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Summary
Lust for Letters
Dutch women poets and the literary system
This thesis is a contribution to feminist literary theory which provides the ‘revolt of women readers’ with an academic foundation. It also contributes to the discussion on interpretation, theory of reading, Dutch literary history and reception research. The work of a number of post-war women poets-among them Vasalis, Min, Herzberg, De Waard, Michaelis, Warmond-is central to it. Theories-of Culler, Riffaterre, Jauss, Fetterley and others-are always related to the texts. The ‘erotics’ and ‘politics’ of reading are basic principles. Finally, the hypothesis of the literary polysystem is adopted, tried, and modified.
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I The Paradox of Interpretation
Sometimes women poets are unjustly considered to be easily accessible and simple. This goes for M. Vasalis, for example, whom I contend belongs to the mystic poets (in chapter 1). Many of M. Vasalis' poems take an unexpected turn to another perception of reality. They contain elements which are mystical by tradition: being startled by a ‘face’ or vision, the disappearance of the sense of time, the lifting of the separation between subject and object, the fear and/or breathless sense of happiness that accompanies this transforming experience. Vasalis deserves to be included in the recent wave of interest in poetry and mysticism, an interest which is still focused on male poets alone.
In my discussion of Vasalis I deliberately adhere to the traditional conventions of interpretation.
In chapter 2 I question these conventions by discussing two notorious problems of poetry interpretation.
Problem 1: who is responsible for the meaning of a text - the text or the reader? In keeping with the new interest in literary theory for the reader, I opt for an active and creative role on the reader's part. Jonathan Culler (1975/1981) is representative of the shift in paradigms. His reader is the assembly point of literary conventions
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of reading; I would add: the assembly point of specific experiences and social opinions and judgements as well. The reader creates meaning on the basis of a. conventions of reading (Culler's ‘literary competence’) and b. positional - (sub) cultural and political - factors. Next I argue for a new, selfreflective mode of interpretation. Meaning becomes a process in the reader, instead of the ritual, reductive statement of what the poem means.
Problem 2: can a rational, systematic-explanatory interpretation of poetry make sense at all? Reading poetry has a disorganizing and disruptive effect. Poetry derives this disordering capacity from projection on the part of the reader. The poem can ‘abduct’ because the capacity to do so was bestowed upon it by a (meaningful) cultural agreement. This, however, turns interpretation into a paradox: a poem fascinates because of its ‘strangeness’, while interpretation skilfully removes this same strangeness.
I object to the classic systematic method of interpretation. Even the interpreter's metaphors (bringing to light, revealing, unravelling) show that this interpretation wishes to haul the poem back into the world of explanation and rational understanding, the very world from which the poem seeks to detach us. Inspired by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous and Camille Mortagne, I propose a reversal: interpretation should not draw the poem back into the rational world, but, on the contrary, help the reader experience its sensuousness, imagery and ‘strangeness’. Such ‘erotics of reading’ lead to what I would call a counter-interpretation.
In chapter 3 I apply this counter-interpretation. In reading Herzberg's poems, prevailing standards of language and ways of thinking and perceiving may become disordered. The logic of grammar is defeated by the logic of poetry. This poetry can be construed as an invitation ‘to hear more, to see more, to feel more’, in the words of Sontag. By comparing six different interpretations of the same poem (‘Ziekenbezoek’), the differences between ‘allegorical’, ‘technical’ and ‘erotic’ legetics or readers' poetics become visible. In the latter form of legetics the reader seeks to inwardly undergo poetic disruption. Erotic legetics can solve the paradox of interpretation. The reader assumes an intermediary position between the poem on the one hand and the normality of everyday consciousness and oridinary language on the other.
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II The Will to Read
Chapter 4. What a reader suppresses in himself he will not want to face in a text. Conversely: a text can only yield meanings if the reader is willing to accept them. The work of Neeltje Maria Min, for example, contains an unreadable secret. The critics chose not to read it: they pronounced Min's work facile. When I read her work, it proved complicated and resistant to interpretation for a long time. Using Riffaterre's Semiotics of Poetry, I resolved its ‘ungrammaticalities’ and open spaces into a central source of meaning which is ‘the rape of daughters’. This is the haunting secret which is always referred to but which is also systematically concealed. The poems themselves are an expression of the evasiveness and silence of incest victims. This reading is followed by reflections requisite to my method of analysis. In these reflections, the reader also tries to specify the positional factors that have guided the interpretation. In this case poetic-political views, historicity, cultural background, and being female play their part in the attribution of meaning.
In chapter 5 I depose the theory that the ‘higher’ analytical model should be applied to the ‘lower’ object of research, the text. In order to abolish the prevailing hierarchy, I reverse it, which enables the poetry to ‘analyse’ the theory. In so doing Min's text reveals the original meaning of the ‘primal scene’ as suppressed by Freud. Also, Riffaterre's dogma that poetry by definition transcends the level of mimesis turns out to be an ideological keynote. Here a ‘male’ perception of reality has been used indiscriminately as a basis for a poetic theory. The ‘unspeakable’, which we traditionally expect of poetry, is not something beyond reality for this woman poet, but the very thing within reality which is intangible and unspeakable.
In the interpretations produced so far, the text was taken at face value, so that the above ‘erotic’ and emphatic ways of reading could be applied. But texts are not always trustworthy, as feminist and other ideologically-critical analyses have taught us. This puts the political dimensions of reading into perspective. In part III the affirming reader makes way for the resisting one.
