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novel reading
finished marge piercy's woman on the edge of time this morning. what a fascinating novel. i really enjoyed it. i'm just jotting some notes about it here because i think i might like to write about it at some point. the main thing i've been thinking about it is how it challenges processes of particulation in science/modernity--by "particulation" i mean the practice of breaking objects of study into pieces (or particles) and analyzing those particles in isolation from their contexts. ostensibly this novel is a feminist utopia, and quite specifically a 2nd wave feminist utopia. (i seem to be reading a lot of utopias and dystopias lately--even when i'm not, i see these elements everywhere, a thread of "futurism" that reading fredric jameson* (a.k.a. "freddie J") is making stand out. kind of like when you buy a new car, and suddenly it seems like EVERYONE owns the same kind of car as you.) anyway, this novel...the main character, connie/consuela/conchita/pepper and salt, is a patient at bellevue; she is poor and chicana, and is committed to bellevue by her brother, who basically wants to get rid of her because he's trying to "whiten" his family (he has a succession of 3 wives, each "lighter," as connie says, than the last). anyway, connie finds herself able to commune/communicate with an egalitarian community from the future, in which the sex/gender system (to borrow gayle rubin's terminology) has been disrupted by technological interventions into biological reproduction, such that babies are now grown in vats, men and women fully share parenting duties, and population demographics are tightly controlled through the measured production of babies--both in terms of number, and of race and sex. the result is a society without raced, classed, and gendered hierarchies--quite different from the society structured in dominance (borrowing stuart hall's terminology) from which connie comes. at the end of the novel, connie is desperately trying to escape from a research study to which she has been consigned by her doctors, with her brother's signature on a consent form. the study aims to "rehabilitate" patients by implanting devices in their brains that will control violent outbursts. anyway, i don't want to get too deeply into this here, but as i said, what interests me about this novel is how it challenges processes of particualation. it does this in two ways. first, the narrative form registers the slow, painful, step-wise reduction of connie's life through the workings of various forms of power, along all of the axes of race, class, and gender. at the same time, it is connie's capacity for hope that opens her up to communing with the future, and the narrative registers this complexity too, by presenting connie's time in that future in a fully realized form (i.e. piercy presents both connie's present and her travels into the future, with the same realism). the second way in which the narrative critiques particuation is by leaving open the question of whether or not connie "really" travels to the future. at the end of the novel, as a sort of appendix, we see summaries of clinical notes about connie's two stints in bellevue, as well as her diagnoses: "schizophrenia, undiff. type 295.90" after the first stint; and "paranoid schizophrenia, type 295.3" after the second stint (notice the "downward" trend--the movement from a less threatening to a more threatening diagnosis, and thus from a lower to a higher need for more drastic psychiatric intervention). these clinical notes, which summarize connie's entire life and comprise a total of about 5 pages, stand in counterpoint to the rest of the novel, a rich, thickly narrated 370 pages. here, we see literature and science side by side, and the juxtaposition (there's my favorite literary term...bleah, sorry) highlights the fact that both forms of discourse operate through analysis, interpretation, and mediation--i.e. representation--but it is the reductive discourse of science (here, the psychiatric evaluations written by connie's doctors) that seems paltry in the comparison. science--both in its practice, as experienced by connie (the novel has a 3rd person narrator), and in its discursive representation, as illustrated in the novel's appendix--is revealed as fully articulated with other forms of domination that operate in contemporary (1976) u.s. culture: science, with its power to categorize, to label, to dissect, to analyze, to disinfect/rehabilitate, and to exploit (in the name of "research") those who occupy positions of least power in society, completely misses the point of connie's life, because of its strictly limited field of view and its paltry vocabulary of signs. the result is tragic. connie's subject position is fixed by science. i mean "fix" in both senses, here--connie's objectification by science fixes her in place, shoves her into a social position from which there is little, if any, hope for further movement; and it does so through its attempts to fix or repair what is wrong with her. it fails because it has improperly diagnosed what is "wrong" with her, seeing it as an illness to be treated surgically and pharmacologically, when what actually ails connie is the fact that the narrative of her life is a concrete, historically specific materialization of racism, sexism, class warfare, and finally, science's instrumentalism. the novel is not reactionary against science, however. it offers an alternate view, a model of how a fully socialized and communally driven science might work, in a society structured not by dominance but by mutual constitution, critique, and egalitarian negotiation.
those are my first thoughts about the useful tools offered by this novel, so my analysis probably sounds like applause. however, there are important critiques to be made about it as well, ones that resonate with my critique of the third child, actually, now that i think about it. this novel's utopian element is laced with problematic liberal multiculturalist and ecofeminist imagery: a "rainbow" of people living in harmony, in close relationship with nature, named after an indigenous group whose cultural practices this future community has adopted, etc. my purpose here was simply to get out my thoughts about how the novel might fit into my dissertation project, what it might offer me. its limitations will come out in a longer analysis; should i decide to do that analysis, it would be important to more fully situate this novel historically and culturally, as well as to situate my analysis in terms of what other scholars have written about it.
p.s. this is my typical analytical practice: i tend to focus first on what a particular text--whether it's a theoretical text, a novel, a scientific paper, etc.--has to offer; and i try to get my own thoughts down somewhere before i read any other scholarship or criticism about that text; and then i read further and develop my critiques. unless i hate the text (which might mean either that i just plain hate it, or that it has glaring problems), of course, in which case the gloves come off much earlier.
those are my first thoughts about the useful tools offered by this novel, so my analysis probably sounds like applause. however, there are important critiques to be made about it as well, ones that resonate with my critique of the third child, actually, now that i think about it. this novel's utopian element is laced with problematic liberal multiculturalist and ecofeminist imagery: a "rainbow" of people living in harmony, in close relationship with nature, named after an indigenous group whose cultural practices this future community has adopted, etc. my purpose here was simply to get out my thoughts about how the novel might fit into my dissertation project, what it might offer me. its limitations will come out in a longer analysis; should i decide to do that analysis, it would be important to more fully situate this novel historically and culturally, as well as to situate my analysis in terms of what other scholars have written about it.
p.s. this is my typical analytical practice: i tend to focus first on what a particular text--whether it's a theoretical text, a novel, a scientific paper, etc.--has to offer; and i try to get my own thoughts down somewhere before i read any other scholarship or criticism about that text; and then i read further and develop my critiques. unless i hate the text (which might mean either that i just plain hate it, or that it has glaring problems), of course, in which case the gloves come off much earlier.