Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (8 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

Tags: #Women and Literature, #England, #History, #20th Century, #Literary Criticism, #General, #European, #English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, #Women Authors, #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #test

BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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voke "scandal and abomination"the situationist and the punk become, through situations, "a reproach to your happiness" (Genet, p. 22). Now, duly reproached, the spectator should, in Brecht's terms, "take up a position toward the action." In this attempt to "put an end to dead time" and to "get out of the twentieth century'' (Gray, p. 5), passive becomes active and the spectacle's thrall is broken. It becomes clear from Greil Marcus' 1989 book,
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century,
and Jon Savage's 1991 book,
England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock,
that in the breaking of this thrall, the punk persona is centered on a performance of a reinvented identity based on a rejection of expertise, of ideology, and of audience, while the textual style of the punk centers on
détournement
(montage) and on the transitory, revolting gesture.
Feminist-Punk: Collision/Collusion
"Feminist" best articulates, then, the politics of Fay Weldon and her texts; "punk" best articulates the style of her personae and her writing. Weldon both is a feminist-punk and writes feminist-punkthis best describes the manner of her cultural intervention. It is through the creation of a punk persona and through a punk style of language that Fay Weldon attempts, in her novels, to get out of identity categories, particularly those defining sex, sexuality, gender, and feminism.
In many ways, such a coupling seems bound to have happened, sooner or later. Punk has, after all, been used to crack the code of other literary texts. For instance, David E. James uses punk in his analysis of the literary scene in Los Angeles in an article called "Poetry /Punk/Production: Some Recent Writings in LA." Neil Nehring unashamedly collides Graham Greene with the Sex Pistols in a
PMLA
piece called "Revolt into Style." Most recently, Larry McCaffery, in "The Artists of Hell," has defined Kathy Acker's fiction as "fiction to slam dance by" (p. 228). My essay proposes that such slam dancing may be done in the name of feminism and, particularly, in the name of Fay Weldon.
This collision between feminism and punk produces more than a wreck, however. The interaction, however brief, changes the direction and momentum of both feminism and punk, defamiliarizes each, exposes each's inner workings. The collusion becomes apparent as an understanding between the two parties is revealed, and we realize that something can indeed be Johnny Rotten in the state of feminism. The impact reveals a pact. This is a pact that, most recently, the 1990s subcultural phenomenon of the Riot Grrrls has recognized. Erratically organized around punk bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and the tastily and not-so-tastily named
 
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Cheesecake and Chicken Milk, these grrrls "coopt the values and rhetoric of punk ... in the name of feminism" (White,
LA Weekly,
p. 34). They realize that the interests of feminism and punk do, in fact, surprisingly enough, coincide. Feminist-punk. Let's dance.
III
A Punk Persona: A Feminist with an Attitude
If cyberpunk is, as Stewart Brand suggests, "technology with attitude," feminist-punk is, most emphatically, "feminism with attitude." Such "attitude'' is particularly revealed, as we shall see, in transitory, revolting gestures, but also in the way the feminist-punk fashions her self in relation to the world. In the versions Fay Weldon produces of her self, mostly in interviews, there is feminism, there is punk, and there is the feminist-punk.
To call Fay Weldon a feminist is hardly a radical or an original thing to do. Everyone seems to do it, even though, as Micheline Wandor suggests, "I think it's not particularly useful to spend a long time deciding on whether or not she is or isn't a feminist writer" (
Bookshelf
). Scarcely an article goes by, however, without some discussion of Weldon's feminism and some attempt to pin it down. For instance, David Lodge says categorically that "there is no doubt that she is a feminist writer" (p. 26), while Nancy Walker talks of Weldon's articulation of a "tone of resignation" which seems "antithetical to the necessity for action urged by feminists" (p. 1). Despite this, however, Walker does still see an "overt feminism in much of Weldon's work" (p. 1). In
The Guardian,
Joanna Briscoe says that Weldon writes "deeply undreary feminist novels," while Michiko Kakutani in the
New York Times
complains of a dreary "didactic feminism" on Weldon's part. Weldon herself seems to take no responsibility for the "given" of her feminist identity when she says, "I'm not a feminist because I decided to be a feminist" (Briscoe). She would, rather, seem to resist the category.
Nevertheless, because Weldon's novels center around groups of women (
Female Friends, Down Among the Women
) and typically feminist issues, such as the social construction of beauty (
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
), reproductive technology (
The Cloning of Joanna May
), and female sexuality and spirituality (
Puffball, Remember Me
), Weldon is assigned the label "feminist." Her work centers around the concerns of feminism, people argue, and so Weldon the writer (the "fictional personality") is perceived, by association, as a feminist. Weldon, I would argue, is, to some degree, as she is perceived. What seems important here is not whether Fay
 
