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`Dream(e)scapes':
a Poetic Experiment in Writing a Self
SAGE Publications, Inc.200410.1191/0967550704ab008oa
SusanneGannon
University of Western Sydney, Australia, S.Gannon@uws.edu.au
Address
for correspondence: Susanne Gannon, School of Education, University of Western
Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith South, NSW 1797, Australia; Email: S.Gannon@uws.edu.au
Feminist poststructuralist
approaches to research can authorize different ways of working with different
types of texts in search of insight into the discursive constitution of subjects,
including the (sexed) self. Such texts draw attention to their own construction
and analysis of them tends to multiply the `meanings' that might be on offer.
In this paper I perform a risky in(ter)vention into autobiographical writing
in order to trouble realist conventions of self-writing, particularly in
feminist autobiographical textual practice. An autobiographical self is constructed
and put under erasure, in the form of a poem. The data that I represent here
in poetic form were collected from recorded fragments of dreams. Privileging
dream data leads me to explore how feminist poststructural theory, informed
particularly by the work of Hélène Cixous, engages differently with psychoanalytic
and discursive approaches to writing the self and about writing itself.
INTRODUCTION
This paper engages in transgressive ways with usual approaches to auto/biographical
writing in academia. My work is underpinned by a poststructural hypervigilance
to the politics and practices of lan- guage, particularly to language that
purports to represent the self, and to the possibilities that feminist poststructuralist
theories bring to research and writing practices (e.g., Davies and Gannon,
in press; St Pierre and Pillow, 2000). This paper is intended as an oblique
and messy entry in the field on several levels. It messes with the conven-
tions of much feminist work in autobiography by turning the analy- tical I/eye
onto the production of my `own' textual self, rather than on some other woman's
autobiographical or personal narrative. It dislodges sociology as the pre-eminent
frame for understanding
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feminist
autobiography, taking up the feminist poststructuralist tex- tual practice
of Hélène Cixous as a frame that permits the compo- sition and decomposition
of a fragmented and tenuous self. Data is generated through a textual experiment,
a poem written from dreams recorded in personal journals. Thus the paper poses,
and practises, a poetic politics of resistance as — and simultaneously
against — femin- ist autobiographical research practices. The poem herein
and my analyses of it are intended as textual interventions, as `sorties:
in and out: attacks/ways out/forays' (Cixous, 1986) into the field. FEMINIST
AUTO/BIOGRAPHY Feminist theoretical and political practices have been influential
in authorizing `the self' as represented in autobiographical texts as a legitimate
subject/object of research (e.g., Miller, 1991; Smith, 1987; Stanley, 1992).
At the same time, poststructural critiques of self writing (e.g., Barthes,
1977; Bennington and Derrida, 1993; Foucault, 1997a; 1997b; 1998; Gannon,
in press) have radically destabilised autobiographical practices. Indeed,
Probyn argues that poststructur- alism's legacy is an `evacuation of any ground
upon which one could speak the self' (1993: 14). Yet, autobiographical studies,
even within feminist epistemologies, remain erratic in the extent to which
they problematize the author as a source of truth and attend to writing itself
as constitutive textual practice. The theorist who analyses auto- biography
and its (dis)contents remains more likely to fix her analyti- cal eye on another
woman's autobiography than on her own. The recent interdisciplinary anthology
Feminism and autobiography: texts, theories, methods (Cosslett et al., 2000),
for instance, provides a representative snapshot of the field. The editors
trace the (inter)disci- plinary history of feminist scholarship to the current
moment where, they suggest, most scholars agree `that textuality should be
at the heart of the study of autobiography' and, furthermore, that `the dissolution
of the distinctions between self-life-writing' should also be an objective
in feminist autobiography (Cosslett et al., 2000: 5). Poststructural theorizing
about subjectivity is foregrounded, as con- temporary feminist autobiography
is positioned as being interested in exploring shifting subjectivities and
in the intersubjective and dialogical qualities of (women's) lived experience.
