Men have often before been ashamed of particular ways of falling short of being a man, but now some men are encountering the shamefulness of being a man as such and at all. First, I say that men are coming into shame. I try to conclude that male shame is less to be regretted than one might at first think. Writing might also be a way of meeting with shame, a coming into male shamefulness.
#Textual practices free
Here, I say that to write is not to free oneself from the shame of being a man. 'The shame of being a man is there any better reason to write?' wonders Gilles Deleuze, and so do I. In her acclaimed novel, and in her short fiction, Proulx interrogates the right to silence as well as the wrongs that provoke speechlessness. The dumb show of Proulx's characters, whether tongue-tied through trauma or tactical manoeuvre, can inhibit and estrange, but it can also engender a muted musicality, eloquent and empowering. This combination of gendered world and silent disempowerment is imagined by Proulx in ways that complicate theoretical certainties and make the reader listen more closely to the careful quietness that can be misread - misheard - as awkward silence. Their apparent inarticulacy arises not only from a pervasive misogyny, but also from an arid masculinity and a suffocating homophobia. There, the silenced figure (protagonist, reader) was invariably female, while in Proulx's fiction, the protagonists - often male, sometimes female - have different reasons for keeping quiet. What happens when a new literary text invites us to revisit an older or established form of criticism? This essay explores the gender politics of silence in Annie Proulx's The Shipping News through a re-examination of feminist critical theory of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on the theories of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Roland Barthes, Shoshana Felman and Dominick LaCapra, and most particularly Emmanuel Levinas, as well as exploring the South African philosophy of ubuntu, the study examines how the caged testimony of South Africa's Human Spirit might offer a more complex understanding of the response, and, indeed, responsibility, to the face of the wounded other. My "reading' of the audio-text, initially impelled by my ambivalent reaction to the anthology's design, is intended to determine how the figure and function of the cage mediates the response of the individual listening to these compact discs. The intersection of these potentially competing methodologies is made structurally manifest in the design of South Africa's Human Spirit, as the compact discs through which one audits the testimony of the predominately black South Africans are housed inside a padlocked metal cage. Representations of the TRC hearings are particularly compelling in how they bring together issues of post-traumatic witnessing with postcolonial questions addressing whether it is possible to adequately comprehend the other.
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This article examines the possibility of responding to the postcolonial other by theorizing how such a response is constructed in a recent textual representation of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings: an audio anthology entitled South Africa's Human Spirit.
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