Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (9 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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about things she has no expert knowledge of, to "not knowing" about things that she should have expert knowledge of, that Weldon appears quite the punk.
Ideology: No Headquarters
What seems particularly refreshing, if slightly naive, about the punk is his/her anarchic rejection of dogma, of party politicsthere is the avoidance of what George Woodstock calls "systematic theory." The situationists say that "there is no such thing as situationism" and that they have no desire for it, because, as Greil Marcus points out, all ideologies are alienations, "transformations of subjectivity into objectivity" (p. 52). As one gives oneself over to a particular set of beliefs, one becomes an object of them. When Malcolm McLaren bought books on situationism for the pictures, "not the theory'' (Savage, p. 30), he was practicing for punk. The Sex Pistols were designed to "make an impression," to make a picture, rather than make a political theory. On (non)principle, the Riot Grrrls advocate a similar rejection of ideologythey claim that they "don't have a doctrine," says Molly Neuman of Bratmobile, or any "10-point program." It seems that style rather than ideological agreement is paramount to the punk and that punk itself seems to operate as a practice rather than a politics. Even though ideological biases can be found in such practices, it is not necessarily because the punk puts them there.
In a similar fashion, Weldon seems to resist ideology and, particularly, a party political, "prepackaged" feminism. Despite the fact that she is invariably called a feminist, she refuses a totalizing notion of feminism and, in fact, ridicules and problematizes feminist identity itself. For instance, Weldon laughs at the fact that the American publishers of
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
cut out Ruth's less-than-joyous trip to a feminist commune"no ideological unsoundness" for them, she chuckles. When asked to define feminism, she dismissively says she can't remember what she said the last time, but that there is, for her, "no party headquarters," "nobody to issue an ideological card" (Mile). Clearly for Weldon, feminist identity is as slippery as all the other kinds. Sometimes, in fact, she seems highly critical of the movement's single-mindedness"In recent years," she argues, "feminism and the preoccupation with domestic justice has blinded us to the wider issues" (Bovey). Feminism cannot offer decrees for Weldon, that much seems certain.
The Audience: No Respect
Weldon may take responsibility for her own identity and its invention, its knowledge, and its affiliations, but she clearly takes no responsibility for
 
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her audience. This refusal is essentially punk in nature. For the punk, the audience is often, as Siouxsie Sioux puts it, "a miserable bunch of twisted people" and a legitimate object of abuse. The punk is not interested in idolatry of, or even respect for, the audience, and is "sick," as Mary Haron puts it, "of people being so nice" (Savage, p. 133). According to Greil Marcus, the "passive neologisms of the 1970s" like "thank you for sharing your anger with me'' are translated by the punk into "active English": "Fuck off and die" (p. 89). Not in so many words, but in effect, Fay Weldon constructs a persona who also tells her audience to "fuck off," to find validation elsewhere.
Weldon doesn't expect her "friends to behave well and they don't" and says that she has "no illusions about people." Such disillusionment is not expressed by Weldon by the grabbing of ankles or spitting in cameras. It is, rather, expressed by a refusal to nurture her readersMolly Hite says that "she is hardly a nurturing feminist, unless you count nurture a reading experience rather like being suckled on lemons." Weldon refuses to respectfully guide her reader through the text and tells you to "think what you like" (Mile) and to "work." Reading a Weldon novel should, she says, "be exhausting" (Barreca, p. 7), because she is not willing to "come to conclusions for you" (Mile). That, she says, would be "immoral" (Mile). If we want to find her books "disgusting," like her son's English teacher does, then so be itthe Sex Pistols were accused of "disgusting" behavior too. When I interviewed Weldon in July 1992, looking for validation for my literary critical analysis, she quite merrily refused to give it. "How could" literary criticism "matter, possibly?" she asked. It's better than making armaments, it seems, but not much else. Happily invalidated, I left.
IV
Writing Style: As the Word Turns
The quintessence of punk textual styleof situationsis the transitory, revolting gesture, rooted in the everyday and "saved" by what Larry McCaffery calls a "perverse optimism" (p. 221), a desire to change the world. The punk gesture is often violent (Rimbaud's "paradise of violence, of grimace and madness"), and often repulsively humorous, quite ridiculous. It is also, invariably, noisyhas what Marcus calls a "blinding intransigence" (p. 12). It also leaves a lot to be desired: it offers no coherent or formalized ideology but instead operates as a warning, Hebdige says, of differencea difference that raises suspicions, elicits rage, but gives no answers (p. 2).
A safety pin through the Queen's mouth; the Sex Pistols say "fuck" on
 
