Gender is an especially problematic issue when it comes to postmodern theory. A cursory glance at the roster of prominent names in the postmodern debate might lead to an obvious question: where have all the women gone? Indeed a version of this question informs part of the argument of two important contributions to the debate at its highpoint in the 1980s, Craig Owens's ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’ (Owens, 1983) and Andreas Huyssen's 1984 essay, ‘Mapping the Postmodern’ (Huyssen, 2002). Their assumption is that feminism ought to find something of value in postmodernism, for it is about challenging authority and asserting difference.
These discussions by male theorists did serve to provoke many feminist theorists into the debate. Sandra Harding, for example, protested that feminism can only go so far in throwing out Enlightenment ideals (Enlightenment assumptions and prejudices are another matter), for, like Marxism, it is by definition committed to some of these, such as emancipation (Harding, 1990, 99). Sabina Lovibond took this argument further by identifying in the championing of postmodernist theoretical principles by male theorists ‘a collective fantasy of masculinist agency or identity’, one exposed by Owens's and Huyssen's assumption that it is humiliating to be ‘caught out’ – as they imply feminists are – ‘longing for a world of human subjects sufficiently “centred” to speak to and understand one another’ (Lovibond, 1989, 19).
Most powerfully, perhaps, the cultural critic Meaghan Morris pointed out that the very question implicitly posed by Owens and Huyssen was actually the problem. Wondering where all the women have gone is ‘perhaps the latest version of the “why have there been no great women artists (mathematicians, scientists…)?” conundrum’ (Morris, 2002, 393). Of course, as students on University English courses know as well as anyone, there are great women writers wherever we care to look in literary history. The problem is that for us to recognize them as ‘great’ they have to be isolated by literary critics from a masculinist frame of reference that limits them; they have to be judged on grounds other than those set out by masculinist views of art. Likewise, in the postmodern debate, argued Morris, important women theorists – and she cites many, including Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jacqueline Rose, Donna Haraway, Teresa de Lauretis, Angela McRobbie, Judith Williamson – have shaped the postmodern debate but have then been excluded from the critical canon because they do not explicitly address the question of postmodernism or write within the theoretical parameters set by male theorists which mark the discussion.
For similar reasons, no doubt, the postmodern ‘canon’ has included relatively few women writers. It would be possible to make the case for others (e.g. Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters, Siri Hustvedt), though as an introduction to the novelists most consistently associated with the postmodern, this is not the job for this book. However, another feminist critic to address the question of postmodernism and feminism, Bonnie Zimmerman, argued in response to Owens and Huyssen that one of the problems of connecting the two when it comes to literature is that most women writers, no matter their feminist credentials, remain committed ‘to realism, to creating an authentic female voice, and to portraying authentic female experience’ (Zimmerman, 1986, 186). What is striking about the writers featured in this chapter is that this is not the case.
Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, and Kathy Acker are the three female novelists who have been most consistently considered in the light of postmodern ideas (a fourth would be Toni Morrison, whose work we considered in the previous chapter.) Treating them in a chapter of their own runs the risk of suggesting that they somehow, as women, figure outside the postmodern mainstream, when in terms of the subject matter of their work (e.g. sexuality, subjectivity, history etc.) and its formal techniques (e.g. intertextuality, metafiction, ‘cut-ups’) their work is quite representative of postmodern aesthetics. Each draws freely and critically from the mass of literary and cultural myths which shape contemporary culture. But, at the same time, their work directs its postmodern techniques towards uncompromisingly feminist ends, continually insisting on what is different about female experience of the contemporary world and why this needs to be taken into account.
While they have certainly been appreciated by women readers and critics for having created an authentic voice and portraying female experience, the forms they write in are firmly anti-realist. There can be no doubt that – unlike many ‘experimental’ authors – this formal innovation has helped Atwood and Carter, in particular, become appreciated on a mass scale. Both are now central to the contemporary fiction canon, their work having generated a whole secondary industry of academic books, study notes and scholarly essays. The case is rather different for the ‘aesthetic terrorist’, Kathy Acker, but we’ll come to this in due course.
Like postcolonial theorists, feminists have found it problematic to appropriate postmodern theory in their arguments. Postmodern aesthetic strategies, however, have proved useful to feminist novelists. More precisely, metafiction, a naturally critical strategy, a form of ‘theory-in-practice’, is employed by Carter and Atwood not to question just literary history but the kind of ‘masculinist’ discourse which has dominated history, science, and academic argument on a wider scale. More precisely, what each of these writers do is to use postmodern strategies in order to critique and subvert the Enlightenment metanarrative, but also caution against chipping away at it until there is nothing left.
Here their ‘position’ parallels the one adopted by the theorist Patricia Waugh, who has argued that postmodernism is valuable for its critical potential, as a kind of reading strategy which can question and subvert Enlightenment texts (literary realism or philosophy) but ought not to be imagined as contributing more directly to feminist politics, as pointing the way to a feminist way of life (Waugh, 1992). In particular, each of the three writers might be seen to be addressing what Lyotard identified as the demise of the metanarrative. Social and cultural perceptions of gender are sustained by a particular metanarrative which implies the universality of male experience, and that women are only objects in a male drama. Besides their various formal techniques, the work of these writers is postmodern in their continued challenging of this metanarrative.
In her 1983 essay ‘Notes from the Front Line’, Angela Carter states that the ‘investigation of the social fictions that regulate our lives…is what I’ve concerned myself with consciously’ ever since the beginning of her career in the 1960s (Carter, 1997, 38). Exposing ‘social fictions’ is what we might consider an eminently ‘postmodern’ aim, one quite in tune with the kind of postmodern theory we discussed in the Introduction. At one level some of her novels can be read as allegories of the effects of postmodernity and postmodern ideas. Indeed Carter was quite at home with theory, and in her interviews happily discussed Barthes, Nietzsche and Foucault alongside medieval and nineteenth-century literature.
For all her learned quality, what is notable, though, is the sense of sheer excess that we get from reading Carter. Her prose is rich, heavy, intoxicating and sensual, packed with feelings, images, sounds, smells, elaborate metaphors and ideas. Her style is comic, gothic, grotesque, sexually explicit, and (as H. G. Wells famously said of Joyce) gratuitously ‘cloacal’ (Wells, 1917, 710). Her plots, too, are nothing short of outrageous, featuring such things as a man being turned into a woman and a city under attack by a powerful ‘desire machine’. Her characters are outlandish, monstrous figures, she-wolves and bird women. Her fiction is obviously non-realist, and generically ‘promiscuous’, ranging across, as Lorna Sage put it, ‘romance, spies, porn, crime, gothic, science fiction’ (Day, 1998, 9).
