Where there's smoke there's fire, conventional wisdom tells me. At first I drafted a rampage about the fact that many other things release smoke and recommended changing the idiom to: Where there's smoke there's combustion. (I even looked up the relationship between the two, discovering that smoke is just a change in state that is a by-product of a chemical reaction. Huh. That's why I am not a scientist.)
Then I realised a logical error of deduction: Just because smoke is a necessary condition of fire doesn't mean fire is a necessary condition of smoke. Which, on second thought means the idiom still doesn't make sense, since you aren't guaranteed to find a fire if you see smoke - you could come upon a heap of smouldering phosphorous, for example.
If you are already bored, I apologise. But you know how I like to the circle the point, in the hopes of catching it (and you) unawares. Consider this added value: a science, philosophy and English lesson, for the price of wading through two paragraphs of in search of a point.
On to my heap of phosphorous: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath are two of my favourite authors - and have been since I was in high school. Through their writing, I saw women who felt as I feel. Women who wrote in the 20s and 60s, when society was still (arguably) unaccepting of a woman's voice. I saw strong women, with force of wills, who dared.
I think I also saw a promise, that I could be a writer, even before I knew I could. (In my experience, being a writer is not a choice. It is a physical sense, an innate means of experiencing the world. But that doesn't mean using the sense doesn't take courage. Try it, just once, and I dare you not to tear up or delete the first draft in frustration.)
The Waves by Ms Woolf is my favourite of her novels, and one of my favourite novels of all. A group of college friends congregate at the funeral of one of their party. They haven't seen each other since college, about five years prior if I remember correctly. Buried hurts and loves surface, buried identities too. As if merely being together has the power to swallow time. Regression. Suspense. Suspicion. Ruined love. Alliance. Written as stream of consciousness.
Don't be put off by the opaque ramblings of James Joyce! Or by the echoes of navel-gazing, Woolf-inspired movies.
The Modernists gravitated to stream of consciousness - artists, writers, even psychologists. Few did it well; most attempts read like the experiments they were (a la Joyce). Ms Woolf actually uses punctuation and paragraphs; she restrains her liberties to the character voices. Her novels have a languid sensitivity that her non-fiction does not; they do not have the buried rage of Joyce's - although both carve out the inner landscapes of their characters with fine chisels.
This is not a plot-driven novel. There are no meet-cutes, murders or betrayals, except in the past tense, and definitely no car chases or explosions. It feels like The Secret History, except that here the dead guy is already dead. All of these reasons are why I would give body parts to have written The Waves.
This post's smouldering phosphorous is made of the associations of reading Ms Woolf and/or Plath. Of worshipping them. Both authors have become symbols (with or against their wills?), of feminism and liberalism. What does that say of me? Not of me as I am but of me as you see me. I am a feminist and a liberal (give me a chance!), but I hate those words. They make me cringe as much as you.
I believe that I have the right to navigate my own path. I also believe that chauvinism is institutionalised (I have evidence, my favourite of which is the exclamation that I am 'a smart cookie'). I believe that humanity is as good as it is bad, that people just want love and respect (again, I have evidence). I don't kill anything, even insects, because who am I to take life?
Mss Woolf and Plath are the smoke rising from this heap.
That irks me - that beliefs should be reduced to superficial revolts like bra-burning and chaining bunny-huggers to trees, diminishing their power. That I should be reduced by this association and so disregarded. Granted, we need to make snap judgements all the time because the world is flinging stimuli at us and we don't have enough hands to catch them.
Yet, we are prepared to take the time to read a novel like The Waves and understand the characters - even empathise with them. We are ready to open their boxes but I must huddle in the one I have been forced into. Not a chance. Instead, I rant and rave, because if you cannot walk in line, you must heckle from the sidelines.
No comments:
Post a Comment