CI FORUM: Pedagogical Sex
Kincaid, "Response"
page 2 of 3

Still, I'm not going to waste this opportunity to say something to the readers of Critical Inquiry, who have been voted the most alert by far among habitual readers of scholarly journals. If I have room--ten double-spaced pages they gave me!--I have a few probably unique ideas on the ending of Great Expectations I will outline before I'm done. I'll never get another chance like this. Anyhow, Jane Gallop and Ann Pellegrini don't need me, a man they have cushioned between them, to speak out on the things Tania and Terry have charged them with.

I would like to spend the time remaining to me, then, discussing some of the allegiances shared by Modleski and Caesar and some of the procedures the allegiances seem to force on them. Mainly, I wonder why Modleski never questions the implications of granting to power such metaphysical power and why Caesar, who recognizes the issue, still grants power such primacy. Both act as if power were an explanatory center that was not really an explanatory center but a truth, a deity, that which encompasses and directs all other explanations. Both set themselves up as followers out to police any discourse that fails to follow the set rituals of worship and faithfully to produce, once again, the reassuringly orthodox arguments. I think myself that power is a useful way of explaining power, not truth, and that it offers a wonderful way of showing how power operates, not how the world operates as a whole. I don't pretend that any center can tell us how the world operates as a whole. I do not claim that for the absurdist, nonsequential comic mode I use, the one Modleski characterizes as being just one more white male power mode, as if only whites and males had ever used it. Modleski is right that one can analyze comic modes by way of a power center; what she will not grant is the reverse, that power explanations are susceptible to an absurdist or nonlinear understanding that can be just as revealing and active in the world. She thinks, and so does Caesar, that power explanations are not only privileged but have bullying rights over all others.

Both the Tania and Terry responses, let's notice, put heavy weight on heartbreaking anecdotes to illustrate, not how useful power analyses can be, but how they are the only analyses that are cogent. The suggestion--well, it's more than a suggestion--is that all stories are like these if we could only see it and that any way of viewing them outside the iron grip of power is irresponsible, indecent. This all reminds me of family reunions, where weighty issues of health, highway construction, and morality were settled by citing the case of Aunt Emma and Uncle Russ. Here, the much more sophisticated Caesar and Modleski--they would have hated our family reunions--show how persuasive power analyses can be by offering the equivalent of Christian morality or faith-healing stories. They give us no place to stand except with the broken life and no way to view the story aside from the abuse of power.