The most important ‘social fiction’ Carter wanted to explore was about gender. Her writing was a way of ‘answering back’ after years of ‘being told what I ought to think, and how I ought to behave, and how I ought to write, even, because I was a woman and men thought they had a right to tell me how to feel’ (Carter, 1993, 5). Deconstructing the gender metanarrative is clearly the function of one of her most celebrated collections of short stories, The Bloody Chamber (1979). Each story is a reworking of a different fairytale or myth – cultural narratives which perpetuate the overall masculinist metanarrative – as Andrea Dworkin's ironic description of the traditional fairytale reveals:
The lessons are simple, and we learn them well. Men and women are different, absolute opposites. The heroic prince can never be confused with Cinderella, or Snow-White or Sleeping Beauty. She could never do what he does at all, let alone better.…Where he is erect, she is supine. Where he is awake, she is asleep. Where he is active, she is passive. Where she is erect, or awake, or active, she is evil and must be destroyed.
(Dworkin, 1974, 79–80)
The title tale, for example, is a version of ‘Bluebeard's Castle’, one that is remarkably faithful to the conventional tale except that the heroine is saved by a mixture of her own ingenuity and her mother, rather than a band of brothers.
Carter's writing displays an exuberant delight in storytelling, apparently for its own sake – though she insisted that narrative was valuable as a way of fulfilling the fundamental human impulse to make sense of our own lives through narrative. She defined narrative as ‘an argument stated in fictional terms’ (Carter 1993, 2) and this is a useful way of describing her work's combination of narrative excess and philosophical debate. In what follows I will consider two novels which critics have tended to discuss in terms of postmodern philosophy, and which both demonstrate Carter's ability to create fables for our modern times, outlandish, fantasy-fictions, but which make pertinent points about the real world.
The first of these is The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, published in 1972. It is set in an unnamed South American country whose capital, once characterized by its ‘smug, impenetrable, bourgeois affluence’ (Carter, 1994, 16) has been placed under siege by the sinister figure of Doctor Hoffman. The assault involves the machines of the novel's title – which cause the most secret desires and fantasies of the city's inhabitants to become objectively real, trapping them ‘in some downward-drooping convoluted spiral of unreality from which [they] could never escape’ (20). The plot concerns the attempts of the city to defend itself against the threat. Its narrator – Desiderio, whose name itself, critics have pointed out, evokes the Italian term for ‘desire’ (Day, 1998, 65) – is enlisted by the city's Minister of Determination, who remains immune to Hoffman's attack, to track down and assassinate him. The problem Desiderio faces is that, as a result of Hoffman's revolution, everything he sees and feels during his quest is generated by his own desire. The places he goes to, the people he interacts with, the time-frames he thinks he is within, are imaginary constructs.
As critics have noted (Suleiman, 1994; Day, 1998; Robinson, 2000) the story reads on one level as an analogy of the postmodern critique of Enlightenment philosophy. Before Hoffman's attack, the city figures as a model of empiricism and order. The (appropriately named, of course) Minister of Determination:
believed that the city – which he took as a microcosm of the universe – contained a finite set of objects and a finite set of their combinations and therefore a list could be made of all possible distinct forms which were logically viable. These could be counted, organized into a conceptual framework and so form a kind of checklist for the verification of all phenomena.
(Carter, 1994, 24)
Desiderio is despatched from this world like a descendant of Swift's Gulliver, encountering people and places on his route which destabilize his faith in rationality and empiricism.
The psychoanalytic conception of reality, we recall from the Introduction, is to regard it as something we all tacitly agree to share – because not to do so would mean that we could not function as social beings – but which varies from person to person depending upon their specific perspective. Dr Hoffman rewrites the Cartesian cogito from ‘I think therefore I am’ into ‘I DESIRE, THEREFORE I EXIST’ (Carter, 1994, 211). As a result he ushers into this Enlightenment world what might be described as a ‘crisis of representation’. His machine makes reality relative to the inhabitants of the city. What this means is that he doesn't simply change the city, he changes the city for each of its inhabitants, whose imaginations are responsible for transforming it according to their desires. No one there can now agree on what is real or not: everything is subject to change according to the different value systems and beliefs and desires, fantasies and anxieties of who is doing the perceiving. There can now be no single stable figure of authority presiding over this world, just as no author can dictate the meanings generated by a novel.
What results is in fact not a single world but a series of worlds. Carter's novel, in this way, might be regarded as also a portrayal in fiction of Brian McHale's theory about postmodernism's ‘ontological dominant’. Her novel does not break down the boundary between the fictional and the real world in the way metafiction does, nor leave the reader unsure about what is to be taken as real or not in its world, as in Coover's ‘The Babysitter’ or Nabokov's Pale Fire. Yet it informs us about how reality is understood in postmodernity, as a network of worlds rather than one unified world.
Although the world created by Dr Hoffman can be read allegorically as a post-Lyotardian one where metanarratives no longer function, one metanarrative remains tellingly in place, and this is the narrative about men subjugating women. The kinds of fantasies and desires made real by Dr Hoffman's machine often involve acts of sexual violence against women. This is a feature of the people Desiderio encounters in his quest to find Dr Hoffman: the blind peep-show proprietor whose images are often of abused women, the dehumanized women of the ‘River People’, the sinister Count who believes that ‘since there is no God, well, there is no damnation either’ (Carter, 1994, 124) and inhabits a brothel where women have been replaced by literal embodiments of his desire unleashed by Dr Hoffman: ‘sinister, inverted mutations, part clockwork, part vegetable and part brute’ (132).
This might be seen as Carter's own response to the assumption by male critics like Owens and Huyssen that the postmodern discourse of liberation is valuable from a feminist perspective. The cumulative examples of male abuse of women in Carter's novel cautions that postmodern relativism is not necessarily beneficial to all. If we are to assume that everyone's perspective is valid and every ‘petit récit’ contains its own truth, does this not legitimate some of the unsavoury and dangerous aspects of society which the patriarchal order of Enlightenment society managed to keep broadly under control, such as racism and sexual violence?
This is why, although he has become seduced by the liberation Hoffman's machines can offer during his quest, it is still necessary for Desiderio to kill Doctor Hoffman by the end of the novel. While masquerading as the agent of liberation, ultimately his machine licenses a destructive form of selfishness, where everyone attempts to impose their desires on those of the other. This is why, too, though it might seem to be another male act of violence against a woman, Desiderio must get rid of Hoffman's daughter Albertina, for she turns out to be nothing more than the Doctor's puppet, a representative of this dangerous relativism. In the end we realize that Desiderio has been faced with a false choice, for it is really between two forms of totalitarianism.