The preface to the collection describes the seminar series from which the
anthology emerged as being highly personal, intersubjective and embodied — as `a prism through which I looked inside myself to see how bits of theory,
odd empirical data, ideas from differing disciplines could tell my research
story' (Humm, 2000: xv). Yet, in the anthology itself, the
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final
outcome of the workshop series, only four out of the 16 chapters foreground
aspects of the researcher/author's life and the proble- matics of writing
this self/text. Other chapters remain more interested in unpacking `autobiography'
in terms of (other) women's lives constructed in (other) autobiographical
texts. There is a lingering trace of autobiography as — more or less — authentic, realist self- narrative; albeit marked by the discontinuities and
relationality of female subjectivity that are of interest to the feminist
scholar. In this paper, in contrast, I am interested in both exploring the
textual strategies that might be taken up for writing autobiographically and
in critiquing this practice at the same time and through the same text(s).
In the aforementioned anthology, Miller (2000) rereads her(younger/other)self
situated in a particular place at a different moment in time; Scott and Scott
(2000) reread themselves as sisters in relation to their mother in order to
critique normalized discourses within the family that positioned the sisters
as other to one another; Rivera-Fuentes (2000) writes what she calls a `sym/bio/graphy'
as an intertext alongside her friend Yasna's letters about her lesbian life
history; whilst McElroy (2000) resituates herself as Welsh and academic in
the social spaces of academic conferences. In these four chapters, the authors
both catch hold of and lose themselves in their deconstructive autobiographical
texts. They take themselves up as poststructurally inflected subjects, perpetually
in process inside competing discourses around what is to be daughter, mother,
lover, friend. Their chapters emphasize subjectivity through `verbs not nouns — writing, not texts' (Cosslett et al., 2000: 7).They enact distinct and different
textual practices determined by their topics and context. They make their
language problematic through intensification, excess, multiplicity. With few
explicit references to poststructural theories or theorists, these authors
take up writing (the self/itself) as though it provides `precisely the very
possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive
thought' (Cixous, 1981: 249). In this paper, my writing also takes an `autobiographical
turn' with the intention of `not ``just doing it'' but [simultaneously] using
it as data for analysis' (Cosslett et al., 2000: 12). WRITING My strategy
in writing autobiographically has been to sidestep issues about the transparency
of language by adopting highly constructed textual genres and using these
data to generate multiple readings of `real' events within complex discursive
contexts (Gannon, 2001; 2002; 2004a; 2004b). In this paper, my risky in(ter)vention
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into
autobiographical writing aims to trouble any remnant realist conventions in
writing the self. The data are represented in poetic form and were collected
from fragments of my own dreams. I take up poetic practice in particular,
influenced by the work of Laurel Richardson (1997), to argue that poetry creates
another sort of knowledge, other sets of truths, located in multiplicity and
ambiguity, to those more singular truths created in other types of text. Dream
data disrupt assumptions about the knowable, or rational, in the recording
of the self. I take my textual and analytical practice also from the work
of French feminist poststructuralist Hélène Cixous. Specifically, in this
paper, I attend her `school of dreams'. This is the second of the stages that
Cixous outlines in Three steps on the lad- der of writing (1993): the `school
of the dead', the `school of dreams' and the `school of roots'. Altogether
they make up `a type of shama- nistic journey towards the experience of writing'
(Bray, 2004: 68), towards a Cixousian writing that might be found in `zones
in(terre)- conscious' (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 88). I mine my notebooks
for source material, looking to events and details far from the present. The
poem in this paper `Dream(e)scape', distils one thread from many dreams over
several years, the thread of husband/lover. I follow the practice of `crystallizing'
longer texts into poetic form that Richardson pioneered in her work with `Louisa
May' (1997). Phrases, words and images relating to my theme are extracted
and threaded into a new text, in the order in which they were recorded and
in the language in which they were written. In con- trast to other collective
(con)texts that I have written about (2001; 2004a; 2004b), where I have constructed
poetic and theatrical texts from collective biography workshops, the dream
poem does not have the social context for writing of those crowded spaces.
