Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (44 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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self, as Derrida points out in his essay on Condillac,
The Archeology of the Frivolous,
it functioned as a key term to distinguish the bourgeois values of the useful and the serviceable, cardinal values of empiricism, from what seemed superfluous and excessive.
3
With its near neighbor, the carnivalesque, the frivolous shares "an attitude of creative disrespect, a radical opposition to the illegitimately powerful, to the morose and monological" (Stamm, 55). But unlike carnival, the scoff-law frivolous looks for more than a temporary suspension of the established order. It looks instead for an immortality and completeness of its own designation.
4
Obviously, I am troping the term, turning it, like Black or Gay, to reinflate a kind of experience the original usage attempts to degrade. Weldon's Sandra cuts to the core of this recuperated frivolous when she insists that frivolity means "Form, style, contentin that order of importance":
form,
"the intricate patterns which contain the key";
content,
''the mere stuff of the universe ... last and least" (p. 8). Such a resistance to the referent's dominion over signification continues, into
laissez-faire
and thereafter, that founding movement in British antiestablishment discourse: antinomianism, the powerful antithesis to the Calvinism of the "respectable bourgeois Puritan" (Hill, p. 276). Weldon heroes like Sandra, or earlier the furious Ruth of
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil,
parade clearly the key features of the antinomian spirit.
5
Not only do they interiorize authority until impulse becomes the only law to which they admit themselves subject, but any earlier adherence to an institutionalized law becomes demonized. The frivolous/antinomian is thus always a former law-abidera law-abider whose conversion leads in turn to a radical willingness to act in and on time rather than to an intellectual or apolitical flight from history. The Weldonian-antinomian becomes
radically
involved in acting upon, rather than "radically alienated from the secular order" (Pocock, p. 346)the way of the Romantic sublime.
Learning from the She-Devil
Those features virtually outline
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
. From all too willing, though sadly inept, "good wife" under the law (indeed that is what the Biblical allusion to Ruth insists on), Ruth is transformed to the she-devil whose will and desire are the only laws she need acknowledge, and before which every other life and history palls. "But this is wonderful! This is exhilarating! If you are a she-devil, the mind clears at once. The spirits rise. There is no shame, no guilt, no dreary striving to be good. There is only, in the end, what you
want
. And I can take what I want. I am a she-devil" (p. 43). Apocalyptically, Ruth uses this crucial
 
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change to mold not only the law (Judge Bishop) and religion (Father Ferguson) but even the truly sacrosanct modern profession, health (Dr. Black and Mr. Genghis) in the forms found by her large and capable hands. From the crucial moment of her conversion, she demonstrates vividly and wittily that crucial antinomian "conviction of a radically free natural capacity within [her]self [that] intensifie[s] h[er] ability to engage in radical action based on radical criticism of ... laws and liberties in their inherited form," a "liberation amounting almost to divinization of human capacities" (Pocock, p. 375). If in the late twentieth century, divinization must alter to demonization, as the gender of the pronouns also changes, that is simply the mark of a fully secularizedfully frivolousassimilation of what was earlier religious and male.
6
The frivolous refuses the mainline form of bourgeois cultures, the melodramatic.
7
In
She-Devil
melodrama is represented by its sweetened, neutered form, romance: the life, loves, and writing of Mary Fisher. Since melodrama helps to disguise puritanism's transformation into capitalism, by no accident does Mary Fisher grow rich writing novels that deny all problems of epistemological economy and clarification. Instead, her books (unlike her creator's) fulfill "a desire to make starkly articulate" (Brooks, p. 4). She invites her readers to see, as she does, looking out from her High Tower, "the way the evening sun stretches across the sea onto the old stone and makes everything a warm soft pinky yellow. Who needs rose-tinted glasses when reality is so cozy?" (
She-Devil,
p. 66). Simultaneously moralistic and antimetaphysical, her vision can " 'prove' the existence of a moral [read: melodramatic] universe, which, though put into question, ... does exist and can be made to assert its presence and its categorical force among men'' (Brooks, p. 290). Especially when that force performs as a kind of all-pervasive sympathy, generating a world where "the rain falls because she is sad, [where] storms rage because she is consumed by unsatisfied lust and the crops fail because she is lonely" (
She-Devil,
p. 161). Here, any problematic "excess of the signifier in relation to the signifiable" (Brooks, p. 67) vanishes. Her readers accept supine passivity as the valid price of narcissistic centrality. It doesn't matter if I'm bull's eye to the world's slings and arrows as long as that guarantees that I'm the main attraction.
Prizing this cynosure innocence, despite her sexual self-indulgence, Mary Fisher writes and reads herself like Styron's Sophie: a righteous subject whose choices, dictated and structured by a predestined power, are no choice at all. She is thus powerless when Ruth turns against her. Melodramatic imaginations like Mary Fisher's read need as a trace on the squeaky-clean slate of the subject, inscribed by others' withdrawal or ab-
 
