William Carlos Williams and the Metaphors of Science

Picabia - The Love Machine

What does physics have to do with poetry?

Ever since the Romantics famously let their hair grow wild and declared that poets were better off rejecting science and turning inward to seek truth by the imagination, academics have been reluctant to draw strong parallels between the work of scientists and the work of poets. Our theories tend to rely upon uncovering sociological histories, and we tend to think of poets as bohemians who write “from the heart”; whose work entails uncovering the psychological life rather than in probing physical reality.

Now, William Carlos Williams was certainly no bohemian. Although he maintained productive friendships with numerous artists and writers of his day, he spent his life working as a paediatrician in a small New Jersey town. He was as well-educated in the sciences as in the arts; he read scientific journals and went to lectures by the pioneers of thermodynamics and atomic chemistry of the early 20th century. Williams often writes explicitly about the discoveries of early 20th century physics – much like the theme of evolution repeatedly appears in Thomas Hardy. For instance, in 1915, Albert Einstein published the paper outlining the General Theory of Relativity; and 6 years later Williams Published the following poem:

Oscar Dominguez - Nostalgia of Space

Overture to a Dance of Locomotives [extract]

A leaning pyramid of sunlight, narrowing
out at a high window, moves by the clock:
disaccordant hands straining out from
a centre: inevitable postures infinitely
repeated –
two – twofour – twoeight!

…

Poised horizontal
on glittering parallels the dingy cylinders
packed with a warm glow – inviting entry –
pull against the hour. But brakes can
hold a fixed posture till –
The whistle!

Not twoeight. Not twofour. Two!
Gliding windows. Colored cooks sweating
in a small kitchen. Taillights –

In time: twofour!
In time: twoeight!

- rivers are tunnelled: trestles
cross oozy swampland: wheels repeating
the same gesture remain relatively
stationary: rails forever parallel
return on themselves infinitely.
The dance is sure.

This is probably quite an obscure example – but you can see that he talks explicitly about both Special and General relativity. Note that the metaphor of trains is the one that Einstein himself chose to illustrate Special Relativity – and we are aware of how much science communicates through metaphor in this way. The poem closes with the phrase “the dance is sure” – expressing, perhaps, an appreciation for the certainty of physical law. [The trains – the older symbol of technological advancement; operates on the laws of Newtonian physics – now transformed into the “dancing” locomotives of Einsteinian relativity]

So – although it is an amusing game to trace the scientific themes within Williams’s poems, I am actually interested in a more meta-physical (or, meta-poetical) question – given that Williams clearly believed in the power of scientific metaphors to explain reality and truth; what does the poem do? Does the language of poetry operate differently to the language of science? And if so, what does poetry offer us that other uses of language can not?

Henry Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams, describes why the scientific changes of the turn of the century were so revolutionary. He says,

In these seven years [between 1895 and 1902] man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible to his sense … [We] seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused – physics stark mad in metaphysics.[1]

Newtonian physics, which had dominated scientific thought until the 20th century, presents a view of the universe as stable. Objects are inert unless acted upon by some force. His paradigm largely describes our common sense experience of matter. Einstienian physics, on the other hand, proves that space and time are themselves dynamic quantities that are effected by forces and movements – and in turn, the curvature of space-time influences the way in which bodies move and forces act. All of the universe is in motion; E = mc2 - mass is energy. 20th century physics asks us to imagine reality on scales that we have never experienced, and to believe that the laws of nature are not what we would expect. This requires a leap of imaginative faith that is near-religious:

Where then will you find the only true belief in our day? Only in science. That is the realm of the incomplete, the convinced hypothesis – the frightening embodiment of mysteries, of transmutations from force to body and from body to – nothingness. Light.[2]

Williams reflects this exhilarating sense of a universe in motion by presenting us with poems that are built with verbs. Objects are never static; he does not paint still lives. Churches “tremble”, trees “arch”, and socks “endure”. This process is not simple personification; rather it is a recognition of a universal animating force, and a record of the mind encountering the world through language.

A Sort of a Song

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

- through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

Note that the metaphoric relationship is between the snake and the poem about the snake; in this way he is drawing explicit attention to the disjunct between signified and signifier. “No ideas but in things” was his motto – and he preferences concrete words over abstract ones. However, the tension for us as reader lies in the fact that we do not have access to the snake but only to the word or the idea, “snake”. “No ideas but in things” is problematic, then, as long as we insist on reading the poem as a signifier or a secondary representation of reality (and some hypothetical real snake). Clearly, the poem insists that we don’t. Instead, we must take the poem itself as the object. Here is another example:

Picasso - Nature Mort

The Dish of Fruit

The table describes
nothing: four legs, by which
it becomes a table. Four lines
by which it becomes a quatrain,

the poem that lifts the dish
of fruit, if we say it is like
a table – how will it describe
the contents of the poem?

Clearly I am drawing here on Structuralist and Post-Structuralist assuming that language can function as a closed system. But the image that Williams chose is perhaps more illuminating. He fixed upon the metaphor of the dynamo, and claimed that the poem is a machine. This image is far removed from the Romantic conception which sees poetry as sentimental or emotional; something written in times of grief or two express love. No, he argued,

There is nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.[3]

Williams was not alone amongst Modernist poets in arguing that good poetry should aim to be objective; that the “I” persona of the lyric should vanish; that the distinction between the speaking subject and the described object is an illusory one. T. S. Eliot argues something similar in Tradition and the Individual Talent[4], and Williams’s once-mentor Ezra Pound pioneered a similar notion. The poem is not expressive but creative – it creates meaning rather than communicates it. Therefore it does not matter if the subject matter of the poem is banal and mundane. For instance, the short poem called, Poem.

Poem

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

Because the content is so mundane, what is foregrounded is the poetic process itself – as is highlighted by the title. We are almost tempted construct meaning out of it – to claim that the cat symbolizes the phallus and the flowerpot the nihilistic void – but what is interesting about the poem (and there are many others like it) is the fact that it is powered so vigorously by the mechanisms of poetry: syntax and rhythm; or, form and sound.

The first word in the poem, “As”, places the poem within a continuous tense. The cat and its actions are conjured “as” the poem is read. The “as” also requires the sentence to be completed by a second clause, and this expectation propels the poem. The action is slowed down, the cat moves part by part – first “the right forefoot” and then “the hind”. The action is slowed down further by the modifier “carefully”; and the crucial verb “stepped” is withheld until the eighth line.

Rhythm reinforces the pace postulated by the syntax; the trotting rhythm of “as the cat / climbed over / the top of // the jamcloset” is interrupted by “carefully”, the rhythm is interrupted, mimetically reinforcing the considered, uncomfortably tense moment as the cat shifts its centre of balance – and then is resumed as the undefiable law of gravity takes over. It is an immensely satisfying poem to read, as it creates the sensation of a physical experience. This is the poetic engine. It is the foregrounding the mechanisms of language that are objects to be experienced in themselves.

But, of course, engines must have functions; dynamos must power a system. What system does Williams’s poetry power?

If Relativity was one cornerstone of 20th century science, then another was surely thermodynamics. Thermodynamics and the notion of entropy developed during the 19th century, but entered popular culture as metaphysical concepts in the early 20th. Entropy, simply put, is the rule of energy dissipation; the notion that the universe becomes increasingly chaotic and finally runs down. Entropy is the reason for the irreversibility of time, it is the rule that ash cannot again be flame. Like evolution, entropy became a metaphor for the decadence of Western culture, and it is cultural entropy that is expressed in works like Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s Waste Land. Both works, with their numerous allusions to literary tradition and the chaos of their forms, argue for an old culture, a tradition that has become so overbearing that it allows no space for comprehension; it is the information overload that becomes nonsensical, that Don Delillo will later call “noise”. Life continues but there is less and less energy in the system, and living becomes painful, leading Eliot to call April “the cruellest month / breeding lilacs out of the dead land”.