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Weldon is or isn't a feminist, but that she is invariably identified with feminism. She can perhaps be called a feminist writer merely because, if nothing else, both she and her critics consistently raise the issue of, and call attention to, questions of feminist identity and ideology. She is, whether she wants to be or not, fixed in various positions, always within the constellation of feminism. No one, however, (as far as I know) has tried to fix her, and her persona, within the constellation of punk.
What may seem surprising is that this fixing can be done fairly easily. Unintentionally, one would assume, Weldon constructs herself as a literary figure after the fashion of the punk. She emerges with a punk persona in four significant ways: she reinvents her own identity, rejects the value of expertise, rejects the notion of an ideology, and, lastly, refuses her audience the respect they "deserve." It is this punkish fashioning, coupled with her identification with feminism, that makes Weldon, the writer, a feminist-punk.
Reinvention of the Self: "I AmUntil I'm Not"
The identity of Fay Weldon herself seems to be the stuff of fiction. Like Ruth Patchett in
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil,
Weldon's identity is constantly subject to revisionthe text of it, therefore, should be used as merely another fiction to inform her novels, not as a means to "master" them. Identity, postmodernly enough, becomes unfixed, unbound, a free signifier, signifying whatever it darn well likes. The antistatic self clings to nothing.
How very punkish. One only has to look at the names of most punks to know that one is in the presence of linguistic reinvention: Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, Richard Hell, Sid Vicious, and, of course, Johnny Rotten. It is not so obvious that "Fay Weldon" is "one of them" until the
Oxford Companion to English Literature
reveals that Weldon was born "Franklin Birkinshaw." So much for Franklin.
So much too for biographical "facts." The history of punk is shaped by skewed informationas Jon Savage says, "the question of authorship bedevils the whole story of punk" (p. 12). Malcolm McLaren, punk's patriarch, himself performed, Savage suggests, a "shifting, constant parade of mythologizing, selective perception and acute self analysis" (p. 12). History was, it seems, constantly rewritten "according to the demands of [the] current project'' (p. 12). The distinction between "fact" and "fiction" collapses for the punk since, says Andrew Loog Oldham, "If you lie enough ... it becomes a reality" (Savage, p. 12).
In Weldon's performance of her self, there is a similar delight in "skew-
 
