Modern Fiction and Performance

Session Coordinator: Martha Patterson
McKendree College

“To Pull a Single Thread”: Sanitized Performance in the Anthologized Fiction of Louise Erdrich

This paper explores ways in which fiction with roots in folklore and oral tradition can be performative when read by an audience competent to enact the epistemological possibilities presented in the text. To explore possible literary performances as well as specific reading contexts where the performance shifts, this paper examines Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and a chapter from that novel, “The Red Convertible,” which is often read in the context of Introduction to Literature anthologies. Erdrich’s work in general draws heavily from Chippewa oral tradition and is written in a way that has the potential to recreate the performance arena of traditional storytelling, albeit in political and innovative ways. However, when readers do not enact the performance that the textualized folklore invites, the literary performance will be dramatically different if it occurs at all. Although critics have compared Erdrich’s fiction to traditional Chippewa storytelling, when read in this specific context, the textual codes that key the literary performance remain largely inoperative, and because of this the performance is sanitized making it so the traditional epistemology does not emerge.

Drawing on the work of scholars like Catherine Rainwater, James Flavin, John Foley, Dell Hymes, and Richard Bauman, this paper engages performance theory and reader-response criticism to contribute to conversations of how readers create meaning from texts. Additionally, this paper presents pedagogical suggestions for increasing the competency of readers in introductory literature classes.

David A. Allred
University of Missouri-Columbia

Moments of Laughter: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as Conscious Gender Politics

Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1937) presents an example of how literary modernism holds the possibility of marking politically the boundaries of gendered and sexual identity through form. Unlike more familiar formations of modernist self-hood that assume a stable and autonomous identity, in Nightwood it is the reader’s stable sense of sexual and gendered identity becomes displaced. I argue that Barnes’s formal experimentations with syntax and language (which mark her modernism) enter into a consciously political conversation with formations of gender and sexuality.

Through formal strategies, Barnes makes the unconscious gender negotiations of her characters conscious to readers, therefore making the gender politics of the text perceptible and “political.” In particular, I look at the “moments of laughter” in Nightwood, and argue that these mark for the character (as well as the reader) the collapse of essentialist tropes of gendered and sexualized subjectivities. I see Barnes’s project in Nightwood as similar Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance in Gender Trouble, where Barnes’s fictional representations enact a “radical critique of the categories of identity” in order to “expose the foundational categories of sex, gender, and desire as effects of a specific formation of power.” Such a denaturalization of gendered categories occurs especially in the novel where Barnes’s liminal characters confront their own participation in ideologies of compulsory heterosexuality and patriarchy, destabilizing such structures of power for her readers as well.

Jeff Ludwig
Illinois State University
jlludwi@ilstu.edu

Performing Death: Medical Ritual and Performative Utterance in The Ghost Road

Awarded the Booker Prize in 1995, the third novel of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy enacts a cross-cultural display of medical performances, comparing traditional shamanistic ritual to Western technocratic medicine. Set during the final months, then weeks, of World War I, The Ghost Road considers the war at two removes through her fictionalized historical character, the distinguished doctor, psychologist, and anthropologist William Rivers. Removed from the front line, on the wards of London’s Empire Hospital, Rivers responds to the war’s mental and physical casualties with compassion, scientific interest, and numbing routine. But increasingly, at another remove, he recalls healing practices, along with headhunting and mortuary rituals, from a Melanesian island where he did anthropological fieldwork before the war.

This paper uses three frameworks to suggest implications of Barker’s presentation of medicine as culturally constructed performance. First, historical research reveals that the novel’s cross-cultural comparisons of medical performances reflect the historical Rivers’s wartime writings and lectures, particularly his Fitzpatrick Lectures, delivered at the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1915-1916 and later published in The Lancet as well as in the book Medicine, Magic and Religion. What strikes the reader of these wartime lectures is how much they suggest the historical Rivers learned from his stays in Melanesia about medicine as a performance art, whose effectiveness stems from the mind’s role in illness and healing. Second, speech act theory brings out a crucial difference between traditional and modern medical practices: in the rituals of Melanesia, the shaman’s words are “performative utterances,” words that in their utterance have the power of deeds. Barker highlights this difference through her Rivers’s bureaucratic, ineffective words for the dying, along with his non-performative, scientific repetition (preservation) of Melanesian ritual utterance, and his nostalgic longing to experience the power of the shaman’s performance. Finally, anthropological perspectives, like those in Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman’s The Performance of Healing, show that some contemporary oncologists, like Barker’s Rivers, are learning from the traditional shaman’s ways of using words so that they have the effect of deeds, of rituals, such as when the words of diagnosis (“Your condition is terminal”) are repeated by the physician until the patient is engaged in the performance of dying—rites of remembrance and release—rather than in illusory attempts to prolong life. Through these three approaches (historical, linguistic, and anthropological), this paper demonstrates that The Ghost Road contributes to ongoing exploration of performance as a vital aspect of medical practice, showing that modern medicine has much to learn from the performance arts of the traditional shaman.

Sheryl Stevenson
University of Akron
ssteve3@uakron.edu

Madness, Medicine, and Dance: Musical Performance and Social Rank inRose Tremain’s Restoration

In her study of music in the early modern era, Linda Phyllis Austern observes that musical performances were believed to cause “affective reciprocity” between the participants through a “form of sympathetic vibration…from body to soul, and soul to soul.” Thus, musical performance takes on a special significance during this period as it empowers people to bond with each other in a very intimate way. This idea highlights the importance of the music that pervades Rose Tremain’s Restoration, as one must recognize the implicit connection between the characters that are involved in a performance together. However, affective reciprocity is inherently controversial in Tremain’s England, a society that strictly maintains boundaries between the classes, and so relationships become more complicated as characters attempt to use music as a tool to achieve (or prevent) social mobility. While most characters try to lift themselves into a higher social class, the Quakers, who claim to reject class distinctions, use musical performance to heal their mentally ill patients. However, a closer examination of how (and to whom) the Quakers choose to perform their music reveals that even they maintain certain class boundaries between themselves and their patients.

Christina Cottrill
University of Akron
cc21@uakron.edu