Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (25 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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"Say Your Goodbyes and Go": Death and Women's Power in Fay Weldon's Fiction
Elisabeth Bronfen
In her seminal article "Metaphor-into-Narrative: Being Very Careful with Words," Regina Barreca argues that one of the strategies contemporary women writers have developed, in order to critique the cultural image repertoire within which and against which they write, could be defined as a translation of traditional tropes into tellingly critical stories. "By attaching a buried literal meaning to what is intended to be inert and meaningless," she argues, ''women subvert the paradigmatic gesture of relief that is seen to characterize comedy" (p. 244). Reliteralizing what has become merely symbolic, this strategy serves to uncover some of the presuppositions tacitly accepted in an act of "feminine transsubstantiation that makes a word the thing itself as well as the representation of the thing." Where the joke depends on the mistake of taking something figuratively when it turns out to have been meant literally, Barreca adds, comedy is more apocalyptic than reassuring.
Giving somatic materiality to what seems safely symbolic in a sense, however, becomes a fascinating and dangerous game with fatality as well. Not only because the resubstantiation turns a living body into a dead sign, but also because it seems to be endowed with an "ability to bring the 'dead' back to life." The duplicity this narrative strategy unfolds is the following. Even as it reduplicates cultural conventions of femininityby figuratively deadening the stories of real women into clichésit also revives the dead metaphor in a twofold manner. The cliché as "dead met-
 
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aphor" is shown to be alive after all. At the same time, this resubstantiation also serves to articulate another meaning, namely feminine power, buried beneath woman's social deformation by cultural representations. In the following discussion I will offer a reading of two novels by Fay Weldon
Remember Me and Life and Loves of a She-Devil
so as to delineate how taking the figurative literally, how giving somatic, bodily quality to what seems to be safely symbolic can involve fatality as well. The ensuing "comic turn, turned serious" (
She-Devil,
p. 278) may be seen as a specific feminist confrontation between comedy and death.
To do so, however, I must add another rhetorical device to my discussion. For in his semiotic analysis of contemporary myths, Roland Barthes has given a definition of tautology that is apt for an analysis of the feminist strategy of plot-revision that Weldon employs. "One takes refuge in tautology," he argues, "as one does in fear, or anger, or sadness, when one is at a loss for an explanation: the accidental failure of language is magically identified with what one decides is a natural resistance of the object" (p. 142). The narrative use of tautology involves taking recourse to a rhetoric where like is defined by like, because the reality one seeks to describe has led one into a discursive impasse. However, rather than attributing this impasse directly to the condition one seeks to describe, one faults language instead. In so doing, one shifts the problem of descriptive failure from one level of signification to another, from the phenomenological or material to the rhetorical. "In tautology," Barthes continues, "there is a double murder: one kills rationality because it resists one, one kills language because it betrays one. Tautology is a faint at the right moment, a saving aphasia, it is a death, or perhaps a comedy, the indignant 'representation' of the rights of reality over and above language.... Now any refusal of language is a death. Tautology creates a dead, motionless world."
I want to highlight the conjunction of death and comedy. Tautology may testify to a profound distrust of language, which is rejected because it has failed. At the same time, tautology may also be used to deconstruct why a certain type of languagecertain established plots and metaphorsought if not to be rejected, then at least to be mistrusted. If one turns Barthes's argument inside out, one could argue that narrative instances, where the comic and the fatal come together, in some way also necessarily employ the rhetoric strategy of excess as redundancy. For another definition of tautology is that this rhetorical figure produces an emphasis or precision in definition through the admission of superfluity. Given that in patriarchal society both the dead and women have, at least in their cultural constructions, repeatedly been defined as superfluous, the conjunction of these two conceptsWeldon's repeated use of a dead woman returned to
 
