of peanut-brittle stuck to its fur.” Awesome. :)