Culture and Identity: "The Last One" by Fatima Daas

Although there is considerable controversy about this, the ancient Greek rhetorician Isocrates (436-338 bce) is credited with advancing the idea that culture can trump other markers of identity.

This was at the time when Philip II of Macedon, not a Greek but a person with Greek leanings partially as a result of three years of early education in Thebes, was about to embark on conquests that, under his son, Alexander the Great, would "Hellenize" much of the then-known world.

"Our city has so far surpassed other men in thought and speech that students of Athens have become the teachers of others, and the city has made the name "Greek" seem to be not that of a people but of a way of thinking, and people are called Greeks because they share in our education rather than in our birth," Isocrates said in one of his writings. 

I mention this because it is an important idea for many modern nation states, in particular -- in this instance -- France, which much like Isocrates in ancient Athens, came to believe French culture superior to most if not all others.

A few years back, for instance, the man then serving as France's Minister of Education, denounced "intersectionality," an outgrowth of the feminist movement, as in conflict with French republican values.

While Kimberley Williams Crenshaw, a Black American feminist, is credited with originating the term in the late 1980s to explain different layers of oppression experienced by women of color, intersectionality has since come to be a way of parsing out what, in the current era, are all-important questions of personal or social identity. According to Wikipedia, this includes such things as race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, ability, nationality, citizenship, religion, and body type.  

One other thing worth noting before continuing: a person's perceived intersectionality can be viewed either in positive or negative terms.

That's a very lengthy introduction to a few comments on a book called "The Last One," which, according to the New York Times, created quite a sensation in France where it was originally published. Written under an assumed name by a young lesbian Muslim woman living in a Paris suburb, the protagonist attempts to sort through her multiple and sometimes conflicting strands of identity both to find her true self and to reconcile those strands of identity with what it means to be French.

"Representation and identity are fraught topics in France, a country that prides itself on a universalist tradition that unites all citizens under a single French identify, regardless of their ethnicity or faith," Julia Webster Ayuso, reviewing the book in The Times, said. That's at least in part because too much focus on individual identity can be seen as a threat to social cohesion, the NYT review noted.

In other words, collective culture trumps individual notions of identity if you are French, more or less along the lines of the notions but forward by Isocrates.

"If you want to be French today, a fully French citizen, you have to give up one of the fragments of your identity," the author of "The Last One," called Fatima Daas, told the NYT.  Perhaps more than one, it might seem.

"The Last One" is apparently divided into a number of chapters, each of which considers one strand of the protagonist's identity. Some, such as her sexual orientation and her Islamic religion, are in conflict with each other as well as, perhaps, with a general cultural overlay. There's arguably nothing particularly new about that, but overall, the book, available in English, is perhaps an illuminating read in our current identify-focused culture. 

Amy Sillman and the State of the World of Art

 In the preceding post, on Flannery O'Connor, I wrote the following:

"In the age of Cancel Culture, the significance or worth of a piece of art is determined far more by the racial/gender/sexual orientation of the artist than by the attributes of the object in question. One need only read the arts pages of the New York Times in current times to see how that works."

To reinforce that notion, the lead article of the "Weekend Arts" section of the Oct. 9, 2020, NYT, about the painter Amy Sillman, contained the following observation by the author of the piece, Jason Farago:

"Yet the rolling crises of the past few years have brought along a shift in art galleries toward easy-to-read, politically forthright imagery, some of it righteous, some just agitprop. It's a time more prone to the certainties of rage than the ambiguities of art."

Farago positions Sillman's abstractions -- full of ambiguities one might argue -- as a counterpoint to that trend. "I was thinking about looming," the artist said in response to the off-center, somewhat out-of-balance images that dominate her current show at Manhattan's Gladstone Gallery.  In other words, like the current U.S. presidential election, things that seem about to happen but haven't happened yet.

It's an evergreen notion so if you acquire one of these images, it won't get stale -- from that perspective, at any rate.  Bur there is no need to rush to buy a Stillman image, it would appear. Farago reports that Sillman has made "hundreds" of abstract paints during just the past 12 months.

The NYT piece also serves to illuminate another aspect of the art world that is far from new.  It's as much about celebrity as it is about imagery. The accompanying picture of Sillman herself is far larger than the pictures of her art and the only image on the front page of the Arts section.

While details of Sillman's personal life are scarce to non-existent in what one can easily read about her, some of her work appeared in a 1978 exhibit entitled "A Lesbian Show" that was curated by an artist named Harmony Hammond.

According to Art News, "the show was an energizing political statement about lesbian visibility, creating a community of artists who publicly identified as lesbian -- and risked professional discrimination by doing so."

Well, that was over 40 years ago and how times have changed!

To Sillman's credit, however, she is not riding that horse. Unlike a number of others in the art and entertainment worlds these days, she does not explain her paintings as images seen through "the lens" of her sexual orientation, or gender, or race, or whatever. Rather, she talks, in the NYT piece and elsewhere, rather refreshingly as to how they fit into the history of art.