The second novel we shall consider here, The Passion of New Eve (1977), also underlines the difficulties of freeing ourselves from the trap of the gender metanarrative. Carter suggested that this novel set out deliberately ‘to say some quite specific things about the production of femininity’ (Haffenden, 1985, 86). One of these things is a thesis which was to become a mainstay of postmodern theory, the idea that gender is, as the theorist Judith Butler termed it, ‘performative’, rather than anything fixed or essential (Butler, 1990a, 271). One's sex is fixed, in that one is stuck with being biologically a man or a woman depending upon how one happens to turn out at birth (though of course this can be altered, as The Passion of New Eve in fact explores) but one's sexuality (one's sexual preferences and how they are expressed or repressed) and one's gender (how one presents oneself to the outside world as either a man or a woman) is something acquired and conditioned. Our sexual identities are constructed through the kind of ‘social fictions’ which Carter's fiction unmasks.
The Passion of New Eve is at once rigorously theoretical (using seventies terms like ‘phallocentric’) and completely over-the-top: filmed as faithfully as possible it would resemble a cross between a Carry On! film and a Hammer Horror. It is a testament to the invention and pace of Carter's writing that we take it seriously at all. It is narrated in the first person by an Englishman called Evelyn – note the appropriately androgynous name – who is fascinated by the Hollywood actress, Tristessa de St Ange, billed as ‘[t]he most beautiful woman in the world’ and every man's desire. Like Greta Garbo, Tristessa has suddenly removed herself from the Hollywood glitter in her forties, and become a recluse. Like Dr Hoffman it is essentially a quest-narrative, as Evelyn sets out to find her.
His picaresque adventures begin in London, move to a seedy New York and then the deserts of Colorado, where he is captured and imprisoned by a mysterious all-female sect and taken to Beulah. The commune worship ‘Mother’, a ‘sacred monster’, a grotesque caricature of femininity, who dons a large black mask, a false curly beard, and has gigantic limbs and two rows of breasts (‘so that, in theory, she could suckle four babies at one time’ [Carter, 1992, 59]). The commune is working towards a utopia where woman is simply ‘the antithesis in the dialectic of creation’ and their kidnapping of Evelyn is the first step in their plan to begin ‘the feminisation of Father Time’ (67) by kidnapping men who wander into the desert, castrating them and turning them into women.
This is when Evelyn, after much elaborate surgery, hormone replacement, and instructional lectures from Sophia, the apologist of the regime, becomes the ‘new Eve’ of the title, ‘the perfect specimen of womanhood’ (68). Mother's plan is that he will then be impregnated from the reserves of his own semen, collected after he is ceremonially raped by Mother, so that s/he will become perfectly self-sufficient, the first woman able to both ‘seed’ and ‘fruit’ herself (76). When cast out into the desert by Mother's commune, ‘Eve/lyn’ is immediately captured by another group, only this time one ruled by a man, a one-eyed and one-legged poet called Zero. Evelyn is especially vulnerable as a woman and her capture makes us even more aware of the impact her bodily differences from men have on a woman's capacity for agency. Having been raped ‘unceremoniously’ by Zero (86), Evelyn is immersed in his polygamous harem of women, all of whom are expected to indulge their master's sadistic sexual whims and end up loving him all the more for it.
Zero is also obsessed by Tristessa and eventually he and his harem, with Eve/lyn in tow, manage to find her, holed up in a glass mansion, like a Gothic version of Elvis Presley's Graceland, full of cheap piped music and waxwork figures of dead Hollywood celebrities. They tear off Tristessa's clothes to reveal, to their disgust, his penis. Eve realizes, ‘[t]hat was why he had been the perfect man's woman! He had made himself the shrine of his own desires, had made of himself the only woman he could have loved!’ (128–9). Inevitably, once they escape Zero, Tristessa and Eve have sex, both of them in different ways examples of the ‘female man’.
The Passion of New Eve thereby demonstrates how gender performance involves a complex relation between substance and image (Butler, 1990b, 22–32). Each of the ‘sacred monsters’ – Tristessa, Zero, Mother, Eve/lyn herself eventually – seem to represent different gender stereotypes: for example, Zero as Alpha Male, Mother as Phallic Mother. These emphasize the idea of gender as performance which is central to the tales of both Evelyn and Tristessa. Tristessa illustrates how in postmodernity the signifier ‘man’ or ‘woman’ has little to do with the referent. What is important is the signified which has been attached to it by culture. The novel's main setting, the United States – regarded by Baudrillard as a literal embodiment of hyperreality, a universe of signs detached from any referent – is the appropriate location to put forward this argument.
One of the ‘specific things’ The Passion of New Eve wants to say about women, then, is the way that femininity becomes a commodity, in particular how ‘Hollywood produc[es] illusions as tangible commodities’ (Haffenden, 1985, 86). The second, related point The Passion of New Eve makes about gender is similar to the conclusion of Dr Hoffman. Although there is no substance other than the surface, this does not, in fact, lead to a completely free play of signification but merely another form of imprisonment. What happens is that this ‘perfect specimen of womanhood’ still ends up as a man's conception of the perfectly desirable woman. Gazing at herself in the mirror for the first time, Eve/lyn realizes that ‘They had turned me into the Playboy centre fold. I was the object of all the unfocused desires that had even existed in my own head. I had become my own masturbatory fantasy. And – how can I put it – the cock in my head, still, twitched at the sight of myself’ (Carter, 1992, 75). Similarly the novel shows that ‘a woman is indeed beautiful only in so far as she incarnates most completely the secret aspirations of man’ (Carter, 1992, 129). This is what enables Tristessa to become the most beautiful woman in the world. The lesson she has learned about this inequality is perhaps why, when Eve/lyn is offered her genitals back at the end (implying that she could somehow go through the whole experiment backwards) she refuses.
Ultimately, for all the explicit theoretically informed context and subject matter of both Dr Hoffman and New Eve, it is the style that makes Carter's fiction postmodern. Her work trades on myths, but her writing is resolutely anti-mythic (she once stated that she was ‘in the demythologising business’ [Carter, 1997, 38]) – and this makes her post-modern, in that she rejects the mythic explanations which typically underpin the works of high modernism. Like Gravity's Rainbow and Waterland, Carter's work plays with myth, teasing the reader into making connections.
Eve/lyn repeatedly describes her story as a ‘maze’ further into which she must continually go to find its truth – or the way out. But it is also, of course, a labyrinth for the reader to become lost in. This is one function of Carter's use of myth in the novel. Its narrative self-consciously evokes the stories of Oedipus, Lilith, Lot's wife, Samson and Delilah, etc. as well as more contemporary pop-cultural parallels like The Lost Island of Dr Moreau. But none offer a foundational structure for reading the novel – they are used in the style of the bricoleuse, objects ‘found’ by chance as the author's imagination takes the narrative along certain paths only to be discarded when another, more appropriate one, comes to mind. New Eve, typical of postmodern fiction, seduces us into interpretation, only to frustrate our efforts. Carter's is a strategy whereby reference to myth is used not to add layers of explanatory meaning in the manner of modernist fiction, but ultimately to demystify – that is, to use myth to illustrate, ironically, how dangerously dependent we (i.e. the subjects of patriarchal culture) are on myths as a way of experiencing the world and making sense of it.
