First Person Female: Some doors a man can open only by being a woman.
Chive Mynde
There are some doors a man can open only by being a woman. By JIM
HARRISON
Why did I think I might be able to write in the voice of a woman?
Anyone who knows a novelist or poet very well has probably figured out
that they are not dealing with a true intellectual. Intellectuals have
a compulsion to be right and this urge is inimical to what John Keats
called "negative capability," the capacity a poem or novel must have
to keep afloat a thousand contradictory people and questions in order
to create the parallel universe of art. Rationality, to borrow from
Foucault, may be an inferior level of discourse. This is a very
high-minded thing for me to say, keeping in view the recent moment
when my wonderful mother, who is 84 and of 100 percent Swedish
derivation, said, "You've made quite a living out of your fibs."
She and her four sisters grew up on a small, poor farm in northern
Michigan with a rather strong and domineering father. However, all of
the daughters became rather strong and domineering themselves, with
not a weak sister in the lot. God pity the man, and hopefully He did,
who ever tried to pull a fast one on these women. At this point I
somehow remember that there is a reason I'm not supposed to call them
ladies. They were not averse to having a good time and neither were
their husbands who, though they all fished and hunted strenuously,
would never describe these particular activities as "manly." That idea
seemed to derive from writers of city origin like the tortured
Hemingway, who, though a very great writer, seemed to suffer from a
prolonged struggle with his manhood. Faulkner was a bit more
nonchalant and colorful on the subject, what with his lifelong
fascination with the "pelvic mysteries of swamps."
So I have often wondered about the peculiar female umbrella I grew up
under and what particular effect it had on my work, what drove me to
write in a female voice in most of "Dalva," all of the novella "The
Woman Lit by Fireflies" and a large portion of my most recent novel,
"The Road Home." I could always ask the analyst I've been visiting in
New York City for more than 20 years, but I never have. That would be
poking needlessly around the sacred veil of art herself. The answer is
always in the entire story, not a piece of it. As the Acoma poet Simon
Ortiz says, "There are no truths, only stories." And on a wretchedly
therapeutic level there's the idea that my capability to write as a
woman saved me from death by drugs and booze, in that manliness in our
culture can paint you into a corner where the only thing left to do is
eat road kill and bite the moon.
Back in the late 70's the character of Dalva came to me in a dream.
This is not the sort of thing that is fashionable with literary
critics, but then they have their lives and I have mine. In fact she
appeared several times in dreams. At first her voice was beyond my
ability to hear, as if I were indeed deaf or could hear only the
rhythm of modulations, but by strong inference her dream language
seemed to say, "Listen to me now, I've been waiting for you a long
time." Perhaps it takes a culture as slippery and venal as our own to
discount the dream life that was so vital to people for 30,000 years.
Dalva appeared at a time of great emotional stress, after I had taken
a very long nondirectional car trip, fixing on the particularly
unknown state of Nebraska -- a place that had always fascinated me as
a last locale for the collision of our own and native cultures that
ended in South Dakota at Wounded Knee in 1890 but still survives in
vital remnants to the extent that if you're blind to it in our past,
you're liable to be blind to it in the present and future.
My grand historical scheme dissembled in the imaginary life of this
woman, who herself was part Lakota, whose father, grandfather and
great-grandfather had truly lived our history, and she, finally, no
less than they, not as a pawn but as a particularly vivid human being.
Of course, the raw meat on the floor, the mystery, is how to manage to
convincingly enter another's voice. At 19 I was a poor scholar indeed,
but I owned most of the Bollingen volumes of the collected work of
Carl Jung. Rather than study the text I mined it for my own purposes,
though it would be a couple of decades before I had the wit to use the
material. One very troubling idea was Jung's question of what we have
done with our twin sisters that the culture forces us to abandon at
birth. This is a reduction, but then I'm a novelist and poet, and I'm
talking about fiction, not accuracy. But perhaps in my work in the
voice of a woman, I was trying to revive this ghost that the culture
steals from us.
