Distribución de competencias y recursos entre los diferentes niveles del

requires vigilance in avoiding degeneration into a rescue project that views “their” condition as inferior or assumes “their” need of assimilation into a privileged ideology.

4 See Karen Jacobs, The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (Cornell UP, Ithaca and London, 2001). For further discussion of W o o lf and Benjamin’s relationship to each other and with fighting fascism, see Leslie Kathleen Hankins’s chapter, “Virginia W o o lf and W alter Benjamin Selling Out(Siders)“ in

Virginia W oolf and the Age o f Mechanical Reproduction (N ew York: Garland Publishers, 2000): 3-35 and Marilyn L Brownstein’s “Silver Spoons and Knives: Virginia W o o lf and W alter Benjamin (Some Notes on a Practical Approach to Cultural Studies)” in Virginia W oolf Emerging Perspectives Eds. Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow, Intro, by Jane Lilienfeld (N ew York: Pace UP, 1994): 204-9.

5 W alter J. Ong’s book Oral'rty and Literacy: The Technology o f the Word (Routledge: London and New York, 1982) speaks to the nostalgic longing for utopia I am investigating. For instance, his idea of a “prehistory” in the “oral character of language” (5) resonates with Lacan’s Imaginary and Symbolic stages of language and the development o f consciousness, the theoretical framework upon which Kristeva’s semiotic chora is based. His discussion of the difference between the literate mind and the mind engaged with “copia” reminds me of W o o lf s depictions of M r. Ramsay trying to reach the end of the alphabet that is his thought process and Mrs. Ramsay weaving waves of fluidity in her own in To the Lighthouse: “Since redundancy characterizes oral thought and speech, it is in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity. Sparsely linear o r analytic thought and speech are artificial creations, structured by the technology of writing” (4 1). This longing and yearning fo r the wholeness of the m other tongue and the baby babblings of oneness is an important element of the phenomenon I have been striving to articulate in my work.

6 My discussion of the Lacanian origins of Kristeva’s chora stems from Jacques Lacan, “The M irror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” Alan Sheridan, trans.,

Ecrits, A Selection (1949) I -7. Briefly stated, Jacques Lacan reappropriates Freud’s Oedipal stage into his own theory for the process by which we acquire language. Lacan maps our movement from the imaginary stage

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as an infant ecstatically unified with the maternal body, to a false but pleasurable sense of synthesis with his m irror image, and finally to the child who is thrust into the world of difference. Once “he” realizes that he is separate from his m other and his own reflection, he must conform to the parameters of the symbolic order of language and greater society; language acquisition strives to restore (symbolically) the unity that has been lost.

See Julia Kristeva, “A Question of Subjectivity— An Interview” Women’s Review 12 (1986) 19-21, Phillip Rice and Patricia Waugh, eds.. Modern Literary Theory: A Reader (N ew York: Arnold, 1996) 131-7. For a comprehensive collection of Kristeva’s work, see Kelly Oliver, ed„ The Portable Kristeva (N ew Yorlc Columbia University Press, 1997).

7 O u t o f this union comes the meaningful language of emotions, a “nonexpressive totality” (35) that is “nourishing and maternal” (Kristeva, The Portable Kristeva 36) and is apart from, yet equally as viable as the written language of the symbolic by which we are indoctrinated. In Kristeva’s words, “Indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, this space underlying the w ritten is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgment, but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax” (38). By syntax, Kristeva refers to the inevitability o f the symbolic realm's intervention into the prefinguistic; the imaginary space of the chora is interrupted and irrevocably changed by the acquisition of written language. There is an immediacy in the moment and the emotion associated with the use of this otherlanguage, a kind of spontaneity that brings about the urgency and the authenticity of the imaginary experience I have long associated with W oolfs incandescent moments of being. Although the chora has no stable identity and no traditional construction of language, Kristeva argues that it is the origin of poetry, and music and poetry are intimately linked. Kristeva indicates in the return to the maternal sphere of the semiotic that we are "searching for the inscriptions of language of the archaic contact with the maternal body which has never been forgotten...they are to be found in the tempo of the voice, in the rapidity of delivery...or in certain musicalities” (“A Question of Subjectivity” 135).

