The Perfect Text: Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl

 [notes for a talk delivered at Morehead State University]

 

The Pattern

 

The pattern that connects.  Why do schools teach almost nothing of the pattern which connects?  Is it that teachers know that they carry the kiss of death which will turn to tastelessness whatever they touch and therefore they are wisely unwilling to touch or teach anything of real-life importance?  Or is it that they carry the kiss of death because they dare not teach anything of real-life importance?

—Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature

 

Meridel Le Sueur’s novel The Girl is, curiously, both a traditional and a uniquely post-modern novel that challenges the canon of the (male) modern novel characterized by the obsessively introspective narrator and characters isolated from each other and alienated from society; in short, The Girl represents a challenge to the literature of defeatism, pessimism, and anti-heroics.  It is also a novel that challenges teachers to discover and reveal “the pattern that connects” the students’ lives and their own lives to issues that Bateson cites as being of “real-life importance.” It is a novel that makes connections not only to social issues experienced by the characters and ourselves but makes these connections through the formal patterns of the novel itself.

This novel mirrors what we attempt to teach in our writing and literature classes: the structural integrity of purposeful prose and the craft of organizing each and every part of the text, something which I am going to call aesthetics, using Bateson’s definition: “By aesthetics, I mean responsive to the pattern which connects.” This novel is traditional in most of its formal structures, allowing us to re-enforce in our teaching the form of the essay, a prime component of composition studies, yet it is radical in the details of how the formal organizational structures develop, especially the use of voice as the key determinant of how narration is represented in writing.

And it is this radical aspect of The Girl which provides the opportunity to expand the nature of composition studies into the “living voice” of students’ lives.  Because the novel is essentially oral, it develops the anticipatory reader, which is another way of saying that the novel involves the reader in the creation of the text, an activity that is at once a formal requirement of engaged reading and can be a political praxis.

One significant example of how the novel involves the reader is that the evolving and involving pattern of narration embraces the reader as co-creator, forcing the reader to speak the text rather than read silently.  This is a formal achievement as well as an act of moving the pattern out of textual and into political reality.

 

The Human Universe

But I have my kin, if for no other reason than

 (as he said, next of kin) I commit myself, and,

given my freedom, I’d be a cad

if I didn’t.  Which is most true.

...if I have any taste

if is only because I have interested myself

in what was slain in the sun

 

—Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers”

 

Through the figure of Charles Olson I concentrate on the movement of modern poetry away from the sight-dominated imagism of Olson’s mentor Ezra Pound, and opposed to the reactionary poetics of L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E, and toward a poetics of the voice, with the emphasis on breath giving rise to a poetry situated, essentially, in a human universe (the title of Olson’s collected essays).  The importance of breath that Olson saw as key to a poetry that matters (is materially based) is what moves The Girl so forcefully into the students’ lives, what makes The Girl very much a “projective” novel.

For the poet it is the animating power of the voice that characterizes poetry alive to what is essentially human:

 

Because breath allows all the speech-force of language back in (speech is the “solid” of  verse, is the secret of a poem’s energy), because, now, a poem has, by speech, solidity,....

— “Projective Verse” The Human Universe

 

 

Curiously, reliance on that most fragile, effervescent activity, the breath that speaks the word, makes for that material the solidity of which makes the material “matter.”

It is through this materialism of the production of the living voice that The Girl finds a theoretical base in the pedagogy of Paule Freire and the theology of liberation exemplified best by Gustav Gutierrez. As interesting and important as the connections are between the novel and the theories of liberation, the only reasons there are such a connection is that The Girl validates the students’ experience in a way similar to how Freire’s literacy teachings and Gutierrez’s theology arise from the experience of the poor of South America.

The Girl, because it is based on the people’s real-life experience, poor people, women, who suffered through the Great Depression, introduces into our literature a radical departure in narrative structure through the means of a collective author (or as close to one as may be possible) with a necessary emphasis on the living voice of the people.  I use the term “living voice” with some purpose and with reservation, knowing that the voice can be coercive [voice, voc, dictum], that the word “dictator” comes from the Latin dictatum: rule, precept.

The spoken word can be coercive and oppressive when it denies active interchange, dialogue.  And dialogue is a more accurate way to think of “living voice” for the type of mutual respect implied in true dialogue points toward the author’s description of how (and why) she came to write the novel: by listening to the stories told her by women with whom she shared the communal experience of economic hardship and coercion by state power.

I appropriate the term “living voice” from a philosopher and teacher Le Sueur seems to have the most in common with: N.F.S. Grundtvig, the founder of the Swedish folkschool.  Grundtvig, who influenced John Dewey and all other developers of progressive pedagogies of adult education, evolved a philosophy of education and a revitalized Christian theology by infusing qualities of voice (orality) into the fossilized, codified principles of privilege and exclusion and of the prohibitive written rules of past social structures no longer relevant to a society in continual process.  It is the living voice of the people that Le Sueur incorporates as integral to the novel, and from that living voice follows not only the details of Le Sueur’s philosophy of composition but the philosophies of any liberating pedagogy not tied with prescribed and predetermined ideologies derived in advance of people’s lived experience.

