Scary – it’s my last semester at Cal and today was the first day of classes. And as always, I have no idea what my schedule is going to look like. I attended six classes today from 9:00 to 5:30, two of which were different sections of 45C and two classes with Professor Puckett. Hearing roll call is bad enough, but after six times in six different classes I’m almost sure I’ve heard every student’s name in the English department butchered by one professor or another.
Aside from staring at various syllabi, I also started reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. By the time I got through the Preface, I felt like she had challenged everything I conceived to be true about gender and identity. I found the section on theory of performativity to be especially interesting in relation to my project and ideas of how gender is constructed. She looks at Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s “Before the Law” as an example in which the anticipation of something conjures the object. In Kafka’s story a man waits to be admitted to the Law, but a doorkeeper stands in his way. The man thinks that the Law, “should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, which his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter” (Kafka, 3). The man waits and waits outside the gate with the doorkeeper until he grows old and gray. His eyesight begins to fail him, “and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him” (4). Finally, just before the man dies he asks the doorkeeper how it is that no one else has asked for admittance to the Law. The doorkeeper tells him that the gate was made only for him, and that now he is going to shut it.
Butler’s point here, I think, is that we blindly believe in that which we cannot even know to really exist. This man spends his entire life waiting outside a gate for the Law, which only builds its force and power in his anticipation to be admitted. Butler argues that the man’s expectation produces the very phenomena it anticipates. She dubs this temporal problem as metalepsis and relates it to the construction of gender: it is the repetition and ritual of gender roles that achieve their effects within the context of a body. So, if a woman were to stay home to cook and clean, these repetitive ritualistic actions not only define her role as a woman, but also reaffirm the expectations of a woman in society at the same time. Furthermore, a housewife who acts and dresses as such is realizing gender roles upon the context of her body and through her labor. In relation to fairy tales, I have to wonder can the idea of the body, not only mean a physical body, but also a body of work or a text through which expectations are realized? Or for example, can storytelling be a ritual of certain social expectations that extends through time and across cultures?
This idea of expectations producing the same phenomena it anticipates also relates to a temporal problem in Jane Gallup’s reading of Lacan’s The Mirror Stage. In her book, Reading Lacan, Gallup discusses making a return to what came before in order to anticipate what is to come:
The mirror stage is a decisive moment. Not only does the self issue from it, but so does the ‘body in bits and pieces.’ This moment is the source not only for what follows, but also for what precedes. It produces the future through anticipation and the past through retroaction. And yet it is itself a moment of self-delusion, of captivation by an illusory image. Both future and past are rooted in illusion. (80)
I think Gallup highlights an interesting dialectic that takes place between the old and new, a necessary return to what came before in order to move forward. With that in mind, why do we keep reading fiction? What makes us continually return to the stories that represent us through social fictions? Lacan returns to Freud to redescribe theoris of psychoanalysis, and in a similar vein, Carter does the same with Perrault’s fairy tales. This idea of a “return” to create something new is extremely important in analyzing the importance of The Bloody Chamber as a work of literature that seeks to redefine social fictions. In Notes From the Front Line, Carter writes: “reading is just as creative an activity as writing and most intellectual development depends upon new reading of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode” (24). She continues, “this past, for me, has important decorative ornamental functions; further it is a vast repository of outmoded lies, where you can check out what lies used to be a la mode and find the old lies on which new lies have been based” (28). How else are we to create new myths if we can’t identify the falsity of the old ones? And if this is true, can new myths work towards a more “accurate” representation of our reality? Do they want to?
How does this return to what came before, in Carter’s rereading of fairy tales or Lacan’s rereading of Freud, or Gallup’s rereading of Freud, the idea of putting new wine in old bottles have to say about literature and theory? If all is an illusion – gender, ideology, a hope for true identity – then why do we need myths?
