More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
who had a lively tradition of both oral and written literature, never having scrapped one in favor of the other.
the dependence of narrative on conflict is to uphold Social Darwinism in all its glory, I sadly suspect.
Existence as struggle, life as a battle, everything in terms of defeat and victory: Man versus Nature, Man versus Woman, Black versus White, Good versus Evil, God versus Devil—a sort of apartheid view of existence, and of literature. What a pitiful impoverishment of the complexity of both!
this inceptive state or story-beginning phase does not come from anywhere outside the mind that can be pointed to; it arises in the mind, from psychic contents that have become unavailable to the conscious mind, inner or outer experience that has been, in Gary Snyder’s lovely phrase, composted.
Writers have to get used
to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn.
They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn’t know they knew. All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Glastonbury.
We first meet Jo as a writer when sister Amy vengefully burns her manuscript, “the loving work of several years. It seemed a small loss to others, but to Jo it was a dreadful calamity.” How could a book, several years’ work, be “a small loss” to anyone?
“fall into a vortex,”
Jo is doing something very important and doing it entirely seriously
and that there is nothing unusual about a young woman’s doing it.
but I don’t know where else I or many other girls like me, in my generation or my mother’s or my daughters’, were to find this model, this validation.
few readers would question the assumption that a woman should put family before public responsibility, or that if she does work outside the “private sphere” she will be neglectful of her house, indifferent to the necks of her children, and incompetent to fasten her clothing.
The quick-feminist-fix answer is that they are victims of and/or accomplices with the patriarchy, which is true but doesn’t really get us anywhere new.
and I don’t think I have ever had two hours undisturbed (except at night when everybody is in bed) during my whole literary life.
She seems to feel that she profited, that her writing profited, from the difficult, obscure, chancy connection between the art work and the emotional/manual/managerial complex of skills and tasks called “housework,” and that to sever that connection would put the writing itself at risk, would make it, in her word, unnatural.
it is the idea that the artist must sacrifice himself to his art.
Where Alcott receives a gift, Conrad asserts a right; where she is taken into the vortex, the creative whirlwind, becoming part of it, he wrestles, struggles, seeking mastery.
The artist with the least access to social or aesthetic solidarity or approbation has been the artist-housewife. A person who undertakes responsibility both to her art and to her dependent children, with no “tireless affection” or even tired affection to call on, has undertaken a full-time double job that can be simply, practically, destroyingly impossible.
A culture or a psychology predicated upon man as human and woman as other cannot accept a woman as artist.
I’m talking about mothers who write because it is almost a taboo topic—because women have been told that they ought not to try to be both a mother and a writer because both the kids and the books will pay—because it can’t be done—because it is unnatural.
“The advantage of motherhood for a woman artist,” she says—have you ever heard anybody say that before? the advantage of motherhood for an artist?—
The advantage of motherhood for a woman artist is that it puts her in immediate and inescapable contact with the sources of life, death, beauty, growth, corruption…. If the woman artist has been trained to believe that the activities of motherhood are trivial, tangential to the main issues of life, irrelevant to the great themes of literature, she should untrain herself. The training is misogynist, it protects and perpetuates systems of thought and feeling which prefer violence and death to love and birth, and it is a lie.
That is the killer: the killing grudge, the envy, the jealousy, the spite that so often a man is allowed to hold, trained to hold, against anything a woman does that’s not done in his service, for him, to feed his body, his comfort, his kids.
Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life: but no artist can work well
against daily, personal, vengeful resistance. And that’s exactly what many women artists get from the people they love and live with.
And for years that personal freedom allowed me to ignore the degree to which my writing was controlled and constrained by judgments and assumptions which I thought were my own, but which were the internalized ideology of a male supremacist society.
that the material privilege and social approbation our society grants the heterosexual
wife, and particularly the mother, prevent her solidarity with less privileged women and insulate her from the kind of anger and the kind of ideas that lead to feminist action.
Gilligan’s thesis, stated very roughly, is that our society brings up males to think and speak in terms of their rights, females in terms of their responsibilities, and that conventional psychologies have implicitly evaluated the “male” image of a hierarchy of rights as “superior” (hierarchically, of course) to the “female” image of a network of mutual responsibilities.
“Great Artist” is defined as inherently superior to and not responsible towards others.
Saucerism has a lot to do with religion, as Jung pointed out, but nothing at all to do with either science or science fiction.
it affirms the radical irresponsibility of mankind.
The Canopans are angels, messengers of God, but Lessing’s concept of the divine excludes that Trickster who creates and destroys. No Coyote, no Loki, no Hermes.
but vitiated by Beardsleyism. One must wonder why so many illustrators of fantasy seem scarcely to use their powers of fantasy, the concrete visual imagination that is their birthright as artists, but limit themselves to the style and mannerisms of Beardsley, Rackham, Nielsen, and other late-Victorian and Edwardian minor artists.
Character is destiny: her characters make themselves a human destiny, far more impressive than any conceivable pseudo-divine Five-Year Plan for the good of Zones Three to Five. They might even have risen to tragedy, had the author not opened heaven’s trapdoor to them to prevent that chance.
Chinese box narrative
Depression is the only clinically recognized psychic illness that is frequently fatal: it ends all too often in suicide.
“What I am trying to do is actually turn the question from a semi-mocking one to a perfectly serious one—to ask what it is that, when lacking in a woman’s life, can lead to states of depression? What do women, at the various stages of their lives, require in order to live?”
And always the achievement of
self-reliance, of a self that can freely be and do in the world, is hampered by the cultural bias that encourages a woman to ask, “What do they want of me?” and frowns upon her asking, “What do I want to do, to be?”
Prowling among dictionaries, I discovered that the word “fairy” is fata in Italian and that it derives, like the word “fate,” from the Latin verb fari, “to speak.” Fate is “that which is spoken.” The Fates that once presided over human life dwindled away in fairies, fairy godmothers, inhabitants of fairytales.
No doubt the moral function of the tale, in the popular conception, is to be sought not in the subject matter but in the very nature of the folktale, in the mere fact of telling and listening.
Like all great works of art, the great myths change you. Anyone who has attentively read or heard such a story as Archie Phinney’s “Coyote and the Shadow People” will know that the Greek myth of Orpheus is only one version of a deep and powerful human theme, and will have enriched their understanding of such matters as the landscape of the Western Plains, and married love, and death. Imagination is, after all, an intensely practical activity.
The experiments, and criticisms, based on the assumption that an animal is a kind of machine tried to eliminate emotional relationship and emotional reward from the attempt to find out if the ape brain could be programmed for language.
