The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822312921 ISBN 13: 9780822312925

Publisher: Duke University Press, 1993

Synopsis

For a long time now, readers and scholars have strained against the limits of traditional literary criticism, whose precepts—above all, "objectivity"—seem to have so little to do with the highly personal and deeply felt experience of literature. The Intimate Critique marks a movement away from this tradition. With their rich spectrum of personal and passionate voices, these essays challenge and ultimately breach the boundaries between criticism and narrative, experience and expression, literature and life.
Grounded in feminism and connected to the race, class, and gender paradigms in cultural studies, the twenty-six contributors to this volume—including Jane Tompkins, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Shirley Nelson Garner, and Shirley Goek-Lin Lim—respond in new, refreshing ways to literary subjects ranging from Homer to Freud, Middlemarch to The Woman Warrior, Shiva Naipaul to Frederick Douglass. Revealing the beliefs and formative life experiences that inform their essays, these writers characteristically recount the process by which their opinions took shape--a process as conducive to self-discovery as it is to critical insight. The result—which has been referred to as "personal writing," "experimental critical writing," or "intellectual autobiography"—maps a dramatic change in the direction of literary criticism.

Contributors. Julia Balen, Dana Beckelman, Ellen Brown, Sandra M. Brown, Rosanne Kanhai-Brunton, Suzanne Bunkers, Peter Carlton, Brenda Daly, Victoria Ekanger, Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, Shirley Nelson Garner, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Melody Graulich, Gail Griffin, Dolan Hubbard, Kendall, Susan Koppelman, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Linda Robertson, Carol Taylor, Jane Tompkins, Cheryl Torsney, Trace Yamamoto, Frances Murphy Zauhar

About this title

About the Author

Diane P. Freedman, Assistant Professor of English at University of New Hampshire, is the author of An Alchemy of Genres: Cross-Genre Writing by American Women Poet Critics.

Olivia Frey is Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies at St. Olaf College.

Frances Murphy Zauhar is Assistant Professor of English at St. Vincent College.

From the Back Cover

"Grouped together, these very different essays raise and respond to a question that feminist theorists continue to ask--about the extent to which individual experience and self-expression may be read as representative."--Rachel M. Brownstein, author of "Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Intimate Critique

Autobiographical Literary Criticism

By Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, Frances Murphy Zauhar

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1993 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-1292-5

Contents

1. Cover Page, 
2. Title Page, 
3. Copyright Page, 
4. Acknowledgments, 
5. Introduction, 
6. Part I Muse-ings on Genre, Autobiography, Narrative: Formative Strategies, 
7. Part II Critical Confessions, 
8. Part III Autobiographical Literary Criticism, 
9. Selected Bibliography, 
10. Contributors, 

CHAPTER 1

Border Crossing as Method and Motif in Contemporary American Writing, or, How Freud Helped Me Case the Joint

* * *

Diane P. Freedman

Throughout women's lives, the self is defined through social relationships; issues of fusion and merger of the self with others are significant, and ego and body boundaries remain flexible.—Judith Kegan Gardiner, "On Female Identity and Writing by Women"

When a graduate student in English, I became fascinated by post-Freudian theories like those informing Judith Kegan Gardiner's essay. As a writer-critic, I could identify with Gardiner's notion that for women there is a "continual crossing of self and other." Because of this ego crossing or merging, Gardiner goes on, "women's writing may blur public and private and defy completion"; it resists tidy alignment with a single genre or realm of discourse. For women, borders—of ego, genre, discipline, geography—are made to be crossed (for warring men, too, though their deadly border wars that simply reaffirm and rearrange dividing lines among nations are not what most women writers seek). Many contemporary women writers want an intimacy with their readers and subjects as well as with themselves, for, as Susan Griffin puts it, "separated from our authentic cries we become weak imitations of who it is we think we should be" (249). In a series of self-disclosures like Griffin's, increasing numbers of feminist poet-critics explicitly announce their commitment to forms which transgress conventions and so better facilitate communion with self and others. This metadiscursivity is another way in which women writers cross borders, loop the inside to the outside.

