Sheffield, Genuine Ming or Fabulous Fake

In his 1987 essay on contemporary American fiction, Steve Katz deplores Marianne Hauser's lack of visibility in the American literary scene, describing her work as "a national treasure kept in the attic." Ewa Ziarek, in her 1992 essay on Hauser'sThe Talking Room begins with Katz's quote. In the pages that follow, she not only carries Hauser's 1976 novel down from the attic, but displays it in the light of postmodern and feminist theory. With Ziarek's insightful reading, the formal innovations ofThe Talking Room, innovations that baffled and annoyed early reviewers, receive validation and the brilliance of Hauser's style at last shines forth for all to see. Yet even still, at the end of the decade and the century, it seems that hardly anyone has looked--at eitherThe Talking Room or Ziarek's essay--for Hauser and her work remain as neglected by the critics as ever. GivenThe Talking Room's subject matter--lesbian motherhood and artificial conception--as well as its virtuoso form, one might think that the novel would, at least, have received more attention from other feminist readers eager to, as Ziarek puts it, rescue "women writers from the 'attics' of our cultural past"(480). But thoughThe Talking Room has received the occasional admiring remark or once-over-lightly from male champions of postmodernism such as Steve Katz and Larry McCaffrey, the only published critical work by a woman on Hauser's novel in the last two decades is Ziarek's.

I will begin this essay with an inquiry: why hasThe Talking Room received so little attention, particularly from feminist critics, since the novel surely deals with subjects and themes of interest to feminism? I believe this inquiry is important not only in order to highlight the conceptual roadblocks that Ziarek works her way around--namely American feminism's unconditional valorization of the subject--but also to provide a means of contextualizing the new set of limitations inherent in Ziarek's own theoretical apparatus. For while Ziarek does go far in reclaiming Hauser's prose "for readers interested in the intersection of postmodernism and feminism"(480), as she demonstrates how the novel's radical interrogation of all forms of identity and "authority" is compatible with feminism, she also fails, by overlooking the novel's "queerness," to realize the full potential of this interrogation. Rather than investigating the relationship between the novel's experimental style and its queerness, she attempts to fit this style into the conceptual categories of French feminism and thus attributes the novel's subversive power to the maternal feminine. However, a careful reading of the novel--of the various doublings, duplications, and parodic displacements figured through its complex tropology of mirrors--demonstrates the untenability of even such a seemingly disruptive category as the maternal feminine. The Talking Room undoes the maternal feminine just as it undoes all other categories of being--by showing that the dream of any sort of being or essence outside the Symbolic's house of mirrors is simply a dream.

But to return to the agenda stated above: why hasThe Talking Room received so little attention, particularly from feminist critics? At this point it might be useful to loop back as well to Steve Katz's description of Hauser as "a national treasure kept in the attic," or more specifically, to Ewa Ziarek's quotation of Katz. In deploying Katz's description of Hauser at the beginning of her essay, Ziarek summons up two different critical discourses: the discourse of theorists of men's experimental writing in America (by virtue of the fact that Katz himself is both a practitioner and purveyor of postmodern writing) and that of American academic feminists (as the association of women with attics summons up Gilbert and Gubar's highly influentialThe Madwoman in the Attic). Nicole Cooley, in her essay "What Does It Matter Who Is Speaking: Toward A Feminist Avant-Garde?" argues that neither of these discourses has adequately dealt with or cleared a space for the phenomenon of women's experimental fiction. Cooley attributes the scarcity of women writers in the canon of postmodern fiction first to the fact that the formation of that canon has been a largely male enterprise, and secondly, and more importantly, to feminism's failure to reshape it. The failure of feminism to address and rectify this exclusion can be ascribed, Cooley asserts, to an alliance between feminism and conventional realism, an alliance which arose out of feminism's resistance to a literary tradition and a culture that had denied women full subjecthood. Given these conditions, the best literary practice seemed to be one that allowed (or appeared to allow) women writers the opportunity to speak unambiguously, and with authority. And through such a practice, the author becomes an instructress, while "the text itself becomes a lesson" which "can 'teach' the reader"(Cooley 13).

