David Brooks
"THE MALE PRACJIICE OF FEMINIST CRITICISM:"
A SECOND MOMENT
The needs of men and women engaged in the practice of feminist criticism are very likely to be quite different. Certainly their motives, in as much as we can ever assess such things, appear to differ considera- bly. It is very likely that the implicit audience of any texts that such practitioners produce will also be different. It is, moreover, of the very nature of the subject that any community of language, of discursive mode, or of discipline itself cannot be readily assumed. Given this difference - these impossibilities - it seems improbable that any criticism by one party of the practice of the other can be made very readily on mutually-acceptable grounds. That such criticisms are made as often as they are, however, suggests that disproportionate assumptions of community still linger.
If this state of affairs seems to continue against the better judge- ment of many of those concerned, it may be a result less of widespread flaws of character than of some obsolescence in the framework of their discourse. For many of their practitioners, even the terms "feminist criticism" or "feminist critical theory" might be due for some reconsid- eration. This would seem implicit, for example, not only in the asser- tion, by Julia Kristeva and others, that "Woman" itself "cannot be defined, indeed should not be defined, since the term is a social and not a natural construct", 1 but also in the general drift in the theory of many such writers towards the employment of what we might call gender- transcendent latencies in deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory - toward, in many cases, use of the term "woman" as a metaphor for more generalised notions of the Other.
It is one of the principal arguments of this paper that many of the males currently regarded, as often by themselves as by others, as being engaged in the theory and practice of feminist criticism might as readily be said to be engaged in something far different, and that a better sense of what it is that they are, or might be engaged in will qualify many of the reservations they encounter.
The first instinct of many a male critic, and perhaps of many a female, when faced with the question of differences between their respective practices of feminist criticism, will be to assert some version of the old male-reason/female-intuition dichotomy, and to suggest
that the male pursues a closure with which the female practitioner is not quite so concerned. In this view, perhaps, the male practitioner becomes a publicist or propagandist in the manner of those whom K.
K. Ruthven describes as "contributing ideological expertise and rhe- torical skills towards the construction of a feminist critique which will not be vulnerable to attacks by antifeminists or the corrosions of skepticism". 2 If this is so, however (and I do not dispute that this is the way many males see themselves), he but continues Adam's purported task of naming, and might well be accused of attempting to imprint feminist criticism with his own mark, of helping less to articulate than to control or colonise it. Whereas the possibility must instead be granted that feminist criticism is in essence far different, far other, inherent less in such formulations than in its reluctance to be confined by them. In taking feminist criticism to a wider public, that is to suggest, those often presumed to be its male practitioners may not be, first and foremost, practitioners of feminist criticism at all, but the unwitting missionaries of a male formalism.
It must, in any case, be recognized that any employment of an old reason/intuition dichotomy by way of explanation of apparent differences between the male and female practices of feminist criticism can only be presented in neglect of far more plausible alternatives. It might, firstly, be argued that those very things about much feminist critical and theoretical activity which might seem to the male to invite some sort of systematization - what might sometimes appear to him to be its "ambiguity", its "amorphousness", its "difficulty" - are in fact the results of its own deep suspicion of all such systematization, and in particular of language itself, as tainted by the patriarchy. It might be argued, secondly, that if the male practice of feminist criticism appears more forensic than the female, it is because, abashed by the degree to which he finds himself to have been in unwitting complicity with an oppressive hegemony, the male critic enters the field in order to explain to himself and others like him how this may have come about, whereas the female, unencumbered by such guilt (whatever else may encumber her), is the more concerned to explore, the more ready to encounter uncharted (read "unchartered") territory.
It might also be suggested that this - the unchartered territory itself - offers us a third, and perhaps, for the male practitioner, far more significant line of argument: namely that if, in attempting to explain the reason and form of feminist criticism to himself and others, the male critic seems thus to colonize it with his own predilection for system, it might in some part be also because, entering a field of comparatively amorphous activity, and finding there few forms which announce themselves to him
as
such, he can cast there only images ofhimself, It is unlikely, if this is so, that he will remain ignorant of the fact indefinitely, nor that he will remain very long unaware that, cast in this new place, such images cannot fully resist its influence. There is, that is to say, a sense not only in which the self the male finds here will be a self he could not have found without entering this territory, but also in which his activity here will become more and more consciously a search for a lost or abandoned identity.
II
Simplistic accounts of motivation are always suspect. Like all other modes of causality, it is subject to infinite degrees of dilferance,
and the person who asks about or chooses to suspect motives must eventually recognize that what they seek can be determined only by an arbitrary interruption of a potentially-unending congeries. One can know only one's apparent motives, and should be conscious that these in themselves depend to a large extent upon how much time is allotted their examination and upon how much about oneself one is prepared to question.
This said, however, I think it nonetheless feasible to sketch certain possibilities. If we doubt, as I have just suggested we do, the
presence of motivation, we may prefer to call these possibilities
"fields" of motivation, areas from which apparent motivations are likely to be constructed.
At least two of the principal fields that may be taken to spur the male practitioner of feminist criticism would seem to be more or less obvious and to have been well recognized. We might call these varieties of social and of critical activism - of concern, that is, on the one hand for the health and balance of society (whether, in this instance, motivated by what Ruthven calls a "passion for oppositional discourse", 3 or by the need to expiate a felt complicity with an oppressive hegemony), and on the other for the health and balance of literary criticism itself. 4 It appears, however, that these areas of motivation have been given their attention at the expense of a third which may in the long run be found to eclipse, if not actually underlie them.