Many of these writers find border crossing a simultaneously risky and empowering metaphor or compositional mode. Perhaps the works best exemplifying the crossover and even cross-fire mode are those by writers who have had literal, geographic borders to cross, those writers exiled from both home and dominant, white, heterosexist, bourgeois culture. So Gloria Anzaldúa, in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a text foregrounding border crossing as the chief mode of her life and language, asserts she will face and overlap the borders of her many selves, countries, and cultures in her writing: "I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, White. I will have my serpent's tongue—my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence." Yet there are those not so often or obviously marginalized as a Chicana lesbian feminist writer from the working class who nonetheless feel themselves to be in the "Borderlands," where, as Anzaldúa describes it, "Being a writer feels very much like being a Chicana, or being queer—a lot of squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls. Or its opposite: nothing defined or definite, a boundless, floating state of limbo; ... [and yet] living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create" (72–73).

Many of us whose essays are assembled here feel ourselves in a kind of borderland, too often caught in the cross fire between cold, competitive, critical writing on the one hand and personal, even confessional, creative responses to literature and life on the other. We're caught between our families and our work, facing the pressures of publishing or perishing, choosing between traditional scholarship and feminism. Or we find ourselves faced with no such choices at all, scarcely being listened to, asked to quit griping and turn in our poetic licenses or quit this heady scene.

On the other side, we do have allies, even in surprising places. As Jane Gallop, who crosses disciplinary borders in her writing to join psychoanalysis with literary criticism, feminism, and poststructuralism, tells us, "[Freud] too worked at the juncture of the autobiographical and the theoretical, inventing a science by interpreting his own dreams and personal history in connection with his work with others.... Willy-nilly, he stumbled into a realm of knowledge where science is not clearly separated from poetry" (5–6). And it is that Jewish writer-analyst Freud, I recently realized, who helped me route my way away from tidy generic and critical borders or boundaries. As I read and was inspired by the liberatory aesthetics of American poet-critics Gallop, Anzaldúa, Adrienne Rich, Louise Bernikow, Susan Griffin, Marge Piercy, Maxine Hong Kingston, Judy Grahn, Mary Daly, and so many others, Freud—and my father's home library—came to mind.

When as a sophomore English major I learned that several of my professors considered Freud's and other psychoanalysts' writing relevant to the study of literature, I looked around at my father's collection for a book of Freud's work. I knew my father had once intended to become a psychiatrist and had earned an M.A. in psychology; moreover, he had an extensive collection of books, most stamped with the little man (Mercury) that is the logo of the Random House "Modern Library." The text I found, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, translated, edited, and introduced by Dr. A. A. Brill, fascinated me, and my father said I could keep it for my own. I have it to this day, though I have not read much beyond Brill's introduction, having taken most of my Freud in smaller, paperback doses doctored by other editors and translators. But what fascinated me about this edition was the final footnote to Brill's introduction: "Alas! As these pages are going to the printer we have been startled by the terrible news that the Nazi holocaust has suddenly encircled Vienna and that Professor Freud and his family are virtual prisoners in the hands of civilization's greatest scourge" (32).

This footnote or epilogue showed me that a book's "borders"—its packaging, format, and the contexts in which it is read and published— are inseparable from its more apparent content. Not only was an author more a part of the text than I had imagined, but so were its editors and readers. Brill alerted me to the fact that every book, every reading, is laced and surrounded with circumstances worth considering, border crossings within the text as well as at its edges. (It wasn't until later that I saw the sustained and sophisticated use of border imagery foregrounded in works by ethnic-American women, about which I speak more in the book-length study from which this essay derives.)

Brill's entire introduction expresses, even without its final alarum and news brief, such personal and dramatic concern for the safekeeping of Freud's works that I was shocked, since such voicings, such extratextual paraphernalia were not a concern of the New Criticism practiced in the literature seminars of my day. The introduction forced me to be an active reader newly attentive to the many forces behind a published text. I was intrigued by Brill's personal relationships with Freud and Jung as well as with the notion that Nazism threatened all readers of the Random House Basic Writings along with "Professor Freud." I was amazed by the intrusion of the "real" world into the written. I might never read another book immune to the circumstances of its production and my reception. For all I could not comprehend the bulk of the translated Freud, I nonetheless could be both moved and amused by Dr. Brill's old-fashioned cry, "Alas!"

