An Encounter with Kate Zambreno
‘All my beautiful pieces I keep like in a museum, because I don’t want them ruined somehow by the stink or casualness of my body.’
As I child my library mostly consisted of mobile units across various domestic spaces; there was no public library I had access to and that included my school, so I made use of the odd stashes of books in my grandparents houses or friends of my parents. Most of these books appeared in odd combinations — fiction, propaganda materials, specialist books, books on agriculture, untranslated books in Russian or French. Books were propping up plates and cutlery in the kitchen, kept doors open in the house, sometimes had pages ripped off for the stove or fireplace. This made me feel mobile, and the illigetimate writing I was doing also felt very freeing, safe in the knowledge that few — if anyone — would uncover my scribbles.
Reading Heroines took me back to this mobile library because of its insistence on thinking about writing and illegitimacy in part, as a problem for feminism; because of its insistence to never let criticism go, to make visible the inherent politics of any writing, and to explicate the violence — physical, intellectual, emotional- of constant attempts for singularity of the self in writing, for the patriarchal nature of form, for the moralising of private and public as if these were always paradigmatic in writing.
Something my mobile libraries gave me- besides a very acute and, as I later found, incredibly freeing lack of canonicity contouring around a rigid education system — was the sense of form always being a matter of criticism; I was reading haphazardly, hungrily and without context, but my linking did not emerge through histories of form, and was not committed to a single period of time. This isn’t to say that I understood the ways in which power shapes modes of thinking, voices and forms of doing so; but my fractured knowledge gave a sense of writing as a plural space.
Zambreno’s Heroines is not a novel; it is not a piece of literary criticism or a theoretical study, or even an autobiography, except that it is all of these at once. Heroines parallels a period of Zambreno’s life following a relocation to Ohio, prompted by her husband’s recent job as a rare books librarian at a university, with a breathtaking study of the life and writing of literary modernist wives- Virginia Woolf to Zelda Fitzgerald, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes and more. A writer and occasional teacher, Zambreno speaks of the desires in and of writing, of toxicity and depression, of white privilege and isolation, but she also speaks of passion and secrecy and the power structures that mark and erase writing, the plural voice, and the idea of the self.
Heroines is shaped from a blog Zambreno kept in late 2000s with the relocation to Ohio, called Frances Farmer Is My Sister. The book is commissioned by Chris Krauss as the editor of Active Agents, Semiotext(e)’s nonfiction strand. I mention this precisely because what makes Heroines so fiery for me is the unapologetic ways in which it wraps itself around a subjective criticism that confronts the canonicity of modernism, with a formal, novelistic emphasis on the fictional in the real, and the intimacy and closeness of the memoir.
Vivienne Elliott received her first dose of bromides for hysterics when she was sixteen; Zelda Fitzgerald got chloral hydrate ovarian extracts dried thyroid gland powders and regular injections of her own blood and a serum ‘made from the blood of a mentally stable person’. There were also regular purges and wetpacks and insulin therapy for realigned behaviour and coma therapy. Virginia Woolf got veronal adalin chloral hydrate paraldehyde potassium bromide digitalis and Dr Bruno asks Zambreno if she enjoys the novels of Julian Barnes, and she says she cycles through them, like a demon woman.
I don’t know when I first realised how disciplining weaves itself into writing, or the lack of borders between composure and composition; I grew up in an education system that had an insistence on composure that itself was a kind of malaise, one so regulatory and normative that it took me a long time to see it structurally, to not read it by means of institutional necessity or historical hangup. Zambreno returns to this over and over again, to the sociabilities of Djuna Barnes’ writing and her work, to Stein and Alice Tolkias and domesticities of exclusion, to women fictionalised in the novels of great men, who were their husbands and partners. Zelda and Scott. Tom and Viv.
Zambreno does not argue; she feels and thinks in a way that is equally confrontational and caring; she reminds me that no matter how many times we unpack what has been so tightly held together by modernism — its colonial violence, its literary favouritism, its reinvention of the genius, its singularity — we still encounter its powers and echoes, its hauntings and grip on writing and form. There is hope in desire, Zambreno says; there is power on the borders between sanity and something else. To me, the most fervent echoes of this cling in and to criticism, as the space I encounter everyday, towards which I take a different position everyday, with which I distance myself from and return to.
I think of the pathologising of these women (white women, almost exclusively, as those permitted into the domestic spaces of white men, required to govern them, sustain their writing, inform their writing, be their writing) that Zambreno sketches so precisely; I keep returning to the image of Zelda burning her clothes and attempting to move- quite literally, by dancing. Writing and sociability, the fictionalisation of the real, and the paradoxical, violent refusal that so much criticism still maintains towards the self. The continued dominance of authority in authorship; the gatekeeping; the functionalisation of patriarchy to the point of legitimacy. The criminalisation of and obsession with the confessional in criticism, even after the work of Krauss or Myles or Lorde or Spivak or Bellamy.
‘Having something to say’, as Scott often said to Zelda. ‘Did she ever even have anything to say?’
I keep returning to this line towards the start of Heroines: ‘I have become used to wearing, it seems, the constant pose of the foreigner.’ Let me write that again. I have become used to wearing, it seems, the constant pose of the foreigner. This is where it all collapses for me; that dissonant space between foreignness within yourself, and foreignness applied to you — and this isn’t a question of belonging, as much as it is a question of permission and privilege and representation. Zambreno writes at the wound, except the skin and the text are one, even- or especially- when skin dictates so much about what is policed, what is silenced, and what it means to speak, or speak out as Lorde says.
The return of ‘ghosts that aren’t even our ghosts’ (I wonder, how many ghosts do I write with).’A life that is like a shadow life. A wife that is like a shadow wife’. Or, rather ‘when I don’t write I feel like I don’t deserve the day.’ What came first: the writing, or the diagnosis? I return to the physical symptoms of writing not yet written.
**Encounters is a new series by the Department of Feminist Conversations, in conversation with the work that inspires, nourishes, challenges or provokes us. We welcome contributions from interested readers: your encounter can be with a novel, a poem, a political text, a film, a song, a photograph, a cartoon, an exhibition, a performance, a game — the list goes on and on. To register your interest, please email us at: departmentfc[at]gmail[dot]com
