Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘Kate Zambreno’ category

Kate Zambreno – Book of Mutter

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My review of Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter came out yesterday at Necessary Fiction – it begins like this:

A quarter of a way into Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter the following stand-out line surfaces amidst a collage of anecdotes related to memorializing, burial practices, and grief writing:

What does it mean to write what is not there. To write absence.

The line sits on its own, separated out from a preceding block of text commenting on Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, and it feels, at first, like a standard academic question. A way to frame Zambreno’s thirteen-year project to write about the death of her mother. And it certainly does do this. But its tone and position—that missing question mark, the clarified repetition of the idea of absence, and the white page that engulfs the reader as they finish the weighted word—give these simple sentences all the power of a lament and an entreaty. This isn’t a curious professor posing a rhetorical question to a dispassionate audience, this is the fierce howl of a desire for sense-making.

Grief memoirs are interested in burdened negotiations of this sort because grief is always a plea bargain, an attempt to wring sense from this most senseless of experiences. But here’s the trick: death is senseless in only one definition of that word, meaningless, but it engages the five senses relentlessly. So what does it mean to write what is not there? That missing question mark in Zambreno’s line places her sentence somewhere between a defeated query and a brave gesture to the impossible. And she doesn’t mention writing about what is not there, she is interested in the verb, the act of writing and what that very act might mean. In this way, the question is also about the asker. She could be saying_, what does it mean that I am writing what is not there_. And in this, immediately and cleverly, Zambreno embraces the conflicted dichotomy of absence versus presence.

You can read the entire review here.

Heroines – Kate Zambreno (more thoughts)

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I’ve now had some time to think about Kate Zambreno’s Heroines a bit more and I’d like to add to what I wrote about in my first post. This is definitely the kind of book that stays with you and provokes discussion, from several different angles.

Last week I wrote mostly about my overall response to the book, how it is put together and how its structure affected my reaction to Zambreno’s project. I also summed up what I felt was the main point of the book, and I still believe that this overall point—this idea of women’s literary voices being systematically erased in a very particular way— is really what makes Heroines a fascinating and successful piece of literary history/criticism. Zambreno also writes so compellingly about the women writers and/or spouses of those successful male writers—she gives them histories and bodies, she fleshes out their presence alongside their successful partners, she invites us, as readers, to look backward at the literary canon and start over again, reading forward with a new perspective. We’ve had to do this before and we’ll have to do it again, and it is always an exciting moment.

Today, though, I’d like to write about the more personal reaction I had to Heroines. Obviously, every book elicits a “personal” reaction, so this is a little bit different… and perhaps a little harder to write about. Somehow the nature of Zambreno’s narrative, the way she mixes her own personal memoir into her re-drawing of the “modernist wives” seems, at least to me, to be what is polarizing opinion about the book. And in a way, my reaction to the book—although by the time I turned that last page was almost completely positive—my reaction to the book embodies both extremes.

Zambreno puts a lot of herself into the book, including numerous anecdotes about her private life—her relationship with her partner, her worries as a writer and an academic, interactions she has with other women, and how she felt alienated as a “trailing spouse” as she and her partner moved to different places to follow his work. Most of this information is front-loaded into the book, by around page 100 it drops out significantly and the rest of Heroines focuses almost completely on the women Zambreno is championing.

In those early pages, however, much of her story revolves around a kind of tension between herself and her partner—she puts herself into the role of the erased modernist wife, and so by default her partner must play the role of the oppressive successful man. Zambreno does admit that she makes him into a character, and to some extent she admits that she herself is reveling/wallowing in the role she gives herself. She later calls it a form of “memorializing”—a very interesting idea, but one I’m not quite comfortable with.

While reading those early pages of Heroines, it was hard for me to keep a critical distance as I have lived and continue to live a similar situation. On paper, at least. I’m about her age, I’m a writer, I considered working toward a Phd but decided at the time that it wasn’t right for me. Like Zambreno, who appears ambivalent about her unfinished academic status, this is a decision I still sometimes regret. My husband, however, is an academic (a physicist) and I followed him all the way to Switzerland because his job is more stable, more financially sound. As a writer who happens to be a woman, as a relatively new mom who has found herself without many hours of productive writing/working time, I struggle with many of the issues Zambreno touches on throughout the book.

Despite these similarities, or rather, I think, because of them, I found myself unsettled with the way she puts herself and her partner into the oppressed/oppressor roles. Not because I don’t believe that this can’t happen, but because in Zambreno’s case it felt somehow self-imposed. It felt like she wanted to be in these roles because it brought her closer to the women she so admired and wanted to save. I couldn’t help thinking about how dissimilar her life could have been (or is, I really have no idea), and about how much opportunity she appears to have had. Frankly, I can’t quite think of anything more free, more empowering, than an open schedule and full access to an academic library.

I say this last sentence somewhat flippantly, yet knowing how crippling the self-doubt of a (woman) writer/academic can be, knowing how difficult it is to find your own fictional/critical voice when the models are overwhelmingly male and knowing how enraging the perpetuation of certain gender roles in writing/publishing/academia—I know these things, I don’t want to minimize the issues that must be negotiated.

