Feminist Lyric embraced fragmented women’s narratives more suitable to the idiosyncrasies (swerves and awkward breaks) experienced by women writers regardless of space and circumstance.

Josephine Donovan’s inisghtful slant on, “A women’s poetics, therefore, may have to reconceive the notion of plot as a fundamental aesthetic category so that it may be grounded in an idea of temporal order more appropriate to the cyclic experience of women’s lives.” Noteworthy is Donovan’s consideration of a women’s temporality to shape her experience and perspective:

1 – Otherness imposed by patriarchal and andocentric ideologies …

2 – “interruptability” of women’s domestic experience contingent on chance …

3 – making of objects used in the home

4 – physiological experience, menstruation, childbirth, and breastfeeding

5  – rootedness

6 – thought process 

 

Italian words had dropped like wounded animal sounds. Pronunciation integral to communication, plot is a superfluous imposed construct. Realism’s reliance on plot to mimic real life in fiction distorts representation as fate spun out and unraveled like Penelope’s weaving to manipulate the reader with convoluted patterns of cause and effect.

I learn through my literary mothers. Virginia Woolf is seminal to women’s writing (but why gender writing).  A Room of One’s Own, and Modern Fiction, (just to name two) are pivotal texts to liberate the writer from the constraints and constructs of Realism. , I recommend to all writers. Woolf’s prose is a web of associations, an interconnectivity of disparate elements I have set as the bar for my writing. 

The financial freedom to spend days writing, free from the basic concerns of providing food, shelter. 

The freedom to move around, locally and globally, unhampered by financial constraints.

Are there more constraints imposed on women’s writing by patriarchal cultural and literary conventions. 

The first line written is aware of discourse, relationship and communication situated in cultural context of the author. To ignore intertextuality, is to wrongly perceive of the author as originator, and to prove ignorance that the act of writing is anchored in the act of reading. A writing subject who is not a reading subject is a self exiled from the myriad discourses on authorship. To think oneself the creator is to fall into the God-author delusion of subjectivity believing one is imprisoned by one’s own shadow.

The verisimilitude novel as a mirror, a reproduction of desire represented as the Lacanian Real that repairs and restores lost identity through an authorial “I” masterfully plotted from beginning, middle, and an end resolution reflects cultural values of justice to reward and punish. The lyric “I” invites polyphony, fragments language, subverts verisimilitude. It challenges the subjective concept of the author and the conceit of originality and mastery written into the poststructuralist discourse as the “disappearing writing subject.”

The lyric “I” opens a space for the adventurous reader to interact with the text. Authorial subjectivity removed the page opened. The writer is the reader of her own writing able to discover the voices situated in her work.

Two thousand eight hundred years since Aristotle’s Poetics prescribed the rules for Greek tragedy fiction conventions continue to bend to its rules. Greek tragedy is to fiction what a catapult is to the antiballistic missile, the steam engine to the space shuttle, the carrier pigeon to the iPhone, a papyrus scroll to the Internet. Time had forgotten Aristotle’s structure, beginning, middle, end, resolution, until patriarchal constraints enslaving story. Time (plot’s purpose) should have frayed the knot. Although the umbilical cord withered and fell off the writer remains tethered. Although fiction is burdened with Aristotle’s dictum for Tragedy if ever he had laid eyes on his bastard child he would disavow paternity. 

The manifesto’s tone is appropriate to my purpose—to liberate writer, story, and reader from the constraints of convention, and to promote counter-narratives. I cannot imagine why plot continues to encumber fiction. Once-silenced voices have expanded narrative possibilities. All fiction narratives must be given equal consideration (including narratives of destruction) to understand the complexity of shared existence.

Realism creates the illusion of a seamless stream of events. Is the structure of those events that is in question? A reader carries the long ingrained expectation for the storybook narrative. The writer of conventional fictional has some freedom to shake up the sjuzet, even complicate the timeline of events with sub-plots. However the writer must be prepared for the reader to question what is going on. 

Women don’t write plot. Is there a need to explain that statement that came to me through an undergrad workshop advisor? Should I write an expository essay on that statements meaning to me? I have. I wrote a manifesto outlining plot’s historical sources.

