Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions by Regina Barreca Read Free Book Online Page A

She seems to refuse to be professionalized and fetishized by the academic world. It is true that she courts a somewhat "serious" imageshe has spoken at the MLA and has graced the cover of the New York Times Book Review, for examplebut, the serious turn, more often than not, turns comic. The Hearts and Lives of Men, for example, was serialized in a "women's" magazine, which Weldon admits is "not the kind of thing one ought to do if one wishes literary respectability" (Thomas). A less-than-"scholarly" image of the writer is conjured up when Weldon describes herself getting up and writing, "wearing whatever I happen to be wearing in bed, which is sometimes nothing at all" (Boylan). In fact, Weldon often appears, starkly enough, to be doing all this, not for some abstract sense of "art," but for money. She admits that writers "market and service" ideas (Briscoe) and that she will dress "nicely" for a book jacket because "better looking equals you earn more" (Davies). She will do the "university and academic thing" because it looks good when put in the blurb on the back of the book. Weldon, like the Sex Pistols, is sure of the benefits of a great rock 'n' roll swindle. In these kinds of moves, she pogos to and fro between the "serious writer" and the "not so serious."
The rejection of expertise on Weldon's part goes as far as her refusal to be constructed as an expert on her own work. As if reinforcing D. H. Lawrence's imperative not to trust the artist, but "trust the tale," Weldon diverts the critic's attention from her. When asked if she feels she can listen to opposing interpretations of Life Force and then declare who is right and who is wrong, she simply, and perhaps dismissively, replies, "I don't have the time" (Mile). When considering if her works fit into modernism or postmodernism, she claims to have once been told by Malcolm Bradbury the definition of these terms, but that she "forgot it at once" (Mile). Put the line between Spark, Eliot, and Weldon "where," she says, "you like" (Barreca, p. 15). She'll only suggest things in novels, she says, that "I don't know myself but I think should be considered" (Barreca, p. 7). Don't look to Weldon for the extended footnote, for the Cliff-Note commentyou're likely to be met with an "I don't know." It is in this shift from "knowing"

 

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about things she has no expert knowledge of, to "not knowing" about things that she should have expert knowledge of, that Weldon appears quite the punk.
Ideology: No Headquarters
What seems particularly refreshing, if slightly naive, about the punk is his/her anarchic rejection of dogma, of party politicsthere is the avoidance of what George Woodstock calls "systematic theory." The situationists say that "there is no such thing as situationism" and that they have no desire for it, because, as Greil Marcus points out, all ideologies are alienations, "transformations of subjectivity into objectivity" (p. 52). As one gives oneself over to a particular set of beliefs, one becomes an object of them. When Malcolm McLaren bought books on situationism for the pictures, "not the theory'' (Savage, p. 30), he was practicing for punk. The Sex Pistols were designed to "make an impression," to make a picture, rather than make a political theory. On (non)principle, the Riot Grrrls advocate a similar rejection of ideologythey claim that they "don't have a doctrine," says Molly Neuman of Bratmobile, or any "10-point program." It seems that style rather than ideological agreement is paramount to the punk and that punk itself seems to operate as a practice rather than a politics. Even though ideological biases can be found in such practices, it is not necessarily because the punk puts them there.
In a similar fashion, Weldon seems to resist ideology and, particularly, a party political, "prepackaged" feminism. Despite the fact that she is invariably called a feminist, she refuses a totalizing notion of feminism and, in fact, ridicules and problematizes