The crowds in this poem are interior, the multiple voices come from somewhere
`inside' the poet (inside her body, inside her mind), somewhere unconscious,
beyond consciousness, beyond reason. DREAMING Language such as `dreams' and
`unconscious' necessarily suggest psychoanalytic discourse. In this paper,
I trek into the valley of the unconscious and writing. In particular, interested
in taking Cixous more literally than she ever intended, I follow her into
dreamscapes. I set myself the task of shaping dreams into poetry in order
to interrogate her claim that: `Dreams teach us. They teach us how to write'
(Cixous, 1993: 79). Ultimately, Cixous suggests that dreams teach us to go
beyond the limits of our lives `towards foreign lands,
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toward
the foreigner in ourselves ... in the unconscious, that inner foreign country,
foreign home, country of lost countries' (1993: 69-70). Cixous appropriates
aspects of psychoanalytic discourse to elabor- ate her practice of écriture
féminine, writing that practises a feminine libidinal economy that is as diffuse
and polymorphous as woman's sexuality (e.g., 1981; 1986; 1991). Cixous claims
jouissance as a fea- ture of poetic writing — `total access, total participation,
total ecstasy ... extra, abundance' (Cixous and Clement, 1986: 167). Her writing
challenges `the rules of binary logic, objective meanings and the single,
self-referential reference point decreed by masculine law' (Sellers, 1996:
15). Part of her strategy is to explore what she calls the `jewellery box'
of the unconscious for `pearls ... diamonds ... signifiers that flash with
a thousand meanings' (Cixous, 1991: 46). Operating as a (t)he(o)retical outlaw,
Cixous steals `past Freud's blind spots to take up his instruments to do [her]
work' (Cixous and Clement, 1986: 166). She steals the language of psychoanalysis
and turns it to her own purposes in her theory/practice of embodied women's
writing. She takes up what in psychoanalysis is `not-the- subject' — woman (Grosz, 1990) — as her subject, and she writes woman writing.
Dreams in psychoanalysis are `composites of various unconscious memories or
wishes, usually of an oedipal or pre-oedipal kind' (Grosz, 1990: 90). They
are texts for dream work where the analyst maps the `chains of associations,
overlapping memories, linkage between elements, repetitions and nodal points'
(Grosz, 1990: 91). However, for Cixous, poetic writing is an aesthetic (and
theoretical) practice, rather than an analytical or interpretive prac- tice.
Cixous speaks in her own language of the relationship between the unconscious
and dreams in writing: At night, tongues are loosened, books open and reveal
themselves; what I can't do, my dreams do for me. For a long time I felt guilty:
for having an unconscious. I used to imagine Writing as the result of the
work of a scholar, of a master of Lights and measures. (Cixous, 1991: 45)
Dreams operate on a semiotic level where pretensions of unity or of symmetry
between signified and signifier fall away. The endless dis- placement of différance
(Derrida, 1978), of constant substitution of meanings, plays through the language
of dreams in ways that subvert the logic of the scholar of reason. Dreams
operate outside the phallogocentric economy of `lights and measures' and attending
to dreams is entry into a space that allows for écriture féminine, for
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poetic
feminine writing. Cixous links dreams and the unconscious repeatedly when
she talks of her own practice of writing: I began to write in the regions
of the unconscious. I had tremendous and clandestine relations with dreams; my dreams were so much stron- ger than I was I couldn't but obey them. But
I had a disturbing sense of imposture. I kept thinking: what I have just written
didn't come from me. I could write a thesis, but the texts I wrote were never
mine. They think it is me, but I only copy the other, it is dictated; and
I don't know who the other is. (Cixous, 1993: 102-103) Dreams give access
to the other within, the other that is not coded and bound by the apparent
unitary subjectivity of the everyday. Dreams spill out all the others of our
lives in different combinations and fragments, known and unknown, in surprise
and in shock. The body is also there in dreams, always at the centre of the
dream, and always there when we wake: running, falling, sweating, heart pumping,
or smiling at the soft touch that we still feel on our skin. THE BODY In the
dream poem in this paper, and in Cixous's enigmatic writing, the body is present
and the body is the source of writing but this writ- ing comes from another
realm of the body where the author is not in control. Strange slippages occur
and new combinations of images and thoughts emerge. These texts emerge from
zones of `in(terre)con- scious' (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 88). This
is how Cixous describes Derrida's writing, where he brings together `structures
or logics that have never before been thought' (Cixous and Calle- Gruber,
1997: 88). Dreams do this too. But Cixous characterizes her own thinking and
writing, as distinct from his, as the pursuit of the fragment, of the small
detail, the sign, the haunting. She is an `astrophysicist of miniscule stars'
(Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 89). In another reading of `in(terre)conscious',
Davies locates the site of writing as `between earth and consciousness' and
traces its practice in fiction that locates bodies in landscapes (Davies,
2000: 235). For Cixous, the zone of writing, her own `in(terre)con- scious'
is not located in the `physical' landscapes of the world (rivers, forests,
oceans, earth), but in `subconscious, interconscious ... if not buried conscious
zones' (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 115). Her role (as a writer) is at
the `scene of the body.... Not the head. The body. The entrails...the soul'
(Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 89-90). Memories are stored in flesh and writing
unfurls from the
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body.
