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by Kathleen O'Grady
Trinity College, University of Cambridge
(1997)
Introduction
So much of contemporary critical theory alienates the
uninitiated and exasperates even the most determined reader.
And postmodern commentaries, which promise to unlock the
mysteries of the movement, often make better doorstops or
coffee-coasters than easy entries into the twisted and
lugubrious passageways of postmodernist thought.
Contemporary feminist theory has not always been free from
this tendency either.
Linda Hutcheon, one of the most respected and renown of
Canada's theorists, has long been known to dismiss this
proclivity with an easy shrug of the shoulders. Her
extensive writings, both on postmodernity and feminism,
provide lucid and succinct analyses of the most slippery of
topics -- parody, irony, aesthetics -- and do not stop
there. In each work she adds her own valuable insights from
her background in literature, her interest in art and
architecture, and her understanding of contemporary
philosophy. With such a diverse background it is often
difficult to characterize her work with a single title. She
is known by many to be a "cultural theorist" or "literary
critic", by others as a "feminist"; some think of her as an
"art critic", while she is often seen to be "a specialist in
Canadian literature"; others still, think of her as a
"philosopher" in her own right. Of course, it is likely true
that she is all of these things, and more. What is
not disputed is that her writings are always engaging,
dynamic, and above all else, prolific.
Linda Hutcheon is Professor of English and Comparative
Literature, at the University of Toronto. Her theoretical
works include A Poetics of Postmodernism: History,
Theory, Fiction; The Politics of Postmodernism;
Narcissistic Narrative: the Metafictional Paradox;
A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century
Art Forms; The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of
Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction; Splitting
Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies; and most recently
Opera: Desire, Disease, Death with Michael Hutcheon.
You have recently co-authored a book which examines
the aesthetic and erotic representation of disease in the
heroines from various operas. What did your study uncover
about the construction -- or in your words "mythifying" --
of gender, desire and illness? You also note the relation
between the 19th century scientific understanding of disease
and its subsequent gendered representation in art. Have you
noted similar contemporary parallels?
The research I did with my (physician) husband on the
cultural construction of women and disease in opera was a
real eye-opener for me, I must confess. Like everyone else,
whenever anyone mentioned disease in the context of opera, I
thought of Puccini's Mimi in La Bohème
or Verdi's Violetta in La Traviata;
because of the strength of the stereotype, I imagined
that there were all kinds of other such consumptive operatic
heroines. Well, there aren't. There are only a few more.
This is what prompted us to study the reasons for the power
of this stereotype and, thereby, to examine the cultural
meanings given to diseases and those who have them.
As you might imagine, our work was also provoked by the
fact that we have all been watching the cultural
construction of meaning of a new medical condition -- AIDS.
We discovered that the representations in the media and in
art of this syndrome have played out the history of many
other illnesses -- from the plague (it was called the "gay
plague" in the early 1980s) to syphilis (as a sexually
transmitted disease). We have all watched the press and
television make the differentiation between "innocent" and
other victims --thereby passing a moral judgment, while
apparently dealing with a medical issue. This slippage isn't
new, of course: the history of disease and its
representation in art (think of leprosy in earlier periods)
is a history of social and moral values as much as medical
information.
In Opera: Desire, Disease, Death
(1996), we looked at moments in medical
history when major scientific changes occurred in the
understanding of a disease -- for instance, 1882, when
Robert Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus, and taught us
that tuberculosis was not something you inherited as a
matter of familial disposition, but was something you could
catch from someone else. We then studied how this medical
information made its way into the art forms of the day:
La Bohème (1896), with its insistence on
urban poverty and the hero's fear of contagion (he leaves
Mimi after she has a bad night of coughing), is a post-Koch
opera, though its romanticizing of the consumptive heroine
-- in all her pale and feverish beauty and desirability --
is a continuation from the earlier construction of women
with the disease.
