Better Not Read?

Better Red, the Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Seuer by Constance Coiner (Oxford U Pr. 1995), this book promises much and delivers little, which is why it is such a disappointment. Better Red should be a good book. I’ve been waiting for a book that places Le Sueur in the context of her times, our times, the whole twentieth century, especially detailing her relationship with the Communist Party. The book appears radical but does nothing but restrain, confine, and, ultimately, paralyze the left into inaction by fragmenting our concerns, keeping us isolated into a debilitating sense of “the personal is political.” Coiner seems more interested in using Le Sueur to promote her own ideology than in helping us (and I say “us” deliberately, not that anonymous thing “the reader”) understand how a radical woman writer could survive then and keep writing now.

Writers reveal themselves; it’s not possible not to. Look to this writer’s own words; they are the net she catches herself in. Coiner says, “...in the context of this study ‘resistance’ means writing that opposes not only the dominant culture but also at times restrictive elements within a leftist subculture” (6). Rather than praise Coiner for at least writing about these women writers, we need resist her on her own terms, especially that opposition to the leftist subculture that is her book, for hers is a leftist subculture that is anything but liberating.

Coiner lays out the terms of her stance toward Le Sueur in order to make a case against her. She states that her own work is dialogical and an example of enlightened feminism: “Moreover, I reject any categorical opposition between male domination and female virtue,...” (7). She uses these positions to accuse Le Sueur of several ideological sins: monological writing (making of the reader a passive recipient), separatism, and dualistic thinking about gender. Le Sueur, according to Coiner, suffers from a “fundamental problem.” Oh, my. This is the big Critic speaking! She pulls in help from her “sisters” to make the case:

Mary Jacobus and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in their work on other women writers, help illuminate this fundamental problem in Le Sueur. [Note, the problem is not even in her work, or in some of it, it’s in her. It makes me shudder to think how this party chair woman would apply the censor’s scissors.] As Jacobus argues, women writers, “at once within this culture and outside it,” must simultaneously challenge cultural terms and work within them.”

Well. If this working “simultaneously” doesn’t describe Meridel’s whole career, what does? Coiner seems oblivious to the most elemental quality of all writing: it is always distant, removed, isolated, because writing is a private act of individual writers. Le Sueur’s frustration about the “fetish” of being outside the culture of the workers, the exploited, women, farmers, Native Americans, is a call to look to where the kind of ignorance about writing that Coiner illustrates will lead us. As Meridel says (and William Carlos Williams had the same sense of this, his Spring and All being his response), Eliot’s “The Wasteland” leads to the Bomb. And it does. Unless we continually remind ourselves of the dangers of  that detachment, the illusion of objectivity, the seduction of institutional power, the “Olympian” superiority that comes from the conquest of literacy over oral cultures (including our own orality every time we sit down to write). Otherwise, the pessimism, the fear that drove Eliot to seek refuge in the monarchy, Anglican Church authority, the fascist mind in other words, all of this will subvert the communal impulse that is always latent in oral discourse, oral culture. And this communal impulse is at the heart of Le Sueur’s work.

Coiner accuses Meridel of monological writing when this is exactly what she herself does. Against Le Sueur and Tillie Olsen, Coiner uses the authority of all those “sisters” of hers; she uses the authority of her own scholarship (all those works cited!); she uses the authority of Oxford University Press; she uses the whole apparatus, all the objective, reasoned discourse to beat these two creative women down. And the irony, of course, is that these two are the kind of writers Coiner fears most while seeming to praise them because they do exactly what she refuses to do. They have engaged themselves throughout their entire lives in active struggle as writers to not dominate the reader, not to speak in only one voice, not to claim institutional power as their own. When Coiner accuses Le Sueur, she is blind to the fact that this is exactly the criticism that she should be leveling at her own writing: “Although the ‘message’ in these polemical pieces is culturally and politically oppositional, the rhetorical model is that of the dominant culture” (14). What could be more a model of dominant culture than her own book?

Coiner wants to be on the side of the angels, but her whole book is pretext for applying swift justice with the devil’s police club. She seems not to understand the first thing about power. Her book in indistinguishable from any other academic criticism. Her language is absolutist, monological, unvarying in it scolding tone, and unrelenting in its own sense of its own authority. She has learned nothing herself from Bahktin, only learned enough to criticize others by using the authorities for the past twenty or so years in fashion on the Left: Bahktin, Kristeva, Gramsci. Most of all, however, Coiner has accepted the dominant culture’s function of literary criticism: to isolate, alienate, enfeeble, paralyze. She states in her introduction that her work on this book has changed her, but only a little.