She addresses this issue of role playing rather quickly and a little obliquely, toward the end of Heroines when she makes a comment about Second Wave feminists and their requirement that women write and be empowered heroines. And there is some idea—which Zambreno mentions in an interview—that I should be reading the book like a novel and not a memoir. So then my quibble is not so much with the “truth” of Zambreno’s story but with the form of the book and this mixture of criticism/biography/memoir. Does her own story inform my understanding and reactions to the stories of the silence modernist wives? I think—and I think this after days of thinking, and rereading—that it does not. Simply because while I found her book incredibly intelligent and her writing and ideas a real pleasure to read, I found myself becoming impatient with the “character” of Kate Zambreno as she was written in Heroines.

But I am still thinking about this… about what my reaction might mean in terms of my own feminism, how I judge other women as they handle the difficulties that all women writers face compared to how I handle them, how I feel about the stereotype of the irrational woman and why I feel that way.

So I am still re-reading, and I am still thinking…

Heroines – Kate Zambreno (first thoughts)

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This may end up being one of my last book/reading posts of the year, so it is a happy coincidence that I’ll finish up by writing about Kate Zambreno’s Heroines – a book I only recently came across (thank you Anthony) but which speaks to so much of what I’ve been thinking about in recent years – namely literature and women and women’s writing and its place in/displacement from the canon. This entire year here at Pieces was dedicated to reviewing women writers and a feminist approach to the whole literary universe.

I think my reaction to Heroines is going to take a few separate posts – I have a lot to discuss. So today is just one initial reaction. I’ll try to get the others written up before the end of the week (although my daughter’s daycare is closed now until the 7th of January – I am not unaware of the irony of this fact keeping me from writing again more quickly about this particular book).

Before I say anything else, I will say that Heroines is a Before/After book, meaning that reading it has broken my literary perspective into a “Before I read Heroines” and an “After I read Heroines.” I will not be able to look at that long line of canonized male writers in the same way ever again, nor will I be able to make the same assumptions about the women who were connected with them and women writers in general – and I want to send a huge heartfelt thank you to Zambreno for doing this. I’ve always been aware of the sad exclusion of so many wonderful and talented female writers from the canon and other generalized literary discussions, but she’s gotten me to think about why this happens in a very particular way.

In brief, Heroines is a hybrid work: part criticism, part literary biography, part personal memoir. Zambreno is interested in the “modernist wives,” women like Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien(ne) Eliot, Jane Boyles, Elizabeth Hardwick, Sylvia Plath, and, to some extent, Virginia Woolf and a handful of others. Women who were used as muses for their famous spouses but forbidden their own artistic expression, often diagnosed as mentally unstable and eventually silenced and/or institutionalized.

Just a few words on the hybrid form of the book before I write about the content. This kind of fractured nontraditional narrative is beginning to feel more and more comfortable (and Zambreno makes a case for it as a particularly feminine form of writing – an idea which I found quite interesting), and I think that as postmodern readers we have come to enjoy it—I certainly do—and also expect it. The book as a whole feels very accessible, and yet it remains rigorously academic as well.

In her acknowledgments, Zambreno thanks her editor for supporting the idea that we should not be “erasing the self in our criticism.” It’s obviously something she thought a lot about – how to put herself into the book, how to structure the narrative while keeping herself woven through it. This, I think, is where the book will be contested. It is where she minimizes (on purpose, by invoking her own fragility) her writer’s authority, and it puts her in a vulnerable place. I am still working out my own reaction to it.

One thing I can say now, however, is that I think the book’s blog-like structure, with the reader following along as Zambreno makes all these connections and bridges, jumping from subject to subject and exploring the various writings, biographies and other disjointed textual and anecdotal evidence on the lives of her heroines and their connections to her, means that some of her overriding arguments and ultimate conclusions become hidden at the end of the book – and this is a bit of shame, because they’re brilliant.

I’m not arguing for a traditionally structured work of academic criticism, not at all, but an awareness of the risks inherent in this kind of jumping, fractured, and personalized narrative – and then somehow the ability to undercut it, to insure the reader doesn’t get lost in the mix of personal and academic, to get right away to the heart of the argument.

Which is this – and it’s undeniable and brilliant:

That a male writer’s emotional excess/singular artistic focus is glorified and lauded, it becomes his genius, his ability to embody the other, his “transcendence of the self” – while a woman experiencing/attempting the same is diagnosed and institutionalized, it becomes her madness, her inability to live in normal society, her loss of reason.

Zambreno fills the book with examples – Scott Fitzgerald actually using lawyers to keep Zelda from writing (his case is nearly the most egregious, I may never be able to read him again), Virginia Woolf’s carefully allotted writing time (by doctors and Leonard) – no more than an hour a day, Flaubert lecturing Louise Colet against excess, Robert Lowell idolizing then demonizing his women as he fell in and out of love, and more and more, example after example… the book is composed of interwoven case studies of this kind of violence/oppression and the denial of the worth of a woman’s artistic creation.

 So overall, what Zambreno puts forward is an extremely compelling idea – and a way to re-envision what have been considered “minor” works and place them back on equal footing with similar novels and poems and stories created by male writers all along. This, to me, is the greatest contribution that Heroines makes to the literary discussion.

I’ll have more to say about the book – specifically about the personal part of the narrative and about Zambreno’s romanticism of the silenced woman writer (a romanticism she acknowledges and addresses), and about the different feminist approaches to the problem of the female writer, approaches which fascinate me and provoke a lot of questions – but I’ll have to do it another day. More soon.

 

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