Patti Smith and Performative Gender
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Résumés
Patti Smith once said, ‘being any gender is a drag,’ To her gender was like clothing, to be changed at will. In transvestism she found a way to experiment with her own gender identity and then to challenge the gender divide. To explore how she did so, I analyze her creative works, starting with her early poems in Seventh Heaven, Babel, and WĪTT, and moving to her punk rock song ‘Land’. I draw on Judith Butler’s notion of performative gender and then reveal the significance of what Smith eventually achieved, the sonic language she presented in her musical performances.
Pour Patti Smith, ‘devoir appartenir à un genre est vraiment pénible’. Pour elle, le genre devrait être comme un vêtement, dont on pourrait changer à volonté. Elle a trouvé dans le transvestisme une façon d’expérimenter avec sa propre identité genrée et de remettre en question la dichotomie du genre. Pour explorer la façon dont elle a procédé, j’analyserai sa production artistique, en commençant par ses premiers poèmes, parus dans Seventh Heaven, Babel et dans WĪTT, puis le morceau de punk rock ‘Land’. Je m’appuierai sur la notion de genre performatif développée par Judith Butler, et conclurai en insistant sur l’importance de ce que Smith a élaboré, un langage sonique qu’elle utilise pour son œuvre musicale.
Texte intégral
Introduction
1In the early 1970s, the New York City punk rock icon Patti Smith, then in her mid-20s, agonized over her given gender identity: female. The 1970s are known for being disrupted partly by the second wave of women’s liberation, which many say began with Betty Friedan’s iconic The Feminine Mystique (1963). At the time, while many women activists fought to eliminate social injustice against women, some feminist artists, including Judy Chicago, Adrian Piper, and Mary Kelly, were actively redefining femininity itself. To Smith, however, this was not enough. She was eager to push farther, to challenge the so-called gender divide: the gender differences that regulate men and women. When she decided to become a rock musician, rock music was still regarded as belonging to a male domain; guitars were still considered male instruments. Smith was one of the earliest women rock musicians to step into this men’s realm. As far as she was concerned, she said, ‘being any gender is a drag’ (Jahr). Here she showed her indifference to gender, her refusal to recognize it as original or authentic. To her, gender was like clothing, something one could change at will. And by performing in drag, she could compare gender to clothing. While she accepted gender differences, she believed everyone should have the freedom to choose their gender, and in transvestism she found a way to experiment with her own gender identity. She was hardly the first woman to use drag as a means to assimilate into men’s world; consider the French woman writer George Sand (1804–76). For Smith, however, drag extended further; she saw it as a way to challenge the social order, which prescribes the gender divide as given.
2The question I address here is how she challenged that order through drag. I answer this question by analyzing her creative works, starting with her early poems in Seventh Heaven (1972), Babel (1973), and WĪTT (1978), and moving to her punk rock song ‘Land.’ In Seventh Heaven she demonstrated her uncertainty about her own gender identity and played with performances to explore both genders. In Babel, she took words apart and reinvented them into what she called babelogue, to bridge the gap among the disassociated elements she created, including genders. She eventually defined babelogue as sonic language and presented it in her musical performances as the redefinition of verbal language. To develop my theoretical speculation about this process, I draw on Judith Butler’s notion of performative gender. As it is applicable to Smith’s performative experiments, I believe it is useful for deciphering her series of experiments on poetic language centering around her song ‘Land’ (Horses, 1975). The song is symbolic in the sense that it is full of fragmented memories from her poems in Seventh Heaven, Babel and WĪTT on the one hand, and heralds her forthcoming performances as a rock musician on the other. My question then leads me to elaborate on the relationship between her performative experiments and her desire to go beyond the gender divide, and then to reveal what she eventually achieves. In the process, I demonstrate the significance of her performative gender.