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the livingonce again points us into the direction of tautology. This ghostly aspect of the rhetoric of tautology will allow me, a little further on, to discuss two aspects of the uncanniness of the double. For the uncanny double can refer to a dead body returned in the diegetic world of the narrative, but it can also refer to the rhetorical strategy of duplicating a figurative with a literal meaning on the extradiegetic level, the text's structure.
When one is concerned with feminist revisions of cultural representations, it seems necessary to highlight both the axis of continuity and the axis of disruption. That is to say, we need to ask what elements of Western patriarchal culture continue to inhabit our image repertoire as we rethink the stories that are useful for women to write today. I have chosen these two novels by Fay Weldon because their theme is a common one in our cultureghost stories that delineate the power dead women have over the living. I want to argue that these two novels serve as particularly salient examples for a feminist strategy of writing that undermines the clichés of patriarchal culture by making dead language excessively and thus self-consciously dead, because in these two texts the ghost theme supports a ghostly rhetoric. For the notion both novels address is that feminine characters acquire their power only once they are deadas angels or demons, as phantoms or ancestors, as monuments or mummysall of which ultimately point back to the maternal body lost with birth. Or, as Sigmund Freud (1913) formulates the mythopoetic conjunction between femininity and death, there are "three inevitable relations that a man has with a womanthe woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him." The three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a man's life are "the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once more" (p. 301). Weldon's comic tautology, her feminine resubstantiation, seems to ask, what does this tripartite feminine death figure look like from the position of the woman, rather than the man? Is it still reassuring, is it so inevitable?
Her narrative strategy of feminine resubstantiation deconstructs this common patriarchal mythopoetics, however, not only by thematically addressing the issue of the powerful feminine ghost, but also by rhetorically constructing a textual revenant. What is significant about these two novels by Fay Weldon, I want to argue, is not only the fact that they disrupt a conventional cultural plot motive in order to offer a feminist deconstruction of presuppositions about femininity, power, and death. Rather, they do so by virtue of the rhetorical strategy of hyperbolic tautology, that is to say by virtue of excess, of exaggeration. The genre these texts can be sub-
 
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sumed under is that of the humorous, which, when in conjunction with a thematic concern with death and when taken to an excessive degree, becomes the macabre. My concern is thus Weldon's use of excessive humor, with her notion of a rhetoric of overturning or redundant doubling that moves back into the literal, to the real, to the serious, even as it remains within the semiotic space of the text and never entirely abandons a comic tone.
The plot common to both novels is that the heroine is placed in a liminal period between life and death, and that she gains authority from this position. Each novel addresses the issue of mourning as a dialectic between remembering and forgetting. In each the dead woman continues to have power over the living, to influence their lives. These revenants are doubled because they appear to be both present and absent, alive and dead. Death places the survivors in a liminal position as well, destabilizes their sense of self and of their position in the world. These dead but returned heroines, these feminine corpses that won't lie still in their graves, pose what Margaret Higonnet has called a "hermeneutic task." They force the survivors to read their death. In order to reestablish peace and sever themselves from the dead woman, the survivors must produce an explanatory text. They must settle on a satisfying interpretation of the death they are suddenly faced with, even as the double body of the deceased woman must be restabilized in the form of a clear separation between her body and her soul. Her grave must be closed, concomitant with a closing of her case. All duplicity and ambivalence that were initially engendered by her ghostly presence and the uncanny power connected with this liminal position must be eliminated.
These two novels by Weldon thus serve as superlative examples for the narrative technique of tautological resubstantiation of clichés, for here the rhetoric of reliteralizing is doubled by the theme of revivification. A safe, figurative meaning loses its reassuring quality by turning literal in narratives where the protagonist either dies to return as a revenant or where she kills her body so as to return as the living embodiment of a cliché of feminine beauty. However, as a dead woman is literally unburied and revived, two forms of rhetorical unburying occur. The socially dead feminine body has its analogy in the supposedly inert and meaningless figurative phrase used to characterize it: in
Remember Me,
the discarded first wife is accused of being a parasitic, burdensome vampire; in
Life and Loves of a She-Devil,
the protagonist realizes that the world wants women to "look up to men." These dead tropes, i.e., cultural conventions, can be materialized only in the advent of deathMadeleine's ghost returns to restructure the lives of those she left behind, and Ruth literally cuts her
 