The body is a (physical) landscape that turns the outside to the inside, and
dreams are one of the strategies the body uses to turn the inside to the outside.
Cixous writes constantly of the necessity to go deep (into the body) to encounter
the source of writing: [Writing] is deep in my body, further down, behind
thought. Thought comes in front of it and it closes like a door. That does
not mean that it does not think, but it thinks differently from our thinking
and our speech. Somewhere in the depths of my heart, which is deeper than
I think. Somewhere in my stomach, somewhere in my womb. (Cixous, 1993: 118).
What we know in the body is not retrievable in any simple or straightforward
manner. Nor is the body erasable through the abstractions of high theory.
Memories, sounds, images, smells, feel- ings, fleeting sensations and other
fragments are folded into the body, stored deep down but also on the surface,
always ready to erupt into language, always already language. Dreams erupt
from within the body, from beyond reason and consciousness, and dreaming is
another mode of thought that is taken up by the body. WRITING `DREAM(E)SCAPES'
So I turn to my dreams. I trace them through my notebooks, search- ing. My
practice has been, over the years, to write down dreams that wake me with
a shock, to `get them out' and on paper, out of `my head' so that I can go
back to sleep or start the day. So now I can look through these scribbled
traces here and there in my journals and ask: what does my body give me when
I dream? What are my `signifiers that flash with a thousand meanings' (Cixous,
1991: 46)? I find that the fragments that the body throws up that wake me
with a fright strong enough to have to write them down are fragments of banal
and ordinary events. They are people, places, moments, emo- tions that (perhaps)
I know already and that keep replaying in infinite upsetting combinations.
Nightmares of work, of relationship break- downs, bizarre versions of ordinary
events. My jewellery box is packed with paste. But I set myself the task of
writing poems from dreams, in this experiment in poetic writing. One of the
problems of catching dreams is that already, by the time you have pen in hand
and notebook open, the dream is gone and the details that remain are already
under the control of the rational mind and its desires to pin down, record,
make sense, construct some sort of narrative. Never- theless, the poem that
follows was shaped from dreams recorded on waking. It is not meant to be a
text for psychoanalysis of
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submerged,
repressed emotions or desires. I do not write poetically with hermeneutic
intent. The subject of this poem, the `I' who speaks, is continually reconstructed
and reconfigured as she slips and slides through the dream/poem. Though it
is this body that woke in panic or surprise, the poem writes from a subject
position that seems strangely disembodied in the detail that the poet/dreamer
(me) records but that is very mobile in space and time and social context.
Sticking to the rules that I set myself in this task meant that I did not
add any details to these fragments and I did not reorder them. Nor did I produce
current material. I took old texts scrawled in the dark of the night and cut,
cut, cut and what remained was this poem. It is not offered as an exemplary
poetic text but merely as one of my attempts to find `a virgin way of listening'
(to myself, to my body, to language) and to make the `always newold language
speak' (Cixous, 1994: xxi). I take up a strand of research mentioned by Cixous
and I follow it into my writing: [F]or a long time I have permitted myself
to use the writing of dreams to conduct a certain research in writing. I assume,
in saying this, that the dream does not cheat with metaphor. That is impossible
by defi- nition. (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 27) Nevertheless, working
at a text like this, shaping it into this poem, is a conscious, careful practice.
Research poets endeavour to focus and polish up some details in the text as
they discard other aspects of the text. At the same time they aim to `open'
the text so that `the questions the poem raises for readers ... reflect their
own parti- cular subtexts, not universal texts' (Richardson, 1997: 141). The
tex- tual strategies that shape a poem are not generalisable to other projects,
they vary according to each (con)text, but reflexive attention to writing
is also part of a poststructuralist research ethic. This poem takes up one
thread from the journals that I have written about elsewhere — the end
of the wedding (Gannon, 2002) — and traces that through occasional dreams
of husbands and lovers that I recorded over several years of journal writing.
