On Cora Kaplan

Rereading​ the work of the pioneering feminist literary critic Cora Kaplan, who died in November, I had two equally powerful but perhaps contradictory impressions: on the one hand, the sustained political energy of the writing, the refusal at any historical moment over the past forty years to relinquish the belief that cultural and literary analysis and production play a – sometimes the – key role in drawing the imaginative landscape for radical political transformation; on the other hand, a no less relentless charting of the decline of political utopianism from the heady euphoria of the 1960s and 1970s – ‘For me,’ she writes in the introduction to her essay collection Sea Changes (1986), ‘those years were as close as I have ever come to an unalienated experience of political life’ – through the long night of Thatcherism to the ruthlessly conservative modernising agendas of Tony Blair and New Labour, still with us today. One of my most vivid memories of dialogue with Cora is from the early days of Thatcher’s election when we were travelling back from some conference or feminist event and she expressed her anxiety that the new conservatism would relegate feminism to the status of poor sister in what would no doubt come to be seen by the boys as the main struggle against a resurgent capitalist hegemony. In other words, there would be a backlash. An important thing for me about Cora’s thinking was the way her stubborn optimism of the intellect never blinded her to what it is we have most to fear.

I realise that the long years of my friendship with her have charted the decline of a certain form of political faith. A belief, one which I think coloured the thinking of 1960s and 1970s feminism, that the world, at least partly because of the strength of political energy we were bringing to it, would never go so wrong, so terribly and utterly wrong, again. Red diaper babies (as Cora would allow me, I hope, to describe her), and postwar baby boomers (as I almost was), need I think to place that euphoria more firmly than we did at the time in the context of the Second World War. We were the children of that war. And it was the direness of the 1950s for women, another backlash after the war’s liberating potential, which precipitated the feminism that was to follow. Today I find myself asking whether the intensity of conviction wasn’t carrying partly the unspoken agenda of the horrors of 1939-45. It wasn’t just women, it was the whole world that had to be reborn. ‘That sustained excitement,’ Cora wrote in 1986, ‘and a belief in the possibility of collective change, is hard to evoke today as a general mood.’ Nonetheless, she insisted against the grain of her own melancholy (and I see this next comment as both diagnosis and as something of a manifesto), ‘what seems important to emphasise here is the way in which that period altered the conditions under which many of us produced intellectual work, and what that change in turn effected in the objects of our study, our strategies of analysis and our general sense of the possibility of political transformation.’ Post-feminism, which she described in 1986 with wondrous brutality already as ‘a position without a practice of any kind’, is, she goes on to state, a symptom of the desire to make culture stand in for practice, ‘to mistake the texts that argue for change for the instance of change itself’.

This, as I see it, is complex and brilliant. There is a world which is at times – and today even more – regressive and frightening; cultural analysis must never make the mistake of thinking either that it alone will redeem or can substitute for that world; but that gap, the acknowledged disjunction between analysis and transformation, makes the task of such analysis more, not less, urgent.

Cora’s role in forwarding such analysis was unique and decisive for many of us. It certainly was for me. She was one of my earliest political mentors. Most of what I like to think I can at times do for my women students, especially Muslim women students in their confrontation with brute modernity, I can trace back to a moment in 1976, when I was newly appointed to Sussex University and hoping that my new commitments would not stop me from writing (sound familiar?) – trying, I confess, to cut a few corners. Cora quietly suggested to me that my women advisees might need a peculiar kind of attention and therefore time. And I also remember vividly when the students were protesting against the first massive hike in overseas student fees – a hike whose consequences they saw better than pretty much anyone else – her widening the brief, and arguing again, quietly but firmly, that on such political matters, the students were almost invariably right. She was accused of courting their favour; I would say more simply that she respected and loved them. From the widest political frame of government policy on the universities, right into the most intimate, protected, unrecorded moments of encounter with each individual student, from the economy to race, from the institutional to the affective, Cora always knew how to trace the lines.