Williams knew that Eliot was a great poet, but felt that his pessimism and his clinging on to the European tradition of poetry betrayed the poetic responsibility of the American Modernist, which was to “make it new”, as Ezra Pound says. Williams was working on his epic poem Paterson at the same time that Eliot was composing the Waste Land – he published books 4 and 5 after he had read Eliot’s great eulogy for European poetry, and consciously subverts Eliot’s idioms within them. Here are just two small examples:

Williams

The sea is our home whither all rivers
(wither) run .

the nostalgic sea
sopped with our cries
Thalassa! Thalassa!
…
. draws us in to drown, of losses
and regrets .
(Paterson Book IV)


This is the blast
the eternal close
the final somersault
the end.
(Paterson Book IV)

Eliot

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
…
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
(The Waste Land)

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
(Hollow Men)

Paterson is built around the central image of a waterfall, which is perhaps the ideal metaphor for entropy (it is a deadly force that only runs in one direction). However, by the end of the poem, Williams insists that the river has begun to run backwards, because of the power of the poem to create sensual experience, within a poem, “the scent of a rose / startle[s] us anew”.

The concept of the permanence of the poem in a world that is otherwise filled with death and decay is an old one; one that occurs for instance in Shakespeare’s sonnets. What is unique in Williams’s poetics is a consciousness that the poem does not preserve lived experience; rather it constructs an experience using uniquely poetic mechanisms. The energy of poetry is immediate and sensual.

A life that is here and now is timeless … All things otherwise grow old and rot. By long experience the only thing that remains unchanged and unchangeable is the work of art.

Often, in traditional poetic discourse, the fertility of love and sex is the figure for this renewing force. Williams consciously rejects this, however. He makes reference to an essay by Henry Adams called “The Dynamo and the Virgin”. In this article Adams (with his idiosyncratic wit) argues that America has never quite managed to free itself from the fear of sex that they inherited from their Puritan ancestors. In American culture, the woman is substituted by the machine, which is eroticised and fetishised. The mechanised woman is a recurring figure in Modernist art (e.g. Kandinsky and Duchamp) and occurs over and over in Williams’s poems.

In book IV of Paterson, he subverts the image of the Holy Virgin by presenting her as Marie Curie, and in her praises a feminine power that is scientific rather than r(R)omantic.

From Paterson Book IV

a cavity aching
toward fission; a hollow,
a woman waiting to be filled

- a luminosity of elements, the
current leaping!
Pitchblende from Austria, the
valence of Uranium inexplicably
increased. Curie, the man, gave up
his work to buttress her.

But she is pregnant!
Poor Joseph,

the Italians say.

Glory to God in the highest
and on earth, peace, goodwill to
men!

Believe it or not.

A dissonance
in the valence of Uranium
led to the discovery [dissonance = juxtaposing, anti-metaphor]

Dissonance
(if you are interested)
leads to discovery

- to dissect away
the block and leave
a separate metal:

hydrogen
the flame, helium the
pregnant ash

[1] Adams, Henry (1918; 1931). The Education of Henry Adams. Random House, NewYork: p. 1069.
[2] Williams, William Carlos (
[3] Williams, William Carlos (
[4] Page 41.

Pancho Guedes: An Alternative Modernist at the SANG

Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.
Le Corbusier

The first South African retrospective of the works of influential architect Pancho Guedes runs at the National Gallery until 31st August. The show consists of two discrete exhibitions: the first, curated by Pedro Gadanho, focuses on his intensely productive period in Lourenzo Marx (now Maputo); while the second, curated by Henning Rasmuss and Dagmar Hoetzel, isolates work he completed after the Mozambiquan Civil War when he was forced to flee to South Africa and subsequently became the Dean of Architecture at Wits University. The juxtaposition of the two perspectives on Guedes throws the curation choices into sharp relief, and a dialogue emerges that questions the methods of framing the architect as artist.

The post-1974 exhibition reflects the curators’ training as architects. Although the space of the gallery is used playfully, with geometric dividers decentering the strict division of floor and wall space, the works on display are presented strictly as finalised architectural plans and photographs of “finished” buildings.

The few paintings included in this part of the exhibition are isolated from the other projects, and are presented as artistic objects severed from the creative process of his architectural design. Furthermore, the texts that frame the architectural plans reinforce the concept that the building is primarily a product designed for a client by captioning each design as such.
This room provides a representative overview of Guedes’s oeuvre, but offers no glimpse into the creative process that gave birth to the final products. This exhibition is primarily aimed at the architecturally literate, and may remain fairly impenetrable to an artistic eye that may encounter it casually while trawling the SANG.

The entrance to the pre-1974 section is flanked by a portrait of Guedes crowned by a radiating egg. Indeed, in this section, concepts that are presented as products in the Hoetzel-Rasmuss exhibition are traced back to their embryonic forms.

For instance, photographs of the famous sculpture of two “talking heads” that was presented at the Biennial di Venezia 1976 are displayed in the post-1974 exhibition, while the initial painting can be found in the Gadanho show.

The two exhibitions are complementary, but one is nonetheless led to ask whether the essence of Guedes is most found in the buildings he finally supervised or in the less restrained process of his creative experimentation. Pancho himself has claimed that, for him, making drawings is more important than making buildings; and An Alternative Modernist primarily reinforces the sense of Pancho as an artistic personality that expresses itself through art, instead of framing him as the author(ity) of a strictly defined architectural project.


Painting for the “Talking Heads”

Gadanho chooses to exhibit Pancho’s work as a series of experiments. The final architectural product is curiously absent: the few photographs of the buildings are old, small and few. Rather, the exhibition is dominated by the principle of liminality.

The architectural plans are presented as being only one stage in a series of contingent possibilities that are expressed in multiple forms. The centre of the room is dominated by a series of small wooden sculptures. The sculptures are untitled and resist the mimetic. Some refer directly to recognisable shapes (for instance the sculptures referred to by Guedes as the “Mechanical Flower” and the “Egyptian Barge”), but the majority function as toys that seem to become different objects when they are placed in different positions. Guedes can be seen in the video that accompanies the exhibition playing with his sculptures in this way.

The irreverence expressed in the sculptures does not obscure their referential meanings; but they seem to refer directly to other artists than to platonic forms. The influence of Miro, Klee, Dali and Picasso continues into a series of paintings and rough sketches that are also displayed.

The paintings are notable for the success of their naïf style. Like Duchamp, Guedes considers the relationship between the human and the machine in a post-industrial world. A persistent theme in his paintings is the engine: he represents locomotives, ships, cars and buses; and paints bodies in a cubist style that exposes the fundamental similarity between the man and what he creates.

A surrealist thread runs through all of Guedes’s work; the result of displacement and defamiliarisation. In one painting, a crocodile inhabits a basement. Many of Guedes’s buildings are anthropomorphised (The Smiling Lion; The 5 Caterpillars; The Pregnant Building). The line between the impossible and the concrete is transcended simply by transferring a concept from a drawing to a design.

The naïve style at times disguises highly emotive political statements in Guedes’s work. One painting depicts a stack of dead soldiers in a refrigerated ship being returned for burial in their homeland, the soldiers’ effacement of identity reinforced by the childlike, abstract way in which they are painted.

Like the sculptures, the paintings have been displayed without titles. Although this denies the viewer a familiar point of access into the work, it also reinforces the principles of Guedes’s playfulness and open interpretivity. The curator has designed the exhibition in a spirit true to the Guedes aesthetic. The small captions that surround the works do not attempt to “explain” or fix the meaning of any one work.

The paintings are splashed across the walls with the randomness of a Pollock painting, and are grouped into broad family groups rather than being arranged by strict chronology or theme. The titles of these groupings are tentative statements in the present continuous tense: “Exploring Form and Space” and “Contributing Towards a Modern Space” are examples.

