Impartiality, Storytelling, and the Seductions of Narrative: An Essay at an Impasse

I have been working on this article for some time now in hopes of writing my way out of an impasse. I think of this place as a deadlock that forms where feminist convictions about the transformative power of telling stories butt up against the claims of literary theorists regarding the seductions of narrative. This term narrative sits at the joint of this abutment, helping at once to produce these fields as distinct domains and to set them at odds with each other. The article has been difficult to write because I found it disorienting to bring the two fields into conversation with each other. As the impasse metaphor suggests, their debates are both orthogonal to each other and intersecting. Whereas the principal concern in feminist work on narrative is to battle positivism, that of literary critics has been to analyze realism. Yet where they intersect--in the word narrative--they produce dissonance by using the term quite differently. After a time, I set the work aside, convinced that the dilemma it posed for me was not real but an idiosyncrasy that would be dispelled if I simply read more. Two years ago, in spring 2001, I met my impasse in the flesh--and it gave me a story to tell. I was at a conference that, as director of the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota, I had co-organized in collaboration with a colleague in Holocaust studies. The idea was to offer a feminist critique of the ways in which, in testimonials and feminist scholarship on the death camps, "women's experience circulated. We noted that this often turned on relatively conventional notions of sex difference, emphasizing women's special survival skills (due to their orientation toward maintaining relationships) or their abject victimhood (due to the "double jeopardy" of being both woman and Jew). We announced our departure from these perspectives with the keynote address, delivered by a young feminist scholar who argued that the place of s ex difference in these stories might say more about narrative conventions than about difference itself: Myths and stereotypes of womanhood had affected the way women survivors told their stories and even remembered their experiences. Not two hours into the event, one of the participants approached me. A woman survivor and author of two influential Holocaust memoirs, she was deeply offended by the plenary session, which had opened for debate the question of whether claims about women's special status should be understood to produce gender as a self-securing fiction, rather than to validate that there exist "real" differences between men and women. As the session disbanded, she confronted me forcefully: Had she understood what we would be "up to," she said, she would never have agreed to participate in the conference. Incisively, she explained that she had long remained silent about her camp experience, simply accepting the fact that the iconic survivor narratives were written by men and that anything a woman might have to say about that experience as a woman would necessarily trivialize the fact that the Nazis persecuted her as ajew. Women's studies had opened up a space within which her story could count for something. It seemed to her n ow that careerist young feminists aimed to shut that space down with this talk of gender convention and unreliable narrators. She finished bluntly: "Now you mean to tell me that we are lying?" It is tempting to launch this article as my answer to her question. Tempting, but it would be misdirected, because her question affords no answer. It does not pose a question but rather sets up the impasse that forms wherever a narrator hails you, whether in the flesh or from the page. I tell this story not to settle the question whether this article is worth writing, as if the fact that I can testify to this impasse would make it real. This story is, like any other, a solicitation. It is a bid for attention, a way to start a discourse that promises to arrive at a point. …