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sence. Her collapse thus unfolds not from a gap within her character but from a rupture in time and space, engineered by the now frivolous Ruth, who appears to Mary as an excessive, inexplicable, externalized cupidity, before which melodramatic subjects, Mary herself or the Bobbo of the Tower, can only experience her- or himself as prey. "How weak people are!" Ruth realizes. "How they simply accept what happens, as if there were such a thing as destiny, and not just a life to be grappled with" (p. 240).
Frivolous Ruth, grappling with life, scarred into awareness by melodrama's self-squeezing regime of service and utility, cautiously conserves her own, incessantly jeopardized, power to maintain it and herself beyond the claims of any reference: the Swiss bank accounts. She has complete mobility. She can change her occupation, even her name, at will, while Mary and Bobbo remain stationed and targeted in the entirely vulnerable High Tower. Weldon's great comic image for this difference is, of course, Ruth's transformation of her own body, despite its enormous cost in suffering. She makes herself refer, quite literally, to the image she has chosen, rather than to the image the natural and social orders conspire to impose upon her. Frivolity displaces cupidity with obsession, centered on the ability to fold back on oneself, both semantically and erotically, rather than to point to a place within a fixed order of (suburban) identities. Frivolity thus becomes a term for "need left to itself, need without object, without desire's direction" (Derrida, p. 130). Ruth wants Bobbo back, not because she any longer loves, let alone desires, him, but because "the seeming repetition of desire without any object or of a floating desire" (Derrida) marks the essential triumph in the frivolous mind of the subject over her heretofore ordained subjugation.
This contest between melodrama and frivolity comes to a head on the question of suffering. Aware that suffering is always indecent, and also likely to improve the position of someone other than the sufferer, the frivolous prefers, whenever possible, to be heartless rather than to celebrate heartache. But this heartlessness also allows frivolity to use rather than to be used by suffering. Melodramatic culture, loathing suffering but finding it inevitable, offers to convert pain into the price of wisdom and the bond that cements society. That's Styron's point, or pointlessness, if we read him with Starlady Sandra. Ruth, entirely frivolous, reads suffering in a very different way.
"Il faut suffrir"
(
She-Devil,
p. 162), she acknowledges. But her suffering she herself selects: "The more you want the more you suffer. If you want everything, you must suffer everything." The melodramatic "suffer at random, and gain nothing." Not even dignity. Suffering makes Mary Fisher merely "petulant," and Bobbo ''depressed" (p. 161).
 
