Fantastic Metropolis

I enjoyed a number of collections and anthologies of essays this year. William Gaddis’s The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings (ed. Joseph Tabbi, Penguin, 2002) suited my taste for tart, pointed wit. “We who struggle to create fictions of various sorts,” he writes in “How Does the State Imagine? The Wiling Suspension of Disbelief,” “must regard the state with awe, for the state itself may be the grandest fiction to be concocted by man, barring only one.” (123) Two collections by feminist cultural theorists gave me particular pleasure: Janet Wolff’s Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism (Yale University Press, 1995) and Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York University Press, 2000). I especially appreciated Wolff’s “Death and the Maiden: Does Semiotics Justify Murder?” as it grapples with our culture’s circulation of woman/death tropes, examining narrative and ideological strategies of gender at work in musical, literary, visual, and filmic texts to do so. Felski’s essays historicize modernist and postmodernist culture and insist that the cultural theorist attend to the particularities of the heterogeneous public spheres rather than reading every artistic and cultural production as aimed at a mass, homogeneous audience. Kate Bernheimer’s Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales (Anchor Books, 2002) offers a feast of essays by twenty-eight writers reflecting on how fairy tales have impacted their “feminine selves”; many of these essays resonated with my year’s preoccupations.

Christine Brooke-Rose’s Invisible Author: Last Essays (Ohio State University Press, 2002), despite its disconcerting title (Brooke-Rose is, after all, still alive and writing) is both painful and exhilarating. In these essays, Brooke-Rose reveals the “keys” to the lipograms underlying each of her experimental novels. She does so ruefully, since such “keys” tend to be welcome from innovative men writers only. “A man experimenter,” she explains, “once he does attract attention, is innovative, bold, original, and so on, in articles that show a knowledge of development from precedents; a woman experimenter is just, well, an experimenter, the term often slightly pejorative, without further exploration. Indeed, any noticed or imagined development from precedents is mentioned only for dismissal as imitation. Sacred cows are mysteriously needed but must be male. Any female who left ‘keys’ would be laughed out of court or ignored, as I shall be, no doubt.” (4) Ignored, is my guess. The Dalkey Archive Press has been publishing Brooke-Rose’s fantastic and science fiction novels for years, but in the circles I move in, she’s sadly invisible. I end with recommending to all Jane Austen aficionados the book-length essay that felt almost illicitly pleasurable to read: D.A. Miller’s Jane Austen: The Secret of Style. This slim volume takes up the related questions of voice and style in fiction by way of considering Austen as the epitome of Style. Its insight into the gendered politics of reading Austen issues from an underrepresented angle of vision in Austenophilia: that of the gay man. Early in his essay, Miller distinguishes two possible positions for the male reader–”a foolish and a clever. The foolish one has evidently fantasized ‘being’ Jane Austen–being the woman she was–but ends up only being the object of ridicule in a quasi-Austenian comedy; while the clever one, more intelligently bent on ‘performing’ Austen–on writing that comedy–mocks, scorns, disowns the very name of Jane Austen, and so contrives, anonymously and in secret, to carry on her work.” (6) Austen’s work, he asserts, “most fundamentally consists in dematerializing the voice that speaks it.” (7) Austen, Miller tells us, is the only Anglophone author who has ever succeeded in doing so.