The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood resembles Carter in the generic variation of her fiction, though rather than invoking a host of different genres all at the same time, like Carter, Atwood seems systematically to choose a different genre in each successive novel. Nevertheless the recurrent concern in all her fiction is with the constructed nature of history and the way cultural myths operate as kinds of scripts that dictate our behaviour. A more conventional kind of ‘feminist rewriting’ takes place in Atwood's work, compared to Carter's. Novels such as The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace effectively write history from an explicitly feminine perspective, one which contests the authoritative ‘masculinist’ narrative that constitutes much official history. It is a common concern of those writers (mainly, but also postmodern historians) that the narrative of history inevitably leaves the powerless unvoiced. This includes ethnic minorities, the colonized, the marginalized, and, especially in earlier times than our own, women.
In this respect Atwood's work exemplifies Linda Hutcheon's category of historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon, 1988a, 21). She produces historiographic metafictions from a feminist viewpoint, a strategy that has been labelled ‘herstory’. Consequently, as realism is the natural form for the traditional, linear view of history, it follows that each of her novels might justifiably be read as a critique of the conventions of realism, exposing the ideological foundations of the mode and challenging its pretence that it is a ‘natural’ form of storytelling – albeit in a more subtle and double-coded way (since it preserves some realist elements, like all historiographic metafiction) than an earlier tradition of North American metafictionists.
The interrogation of both traditional historiography and realism are central to the achievements of The Handmaid's Tale. The novel is, to borrow Angela Carter's description of her own work, a ‘speculative fiction’. It is a dystopia in the tradition of Yevgenie Zamyatin's We (1921), Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and Orwell's 1984 (1948), set in the not-too-distant future. Typically the dystopian genre, a science fiction sub-genre, depicts a fearful, paranoid world in the near future in which individual liberty has been severely compromised by a brutal totalitarian regime which regards people as units of data or orders them to conform to repressive social norms rather than treat them as individuals. It is a critical commonplace to say that a work of science fiction is actually a diagnosis of the present rather than a prediction of the future.
The Handmaid's Tale expresses Atwood's concern about the rise of reactionary politics and culture in 1980s America (represented by the Reagan administration). Perhaps unsurprisingly, as it was published in the middle of that decade, The Handmaid's Tale quickly became famous and notorious, a fixture on school syllabi but also the subject of frequent complaints about its perceived anti-religious sentiment.
The novel is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where, following a revolution, the US constitution – traditionally considered a sacred foundation of American life – has been abolished and the country is now the Republic of Gilead, a Christian theocracy, run along the lines of Biblical fundamentalism. Freedom for citizens is severely limited, with social roles rigidly maintained by ideological means and by force. Literacy, for example, is being deliberately eroded, with pictures replacing words on labels in shops and women being forbidden to read, while non-conformists are deported to the ‘colonies’, and dissidents and homosexuals are put to death publically at ‘The Wall’, outside what was formerly Harvard University.
Women are the most subjugated group in Gileadean society. Black and Jewish women are removed from society completely, while the rest are segregated into seven categories: Wives, Daughters, Widows, Aunts, Marthas, Handmaids, and Econowives. Only upper-class couples are permitted to have children, though Gilead is beset by desperately low fertility rates following previous environmental catastrophes, pollution, and chemical leaks, which have seen the colonies made dangerously toxic by pollution and much of Gilead uninhabitable. As a result the privileged turn to ‘handmaids’ as surrogate mothers for their children. Handmaids are treated like slaves. They have no names of their own, but are given names which denote who they belong to.
The novel's narrator and central character is one of these handmaids, Offred (whose Commander is Fred). She is permitted to leave the house only to go shopping in the company of another handmaid, is unable to close the door to her room, must visit the doctor frequently to check for disease, and is subject to constant scrutiny by ‘the Eyes’, Gilead's secret police force. At the appropriate point in her menstrual cycle Offred must have sex with the Commander – in silence and exhibiting no sign of pleasure or independence – while the Commander's wife, Serena Joy, sits behind her, holding her hands. Handmaids are allowed up to three placements with different couples to see if they are able to have children, and, if not, they are deported to the colonies as Unwomen. Fred and Serena are Offred's third placement, without success so far, and if there is no conception, she faces deportation.
The conventions of the regime might be regarded as literalized versions of aspects of the experience of being a Western woman in the 1980s, even in a free society: under constant scrutiny by the male gaze (the Eyes), and valued chiefly as sexual objects whose appearance and behaviour is prescribed by the way that male desire is encoded in the marketing and advertising apparatus. The novel thus makes use of the specific power of dystopian fiction: it is not simply a ‘wouldn't it be awful if…?’ kind of cautionary tale, but an intensification and formalization of attitudes in our own world. Atwood is careful to show that Gilead is not the result of a sudden, unprecedented lurch to the right. In fact it represents simply the worst of two evils for women. During flashbacks into Offred's past we learn that Gilead came into being in a climate of increasing social disorder, the symptoms of which were severe abuse of women, such as easily available pornography, prostitution, and violent attacks. The novel also shows that although Gilead eventually collapses, it reverts only to a similar state of affairs to those which led to its gestation, with little change for women.
The novel takes the form of an oral narrative, recorded onto tape, in which Offred tells of Gilead, but also – in the form of dreams and memories – the story of her previous existence. Offred, the daughter of a feminist activist (and single mother), had an affair with a man called Luke, who divorced his wife and had a child with Offred. During the military coup which saw the rise of Gilead, they attempted to flee across the border to Canada, but were caught and separated. Offred has never seen husband or daughter since. Serena Joy arranges for Offred to have sex with her Commander's gardener and chauffeur, Nick, in the hope that Offred will become pregnant and the baby can be presented as the Commander's. As an incentive, Serena promises to give Offred a picture of her lost daughter, thus revealing that she has always known her whereabouts. What Serena doesn't realize is that Offred and Nick have begun an affair. Offred then learns of the existence of a covert resistance group entitled Mayday.
The ending of The Handmaid's Tale is famously ambiguous. Having found out about a trip to Jezebel's, a secret club for commanders, Serena sends Offred to her room to await punishment. As she sees the black van of the Eyes coming to get her Nick enters her room and tells her not to worry because in fact the men in the van work for Mayday. Offred assumes they will take her to what is known amongst the subjugated women of Gilead as ‘The Underground Femaleroad’. The novel ends as she is taken away – but whether this is by the Eyes or by the resistance movement is unclear, just as it is unclear whether Nick is part of Mayday or an Eye, working for Gilead.