The Talking Room does indeed fall under the rubric of the problem as Cooley has defined it. The narrator of Hauser's novel, a pregnant 13 year old named "B" who is the daughter of two lesbians, "V" and "J, speaks from a position of radical uncertainty, as she cannot claim for sure her maternal origin, let alone her paternal one, since she "may or may not be a test tube baby." Further, the authority of her discourse is constantly undermined by contradictions in time and situation, lapses in sequence and mismatches in detail. And lacking an authoritative voice, the text can bequeath no lesson: as one early reviewer bemoaned, nothing "truly significant and instructive" ever takes place.

Ziarek in fact cites this reviewer in her own essay as she discusses whyThe Talking Room, despite praise for Hauser's "stylistic achievements," has failed to elicit a "mainstream readership"(483). Like Cooley, Ziarek locates this failure in the novel's refusal to deliver "significant instructions." On the basis of a close reading of the language of early reviews, she argues that the novel's style is seen as "a seductive but shallow woman" to whom "we might be in danger of falling prey without ever finding any moral gratification"(483). Further, she notes, the reviews associate this seductiveness with "the figure of the mother" in the novel. Yet while Ziarek takes the early reviewers to task for expecting "significant instructions," she herself discovers guidance in this novel: in the figure of the mother, who "indicates a direction beyond the space of representation"(486). The mother's authority to perform this task seems to derive from her originary position, as Ziarek associates her with the novel's "feminine" or "matrilinear genealogy"(482).

To her credit, Ziarek manipulates the term "matrilinear genealogy" with poststructuralist chariness as she goes on to explain that this genealogy does not "recuperate a central consciousness but entails a dissolution of subjectivity and narrative into a plurality of voices"(482). Skillfully, Ziarek's reading steers away from notion of the mother as a recoverable origin or linguistic inheritance that would allow the daughter/writer to set up "self-keeping" in the Symbolic domain. Rather, in Ziarek's reading, the mother figure opposes the Symbolic and its "logic of representation"(493), creating "gaps and breaks" and introducing a kind of linguistic "drift" that unsettles the position of both the signified and the subject. However, even as Ziarek is careful to disassociate the mother from the notion of an originary presence or plentitude out of which the daughter/writer could fashion a unified self, the very language she uses to achieve that disassociation reveals the mother's genitive function in her reading: if "the daughter's return to the figure of the mother as the origin of a new aesthetics is by no means an unproblematical undertaking"(485), it is still a return to an origin. And while Ziarek seems to want to locate this origin somewhere outside or beyond language, or at least outside the Symbolic, as she associates the mother with Kristeva's semiotic function that disrupts meaning by introducing "wandering or fuzziness," the fact is that "the mother" is just as much a product of the Symbolic as "the father," without any connection to the real. For to the degree that "mother" is a word and a concept, it requires the annihilation of the individual existence of what it names. ¹"Mother" collapses and destroys the differences between actual mothers, and instead derives its meaning in relation to other words and concepts, such as "father" and "child" and "other." The term has no secret life beyond language, no pre-linguistic power, and thus Ziarek, in her attempt to demonstrate thatThe Talking Room offers a "matrilinear genealogy" to the daughter/writer only uncovers "mother's" age-old conceptual associations within the Symbolic--her associations with both origin and otherness.

I would like to propose that rather than indicating a space beyond representation, Hauser's novel shows that there's no way out; Ziarek's feminine "door" (or "matrilineal genealogy") is a linguistic construction, a construction that always takes us back inside language. InThe Talking Room., we can find a figure for language's enclosure in the bedroom where J and Aunt V talk "nonstop," since the "talking room" is also the source of the novel's title: clearly the term covers more square footage than the relationship between J and V, as it denotes the very pages of the text we are reading. And as these pages foreground language itself, through the constant play of both signifier and signified,The Talking Room pushes beyond the boundary of its own binding to describe an even larger territory, a territory which it is nevertheless impossible to escape. In Hauser's novel, this impossibility perhaps finds expression in a series of "lost key" images, the most striking of which appears on p.36, in an anecdote about a bulimic convict who manages to steal the key to his cell, but then can't "resist swallowing it" rather than breaking loose.

