Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (46 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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Page 146
"Edward Teller, Father of the Bomb. Innovator. Saviour" (p. 110), but of Sandra herself, the Astronomer Royal, his fellow-scientist and thus, in a double way, heir to his "genuine spirit of scientific enquiry" (p. 105). "I'm my father's daughter" (p. 105), owing to him not only atrocity, but in a more important way, intelligence and distinction. Acknowledging herself as ''a perfect little replica of my father" (p. 111) thus, unexpectedly, normalizes Sandra's previously unique monstrosity: "We are all misbegotten, by one form of monster or another" (p. 111).
As she struggles to recuperate her family history in
all
its horror, Sandra recuperates her own genetic complexity, and her innocence in cooperating with its continuity. Her achievement parallels Orestes' release from the Furies through the divine establishment of the Athenian justice system. In this frivolous novel, however, enfranchisement comes not from submission to a transcendently mandated political order but by the self's pleasure-saturated realization of her own accidental, fortuitous, and therefore innocent identity. This is the way everyone's life is. There's nothing to be angry at, and plenty to laugh about. Sandra may be Byronically "the point where the mad, the bad, and the infamous meet." But that means she is also a nexus of scientific genius, extraordinary sexual energy, and a marked ability at fiction (p. 137). Her new sense of self and the self's history maintain her clear right to continue her own scientific and sexual experimentation, including carrying "this baby" she has conceived with Jack, to "allow it its passage into daylight" (p. 155).
Nevertheless, in taking from her own father's and from Jack's potential for paternity as much as she needs and no more, Sandra sublates, she does not replicate, patriarchy and the male voice. Even a reputable patriarchal genetics, for example the Nobel Prize-winner François Jacob's
The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity,
insists, despite its emphasis on flexibility, that "A genetic code is like a language: even if they are only due to chance, once the relations between 'sign' and 'meaning' are established, they cannot be changed" (p. 316). For Jacob, history moves "In spite of errors, of dead ends, of false starts." But
Leader of the Band
comes to rejoice in a frivolous history, history that moves accidentally, luckily,
because
of errors, dead ends, false starts. Running away from a dull marriage, Sandra finds herself for the first time pregnant with a child she wants to have, while at the same time happily able to send her lover back to his dull wife. So much for unchanged and unchanging relations. This is a history that breaks off with a question"Who doesn't, these days?" (p. 155)that is, who doesn't these days worry whether a fetus will turn out he, she, or it? And then, leaving that question open-ended, goes on to append three stories that deconstruct the novel's primary narrative. So much for "established" meaning.
 
Page 147
Metis: An Epiphany
Bearing the child while sending Jack back to his dreary marriage, and spurning any claims on her even drearier husband, Sandra reverses Athena, mother and maternity repudiator. Early on, goaded by the Furies, Sandra saw herself as an Orpheus, forbidden to look back: "and he was a man, what hope is there for you, a woman?" (p. 45) But she has looked back, and as Orphic narrator redeemed her own Eurydice-self, from the hellish shadows that claimed her for an underworld of infertility and frenzy.
But we can perhaps go even further than the myths Weldon names, to one her frivolous inventions seem to adumbrate and renew. Behind the conventional narrative of Athena's "virgin-birth" from all-knowing Zeus, there's a feminist myth, long overlaid in the patriarchal myth-kitty. Hesiod claims that Zeus produced Athena apparently on his own only because he had actually swallowed up her pregnant mother, Metis, of whom he had become terrified. Metis meant terror to the all-ordering patriarch because, as Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests, she represented the "future understood as risk" (p. 1): "She tells the future not as something already determinate but as a possibilityeither good or ill; and at the same time she offers the use of her stock of wiles to make it turn out for the better rather than for the worse" (p. 1). Metis, lo and behold, is Alice's Mum! the Ur-goddess of frivolity! Reader, are you surprised?
Mum-Metis, urging our accidental nativities and luck-struck lives, prescribes Weldon's antidote to fury. Fury can only make most of us merely and noisily ineffectual. Think of the sad mess Ruth ends up, in that tower with "artificial copses and granite-fountained fish ponds" (
She-Devil,
p. 241), rewriting Mary Fisher's mindless, bloodless books. But relinquishing fury, the Starlady moves from "passing presenter" (p. 66) to "fulcrum where the past and future balance" (p. 155). Who then needs the boy-god Eros, petulant and obtuse, all overdetermination and depression, presiding over the sober "collectivity ... who" strive and tirelessly fail to ''communicate with each other by means of sex" (Jacob, p. 23). Not I! Not while Fay Weldon points frivolously beyond Athena to Metis, the mother-star, tricking again her lucky, long-extinguished beams. A leader about whom even her male devotees can band.
Notes
I am delighted to acknowledge a deep debt to my learned colleagues in the Georgetown University Classics Department, Joseph O'Connor and Victoria
 