Performative Gender
3In her early days as a punk rocker, Smith performed in drag as a man. Around the time when she released her first album Horses, her favorite style of dress was mostly black: slim black pegged pants, a black silk shirt, and a black silk bow tie, ‘her Baudelaire dress suit’.1 On top of that she wore a white cotton T-shirt, imitating the style of Keith Richards.2 She finished it off with white shoes, which she wore as a tribute to the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones and Jeff Beck—but she wore either white ballet slippers or white Capezios.3 She believed that having a distinctive style was very important for an artist or rock musician; it was ‘a spirited part’ of her artistic creativity.4 Remembering her photo sessions with Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–89) for her Horses’ cover jacket, she wrote:
The pursuit of style has always been a spirited part of the work process. Images that inform the work or the movement of the work. . . A sense of style. A certain body language. A simple, intricate gesture. More often than not, bred from innocence, awkwardness, or pure survival.
(Smith, Patti Smith Complete, 5)
4In the same passage, to emphasize the significance of style in artistic creativity, she gave the examples of Baudelaire’s cravat and Bob Dylan’s snap tab collar. Why did she choose to wear men’s clothes as her own style? In an interview, she said, ‘I was always a tom-boy. I hated being a girl. I was always Flash Gordon,5 not his old lady, I never identified with any female at all.’ (Green, n.p.)6
5Smith’s use of the word ‘tomboy’ indicates that she was having deep trouble identifying herself as a woman. She was upset and bewildered at being a woman, and described her agony in her poem ‘Female’:
female. feel male. Ever since I felt the need to choose I’d choose male. . . . Every feminine gesture I affected from my mother humiliated me. . . . Growing breasts was a nightmare. . . . I begged him to place me in my own barbaric race. The male race. The race of my choice.
(Smith, Seventh Heaven, 44)
6Here again, she showed her strong desire to identify herself as a man instead of a woman. Was she suffering from a gender identity disorder? No. She simply couldn’t figure out what was happening as she grew into adult womanhood, as she described in another interview:
And the truth of the matter is I’m really a late bloomer. I’m still a tomboy, old as I am. When I was writing my Seventh Heaven book, which has a lot about women and seducing girls, I was in my early twenties and going through this big crisis that I had to learn how to become a girl. Then I was a total boy. I was walking around like ‘Don’t Look Back.’7 I was part Bob Dylan, part Keith Richards, and I figured, fuck guys, I got to learn how to be a girl. (Gross, n.p.)
7Later in the same interview, Smith said she watched Jeanne Moreau movies over and over to learn the way she walked; she tried to walk in high heels, and bought silk stockings and garter belts, but still didn’t know how to put on makeup or how to walk in shoes with higher heels than sneakers.
8These details show that, for Smith, femininity, like masculinity, was a particular kind of drag, a stylistic gesture or performance in which she could try on gender differences. Also, the fact that she always had models for any styles she followed clearly suggests the imitative nature of her drag.8 Furthermore, in addition to challenging the gender divide through the drag she expressed in her poems, she pulled animals, the dead, and even rapists into her drag performances.
I think of myself not as male or female or rapist but as a comedian. . . . When I’m writing, I’m just like a novelist. Novelists have to slip into the skins of all kinds of people and so do I. . . . I get into so many genders I couldn’t even tell you. I’ve written from the mouth of a dog, a horse, dead people, anything. I don’t limit myself to anything.
(Gross, n.p.)
9But probably her most intriguing comparison during this era was between herself and a comedian—not an actor. A comedian is an indispensable part of parody, which is meant to mimic the style of somebody or something in an exaggerated way, especially in order to make people laugh. In addition, Smith’s words resonate curiously with Butler’s description of the relationship between parody and drag:
The notion of an original or primary gender identity is often parodied within the cultural practices of drag, cross-dressing, and the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities. (Butler, 174)
10According to Butler, drag parodies gender identity. Further, she explains why parodic proliferation denies the notion of originality:
In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency. . . . Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original; just as the psychoanalytic notion of gender identification is constituted by a fantasy of a fantasy, the transfiguration of an Other who is always already a ‘figure’ in that double sense, so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin.
