Reading in the Waiting Room

I have a salt-loving tongue, not a sweet tooth, so the mass of papers I had collected from my printer tray and stuffed into an oversized envelope tempted less like a sack of candy or cookies, more like a packet of tasty chips or crackers. Nancy K. Miller and Victoria Rosner had just emailed me about the possibility of my adding something to the collection of talks given at Columbia University in honor of Carolyn Heilbrun. Hefting the transcript of the readings and responses delivered on the occasion, entitled Writing a Feminist's Life: Academics and Their Memoirs, I intuited immediately that I couldn't just sample one of them; I would have to start at the beginning of the manuscript and, I realized in my office, I would never be able to put it down until I had gobbled up the very last crumbs. But I couldn't begin reading there and then, so I stored the envelope in my car, and only started savoring its contents (oddly enough) in a waiting room at a surgical center (while a friend underwent a second operation on a finger that had become infected because a nurse had left a single stitch, around which scar tissue had formed after the first procedure).

Like the friendly readers of Nancy's wonderful Bequest and Betrayal, who admitted they relished her italicized autobiographical passages (whereas they skipped her critical analyses in regular type), I was ravenous (think - even in the depressing atmosphere of a surgical waiting room!) for the intimate details the memoirists would recount. Perhaps especially for those of us not on either coast (and abiding instead in what Mary Ann Caws considers the "oxymoron" of "Surrealism in Bloomington"!), the craving for connectedness with other feminist scholars is profound, or so it seemed to me, as I read from start to finish (though not in one sitting, with quite a few interruptions) a series of presentations that impressed me with what I already knew (the extraordinary diversity of backgrounds characterizing feminist academics) but also what I was pleased to discover I shared with a number of the speakers as well as those members of the audience who spoke up with questions or comments: an urgent desire to find forms of writing more supple and nuanced, less formulaic and tired than academic discourse as usual. With the help of Carolyn Heilbrun, are we on the brink of transforming critical prose in much the same manner we had earlier re-invented syllabi, courses, and degrees in too many disciplines and institutions of higher education to name?

Since most of my writing is not personal and since the book I had just completed is an experiment in what I am calling narrative criticism, I looked to see how narrating a feminist's life could modify the ways in which we craft feminist criticism. Breaking the conventions of scholarly writing was what I had set out to do under the auspices of Virginia Woolf, specifically in a revision of her classic that I have entitled Rooms of Our Own. (The tentative title of the manuscript-in-progress, "A Feminism of One's Own," had been vetoed even by supportive readers because "no one cares about feminism any more" or "feminism is a turn-off"!) For me, as for many others, the usual sorts of theoretical and critical discourses had started to seem stale, flat, or bland. The problem was not just obfuscatory or elitist jargon since one could produce perfectly lucid critical paragraphs simply by omitting the sorts of linguistic tics that too often twitch throughout the sentences of what is called highly theorized verbiage. No, it went deeper or wider than that (maybe explaining why too many people today feel that "no one cares about feminism any more" or "feminism is a turn-off"), for feminist criticism as usual (even when written with clarity and wit) has grown old enough to taste as canned or freeze-dried as any other brand of criticism. What the conference packet told me, then, was how urgent is the need to reinvent it. Many of the conference participants in New York shared that feeling and indeed may have been propelled into the composing of memoir by it, but Leila Ahmed put the sentiment most powerfully: normative critical language had come to feel to her "almost like a prison," and "that was where many of us found ourselves, in those years, at least many feminists, at the end of the '80s and early '90s."

Several of the participants expressed the view that what was exciting about the memoir form was its specificity, and also its ability to reach a wider audience than academic publications ordinarily attract. When embedded in particularity, insights about gender and about race, class, age, ethnicity, and sexuality seem to arise with more tonality, with a resonant timbre, and with less ideological grandstanding than they do when cramped under the theoretical rubrics usually used to engage them. Additionally, a host of differences surfaced in the snippets of memoir the participants read about their own therapies, the catastrophic deaths of relatives, their families' religious and social customs, and the horror of rape. But if abstractions transfigured into concrete instances bristle with accessible, evident vibrancy and if various differences surface when the borders demarcating the personal, the political, and the professional become malleable, then might they do so not only in the memoir but also in less autobiographical forms of feminist writing? Perhaps publishing houses are cutting down on their lists of criticism, perhaps criticism is no longer selling in part because the affective, emotional complexities of our private but also our pedagogic and collegial investments have been severed from the scrutiny we accord literary texts.

To be sure, there are anxieties and pitfalls awaiting those whose practices depart from traditional modes of feminist criticism. "At least in academia," Deborah McDowell cautioned at the conference, there reigns "the kind of tacit understanding that the personal and the scholastic should be mutually exclusive." Will innovative forms of writing "count" during, say, tenure and promotion decisions? Might they be disparaged as trivial interventions within the intellectual conversations of our peers? Do such attempts inevitably trap the writer in narcissistic self-absorption? Can younger, less established scholars risk the professional insecurity of experimental modes of composition? Such queries understandably trouble many aspiring authors in the academy. Of course, too, one needs to have somewhat of a substantive and self-consciously experienced past in order to elaborate upon it either in autobiographical or in other creatively conceived forms.