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.All I had managed to do was suppress one half (for a while) at the expenseof the other (Jong 73).Fear of Flying contains dozens of such examplesof Isadora s seemingly inescapable ambivalence, so that at times the novelreads as little more than an endless catalogue of her competing desires.From another perspective, however, Isadora s insistence on rehears-ing her oscillating wishes ad nauseam functions as another example ofher stubborn resistance to transformation.Just as Don Juan is perpetu-ally seducing, unwilling to choose and be faithful to one woman, Isadorais perpetually ambivalent, unwilling to stick to any one path longenough to experience progress.Tellingly, the novel s head note, takenfrom Byron s Don Juan, suggests that the refusal to choose may be theonly viable option for women given the paucity of their choices: Few changes e er can better their affairs, / Theirs being an unnatural PROMISCUOUS TIMES 103situation (Jong xi).For Isadora, the unnatural quality of her situationmeans that she is faced with mutually exclusive choices, neither ofwhich provide her with the fulfillment to which she should haveaccess: If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter whichway you turned.Either you drowned in domesticity.or you longedfor domesticity in all your art (Jong 157).Faced with choices that donot offer a genuine way forward, Isadora s only recourse is to makeno choice at all, to lodge her resistance in the refusal to commit to anydevelopmental path.Through her irresolution, Isadora enacts one ofthe literal meanings of promiscuity: the tendency to indiscrimination, orthe rendering equivalent of a heterogeneous group.If, as Felmanargues, Don Juan functions by equivalency, by making all women equallydesirable, then Isadora similarly functions by equivocation, by refusingto choose between options that are equally partial and incomplete.As I suggested, there is an ironic, self-canceling aspect to thisapproach: having begun by resisting the stasis of narrative teleology, thesenarratives find themselves struggling with a mode of stasis produced bythat very resistance.This collapse of alternatives into one another echoesthe problem of structural repetition that Peter Starr has isolated inpoststructuralist responses to the implosive ending of the 1960s.41 AsStarr points out, one of the signature arguments of poststructuralismis that representational politics lead to violent epistemological closureno matter what the political platform in question; therefore, any attemptto wield the technologies of representation in a conventional fashionwill only render radicals indistinguishable from those they began byopposing.42 As the polar opposite of any system whatsoever, the eventprovides poststructuralism with the perfect avenue for avoiding thestructural repetition that would arise from merely replacing onetotalizing system with another.Instead, the event is that which will notbecome anything other than itself, which cannot be conceptualized orput in the service of any goal, however radical.As Paul Harris puts itin his critique of Lyotard s approach to temporality, narrative for thisreason must remain serial and constantly disrupt its unfolding intoan itinerary where the points along the linear progression form a neatdiachronic line. 43 Considered in terms of the desire to escape statictime, the turn to the event thus produces structural repetition with avengeance: having begun by attempting to escape the closure and stasisof narrative totalization, this approach ends by enforcing the closureand stasis that arises from the lack of any recourse to transformationand development.Such complaints resemble the classic lament ofMarxists regarding poststructuralist strategies: without synthesis, thesearguments suggest, one has only an inert series that cannot become any 104 POPULAR FEMINIST FICTION AS AMERICAN ALLEGORYkind of radical impetus, that cannot be made to work toward change [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.All I had managed to do was suppress one half (for a while) at the expenseof the other (Jong 73).Fear of Flying contains dozens of such examplesof Isadora s seemingly inescapable ambivalence, so that at times the novelreads as little more than an endless catalogue of her competing desires.From another perspective, however, Isadora s insistence on rehears-ing her oscillating wishes ad nauseam functions as another example ofher stubborn resistance to transformation.Just as Don Juan is perpetu-ally seducing, unwilling to choose and be faithful to one woman, Isadorais perpetually ambivalent, unwilling to stick to any one path longenough to experience progress.Tellingly, the novel s head note, takenfrom Byron s Don Juan, suggests that the refusal to choose may be theonly viable option for women given the paucity of their choices: Few changes e er can better their affairs, / Theirs being an unnatural PROMISCUOUS TIMES 103situation (Jong xi).For Isadora, the unnatural quality of her situationmeans that she is faced with mutually exclusive choices, neither ofwhich provide her with the fulfillment to which she should haveaccess: If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter whichway you turned.Either you drowned in domesticity.or you longedfor domesticity in all your art (Jong 157).Faced with choices that donot offer a genuine way forward, Isadora s only recourse is to makeno choice at all, to lodge her resistance in the refusal to commit to anydevelopmental path.Through her irresolution, Isadora enacts one ofthe literal meanings of promiscuity: the tendency to indiscrimination, orthe rendering equivalent of a heterogeneous group.If, as Felmanargues, Don Juan functions by equivalency, by making all women equallydesirable, then Isadora similarly functions by equivocation, by refusingto choose between options that are equally partial and incomplete.As I suggested, there is an ironic, self-canceling aspect to thisapproach: having begun by resisting the stasis of narrative teleology, thesenarratives find themselves struggling with a mode of stasis produced bythat very resistance.This collapse of alternatives into one another echoesthe problem of structural repetition that Peter Starr has isolated inpoststructuralist responses to the implosive ending of the 1960s.41 AsStarr points out, one of the signature arguments of poststructuralismis that representational politics lead to violent epistemological closureno matter what the political platform in question; therefore, any attemptto wield the technologies of representation in a conventional fashionwill only render radicals indistinguishable from those they began byopposing.42 As the polar opposite of any system whatsoever, the eventprovides poststructuralism with the perfect avenue for avoiding thestructural repetition that would arise from merely replacing onetotalizing system with another.Instead, the event is that which will notbecome anything other than itself, which cannot be conceptualized orput in the service of any goal, however radical.As Paul Harris puts itin his critique of Lyotard s approach to temporality, narrative for thisreason must remain serial and constantly disrupt its unfolding intoan itinerary where the points along the linear progression form a neatdiachronic line. 43 Considered in terms of the desire to escape statictime, the turn to the event thus produces structural repetition with avengeance: having begun by attempting to escape the closure and stasisof narrative totalization, this approach ends by enforcing the closureand stasis that arises from the lack of any recourse to transformationand development.Such complaints resemble the classic lament ofMarxists regarding poststructuralist strategies: without synthesis, thesearguments suggest, one has only an inert series that cannot become any 104 POPULAR FEMINIST FICTION AS AMERICAN ALLEGORYkind of radical impetus, that cannot be made to work toward change [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]