As the image of the bulimic convict suggests, our imprisonment in language's enclosure cannot be blamed solely on external forces--there's an inner compulsion at work as well. In the case of the human subject's relationship to language, this "inner compulsion" could perhaps be better described as a structural relationship, specifically, as the structural relationship between the human "subject" and the "mirror" delineated by Jacques Lacan. In his essay "The Mirror Stage," Lacan explains that this structure is made necessary by the fact that human beings are born extremely prematurely and thus enter the world as bundles of desires and uncoordinated motor functions, or as "bodies-in-parts." By identifying with an image outside itself--the mother, another child, its own shape in the mirror--the "body-in-parts" gains a sense of itself as an integrated whole. Only with the acquisition of language, however, does the human subject's illusion of "self" become complete--here, as the subject comes to intuit the separation between word and thing (without which there would be no language), it also comes to see itself as separate (from the (m)other or "matrix" upon which it has formed its identity). At this point, as the subject steps into language and the Symbolic, there's no turning back--to relinquish the linguistic, social and cultural networks which provide meaning for the human subject is also to collapse the very structure of the self.

Significantly, The Talking Room is full of mirrors--V's house, for instance, is "a maze of mirrors" where "[y]ou run into yourself at every turn"(11). And as B recognizes, "[t]here's no escape"(12) from these mirrors. Ziarek, however, in line with her reading of J as "the mother" who points the daughter/writer in the direction of a new aesthetics, finds liberation in the fact that J is always smashing them. Through the act of breaking mirrors (and cameras as well), J steps beyond "the logic of representation" (Ziarek 493), and returns with a disruptive femininejouissance capable of "transform[ing] the space of cognition into a sphere of eroticism"(496). Yet when Ziarek attempts to explain how this disruptive feminine force works, via the theories of Luce Irigaray, we see that it relies on the very terms of the logic it is supposed to displace. Ziarek associates J's feminine power with Irigaray's notion of female eroticism, which relies on "touch" rather than vision (the mode of male sexuality), and thus presumably frees woman from the destructive optics of "masculine" representation. But if we look at the particular lines Ziarek takes from Irigaray to describe feminine "touching" and what it requires, we find that this touching is already bound up with language and representation, no matter that it is "heard" and not "seen": "One would have to listen with another ear, as if hearing an 'other meaning' always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, but also of getting rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them"(29). For even if words are being discarded, are being thrown away like old dried-up tubes of paint, this does not negate the fact that they were used at some point to express "meaning" and thus to represent.

The problem becomes all the more pronounced as Ziarek applies this notion of an audible "touching" or listening with "another ear" toThe Talking Room. Claiming that the novel enacts a "shift from representation to listening," she finds support in the way B listens to the "polyphony" of voices surrounding her, a polyphony which includes not only the voices of V and J and all the other characters in the novel, but also the "voices" she hears coming through her little transistor radio. But the fact that the words B hears coming from the talking room or over the airwaves are spoken (a "spokeness" which is of course a fiction, since we're seeing these words on the page) does not make them any less representational than the words she finds printed in books or scrawled on walls. Both types of discourse serve a representational function, and we see this function brought to the fore as the novel collapses the distinction between inside and outside, between the "inside" of B's life and the "outside" of the media, and allows the words of the latter (both visual text and aural) to refer more often than not to the words of the former. Thus the words B sees in a women's bathroom, "B IS A TEST TUBE BABY," mysteriously reflect her own ponderings about her origin in the preceding pages, while the words she hears on the radio, "VATICAN URGES BAN OF SPERM PRODUCING DOLLS FOR GROUPIES"(126) comment obliquely both on her loving account of a randy afternoon in the park with Uncle D who "look[s] like a doll"(40), as well as D's own question earlier in the novel, "[w]hen little girls play with dolls, where is the father?"(39). Rather than enacting "a shift from representation to listening,"The Talking Room foregrounds the fact that words represent, both visually and aurally, by highlighting their reflective properties, rather than allowing these properties to disappear in the evocation of some external and/or "real" referent.

Just as V's abode is full of mirrors so that "[e]verything is done twice in this house. Everybody has a twin"(33),The Talking Room itself teems with verbal "reflections." Every image seems to have a double, sometimes more than one, and thus the almond soap J hurls at B on p.69 appears in the recollections of Uncle D on page 117 as he describes the "almond-sweet" ante bellum afternoon when his black nurse Penelope "pitched a cake of soap" at him, rests briefly on J's buttock as an "almond-shaped mole" on 118, shows up on 120 as the bowl of "sugared almonds" accompanying V and D's tea, and finally on 127 lands in the silver shell soap dish in D's bathroom. These verbal reflections occur not only through images, but through sounds as well. The novel shimmers with sound reflections, with puns and instances of alliteration and assonance, as in J's tirade against V for coercing her into motherhood on the opening page of the novel: "Two capital letters? One capital lie? Here lies the lie, the fly, initial parents of one baby B, excuse the fart. The part you forced on me--I was cut out for it, don't you see?"