Many in the women’s movement have made archetypes of Le Sueur and Olsen, who have become emblematic figures as much as historical ones, and yet I have more patience now than I did at the beginning of this project with interviews that tend to be honorific rather than penetrating. (13)

God, would Meridel have had something powerful to say about Coiner’s choice of words! Penetrating indeed. Criticism is not penetrating. It is an act of love. Or it is just some power trip. This book was written as if there Coiner had learned not a little but nothing at all from Le Sueur’s writing or the writing about her writing. She, however, had a model to learn from: Neala Schleuning’s America: Song We Sang Without Knowing. Neala made herself vulnerable in the act of her criticism much the way Le Suer made herself vulnerable in the act of her writing, teaching us that all genuine writing involves such a risk. Schleuning altered the form of her book as the materials presented themselves to her; much like Thoreau’s stance toward reality, she refused not to “face” the facts of Le Sueur’s work and her own pull towards it. As she recounts early in her book: “I decided to take up her challenge: to try to write with heat and passion, to try to be with her, to understand her life as it unfolded” (3). One thing she certainly did not do: she did not PENETRATE!

Coiner reveals herself most when she criticizes Le Sueur in relation to Rebecca Harding Davis’ short story “Life in the Iron Mills.”Coiner’s basic criticism is that Davis and Le Sueur are afraid to deal with their real issues so they concern themselves with the working class instead. Here is Coiner’s critique of one of the most abused nineteenth century writers:

Davis’s sympathy for the mill workers depicted in her novel (sic) was the result of her own circumscribed life as a woman, albeit of the middle class. Davis used the working class safely to protest her own oppression, partly displacing a latent feminist voice. (139)

There was nothing at all safe about Davis’ writing about the working class. Her story is almost the only American fiction written about the working class until the 1930s, over fifty years later. Davis was forced to change the title of her story from “The Korl Woman.” This is a genuine displacement, made by male editors, and it switches the emphasis from women (Davis herself, Deborah, the real woman of the Korl, the discarded refuse of the steel making process) to men, the male artist (Olympian in his choice to kill himself, especially now that the focus is on him instead of Deborah) whose life is ruined by mill life. I’m sure the male editor and the male promoters of the male artists had no problem identifying with this fellow artiste. The switch in focus distorted the class focus of the story, but Coiner distorts it even more so by blaming the writer. How many times must the victim be blamed before this pervasive tendency be exposed for what it is? Also, note the putdown, “albeit of the middle class”! Albeit nothing. What is Coiner but middle class? On these terms, what else is the book she is writing but a displacement? Anyone can play such a game. Here she is on Le Sueur:

Le Sueur, like Davis, has not fully confronted the cruelty of her own life. Adopting the personae and subject matter of the working class (and Native Americans, in the case of Rites of Ancient Ripening) to an extent relieved Le Sueur of that burden—at some cost, perhaps, to her readers. (139)

What a crock. Coiner commits the very sin she criticizes Le Sueur for the most, reductionism. For Coiner, all writing but the personal is displacement (excepting her own writing). Coiner would have no one but working class people write of and for the working class. But Coiner is not of the working class. Or if she was born into it, she is now out of it. Can she still write of it? Of course. Workers don’t write. They work. Anyone who has worked enough to know what it means to be exploited knows that you haven’t the energy to write, which is the very tragedy recorded so eloquently by women writers, writers raised in poverty, workers who gain some temporary respite from the kind of spirit killing work the “working class” designation refers to.

Writers write from privilege. And we struggle for the rights of all oppressed to ensure that privilege for all. Insisting that concerns for anything outside of the writer’s own personal, daily life is “displacement” is the surest way to ensure the victory of reactionaries of every stripe, and worse, to ensure the reactionary spirit within one’s own self. What more do these little fascist minds want of us, the Doles, Gingriches, Clintons, but to keep us not concerned about Guatemala, El Salvador, the CIA overthrow of Allende, the workers’ strikes of 1877, the women mill workers in Maine?