The dream lover/ husband is the fragment, the haunting, that I follow through
these dreams and this poem. Dream(e)scape Inside a huge old house (a façade,
another house floats inside it), My husband, his lover, another not-me, lover,
line up against me.
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(He's
confused, he says, he loves them both) My room is blue, the walls are false; Below two children write their misdemeanours in a book. (Why won't he?) My
only escape is down the stairs into the sea; and ... I'm at a dance, an old
man is leaving, if he had a knife, he says, he'd slice off my breast as a
mark of courtesy, and ... I'm in a house with a dead man, I slit his throat
when he attacked me. I should burn the evidence But I have a pocketful of
letters and no time to read them, I'm too busy writing, and ... My husband
says he'll get someone else to fuck me, to give me a baby, then he'll be free
to leave. My husband's lover takes him shopping for watercolour yellow shoes.
I know the colour will wash out with the first rain but he won't listen and
... It's our last night, in a double bed, on a train going nowhere. They shunt
our carriage off the track, BANG,
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the
door swings open and there she is, eating cereal and smiling, and ... I'm
in a recruitment hall, looking at her photo, on the wall, long hair across
her eyes, and she's there, in front of me, sitting on a row of seats against
a wall, and I'm in front of her an ashtray in my hand, I smash it at her feet.
I run after so sorry for my temper, sorry that I'm still so upset after so
long. (She didn't know, she said, how much I cared. Nor did I) In a kitchen,
a woman washes dishes while my friend feeds her baby, she introduces us and
the woman becomes a young man, who becomes my lover, I ask him what his name
means in English Prostitute, he says, and ... I'm in a hostel in a rainforest,
preparing for my wedding but I don't want to marry him again and I have nothing
to wear, and ... I'm at the ATM and Straightaway I hit the jackpot one million
dollars, more, it just keeps coming, and ... There's someone in the house
who knocks me down and runs out, arms piled high with things and ...
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I'm
on a jetty at dawn, My husband's in a dinghy He looks good, he tells me he's
leaving her, (He's sorry, he says, and we hug each other and cry). I was pregnant
but my baby was kidnapped. My lover leaves me when my back is turned, lingers
with another woman, disappears onto a balcony, (I still love you, he says)
and ... A man sells me a lucky charm, an amulet, I buy it with my last coin
certain that my luck has turned. My lover returns with a woman, He says he's
leaving I swim outside into the backyard pool green and cool watch them throw
water over each other and laugh, I know that that they are lovers, and ...
I'm waiting for my husband on the verandah of a small hotel, The car is loaded
with all our things, I have to wait for him but I know he's forgotten, yet
Still I can't leave and ... I'm living in a shack on an island, I come from
the ferry to find dead fish strewn across my beach, I take my shovel down,
and A man stands beside me, watching, with his little dog under his arm, Pat
my dog, he says, the dog grinning its piano key teeth, or I'll split your
back open with my axe. I'm in my yard at midnight
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pruning
roses, when someone comes, Who's there? I call, Your loving husband. His face
bristles with hatred, I've come for my things, he says, with his dog beside
him, growling Are you alone? He says he's seen a lawyer and my father, But
I have my rose clippers and my own dog and my car and (even without any keys)
I start it and drive up the slope and away In Cixous's School of Dreams, there
are four lessons to learn about writing. The first is the lesson of Without
transition (Cixous, 1993: 79). We wake (still sleeping and dreaming) and we
are already, instantly, in a foreign world, and in the country of writing.
In this world, `extreme familiarity' coexists with `extreme strangeness' and
our pure foreignness is a `fantastic nationality' (1993: 80). In the dreams
that make up the poem `Dream(e)scape', real husbands and lovers (his, mine)
are transposed into unfamiliar and unpredictable places and events. As is
the way of other worlds, of dreamscapes, bor- ders are unclear and landscape
is unpredictable: houses float inside one another, solid walls are false.