(Butler, 175, italics in original)
11To Butler, the parody reveals that there is no such thing as an original. Without an original, she argues, parodic proliferation leads people to perpetually resignify and recontextualize their identities; in theory it eventually denies the existence of naturalized gender identities as such. She writes,
This perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities. (Butler, 176)
12Butler turned this idea into her strategic tool to challenge gender identities as given and introduced an alternative argument to gender dichotomy, which she believes leads only to deadlock. Her argument marked a historic milestone in the sense that she questioned the subjection of women (and therefore men) as stable terms based on fundamental sexual difference. Instead, she tried to open up the field of possibility for gender. As in Butler’s argument, Smith’s use of drag, which began with her confusion about or resistance to being a woman, then led her to realize that gender is parody; therefore it was open, as Butler would put it, to perpetual resiginification and recontexualization. On the other hand, Joan Copjec points out the role that limits play in this process: only with limits, she says, can we be sure that meanings will be continuously revised. She writes:
. . . only a closed totality can be considered infinite; only a limit guarantees that the production of meaning will continuously be subject to revision, never ending. Rather than baring the device of difference behind the illusion of totality, Lacanian theory reverses these terms and shows the infinite play of difference to be dependent on a limit, a closed totality. (Copjec, 60)
13Returning to Butler’s argument, Copjec points out its contradictory nature by saying that the perpetual resignification and recontexualization of gender identities are possible only in a closed totality. Further, she claims, ‘The paradox derives from a definition of the whole such that one of its essential features is its superiority to its parts’ (Copjec, 60). In fact, it was on this point that Smith’s gender performance, or drag, later encountered trouble.
14I will begin by examining Butler’s argument; she tries to liberate female subjects from a prison of gender by arguing that there is no such thing as gender as given, but only gender parody. If Butler is right, gender identity will be disturbed by the parody called drag and will become meaningless. This is her very strategy in Gender Trouble. The question is whether we can capture Smith’s gender trouble within this context.
15In this paper, the central focus of my analysis is on Smith’s early song ‘Land’ from her first album Horses.9 As I discuss in more detail later, ‘Land’ turned out to be fundamental to her entire creative œuvre. Therefore, analyzing this song should lead us to the thematic subject of this paper and eventually help us decipher her gender trouble as such.
Ambiguous Distance
16Smith’s debut album Horses describes the dark perverse world deriving from her first book of poems, Seventh Heaven (1972), which allegedly reflects her ambiguous attitude toward her own gender identity. Many of the poems in the book are written from a male perspective; she speaks of women using the first person singular, and a male persona. According to these analysts, this implies that Smith hesitated to identify herself as a woman and instead spoke of her desire to become a man. In fact, she admitted to writing many poems in Seventh Heaven from a male perspective, wondering what it would feel like for a man to write about a woman (Green, n.p.). I suggest, however, that it was only her ambiguous attitude toward her gender identity that drove her to express that idea. I believe it would be useful to look at it from the opposite direction, taking her poem ‘Girl Trouble’ as an example:
A heavenly body. Anita Pallenberg10 in a south american bar. the back of her dress cut so low as to reveal the crease of her buttocks. bottoms up. I sashay in. me I’m dog jones.11 a few quick shots and I get my nerve up. I’m ready to fish my fingers in. part that butt and press against her opening. like a door bell buzzer. until she lets me in. (Smith, Seventh Heaven, 26)
17Here Smith plays the role of a man seducing a woman, saying ‘me I’m dog jones.’ But she actually creates a banal theatricality by using so many stereotypes: a sexy woman in a South American bar, a lady-killer who sashays in (sashays suggests a ballet dancer), and the term ‘dog jones,’ which compares him to a penis. Neither the sexy woman nor the lady-killer is a real person; both are exaggerated, stereotyped characters. Instead, Smith creates a parody by playing the role of an exaggerated male persona. This piece is not based on ambiguity about her gender identity; instead, she generates such ambiguity by intentionally creating a parody, playing on the stereotypes. So, anyone who would snicker at Smith’s male persona must already be taken in by her fantasy.
18In another poem, ‘Fantasy,’ she writes:
he says on your back bitch.