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body up so as to comply with her culture's feminine beauty myth. The sad paradox Weldon deconstructs is that actual death endows her heroines with a power they never had in life.
Yet what radically irritates us, is that these heroines gain power by confirming to excess the cultural formations that were shown to turn them prematurely into inert and meaningless beings. Weldon thus deconstructs clichés of femininity so as to uncover an array of tacitly accepted presuppositions, by showing that curtailing language can conceivably produce real suffering. Yet she does so by having her protagonists perform these cultural formations to excess, in a ghostly representation with their body that reliteralizes the contradictionMadeleine and Ruth have power, but they are dead or bodily transformed. In her texts, the enactment of a non-coincidence of the story of real women and the cliché "Woman" is such that each female character self-consciously turns her historical self into a figure, resisting an identification with these curtailing images precisely by complying with them, but to excess; "a comic turn, turned serious." They enact what it looks like if the language that performs tropes of femininity becomes reality, so that the figuratively dead feminine body is literally killed, only to become alive and socially powerful for the first time.
In order to illustrate more precisely in what sense each of these texts makes use of a feminist strategy of turning the comic into the serious or turning the serious, on the face of things, into the comic, so that it is this doubled turning that makes up the real tautological excess of these narratives, it will be necessary to digress briefly by turning to a psychoanalytic discussion of the theme and rhetorical function of the ghost as an uncanny double. In his discussion of the concept of the uncanny, Sigmund Freud (1919) turns the lack of a clear definition into the crux of this concept's rhetorical strategynamely as a semantic subversion based on the blurring of stable concepts. In order to explain the fundamental instability at the core of the uncanny, Freud focuses on two central features. Because in German the word uncanny (
unheimlich
) refers both to the familiar and the agreeable (one could add the culturally accepted figural meaning) and to something concealed, kept out of sight (the buried, literal meaning) it comes to signify any moment where meaning develops in the direction of ambivalence until it coincides with its opposite. Semantic oppositions collapse and a moment of ambivalence emerges, which induces intellectual hesitation (
unsicherheit
). As a situation of undecidability, where fixed frames or margins are set in motion, the uncanny also refers to moments where the question whether something is animate (alive) or inanimate (dead), whether something is real (literal) or imagined (figural), a unique original or a repetition, a copy, can not be decided. Again, I would add,
 
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the uncanny also marks such moments where serious and comic can not be differentiated. One could extend Freud's definition to include instances that involve the ambivalent distinction between a material animate, immediate and literally self-present body and its representation, as immaterial, inanimate, belated figural body signifying through the interplay of absence and presence. Because the uncanny in some sense always involves the question of visibility/invisibility, presence to/absence from sight, and the fear of losing one's sight serves as a substitute in Western cultural myth and image repertoire for castration anxiety, the uncanny always entails anxieties about fragmentation, about the disruption or destruction of any narcissistically informed sense of personal stability, body integrity, immortal individuality.
Freud locates the main source for an experience of the uncanny in the compulsion to repeat, to represent, double, supplement; in the recurrence or re-establishment of similarity; in a return to the familiar that has been repressed. This doubling, dividing, and exchanging can, furthermore, involve the subject in his relation to others as she or he either identifies with another, as she or he substitutes the other, external self for her or his own, or as she or he finds her or himself incapable of deciding which of the two her or his self really is. Since the most important boundary blurring inhabited by the uncanny is that between the real and fantasy, Freud finds analogies to the animistic belief in an omnipotence of thought in primitive cultures. He also draws a parallel between the uncanny omnipotence of thought and the developing infant's unrestricted narcissistic valorization of psychic processes over material reality. This gesture of potency is repeated in adult neurosis whenever the ego needs to defend itself against the manifest constraints and prohibitions of the symbolic and the real. An effacement of the boundary distinction between fantasy and reality occurs when something is experienced as real which up to that point was conceived as imagined; when a symbol takes over the full functions and meanings of the object it symbolizes; when a symbol enacts a sublation of signifier and signified or an effacement of the distinction between literal and figural.
One could also extend Freud's definition to say the uncanny marks a moment where desire for something, along with an unbroken belief in the omnipotence of one's ideas, sublates into anxiety about something, into a disbelief in one's own self-construction. When Freud says that the most common images of the uncanny are
doppelgänger
and revenants, the dead returned, he points to a fundamental instability in our attitude toward death. In the figure of the double, death returns as something known but defamiliarized by virtue of a substitution. Instances of the uncanny mark

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