Knowing little about Freud at the time, I had no idea whether he escaped the Nazi occupation unharmed or died in fear or violence. World War II became suddenly real to me, while Freud's life became novelistic: he, his translators, and I traversed the borders of fiction and fact, story and data. I felt invaded by the text as my personal circumstances seemed suddenly written into it. Brill couldn't resist the simultaneous melodrama and authenticity of an exclamatory footnote; I couldn't resist it either. The text expanded to include for me the mysterious fact of my father the doctor almost becoming a psychiatrist; my own desire for father Freud's book from my father's large library of male-tattooed texts; my being a woman with a Jewish surname long after the Nazi reign and Freud's death from natural causes; and, finally, my written record of all this here. We were language lovers all—writer, translator, reader. Philology brought us into countries occupied by one another. Footnotes and margin notes suddenly confettied and confounded the tome.

Like my father, however, I am not a psychoanalyst, so I stop this story, whose full psychological significance is likely beyond me, here. I can say, however, that in the footnote (or this preamble) lies the beginning of my fascination with texts on the border, authors in war zones, the imagery of edges, cross fire, crosshatching. Yet I wanted my own library, one of recent writers whose experiences were closer to my own, one with no more little men embossing the book covers. Perhaps even more to the point, I needed to tell my own story, and now I am. As Barbara Christian, quoting Marcelle Thiébaux, writes in Black Feminist Criticism, "The only possible library for a woman is one invented by herself, writing herself or her own discourse into it" (x).

When I began to write poems, I found it necessary to express what I considered the end points of my identity: the Russian Jew and the Ukrainian Catholic. Part of what disturbed me about the Freudian footnote was that I was a Jew terrified of Nazism—and yet, I was not a Jew. I felt awed and guilty as I read about Freud's danger: I was not a Jew in danger; I didn't know enough about World War II; I felt ineligible to learn even my own family's history. I wrote poems informed by these twin senses of uncertainty and guilt and learned that my identity was not in fact neatly suspended between two poles or end points. Instead, like the identities of the contemporary feminist writers whose border-crossing works originally inspired this essay, my identity oscillates among sometimes fogged-in points of reference, multiple angles of vision—and confusion. Like other contemporary women poet-critics, I find I oscillate between poetry and prose as well. I seek prose to relieve the gnomic anxiety of poetry, poetry to override the seeming clarity and control of prose. Prose has tidy borders on the page, poetry a tidal edge—no clear edge at all.

Yet though poetry may "speak the language of wildness and danger," it is also, according to Susan Griffin, "a secret way through which we can restore authenticity to ourselves" (245). This alternating of prose with poetry keeps me from sticking too blandly to a critical discourse I find constricting, helps me find my true subject and subjectivity, as the Lacanians say. And that subjectivity is inevitably crosshatched, multiple.

I thus cross and examine (or cross-examine) the borders, edges, limits, overlaps of my ethnic and religious identities in my poems "The Performance" and "The Way the Gravestones Align." Like Adrienne Rich, I grew up technically neither Jew nor Gentile and yet temperamentally, genealogically, both. Under Conservative or Orthodox Jewish law, Rich and I are not Jewish because our mothers are not. We also did not qualify under Reformed Jewish law because although one parent was Jewish, we were not raised as Jews. And I'm not considered Catholic because my father is not, although my having been baptized may complicate things.

While Rich had a largely Christian social life and even attended for five years an Episcopalian church where she was baptized and confirmed, I had a largely Jewish social life in my Long Island, New York, hometown of Jericho, but I was sent neither to temple nor church and was kept fairly ignorant of both religions, their rituals, their politics. I did learn that my mother's church had been a Ukrainian Catholic one, itself a cross between the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, though the services in her hometown, Shamokin, Pennsylvania, were in either Latin or Ukrainian. When I was about eight, I found a rosary in her bedroom, and I asked her whether she still believed in Jesus; she said yes. And then, about the time I was twelve and beginning to attend my school friends' bar or bat mitzvahs, my mother told me I had been baptized as an infant and that I had godparents somewhere in Pennsylvania. My younger sisters and brother had not been similarly baptized, and I never saw my godparents. I was left in limbo, which alternately relieved me (I did not have to learn Hebrew like my complaining friends, nor did I have to devote Sundays to dressing up and quieting down) and left me painfully without faith—in anything:

The Performance

You go over the parts of your costume:
black tights, black slippers, tunic,
a black cross on a black string.

You play a nun, a barmaid, a singer
all rolled into one.
You've washed the tights, your cap,
and your feet,
but you're not sure about
this part.

