Silence, Style and Self

Silence, Style, Self

Notes for the session "Interpretation and Discourse" of the CLAGS conference at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center,CUNY April 29 -30, 1988 Transforming the Categories: Lesbian and Gay Studies Tucker Pamella Farley Language reveals and conceals simultaneously; what can be revealed? --and how? --to whom? --and under what conditions? Early lesbian literature allows us to look (in English) at a process of voices emerging from silence and erasure, coding and doubleness, to scholarship and song. This move contributed to and was made increasingly possible by social activities that made the space into which these writers must speak a little safer --what the listening/reading space looks like has a lot to do with what the speaking/writing space looks like; the clarity of style and the possibility of speaking --and surviving in your world --were closely coupled interactions. The less safe, to the writer, the more silence, coding, and layering went into the text (an effect we call style). And readers participate, from their various discourses, in determining meaning, by their various interpretations. Meaning no longer lives simply in the text. Readings, like writings, have been forced into silence or obscurity, erasure or codes. In looking at concealing, then, what can be revealed? A 19th century poet whom we have heard was slightly mad teaches us to look beneath silence. Emily Dickinson left her poems tied up in her drawer. When I was able to read them in less edited and changed form, and read the remains of her journals and letters which had been mutilated by well-wishers after her death, I could understand why the passionate addresses to Sue Gilbert might not have survived a more public exposure. As a wasp I am powerfully aware of the constraints concerning what "is" and "is not" said. Even the unpublished poems were circumscribed. Longing, passion and rejection are explored as her "calvaries of love." Critics happily discuss "the imagery of circumference" (like a thing, outside a world of concern), and interpret the metaphor of calvary as a sure sign she was secretly in love with a minister whom she had barely ever met). The heterosexual plot narrates the biographical and critical text, like all texts. "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant," she wrote. But if even Sue Gilbert couldn't sustain the romantic attachment between the two women, what could Emily Dickinson do? Plead her case in public against her own brother? Another kind of silencing can be read in the studies of missionaries and traders and doctors who made up their own representations of what they saw. Imagine what might have been the story had the native American women, the passing women, the medical students, studied by alienists and neurologists and pathologists, been able to tell their stories in their own words. This was a pervasive kind of silence, even erasure. Dr. J.