As underlined by the title, An Alternative Modernist presents Pancho as an artist well-informed by the artistic principles of Modernism. The “alternative” may indeed be tautological – Pancho is most Modern precisely when he inverts tradition; when he brings the marginal to the centre.

Much is made of Pancho’s interest in traditional African art – although it is ironically unclear whether this was truly due to a receptiveness to his surroundings or whether the influence of African forms came to him via the channels of earlier European Modernists, such as Picasso, who famously appropriated African forms for the Avant Garde project.

Pancho clearly had a complex relationship with his context and was critical of monolithic notions of “Africanism”. He was nonetheless an important patron of African artists in Mozambique and had an extensive collection of traditional African artifacts.

Although he spent the majority of his productive life in Africa, Guedes always maintained strong links with European Modernism. He was a member of the influential Team 10 during the 50s and 60s, and the strong influence of Gaudi and Le Corbusier on his architectural designs is irrefutable. He referred to some of his own work as “Dali’s soft forms set in concrete and made habitable” and called his Prometheus building his “first built misinterpretation of Picasso’s drawings and paintings for sculpture.”

A Guedes retrospective has been long overdue. Whether Bauhaus-inspired apartment blocks or fantastical floral buildings, his architectural work always ventures beyond the principles of building into the experimentation of form and spatial composition. In him, the functional and the aesthetic impulses become subsumed by the basic Modernist exercise of exploration: finding new ways to use the old.

He is the ultimately democratic artist. He brought his paintings into urban spaces and displayed them as murals; his sculptures were factories and apartment buildings.
There is something ironic in the fact that he has been returned – after all these years, to the gaze of the gallery – while in Lourenzo Marx the buildings themselves are crumbling and neglected. The curators have not, however, done him an injustice, and have played with the gallery space in a way that remains true to the spirit of Guedes’s artistic project.

The Last Turn by WCW

Then see it! in distressing
detail---from behind a red light
at 53d and 6th
of a November evening, with
the jazz of the cross lights
echoing the crazy weave of
the breaking mind: splash of
a half purple half naked woman's
body whose bejeweled guts
the cars drag up and down---
No house but that has its
brains blown off by the dark!
Nothing recognizable
but the whole, one jittering
direction made of all directions
spelling the inexplicable,
pigment upon flesh and flesh
the pigment of the genius of a world
artless but supreme ...

Beheadings in Irving Welsh's "Marabou Stork Nightmares"

This essay - written for an Honours Course in Femininst literary theory - examines Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh as a genealogy of the construction of violent masculinity. I explore the method by which the narrative is framed, arguing that the structure posits a hierarchy of consciousness and a distinction between the “internal” and “external” world.

This leads to questions of innate or learned sexual disposition, and a discussion of the homosocial matrix that regulates the socialization of the individual. The place of women within the novel’s social economy is discussed with particular focus on the forces behind Roy’s rapes. I then return to the question of mind and body, and explore questions of the “gaze” within the novel, and argue finally that the text concludes by collapsing the mind-body distinction into a single, fragile construct.

I – Being Inside Roy Strang

Roy Strang initially presents himself as the sort of subject posited by early psychoanalysts. The novel proceeds not according to the logic of realism, but rather by the operations of the dream that Freud outlines – Condensation, Displacement, Representation and Symbolism[1]. Roy Strang, therefore, is not merely the narrator of the novel; he is also its setting. Roy’s mind is discursively constructed as vertical and the narrative moves “higher” and “lower” within his conscious levels. The Stork-Quest sequences are posited at the lowest level of his character (he arrives there by going “deeper/deeper/deeper”) – it is his “subconscious” world, analogous to what Freud would have called his “preconscious”, but presented in the sustained logic of a particular literary genre that would be impossible in the barely accessible preconscious of the human subject. On the highest level is the present (the word here indicating both temporal immediacy and embodied presence). Memory, according to the prepositions that define the narrative space, is the intermediate level between the “reality” and the “dream”. I will talk loosely about the three levels being the world/reality, the memory and the dream – although all three levels are primarily literary, and mediated by an unreliable narrative voice.

In the hospital scenes, Roy is the vulnerable body that Judith Butler describes in “Beside Oneself”, but in these scenes he is a mute object. In his memory and in his dream, he is a talking subject; he is Roy Strang, although the very construction of his subjectivity relies implicitly on the objectification of others; of “undoing” others (women, homosexuals, other men) by taking advantage of the vulnerability of their human bodies.

Basic tensions in Marabou Stork Nightmares are generated by the question of the internal. There is a trail of thought in Feminist theory, from Riviere (1929) to Butler (1990), which contests the notion of gender as identity. Instead, gender is a performance, “a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through a naturalization in the context of a body” (Butler, 1990: xv). The question that Butler then poses, is whether there is something that is masked by the masquerade, or whether the concept implies that interiority is evacuated, and that there is only the mask (1990: 64). Roy, conversely, consistently uses language to suggest that people can be “authentic” or “fake”, and yet is aware that he narrates from an entirely subjective position,

"All I have is the data I get. I don’t care whether it’s produced by my senses or my memory or my imagination. Where it comes from is less important than the fact that it is. The only reality is the images and texts" (p. 16)

Roy constructs the frame of the narrative so that his narrative voice is seen as an “internal” position, disconnected from his physical body that lies on the hospital bed. Therefore, our analysis of the text should proceed from a theoretic position that analyses “interiority”; but the best paradigm is not a foray into the argument between essentialism and determinism, but rather the question of power suggested in Butler’s comment:

The critical question is not how did that identity become internalized? as if internalization were a process or a mechanism that might be descriptively reconstructed. Rather, the question is: From what strategic position in public discourse and for what reasons has the trope of interiority and the disjunctive binary of inner/outer taken hold? In what language is “inner space” figured? … How does a body figure on its surface the very invisibility of its hidden depth?”(1990: 183)

With the question of performativity and the “interior space” in our mind, let us turn to the question of Roy’s sexuality.

II – The Closet-Case

(Almost exactly) halfway through the novel, Bernard describes Roy as a “mercenary wee closet rent-boy” (p. 127). Indeed, in Roy’s dream-world there are numerous suggestions of homosexuality, which are rapidly suppressed. For instance, Roy says to Sandy “ – Maybe we should take our clothes off and go for a little dip”, and then immediately moves out of the dream-world with a repetition of “naw naw that wisnae it” (p. 84). Roy’s only homosexual encounter in the “real” world is his molestation, which in the beginning are a source of pleasure for him (“I felt a sense of power, a sense of attractiveness, a sense of affirmation that I hadn’t previously experienced”, pp. 71-72). It may be that Roy’s (ultimately false) sense of power is akin to that felt by the women in the novel who attempt to access phallic power by accepting a role as sexual objects for men (such as Kim, as will be discussed in section IV), but it must be acknowledged nonetheless that Roy’s homophobia is largely a learned response.

Roy comes to be homophobic as he becomes aware of the punitive power of social masculinity. Shortly after their return from South Africa, there is an incident when the Strangs learn of Bernard’s early experiments in homosexual behaviour, and they threaten him with castration as punishment (p. 88). This incident shocks Roy deeply, and his castration-anxiety becomes associated with homosexuality[2]. As she threatens Bernard, Roy’s conception of his mother alters:

I had always thought of my Ma as young and beautiful. Now she seemed to me to look like a twisted, haggard old witch, staring out at me from behind a smudged mask of eyeliner. I noted the strands of silver in her long black hair" (p. 89)

his extract indicates that the fear of castration irrevocably alters Roy’s perception not only of homosexuality, but of women too, who as “castrated” or “castrating” become crone-like and a source of anxiety. The Freudian reading could be extended further into the extract. Freud (cited in Butler, 1990: 78-88) argued that gender is a form of melancholia, whereby a lost love-object is incorporated into the self so that it may be psychically preserved. Roy, who is taught that he must forsake homosexual love or suffer castration (that is, one can only love a man if one is a woman, and therefore castrated) begins to embody what he believes is the essence of masculinity in order to replace the lost love-object. Although this reading is a quite a far departure from the text, it usefully offers an explanation for the tension between Roy’s homosexuality in his dream-world and his “real”-world homophobia and misogyny. Freud’s framework even predicts that suicide often results from the ambivalence generated by melancholia[3] - in this case, it could be argued that Roy’s phallogocentric society causes him to incorporate or imitate an abstract masculinity, which he both loves (because it affords him power) and hates (because there is a pre-existing aspect of his ego that reviles the incorporated object, in this case the self-critical aspect of Roy), and this tension becomes irreconcilable and causes his life to become unliveable.

