"And when the news broke through the senate chamber, she had no
idea of to what use which her absence was being put." (19)
"all heroines are not beautiful. Nor charming. Nor long-legged.
Nor wealthy. Ours will not fall into any category not any
convenient anti-category either." (29)
"Dyna is not part of this picture, but is also ready to be
described. She begs for pulp terms to break the taboo against
violence to women with the glandular vocabulary of the
supermarket novel. Her moments lend themselves to
sensationalism. She lives the very antithesis of the obscure
literary genre. Hers is a popular mythological tale, full of
glamour, gloss and textural attributes. But feeling correct and
circumspect we merely indicate the presence of a woman." (53)
"Work, the poet, had had a wife. Now he lived with an hysteric,
silenced by the general social consensus on her disease. The
woman gone mad, shut up in her attic, away from the world,
feared by herself and despised by the unnamed masses of her
real imagination. She spent her days in semi-private, almost
medical isolation, visited only by her ex-, who remained her
closest connection to that tarnished circle once termed
literary. He kept her smoldering role ignited, time to time,
with the careful promotion of her manuscripts while she
postponed her life forever, waiting in the sealed rooms for a
chance to operate safely in the other world...Look closer.
While the doors are not locked from the outside, she was
regularly encouraged in her malaise. Her withdrawal served the
general social group as the buried point of constant reference,
stable, static, immutable. She doesn't figure in out story. But
her absence is a marked one continually raised in
conversation." (59-60)
(Oolga) "Now she wrote him poems on her underclothes and sent
them through the wash to see what effect they had on her
meaning...She served as the risk-taking undercover agent,
playing out her marginal role conscientiously, aware that every
semblance was only a resemblance of what had never been a very
real situation. But her crucial hysteria kept her honest...She
would continue to bite daily into fruit... (67-68)
Oolga seems to be an interesting parallel to the exiled
narrator. She too is removed from the political sphere at least
geographically speaking, on the island like O. in suburbia.
And since He and She seems to float about the text, maybe all
Drucker's female characters are Eve archetypes following
alternative histories. And if the narrative, which seems to
adhere to some sort of structure in the garden bit and the
night bit (when they woke, "it was a wild night,"
night-dark-urban) is a sort of ungrounded parable of the
eighties, there seems to be something going on somehow about
the eighties being the decade in which feminism sort of failed,
fractured beyond recognition, when the "emancipated women"
became the power hungry corporate bitch in shoulder pads or the
star sex scandal (Jessica Hahn, Donna Rice--is that her name?
of Gary Hart fame?) or the nutty matriarchal wife (Nancy
Reagan, Tammy Faye Baker)? and then there's the madwoman in the
attic idea and Gilbert and Gubar's theories of enclosure and
the female literary imagination, which was a "big" text during
eighties academia, no? (i.e. the woman in the attic in Jane
Eyre perpetuated by the glamorization of victim hood,
("encouraged in her malaise," Work's wife as hysteric, Oolga as
revised hysteric,) and exiled further and further from the
central narrative or text?)
argh, these are less than coherently-formed thoughts, but maybe
they point somewhere interesting.
in sum, and in response to Unsworth's question, i liked this
book alot. my experience wasn't one of feeling unable to
penetrate the surface (her "opacity"), but more like one of
walking on snow you expect to stay on top of but continually
sink in up to your knees. I found myself trying to read through
it evenly but continually getting drawn into words, phrases, or
images. and as someone else said, i looked for meaning in
everything and think i found some. and to risk sounding
presumptuous, not having read anything else by drucker, i'd say
she's up there on my list with the likes of virginia woolf and
toni morrison, she leaves a lot of connections for the reader
to struggle to make, and the language is brilliant.
but I there seems to be some slippage going on with
interpretation of drucker. regarding the susan sontag essay, I
get the point about distorting images, but the fact is drucker
is herself dealing with distorted images (and I think she is
doing some distortion of her own, as does sontag, I think, in
her own novel "the Volcano Lover"), distorted by the media and
so on. so i think there is a distinction between taking the
novel itself as an "image" and interpreting the images within
the text.
and a final point:
for me, what is as frustrating, as much cause for throwing
something across the room, as the density of Dark Decade's
language,if not more so, is the quick tendency to dismiss
drucker's project as meaningless, to conclude that she' s not
saying anything at all, that it's all about "being" not
"meaning," and that perhaps we are being "too literal here" or
maybe too literary, always criminal in discussing literature.
and so i agree with matt and carter: that to put such heavy
weight on the last line is "dangerous" because there is
nothing, nothing in this text to suggest that drucker would tie
up her purpose in such a neat little package to "relieve the
book of the responsibility to mean," to make things easier on
ourselves, to pack our bags and go home.
-kaelen.
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