While the lines just quoted are spoken by J, V is the one who likes "to play word games"(154). In fact, throughout the narrative she is associated with the concept of reflection, specifically as she is connected to images of duplication and mimicry. Not only has she filled her house with mirrors, but she grows "plastic tulips and roses" in her garden(6), collects antiques likely to be "fabulous fake[s]"(26), and tries to project the image of a happy heterosexual family to the social workers, even going so far as to entertain the idea of procuring a "dummy" as a husband for J(45). In her reading ofThe Talking Room, Ziarek describes V's instances of duplicity--from her plastic flowers to her attempts to imitate heterosexual life--as a "destructive enterprise"(490), a phrasing which implies the "original" is somehow exterminated by the copy. Thus as Aunt V enacts "the mimicry of female desire" through her staging of heterosexual respectability, she also "wipe[s] out" the erotic female body and its "effects of difference, subversion and pleasure"(Ziarek 490). That this "faked" female desire somehow destroys "real" female pleasure and desire seems to rule out the possibility of peaceful co-existence. And in Ziarek's reading it is to V's discredit that she apparently lacks the perspicacity to perceive this radical incompatibility between the original and the copy, as she makes J's accusation against V, "you don't know real from false, you are the last to know..."(TR 490), her own.

But if V is the last to know real from false, perhaps this is because she is the first to understand the difficulty in distinguishing "real" from "false" or the original thing from its reflection. As Rodolphe Gasche‚ has explained in his treatise on the philosophical system of Jacques Derrida,The Tain of the Mirror, "the reflection, the image, the double splits what it doubles, by adding itself to it, and the reflected or doubled is also split in itself" (226). There is no original that is not already inscribed with the possibility of its reflection: "if the simple could not be doubled, the simple would not be what it is"(226). Given this reciprocal structural relationship between the original and its double, it is impossible to establish "a last source, origin, and original": what we get instead is "an infinite reference between originals and doubles"(226). Reflecting once again on Ziarek's argument that the mimicry of heterosexuality is a destructive enterprise, I would like to propose that the relationship of reciprocity between original and double suggests quite the contrary: without the possibility of the "faked" female body there could be no "original." But perhaps what concerns Ziarek is not so much the destruction of that original body as the loss of its status as primary andsui generis. After all, not only does the original body depend on its copy to define its originality--one could even say that the "original" comes after the copy, since it does not come into existence as original until the birth of its copy. And in fact, Ziarek seems to inadvertently suggest that it is this loss of the originality of the female body rather than its destruction by the copy that is the problem as she links the "mimicry of female desire" with "female bodies turning into dummies"(490). That is, the faking of female desire perhaps shows that "real" female desire is itself nothing but a copy. ²

If Ziarek wants to preserve the "original" female body, we can assume she has the best of intentions. For if the female body is a "copy," it must obey the logic of representation, a logic which the French feminist theory informing Ziarek's argument designates as masculine. Thus when female bodies are turned into "dummies" it is inevitable that they will be manhandled by "the invisible 'Pop'" (Ziarek 490). To support the idea that "faked" female desire evokes a femininity that is dependent upon and subject to the masculine, Ziarek quotes B's paraphrase of V: "Aunt V says the fellows make her feel like a real woman, especially after one of those screaming, nerve-shattering fights when her very womanhood has been shattered. None of the girls of her acquaintance could quite restore her femininity the way the fellows can restore it, the girls being too masculine, she fears"( TR 27). But one can also use this passage to argue the contrary. That is, rather than showing feminine identity as subjugated to some masculine notion of "woman," it demonstrates how "woman" (and therefore "man" as well) is merely a performance, and that the persuasiveness of this performance rests on a consensus between actor and audience. Because gender is a performance, not only can V rely on the fellows to make her "feel like a real woman," but the girls can be "too masculine." What's more, V can be both a "real woman" and possess a "penis," since "whether or not she [has] one [has] nothing whatever to do with the price of beans"(21).