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But the frivolous locates suffering as part of the achievement of, the pleasure of, power. "I have all," Ruth boasts at novel's end, and Bobbo "has none" (p. 241).
But you are wrong, you will say. Fay Weldon doesn't approve of Ruth. She says that
She-Devil
is about envy and its corrosive power.
8
Ruth, at the end, has not liberated herself. In her fury she has merely converted herself into the image of everything she once, wisely, loathed. Ruth is not the answer.
Segue into Leading the Band
You're right. Of course. Which is why I focus on
Leader of the Band
. The later novel not only represents a key text in the development of the contemporary frivolous, a model or Ur-text of what such fiction could be, but it also seems to signal a far-reaching change in Fay Weldon's own vision of self-liberation. At its core,
Leader of the Band
quite literally renounces fury, purging frivolity of its contaminating double.
At first, it seems to make such good sense that fury opens the way to frivolity. Doesn't the frivolous turn mark a subject's furious rejection of imposed identity in favor of an identity she chooses to enact? In what else does the toughness of the frivolous root if not in its steady refusal to be read by any public order of utility? Isn't that why bourgeois society has insistently dismissed the frivolous with such derision? Because it can't believe in a viable meaning outside a socially constructed order?
Weldon answers this argument with the entirely admirable Mum in "A Libation of Blood," the first of the three stories appended to
Leader of the Band
. "You're so frivolous," complains Alice to her mother (p. 162). What has her mother said or done that merits the term? She's merely told Alice she's the result of a faulty condom, and ''whoever liked"the frivolous narrator immediately asks"to believe they sat thus accidentally in the world?" If we are all here, men and women alike, accidental in an accidental world, (and not essential to an overdetermined universe, as Mary Fisher would have it), then what sense does fury make? What good can fury do? Alice has just suffered a miscarriage. Mum consoles Alice for her recent miscarriage by recallingthe first time her daughter's ever heard of it"the time I miscarried the first lot of twins," said Mum, who was, as ever, full of surprises.
"Just as well. They weren't your father's. Now drink a lot of water, and replace the lost blood, and here's to better luck next time. It'll happen." [Pp. 17273]
 
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Fury, as we'll see, can only subvert the enlargement promised by frivolous conversion: downscaling comedy to that "comic turn, turned serious" which finally summarizes
She-Devil
(p. 241).
Replacing fury, no matter how righteous its claim,
Leader of the Band
centers Starlady Sandra's "turn" on an unimpeachable commitment to enjoyment. "What else was there to do," Sandra asks, "but get through [life], enjoying yourself on the way'' (p. 96). And that commitment to enjoyment, in turn, opens the way to the return of all that fury represses: of the father, of what the father knows and unknowingly misrepresents (classics and science), and even of the patriarchal family. This frivolous book argues that, beyond gender, ideology, class, injustice, and strife, it's "Luck of the draw, all luck of the draw" (p. 167). Using luck, then, not inviting or refusing suffering, turns out to be the way to liberate both the self and the knowledge the self needs to sustain itself. How frivolous.
Part Two
Leading the Band
The dynamic of that frivolity helps me, as the impossible reader of
Leader of the Band,
to sense the possibility of a pertinent male voice, of a not-irrelevant male reader. It makes me want to try to set going now a frivolous dialogue between the novel itself and what I know: the kinds of traditionally male knowledge the book subverts and revises, classics and sciences, or more specifically mythology and genetics. (Or does that simply mean older and contemporary mythologies?) Sandra's choice to accept her pregnancy opens a process that rethinks both the pseudo-tragic glamor of guilt-through-inheritance (the classical Furies that haunt her), and the semitough science of identity-by-inheritance (the mad, modern pursuit of genetics that originally caused her). By the end of the novel, the genetic and, more notably, the classical, each in its own way furious, have been not surpassed but sublated by the frivolous.
9
All unknowing, the frivolous imagination recovers what the furious heart leaves out or behind, retrieving a buried past to secure a dawning future.
Reviving the Classics
Sandra, discoverer of the planet Athena, maintains she is driven to France by "
*
Harpies
*
Furies
*
History" (p. 2). "In my veins," she claims, "runs the blood of the past" (p. 31), but networked through the capillaries of the Antique. Her story, like the stories hers adumbrates, works out the revenge of "the God Eros" (p. 12). Discovering and naming Athena, interpreting the Universe to thousands, ganged up on and ultimately discarded by the

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