Bibliography
Nov. 26th, 2012 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyNightwood – Djuna Barnes
Crikey, this was an odd read - it's only a slim novel, but I kept on having to re-read sections to make sure I'd understood what Barnes was saying. And given that she sneaks in some really filthy material, it's worth paying attention to what she says carefully. For a start, the novel is actually an exploration of lesbian and gay identities in 1920s Paris, which you totally miss from T. S. Eliot's very sly introduction (he alludes to one particularly impressive scene and I had to go back and re-read his comments to see if he had in fact been as underhanded as I thought he had - and yes, yes, he had). It traces the life of Robin Vote, a woman who marries into faded pseudo-aristocracy, has a child, takes up with a long-time female lover, is seduced away by another woman, and (so the novel implies) finally comes back to her first female lover in the end. The woman in question is a tormented soul - but frankly, so are all the characters, regardless of sexual orientation.
Barnes also includes a queer doctor, a loquacious, volatile sort, who for some reason acts as a sounding board and a source of considerable background information on the practices of the gay community in Paris. His life is painted as a rather sad and miserable thing, full of unsatisfied longings that can never quite come together because of his sexuality (which he at one point frames in terms of being born into a misgendered body), but at the same time it is to him that the women turn in order to have their own sexual desires explained. Or, rather, he fills in the silence while they refuse to move from the object of their respective affections.
I'm honestly not entirely sure what to make of this piece except to gasp at the sheer nerve it took Eliot to publically commend it given its subject matter. I had known, although I have only just remembered, that Nightwood is one of the reasons that we're so sure the Left Bank in Paris was associated with the lesbian scene, and thus one of the reasons that Hope Mirrlees and Jane Harrison's choice to reside there is read as Significant. But I honestly had not imagined that it would be something as frank and explicit as this.
I'm letting the subject matter get in the way of the content, and I should say that Barnes' characters are very complex, that the writing is a great example of modernist tendencies in fiction at this period, and that the moral outcome of the events described therein is pleasingly unresolved (nobody dies or suffers beyond what might be considered acceptable levels of relationship fallout). Apparently this is a roman à clef, or a novel based on real life and only vaguely disguised, but I don't know the period well enough to judge. Anyway. Read it.
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston
Also, read this. I have never quite had a reading experience like this before. Kingston's parents came to America from China but always intended to go back; they never did, but Kingston and her siblings grew up in a strange half-world. The ghosts of the title are the white people among whom Kingston and her family live; her mother makes great effort to separate her children from the world of the ghosts and keep them within a traditional Chinese culture, but at the same time not quite giving them the framework they need to understand the unspoken assumptions about how it works.
Kingston interweaves her family's personal history with old Chinese folktales, and it's the retelling of these stories that I found particularly powerful. There's a very poignant strand to them, of stories that create heroines where Kingston's own experience said heroines could not exist, and how they counter what she is told about America and China by those around them. It's one of those books that shows the intersection between cultures in a very powerful way.
Now, I'm not saying that the book is entirely free from Orientalism and exoticism and all that sort of thing. If you're retelling ancient fable, it's kind of a ready-made trap. But at the same time, the historical material about the Cultural Revolution and post-Second World War China and America and the cultural expectations of the Chinese expatriate community... Let's put it this way, you wouldn't want to cite it as the authority on What Life Was Like Under These Circumstances in a historical article, but it's a fascinating insight into one woman's experience of living under conditions which feel utterly foreign to me.
Crikey, this was an odd read - it's only a slim novel, but I kept on having to re-read sections to make sure I'd understood what Barnes was saying. And given that she sneaks in some really filthy material, it's worth paying attention to what she says carefully. For a start, the novel is actually an exploration of lesbian and gay identities in 1920s Paris, which you totally miss from T. S. Eliot's very sly introduction (he alludes to one particularly impressive scene and I had to go back and re-read his comments to see if he had in fact been as underhanded as I thought he had - and yes, yes, he had). It traces the life of Robin Vote, a woman who marries into faded pseudo-aristocracy, has a child, takes up with a long-time female lover, is seduced away by another woman, and (so the novel implies) finally comes back to her first female lover in the end. The woman in question is a tormented soul - but frankly, so are all the characters, regardless of sexual orientation.
Barnes also includes a queer doctor, a loquacious, volatile sort, who for some reason acts as a sounding board and a source of considerable background information on the practices of the gay community in Paris. His life is painted as a rather sad and miserable thing, full of unsatisfied longings that can never quite come together because of his sexuality (which he at one point frames in terms of being born into a misgendered body), but at the same time it is to him that the women turn in order to have their own sexual desires explained. Or, rather, he fills in the silence while they refuse to move from the object of their respective affections.
I'm honestly not entirely sure what to make of this piece except to gasp at the sheer nerve it took Eliot to publically commend it given its subject matter. I had known, although I have only just remembered, that Nightwood is one of the reasons that we're so sure the Left Bank in Paris was associated with the lesbian scene, and thus one of the reasons that Hope Mirrlees and Jane Harrison's choice to reside there is read as Significant. But I honestly had not imagined that it would be something as frank and explicit as this.
I'm letting the subject matter get in the way of the content, and I should say that Barnes' characters are very complex, that the writing is a great example of modernist tendencies in fiction at this period, and that the moral outcome of the events described therein is pleasingly unresolved (nobody dies or suffers beyond what might be considered acceptable levels of relationship fallout). Apparently this is a roman à clef, or a novel based on real life and only vaguely disguised, but I don't know the period well enough to judge. Anyway. Read it.
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston
Also, read this. I have never quite had a reading experience like this before. Kingston's parents came to America from China but always intended to go back; they never did, but Kingston and her siblings grew up in a strange half-world. The ghosts of the title are the white people among whom Kingston and her family live; her mother makes great effort to separate her children from the world of the ghosts and keep them within a traditional Chinese culture, but at the same time not quite giving them the framework they need to understand the unspoken assumptions about how it works.
Kingston interweaves her family's personal history with old Chinese folktales, and it's the retelling of these stories that I found particularly powerful. There's a very poignant strand to them, of stories that create heroines where Kingston's own experience said heroines could not exist, and how they counter what she is told about America and China by those around them. It's one of those books that shows the intersection between cultures in a very powerful way.
Now, I'm not saying that the book is entirely free from Orientalism and exoticism and all that sort of thing. If you're retelling ancient fable, it's kind of a ready-made trap. But at the same time, the historical material about the Cultural Revolution and post-Second World War China and America and the cultural expectations of the Chinese expatriate community... Let's put it this way, you wouldn't want to cite it as the authority on What Life Was Like Under These Circumstances in a historical article, but it's a fascinating insight into one woman's experience of living under conditions which feel utterly foreign to me.