Besides telling this story Offred's narrative contains occasional digressions about the problems of constructing accurate historical narrative. At one point she comments
This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It's a reconstruction now, in my head, as I lie flat on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn't have said, what I should or shouldn't have done, how I should have played it.…When I get out of here, if I’m ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove. It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances, too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavours, in the air or in the tongue, half-colours, too many.
(Atwood, 1996a, 144)
We recognize here the familiar postmodern concern about the unnarrated events which figure in the gaps and margins of any narrative. In the novel's epilogue, ‘Historical Notes’, we realize that Offred has indeed managed to ‘set it all down’. This section takes the form of a transcript of a talk given by a Cambridge University Professor, one Professor Pieixoto, to the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies in Nunavit in Arctic Canada in 2195. His lecture focuses on what has become a significant document in ‘Gileadean studies’, the tapes of Offred's story – given the Chaucerian title The Handmaid's Tale by a Professor – which, he says, were discovered in Bangor in Maine, ‘a prominent way-station in what our author refers to as “The Underground Femaleroad”’ (313) where it was, he surmises, recorded in a Mayday safe-house. His research has led him to identify the Commander as a ‘real’ historical figure (probably one Frederick Waterford or B. Frederick Judd).
‘Historical Notes’ is the most debated section of The Handmaid's Tale by critics. It is the kind of fictional paratext which commonly appends postmodern novels – for example, Pale Fire, Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, Ian McEwan's Enduring Love – which at once recalls the eighteenth-century tradition of ensuring verisimilitude through editorials and postscripts, and invites its reader to focus on its processes of construction and indeed those of all narratives. The most obvious effect is that it is a self-reflexive commentary on the novel we’ve almost finished, its own first piece of criticism. As in Pale Fire we have an academic commenting on a work of literature given the same title as the novel we have read.
In his discussion of the status of the story Pieixoto comments on the nature of its narrative and thus continues Offred's story, up to a point. It becomes clear that he has been the translator of what we have read. But this revelation also means that her voice has come to us mediated through his; the woman's monologue has been filtered through a man's narrative, moreover one who cautions his readers against the cultural bias of judging Gilead too harshly, for he considers the Republic an attempt to ensure the survival of humanity in the face of falling birthrates and environmental disaster. He claims to have transcribed her oral narrative, and we reasonably may wonder if he has edited this too.
This means that ‘Historical Notes’ is at once the source of hope and depressing familiarity. It solves the mystery of Nick's fidelity, making it clear from the very existence of the tape that Nick was in fact a member of Mayday, who helped his lover to escape (even though there is no indication of what happened to Offred: if she had escaped, the Professor assumes, she would surely have turned up in England or Canada and published a proper account). Thus it brings a small counterbalance to the novel's negative depiction of men, showing that some can be trusted. However, even though the date of the Historical Notes is also the source of hope, as it shows that the Gilead regime eventually died out and has been replaced by a more liberal one, the very nature of the Professor's lecture confirms that the historical position of women is really no better. His lecture concentrates on the early commanders and their role in developing Gilead, and accuses Offred of missing key events. His discourse thus positions women as insignificant footnotes to a predominantly male history. As Coral Ann Howells has put it, ‘His reconstruction effects a radical shift from “herstory” to “history”…the historical facts that Pieixoto selects as significant effectively erase Offred from the Gileadean narrative’ (Howells, 2005, 107). And this is something that Offred herself has foreseen, noting in her narrative that ‘from the point of view of future history…we’ll be invisible’ (Atwood, 1996a, 240).
Offred describes her narrative as the reconstruction of a reconstruction. Pieixoto's translation ensures that it is reconstructed at one further remove. Effectively his role means that her narrative is treated in a similar way to her body: appropriated by a patriarchal male for the benefit of an overall metanarrative. Pieixoto thus gives us one reading of The Handmaid's Tale – one which works on a metafictional level, of course, as it is partly a commentary on Atwood's novel. However the layerings of narrative point to another twist in how we respond to the story's message. The epilogue reveals that Gilead has become a research area, a historical period subject to academic analysis. The more we study a regime, the more we might learn its lessons. Subsequent readings of The Handmaid's Tale after Pieixoto's – as well as readings of Atwood's novel, subtly prompted by this metafictional logic, might therefore reach alternative and more feminist conclusions to his.
Atwood's novel Alias Grace (1996) examines deeply ingrained cultural attitudes to women in a different way. The ‘Historical Notes’ section in The Handmaid's Tale is about imagined research on an unearthed narrative, which turns out to be inadequate. In Alias Grace Atwood attempts something similar herself, only this time combining real research on a real text, but interwoven with fiction. Her novel tells the story of Grace Marks, a sixteen-year-old immigrant servant girl who, in 1843, along with fellow-servant James McDermott, was convicted of killing their employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Upper Canada. McDermott was hanged and Marks spent thirty years in prison until she was pardoned. She moved to New York State whereupon she vanished from all official records. Marks's involvement in the murder and her motivations have always been unclear. The most common version of the story is that Kinnear and Montgomery were having an affair, and Marks was jealous at the status this provided Montgomery in the household. Marks herself, however, always claimed that she could not remember the events surrounding the murder, and gave conflicting explanations, once claiming to have been possessed by the spirit of a dead friend.
Alias Grace bears out Atwood's conviction that while history might set out ‘to provide us with grand patterns and overall schemes’ it would fall apart ‘without its brick-by-brick, life-by-life, day-by-day foundation’. She continues: ‘Whoever tells you that history is not about individuals, only about large trends and movements, is lying’ (Atwood, 1997, 6–7). Grace Marks's story is one such small unit in history. But it is also a problematic one, because of the impenetrable kernel of mystery at its heart caused by the fact that the case has been built up by the testimony of so many witnesses, and the testimony of the only survivor of the four people involved, Grace Marks, is so contradictory.
In Alias Grace Atwood uses fiction to do something other than try to solve a historical mystery, however. While it deals with its period as seriously as a historian might (the number of texts in the Acknowledgements section at the end suggest this) the novel is also the product of Atwood's decision to invent material, ‘[w]here mere hints and outright gaps exist in the records’ (Atwood, 1996b, 467). The obvious result of her exercising this aesthetic licence is the invention of a character, a practitioner of the new medical science of ‘mental pathology’, Dr Simon Jordan, who interviews Grace in an effort to help her relive the experience of the murders and remove the traumatic blockage. Atwood's aestheticization of history has the effect of shifting the focus onto masculinist historiographical processes rather than on the case in question.