Page 26
ing." As Giles Gordon, her agent, suggests, the biographical facts "do not add up" (
Bookshelf
). Problems in addition are caused, largely, by Weldon herself, who says, on the one hand, that her "age is printed for all to see on the birthday list," and then, on the other, that ''it varies depending on who I talk to" (Briscoe). In a blink, Weldon will shift from one identity to the nextwhen asked if she is really as calm and confident as she appears, she says, "Well, yes. I amuntil I'm not" (Bovey). Perhaps the most striking and biographically-boggling example of Weldon's reshaping comes when she talks about filling up the boxes that constitute her "archives" and which have already been purchased by an American university. "I cheat," she says in "Outing the Dead." In the boxes, she puts "letters to and from the great and possibly famous, and assignations with themsome of them are real and some are forgeries and some of them I just make up to entertain myself." Of course, this information about disinformation may also be "made up"all that is certain is that nothing is certain. We must, it seems, be like "Mad Doll" in
Female Friends
and simply cease "to trust information" (p. 96).
Expertise: "Be Terrible Too"
Also characteristic of the punk is his/her rejection of "expertise" and the reverence accorded the "expert." For Guy Debord, the expert only serves to guarantee that the spectacle continues unabated"when individuals lose the ability to see things for themselves," he says, "the expert is there to offer absolute reassurance" (p. 62). In the punk band itself, there is often an absolute and clearly audible antiprofessionalism. After seeing the Sex Pistols in 1975, Bernard Sumner of Joy Division evidently heard the callhe says that he "wanted to get up and be terrible too" (Marcus, p. 7). Punk seems to be a public access identityas Greil Marcus says, "A nobody like Johnny Rotten could be heard because the voice was available to anyone with the nerve to use it" (p. 2). The "voice" is available because it requires no trainingthe period between deciding to play an instrument and "having the nerve and confidence to form a group and play in public," is, according to Simon Frith, "remarkably short" (p. 175).
It is Weldon's ability to "play in public" without expertise that, in part, identifies her with the punk. Her rejection of expertise takes several forms. Most obviously, she challenges the monopoly of experts when it comes to stating expert opinions; she takes it upon herself to make "inexpert" pronouncementsshe realizes that her "opinions are just as good as anyone else's" (
Bookshelf
). One of her delights in writing novels, she claims, is that she can write what she wants "without having to do research" (Mile).
 
Page 27
And despite not "doing research," Weldon does not hesitate in giving opinions on science"Science, in fact, renders us mortal, unimportant, and helpless" (
Bookshelf
)the education system"it teaches us" to merely "reproduce what is in the teacher's mind'' (Mile)linguistics"the response to language is without gender"and feminist academics"they're the only philosophers we have left" (Mile).
As well as promoting a model of "every woman her own expert" and so despecializing "specialized" knowledge, Weldon also refuses, perhaps perversely, to be set up as an "expert" by others. She seems to refuse to be professionalized and fetishized by the academic world. It is true that she courts a somewhat "serious" imageshe has spoken at the MLA and has graced the cover of the
New York Times Book Review,
for examplebut, the serious turn, more often than not, turns comic.
The Hearts and Lives of Men,
for example, was serialized in a "women's" magazine, which Weldon admits is "not the kind of thing one ought to do if one wishes literary respectability" (Thomas). A less-than-"scholarly" image of the writer is conjured up when Weldon describes herself getting up and writing, "wearing whatever I happen to be wearing in bed, which is sometimes nothing at all" (Boylan). In fact, Weldon often appears, starkly enough, to be doing all this, not for some abstract sense of "art," but for money. She admits that writers "market and service" ideas (Briscoe) and that she will dress "nicely" for a book jacket because "better looking equals you earn more" (Davies). She will do the "university and academic thing" because it looks good when put in the blurb on the back of the book. Weldon, like the Sex Pistols, is sure of the benefits of a great rock 'n' roll swindle. In these kinds of moves, she pogos to and fro between the "serious writer" and the "not so serious."
The rejection of expertise on Weldon's part goes as far as her refusal to be constructed as an expert on her own work. As if reinforcing D. H. Lawrence's imperative not to trust the artist, but "trust the tale," Weldon diverts the critic's attention from her. When asked if she feels she can listen to opposing interpretations of
Life Force
and then declare who is right and who is wrong, she simply, and perhaps dismissively, replies, "I don't have the time" (Mile). When considering if her works fit into modernism or postmodernism, she claims to have once been told by Malcolm Bradbury the definition of these terms, but that she "forgot it at once" (Mile). Put the line between Spark, Eliot, and Weldon "where," she says, "you like" (Barreca, p. 15). She'll only suggest things in novels, she says, that "I don't know myself but I think should be considered" (Barreca, p. 7). Don't look to Weldon for the extended footnote, for the Cliff-Note commentyou're likely to be met with an "I don't know." It is in this shift from "knowing"

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