An additional source was my sometimes casual but lifelong study of the
roots of American Indian culture. This is scarcely an abstraction in
northern Michigan, where the closest reservation is only a half-dozen
miles from our farm and the mixed bloods abound. Again, this was not a
scholarly impulse but a search for fuel, for answers to our behavior
that seemed not to exist in white culture. A pervasive theme in many
native cultures is the freedom of shape changing, where the man or
woman becomes a coyote, a bear, a wolf, a bird, a flower, tree, creek,
rock, wind. This is somewhat more attractive to a loony young writer
than an M.B.A., much less an M.F.A., and I unwittingly traveled these
dangerous waters most of my life. The merest suggestion of emotional
limits drives me into a sodden funk. In "The Road Home," Dalva can say
things, simply enough, that a male character can't, and in areas I
can't bear to be voiceless. Talking about loutish cowboys, one of whom
she errantly loved, she says: "By the first midnight in a Hardin bar
it occurred to me that these people made Brooklyn Sicilians look like
English gentlemen. There's a terrible illusion that the grandeur of
landscape contributes to grandeur of personality." I have too many
cowboy friends to say such a thing, but Dalva was up to it.
tend to think of art as essentially androgynous and that gender is a
biological rather than a philosophical system. I doubt that there is
an intelligent straight man who hasn't at times envied the seeming
emotional latitude of either women or gay friends. On a perhaps comic
level for a novelist, once you have decided to make this emotional
latitude your own, you have already committed your act of hubris. You
are way up there on the high board, and now you will discover if the
pool is empty or full. On an almost absurd level I thought once that
since I'm blind in my left eye, I'm missing half of life -- and if I'm
writing only as a man, I'm cut in half again. Being down to a scant
quarter isn't enough to sustain my life.
The pool appears to have been full, but in literary matters the jury
is out for a great deal longer than writers might wish. Dalva began
her public life rather slowly but is still thriving 10 years later.
Clare, in the novella "The Woman Lit by Fireflies," has even been
included in a feminist anthology. Clare's situation was scarcely
unique though not often noted. A young woman marries a liberal,
high-minded young man. She retains her ideals but watches his
degenerate, deliquesce, until she can no longer bear it and abruptly
leaves.
Dalva's reappearance in my recent "The Road Home" did quite well,
especially in France, where the novel first was published and marked
my first appearance on a national best-seller list. I have no specific
ideas on why my work has done this well in France. Of the hundreds of
letters and reviews, there have only been two real objections to my
writing in the voice of a woman. This surprises me, though I thought
that many of the political-minded might think of me as beneath
contempt or essentially harmless, or that possibly women might prefer
stories to politics, or that a literary novel rarely raises anyone to
anger unless there is unpardonable sexual mayhem.
And maybe I could describe the cages in which my heroines lived
because as a male I unconsciously helped to build these cages. Dalva
was free to be an inordinately strong woman partly because I have
known a number of them, easily as many as the inordinately strong men
I have known. You have to look more closely, because men have
generally defined the terms of strength.
If you can agree with the notion of the twin sister you abandoned at
birth, the almost intolerable problem is access to her mind. It is
here that we deal with aspects of the creative process that appear
decidedly nonrational. If many of the culture's presumptions about
women are wrong, and they are, you must certainly abandon any
habituation and conditioning if you want the slightest access. Oddly
enough, the first presumption your mind must demolish is that women
lack the latitude of individuality of men. This is not the less
difficult for being so obvious. I suspect that the source of so much
feminine anguish in political and social terms is the same for anyone
who is purposefully misunderstood. From birth to death someone is
always yelling a name in your face that is not your own.
After "Dalva," "The Woman Lit by Fireflies" and "The Road Home," I'm
willing to give up the quest, but then in an interview I once said
that I didn't want to write about "nifty guys at loose ends," the
fodder for so much of our postmodernist fiction. Men and women alike
as writers may wander lonely as a cloud, or simply scratch their tired
ironical behinds, quite unmindful that the neofascists hope to make us
only workers in a theme park for the convenience of the global
economy.
To show how confused the unconscious well out of which a writer draws
material can be, it occurred to me while writing this that whether it
is Clare in "The Woman Lit by Fireflies" or Dalva herself, perhaps I
am trying to revive the presence of my beloved sister, Judith, who
died with my father in an auto accident when she was 19. We used to
talk about Dostoyevsky and Rilke, Modigliani and Gauguin, while
burning red candles and listening to Berlioz. Who knows? In fiction I
try to make life live itself. Judith was an indomitable young woman,
and it is very likely indeed that this still-living spirit contributes
to my efforts, however short they fall. Ultimately, the perception of
reality in a culture is consensual, and so it must be if its peculiar
civilization is to function. You have to excuse all the question marks
thrown in by the artists, whether they are poets, painters, composers,
novelists or sculptors. Their calling from the beginning has been to
maintain the vitality of the human spirit whether by saying no in
thunder or assuming a voice not of their own sex.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company