I crouch down.
he shoves the whole barrel up
my cunt. cocks the lever
pulls the trigger.
blows his load.12 (Smith, Seventh Heaven, 31)
19In this poem, ‘I’ represents a woman being raped by a man. Using terms from combat such as ‘cocks’ and ‘load,’ Smith describes ‘I’ as a victim of a sexual crime. The poem is written from the male perspective, creating the image of a woman victim. Curiously enough, ‘Fantasy’ will draw the same type of snicker as ‘Girl Trouble’. This is because it draws on a cliché in hardboiled crime novels: comparing a love-making scene to a state of war. Throughout Seventh Seven, we can see Smith continuing to play with drag and repeat such parodies.
20On the other hand, when Smith is not acting as a man, she looks vulnerable. We find this version of her in poems like ‘Edie Sedgewick,’ ‘Marianne Faithfull,’ ‘marilyn miller,’ ‘mary jane,’ ‘amelia earhart,’ ‘sally,’ and ‘judith,’ all carrying titles that are women’s names. For instance, in ‘judith,’ Smith writes:
. . . but the girl I’d like to touch. we’ve shared a bed but I could not touch her. she turned on her side. I could not touch her. rustling of new sheets. a very humid memory. but I could not touch her. nor would she touch me. plea plead pleading.
(Smith, Seventh Heaven, 31)
21Knowing that the writer is a woman, some see a kind of lesbian fantasy in this poem (Jahr, n.p.). In an earlier passage we read, ‘I love her like judas loved jesus. . . . illustrating the drawbacks of homosexual love’—and the intuition as such looks confirmed. But Smith clearly denies it and rather something more peculiar emerges here instead (Jahr, n.p.).
22Compared with ‘Girl Trouble’ and ‘Fantasy,’ the above poem demonstrates what I call an ambiguous distance, or a relationship that relates ‘I’ to ‘the girl’. Here it is expressed in ‘we’ve shared a bed but I could not touch her’. We find this ambiguous distance in other poems that carry women’s names, where women like Edie Sedgewick and Marianne Faithfull are described as idols Smith is always longing for. Can we simply name this ambiguous relationship as lesbian desire, as other authors have? It may not be that simple. To my mind, it is this ambiguous distance that represents the unknown that Smith is persistently driven to explore through her drag performances and to redefine through her perpetual gender performances. In other words, what we see right here is the creative source of her all artistic works.
23What can we call this nameless entity? Can we use the Julia Kristeva’s term, subject-in-process, as Reynolds and Press suggest? They write that some women ‘artists have worked from within the problematic of (female) identity. Their aesthetic has been based. . . in what Julia Kristeva calls a subject-in-process’ (Reynolds and Press, 354). Reynolds and Press continue, ‘this torn subjectivity is expressed through language that’s fractured and frayed, that oscillates between incoherence and visionary lucidity’ (Reynolds and Press, 354). While women artists often find their primary cause in social as well as personal empowerment, and that connection often attracts the most scholarly interest, Reynolds and Press look to Smith’s confused gender identity as her creative source. I agree with their argument, up to a point. Although she would eventually dismiss this perspective, Smith herself would not see the contradiction in it until later on. For the time being, then, I will follow their argument.
24Turning back to the text, the dark perverse world Smith describes in Seventh Heaven derives not from sexual perversity, but from her intrinsic ambiguity about her gender identity. To save herself from this turmoil, Smith repeats drag performances, searches for words, keeps traveling, dives into the deep sea, and flies high in the sky. For practical purposes, I use the term ‘uncertainty’ for her efforts to describe this ambiguous distance or relationship between ‘I’ and the other. From this premise, I now turn to Horses, whose story continues from Seventh Heaven.
25Horses is full of memories as well as traces of change from Seventh Heaven. For instance, Smith covered ‘Gloria,’ a song by the all-male Northern Irish rock band Them13 and an anthem of American garage bands. The song includes these lines:
I look out the window see a sweet young thing
Humping on the parking meter leaning on the parking meter
Oh, she looks so good. Oh, she looks so fine
And I got this crazy feeling that I’m gonna make her mine.