Whether or not V possesses a penis has nothing to do with "the price of beans" because there is, as Elizabeth Grosz says, no "natural" norm of the body: "there are only cultural forms of body which do or do not conform to social norms" ( Volatile Bodies 143). One could even describe the "real woman" and the "real man" as costumes--to be put on, discarded, or recombined, depending on the social occasion. Thus V's employee, U, when she decides to visit "the nearest Queens bar for transvestite and men in leather" first dons a pin-striped suit (a hand-me-down from V), a shoulderlength red wig, false lashes, lipstick and rouge ( TR 100). In her dual-sex garb, U totally convinces the transvestites that "she [is] a he in drag" (100). And while the ruse is apparently over when a jealous queen grabs one of U's "falsies" and discovers that it is "real," this exposure of the "natural" female body only serves to highlight its constructedness. For even as "the leather boys [are] alerted that a female [has snuck] into the exclusive club under the guise of a male disguised as a broad" (100), the reader is tipped off that this "bust" of the gender masquerade relies on a reductive and even rather arbitrary conceptualization: breasts = woman.

Such conceptualizations, as Thomas Laqueur has shown in his study of the history of sex,Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, exemplify how "[t]he power of culture represents itself on bodies," how it "forges them, as on an anvil, into the required shape"(241). For example, before the 18th century, there was only one sex. Rather than being perceived as fundamentally different than man, woman was perceived as simply a lesser form of him. This perception was based on a conceptualization of the female reproductive system as an inverted and inferior form of the male one: "The uterus was the female scrotum, the ovaries were testicles, the vulva was a foreskin, and the vagina was a penis"(236). While such a construction of the female body might seem absurd from the standpoint of scientific discoveries in reproductive biology made since the 18th century, Laqueur points out that these new discoveries have not always supported claims for an essential sexual difference (for ex., it's been known since the 18th century that the clitoris and penis are of similar embryological origins [169]). In actuality, the driving force behind the construction of two sexes was, according to Laqueur, the collapse of patriarchal authority, a collapse incited by the ideas of thinkers like Hobbes that there "is no basis in nature, in divine law, or in a transcendent cosmic order for any specific authority"(156). Thus "[n]ature had to be searched if men were to justify their dominance of the public sphere..."(194). And interestingly, the first physical phenomenon to be seized upon was not breasts (which, after all, many men possess and women often lack) but menstruation, a phenomenon which not only provided a basis to conceptualize half the human race as "women," but also as "animals in heat"(218).

The idea that the body is a kind of raw material to be seized upon and shaped by human culture is perhaps illustrated by the dream that precipitates U's investigation of the transvestite bar. In her dream, U finds herself in a subway lavatory, "staring at the backs of a dozen men in identical business suits...urinating in unison"(99). Only when the "men" turn to face her, they have neither faces ("each head was a white egg") nor penises(99). Since the signifier of masculinity is missing, it is up to U to construct it: "Poor U had the awful suspicion or certainty that each of these faceless, identical business men was expecting of her that she unzip her fly and take out her..."(99)

Gender and sex inThe Talking Room are constructions, culturally and/or Symbolically manufactured images that may or may not reflect some original body--in Aunt V's house of mirrors it is impossible to tell. They are also, as I have already stated above, performances, the success or failure of which depends on a consensus between the performer and his/her audience (in the case of V and the "fellows" consensus is achieved, while in that of U and the "queens" it is not). Being performances, these acts of gender and/or sex construction can be repeated, again and again. And as they can be repeated, they can also be altered, through miscues and misconstruals. That repetition, or reflection, occurs with a difference is quite obvious at the stylistic level of the book. We see this, for instance, in the example of the almond soap discussed above, as the shape and context of the image is altered each time it appears. We also see it in the novel's patterns of sound effects--"Real tits and you better believe it, V titters to T in the chintz over a Schlitz"(100)--as sounds are both repeated and altered over the course of a sentence or passage.