Kristeva points out that the expression of this “recourse to the semiotic” (137), o r “state of disintegration in which patterns appear but...do not have a stable identity” (133), is in no way a monopoly of women. As Bonnie Kime Scott has pointed out in Joyce and Feminism (Indiana UP and Harvester:

Bloomington, IN and Brighton: Bloomington UP, 1989), James Joyce incorporated this concept into his own w ork through use of a fluid, stream of consciousness narrative in which the speaker has no fixed identity; Joyce himself also had a particular affinity to a “feminine” version of language. Yet in her reworking of Lacan, Kristeva lends credence to the power of a traditionally “female” realm of emotional language and expression similar to the “womanspeak” psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray delineates as “decentered, irrational, and nonlinear, unlike the logocentric, hierarchai expression o f patriarchy” (Haberstroh 125). Kristeva’s emphasis on the magnificence of the chora even suggests that it is not important that the female infant could not properly delve into the male world of the symbolic

8 Didier Anzieu’s The Skin Ego (Transl. Chris Turner. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1989) deals explicitly with the womb as a tangible experience. Anzieu posits a theory of consciousness dependent upon attachment to the maternal body. W hile the young infant cannot distinguish between an inner and outer face, s/he experiences “interface” (37), a feeling of “unifying whole” in the skin of self and mother. Later, this “imaginary space” (38), developed “on the basis of the mutually inclusive relation of the bodies of m other and child,” allows the ego to fully and healthfully cohere. Anzieu elaborates as such: “By Skin Ego, I mean a mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychical contents, on the basis of its experience of the surface of the body” (40). This concept has something in common with Kristeva’s chora; Anzieu’s ideas of “reciprocal empathy and an adhesive identification” (63) inherent in the symbiotic relationship between mother and child find a role in the self finding wholeness and eventual communion with others. In particular, his articulation of the almost photographic quality of the state of symbiosis, which “persists; time is frozen, repetitive o r oscillating, cyclical” (64) is relevant to my concept o f the choran moment. Once again, however, I hope to divorce my discussion of the choran moment and interconnective community from a purely psychoanalytic theoretical base in order to imagine a less universalizing, perhaps more sociopolitically-engaged reading of modernist literature and photography.

9 See Hel6ne Cixous, “Sorties,” Phillip Rice and Patricia Waugh, eds., Modern Literary Theory: A

Reader (N ew York: Arnold, 1996) 137-144, Elaine Showalter, A Literature o f Their Own: British Women Novelists

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Women Writing About Women ( 1979) 25-33; 34-6. Phillip Rice and Patricia Waugh, eds.. Modern Uterary Theory: A Reader (N ew York: Arnold, 1996) 9 9 -108.

10 Some readers may wonder how I could use a phrase such as “unified existence” in light of postmodern theory. W hat I hope to suggest here is that this sense o f wholeness exists before we are subjected to ideological constructs of gender difference.

" Lisa Rado outlines how the phenomenon of androgyny represented the possibility of ultimate artistic genius fo r modernists:

These w riters present inspiration not as the incorporation of ‘masculine’ qualities but rather as generated by the precarious coexistence of female consciousness and a masculine other-self that goes beyond mere pseudonym...modernist literary men and women share the desire to embody the newly perceived strengths o f both sexes and to transcend sexual and artistic limitation altogether. (13)

Freud suggests in “Psychology of W om en” (1933) that “the proportions in which the masculine and feminine mingle in the individual are subject to quite extraordinary variations” (155; qtd. in Rado 18). He also notes that “what constitutes masculinity o r femininity is an unknown element which is beyond the power of anatomy to grasp” (156). Following Freud, then, modernists grapple with the idea of a transcendent androgynous sublime.

Like Lisa Rado, I refer to the contemporary definition of androgyny as a fusion of the binaries of sex; since the 1970s, androgyny has been referred to as a m ixture of historically determined feminine and masculine characteristics within the same person. Similarly, Karen Kaivola draws upon W o o lf s writing to speaks of androgyny as an “interm ix” (235) of the sexes and genders. W hile androgyny and W o o lf s concept of it was initially popular in second wave feminism, it later came under heavy critique by scholars and social activists. For a brief tim e in the 1960s and ‘70s, critics such as Carolyn Heilbrun and Nancy Topping Bazin admired W o o lf s vision of androgyny’s ability to provide men and women freedom from the constraints of gendered determinates of behavior. But by 1977, Elaine Showalter argued that W o o lf s concept was a mere fantasy, one that necessitates the denial of a distinctly female literary tradition. For additional edification on the debate surrounding Showalter’s critique of A Room o f One’s Own, as well as a useful guide on the

development of feminist literary theory, see Mary Eagleton, Ed. and Intro., Feminist Literary Criticism (London and New York: Longman Group UK, 1991).