(Smith, Patti Smith Complete, 8)
26‘I’ sings of seeing ‘a sweet young thing’ but the gender of ‘I’ is unknown. The all-male Them sang the original, implying a male ‘I’ and thus making the gender-free ‘thing’ a female. As if to confirm this, one line down we read, ‘Oh, she looks so good. Oh, she looks so fine;’ later in the song Marie Ruth is given as the name of the sweet young thing. Some authors saw lesbian desire in the song when Smith sang it.14 Based on my argument, however, the persona is quite intentionally male. Either way, what is most important here is that the gender identity of ‘I’ is not disclosed and remains uncertain to the end. Put another way, at this stage in Smith’s development, the uncertainty is so clear that it can keep the nameless entity sexually ambiguous. In ‘Land,’ however, Smith reworked the above passage from ‘Gloria’:
When he looked out into the street
Saw this sweet young thing
Humping on the parking meter
Leaning on the parking meter
In the sheets there was a man
Everything around him unraveling like some long Fender whine
Dancing around to the simple rock and roll song.
(Smith, Patti Smith Complete, 38)
27Now the ‘I’ in ‘Gloria’ is a ‘he,’ and what ‘he’ sees has been changed to ‘a man’ in addition to the gender-free ‘sweet young thing’ as derived from ‘Gloria’. Curiously enough, however, the man is surrounded by the sound of a Fender electric guitar and a rock and roll song. What happened in between ‘Gloria’ and ‘Land’? To find out, I now analyze the text of ‘Land.’
Cutting Up
28The text of ‘Land’ looks to me as if tenaciously resisting any possible interpretation; it is full of surrealistic symbols, schizophrenic syntax, and techniques that cut up the text. An example of a surrealistic symbol is the word ‘mare’ at the beginning of the third section. As Reynolds and Press point out, for adolescent girls, horses ‘have long figured. . . as a symbol of potency and independence,’ and in Smith’s vision, they ‘become the image of elemental power, natural grace, and unbridled freedom’ (Reynolds and Press, 357). Furthermore, the pronunciation of the word sounds the same as the subtitle of the third section la mer de, which means ‘the sea of’ in French and connects to the ‘sea of possibilities’ in the text. La mer also sounds like ‘la mère,’ French for mother. Meanwhile, la mer de sounds like ‘la merde,’ French for feces; in its vulgar usage many people find it offensive. Smith continued this word-association endlessly, cutting up words and playing with their semantic functions.
29To give examples of what I mean by schizophrenic syntax, several deictic words and personal pronouns are incompatible in the second and third sections. Smith refers to a boy named Johnny using various personal pronouns such as ‘he,’ ‘you,’ and ‘we,’ creating a narrator without a continuous perspective. Thus she cuts up various characters in her story, and possibly also the narrator herself.
30Finally, turning to the cut-up techniques, the character Johnny is derived from William S. Burroughs’s The Wild Boys: The Book of the Dead,15 so we can assume that Smith had been thoroughly exposed to Burroughs, including his techniques of cut-up. The dreamlike incoherent flux of time and space in ‘Land’ is one example of this technique. We readers seem to be seeing randomly fragmented and patched up images. Smith begins by setting up the whole story as a movie. At the beginning of the first section, Johnny sees another boy approaching him in the hallway with some malicious intent, but then the narrator says, ‘but the movie kept moving as planned’ (Smith, Patti Smith Complete, 31). Then, in the third section, in the sea, a movie screen suddenly appears and an image of Johnny is projected, along with the words ‘And I looked at Johnny’ (Smith, Patti Smith Complete, 37).