Running through the novel is the metaphor of the patchwork quilt. Grace is an expert quilter and during her discussions with Jordan sews together her fabric blocks. It is clear (Grace alludes to it herself) that there is a parallel between constructing narrative and stitching together a quilt, traditionally a matter of making something new from old fragments of fabric. Indeed – as the image of a quilt block pattern prefacing each of its fifteen sections suggests – this is how Atwood has put her own narrative together, combining a huge range of different texts: epigraphs taken from contemporary sources (e.g. newspaper reports of the case, Marks's Confession, pen portraits of Marks and McDermott from a contemporary account of the trial), more tangential period texts, such as Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House (1854) and Robert Browning's ‘Childe Roland’ (1855), as well as the texts Atwood invents: Grace's oral narrative; her interior monologue; a third-person, present-tense, description of meetings and dialogue between Jordan and Grace; and numerous letters written by each. The impression from reading Atwood's huge novel is consequently of a bewildering mass of voices and texts which have been ‘quilted’ together by the author. The mass of documentation does nothing to clarify past events but reminds the reader that history itself is a patchwork quilt of texts, and in order for it to mean anything, it must be stitched together by a narrator.
Atwood's own historical quilting process was a matter of trying to untangle the web of stories about Grace Marks. Debate about her case continued throughout the nineteenth century, and saw her become the object of a number of competing narratives – those which advanced prejudices against the Irish and the Jews, or the poor, or articulated nineteenth-century fears about the ‘mad woman’ and the threats of female desire to masculinist authority. In particular, as Atwood says in the ‘Author's Afterword’, the accounts of the case ‘reflected contemporary ambiguity about the nature of women: was Grace a female fiend and temptress, the instigator of the crime and the real murderer of Nancy Montgomery, or was she an unwilling victim, forced to keep silent by McDermott's threats and by fear for her own life?’ (Atwood, 1996b, 464).
Rather than try to determine what exactly Marks was, Atwood is interested in how authority attempts to categorize and explain different ‘types’ of people. Her narrative reveals Marks as a victim of what the philosopher Michel Foucault called ‘disciplinary regimes’ (Foucault, 1995, 193). These operate via the ‘dividing practice’, the grouping of kinds of people into various subdivisions of the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ (e.g. in the courts, the criminal is marked off from the non-criminal; in psychiatric clinics, the sane from the mad; in hospitals, the healthy from the sick). Thereby a disciplinary regime is able to build up a picture of the normal person, which then enables deviations from this constructed norm to be easily identified and isolated. Grace Marks is classified as abnormal by the discourses of two disciplinary mechanisms in particular: firstly the legal apparatus (through her trial, sentencing, and pardon) and then the medical apparatus, through the efforts of Simon Jordan to understand her. While sympathetic up to a point, trying to establish whether or not she is innocent in her own interests, Jordan is also attempting to explain Grace along the lines of the dividing practice. Significantly, though, he fails, and abandons the case, feeling so unsettled by the experience that he is close to ‘nervous exhaustion’. ‘Not to know’, he reflects, ‘– to snatch at hints and portents, at intimations, at tantalizing whispers – it is as bad as being haunted. Sometimes at night her face floats before me in the darkness, like some lovely and enigmatic mirage’ (Atwood, 1996b, 424).
Atwood, like Angela Carter, has a fondness for the Gothic, and uses it in her fiction to disrupt the (frequently masculinist) processes of rational investigation and analysis. In her 1993 novel The Robber Bride, for example, the demonic woman of the title, Zenia, returns from the dead to complicate the serious historiographical analysis of the character Tony, who writes the opening and closing sections. In literary history, the Gothic represents a parallel force to those of philosophical rationalism and realism which were emerging at the same time (the eighteenth century) and trades in elements which exceed definitions and labels and cannot be contained by conventional theorizing. In Alias Grace the Gothic elements of the central character – her prison nightmares, apparent split personality, the thin disembodied voice she uses when under hypnosis – represent a powerful counter-force to Jordan's theorizing, and ultimately win out.
Carter's and Atwood's writing is highly intertextual. References to other texts – myths, fairytales, works of pop culture and literature – abound. It is clear from considering novels like Alias Grace or The Passion of New Eve that this kind of intertextuality is not the aimless reflex of pastiche, which Fredric Jameson thinks typifies the postmodern, but a much more considered version, closer to Hutcheon's understanding of postmodern parody, which enables it to make pertinent points about postmodernity.
The Handmaid's Tale, for example, as well as being a feminist version of the kind of dystopia produced by Orwell, Huxley and, especially, Zamyatin, is, as Hutcheon has noted, a ‘serious parodic echoing and inverting of the canonical Scarlet Letter’ (Hutcheon, 1988a, 139). Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, one of the foundational texts of American fiction, is set in Puritan New England in the seventeenth century, itself a formative time for America. Like The Handmaid's Tale it is a framed narrative, prefaced by a statement by its narrator insisting that what follows is based on an original document. It concerns Hester Prynne, a married Englishwoman who, waiting for her husband to join her in America, becomes pregnant by another man, refuses to name him, and is punished when she and her daughter are ostracized and pilloried by the community, and she is forced to wear the red letter ‘A’ (for ‘Adulteress’) on her bosom. The story is about religious hypocrisy, as it turns out that the father of Hester's child is a minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, who lacks the moral courage to share her punishment.
The work of Kathy Acker takes this strategic use of intertexts to outrageous levels, while remaining deadly serious and committed to a broadly feminist agenda. Take her intertextual incorporation of The Scarlet Letter, in Blood and Guts in High School (1978). It is the story of a ten-year-old girl, Janey Smith, who is having a sexual relationship with her own father. Having fallen in love with another woman, he sends her to school in New York, and the text details her escapades in the city, which involve numerous sexual partners, joining a gang named the Scorpions, surviving a fatal car crash, being kidnapped by a white slave ring and sold into prostitution, having an affair with President Carter, developing cancer, having a relationship with the French writer Jean Genet, meeting capitalist rulers in Egypt called Mr Fuckface, Mr Blowjob, and Mr Knockwurst, and then dying at the age of fourteen. While imprisoned by a Mr Linker, a Persian slave trader, Janey writes a lengthy ‘book report’ on The Scarlet Letter, in which she seems to have metamorphosed into a version of Hester Prynne, and enters into an abusive relationship with a Reverend Dimwit.
