Section 6
Again, I propose that the combination of anger and abjection Angry Essentialism champions as a source of power and liberation for women can be attributed to the influence of the poete maudit tradition of the avant-garde, which itself draws upon the more ancient Dionysian and Shamanic traditions. The poete maudit tradition valorizes chthonian nature as a positive, creative force which, when tapped, allows the artist to break through the illusions imposed by society and to envision a new reality. Thus, to the poete maudit, abjection is a revolutionary weapon used to violate borders and reveal how systems are constructed, as Hart suggests it should, and it is also a means toward utopia. For example, Arthur Rimbaud, the exemplary poete maudit, describes his "program" for becoming a Poet as follows:
The first task of the man who wants to be a poet is to study his own awareness of himself, in its entirety; he seeks out his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it! . . . --But the problem is to make the soul into a monster, like the compachicos, you know? Think of a man grafting warts onto his face and growing them there.The passage appears in Rimbaud's lettre du voyant (his letter to Georges Izambard, dated 13 May 1871), and the idea here is that artistic "vision" requires decadence and the destruction of rationality: the artist disorganizes his senses in order to break free of all social and moral constraints and liberate his "inner self."
I say you have to be a visionary, make yourself a visionary.
A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! (Rimbaud 102)French feminist theorists have found male avant-garde practices and concepts like Rimbaud's relevant to feminist aims. According to Marianne DeKoven, Cixous, concerned primarily with "inscribing the feminine" in written culture, finds that Jean Genet's work is a rare example of writing that "inscribes femininity" (72). Also, DuPlessis and Workshop 9 note the affinity between women's writing and the avant-garde in that the avant-garde, like feminism, represents a marginal position which seeks to dismantle oppressive social/literary systems, so feminist women writers have appropriated what is best about the avant-garde to suit their purposes. (73). Similarly, DeKoven asserts, Kristeva actually conflates the feminine and avant-garde so that "ecriture feminine is the male avant-garde" (72). Most significantly, Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, identifies Rimbaud as friendly to feminism, quoting "Rimbaud's prophecy" (Marks & Courtivron 233), the "female prometheus" passage of his lettre du voyant
When the eternal slavery of Women is destroyed, when she lives for herself and through herself, when man--up till now abominable--will have set her free, she will be a poet as well! Woman will discover the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? She will discover strange things, unfathomable, repulsive, delightful; we will accept and understand them. (Rimbaud 103)
Interestingly, this "female prometheus" passage appears just a few paragraphs below Rimbaud's description of his program for becoming a visionary, quoted above. I wonder, when de Beauvoir cites the "female prometheus" passage, if she condones the "program" that the liberated "female prometheus" would have to follow to be a Poet. Doris T. Wight recognizes the implications in Seeking the Promethean Woman in the New Poetry (in which the only woman writer represented is Stein, by the way). Wight points out: "Rimbaud assumes that women might be able to touch baser, more repulsive' depths than men." She then asks, "Is he implying that females are in closer association with evil than males?" (11). Unfortunately, she does not answer her own question, but I think this is an important point. The question is not whether females are more closely associated with evil than males, for binaries like "good and evil" are part of what Rimbaud's program (as well as avant-garde practices) attempts to demolish. The question is whether females are more closely associated with nature. Rimbaud's primary source of inspiration was nature, and in order to write about it he had to follow his program of decadence. That program requires that the visionary poet uncover his "true" self, his "inner" self, in order to liberate his vision. Even though Rimbaud is pre-Freud, it is clear, given that decadence defines the program, that the true self to be transformed is always dark and ugly.A forerunner to the Angry Essentialists is Patti Smith, and she reveals the nature of the association of feminism with the poete maudit tradtion. Reynolds and Press describe her as "the genuine article, a shaman from the Amazon, tripping madly on hallucinogenic tree-bark. She gnashes and drools, chokes and gasps strangulated incantations" (358). In 1978, Paul Rambali wrote, "In the dark ages she'd have been burned at the stake. Now she's a rock and roll witch" (Qtd. In Reynolds and Press 281); Reynolds and Press comment, "The witch is a female equivalent of the Dionysian shaman that has served as a prototype for a lineage of male rock rebels (Jim Morrison/Hendrix/Nick Cage etc.). With her magical powers, her transcendence/transgression of social norms, her flight-y independence, the witch is a model for rock she-rebels" (281). Given that thousands of women were executed as witches over several centuries, I want to emphasize the important fact that, in order to be valid, the archetypal transgressive female had first to be appropriated by men and transformed; its re-appropriation by women was the next logical step. Patti Smith cites Rimbaud and William S. Burroughs as her primary influences (she dedicates her book Witt to them, for example), and Rimbaud's aesthetic is evident in her work. Following in the footsteps of Rimbaud, Smith declares herself a "rock n' roll nigger" and plans to transform shit into gold--decadence into art, ugliness into beauty. As Reynolds and Press point out, Smith looked for inspiration to a Romantic tradition composed exclusively of male artists who "believed they were in touch with the feminine within. From Rimbaud to Jim Morrison, these artists had set a premium on flow, flux, the chaos of the unconscious." Thus, Smith felt that, "By identifying with these male avant-gardists and Romantics, [she had] found a way to reclaim women's own wildness" (356).