Despite the gender bending performances of V and U, the possibility of repetition with a difference is perhaps less obvious at the level of character (here, it seems, the author has given more ground to conventional realism, which requires a logical and sequential continuity of characterization).³ Still, we can see the potential for the possibility of repetition with a difference in the single letter names (or double, as in the case of Vs friends, the double letter fellows "GG, ZZ, DD, OO"[28]) of the homosexual characters in the novel. Variously, V can be associated with "Victory," "Vincent V G"(21), or "Santa Veronica," while J can be mistaken for "Jess" the chimp(108), "Jesus"(105), "Janie"(144), "Jennie"(144), "Jackie"(144), "Josephine"(144), "Jemima"(145), "Jocasta"(145) and so on. Such word play does not accompany the names of the heterosexual characters in the novel (with the important exception of B, which I will discuss below), perhaps because these names--"Ollie," "Jake," "Jock," "Flo," "Granny-anny"--are less semantically open. The more "closed" names of the heterosexual characters suggest the more "closed" natures of these characters, who as they are trained in and committed to one gender role or the other, are less apt to make "mistakes," and thus more likely to produce reliable copies.

The one seeming exception to the naming pattern in the novel is B, who on the basis of her sexual history (which consists of liaisons with a window washer whose "dick was huge," and Ollie, the grocery delivery boy who's slow in school but "quick" in the hay), could be considered heterosexual. To be sure, not only has B actively engaged in heterosexual sex, she's also pregnant, and as such is a candidate for that most heterosexual of roles: the mother. This is in fact the role Ziarek assigns B, as she sees her as the inheritor of J's maternal genealogy. Yet a careful reading of the last section of the novel reveals that B receives her bequest not from "mother" J, but rather from "aunt" V.

While B loves J (and in turn loathes V), in the last pages of the novel we see that the "mother" has nothing to offer her. If J's mirror smashing and the long "trips into the unknown" (TR 142) that ensue show, as Ziarek maintains, that "the economy of female eroticism" cannot be "contained or comprehended within the optics of visibility"(496), the fact is that B herself has a vested interest in the visible. Like the audible, it is a means for re-presentation, and this is something that B is clearly interested in as she "repeats" herself both narratively and biologically. She even goes so far in the case of this biological "re-presentation" to claim sole authorship: "the baby is [hers] alone"(138). Given B's interests, J who cannot recall even "a face or a place"(142), and whose memory is like "a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces missing or lost including herself"(145) is a poor role model. And her inability to offer guidance to this child of the visible becomes clear in Ziarek's reading of the single sentence penned in J's notebook, "JEDER ENGEL IST SCHRECKLICH"(67).

The sentence is, as Ziarek notes, from Ranier Maria Rilke'sDuino Elegies. What makes the Angel "schrecklich," or terrible, is his ability to surpass the visible world and gain access to a more elevated and spiritual reality that is unfathomable to human beings: "The Angel of the Elegies is the being who vouches for the recognition of a higher degree of reality in the invisible.--Therefore 'terrible' to us, because we, its lovers and transformers, still depend on the visible"(Rilke 129-30). Ziarek associates the mirror-smashing, camera-bashing J and her trips into oblivion with Rilke's Angel, although she notes that in this case there's clearly no transformation or transcendence: "[o]n the contrary, [J] translates spiritual 'beyond' into discontinuous 'elsewhere'"(497). Still, despite foregoing a vocabulary of transcendence, Ziarek does place this "elsewhere" beyond representation simply by calling it "elsewhere," and further, she connects this movement beyond with "female desires and pleasure"(497). And in connecting J's trips into oblivion with the notion of "female desires and pleasure" that somehow surpass representation, Ziarek's reading only serves to highlight J's uselessness to B. For if B were to follow J's lead in the novel (and it's interesting that B never tails J on her trips into oblivion in the novel, but always awaits her return), the journey would only take her back to where she started, since the notion of "female desires and pleasure" is always already, as I have argued above, a product of representation--a culturally and/or Symbolically manufactured construct that may or may not reflect some original body. Further, even if there truly was a "female pleasure and desire" experienced by some essentially feminine body sequestered in the seraglio of "elsewhere,' we, as "depend[ents] on the visible" or beings whose whole identity is based upon the relationship between the mirror and its object, have no access to it. In conclusion, the terrible angel's "elsewhere," is a dead-end, and this seems to be demonstrated by the fact that J always returns, always ends up back in V's arms for another dance as the old record "BONNE NUIT CHERIE" turns "smoothly again around and around"(156).