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live television; Sid Vicious wears a swastika in downtown Paris. These verbal and nonverbal grand slams are designed to generate shock as the ordinary becomes extraordinary. More than anything, they do not bear repetition. They aim to move in the moment; almost like Gertrude Stein's continuous present, these gestures define a discrete moment, a "space of time filled with moving" (p. 457). Once the moment has passed, it should remain in the past; once safety pins become high fashion, they pin together the parts of the integrated spectacle.
It is perhaps easy to see how Roseanne Arnold's 1990 crotch grabbing is a feminist-punk gesturean "abominable" moment which resexes "woman" as "man'' and regenders her as "masculine" in one fell squeeze. It is perhaps also easy to see how Sinéad O'Connor's tearing of the Pope's picture on "Saturday Night Live" in 1992 revoltingly unfixes the gender and ethnic category of "good Irish Catholic girl." It seems clear, too, when Stevie Smith says, "If I'd been the Virgin Mary, I'd have said: 'No' " (Whitemore, p. 54), that the "no" negates all expectations of female subservience. This all seems to be feminist-punkthe style is punk, the nature of the negation, feminist. Fay Weldon's linguistic gestures are a little less melodramatic, but they are there nonetheless. Particular moments of negation in
Female Friends
and
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
fit the category of transitory, revolting gesture precisely because they are so unfitthey suggest, abominably, that, in certain cases, feminist and gender identity might not be as they seem.
Well
In 1974's
Female Friends,
Weldon has both Chloe and an omniscient narrator tell the tale of three female friends, Chloe, Grace, and Marjorie. At the novel's beginning, we hear from Chloe as she contemplates the "feminine" model of morality passed on to her by her mother: "Understand and forgive. It is what my mother taught me to do.... Understand, and forgive, my mother said, and the effort has quite exhausted me. I could do with some anger to energize me, to bring me back to life again" (p. 5).
Anger, energy, and resuscitation are not long in coming. Within thirty pages, in fact, our omniscient narrator seems to renounce such feminine compliance in a transitory, revolting word. The gesture is, as we shall see, rooted in the everyday, humorous, noisy, nondogmatic, and thoroughly optimistic. It is, in addition, a gesture carefully prepared for. We have learned first that Chloe is, in fact, neither understanding nor forgiving. Her friends, who are "as much duty as pleasure" (p. 8) are objects of her pity"poor little Marjorie, obliged by fate to live like a man" (p. 11)and her piety
 
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"Chloe feels herself morally superior to Grace" (p. 15). She neither understands their predicaments nor forgives them their lapses. And, therefore, when the narrator speaks of Chloe's attachment to Grace's family at The Poplars, we understand what is really meant:
And perhaps it was not cupboard love which drove Chloe to choose The Poplars as her second home, and Esther as a second mother, and Grace and Marjorie as her friends, but her recognition of their grief, and their inner homelessness. It was not that she used them, or that they used each other, but simply that they all clung together for comfort.
Well. [Pp. 3233]
"Well." A single verbal gesture, a single word, which, for a moment, revolts against the previous sixty-three. "Well" means "I doubt it," "I don't think so," in short, "Not.'' Chloe has no fine feelings. Said and gone. The reader gets rooted in the everyday, mundane clichés of "cupboard love," "second home," and "they all clung together for comfort"and then reaches "Well," and, probably, laughs. We chuckle as we hit the ridiculous, bathetic bottom of real human motives, after being taken in by the possibility of ideal ones. As the incongruity between what is "true" and "untrue" is established, the "perhaps" of the first line, which merely qualifies there, becomes unequivocal.
Not only is the moment cynical and funny, but it is also noisythe space that follows is filled with the noise of Weldon's intransigence ("Well" period), but also with the sound of the response demanded from the reader. In an interview in
Belles Lettres,
Weldon discusses her fondness for "little one-line throwaways," which she "could explain" but chooses not to. "Somehow," she says, "the reader has to work out a response before carrying on" (Barreca, p. 7). The reader is asked to reject accept-ability in favor of response-ability. Even though only a space follows this gesture, the space is "filled with moving," and the period, it seems, is only a temporary definitive. One may conclude that the gesture revolts against and unfixes gender roles, but nothing about the moment itself reveals a coherent ideology. We are merely offered the optimistic and punkish possibility of some kind of revolt.
Of course, this kind of amorphous blob of an ideology may infuriate a radical feminist sensibility. Where here is a plan for social transformation? Where is the sociopolitical, economic strategy? Where is the "running beyond" to go with the "questioning of existing relations" (p. 72) that Richard Johnson speaks of? This seems, rather, to be a Nike kind of feminismthe feminism, in fact, of Toni Cade Bambara, who, when asked if fiction is the best way to unite the wrath, vision, and power of women of color, replies, "No. The most effective way to do it, is to do it!" In a single four-

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