12 Ultimately, this attem pt to embody the space between self, body and other creates an occasion fo r Marianne Hirsch’s (Family Frames: Photography Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997) "unidirectional looking,” an interrelationship among those involved in the triangle of agency and interpretation.

13 In Anzaldua’s words, “suddenly I feel everything rushing to a center, a nucleus. All the lost pieces o f myself come [together], magnetized toward the center. Completa" (5 1).

14 Consequently, many women writers were grappling with their fictional responses to questions W o o lf raised: Is there a women’s sentence?, o r form? Is there a woman’s subject matter? Is there some characteristic orientation involving both?

15 W ith this perspective on modernism in mind, we are much like Lily Briscoe, tangled in a “golden mesh” of interconnection that is “polyphonic, mobile, interactive” (4). Ultimately, Scott argues toward a new scope of modernism with no interest in limited definitions of modernism in sub-categories. She emphasizes attention to holes, gaps, and versioning and the concept of gender as performance. One of her important conclusions lies in her reminder that the N ew W omen of the suffrage movement were “midwives o f modernism who brought forth women as well as men of modernism” (Refiguring Modernism xxxvi). In Scott’s reconstructed history— 1914, 1928, 1939— she emphasizes the fact that W oolf, Dorothy W est, and Djuna Barnes w ere affected by the men of 1914 and shared a common critical interest in Joyce. Scott describes the connection/s between modernism/s as embodied by the golden mesh, the web, the ball of yarn; not all strands lead to Eliot, Pound, and Joyce. H er idea of the women of 1928 calls attention to the second rise in modernism.

16 Scott questions in The Gender ofModernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington, IN: Bloomington UP, 1990): “H ow did the G reat W ar, which has generally been seen as a deep influence on modernist views of the world, have different effects on men and women writers?” (5). Both worked on the home-front and in the war itself. The 1920s as a tim e of new excitement and freedoms, particularly fo r women, but by 19 4 1, all the major experimental works had been w ritten and Lawrence, Mansfield, Yeats, W o o lf and Joyce w ere dead.

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W hen considering issues of the canon, Scott evokes the “men of 19 14”— Eliot, Pound, and Lewis, as they proclaimed in Blast in that year. Richard Ellman and Charles Feidelson assembled The Modem Tradition in 1965 and concurred, and included little on any women w riters aside from W o o lf and George E liot H er book tests the limitations of such canonization of male writers.

In Reframing Modernism: The Women o f 1928 (Bloomington, IN: Bloomington UP, 1995), Scott evokes the image of the web in the scaffolding to represent a more comprehensive view o f modemism/s. By moving into the web, previously limited understanding of modernism breaks down. The web is W o o lf s analysis of the process of writing, insisting on exploring new territories (xvi).

17 See Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (N ew York: Oxford UP, 19 7 1), and Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

18 Mikhail Bahktin’s The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Ed. Michael Holquist; Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 19 8 1) argues that it is the novel which represents a democratic zone of dialogic relations and hybrid combinations for characterization.

M ore relevant to my argument here is the w ork of Kevin K. Gaines in Uplifting the Race: Black

Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: U of N C Press, 1996). Gaines pertinently describes of the interrelationship of black and white representations of self in the development of modernism. I concur with Gaines in that, “black modernism was the flourishing of contestation around racial representation ...w ith the centrality of minstrelsy as a foundation for both black and white middle-class subjectivities” (Uplifting the Race 207).

19 Commenting on the work of Richard W right, Gilroy evokes the power of black transatlantic writers in general:

His desires— to escape the ideological and cultural legacies of Americanism; to learn the languages of literary and philosophical modernism even if only to demonstrate the commonplace nature of their truths; and to see complex answers to the questions which racial and national identities could only obscure— all point to the enduring value of his radical view of modernity fo r the contemporary analyst of the black diaspora. ( 173)

The black Atlantic can be defined “through this desire to transcend both the structures o f the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity.”

20 During the First W orld W ar, women in Britain and France w ere allowed to w ork in