It shouldn’t surprise us that Grundtvig influenced the author of the following statement, Miles Horton, the founder of the famed, and infamous, Highlander School:

That was probably the biggest discovery I ever made.  You don’t have to know the answers.  You raise the questions, sharpen the questions, get people to discussing them.  And we found that in that group of mountain people a lot of the answers were available if they pooled their knowledge.

—Aimee Horton, The Highlander Folk School

Le Sueur infuses her novel with the same kind of communal knowledge with a narrator who is essentially a group rather than an individual; it is the women’s voices woven into one story rather than one woman making up a story about other women.  One of the most enduring images from Le Sueur’s talks and writings is her recalling to our attention the death of Albert Parsons, one of the four labor leaders hung for his role in the protests for the eight hour work day, framed by the Chicago police in what has come to be known as the Haymarket Affair.  As he stepped off the gallows he yelled: “Let the voice of the people be heard!”

Though as teachers who encourage students’ own voice, we don’t step out into death, in spite of the fact that we take some risks when we allow students to express what they know rather than what we prescribe for them, Parson’s cry should be our own.  And Le Sueur’s The Girl is the best novel I know of that incorporates the people’s voice into the narrative not as a nod toward “relevance” and not as another theme for the characters and the readers to relate to, something outside of their own “living voice,” but as integral to the writing and the reading, a formal requirement of the novel itself that integrates the act of reading with the acts of our lives.

 

HERoics

 

In the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” the hero kills the sacred bull of heaven, Inanna’s bull.  The bull symbolized earth’s fertility, the moon, so many things... the horns surmounting the breasts on the walls of Catal Huyuk, the crescent horn in the uplifted hand of the Venus of Laussel.  What does Gilgamesh do with the horns of the sacred bull of  heaven?  He hangs them up in his room, like a hunting trophy, a decoration for his male clubhouse.  In this act, “the old conservative religion of the women is being mocked in a celebration of male ambition.” The Gilgamesh Epic dates from 1600 to 2000 B.  C. [William Irwin] Thompson calls this four-thousand-year-old story “the very foundation of Western literature, for what we are witnessing here is to set the pattern for all Hebrew and Greek literature to come.”

This new individuating, mocking, arrogantly alienated ego of Gilgamesh, established in defiance of the Old Religion of the Goddess and the earth, becomes in Western religious and secular history the ego of man.  “Mocker of the past, builder of tomorrow,” etc.

—Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother

There have been many female heroes in our literature; too often they are women who are essentially male in their outlook (or rather their in-looking), little different form the long procession of male heroes they are modeled on.  But the unnamed hero of The Girl is unique in that she is a communal hero, a hero whose intellectual and emotional growth is dependent upon what she learns from other women, a hero who resists the isolation and the “inward turn of narrative” that so characterizes the modern hero turned anti-hero.  Just as the narrative voice is not easily separated from the objective descriptions or the voices of the other characters, the self that is developed by the hero is not easily separated from those of the other women.

The Girl portrays a feminism profoundly different from a self-absorbed issue-oriented feminism because it is based on a solidarity always aware of the class warfare perpetrated by state power and equally aware of the history of state power as patriarchy. There is no one ideology motivating the here’s actions or reactions.  The hero is distinguished from the other characters (notably the politically naive Clara and the politically sophisticated Amelia) by her reliance on the constant realization that she is a continual searcher, searching for knowledge from experience rather than from any theory about experience.

 

ABORTION

 

She [Marian, Meridel’s mother] spoke for the freedom of women over their own bodies and the right not to have children they cannot feed.  The penalty [in 1916] for giving any information on abortion or contraception was ninety-nine years in prison.  She was tried in Kansas City, Missouri, for giving birth-control information to a woman with fourteen children.  The woman refused to identify Marian and was given three years in prison.  She left her fourteen children under Marian’s care.

—Meridel Le Sueur, Crusaders, The Radical Legacy of Marian and Arthur Le Sueur

 

One unique and important aspect of The Girl is that it treats abortion as a real human issue.  Abortion is treated as real because it is a theme developing conflict and resolution with its political, economic, personal, and inter-personal dynamics intact.  Abortion is developed as a real issue by showing its internal contradictions and how this inherent conflict is used by individuals and state functionaries to coerce and control others.

The narrator of The Girl is initially coerced by her boy friend and convinced by the other women she works with to have an abortion.  The proprietor of the bar she works in has had thirteen abortions because her husband didn’t want children.  The meets with the woman who will provide the abortion, but she decides instead to keep the child.  This defiance of her boy friend is supported by all of her women friends, and the resulting birth is the event that not only unites the women in their own solidarity but signals the optimistic future that will arise out of the collapse of the economics of individual gain and greed.  The birth of the new girl makes family out of all of the women.