If, at one end of the scale of what we might, for the moment, call feminist discussion, there are what some see as the vast opposing camps of the feminine and the masculine, at the other there is the relationship between one male and one female, however many times, for each of them, the partner may change. No one, I think, will be surprised at the suggestion that there is trouble in this relationship, though one problem particularly pertinent to this discussion has not, to my knowledge, been very much spoken of.
As the movement of the woman in this relationship has been increasingly toward the reconstruction, discovery, or articulation of an hitherto suppressed or inhibited identity - a recovery, if you like, of occupied territory, - so the concomitant movement of the male of a couple who would seek to maintain their relationship is very likely to have been through more and more advanced stages of disintegration of identity, as he discovers more and more subtle and unsuspected manifestations of his complicity in the patriarchal suppression of the feminine. The shock to his psyche - the damage to his identity - of such discovery and the subsequent excisions is analogous to the shock to the body of one who undergoes a series of operations and chemical treatments for the removal of a deep-rooted and malignant cancer.
This male experience may not as yet be very widespread, it is true, but it must certainly increase as the arguments of feminism gain currency, and it would be as naive to suggest that it does not already exist as it would be to suggest that it is the male status quo.
It is by this stage but mouthing a truism to say that if, in the face of a patriarchal hegemony, women have suffered extreme repression, men, too, in adopting, or being conditioned to adopt, the postures of oppressors, have suffered a self-alienation that is in some measure complementary, if historically a good deal less evident and less pain- ful. For the male who has suffered the kind of dissolution of identity that I have described, retreat into the illusory stronghold of patriarchal assumptions is improbable, if not entirely impossible. The male, this is in part to say, can only project into the unknown of himself, whether or not this is done on the assumption that this is the feminine. Whether gender difference be essential or culturally determined, he can not be female, and any claims he makes toward feminism - any arguments he offers to or for it - must be constructed fundamentally upon hearsay, upon experience that he can only imagine or have vicar- iously or by analogy. He may, of course, explore feminist criticism for the many strategies it has to offer him for the recognition of and projection into the unknown of himself, but he can ultimately be only an ally, a co-traveller: he can not, I would argue, be a "feminist" in any but these senses of the word - he can not, that is, remain unaware that the bases of his feminism are all in this manner secondary - without running the risk of further fracturing, rather than recovering, his identity.
It seems very likely that, for the male practitioner of feminist criticism, this third field of motivation - the search for a new whole- ness, a new unity of being - will become more and more a focus as the first and second (the concern, on the one hand, for the health and balance of society, and on the other for the health and balance of
criticism) are seen, by demanding predominantly the employment of secondary rather than primary modes of experience, to abet the kind of disintegration I have suggested can characterize the male expe- rience in the individual modern relationship.
This is not, by any means, to suggest that there can be no male practice of feminist criticism. It is to argue that there are very likely two principal moments in that practice, if moments that are likely to be as often synchronic as they are to be sequent. In the first of these the male critic enjoins its purposes of identifying, explaining and rectifying imbalances in the received tradition, and determining the nature of, and appropriate critical strategies for, the writing of women. In the second, seeing that its new territory is in some vital sense his own also, he works through feminist criticism toward the establishment of a new identity of his own.
Lest this be taken as simply a circuitous way of saying that the male's engagement in feminist criticism and critical theory may be in the interests of recovering the feminine in himself, an engagement with the other to recover the other, I would stress, by way of conclusion, that it may instead represent an attempt to further define what in him is not the feminine, and that his movement in this shared, frontier territory might be from the "macho", through a disintegration of his encultured identity, towards the male. It is no mere accident of critical history that feminist theory has become so closely allied with psy- choanalysis and deconstruction, for male and female practitioners alike it can assume the proportion of an initiation into that same, non-negotiable bedrock of the self into which they too might eventu- ally usher us, and which the society at large is not yet equipped to offer. It would seem, in other words, that at a certain late stage of the male practice of what has hitherto been known as feminist criticism the term itself becomes outmoded, and there becomes desirable an alter- native which acknowledges the presence together, in unchartered territory, of two mutually-beneficial, if ultimately irreconcilably differ- ent parties, each of which is concerned to retrieve a lost self, and to understand and articulate the process of its recovery.
University of Western Australia
This is not to denigrate the attempt: the essentialistic claim that feminist criticism can only be the province of women entails, surely, its converse - that men have things to tell men about their discoveries, and have ways of telling them, that women may not have.
The term, perhaps, will be seen as ironic, and to impute to the male a gynecide. It is my argument that neither crime nor victim can be so readily defined.
Notes:
Elaine Marks and Isabelie de Courtivron, eds, New French Feminisms (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1980), p. 137n.
"Male Critics and Feminist Criticism", Essays in Criticism, Vol XXXIII, No.4 (October 1983), p. 265 .
ibid
It being eminently plausible, I think, to suggest that all human life is in a sense a process of reading, these concerns - for the health of society and for the health of literary criticism - need not be taken as readily separable or mutually exclusive.
Edward Mycue
THE I?ALKLANDS EXPEDITION
I speak of triumph and rout of new statesmen the new Canutes the latest issue all the jolly tars old England the good frigate this splendid venture the prime loveless minister the last blond course of betrayal the bloody epidemic this Falklands expedition I speak of triumph and rout of new statesmen the new Canutes the latest issue all the jolly tars old England the good frigate this splendid venture the prime loveless minister the last blond course of betrayal the bloody epidemic this Falkiands.