Same-Sex Attraction in "Mrs. Dalloway"

Attraction between women was of great interest to Woolf for more than one reason.

“Chloe liked Olivia.”  [What a concept!] 

“Do not start, do not blush, let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women,” Woof says in the fifth section of her landmark essay A Room of One’s Own.

Where did “Chloe liked Olivia” come from?  Woolf tells readers she encountered that astonishing phrase in a book called “Life’s Adventure, or some such title, by Mary Carmichael.” It was a book she at first hadn’t thought much of, based in part on Ms Carmichael’s terse and short-winded writing style, but that she was obliged to reconsider. Why? “For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it, she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been,” Woolf said.

That chamber was in 1928 the life of a woman “unlit by the capricious and colored light of the other sex.”  In other words, a woman defined in her own terms and not in relationship to a man as Woolf believed had been almost exclusively the case in English literature.

Well, Mary Carmichael was a figment of Virginia’s always fertile imagination and as for Chloe and Olivia, about all we are told of them is that they shared a laboratory where they minced liver, apparently for use as a cure for anemia, and that one of them was married with two small children. Woolf may have seen them as no more than friends, but that didn’t matter. This little invention – a woman being viewed independently of a man -- gave her the springboard she needed to examine at considerable length the impoverishment of women in literature.

The situation was so bad, she maintained, that in order to accurately depict what happens when a woman goes into a room, “whole flights of words” would have to be added to the English language.

[What would the English language look like now if James Joyce had been a woman, one wonders?]

But “Chloe liked Olivia” could certainly have implications other than just friendship and that brings me to Mrs. Dalloway.

Early in the book, after Clarissa is back from her morning walk, she climbs up to the little attic bedroom where her husband, Richard, has insisted she sleep undisturbed after her recent illness. This gets her thinking of Richard and how she has disappointed him sexually –initially “on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden” and later at Constantinople, “and again and again.”

In contrast, she has had a tendency to fall in love with women -- first and foremost with Sally Seton when Clarissa was 18 years old and “knew nothing about sex.” Encountering Sally at a party, Clarissa couldn’t take her eyes off her and then, when Sally unexpectedly arrived penniless at the Parry’s door and was somewhat reluctantly taken in, the two very different young women became almost inseparable, talking for hours about how they were going to reform the world – all Sally’s ideas, one is told.

Finally, out on the terrace one evening at Clarissa’s childhood home, Burton, “came the most exquisite moment in her whole life.” Alone with Sally – the others had gone on ahead – Sally picked a flower and kissed Clarissa on the lips. “The whole world might have turned upside down!” But then who should appear to ruin things but Peter Walsh, and her moment of happiness was embittered.

Readers aren’t told whether Sally and Clarissa took matters any further on a subsequent occasion, but from everything one learns about what Clarissa was like at 18, it seems unlikely. And in later years, when Sally married a rich Manchester industrialist, Clarissa wanted nothing to do with her, turning down invitations to visit.

Woolf contrasts this idyllically romantic, same-sex moment (the “laughing girls in their transparent muslins” Clarissa saw on her morning walk may have helped bring to her mind the “white frock” she was wearing when Sally kissed her) with a far darker example of possible same-sex attraction later in the book.

Whereas Clarissa was pursued by the vivacious, free-spirted Sally Seton who, among other things, ran down the hall naked on one occasion at Burton, Clarissa herself and possibly the Dalloway’s 17-year-old daughter Elizabeth, stimulates barely controllable desires within the rather distressing Doris Kilman, who, like a flasher lurking among trees in a public park, dresses in a green mackintosh no matter what the weather.

Miss Kilman, originally engaged by Richard Dalloway to teach his daughter history, in due course brings Elizabeth under her relatively recently acquired religious sway, much to the distress of Clarissa who wonders at one point if her daughter is falling in love with Doris.

Matters come to a head, when Miss Kilman, laughed at by the far more attractive Clarissa, is consumed by jealously and perhaps also lust.

“It is the flesh” she keeps muttering as she takes Elizabeth to a local department store, loses control of herself, buys of all things a petticoat (what was she thinking, Elizabeth wonders as the sales girl thinks Kilman “mad”) and gorges herself on sweets over tea as a possible substitute for another form of physical pleasure. Increasingly uncomfortable, Elizabeth finds her white gloves (as powerful a symbol as Clarissa’s flowers) and flees. Doris implores her in a quivering voice not to forget her, but she knows that Elizabeth, “so beautiful,” is gone.

Woolf, in an especially powerful passage, depicts Elizabeth, obliged out of politeness to have tea with Miss Kilman, as being “like some dumb creature who has been brought up to a gate for an unknown purpose, and stands there longing to gallop away.”  And so she finally did.  “Right away to the end of the field the dumb creature galloped in terror.”

The down side of possible same-sex attraction doesn’t get any darker than that. But the self-possessed Elizabeth, perhaps lucky to be relatively clueless over exactly what was happening, pulls herself together and appears at Clarissa’s party in a pink dress. Yet another powerful symbol, I think.