A Review of John L'Heureux's The Handmaid of Desire
A production like John L'Heureux's book, The Handmaid of Desire, helps us to revisit these momentous developments. It makes us wonder where the "novel" is going in the murky seas of postmodern creativity.
L'Heureux offers us a visit into the entanglements of an English Department at a university with certain resemblances to his own academic place, Stanford--although the resemblance, says his disclaimer, is entirely coincidental. The department has come into line with the objectives of diversity; race, class, and gender determine worth and place. It also remains the haven of a senior cadre--"the fools"--who cling to the notion that their job is to teach students literary works, not to discourse on literary theory. Its leadership is in transition, and much of the action and talk surrounds the issue of succession. This is spiced up by the younger turks who want to change the departmental name from English to Theory and Discourse. They aim to marginalize the fools, who have tenure, in a peripheral division, safely out of the way of the mainstream of critical theory.
Into this situation, L'Hereux injects the mysterious visiting lecturer, Olga Kominska. Her clairvoyance and power to direct the lives of the characters soon establish that she is the author of this would-be novel. So, the book is fiction a la the postmodern mode, a self-reflexive text about its own fictive processes. It is about Olga doing her thinking about the other characters as they work their way through the episodes of power, varieties of dalliance, divorce, violence, sudden death. It is about the absurdity of the postmodern condition in academe.
By exaggerating the results of diversifying the faculty to include women, ethnic minorities, gays, lesbians, and the physically challenged, L'Heureux gains a mad mix of motives and actions for his text. His satire bites into the soft underbelly of the politically correct doctrines of our day. Much of the action--instigated by Olga, remember--takes place at the grunty but funny level of sex and sex-talk. He deepens this social satire by connecting his (Olga's) amusing caricatures (all is only text, you see) to the pedagogical and cultural issue raised by the turn from literary studies to the focus on postmodern theory in English departments in America.
In other words, through the funny acrobatics of Olga's people, L'Heureux wants to confront a serious question: is there a way for literature and writing to get beyond its present imprisonment in a self-serving scholasticism, based on (mis)readings of French deconstruction theory?
Olga engineers the plot, such as it is, that produces the satire of the story. One of her initiatives is to direct the writing of Francis Xavier Tortorisi. His writer's block is preventing him from doing the novel that is supposed to win him tenure. Olga turns his energy toward a satirical piece about the department and the university, a mirror of the text we have in hand. It becomes a dramatic symbol in the climactic actions in the tenure committee.
We seem to have here an affirmation by L'Heureux that the old-time social criticism of the novel lives, even in the heart of the postmodern textual revolution. L'Heureux punctuates that finding when he allows Olga to cast doubt in her lectures on the Word of Foucault, one of the saints of the deconstructionist orthodoxy embraced by the students. If Foucault's word is not law, is the whole set of postmodern commandments vulnerable? L'Heureux does not confront the question directly.
Some may be disappointed that L'Heureux skirted near such weighty issues in his satirical romp through academe without some sort of resolution. They may have desired that he point a way toward a new fiction, away from the self-dissolving texts of the postmodern. Or they may have wanted him to show a way back to the kind of fiction in high modernism that still resides in memory like high mountains.
Saul Rosenberg caught the disappointment of such hopefuls in his review in the 9 Dec 96 issue of The Weekly Standard. "[I]f a return to the powerful fiction whose absence L'Heureux so much laments required only that writers put aside intellectual games and meditate honestly on character in action, one is tempted to ask why he did not simply do so himself." (p.39)
Earlier in his review, Rosenberg himself seemed to understand that the log of events in the history of modern fiction, including the "problematizing" of the high modern masterpieces, makes it impossible simply to go back. Those who would work imaginatively in 1996 can do so credibly only by taking account of what has been done and said for and about the fiction of their time. L'Heureux wins respect for his imaginative energy by doing so, by embracing as subject matter the theoretical assaults on modernism and the social changes riding in their wake.
In mathematics, Kurt Godel (1906-1978) proved that a mathematical system contains statements that can neither be proved nor disproved within that same system; a system of higher power is required to prove or disprove them. In fiction, something roughly similar seems to be demonstrated by L'Heureux's novel. The system of representation of high modern fiction has been disproven by the newer system of postmodern linguistic deconstruction. The newer system of postmodern linguistic analysis itself cannot stand as legitimate without the support of a newer (higher?) system of imaginative expression. The Handmaid of Desire, in a lighthearted way, tries to show the limitations of postmodern fiction by incorporating it into a newer process, canny about postmodern insight and satirical about its limits.
Readers such as Rosenberg too quickly see the book as a sign of the failure of creative expression in postmodern conditions. Let's get real for a minute. This is a book by a member of the English Department at Stanford--not by the mysterious Olga Kominska. He has a reputation to maintain and a position to justify. What we have in this book is the evidence of his lively imagination, working in the conditions of the moment on the issues of the moment, employing some formal conceits that poke fun, provoke ideas, and make a meaningful day for a reader. The end of modernist realism, we rejoice to find, is not the end of western narrative creativity. Fun and novelty still await the stout of heart.
Postmodern writing destabilizes modernist notions about the representation of reality. Yet running through the literature on postmodernism we find a fascinating survival. It is the survival of a mystical notion of the Urschrift, the "archewriting," the original Torah, the lost divine scripture, never to be found in its first form. Habermas points us to the importance of this survival in Derrida. Habermas says, "Derrida's grammatologically circumscribed concept of an archewriting whose traces call forth all the more interpretations the more unfamiliar they become, renews the mystical concept of tradition as an ever delayed event of revelation." (p. 183).
If we allow this curious concept from Derrida, priest of the postmodern, to guide us, we can accept more comfortably the unendingness of the project of creativity. The high modern fiction, so mountainously impressive as we look back at it, comes to resemble an assemblage of artifacts at a certain station along the way, not as a completion or a fulfillment. Postmodern fiction, with all its quirks, comes to look like a newer way to call forth the absence of the ultimate text. It comes to entertain and inform us as its practitioners take us with them on their assigned part of the human project, undertaken, as it is, with the desire for insight and with the understanding, going in, that the next attempt will be one more failed--but necessary--attempt.
The form of L'Heureux's book gains support not only from this inclusive way of looking at creative expression; it also is validated by the theorizing about postmodernist fiction in Brian McHale's work. Two insights from McHale are worth remembering when reading L'Heureux's book.
One is the main point of his study, that postmodernist fiction concerns itself with issues of ontology rather than epistemology. We see L'Heureux's text "oscillate" between the world(s) of Olga's imagination and the world of L'Heureux's Stanford-like campus in which her world(s) are embedded.
The second McHale insight worth remembering is that postmodernist fiction has a mimetic function. It imitates in its form and substance the destabilized conditions of postmodern life as we really experience them. It gives us something to think about during our enforced expedition through "the pluralistic and anarchistic ontological landscape of advanced industrial cultures," as McHale puts it (p.38). With this in mind, we can regard The Handmaid of Desire as an artful fabrication that holds out to us an imaginative experience parallelling, in satirical exaggeration, the experience we can have in our lived life. (McHale's thought about postmodern fiction as mimesis makes us want to examine the heuristic or the cathartic uses to which we might want to put works like L'Heureux's; but that belongs in another essay.)
Statements, then, about the death of the author and strategies that make the author a character in the text she is making become interesting variations in the imaginative enterprise. Take them as overly definitive at your peril. The author lives. She is not Olga Kominska; he is John L'Heureux, dipping one more oar into the tide, determined to show us something interesting, and determined to hold onto his position in the English Department at Stanford University.