Although (some) people look fam- iliar, they behave strangely: they come back
(repeatedly); they leave or threaten to leave over and over again; they slide
from one into the other (from woman to man to my lover whose name means pros-
titute, from a photo on a wall in a hall to a woman sitting on a bench in
front of me); and they appear to be where they do not belong (in a dinghy,
on a train). And strangers appear, benevolent and malevol- ent, and disappear.
The second lesson in writing is Speed (Cixous, 1993: 80). Dream time operates
at `lightening speed ... no passage, no introduction, no entrance', frontiers
are crossed `at the stroke of a signifier' (1993: 81). In the poem, time unfolds
sometimes at speed (going to bed and then BANG the train is shunted and it
is time for breakfast), though at other times the woman waits, passive and
immobilized by waiting for a man. There is no (time for) explanation or suspense
(1993: 81). The third enigmatic lesson about writing in Cixous's School of
Dreams is the Taste of the secret (1993: 82). Although we cannot know `the
main secret that life is made up of'
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or
it would no longer be a secret, Cixous suggests it is the `feeling of secret
we become acquainted with as we dream' (1993: 85). The impossible secret that
will never be known, that can never be said, yet that is so close that it
is like `a kind of heart beating' is what provokes both dreaming and writing
(1993: 85). Perhaps it is this fragile impossibility that fuels the desire
for writing, the search for the (an?) elusive secret. Dreaming provides a
`living illustration of those paradoxes, contradictions and difficulties in
our relation to the other' (1993: 85-86) that for me (and Cixous) seems to
be the greatest of all secrets. In this context, the poem is a subterranean
map of relations between the dreamer and the others in her life, fictional
and factual, over several years. The final lesson on writing in the School
of Dreams is the Pure Element of Fear, a phrase Cixous borrows from the poet
Tsvetaeva (Cixous, 1993: 88). Cixous is explicit that she is `not speaking
in Freudian terms', but rather that the unconscious, exercised in dreams,
is `the source of instincts that will be the motors of writing' (1993: 88),
including terror and joy. Such instincts are elemental, substantial: as if
they are `something chemical, something concrete that you find, fear, taste,
perceive in dreams' (1993: 90). In heading for daylight — for clarity,
purity and strength in our writing — we must traverse night, the land
of dreaming. Thus we `pass through dreams in order to perceive the supernatural
dimension of the natural' (1993: 97). Tangled elements of grief, fear, abandonment,
loss, anger and forgetting thread through this poem. Fuelled by dreams these
elements (can) become the `motors' of writing. Yet the relationship is not
merely instrumen- tal. The author does not merely choose at will to exploit
emotions that are kept fresh and intense in her dreams. Writing is like dreaming
where, despite our illusions, `[w]e are not having the dream, the dream has
us, carries us, and, at a given moment, it drops us, even if the dream is
in the author in the way the text is assumed to be' (Cixous, 1993: 98). Cixous
is most interested, she says, in texts that `escape' their authors, in writing
that gives in to itself, in books that are more like places than narratives,
in the book `that writes itself and carries you on board' (1993: 100). Yet — as Richardson emphasizes — poetic writing is also work (e.g., Richardson,
1997; 2001). In this case the work entails the struggle to `attain the same
strength and intensity in reality as in dreams' (Cixous, 1993: 103). The poem
becomes a textual construction site for the representation of a discontinuous
fragmentary narrative and a version (or versions) of a self. Cixous warns
that the `dream's enemy' (and the dream's enemy is also writing's enemy) `is
interpretation' (1993: 107). Yet, if, despite Cixous's warning against it,
I was to venture into interpretation, it
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is
obvious that this poem is loaded with signifiers of domesticity. They are
spatial, such as homes, houses, shacks, little cottages, kitch- ens, beds,
fences, rose gardens; and relational, including friend, hus- band, lover,
stranger. They are unreliable and capricious and the subject of the poem (if
we (continue to) take her, as pronoun gram- mar dictates, to be one) is repeatedly
let down by them. Many of them are more or less familiar to me. For Cixous,
these hauntings, these `apparitions' are characters from `the theater that
is my life during a certain period' (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 28); but
in different (dis)guises, transmuted from the everyday. There were many other
characters in these journal dreamscapes, but I extracted the husband/lover
scenes from them to make this much more compact text. Cixous suggests that
her dreams teach her secrets about herself, yet this is not necessarily a
psychoanalytic reading. The secret the dreams of this poem reveal is an obsession
with the end of a marriage. This was the thread I followed through the dreams
into the poem. Not such a secret, perhaps, but in the everyday of the dreaming
times, life went on and that was all in the past. But my body threw me each
time into wakefulness. The body is a curious anomaly in this poem. For Cixous,
the `body in metamorphosis' is `the central interchange' in dreams and writing:
`What the dream shows us in its theatre is the translation, in the open, of
what we cannot see, of what is not visible but can be sensed in reality' (1997:
28). The specificity of the body is the place of metamor- phosis, of translation,
of writing and of reading (our lives and our dreams). Yet, one striking feature
of this poem is the relative absence of the body in the text. The body of
the journal writer was thrown into wakefulness, yet what she has written,
the fragments of text of the dreams that have come into the poem, do not foreground
her own body except as a place from which movement and sight might emanate,
a place from which she might articulate her desires (if she could only find
the words). As her body disappears, her agency is lim- ited. She is relatively
passive in this poem, acted upon by others more often than acting herself.