Further, Smith's emergence as a performer occurred within the context of 1970s punk rock, the roots of which Dick Hebdige and Larry McCaffery trace to the Decadent and Dada tradition(s) of Whitman, Warhol, de Sade, Rimbaud, Genet, Burroughs, Bukowski, Bataille, and Artaud (McCaffery 220). McCaffery suggests that the punk aesthetic reveals "a perverse optimism: a hope in the potentially liberating effect of the perverse or shocking gesture." Thus the "physical repulsiveness" of punk, the "spitting, vomiting, . . . chewing broken glass and then spitting bloody remarks at the audience," allows "the artist and audience [to] achieve a brief moment of transcendence, where we are transported to a sacred place beyond dull rationality and blind adherence" (221). McCaffery argues that Smith and other women "artists of hell" (specifically, Kathy Acker) have appropriated the marginal stance of the avant-garde and the violent rebellion of seventies punk rock because women artists "need to become literary 'criminals,' break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives" (218). However, Susan Rubin Suleiman offers a finer connection between women artists and the avant-garde. As she puts it, "the place of women, and of the avant-garde movements, has traditionally been situated away from the center, 'on the fringe,' in the margins." However, she continues, "One difference is that avant-garde movements have willfully chosen their marginal position, the better to launch attacks at the center, whereas women have more often than not been relegated to the margins . . ." (14). Thus, rather than saying women artists appropriate aspects of the avant-garde, it might be more accurate to say they are reclaiming the territory appropriated and transformed by the male avant-garde. Unfortunately, however, as with most colonized spaces, that territory has been shaped in the image the colonizer and retains his marks.
Perhaps this is why the connection between feminism and the avant-garde has been hidden away like a dirty secret. Marianne DeKoven's article, "Male Signature, Female Aesthetics: The Gender Politics of Experimental Writing," comments on the "substantive historical link" between the (male) avant-garde and feminine (feminine, feminist, female, women's) traditions (72), questioning the lack of mutual recognition between the two traditions. That is, while the French feminist theorists acknowledged the association long ago, Anglo-American feminists have denied it. Laura Mulvey occupies a middle stance, suggesting that feminist filmmakers have adapted avant-garde practices yet stopping short of "theorizing a historical relationship between the two." DeKoven suggests that Mulvey wants to avoid subordinating "feminist film to a male-dominated avant-garde" (74). At the extreme end of the continuum, Mary Jacobus entirely rejects "an alliance of ecriture feminine with the avant-garde" because such an alliance would make women artists "the silenced woman out of whose mouth the male avant-garde-speaks." Thus, DeKoven proposes that in order to avoid subordinating itself to the male avant-garde tradition, the feminine tradition appropriates what is useful from the avant-garde, calls it the female aesthetic, rounds up women artists to form a tradition or canon, denies any connection to the avant-garde, and claims that the female aesthetic is an entirely new practice (77).
At the end of her article, DeKoven asks why avant-garde writing is so anti- patriarchal when it is "so excessively dominated by men," and, "Why is it men who disrupt the hierarchical Sentence, in Barthes's formulation--who write ecriture feminine . . . ?" (78). My answer is that not only is the avant-garde's marginal position gendered female/feminine, but the female/feminine appropriated by the avant-garde is entirely a male construction. Thus, I think one additional question is pertinent when putting the Dionysian/Shamanistic/poete maudit program into feminist performance practice. The question is, since this female/feminine position is, for the most part, a misogynistic male construction of Female Nature, can it be anti-patriarchal in a feminist sense?
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