Catherine MacKinnon (1987) offers a useful perspective on what this “heterosexual matrix” (what I have been calling the “masculine signifying economy”) achieves. She claims that “Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualisation of inequality between men and women” (p. 6-7). The masculine identity therefore secures not biological reproduction (which is never a concern for Roy, and is in fact revealed to be a source of disgust when he dreams of a deformed foetus that has his facial features on p. 159), but rather social power.

III – The Law of the Father

Marabou Stork Nightmares, if it suggests a repressed homosexuality underlying certain kinds of aggressive heterosexuality, does not present an argument for inherent sexual behaviour. What is expressed in Roy Strang’s unconscious world as homosexuality, takes the form in the “real” world as homosociality; labelled by Lacan “the Law of the Father” and by Irigiray “hommo-sexuality” (both cited in Butler, 1990: 55), and it seems impossible to determine which is “primary” and gives rise to the other[4].

Roy’s attempts to become a fully-realised subject (portrayed in the Bildungsroman narrative thread) centre around his acquisition of the rules of masculine culture; his attempts to become an active subject, paradoxically, by submitting himself to the discursive “Law” that dominates his society. Initially Roy finds many aspects of this culture distasteful (or so he claims) but gradually internalises them as protection against the punishment he undergoes when he fails to do so. For instance, as a young boy Roy is forced by his father to fight against his half-brother Bernard (p. 29), as the vessel of his father’s hatred for homosexuality (in these exchanges, Roy thinks to himself “TAKE THAT YA FUCKIN SAPPY BIG POOF”), for being cuckolded (John tells Roy that he must win because Bernard is a “bastard son”[5]) and for being weak or “sappy”. Roy learns from these exchanges that if he is not the more violent, he is forced to “beat a humiliating retreat, overwhelmed by pain and frustration” (p. 30)[6]. In Roy’s world, one is either a winner or a loser (the title of chapter fourteen reasserts this), and although he envies a position in which one can escape the system entirely, he sees the only possibility for doing so in the figure of his brother Elgin, who is autistic (“Perhaps Elgin had the right idea; perhaps it was all just psychic defence”, p. 30).

Football, like boxing, is an institution by which masculine identity is regulated. Roy initially professes to dislike football (p. 101, 117), but gradually comes to incorporate its symbolic power, when he learns that football is a way to delineate alliances and hierarchies between men. For instance, when Roy is harassed by Hamilton and his gang, he is asked what football team he supports, to which Roy replies “Hibs”, thinking that although he has no personal interest in football, “Dad and Tony were Hibs fans and so were most of my mates in the scheme” (p. 101). The particularism of football, which specifically enforces nationalist xenophobia, naturally becomes the site of some of Roy’s most intense expressions of violence when he joins the Casuals. It is ironic, then, that Sandy claims that the attraction of football lies in “the camaraderie of the whole thing” (p. 191). But there is indeed a camaraderie in the violent system, because although it creates antagonism amongst men, it at least defines them as “men” in contrast with those whom the system effaces.

This system of male aggression does not merely position women at the bottom of a hierarchy (as the least physically able to defend themselves) but excludes them from participating in the system of exchange entirely. Butler (1990) discusses Levi-Strauss’s (1969) thesis that in patriarchal societies women act as an object of exchange that consolidates the relationships between men[7], claiming that within his paradigm heterosexual relationships with women are insincere, for their object is not women at all, but other men, and that this is “a repressed and, hence, disparaged sexuality, a relationship between men which is, finally, about the bonds of men, but which takes place through the heterosexual exchange of women” (Butler, 1990: 55). It is not always necessary for women to be present at all for them to be used as commodities; sometimes their symbolic or discursive existence is sufficient. Freud (cited in Doring, 2002: 129) suggests that men often joke with each other about women in a sexually aggressive manner in order to consolidate their homosocial bonds, much like Roy jokes with his uncle Benny that a certain girl has a “[f]anny like the Mersey Tunnel” (p. 139). Sexual aggression as a means to reinforce male bonds takes its most troubling incarnation in the gang rape, in which Kirsty is effaced as a subject, which leads to the impression of the rapists having sex with each other, as though Kirsty was acting merely as a mediating object so that the homosexuality of the act can be denied. During the rape there is a moment when,

Dempsy and Lexo were up her cunt and arse at the same time, their balls pushed together. – Ah kin feel your cock, Lexo, Dempsy gasped" (p. 190)

There is thus a clear tension within the masculine signifying economy of Marabou Stork Nightmares between the desire to exclude women entirely and the necessity of heterosexuality as ego-defensive. Roy asserts the first desire in his “dream” sequence, which is modelled on a genre he calls Boys Own Adventures, in which he childishly (which is perhaps, honestly) tells the women who attempt to engage him and Sandy sexually to leave, yelling that they are “spoiling our adventure … spoiling our fun! It’s just boys! Boys only, boys only, boys only!” (p. 123), and without women to mediate male friendship the system collapses into homosexuality, as we have seen in section I above.

IV – Worthless Women

Within an economy of masculine exchange as all-encompassing as that of Marabou Stork Nightmares, the woman’s place is that of a commodity. Her psychic existence is unacknowledged, and her physicality (the way she is vulnerable to men, and the way she is accessed by them) is consistently reasserted. Roy’s heterosexuality is a product of his homosocial anxiety – he must have sex with women in order to earn the respect of other men. When Hamilton harasses the teenage Roy, he embarrasses him by insinuating that Roy is a virgin (“- Ivir hud yir hole? Hamilton sneered. Gilchrist laughed”, p. 100). Women in this exchange are non-beings, anonymous “holes”, defined by their physical ability to incorporate a man’s penis. Hamilton and Gilchrist parade their girlfriends as signs of their social superiority. When Roy subsequently assaults Caroline Carson, Gilchrist’s girlfriend, it is a way to reassert his status as a man, and the incident coincides with his first attempts at building a gang. Shortly after this event, he properly loses his virginity, and even though he does not really enjoy the sex itself, his immediate thought is that he feels “equals with Tony; both men of the world” (p. 111). His heterosexuality involves talking about his sexual encounters with other men, specifically his brother,

I’d talk to Tony about getting my hole; bullshitting about the number of shags I’d had and the things I’d done. I think he knew I was making most of it up, and I knew that he knew, but he let me go on and said nothing …" (p. 111-112)

Both men are aware that Roy’s stories are a performance; his truthfulness is less important than his ability to participate in one of the rituals of masculinity.[8]

The way in which this commodifying discourse around women (or rather, this commodifying discourse that constructs “women” as a discursive entity) is transformed into physical violence is a genealogy clearly outlined in Marabou Stork Nightmares. The Scots vernacular through which Roy first learns to mediate his experience is presaged on the use of “woman” to denote inferiority. Men who speak in the vernacular constantly label each other female when they are denigrating each other; consistently, “other” men (men not included in the immediate discursive group) are called “cunts”, “tits” or “pussies” (which reinforces not only the concept of female as inferior, but also the concept of female as anatomical) or “wide-o’s” [9] and “punters”[10]. The terms of denigration are specifically applied to homosexual men (on page 22 Roy states matter-of-factly that “Bernard was a girl.”), who are in turn absorbed into the discursive system of pejoratives so that men also aggressively call each other “queer-faced” or “poofs” to indicate that they are lower in the masculine hierarchy. Numerous theorists have suggested that the anxiety created around these words ironically demonstrates the fragility of the masculine norm. In the words of Simone de Beauvoir, “In spite of the inferior role which men assign to them, women are the privileged objects of their aggression” (cited in Kaufman, 1994: 23). Within this system, women and homosexual men are a source of anxiety, as they represent alternatives to the masculine ideal, which must be self-destructively suppressed in order to maintain it.