I noted with great interest that your definition of
postmodernism (in The Politics of Postmodernism)
states that this movement, particularly its attention to
difference and marginality, has been significantly shaped by
feminism. Most commentators -- those compiling the
anthologies and encyclopedias -- have stated the opposite:
that feminism is the direct result of a burgeoning
postmodernism. This may seem a trivial observation -- the
beginnings of a "chicken and egg" argument -- but it may
also be indicative of the proclivity of academic texts to
consign feminist writers to the sidelines, the happy
cheerleaders of the postmodern movement.
My sense has always been that there were certain
important social movements in the 1960s (and before) that
made the postmodern possible: the women's movement (though,
of course, the movement existed much earlier, but this wave
of it in the 1960s was crucial) and, in North America, the
civil rights movement. Suddenly gender and racial
differences were on the table for discussion. Once that
happened, "difference" became the focus of much thinking --
from newer issues of sexual choice and postcolonial history
to more familiar ones such as religion and class. I think
feminisms (in the plural) were important for articulating
early on the variety of political positions possible within
the umbrella term of gender -- from liberal humanist to
cultural materialist. Feminist discussions "complex-ified"
questions of identity and difference almost from the start,
and raised those upsetting (but, of course, productive)
issues of social and cultural marginality.
Why have so many feminist artists and theorists
resisted the lure of postmodernism?
In part, it has been because the early
constructions of the postmodern were resolutely male (and
that's one of the reasons I chose to write on the subject):
male writers, artists and theorists were for a long time in
the foreground. Sometimes this was a real blind-spot;
sometimes it was what we might call a form of
gender-caution: people were afraid, because of that
resistance of feminists, to label women writers or theorists
as postmodern. This was, in part, because, women were indeed
resisting such labeling, sometimes out of a worry that the
political agenda of their feminisms would be subsumed under
the "apolitical" aestheticizing label of postmodernism. But
it depends on whose definition of the postmodern we are
talking about. I happen to think that postmodernism is
political, but not in a way that is of much use, in the long
run, to feminisms: it does challenge dominant discourses
(usually through self-consciousness and parody), but it also
re-instates those very discourses in the act of challenging
them. To put it another way, postmodernism does deconstruct,
but doesn't really reconstruct. No feminist is happy with
that kind of potential quietism, even if she (or he)
approves of the deconstructing impulse: you simply can't
stop there. This important issue of agency has become
central not only to feminism, of course, but to "queer
theory" and to postcolonial theory.
You have noted in your theoretical work (and above)
that feminism has taken a variety of forms in different
cultures, and you prefer to speak of "feminisms" in your
texts rather than a single feminist movement. Much is now
being written on the distinct forms of feminism emerging
from countries like Italy, France, India, Britain and
America. Is there a distinctly Canadian (Anglo and French)
feminism?
As a feminist who has been influenced by postmodern
thinking -- with its challenging of universals and its
stress on the local and particular -- I can't help believing
that Canadian feminism is different: our social situation as
women in Canada is different even from that of women in
Britain or the U.S. -- because of legal as well as cultural
differences -- and our intellectual context is, for
historical reasons, perhaps more of a hybrid than most
(though obviously related to that of post-colonial nations).
Framed geographically and historically between two major
anglophone empires (past and present), Canada has
experienced an odd amalgam of British and American
influences and both have played their role in shaping our
intellectual heritage. When you add the Québec
context, with its strong links to French feminism -- the
hybridity increases. The mix of the Anglo-American activist
strain with the more theoretical European focus has been
fruitful, I think, for Canadian feminists.
Much of your work has focused on or included
representations of "the feminine" in literature and other
art forms. In an early work (The Canadian
Postmodern) you suggest a shared pattern of irony and
parody in texts by women writers generally and Canadian
fiction. What motivates this similarity?
Marginalization -- in a word. Just as women have
traditionally been positioned on the fringes of male
culture, so Canadians often feel as if they are watching the
action (be it American or European) from the sidelines.