The subject is the privileging of conventional narratives.

The reader’s trained expectation for literature to represent Life.

Life, it is hard to shake the concept of universality, a one humanist truth translated to all human behavior everywhere.

The reader’s need for identifiable representation (often stereotypical) with flesh and blood counterparts.

Life is not plotted. Plot is an attempt to make meaning from linear strings of cause and effect. Plot is the literary equivalent of determinism. Determinism as prescribed in dictates of greater forces. Greater forces throughout history, defined in the West as male, some women, most often white, and most often originating from the part of the globe within the latitude and longitude 48° 41’ 27” N / 9° 8’ 26” E. The exceptions to this profile have at certain points of history been conquered by the patriarchal White-Euro/Anglo-Male and andocentric (often privileged) White-Euro/Anglo-Women (this weighted language trope contains obvious limitations). However, it is impossible to escape the impact this one group has had on everyone who does not fit the above description, i.e. the rest of earthly existence. Even liberation is a system of binary contrasts to the established “conventions” of male authority. Anything outside the established “conventions” is burdened with labels, Other, alternative, experimental. 

Literary conventions have historically been subverted. Yet, fiction writing classes, workshops, MFA programs teach (for the most part) the primary pillars of convention, character development, and plot. 

The circuitous path explored, appropriation of any fragment regardless of gender and genre to inform practice, eventually informs liberation from the constrains of patriarchal codes and convention internalized in fiction—particularly genre, plot, and linearity.

 

 

The Republican’s bogeyman, the myth of failed Europe looms large in their narrow ideology of American exceptionalism. The American public is warned against becoming like Europe. I lived in Rome, Italy long before the EU and the Euro. On my last visit to Rome in 2009 the change I observed was culture shock to my romantic ideal but a boost to Italian potential. The reasons for my returning to the States all those long years ago are complex, living in foreign with no safety net (a corporate, academic, or State job) was a challenge. I had run out of money and my spotty employment as an illegal had failed to make the money I needed to stay (my attitude was also to blame). I returned with my fiancee ten years younger, the extent of his English was I love you. In three years he learned English, and was on his way to owning a wine importing business, proof of the American exceptionalism for opportunity.

The world has changed since 1986. The world has changed since the forefathers conceived and wrote the U.S. Constitution. Europe also has changed. Both Europe and the States are trying to recover for financial excesses. Europe since the Euro more resembles the States financial connectivity that leading economist have placed at the center of the individual EU participants fiscal problems. But this represents the large picture and distorts individual experience. How is it to live in 21st century Europe? My last trip to Rome the obvious difference I noted was younger Italians had shrugged off traditional values. Women of all ages were out at night alone and in groups. Asians and worker from other EU countries had taken the place of the iconic Italian waiter (even women). I wish I could pack my bags this moment for an extensive stay to observe and write about Europe today. My personal commitments will not allow me to be an eyewitness recorder and messenger to present a realistic picture of Europe that might inform, save, and revive concept of “American exceptionalism” we have exported around the world but seem to have in short supply here. How and who could get a TV series produced on European life today?     

I have begun, and abandoned because of complexity, a reading map. Today I read the introduction and first chapter of Annie Dillard’s Living by Fiction on my DroidX Kindle app. A free sample has sat on my phone for many, maybe as much as six, months. I have opened and closed the electronic link often. Yesterday the neglected obvious connection to my writing practice clicked. I made my first Kindle purchase ending my long search for examples of experimental texts. In seconds I am reading Dillard’s response to my inquiry on metafiction, analysis of writers and titles with descriptions of experimental techniques explored in the texts. I am reading in the back seat of a taxi heading up and cross town in freezing rain to have lunch with my beloved Feminist, Marxist professor well worth enduring the icy slush pools. Hours and errands later I return home to find Amazon has delivered Hazel Smith’s The Writing Experiment that is singing a duet with Dillard’s text. I will attempt to make a map on bubbl.us, a sort of comparative chart of corresponding and disparate theories.