She is often static whilst others act — they threaten to slice off her
breast, to fuck her, to give her a baby, to split her back open; they knock
her down, they watch her, and they leave her. Leaving her becomes the metanarrative
of this poem, of this particular dreamscape. Where she does act violently
herself is in response to provocation (`I slit his throat/when he attacked
me'), or it is immediately negated (`I smash it/at her feet./I run after/so
sorry ...'). Most often she is the grammatical subject of the verb `to be',
which serves to place her in locations involuntarily, thrown there by the
dream narrative within which she is constituted as passive
121
and
not in control of her own destiny or destination, nor the move- ments of her
body: `I'm ... at a dance/in a house/in a double bed/ on a train/in a recruitment
hall/in front of her/in a hostel/at the ATM/on a jetty/(waiting) on a verandah/(living)
in a shack/in my yard'. Other verbs through which she takes up agency in this
poem are relatively inactive. Most often they describe verbal or emotional
processes, such as writing, knowing, looking, asking, pre- paring, hugging,
crying, watching and waiting. Her (very feminine) passivity is coded into
the grammar of the poem, into the grammar of the dreams she recorded in her
journal. There are, however, moments where her body acts and where she takes
up corporeal agency in more positive ways: she swims, buys an amulet, prunes
roses, starts a car and drives away. These provide glimpses into other possibilities
for being, away from husbands/lovers/men who are strangers who might hurt
her. The poem could be read as a fragment of story (or fragments of stories)
of female escape from subjection to romance, or from the domestic as a safe
and secure location for female subjectivity. If it is read as a narrative
with some sort of linear logic, and a singular subject, the `I', the woman,
attempts to exercise agency through anger initially but this is destructive — she even kills a man. The poem could be read, from another feminist reading
position, as a narrative of a woman learning to speak and to act for herself,
to use an assertive force that is more controlled and effective than anger
and that allows her to meet the threat of patriarchal violence (`Are you alone?',
the husband, the lawyer, the father) with competence and confidence. She too
has a dog and a weapon, and she can start a car without a key and drive up
a steep road and take herself away from that place. The point where the poem
drops me, the moment when the ending (this ending of many others that might
have been possible) suggests itself, and the readings that I have outlined,
give a narrative turn to the poem, which is itself one reading of other possible
readings and writings. If the last section (the last dream), `I'm in my yard
...', had not been there, perhaps the poem might have been more resistant
to closure. If I had not said earlier that the dreams (the poem) were chronological,
perhaps a reader of the poem would be less inclined to seek in it a narrative
logic. But the pull of narrative, of linearity, of modernist assumptions about
texts (and autobiographies) and how they work, about time and the order of
things, is very strong and difficult to resist. Notions of the humanist individual
underpin the logic of narrative, where the individual is `generally understood
to be a conscious, stable, unified, rational, coherent, knowing, auton- omous,
and ahistoric individual', who exercises `freedom, will and
122
intentionality'
in the public sphere as they act in the world (St Pierre, 2000: 500). Although
the humanist individual is gendered male, in another reading using a narrative
logic, the woman of the poem becomes more `male' (less hysterical, more powerful,
more inde- pendent) as she moves towards a type of emancipation offered at
the end. If indeed it is an end. In terms of a poststructuralist reading — and writing — it is the sub- ject herself who is called into question
in the text. In poststructural- ism, `the subject does not exist ahead of
or outside language but is a dynamic, unstable effect of language/discourse
and cultural practice' (St Pierre, 2000: 502). In this experiment in writing,
I have taken up dreaming as another discursive field of play. In a poststructuralist
writing, the subject is `opened up to the possibility of continual recon-