Acker said that when writing the novel ‘it was in my mind to do a traditional narrative’ (Friedman, 1989, 20), but even this brief summary makes it clear that Acker's fiction is about as far from a ‘traditional narrative’ as one could imagine. The story opens with a conventional piece of third-person narration but is immediately interrupted by dramatic dialogue, poems, and pornographic drawings of genitals and sex acts apparently there to illustrate specific lines in the narrative, and soon becomes even more fragmented as it features Janey's diary, her letters, and extracts from a range of literary texts – Hawthorne, Mallarmé, and Genet. Susan E. Hawkins has called this progressive incorporation of more and more different kinds of texts, ‘textual breakdown’, a formal parallel to the ‘bodily’ and ‘characterological’ breakdown detailed in the novel (Hawkins, 2004, 644). The ‘punk porn’ (Phillips, 1994, 173) use of The Scarlet Letter is therefore one of a number of ways Acker's text conveys the inappropriateness or even the impossibility of expressing oneself through ‘traditional narrative’.
Acker is often said to have injected literature with the values of ‘punk’ rock, the kind of music which upset the order of things in the late 1970s by challenging the rock-music orthodoxy – and other social establishments – with its aggressive, nihilist style and lyrics. What makes Acker's fiction most obviously ‘punk’ is its obscenity. Just as the Sex Pistols easily demonized themselves by saying the F-word on national television in 1976, so Acker's novels are full of gratuitous explicit sex scenes. Blood and Guts in High School was banned in South Africa and in Germany (with the transcript of the court ruling incorporated in Acker's 1991 collection Hannibal Lecter, My Father), and her work was seized by Canadian authorities following the Butler ruling on pornography in Canada in 1992.
Another ‘punk’ element of her writing is her incorporation of the world of pop culture into her fiction, and more precisely the way it is crudely set alongside high literary and philosophical sources. Acker's work is an excellent illustration of the typically postmodern impulse identified by Leslie Fiedler to ‘cross the border, close the gap’ between high and low culture. In her 1986 novel Don Quixote, for example, the protagonist (only this time Don Quixote is a woman) tells a story which is actually the plotline of the 1973 Japanese monster movie Godzilla vs. Megalon. In the film both monsters have been produced as a result of the testing of weapons, something which is explained as a ‘rational behaviour’. The plot ends, true to the genre, with the two beasts fighting to decide the fate of the world. However, in the version recounted by Acker's Quixote they suddenly pause and start to discuss human reason, one monster saying to the other:
In the modern period, exchange value has come to dominate society; all qualities have been and are reduced to quantitative equivalences. This process inheres in the concept of reason. For reason, on the one hand, signifies the idea of a free, human, social life. On the other hand, reason is the court of judgement, of calculation, the instrument of domination, and the means for the greatest exploitation of nature. As in de Sade's novels…
(Acker, 1986, 72)
It is a parody of serious philosophical discourse, the epitome of Enlightenment thinking. Yet by placing it incongruously in the middle of a mass-market low-budget movie, its pretentions are exposed and punctured.
But what accounts, most of all, for Acker's ‘punk aesthetic’, besides obscenity and the closing of the cultural gap, is its relationship to other texts. As Larry McCaffrey has said, the central method of ‘punk aesthetics’ is ‘crossing images over unexpectedly’: ‘profaning, mocking, and otherwise decontextualizing sacred texts…into blasphemous metatexts’ (McCaffrey, 1989, 221). The use of The Scarlet Letter in Blood and Guts in High School marked the point at which Acker began seriously to employ plagiarism as an aesthetic strategy in her work. The list of writers from whose work she steals in her fiction is lengthy and includes classic and canonical writers such as Shakespeare, Dickens, the Brontës, Joyce, Mary Shelley, Cervantes, Keats, Faulkner, theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari, contemporary writers such as Harold Robbins and William Gibson, as well as works of pornography, and extracts from the journals and letters of real people.
This kind of aggressive appropriation has been regarded by some as a defining characteristic of postmodernism. It also reinforces the idea that postmodernism prevents us from ignoring the cultural, constructed nature of existence. The most obvious precursor to Acker here is William Burroughs, and Acker is one of the few authors to have used his ‘cut-up’ method extensively rather than just expressing admiration for it. Acker's method also has parallels in postmodern visual art: from Marcel Duchamp's ‘readymades’, his provocative re-presentation of ‘found’ objects, such as drawing a moustache and goatee on a reproduction of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and re-titling it LHOOQ (an acronym which read quickly in French translates as ‘she has a hot ass’ – 1919), through to her contemporary, Sherrie Levine, who exhibited as her own work photocopies of the work of great modern artists like the photography of Walker Evans or the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh.
Acker always spoke about the strategy of appropriation rather ambivalently, as simultaneously a deliberate, legitimate aesthetic practice, ‘a literary theory’ and ‘a literary method’ (Friedman, 1989, 120), a way of ‘inhabiting [other texts] in some way so that I can do something with them’ and, more impulsively, as something that she could not help but do: ‘I have always used appropriation in my works because I simply can't write any other way’ (Acker, 1997, 27). She spoke of the genesis of her writing as being when she was six years old finding her mother's porn books and hiding them inside her Agatha Christie novels: ‘That's why I originally became a writer – to write Agatha Christie-type books, but my mind is fucked up’ (Friedman, 1989, 20).
Where an author like D.M. Thomas, who has incorporated the work of others in his fiction in a more seamless way, has spent much of his career defending himself against accusations of plagiarism, Acker always acknowledged her lifting of the words of others defiantly, claiming it was a legitimate aesthetic strategy. This is not to say that it was always free of controversy. In 1975 she was forced to issue a public apology to the publishers of Harold Robbins for using 1500 words of a sex scene from his novel Pirate in her The Adult Life of Toulouse-Lautrec (under the heading ‘the true story of a rich woman: I Want to Be Raped Every Night!’) after they threatened to sue.
Acker's plagiarism is blatant. But this is what makes it hard to see in terms of the definition of plagiarism, as a devious attempt to pass off the work of others as one's own. This is because her insertion of other texts seems random, free-associative, almost deliberately clumsy and slapdash, as if to make what she is doing as obvious as possible. Typically her practice is to take an extract from a text and stick it roughly into her own fiction, with an additional sub-heading added, and occasionally names or pronouns changed. The opening of her Great Expectations, for example, begins with a chapter entitled ‘Plagiarism’, the first lines of which are: ‘My father's name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Peter. So I called myself Peter, and came to be called Peter.’ These two sentences are identical to the two which begin Dickens’s Great Expectations, except for the change of the name ‘Pip’ to ‘Peter’. Such ‘cutting and pasting’ is a different way of using an intertext than the carefully interwoven, systematic interrogation of a particular source we find in The Handmaid's Tale. It is the apparent solution of the bricoleuse who needed a Bildungsroman and picked the first one to hand, hurriedly changing only what is necessary to appropriate it.