The issue of “family values” is shown to be a disguised fascism calling for the restriction of the woman’s life choices by making reproduction an extension of state power (how, for instance, abortion is treated by the Republican Party with its platform position calling for a constitutional ban on abortion).  Abortion is developed in the context of a polarity with the issue of sterilization (45% of Puerto Rican women of child bearing age are sterilized), showing Family Planning when used as an adjunct to state power as class warfare, another form of fascism, meaning expression of power whereby decisions are made for people rather than by them.

 

The Story about the Story

 

I wanted to write stories that could be read aloud, that people would laugh together over until they cried, embraced each  other, slap each other on the back, lean forward looking to see if you got it all to the last drop, to explain, help you, as if the words were little lights striking, illuminating abysses of racial and national separation.

—Meridel Le Sueur, “Shalom Aleichem Belongs to the People.” Jewish Life

 

Finally, there is the story, how it is told and by whom.  There is the story about the story. Not analysis, not evisceration and dissection, but a look so as to learn, a look at narrative structure and gender  a loving look at the line and the circle of the story.  Meridel wrote against the limits of writing, its essential linearity.  She wanted the dead letters to be delivered, to be alive, and the delivery was through the voice.  She tried to deliver speech out of the printed word, arising out of print and staying always alive as only the printed word can, if given the infusion of the voice.  It’s a circular process, as dialogue always is,  a true give and take and give again.  Words spill out onto the page in lines, but the voice has not line.  Even a command, as close to a line as the voice can make, has its echo.

 

Women can really express this because they’re on the round, not on the linear.  Getting into the global world means there’s no longer the linear world—no time, no progress.  You can only progress along a straight line.  Our ecological problems are a result of being on a straight line.  We imagine we’ll never return, because a straight lien doesn’t return....I call this the feminine consciousness.  The world has gotten into trouble because of the “male” philosophy.  By that I don’t mean just men, but men do represent it.  The female, the mothering element of the earth—men have got to become mothers and nourishers instead of exploiters and seizers.

—Meridel Le Sueur (quoted in Schleuning, 147)

 

 

The Girl is a woman’s story told by women in women’s voices.  And the result is not a traditional story, a plot (to get the reader).

Stylistically, The Girl is unique and powerful.  The story is not so much a “plot” as it is a pattern of change and interaction through which the young girl moves, and by which she is changed and formed.

—Neala Schleuning, America : Song we sang without knowing, The life and Ideas of Meridel Le Sueur.

The pattern is held in place by the voice of the narrator seeking response in the reader, eliminating the separation of her out spoken voice from the in spoken descriptions and responses from the characters she peoples her story with.

I saw Amelia put her heavy sack on her shoulder, which seemed to slope from her carrying.  Girl, she said to me as I helped her, girl I had six children.  Yes six, and I saw in her eyes they were all gone.  I saw in her eyes as terrible suffering.  And once I saw this in mama’s eyes although she never had said a word.  Oh mama I cried, and put my arms around Amelia and she seemed very small and thin and I hate to see her go out alone in the cold night.

—The Girl

 The voice in dialogue is circular.  Writing is linear.  The Girl is a text in continual tension, opposition to the inherent limitations of writing.  Like the women who made up its story, it is a constant refusal to succumb to imposed limitations.

 

One of the most dangerous concepts that we have in modern life is what I call the linear or male view of the world.  It is aggressive, progressive.  I saw this in my childhood in the midwest...the bright and terrible activity of progress, development, making money, grabbing everything in sight.

—Meridel Le Sueur (quoted in Schleuning, 145)

 

And the linear, progressive, the male view is mirrored in the men of the story who believe in making it, alone, in succeeding, in winning.  As Butch says of it, “I’m a natural winner.  I believe in beating.” But the male view is not natural, no more than the female.

 

 

It’s  patriarchal—let’s not call it a male form—it’s authoritative.  The average story that moves to a crisis or a denouement or whatever you call it is a patriarchal movement, you’re imposing on the reader.  Murder stories or detective stories or the narration form of writing imposes on the reader a certain end.  Stockhausen, the great composer of electronic music, says al the music of the nineteenth century moved toward the king.  The structure of a symphony is a number of themes moving upward in a line toward a crisis.  I can hardly listen to some to those symphonies ending with a bang boom. We don’t need those kinds of structures.

—Meridel Le Sueur (quoted in Schleuning, 147)

 

Bang boom.  Rising action.  Suspense. Then the climax.  It’s always all about sex.  But the traditional story is a disguised sex act, a male act.  The Girl is a novel moving away from that imposed but disguised formula.  It is moving toward Le Sueur’s last works, unfinished, symphonies she called them.  A different kind of music, based not upon orgasmic violence of male linear climax but upon the circular multiple orgasms of female sexual love making.