Faced with a strong colonial heritage that conditions its
response to Britain (and France, but in a different way) and
confronted with an even stronger cultural power to the south
of us in the USA, Canadians have often turned to irony to
position themselves (self-deprecatingly) or to contest the
strength of those dominant cultural forces of history or of
the current situation. I wrote a book called Splitting
Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies to try to
explain my sense of the pervasiveness of parody and irony as
a Canadian response to marginalization (often
self-marginalization, I should say).
You have placed parody at the centre of your
descriptions of postmodern art, music, architecture and
literature. Is this also, in your view, the defining feature
of contemporary feminist work?
Yes, if you stress "a" (and not "the") defining feature.
It seems to me that, like Canadians, women are often in the
position of defining themselves AGAINST a dominant culture
or discourse. One way to do that, a way with great
subversive potential, is to speak the language of the
dominant (which allows you to be heard), but then to subvert
it through ironic strategies of exaggeration,
understatement, or literalization. Parody is the mode that
allows you to mimic that speech, but to do so through
re-contextualizing it and therefore without subscribing to
its implied ideals and values. Women writers (witness Jane
Austen) have known of this transgressive power of parody for
a long time. Men too create parodies, of course, but
interestingly the most cogent and forceful of these lately
have often been produced from the point of view of
marginalized men who position themselves by sexual choice as
gay (such as the Canadian photographer known as Evergon) or
by 'nationality' as postcolonial (such as Salman Rushdie, to
pick a controversial example). But women writers today --
from Jeanette Winterson and Angela Carter to Margaret Atwood
and Ann-Marie MacDonald -- have certainly put parody to
excellent political use.
Your texts on irony and parody, and your work on
postmodernism and feminism are all bursting with examples
from a varied mixture of art forms: performance art,
architecture, television, literature, movies, opera and pop
music. It is not uncommon to encounter in your writing
examples from Shakespeare, Laurie Anderson and Wayne's World
interspersed to illustrate the same theoretical point. In
addition to mixing "high" and "low" art forms, your
theoretical assertions arise directly from concrete
examples. Is this a conscious methodology on your part? And
does it arise from your position as a female academic, as a
feminist, as a Canadian? This is a rare treat when so much
of the theoretical works produced today offer as proof for
their conclusions wise words from other critics or
philosophers, producing a kind of insular and incestuous
argument.
I guess I've always believed that theory had to be
theorizing -- in the sense that you had to theorize from
something and that something should be as broad as possible
in its definition. Any theory of irony and parody that only
worked for literature, for instance, was (for me) an
inadequate theory not worthy of its name. So, I chose to
work from examples from visual art or music or film and try
to understand how irony, for instance, worked -- how it came
to "happen" for people in viewing or hearing these texts.
Teaching has taught me that popular cultural examples can be
very helpful in explaining complex theoretical ideas. But,
when working on the postmodern, it became crucial -- because
of the postmodern blurring of the boundaries between art
forms, between high and popular art -- to deal with that
variety in theorizing this cultural phenomenon. I tried to
model it from the first relatively uncontested usage of the
term -- in architecture -- and then looked to other art
forms, from the novel to photography and film with similar
manifestations. This strategy also allowed me to bring in
the work of women writers and artists who had NOT been seen
as postmodern (for some of the reasons outlined above), but
who clearly had used techniques similar to those used by
male postmodern writers -- but with an added political,
contestatory edge. I'm thinking of people like Angela Carter
or Barbara Kruger. So, I suppose, my feminist interests also
condition why I theorize in the way I do.
Rampike publishes contemporary
theory, literature and art from around the world. For
subscription or submission information contact: jirgens@thunderbird.auc.on.ca
The most recent issue (Spring 1998) features Matt Cohen,
Octavio Paz, Grand Chief Matthew Coon Come, Henning
Mittendorf, Vittore L. Baroni, and many more.
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