Writing in shady places

[aliaspseudonym]

 
I did a presentation in Women's Lit class recently on creativity, talking mostly about Cixous's idea of ecriture feminine, or female writing.  My argument was that ecriture feminine is a manifestation of what I called yin, or shaded, or have-not writing.  Yin for the part of the taijitu that represents it, shaded as a translation of the idea of yin and have-not as what is in my opinion the essential part of the idea of yin.  There are some quirks in the idea -- many of the traits we associate with yin (passivity, for example) are rare in shaded writing, but I would argue that the only truely essential trait of yin is scarcity as opposed to yang abundance.  Other than that, shade tends to take on whatever traits are devalued by the light, either of its own volition or by imposition.

In writing, light refers both strength and richness of literary tradition and opportunity to write and have that writing read.  Lighted traditions are rich and complex with strong intertexual links; creating a new text in a lighted tradition means building a new level on a large, well-established body of works.  The problem with lighted traditions is that each work is seen in the light of every other work, and is compared to them.  Pressure to write like Homer or Milton grows, and the more intense the light, the more washed-out and uniform new texts become.  Eventually everything becomes either too complex and obscure to understand or too timid and derivative to possess meaning.

Creative writers, and artists in general, are poor conformists.  As lighted traditions grow overly complex and esoteric, new ideas tend to spring up in direct opposition to them, forming shaded traditions that usually set themselves up directly opposed to the ruling lighted tradition.  These shaded writers challenge and subvert the lighted assumptions and bright to the fore values that the light ignores or devalues.  For example, Romanticism challenged victorian neo-classicism by mixing genres, focusing on the self in nature and refusing to simply emulate the great writers of the past.  As individual shaded writers begin to form a tradition, their works begin to inform one another and the whole literary movement moves in the lighted direction.  Eventually the tradition will become too strongly lighted and will need to have its own assumptions challenged once again by newer, fresher ideas, completing the natural cycle.

This is how it works under ideal conditions, of course.  The dominant literature of the most privileged classes has indeed followed this sort of wave pattern.  When we talk about female writing, though, we are talking about a group that has been thrust deep into the shade for pretty much all of time.  The resulting shade is so strong that the writers that do emerge are too far and few between to establish a strong, lighted tradition, so women's writing remains dark.  This has been changing, recently, in some contexts, but the more elitist circles (particularly those concerned with 'serious writing' and the canon) are still strongly male-dominated.  Women's writing is breaking in, but women writers in this context have to deal with a literary canon that is horribly scewed in its portrayal of their gender  (representing them almost exclusively in broad, generalized strokes as active monsters or passive angels.)

That said, similar rules of shaded writing apply to all oppressed or silenced groups.  Racial minorities, third world countries, queer groups, disabled people, etc.  In all cases the shaded writing with varying success to subvert and overcome the lighted writing it opposes.

Comments

[aliaspseudonym]

what the dominant literary tradition actually is depends a bit on which shaded group you're looking at. from the feminist point of view it's the entire male-dominated canon and from the colonized point of view it's pretty much all of white culture, but if you look at an individual shaded tradition like Romanticism, the lighted side for it was neo-classicism and by extension the greek poets that movement idolized. but yeah, for the most part by that phrase i simply mean the accepted canon of 'literary' works.

and in a lot of cases a shaded or lighted identity depends more on the identity of the work, rather than the author. oppressed groups tend to produce shaded writing because the difficulties they have getting work published (and often with life in general) push them to be suspicious or even hostile to literary 'authority', but individuals from those groups are quite capable of lighted writing of a sort as well. shaded writing is defined by it's innovation, straightforwardness, subversive qualities and emphasis of normally devalued values, as opposed to lighted writing's complex intertexual links that build up and add to the existing framework of traditional ideas.

Of course, this being the taijitu, there's a spot of yang in the yin and a spot of yin in the yang. as we approach purely shaded writing, the difficulty of creating and distributing works approaches impossiblity, and as we approach purely lighted writing the level of derivation and complexity threatens to make texts both meaningless and utterly incomprehensible. pure writing on either side is basically unheard of, though, because all writers have something in them that pushes them to innovate and think differently at least a little bit, and all cultures have _some_ traditional stories and ideas and idioms for the writer to draw on.

finally, note that lighted/shaded binaries are all contextual and it's quite possible for a movement to be lighted in one context and shaded in another (as a rock on the lighted side of the mountain has its own lighted and shaded side.) so 'lighted' and 'shaded' are more useful ways of thinking about how texts relate to one another rather than absolute qualities of the texts themselves. in that sense, in some contexts lighted/shaded quality might be dependent on the author's identity, for example in cultural settings where women are not supposed to be able to write, all works which are identifiably by a woman are subversive to cultural norms simply by existing.

[italiceyeball]

"note that lighted/shaded binaries are all contextual and it's quite possible for a movement to be lighted in one context and shaded in another (as a rock on the lighted side of the mountain has its own lighted and shaded side.) so 'lighted' and 'shaded' are more useful ways of thinking about how texts relate to one another rather than absolute qualities of the texts themselves."

Yes, thank you, I was thinking about this as I fell asleep last night.

It seems that as long as we use a qualifier that the writing is shaded in some way. As long as women's writing is women's writing instead of simply writing. Black writers, latino writers, venusian writers and so on. The same thing happens with genre: An acquaintance sometimes mentions how he does not read science fiction or fantasy, regardless of recommendation or quality of writing. It's not simply a book, it's a scifi book, or a mystery novel, or a western.

I'm curious where you would place something like Finnegan's Wake...