An ironic awareness of the fragility of Roy’s masculinity, and its continual constructedness, pervades the text. After Sandy and Roy, in the “dream-world”, tell the beautiful women to leave them to their “boys only” mission, the women “drop their disguise” and are revealed to be giant preying mantises with “blonde and auburn wigs, lipstick smeared on those deadly pincher-like insect jaws” (p. 124). Roy’s fear of women (as the threat to his masculinity), which has been cloaked in his desire for them, is revealed to be a façade, and immediately he and Sandy grab baseball bats in self-defence. This could be an allegory for Roy’s violence against the women he is initially attracted to; he fears them and so must destroy the source of his fear (and, indeed, the women become “ugly” after he assaults them, and the source of his anxiety is nullified). Roy’s awareness of gender as “masquerade” (in the words of Joan Riviere) is often un-self-conscious. He defends himself against John’s accusation that the Cashies are “posers” concerned not with football (which in this discourse designates authentic masculinity) but with wearing “fuckin designer labels” (p. 136), but Roy later admits that he does in fact spend almost all of his money on new clothes. He similarly expresses confusion when Martine Fenwick “was intae letting me tongue her in public, but when she sussed I was trying to get her away, she knocked me back” (p. 180).

Although there is the sense of “faked” gender running through the text, what Roy represents as gender’s falseness is one of the most powerfully harmful factors in the plot. Roy’s involvement in Kirsty’s rape, he initially claims, was “faked” (p. 184), and even though it is later revealed that he was the main instigator and most physically violent perpetrator, there is a sense in which this too is a performance, an act that masks his anxiety. The performances of gender, even if Roy claims them to be “inauthentic” with his insistent claims of “it wisnae really like that”, are real because it is the performance rather than the intention that harms or does not harm other subjects. Therefore, even though Kirsty and Roy both agree that the courtroom where her trial takes place is “[a] theatre to humiliate and brutalize [Kirsty] all over again” (p. 223), it is a symbolic rape that causes her even more pain than the initial physical rape.

The women who are charged by Roy as being the most “inauthentic” are those he labels “lesbians”. He never mentions actual homosexual behaviour by these women (and, in fact, he at one stage finds himself kissing Martine Fenwick, who is one of the women he had labelled a “dyke”). “Lesbians” are the women who actively subvert the masculine hierarchy that Roy is psychically defending with such vehemence, for instance, the women who overpower him (usually economically) or who resist their status as commodities amongst men. The first such woman he encounters is his schoolteacher, “Lesbo Gray”, who subverts the expectations of the gender (masculine) paradigm by disciplining her male students with a belt, that is, physically overpowering them. Their act of defiance involves breaking into her office and beating each other with the belt “much harder than when Lesbo Gray … did it” (p. 102-103), thereby reappropriating physical violence as a masculine ability. They claim that she has no breasts, thereby defining her as not female, and then defecate in her drawer, as a way to assert that as not-female, she is therefore disgusting, insignificant and expellable as “shit”. This resonates strongly with Butler’s claim in Undoing Gender (2004b) that to be denied definition within discourse is to be denied personhood – Gray, by being denied status as a woman, is defined as inhuman faeces.

After completing school, Roy begins working at a company called “Scottish Spinsters”, which being a “spinster” economy (one does not recognise the masculinity that is Roy’s paradigm) is one in which he is insignificant[11]. Here, Roy is judged by his economic status, by which he is judged poor, and his ability to obey the politeness code of the office environment, in which he fails. Within this differently-regulated economy a woman, Jane Hathaway, is his superior. Like “Dykey Gray”, Jane Hathaway is described in unfeminine terms, overweight, wearing glasses that remind him of his father’s. Roy speculates that she is having a relationship with Martine Fenwick, has “no tits whatsoever” (p. 114), and is derisive of the fact that the women “go all girlish” when they speak to each other. In this context, too, Roy asserts his ability to decide who – within “masculine” discourse – can judge that a woman sufficiently fulfils her femininity, in order to reclaim power in a situation where he is judged as a failure.

Women, in this system, must choose between being dehumanized (called non-persons or “dykes”) or commodified (called “whores”). Bernard’s “fag-hags” are a third category, although by apparently denying their heterosexuality by choosing to befriend homosexual men, they are labelled asexual “hags”, and therefore nearly fall into the first category. Roy calls them “pathetic” and claims that “there was something incomplete about them” (p. 251). When Roy rapes Caroline and then Kirsty, it is because he believes that they are denying him sexually (although it is later revealed that both were in fact attracted to him). And yet the dichotomy within Roy’s discursive system between “hags” and “whores” is unstable; Kirsty is raped because she is sexually unavailable (a “hag”) and is immediately labelled a “whore slut” (p. 178) once she is raped. These pejoratives therefore do not apply to the dispositions of these women, but rather their acts, their performances. Even the apparent hatred of lesbianism is not stable, as can be seen in the interval of Kirsty’s rape, when Ozzy suggests to a homeless woman that she should accompany her back to the rape-scene and “[g]it some lesbo stuff set up” (p. 187), as bizarre as this paradox seems, it could be read as an attempt to subsume the object of threat (female homosexuality) into a performance by two heterosexual women for the pleasure of men.

There are many women in Marabou Stork Nightmares who are shown in various attempts to escape the rigidness of the discourse that designates them commodities. Some women attempt to find success in the system by fulfilling what they perceive to be expected from them. Kim is a good example of this, who is consistently “used” by men and then “abandoned”, and who becomes the sexual partner even of her own half-brother who is described as entirely sexually indiscriminate. Similarly, the nurse Patricia projects fantasies onto Roy about what a caring man he must be, even though she has never spoken with him and has only heard rumours of his misdeeds, and when her experience as a sexual commodity has been similar to Kim’s: “One he got what he wanted he was off … and there I was, left alone, again. Left with nothing” (p. 31). Like the women who testify against Kirsty at the rape trial, there are many instances of women characters who reinforce the masculine paradigm, who attempt to access phallic power by participating in the “Law of the father”. Even though they find themselves bankrupt within the masculine signifying economy, “left with nothing” as Patricia says, their acquiescence is unsurprising in light of the punishment that transgressive women are shown to undergo.

V - Pornography and the Severed Head

The analysis of the gaze has been an important one for feminist theory. For Sartre, the gaze is symmetrical; although to be looked at is to be made an object, it is only by being thus objectified that we become aware of our own unique position to gaze, and to be a subject (1948). Foucault (1977) extends this to the theory of asymmetric gaze; that is, gaze that regulates hierarchies. For Foucault, the gazed-upon (signified) object is not always able to return the gaze and is thereby denied subjectivity (the ability to signify) [12]. Irigiray (1981) contests the very paradigm of the binary between signifying-subject and signified-object, by stating that the paradigm of Woman as Other to Man is an aspect of the “masculine signifying economy” (1981: 266) and that women are not represented in it at all. She continues to argue that the gaze itself, as it is visual[13], is masculine by nature, and that the eroticization of the visual form of the woman is a mechanism by which she is subsumed into an erotic discourse that renders her passive.

