Twentieth-Century Americanism by Yerkes Andrew;

Author:Yerkes, Andrew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

She realizes, also, that she is not among the ranks of these intellectuals: “I was but a worker, but they had time to study theory” (260).

The fictionalization of her life story leads Smedley to an account that emphasizes social conditions, attributing causality to her early childhood experiences and her family, using Freudian models of subjectivity that encourage her to seek the roots of her adult pathologies in early primal scenes. The Freudian understanding she articulates in Daughter of Earth allows her to critique positive aspects of identity but not gender. As a result, Smedley can articulate a critique of the subject positions that she has occupied without ever taking into account a more essential lack that precedes subjectivation. But this inability to go “beyond gender” is not a defect of her writing style, nor is it a shortcoming of the genre she has chosen, the fictional autobiography, by which to explain her life. To the contrary, the genre allows an epistemological fluidity, a liberation from categories of true and false, that allows her to dramatize the subjective experience of her recollected life more vividly than would otherwise be possible.

What does limit Smedley’s account of herself through the figure of Marie Rogers is her insistence that the truth of her life and the impetus of the narrative precede their articulation. Throughout the narrative, Marie makes dogged reference to her non-fictional status. But this is finally incoherent. “I was not a character in a novel,” writes Marie, who is, nonetheless, a character in a novel (156). Her inability to accept that her identity is “mere words,” her vehement deferral to the authority of experience, show that even the fictional autobiography, a genre that can tell the truth, as it were, freed from the constraints of an empirical historicism, is distorted by language. The confusion that pervades Smedley’s fictional autobiography stems from the fact that as she struggles to forge a sense of self from the signifiers of language that comprise her text, the signifiers themselves impose and reaffirm a sense of gender that preexists its articulation in Smedley’s narrative. This is because gender identity occurs at a level before language and naming: it is not an imaginary relationship; it is one that exists in the Real. It occurs at the point where language’s explanatory abilities expire at an impasse untraversable by signification. In “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” Joan Copjec suggests that the attempt to contemplate sex “throws reason into conflict with itself” (Copjec 16). Copjec examines the Kantian model of reason, which functions by way of antinomies, such that rational thought is comprised of binarisms of either/or statements. For instance:

A

Not A

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