Yet if J's (and Ziarek's) "elsewhere" is a cul-de-sac, this does not mean there's no hope in the novel, that we're stuck forever replaying the same old imprisoning gender roles. Hope in fact lies where one might least expect to find it, in the very identities that our natures--as beings whose selves are formed upon the other--force us to take up and repeat. The final image of the novel, of the old record spinning "around and around," even as it suggests the characters are doomed to replay their destructive behaviors, also presents the possibility of a way out. To envision how this "around and around" or "again and again" might serve as an "exit," however, it is necessary to back up a few pages to the final exchanges between B and V on pages 150 through 154.

At this point in the novel, V has ostensibly given up on J's return, and is rooting around in the condemned house next door for salvageable objects before she leaves the city and retreats to her country house in the hills, B in tow. Littered with the broken-down paraphernalia of family life--"a wheeless baby buggy"(150), "the corpse of a mattress"(151), "chewed-up comic books, true crime or love"(151)--the image of the house suggests the failure of this life and the gender roles that support it, and yet, as V suggests, there might be "something there worth saving before the wreckers arrive"(150). What she finally discovers is "a lovely oval frame"(153), which could serve as a "picture frame" or a "mirror" (V in fact decides to use it as the latter: "she will make into a mirror and give it to one of the sisters for Valentine Day"[153]). In its circular form, the frame prefigures the image of repetition at the end ofThe Talking Room, of the record spinning "around and around"; it also suggests, whether it serves to enclose a "picture" or a "mirror," that there's no getting beyond the boundaries of representation. At the same time, however, as the passage following V's discovery indicates, there's quite a bit of room within these boundaries. For as B tells us, the oval frame could also be her baby "O," which as yet has "no sex or name tag," and thus "is a blank [she] can fill in with any shape or face [she] like[s]"(153). Of course B's creative freedom is somewhat limited by the pre-determined Symbolic stock of faces and shapes she has to choose from; however, the very act of drawing from that stock, of "repeating," could make the difference, as the word game that B and V play on the next page hints. If "O," as V says, can be played as the innocuous "oregano," it also, as B takes up the suggestion of the "or" sound, can be replayed as "orgy"(154). And if the promiscuous letter can take on new meaning through a slight alteration or "mistake" in sound context, so too perhaps can concepts such as "mother," via unsettling alterations in cultural context as the novel associates "mother" first with a bisexual alcoholic drifter, and then with her 13-year-old "daughter."

The record (a word which, significantly, can denote a visual or written copy as well as a sound copy) spinning "around and around" of the end ofThe Talking Room bespeaks the fact that there's no escape from representation, as our very selves are founded on the relationship between "original" and "copy." We are signifying creatures, and all signification as Judith Butler writes inGender Trouble, "takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat"(145). Then again, with the possibility of repetition comes the possibility of deviation from the "original," through alterations in context and configuration, a possibility hinted at by the fact that V's old record, even as it spins smoothly around and around, has a "scratch" in it (TR 156). Thus it is here, "within the possibility of a variation on that repetition" that Butler locates "agency"(145). And this seems to be whereThe Talking Room situates it as well, as the novel ends not with B following J into the void of the "unknown," but rather with B watching J and V perform that same old dance of reconciliation within the all too familiar confines of the talking room.

1. Ziarek in fact demonstrates how language works to annihilate the being of what it names in her treatment of the character of J in the novel. Granted, J is a linguistic creation, already made up of words. Even still, J is made up of many more words than "mother," and other words such as "drifter," "runaway," "lesbian," "freeloader," and "drunk" would serve to describe her equally well. Each time Ziarek equates J with "the figure of the mother" she performs an act of abstraction [L. ab +trahere to draw], that separates the character from the totality of her linguistic being, and in effect destroys her (if only temporarily).

3.A novel which does not give ground to such demands is James Joyce'sFinnegans Wake, where the characters are constantly transforming so that, for example, ALP is variously Anna Livia Plurabella, Annah the Allmaziful, Alma Luvia, a chicken, a washerwoman, a river (the Liffey, which becomes the "livvy," the "Liber Lividus," the "Missilifi" and so on), though never, tellingly, a man (the fact that she never becomes a man says much about how important it is for Joyce to preserve such categories in his work, but that is the subject of another study).

Genuine Ming or Fabulous Fake?: Deconstructions of Identity and Gender in Marianne Hauser’s The Talking Room