The destructive force of the visual objectification of women is evident in numerous episodes in Marabou Stork Nightmares. One of Roy’s first sexualised acts is the purchase of pornography, when he says he “never liked the ones where the genitals were exposed in too much detail; they were like raw, open wounds, totally at odds with the smiling, inviting faces of the models” (p. 111). This is reminiscent of the “double movement of exhibition and chaste retreat” described by Irigiray (1981: 263), which reveals the inability of the “masculine signifying economy” – as it posits the phallus as the only sexual organ – to represent the female; her genitals are a lack, the wound that remains of the castrated penis. When he sexually assaults[14] Caroline Carson, Roy achieves his domination by forcing her to expose her pubic hair to him. He looks at her in order to shame her, and yet displaces his gaze onto her pubic hair rather than onto her actual genitalia. Roy’s interest in pornography is implicated with his desire to subjugate, and he describes that the comic book depictions of women “being kidnapped and restrained were the biggest turn-ons” (p. 34). During his assault of Caroline Carson he is conscious that his actions are imitative of this socially-condoned media, and verbally denigrates her, “talking like they did in the wankmags” (p. 107). This is taken a step further in the rape of Kirsty, when the rapists watch television whilst raping her, subsuming her into the broader economy of male visual entertainment (p. 189). Interestingly, following the act of visually subjugating both Caroline and Kirsty, they become ugly to him and lose their sexual appeal[15]. Roy himself claims that this is because the women lose their “sense of self” (p. 190); that is, their subjectivity, and all that remains is the body – the metaphorically “beheaded”, or entirely objectified body, which is a repulsive thing.

During Roy’s rapes, he describes the eyes of his victims as failing or dead. Caroline covers her eyes with her hands (p. 107), Kirsty’s face becomes “frozen, her eyes dead” (p. 182). When this rape is re-presented in the “dream” world, it is in the image of a young boy who has been murdered: his genitals mutilated and his eyes gouged out (p. 203). The image used to describe the expression on Kirsty’s face as she is first penetrated is compared to that of an animal being beheaded:

"The expression on her face was … I remember seeing a documentary about some animal being eaten from behind while its face seemed to register disbelief, fear, and self-hate at its own impotence. That was what she reminded me of "(p. 183).

Beheadings litter the metaphorical landscape of the novel: beginning with the beheadings of Winston II[16], the recurring image of the Stork holding the severed head of a flamingo, scenes in the Casuals’ violence that involve “Ghostie … trying to sever [a “Weedgie’s”] meaty heid oaf wi a broken glass” (p. 193), and finally Roy’s symbolic self-beheading by suffocation with a plastic bag (which re-enacts Winston II’s murder). The image of a beheading is the image of a mind and a body severed from each other; the option of subjectivity (seeing eyes) being permanently denied to the object (the body). Roy’s enacting of the fallacy of the mind-body divide seems to be an effort to consolidate a fragile construction that constitutes the female as embodied and vulnerable[17], while the male is a person, and primarily a mind or identity[18].

The fragility of this construction is revealed in the climax of the book, where Roy’s passive vulnerability is exploited as he is physically mutilated. As Kirsty mutilates him, she cuts off his eyelids, so that he is forced to watch her as she actively destroys his body, much as Roy used a mirror during the rape to force Kirsty to watch him as he raped her. She reiterates both “I want to see you, Roy” and “I want you to see … me” (p. 159), which could be read as an attempt to reinstate the symmetry of the gaze that Sartre suggests (1948).

Conclusion

As a reader, finding truth in Marabou Stork Nightmares is like watching a shadow-puppet play. The images we are presented with, being constructions of Roy Strang’s mind, consistently hint at truth, and present its outlines, but those images are shifting and unstable, and cast very different shapes when the narrative perspective, the “light” in my metaphorical conceit, is shifted. Roy presents his text as being a representation of different layers of himself, but in the end the boundaries between these levels disappear. Roy constructs a masculine subjectivity that presents itself as incorporeal, and he enacts it to the degree that he abandons his body to absolute passivity in order that he can be “liberated” to roam his mind. But the mind-body distinction collapses as the book reaches its climax. Kirsty actively takes her revenge in a way that demonstrates to Roy that he is a physically vulnerable body-self as much as a woman is, and that the entire paradigm that would pardon him from that vulnerability is a fragile construct. The lesson to be learnt is one that Judith Butler outlines in Undoing Gender (2004b); the body is a discursive entity, but also the site by which human beings are able to “undo” each other, both in love and in hatred.

References

Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble. Routledge, New York & London.

Butler, Judith (2004a). “Introduction: Acting in Concert””, in Undoing Gender. Routledge, New York & London.

Butler, Judith (2004b). “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy”, in Undoing Gender. Routledge, New York & London.
Doring, Tobias (2002). “Freud About Laughter, Laughter About Freud” in Manfred Pfister (ed.) A History of English Laugher. Rodopi, London: 121-136.
Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and Punish, tr. A. Sheridan. Vintage Books, New York.

Freud, Sigmund (1900). Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams). Originally published in German by Franz Deuticke Publishers, Liepzig & Vienna.

Irigiray, Luce (1981). “This Sex Which Is Not One” in E. Marks and I. de Courtivron (eds.) New French Feminisms, tr. C. Reeder. New York: 99-106.

Kaufman, Michael (1994). Theorizing Masculinities. Sage Publications, Calif.

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1969). The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Beacon Books, Boston.

MacKinnon, Catherine (1987). Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Riviere, Joan (1929). “Womanliness as Masquerade”, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 10.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1948, originally 1939). Being and Nothingness, tr. H. Barnes. Philosophical Library, New York.

Welsh, Irvine (1995). Marabou Stork Nightmares. Vintage Books, London.

Notes

[1] As presented by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams/Die Traumdeutung (1900).

[2] It is made clear that Roy was not originally anxious about homosexuality. In fact, he claims that he originally believed that all sex was anal, after so often hearing Tony saying of women that he would “shag the fuckin erse oafay that” (p. 111).

[3] Ambivalence refers to cathexic tension that is generated in the love-hate relationship between the ego and the incorporated love-object.

[4] Various psychoanalytic theorists (for instance, Freud and – to a lesser extent – Lacan) suggest that the success of homosociality requires the suppression of an innate bi-/homosexuality, however, the sociological work (although it is now outdated) of Levi-Strauss indicate that it is the evolutionary drive towards heterosexual reproduction that necessitates a homosocial system. This seems to be a chicken-or-the-egg debate; for the purposes of this discussion it is enough to recognize that both systems exist, and are symbiotic.

[5] John tells Roy that he is “fightin fir the Strang name”; the etymology of this surname is a Scots word for “strong”, underlining the ideal which the father embodies. This is not to suggest that the ideal of masculinity which is enforced by John is one which John himself successfully achieves, John is in fact described as a rather pathetic figure, who attempts to find a place in an idealistic discourse that he can never, as a working-class Scotsman, achieve true status in. He mimes an Englishness (in his obsession with Winston Churchill) as well as an intellectualism (as evidenced in the corrective letter he writes to the BBC).

[6] Interestingly, in this exchange Roy is urged to poke Bernard’s eye out. The significance of blindness and beheadings is discussed in section V of this essay.

[7] Levi-Strauss (1969) suggests that this is the reason for the incest-taboo that pervades all patriarchal societies; incest renders a woman “worthless” in the economy of male exchange, as the system requires exogamy. Tony and Kim’s sexual relationship is a reminder of the fragility of the exogamous Law, which is therefore suggestive of the fragility of the Law of the Father as a whole.

[8] Another example of the fact that the sexuality of women becomes a discursive site around which men reassert their masculinity, is the scene in which the Casuals harass the group of “winos” in an interlude during Kirsty’s rape. Ozzy says to a woman, Yvonne, “- Bet you’re a good ride, eh”, and the response comes not from her, but from her male companion who “wrinkled his eyes and puckered his lips, sucking in air, and smiled … - Coorse, he grinned” (p. 187). This extract will be discussed in more depth below.