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III The Politics of Reading
In chapter 6 I do not read poems, but the texts of literary criticism themselves. In ‘Omzien naar Merlyn’ (‘Looking back to Merlyn’) I review the a-political past of literary theory, especially the work-immanent approach. The Anglo-American New Criticism and the Dutch Merlyn are very similar, despite the differences in time and place. After criticizing the ergo-centric theory I offer, as a ‘resisting reader’, a discourse analysis of Merlyn. Women are absent at the representative level, and at the discursive level the Merlyn-camp comprises a homosocial world where men ‘hunt’ other men and where the degree of masculinity is paramount in maintaining the hierarchy among men themselves. A deconstruction: the ‘feminine’ is reduced to a metaphor for everything men wish to disqualify.
In chapter 7 I explore the relationships between white readers and black texts. Black texts put Western norms into perspective and question the countinuity between text and reader which, in the dominant literary criticism, is often assumed as a matter of course. On the basis of poems by the white South African Opperman, and Ter Braak, De Waard and Astrid Roemer, the political aspects of the reading process are discussed in detail. The reader can obstruct the pleasure of reading when he/she is suspicious of the text. What the reader accepts at a pre-reflective level, she may reject at a reflective level, and vice versa: the reader as battle ground. It is more meaningful to describe the reading process as proceeding from the notion of dis-continuity than that of continuity. I criticize the concept of ‘recognition’ in feminist literary criticism is seen as an ideologically-critical position which is not necessarily tied to the colour or sex of the critic.
In chapter 8 a third positional factor which directs the reading process is discussed: sexual preference and the style of living and reading that goes with it. By analogy with Culler's ‘reading as a woman’, I promulgate ‘reading as a lesbian’. In ‘reading as a lesbian’, the reader is deploying her sexual preference as well as her affinity with women, her historical knowledge, her sensitivity to lesbian masks and signals, her knowledge of homosexual literature, her sexuo-political views and her desires. The lesbian poetic tradition and the lesbian frame of reference which make it possible
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to trace this tradition are investigated in the poetry of Anna Blaman, Hella Haasse, Christine Meyling, Ida Gerhardt, Ellen Warmond and others.
Researchers of lesbian literature (Rule, Foster, Faderman, Everard) often use the realistic or socio-historical code as their sole code. However, this code can be seen as a first reading - in the way that Riffaterre's first referential reading is followed by a more literary or intertextual way of reading. The text is then seen as a literary game, which has detached itself from mimesis. In feminist literary criticism it is Elaine Showalter (socio-realistic) and Toril Moi (literary, intertextual) who represent these positions. In my view these reading codes are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. At the referential level, the texts are a literary interpretation of lesbian social history. At non-referential levels they offer fascinating intertextual connections with homosexual literature, with romantic-decadents, and with non-literary discourses such as the medical treatise. Again, in a round about way the intertexts yield referential meanings. The literary and non-literary discourses cannot be separated; neither can the two reading codes.
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IV Literary-Historical Reflections
The vision of the reading process which I outlined in chapters I, II, and III has consequences for literary historiography. In chapter 9 the (wholesome) crisis of literary history is elucidated. The feminist hypothesis of the relatively independent literary traditions of women has been used as a searchlight. In doing so, the women poets of the 1950's, who until now have hardly been represented in Dutch literary history, can be brought to notice. the mythical proportions of the (male) ‘Vijftigers’ (a group of experimental Dutch poets of the fifties) completely dominates the period. I introduce ‘The Great Melancholy’ as a category of classification through which a number of women poets of the fifties can be meaningfully related to each other. The depressive syndrome in women's poetry is placed in the socio-historical context of the collective situation of women in the fifties.
In chapter 10 I question the basic premise of literary historiography that there is but one (the) literary tradition, a more or less uniform mass of consecutive works and movements. This legacy of the New
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Criticism is the scourge of all theories - I discuss Bloom, Jauss, Anbeek - which seek to do away with the ‘new critical’ presuppositions. How closely the One Literature is embraced by reception researchers is shown by their disinclination to actively seek the views of ‘deviant’ readers. They still prefer to acknowledge only the existing handful of professional male readers as readers. As an alternative to the myth of the One Literature, I propose a theory of heterogeneity, inv connection with Even-Zohar's polysystem hypothesis. The literary system is multiform. It comprises a multitude of living literary circuits - see diagram on page 338.
The texts and the outlooks of readers differ per circuit. The non-dominant circuits are ‘counter-literatures’. Not only their dialectical relationships to norms and to each other bear study, but their relative independence as well. This view allows the heterogeneity, the antagonism between the systems and the evolution of literature to be studied in the polyphony of texts, as well as in the multi-voiced attribution of meanings on the readers' part. The erotics of reading, the ground-breaking pleasure of reading, is likely to occur between a ‘kindred’ reader and a text; the politics of reading is likely to occur between non-kindred actors in the reading drama.
In chapter 11 the polysystem hypothesis is tested. Empirical research (1978-1987) on the reception of the work of Elly de Waard reveals three very different horizons of expectations [‘Erwartungs-horizonte’], and thereby three ‘operative circuits’: the men's, the women's, and the lesbian circuits. The social or ‘lebensweltliche’ component of the horizon of expectation-a heterosexual norm interpreted in literary terms and a role expectation with regard to women poets-appears to be significant amongst male recipients. The women's circuits reject the image of female violence. Reception refusal can also be construed as a document requiring interpretation: the document of silence.
In this research project, Jauss' innovation hypothesis has been integrated in the polysystem theory: the same work can have very different effects in different circuits. Furthermore, the unconscious components of the horizon of expectations appear to be of vital importance. Reception researchers are like psychiatrists who have to recognize and interpret evasive symptoms of defense. Interpretation, with all its positional particularity and adherement to va- | |
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lues, still remains the only road to knowledge, in reception research as well. Indeed, this study is a lengthy defense of interpretation. A literary theory that severs its ties with interpretation, under the illusion of raising itself above its subject, strikes me as more of a bugbear than an ideal.
Translation: C.W. Schamhardt
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