To say this is to suggest that Cora, in her work and person, always gave a unique gloss to the feminist slogan that the personal is political, which defined so much of the spirit of those heady early years. Again, rereading her, my sense is that what she was doing consistently was to take that formula and place it into dialogue with both psychoanalysis and with Raymond Williams’s ‘structure of feeling’, so that the project is to give to the ‘personal’ a set of meanings rarely included in its common guise. This is feeling at once as history and community-determined affect, what the world does to the heart; but it is also feeling as something that is always in excess of those determinants, something fiercely, even alarmingly unpredictable, unmanageable and strange. As she openly suggests in Sea Changes, Marx and Freud come together here, but in ways that might have left them unrecognisable to themselves and to each other. For it is not a matter of adding history and psyche, or economic determination and the unconscious. The material determinations, the lived conditions, of reality seep into the tissue of our drives where their destinies can never be fully known. There is something un-masterable at play. It was this, Cora noted in a 2002 essay charting the vicissitudes of feministic scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft, that distinguished her own early writing on Wollstonecraft from the interpretations of Mary Poovey, for whom Wollstonecraft failed to jettison the individualism underpinning sentiment, and Barbara Taylor, for whom Wollstonecraft offered a stunning utopian unity of reasoned political and affective life (this was written a year before the publication of Taylor’s book on Wollstonecraft). For Cora, there was neither failure nor accomplished unity in Wollstonecraft’s tempestuous life of the mind. Affect is unruly: its political pertinence is precisely its capacity to turn things awry. This is, as I understand her, what makes sexuality the at once wild and unique calling card of feminism: ‘Revolutions have come and gone,’ she writes in a 1983 essay on Wollstonecraft, ‘and sexuality is once more at the head of feminist agendas in the West, the wild card whose suit and value shifts provocatively with history. As dream or nightmare, or both at once, it reigns in our lives as an anarchic force, refusing to be chastened or tamed by sense or conscience to a sentence in a revolutionary manifesto.’

But it is also, in an answering move, what brings subjectivity right to the heart of political analysis of any kind:

We need a perspective on history and subjectivity to understand why social movements develop and fail, what sustains the collective morale of a strike, the popularity of a peace movement, the anger of an ethnic community, the defiance of a young civil servant. Without an analysis of the structure of feeling, it is hard to get below the surface of sexual differentiation and subordination, and to understand in what circumstances and in what terms women will rebel or submit.

We need, that is, to understand what the world does to the mind in order to grasp what the mind can, and cannot, do with itself.

In the writing that followed, that brief sustained itself. Of course it shifted guise, as it had to if the responsiveness of her thinking to the felt political moment was to be upheld. So let me just briefly take two instances: the first her Pavis lecture at the Open University in 2003, ‘The Death of the Working Class Hero’; the second her inaugural lecture at Southampton in 1998, ‘Black Heroes/White Writers: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Literary Imagination’.

In the Pavis lecture, Cora talks about men. Men as recast, under the rhetoric of New Labour, from working-class subjects to men whose pathologised identities – as threat, underclass, yobs (how prescient can you be?) – silently but powerfully disable any potential analysis of New Labour’s modernising agenda, its reliance on Thatcher’s destruction of heavy industry, its substitution of the language of meritocracy for that of inequality. This, she argued, was deliberate and strategic: ‘to make “class” itself, especially but not exclusively “working class”, obsolete or “history” as a term of social analysis. Consequently, class becomes part of a version of the past where, if it were personified as male, he would be one of the disappeared.’

At the heart of the firefighters’ pay strike of 1997-98, Cora believed, was the relentless attempt by government, with the backing of an often compliant media, to categorise workers’ resistance as archaic and redundant. In this reading, social exclusion replaces class; and men, torn from their class affiliations, suffer not from their structured position within a system of inequality, but as individuals failing to fulfil their promise in the new modern world. But it is what Cora does with that analysis that is so remarkable. Picking up the strand of affect, as it threads its way through her writing, she mounts a defence of sentiment in three films of working-class life and community, in each of which cultural activity becomes the transforming instance of destroyed lives, and feeling, performed and displayed in cultural activity, becomes the residue of a political consciousness that will not go away. Only one of the films – Billy Elliot – is in real trouble here for so utterly displacing heroism into the body of the unique, transcendent artist. The body rising miraculously in the final frame of the film is too close to the ever-aspiring, insufficiently grounded, meritocracy so proudly promoted as a generalised ethos by Blair, an ethos more or less completely discredited today.

But in the other two films, Brassed Off and The Full Monty, it is the ability of these communities to use their cultural, musical expression, however sentimentally framed, as at once counter to and acknowledgement of their dire predicament that makes them so powerfully resonant as resistance to New Labour’s bland appropriation of, or disappearing of, working-class life. In this sense, I see the essay as running right back to Cora’s earliest work on Wollstonecraft, its appeal for the politically transformative and enabling potential of affect. Sentiment is never pure sentimentality, as recent literary analysts of the 18th century have demonstrated in their different ways; it can also be the lifeblood of political self-knowledge and understanding.