Page 148
Pedrick, who pointed the way toward many of the arguments of this essay. And I wish especially to thank Fay Weldon for her typically generous response to my frivolous endeavor.
1. Of course, not all contemporary British women writers of distinction are frivolous. Margaret Drabble started out promisingly frivolous in novels like a
Summer Bird Cage
but seems to have lost heart about the time of
The Waterfall
. Doris Lessing is never frivolous and never less than magnificent. But that dark Sybil, Muriel Spark, has been frivolous during all of her distinguished career, except immediately after the Arab oil embargo (
The Takeover,
1976) when it was understandably trying for anybody to remain frivolous. And the frivolous also includes much of the fiction of the incomparable, and entirely underrated, Sylvia Townsend Warner, whose "A Love Match" may be counted the supreme frivolous short story.
2. Its clouded history at times overlaps and other times parallels what Peter Sloterdijk calls the
kynical
(
Critique of Cynical Reason
). Sloterdijk locates in classical figures like Diogenes and Lucan the practice of
kynicism,
the revolt of self against domination by power, including the power-seeking, disillusioned, and pessimistic rationalism of so much contemporary theory. In the simplest terms, he posits an opposition between a totalizing, idealistic cynicism, or enlightened false consciousness, which insists that we forget to laugh, and the survival of an earlier kynicism, which reminds us to laugh through an individual and happy refusal of, or at least resistance to, all forms of universalism. The frivolous I'm defining shares much with Sloterdijk's kynical, but differs significantly in refusing its obsessive and Teutonic obscenity. In some ways, following Sloterdijk, one might call kynicism the German frivolousor frivolity the British kynical.
3. My understanding of the frivolous, indeed my use of the term, depends heavily on Derrida's remarkable essay. But, for this chapter, I have decided to stress native British rather than pan-European sources and analogues. After Foucault, rewriting the history of a now much constrained British liberty requires increased and informed concern for the long, vibrant tradition of eccentricity that forms a vital feature of the British national and in many cases individual character. Especially of working- and lower-class eccentricity, a world virtually extirpated between the Blitz and the Telly. Dickens, for example, needs to be relocated even more insistently in the lower-middle-class urban world in which his antinomian moral imagination and his frivolous taste in entertainment was formed. No location for such study would prove more fruitful than the Music Hall, where figures like the inimitable Marie Lloyd represent heroines of a liberation Ibsen's women couldn't even die to achieve.
4. What follows assumes what I can't argue here:
That the frivolous descends at least from the eighteenth century, continuing and redefining that most misunderstood of modern regimes, the rococo. And, even before the rococo, that we can locate a kind of proto-frivolous in the beginning of modern consciousness: in mannerism.
That mannerism, the rococo, and the frivolous all three share an eccentric delight in, a disciplined deviation from, but not an explosion of, the norm, resisting an evolving bourgeois order, which founds its aesthetics and its ethics in a recovered and recuperated classicism.

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