Brian McHale, considering Acker's insertion of passages from William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984) into her Empire of the Senseless (1988), argues that the act of appropriation is entirely ‘pointless’, with ‘no discernible purpose apart from that of producing the “sampling” effect itself’ (McHale, 1992, 235). He sees it therefore as an example of Jameson's ‘blank parody’ (Jameson, 1991, 17). But, at the risk of sounding glib, the pointlessness is actually the point. It causes us to revise Jameson's dismissal of pastiche as an uncritical strategy, for Acker demonstrates that pastiche has a powerful critical edge when it becomes too faithful, as it were, moving from homage into outright theft. Her strategy of incorporation makes valid points about origins, sources, and reading.
In its sheer brazenness, Acker's plagiarism makes the reader an active one. The simple act of giving her novels the same titles as Don Quixote or Great Expectations instantly makes the reader question their knowledge of literary history. Wasn't it Cervantes and Dickens who wrote these texts? How can someone else be claiming to write them? She is actually doing what Borges only imagined his fictional author Pierre Menard doing, ‘writing’ a classic text word for word and making it strangely ‘almost infinitely richer’ (Borges, 1989b, 69). To call one's novel Great Expectations is a provocative act and one which instantly positions the reader in terms of their expectations. Imagine writing a novel and calling it Hamlet or Middlemarch. The practice immediately provides a frame for our reading, setting up interpretive parameters involving themes from the original novel, such as origins, love, or the nature of capital, as well as preparing for a reinterpretation of Dickens's text. It has been suggested, for example, that the sadistic sexual acts in which the hero/heroine is forced to indulge in Acker's Great Expectations serves to comment on the ‘exhibitionist masochism’ of Dickens's hero, who suffers ‘exquisitely’ at the hands of Estella (Mukherjee, 2005, 114).
If there is a story in Acker's Great Expectations, it revolves around the narrator's attempt to deal with the effects of her mother's suicide. But really, rather than a single narrative, what we are confronted by is a continual evocation of specific kinds of narrative – confessional, the epistolary novel, the realist novel. This has the effect of playing on the ‘great expectations’ (as in ‘considerable’) built up in the reader by Acker's borrowed title and its first lines. The experience of reading Acker leads us to question received wisdom about the unity and originality of realist fiction. All fiction, it suggests, is a patchwork of the words of others and pre-existing generic and discursive conventions – despite the efforts of the realist author to pass it all off as a coherent, organic whole. Dickens's Great Expectations is about the achievement of its protagonist to ‘control’ his life through narrative, after being controlled by others throughout the story – effectively being inserted into their narratives.
Acker's aggressive intertextuality also functions as a critique of one of the founding myths of our culture, the Romantic ideal of original authorship. Where the Romantics conceived of an author as a bard singularly possessed by inspiration, although this was itself a disguise for the ideology of capitalist ownership, which becomes important at the same time (Nesbit, 1995), the postmodern conception emphasizes that whatever role ‘genius’ or extreme skill might play in literary composition, it is really a matter of a writer selecting from a number of available conventions and discourses (Barthes, 1977b), or reinterpreting or ‘misreading’ influential works which already exist (Bloom, 1973).
Acker's work is a commentary not just on authorship but on the condition of being a female author. She explained her choice of specific texts as if more or less at random, because they were what she happened to be reading. Her Don Quixote, for example, was a text she couldn't help thinking of when she was about to go through her own abortion and this is why the narrator's abortion is presented as the ironic equivalent of the male knight's quest for Love, her ‘puke green’ paper hospital suit her ‘armour’, her wheelchair her steed. Yet her selections also tend to be some of the most canonical, foundational texts in particular traditions – and this means written by men: Don Quixote, commonly acknowledged to be the first novel ‘proper’, Great Expectations, one of the key Victorian Bildungsroman, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the archetypal American quest for identity, Gibson's Neuromancer, the paradigmatic ‘cyberpunk’ text. Typically her strategy is to make the protagonist a woman. Acker's appropriation of these texts makes us reflect on this fact and wonder why women are not usually the pioneers of new modes of fiction and how the great works of literature would differ if they had been written by women.
Blood and Guts in High School, for example, shows how Acker's strategy causes us to reflect on the typical male Bildungsroman. The Bildungsroman is also known by its French name ‘education sentimentale’ and tends to be a matter of its protagonist overcoming problems on the journey to maturity. In Blood and Guts in High School, by contrast, education comes from the constant repetition of the same brutal pattern. Jenny is ‘fucked’ violently (there's no other word for what passes for sex in this novel) and then rejected by a series of men – continuing the pattern set by her father. Sentimental education here is not a question of progressively gaining greater awareness about the world and how one responds to it, but a matter of the same brutal point being hammered-home repeatedly (and literally). The structure (divided into three parts, ‘Inside high school’, ‘Outside high school’ and ‘A Journey to the end of the night’) explains the title in that it suggests that all of life is crystallized in the High School, presented by the novel as a place, with its brutal violence and indiscriminate fucking, which functions as a microcosm of America itself (Hawkins, 2004).
Though Acker tends to use rites-of-passage texts, the accompanying ideology about consistent, autonomous subjectivity is most certainly not there. The implication in texts like Great Expectations and Jane Eyre is that the protagonist remains essentially the same person despite the trials and tribulations documented in the story – perhaps because of them, since they bring out his or her essential nature. These characters change, but only in the sense that they mature. In Acker's versions, the juxtaposing of different texts, voices, and discourses means that there is no consistency of sexual identity or subjectivity in the characters. Her ‘Pip’ metamorphoses into something between a version of Dickens's Pip, a woman who is perhaps the author herself, as well as other characters such as the French poet Rimbaud, and the film director Pasolini. This fluidity is underlined by the different kinds of narration, ranging from the measured tones of the borrowed passages from Dickens's original to dark, obscene Burrovian streams-of-consciousness: ‘I want: every part changes (the meaning of) every other part so there's no absolute/heroic/dictatorial/S&M meaning/part the soldier's onyx-dusted fingers touch her face orgasm makes him shoot saliva over the baby's buttery skull’ (Acker, 2002, 152).
Nevertheless a more consistent identity does recur in Acker's fiction and that is her own, as the example of the abortion motif in her Don Quixote shows. Although their work challenges realist assumptions about autonomous identity, Carter's and Atwood's fiction preserve the traditional boundary between the author's real life and her fictional world. Acker breaks down the boundary between these worlds by incorporating her own story into her fiction, in a way typical of a more exhibitionist style of postmodern authorship – as visible in the work of celebrity-artists such as Tracey Emin.
But the work of all three novelists suggests in different ways that postmodernism is less about writing than reading (though of course particular reading strategies are made possible by the way a text is written). This reminds us of Patricia Waugh's point that one of the values of postmodernism for women is as a particular reading strategy, a way of interpreting contemporary reality. As Nicola Pitchford puts it, postmodernism enables feminist readers ‘to manipulate texts to make meanings that further their ability to affect the political and social conditions of postmodernity’ (Pitchford, 2002, 21).