Cora’s Southampton inaugural address was also about heroism – one of the key links between these two extraordinary papers – as if she were saying that the register of affect must now take another turn. It must address the role of identification, what makes people believe, fervently, inspirationally, sometimes dangerously, in each other. To cite those lines again: ‘Without an analysis of the structure of feeling, it is hard to get below the surface of sexual differentiation and subordination, and to understand why and in what terms women [but not only women, as the Pavis lecture makes clear] will rebel or submit.’ ‘We don’t need another hero’ (I can’t remember if that is a Barbara Kruger poster or a song by Tina Turner – I think both). Once again, Cora unpacks a rallying cry. In this instance, she is taking another strand, which runs back to the inclusion of Phillis Wheatley, also a heroine in her time as the first published African American poetess, in Cora’s groundbreaking anthology of women poets, Salt and Bitter and Good (1975). What makes a black hero? What are the terms of fantasy, projection, idealisation and revulsion through which Toussaint L’Ouverture enters the Western literary imagination, troubling and confirming its worst racial stereotypes at one and the same time? What place for the black women in those decisive and fraught idealisations? What I love about this paper is the way that the issue of the racial image becomes – as she tracks Toussaint L’Ouverture’s multiple written incarnations, from Harriet Martineau to C.L.R. James to the American poet and playwright Ntozake Shange – a question of the most visceral, inner-held feelings of love and hate. If racism is in itself a structure of feeling, it is one that touches on the furthest reaches of what the literary imagination, and indeed the mind, can bear to acknowledge about itself.

One further point. At the height of the scandal over weapons of mass destruction in 2004, just after the Hutton Report had been published, Cora said to me that at last literary criticism was coming into its own. Everything hung on the slightest nuance and word, as though journalists had become linguists, poring over every possible meaning, and also archivists, as they compared documents, pitching revisions against their forgotten (conveniently forgotten) or hidden source. Just for a moment, the rise and fall of a government seemed to hang on what some of us do for a living. It was of course immensely gratifying. Cora’s writing has that effect: she made you feel that the destiny of a nation turns on the words it produces about itself. I can’t reproduce the impression, but in ‘Black Heroes/White Writers’, we get the same sense of urgency, as if a romantic sensibility, and the political world out of which it was born, hung on Wordsworth’s tormented poetic returns to, revisions and redraftings of his encounter with a black female slave.

This is also one of my favourite papers because it returns Cora to her fathers. Sea Changes ends with an essay in which she describes how she abandoned her thesis on Thomas Paine for her anthology of women’s poetry, from which, of course, in one sense she never looked back. In that essay she acknowledged that this path was charted at least partly by the need to leave her father’s scholarly and political agenda and injunctions behind (he was one of the founders of race studies in the US). From the rights of man to the wrongs of women, and women’s voices, Cora made Wollstonecraft’s journey deeply her own. But that would not, could not – for a socialist feminist – possibly be all. From her early critique of Kate Millett, Cora made clear that patriarchy is never singular, obdurate or simply personified in its worst rigidity by each and every male. Men are not just the enemy; they are – as fathers, but of course not only as fathers – subjects who leave the most complex, ambivalent legacies in the female mind. In her inaugural lecture, her father returns in the first line as the figure who taught her that hero-worship could be a radical, enabling identification. Through the trope of race, she returns, I will risk saying, to the land of her fathers. But you would have to read the essay, watch the presence of the female slave slipping in and out of focus in Wordsworth’s poetry, listen to Harriet Martineau struggling with the same imaginary territory, note the consistent attention to what the black woman does for white literary consciousness, to see, in terms of racial struggle, what a different, and not necessarily better, world it is today.

In 1981-82 there was one of those big freezes across England which become mythical over time, when all life and certainly most traffic comes to a halt. Students would arrive with tales of opening car windows – they didn’t own the cars, of course, they had no money even then – to be confronted with a sheer pane of ice. I remember Cora arriving one day in a panic because just before setting off from London, she had placed her files on the roof of her car while she cleared the windscreen and had then blithely driven off only to arrive and find they had gone (sadly they had not frozen to the roof). I shared her worry but was also, I must confess, delighted: that was the kind of thing I did, and indeed still do, all the time. But what I remember most clearly was what happened when she told Alan Sinfield and me, with no small embarrassment, that, after hours on the road, she also had to stop the car, in the long tailback over the Downs, to relieve herself on the side of the road. Without a second’s hesitation, Alan said that was, Cora, not your most, but nonetheless a truly revolutionary feminist moment. Writing books, he suggested, was all very well but was she aware – she should be congratulating herself – of the effect on the audience in the queue of stationary cars that her gesture would have had? It wasn’t the first, and I am sure that it will not be the last, time that I found myself envying the scandalous political nous of Cora. Although she warns us more than once against nostalgia in her writing, it is really hard for me not to be nostalgic about those remarkable Sussex days when I had the privilege of working with her, a privilege that extended to the time we shared at Queen Mary. That is one reason, but only one, why, as we struggle to define and redefine ourselves as political subjects in a darkening world, to meet the need, as she puts it at the end of the Pavis lecture, to reinvent ‘new forms of feeling … in ways that we will struggle, and must struggle, to imagine’, I – we – will go on learning from Cora Kaplan.