[9] A “wide-o” refers to a vagina, and the specific implications of the metaphor are interesting: the “o” is visually mimetic of a “hole” or a lack (as Irigiray, 1981, argues is the common representation of female genitalia in male discourse); the wide suggests a vagina that has been extensively used by men, or is particularly available for penetration.

[10] A “punter” is also an interesting word, as it suggests both economic and sexual inferiority. A “punter”, according to numerous online slang-dictionaries, refers to a “member of the paying public” and specifically “the customer of a prostitute”. The connotation of a football player, one who “punts” a ball, should not be overlooked within the context of football’s symbolic role of Marabou Stork Nightmares.

[11] Proof of this is the fact that a man who Roy understands as fulfilling all of the requirements for successful masculinity, Derek Holt who is an “ordinary guy; married with two kids, liked a pint at lunchtime, good at his job, … intae fitba …” (p. 114), is seen as a “caveman” (p. 115).

[12] Foucault’s “panopticon” – the prison in which the prisoner is constantly under surveillance, but whose captors are hidden from sight – is therefore the paragon of powerlessness (1977).

[13] Irigiray problematically assumes that “masculinity” is visual, while “femininity” is tactile. It is thorny, and archaic within Feminist discourse, to posit inherent qualities of the “masculine” or “feminine” in themselves; however, we can accept Irigiray’s proposition by allowing for a genealogy whereby the visual is signified as masculine within language. Indeed, prepositionally, sight is often given the semantic property of being penetrative, for instance, “I’ll look into it” or “Look into my eyes”.

[14] The terminology is, of course, negotiable. It could be argued that Roy rapes Caroline Carson.

[15] Of Caroline, he says “To think I’d wanked over that” (p. 107); and of Kirsty, “She looked repulsive already” (p. 183).

[16] This theme begins with Roy’s confessed desire to behead Winston II and use his head as a football (p. 116), is actualized first in his indirect mutilation of the dog’s face (p. 154), and culminates in the dog’s murder, after which “[i]t was like Winson Two had no head at all; just a large, black, charred cinder in a wrap-round piece of melting plastic” (p. 167).

[17] The concept of embodied vulnerability is discussed by Butler, 2004b.

[18] Butler (1990) discusses the fallacious nature of this belief, which she describes as the de Bouvoir-ian notion that the “association of the body with the female works along magical relations of reciprocity whereby the female sex becomes restricted to its body, and the male body, fully disavowed, becomes, paradoxically, the incorporeal instrument of an ostensibly radical freedom (1990: 16).

Freud on Female Sexuality, and later feminist modifications

Giorgione - The Sleeping Venus

Sigmund Freud's famous essay, "Female Sexuality", silly as it seems now, is still interesting when seen as a stage in the development of Gender Theory. Here I summarize some of the core essays in this chain - keeping my personal opinions to a minimum, because otherwise I would come off sounding rude.

In Freud's essay, the central question is - how does the female come to achieve the situation of the Oedipus complex? Like the boy, her first love-object is her mother, but at some stage she shifts her sexual alliance to her father.

Of course, what is problematic with this model is that it suggests that lesbian or bisexual women are merely “underdeveloped”, as they would have never undergone this original shift: “women [who] remain arrested in their original attachment to their mother and never achieve a true change-over towards men” (p. 22). The mature girl has also shifted her interest in her clitoris to her vagina.

The original attachment to the mother is as intense as the later attachment to the father. Although he admits that psychoanalysts have “long given up any expectation of a neat parallelism between male and female sexual development” (p. 22), he speaks in terms of the “normal positive Oedipus situation” of the male, which the female only achieves after going through a “negative complex”. This “negative complex” stage is the root of hysteria, he claims (the word etymologically derives from the Greek for “uterus”).

Freud suggests that women are more prone to adult bisexuality (Freud believes that all human beings are innately bisexual, but that they are socialised from an early age into heterosexuality) because they have two sexual zones: the vagina which is feminine and the clitoris which is masculine (it was never really clear what he meant by this) .

Whereas, in the male, his Oedipal stage is eventually terminated by the fear of castration; the female already regards herself as castrated and this prompts the female Oedipal stage (only after she initially rejects her sexuality entirely, then attempts to appropriate masculinity by choosing a homosexual love-object). Freud claims that many females are incompletely sexualised, since this process is so lengthy and oblique.

He then discusses the conflict between daughter and mother, which he claims originates in the mother’s role in preventing the child from masturbating or, later, finding a sexual partner; and also because the daughter regards her mother as castrated like herself, and therefore reviles all “femaleness”. Furthermore, the mother is blamed for giving the daughter an “insufficient penis” and for weaning her too soon. There is a powerful ambivalence in the emotions toward the mother, and unlike the boy, the negative feelings cannot be displaced onto the father. Therefore the attachment to the mother is destroyed for the female.

So ... that was the prevailing view on female sexuality at the turn of the century. No wonder so many women ended up insane.

Luce Irigaray, a few decades later, in her groundbreaking essay "This Sex Which is Not One", elaborates on Freud’s “2-sex” classification (masculine clitoris, feminine vagina). In her theory, woman’s genitals are multiple; the woman’s sexuality, in fact, is plural. The woman can masturbate passively (her genitals touch “themselves”). Female sexuality is touch-orientated, and shifting, and all-embracing.

The dilemma for women is that Western society is regulated by the masculine, which recognises only the singularity of the phallus as the true sexual organ. The female does indeed, as Freud described, attempt to appropriate that phallus for herself (through subservience to a male love-object).

The multiplicity of female genitalia is disrupted by intercourse with the man, which is an “intrusion” (p. 262) which separates the lips of the vulva and prevents their autoerotic touch. The vagina is therefore reduced to “one-ness” by the phallus; it becomes merely the sheath that “take[s] over from the little boy’s hand” when his masturbation becomes socially prohibited – it is thereby, in fact, less than one – it is nothing, a hole.

Woman, in the phallocentric dominant social imagination, therefore acts only as “a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies” (p. 262). The female tactile desire is subordinated by the male visual desire – and women are forced into a position where they must exhibit their bodies, but hide and efface their genitals (which terrify the phallus).

The pleasure that the woman takes in the incomplete form of her genitals must be hidden because it does not satisfy the “phallomorphism” of our society.

The child, in this schema, becomes the replacement for her repressed sexuality. She is denied the ability to touch herself, or to touch the man (“in a culture in which sexual relations are impracticable because man’s desire and woman’s are strangers to each other” p. 264), and therefore fondles her child.

But this strategy is regressive; it reduces the woman and man to “mother” and “father” and rekindles the Oedipal struggle. The dilemma remains: how does the woman remove herself from the social mechanisms which reduce her to a commodity in exchange between men, without renouncing all of their heterosexual pleasure, and thereby cloistering herself?

Another controversial critique of Freud came from practicing psychoanalysist Joan Riviere. The starting point for her most famous essay, "Womanliness as Masquerade" is a work by Ernest Jones called “The Early Development of Female Sexuality” (1927), in which he argues against Freud’s insistence that the phallus is the primary sexual organ of both sexes. Jones was particularly interested in homosexual women; which he categorizes into two types. One of the types of homosexual woman, which Riviere picks up as the basis of her own essay, is the woman who behaves heterosexually, but is in fact strongly masculine in her identity. Femininity, Riviere claims, is for these women a masquerade to avoid incurring the displeasure and violence of men.

Her schema is based upon a basic assumption of Psychoanalysis that all people are born as bisexuals, and that hetero- or homo-sexuality is achieved through the resolution of a series of conflicts that develop during early childhood. Another psychoanalyst, Ferenczi, claimed that the subconscious recognition of inherent bisexuality causes anxiety, and that some men therefore exaggerate their masculinity as a “defense” against their homosexuality. Riviere’s woman, an intellectual who displays strong feminine traits to mask her desire to be masculine, is a kind of corollary of Ferenczi’s man.