struction and reconfiguration', she is `presumed to be created in the ongoing
effects of relations and in response to society's codes' (St Pierre, 2000:
502). This woman, the subject (if we read her as singu- lar) of the poem,
slides through a range of subject positions that open and close to her momentarily
as her sex and her contexts enable some possibilities and close others. She
is not me, not the me of that time, nor the me of daylight, of waking. She
uses my voice (when she speaks as `I') and she may have some similarity in
appearance but she is a doppelgänger, she is not me at all. She is a wraith,
an appar- ition, she is no one, she is many. The poststructural text and the
post- structural reading of that text retain the strangeness of the subject,
the subject surging forth, the subject in process. The strangeness of thought
itself, of the production of the subject through thought, fol- lowing the
traces of discourses which underpin the text, their twists and turns, their
allusive elusive patterns of signification — these are elements of a
poststructuralist writing. The School of Dreams, with Cixous as the teacher,
is the school without walls in which we can learn these writing practices.
For feminist scholars of autobiography, this school is just one of many we
might attend in order to make the familiar — even when it is ourselves — strange. CONCLUSION Dreams are for Cixous the place of the other inside, the
place of disguises where: `[t]hey think it is me, but I only copy the other,
it is dictated; and I don't know who the other is' (1993: 103). Within a poststructural
theory of writing, the subject is multiplicity: self and other merge and diverge.
Cixous' other is not the abstraction cre- ated in the Oedipal split and the
mirror stage of psychoanalysis. Nor is it the (modernist) subject of `stupid,
egotistic, restrictive, exclusive
123
behaviour
which excludes the other' (Cixous, 1994: xvii). St Pierre suggests that self/other
is the `master binary' of Cartesian rational thought (2000: 494). Mansfield
characterizes `the whole idea of a fixed, knowable, autonomous subjectivity'
as `an hallucination con- trived by power in order to isolate and control
us in the cage of indi- viduality' (2000: 36). Poststructural writers refuse
that cage, aspire to writing practices that disrupt binaries including not
only self/other, but also inside/outside, conscious/unconscious, rational/irrational,
past/present and memory/reality. Attending to dreams has been part of my strategy
to disrupt these binaries. The other has been writing poetry. In this I follow
Richardson who sees auto/biographical writ- ing as the telling of `local,
partial, prismatic stories' (1997: 5) and poetry as a particularly productive
deconstructive textual practice. Autobiographies might be conceived of as
annotations made on journeys through ourselves. In deconstructive autobiographies
the writer catches hold of and loses her self at the same time, simul- taneously
composing and decomposing her `self'. In this paper, I have produced an experimental
`autobiographical' text, a poem written from a journey through my dreams.
I have turned my analyti- cal eye on my own autobiographical text. I have
disrupted realist conventions, and rational expectations in autobiography
by turning to dreams as my data source. I have subjected the poem to multiple
readings in order to displace humanist inclinations towards linearity or causality
in terms of who `I' am and why. Using the transgressive data of dreams as
a point of departure for discursive analysis continues the theoretically productive
and rigorous work of feminist poststructuralists who fold `emotional data,
dream data, and sensual data' into their research (St Pierre, 1997: 175).
This paper provides no template for other researchers, no replicable experimental
or general- izable data, rather it is an intervention, an irritant perhaps,
into any remnant conventions of autobiographical writing. It is an invitation
to experiment with data, with texts and with the `selves' we bring to writing.
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NOTE
ON CONTRIBUTOR SUSANNE GANNON is a lecturer at the University of Western Sydney.
Her doctoral research in poststructural theory and writing explored the creative
and transgressive possibilities of experimental writing in the social sciences — including collective biography, poetry, theatre and autoethnographic/autobiographical
writing.