The curtain is black. The stage will be dark.
They'll film you
with eely black film.

In the dressing room, before the show,
the cast has forgotten roses
for the director.
She has penned notes.
In yours, black squiggles say: "Hold onto your
cross!" She doesn't want your arms to bounce up and
down when you sing.

You can do nothing right.
You've left your husband.
You forgot about gift-giving.
When you get whacked in the ass by the
bartender on stage, you don't react.
You never had any faith.
You never knew your lines.

You try to pray.

I had gotten too many mixed messages about how best to perform, not only as an actor in an ambiguous role, but as wife, daughter, woman, Christian, Jew. Perhaps, as Gloria Anzaldúa confesses she sometimes feels, "I have so internalized the borderland conflict that ... I feel one cancels out the other, and [I am] zero, nothing, no one" (63). I have been at a cold and uncomfortable cross/roads:

The Way the Gravestones Align:
Ithaca, NY/Shamokin, PA

When it snows, the churchyard in Ithaca
is as clean as a salt crystal.
The pastor heaves the church-big door,
and I cover my head with a red wool hat.

Sunday makes me angry;
I wear red instead of veiling myself.
I never go to church; my mother married a Jew.

But once with my grandmother and in a purple coat,
I went to a Ukrainian service in Shamokin—
where my uncle as a child fell off the only bicycle
and broke his arm, so my mother was forbidden to try.

Since in Shamokin lavender is for
ladies' death clothes, I remember
I had to beg my mother for that coat.
My cousin and I dozed as the nuns spoke.

(Today the churchyard in Ithaca is cold,
and all the crosswalks are empty.)

The graveyard in Shamokin is
the highest point in town, higher
than the stripped coal hills:
old women tighten babushkas and hope to be buried
in warm weather, deep, with all the people there.

It was hard, that December, seeing
my lilac-clad Baba in the middle of a box,
feeling forced to kiss the cross, wear black,
and pray, as snow furred the ground
and made slippery our vows and wheels.

Since writing this poem and reading accounts of others "split at the root," to borrow Adrienne Rich's repeated image, I am more at home with my collective past, feeling generally enriched by my double heritage, my connection with other Americans of mixed heritage, my connection to "old country" Russia. I have felt a mild but lingering guilt about not identifying equally with my parents' different heritages, this milder guilt replacing the unease I'd felt earlier about not knowing my past, of having it kept a secret from me. But I have also found strength in resisting what may be the coercive aspects of each heritage: I always caricatured my relatives on my mother's side as people who said "be good" and those on my father's side as those who said "do well." I suppose I feel I've done mostly the latter by becoming a poet-scholar, following in the tradition of my Jewish great-great-grandfather. In Russia, just before the turn of the century, he published books of Jewish philosophy and history in which four different speakers argue in poetry throughout (his original form contains six words per line, six lines per stanza). In America many of my Jewish relatives were great students, if not writers; my own father, a physician, recited Blake and Keats to me when as a child I watched him shave. It is easy to see how I became enamored of his library, including his Oxford Book of English Verse—and yet I am adverse to writing formal verse myself.

In contrast, many of my Catholic relatives today, none of them scholars, work in factories or service positions. My maternal grandmother, a wonderful gardener, seamstress, and cook, never learned to read either Ukrainian or English; my grandfather the coalminer wasn't much of a reader or writer, though my mother tells me he was extremely gentle, a pacifist. Herself a college-educated nurse, my mother read my siblings and me Bible stories in our youth. Though she confided to me her own love for flashlight-reading Shakespeare (over the objections of her mother, who wanted her early in bed), my mother rarely if ever read us poems or plays. Yet the enduring details of her family members' lives—my aunt still lives in the house where she and my mother were born—held me too. I learned from them the pleasures of personal history and continuity in the face of my perceived conflicts and discontinuities. I grew proud of both my heritages, envious of Baba's enduring faith, her girlhood in the Ukrainian countryside, and her house in the Pennsylvania hills (Long Island is flat, our house on a dull, suburban grid), if more comfortable with the Jewish intellectual tradition and the reading and writing it has led me to do.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Intimate Critique by Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, Frances Murphy Zauhar. Copyright © 1993 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822312921
• ISBN 13: 9780822312925
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Freedman Diane P., Frey Olivia, Zauhar Frances Murphy