At the time she was writing (1929) the female intellectual was a fairly new phenomenon. These women were often compelled to excel at both “masculine” traits (intellectual ability) and “feminine” traits (to be a good mother and lover etc.).

She introduces an example of a patient of hers that was of this type. This woman required constant reassurance of her feminine attractiveness from father-figure-type men whenever she had demonstrated her excellence in her “masculine” career. During psychoanalysis, Riviere uncovered a strong sense of sexual rivalry with both her mother and her father – indicating that the innate infant bisexuality had never been effectively resolved into clear heterosexuality. Her need to “castrate” her father (steal his power, and render him unthreatening) resulted in her choosing to excel in a “masculine” career, which afforded her a sense of superiority over men. However, fearing the father’s symbolic retribution, she warded off his displeasure by appealing to the father (who was embodied by various father-figure-type men) with her feminine sexuality. This allowed her to appear innocent of the castration; Riviere argues that her femininity was a ruse to hide the fact that she possessed the phallus (masculine power).

Riviere argues that the masquerade of womanliness is itself “true” womanliness, as gender is performative rather than innate (as J. Butler later argues). However, for this woman, womanliness was a method to avoid anxiety rather than a sincere source of sexual pleasure. In fact, although this woman enjoyed sex to full orgasm, her enjoyment was a mask of the (male) fear of impotence. She was essentially frigid (i.e. castrated, and longing to castrate) and therefore needed to be loved by men in order to restore her sense of self-worth. Riviere suggests that this woman was innately a homosexual (she fantasized about women, and even identified with her husband when he had an affair).

Riviere cites other behaviors that can characterize this type of woman: technically competent women who pretend to be incompetent, intellectuals who dismiss their own subjects when talking to colleagues (telling jokes etc.).

Riviere suggests that the desire to identify with men arises from an intense rivalry with other women (bordering on sadism). Based upon Melanie Klein’s models of female psychosexual development, she claims that this rivalry results from an unresolved conflict of the Oral phase, in which the mother is seen to withhold the nipple. This anxiety/sadism against the nipple is displaced to a castrative desire, and the desire to become the phallus (in practice, to become masculine) in order to placate the mother. However, the woman feels helpless, as she believes that both father and mother possess the phallus and withhold it from her, and her rage prompts her to create a phantasy of non-lack (by attempting to acquire respect for her masculinity, and thereby to claim to possess the phallus), and must also hide the fact that she believes she has castrated her father/mother.

Furthermore, the woman will deny the existence of the mother (as source of the nipple-sadistic anxiety) entirely in order to avoid that unresolved anxiety. Relations with women are therefore subordinated, and the woman becomes obsessed with how she is viewed by men. In this way, Riviere suggests, the homosexuality of the woman is displaced.

Riviere closes with the question of “what is das ewig Weibliche?”; what is the nature of “true” femininity, or femininity that exists “behind” the mask? She cites Ernest Jones and Helene Deutsch who claim that female heterosexuality develops during the Oral phase, and teaches women to find gratification in incorporation. All of the other apparent qualities of femininity, Riviere argues, are merely reaction-formations that develop out of anxiety, and are not a true source of pleasure for the woman. When women come to accept castration (and concurrently become passive, humble beings, she claims) they are attempting to atone for their desires to castrate. This is true, Riviere argues, of both heterosexual and homosexual women.

In the 1990s the Freudian theory got another makeover in the form of Judith Butler.

In her essay, "Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire", she insists that feminist theory does not merely reverse the paradigm of gender generalization and create a homogenous enemy in the “colonizing” male. She talks about the need to consider different sites of oppression “horizontally” rather than hierarchically, so as to avoid the “tactic of masculinist signifying economies” (p. 309) of subordinating certain discourses below others.

Certain theorists have argued that feminism effaces the multiplicity of identity (and oppression) by universalizing the category “woman”, ignoring race, class, culture and other dimensions of personhood. They claim that this is “normative and exclusionary” (p. 309), and in fact serves to disable critiques of these oppressions. A response to these critiques has been the attempts at a “coalitional politics” of feminism. Butler, however, is skeptical, her concern being that the perceived need for unity (as a strategic necessity) would not allow for true democracy that allows multiplicity, remains open to contestation, and does not coerce all parties into a particular (class and culture-based) conception of successful dialogue.

Butler argues that coalitions based upon “identity” are doomed to become oppressive; since when identity becomes a linguistic issue it institutionalizes “a definition that forecloses in advance the emergence of new identity concepts”. Instead, Butler claims that provisional coalitions should form around particular concrete practices, which will allow those whose interests are implicated in those practices to remain free of artificial, oppressive identities for the sake of political action.

The notion of “identity” as an objective, stable and universal experience is contested. The notion of “identity” is a keystone for the definition of the “person” that is so essential in our social discourses, and it presumes that personhood is a diachronic category (the person remains “self-identical” over time). Butler, using a Foucaultian paradigm, argues that the linguistic concept of identity constructs our experience of reality rather than neutrally describes it. This is particularly true in the case of gender, which is a highly regulated feature of social/personal life. Those who transgress the nominal regulative categories of gender/sex (LGBTs, “masculine women” and “feminine men” etc.) are therefore “unintelligible”. The binary and unequal categories of “male” and “female” are required for the “heterosexualization of desire” (p. 312) and do not allow for the existence of “identities” that subvert naturalized gender/sexual ones. Modern movements to have these subversive categories recognized therefore provide an opportunity for the concept of “identity” to be questioned (and thereby the possibilities for these marginal/transgressive experiences to proliferate).

Butler then discusses the theories of three theorists of poststructural gender oppressiveness: Foucault, Irigaray and Wittig. She attempts a reconciliation between their differing theories of how sexual categorization derives from power. Irigaray claims that there is only one sex in language – the male – and that woman in this system is unrepresentable (they are not even the Other of the male subject, they are merely the “relation of difference” in a language of binaries in which there is only the male, and woman is entirely silenced). Foucault suggests that there is a potential multiplicity of sexes, but that they are reduced to a binary in order to suppress any position that disrupts the “heterosexual, reproductive and medicojuridical hegemonies” (p. 314). Wittig, finally, believes that only woman is a sexed/gendered being in our language system (while man alone is a “person”), and that this is oppressive. She claims that only the lesbian could overthrow the male-female binary and restore true humanism (in which everyone is a “person”), since the concept of sex does not apply to the lesbian as it does to relationships/identities involving men.

Wittig’s position falls prey to the fallacy of “the metaphysics of substance”, in which concepts that are created by the grammar of language are falsely believed to be prelinguistic attributes of being (i.e. a set of individual psychic impressions are organized by language into a fictitious unity, which is believed to be substantive). Gender is, as Wittig elsewhere concurs, particularly problematic since it is created by language. Language presumes that gender is substantive, and also that it is an aspect of “identity” (one can “be” a woman or a man, as one can “be” heterosexual etc.). The male-female binary is presumed to operate by différance (one is a man only if one is not a woman), and the structure presumes that (heterosexual) desire follows causally from (masculine-feminine) gender, which follows causally from (male-female) sex. However, Butler claims that in reality there is no core “being” primary to one’s performances. Sexual identity does not cause one’s actions; it is defined by them.

Finally, Butler investigates whether gender, as well as the restriction of sexual practice into “hetero-” “homo-” or “bisexual” that it achieves, can be subverted. This can not be achieved, she argues, by identifying a sexual position (e.g. homosexuality) that is already constituted by the regulations of language. Rather, a recognition of the constructedness of identity (which does not render it false) should allow for a politics of gender that allows for the fact that gender is an ongoing discursive practice, and that identity is continually reconstructed.