gender and VINELAND

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Vaska asks--

 >>Oddly enough, given the
>> reservations I voiced few weeks ago about some aspects of _Vineland_, it
>> also contains some quite overt references to the feminist writing I have
>> mentioned.  I'd be interested to hear what other people on the list think
>> about all this.

I have long felt that VINELAND is clearly and queerly paying a kind of homage to 
*feminized* writing in the deep sense used by the critics DYB and y'all quote a 
lot--Kristeva, Irigiray etc--IMHO he heard the emerging feminist critique of his 
phallocentrism as it resides in the first three novels, and responded.  I have always 
felt in VINELAND an acknowledgement of the validity of--some--of this criticism,
 
as well as a concession to his having been of his time and place, which d-uh, he still 
is and who ain't?

This assessment for me is an intuitive thing, me having a strong anima despite a 
working phallus and all; I don't know enough of the primary literature to create an 
argument that TRP is paying this indirect homage, but anybody can feel the 
distinctly different texture of the writing in VINELAND, different from all his 
previous work (I can't wait to see M&D to see if there is a progression going on in 
his style or if it was a one shot deal.)

There seems to me no way out of the conundrum that if you say in VINELAND his 
writing is feminized and someone says what does that mean you have to rely on accepted 
characteristics of feminine to explain, and then it sounds like you're promoting or 
accepting those characteristics as inherently applying to women and not to men.  But 
masculine and feminie are just ways to name difference.  It's all about difference.  We 
could say *charm* and *strange* as the physicists do.  We say male things project and 
female things accept; male pushes against and intrudes, female covers and protects; male is 
linear, female recursive and on and on.  There are these two distinctly different universal 
forces; our names for them reflect only the narrowness of our conceptual fields--not that 
this is a criticsm of human beings, just a design feature.

That's why so much of this gender language discussion has been infuriating to 
read.  (Not that I can help it any.  But god, such hobbyhorses.)

john m