31In this way, while a movie is in progress, the story begins with Johnny challenged by another boy in a locker room followed by a herd of horses and then moves on to an intense dance scene. Then suddenly appears ‘I’ as a character who runs away and somehow finds itself in the forest and sees a horse. ‘I’ puts its fingers through its hair to find a staircase. ‘I’ then climbs the stairs and finds the sea or the land. ‘I’ here could be Johnny himself. Or, singing the song, Smith herself could be ‘I.’ Toward the end, a street, a parking meter, and a man appears out of the blue. Incoherent fragments pile up; disconnected characters such as a boy, an angel, the sweet little thing, and a man come and go without context. Thus she cuts up the text of ‘Land’ in many ways and ends up with chaos.16
32But why did Smith feel so strongly that she should cut up her own text? To my mind, she became caught in a kind of trap as she applied her drag techniques to her verbal experiments. If we look only at the result, we can read it as the language cutting up our physical presence: the body. In this regard, Lacan argues:
In fact the subject of the unconscious is only in touch with the soul via the body, by introducing thought into it: . . . Man does not think with his soul, as the Philosopher17 imagined. . . . He thinks as a consequence of the fact that a structure, that of language—the word implies it—a structure carves up his body, a structure that has nothing to do with anatomy. (Lacan, 6)
33Put another way, disassociation brought about by language cuts up the body and drives us to look for the self beyond our physical presence. The problem here is that infinite amounts of disassociation can be created through this cutting-up technique. Butler argues that this is an effective strategy, but in fact, as Copjec says, without limits there is no goal. Smith, who tries to redefine words, finds that this is not what she wants. On redefining words, she writes: ‘How then to communicate? To reinvent words. Disassociate them. Redefine them’ (Smith, Patti Smith Complete, 46, emphasis added).
34Thus Smith uses three activities to realize a kind of communication as embodied toward the end of the song as dissolving images of all characters into the rock and roll sound: reinvent words, disassociate them, and redefine them. Her claim here shows a close affinity with what she tries to demonstrate in her parodic performances, which derive from the idea of disassociation: one must introduce distance into an inseparable relationship in order to redefine the other. For example, the love story between ‘I’ and Marie Ruth in ‘Gloria’ continues into ‘Land,’ where she develops ‘I’ into another persona, Johnny, to create a disassociation within ‘I’. Then ‘I’ and Johnny converge into the image of a man to redefine ‘I’. This might explain why she had to cut up the text of ‘Land’ at the beginning. That is, the purpose of disassociation is to prepare for a forthcoming redefinition; at the same time this is the very mechanism of babelogue that Smith continues to search out.
35In order to redefine what was disassociated, one has to retrieve the pieces, while retaining the significance of disassociation, and connect them within the totality. This eventually challenges the definition of the whole as given. But how is this possible?
Babelogue
36To explore this issue, I take a close look at ‘Land’ again in its entirety, though I examined some fragmented passages in the section above. To begin with, Smith says she was inspired to write ‘Land’ when she read her poem ‘WĪTT’ at a public poetry reading event. She kept working on the poem for the next two years and wrote some 20 different stories for it. As the time and effort she devoted to the poem suggest, ‘Land’ became the pivotal point around which her ideas accumulated (Hiss and McClelland, n.p.). In ‘WĪTT, ’ she described a carnival of fools who lost their souls on a shadowy island in a pitch-black night, with neither sunshine nor moonlight. ‘I,’ living on this island, narrates a story, which begins with the phrase ‘where there were angels I saw no one,’ and then continues on to a travelogue, during which ‘I’ meets a white eagle in the jungle. The story goes as follows:
see me walk thru the jungle. naked how noble. . . . overhead is the white eagle. . . . he’s big as a hut now. his cock comes down. like a ladder from the belly of the helicopter rescue. . . . he’s upon me. we know what to do. to move the night with love. synchronization of breath. . . . and me I’m one gaping hole. a cock pit. and his (the eagles) is so fitting. (Smith, WĪTT, 13)
37Just after this love-making scene, the story ends with the following three lines: ‘virtue expendable. angels blotted/ where there were no spiders I saw spiders/penetration til it comes like the flood’.
38What I see as important here is the fact that ‘I’ experienced some sort of penetration just after she made love with the white eagle. Penetration has multiple definitions. When love-making is the premise, however, it naturally means the act of a male putting his penis into his partner’s vagina or anus. Still, we should not overlook the phrase ‘angels blotted / where there were no spiders I saw spiders’. In this context, penetration could mean insight, the ability to see the intrinsic nature of the world. In ‘WĪTT,’ then, penetration has two overlapping meanings: inserting a penis and gaining insight.
39Turning now to ‘Land,’ the entire story has three sections. In the first section, subtitled Horses, Johnny the rock and roll boy is beaten up by another boy, and then finds himself surrounded by a herd of horses coming from all directions. Now he is in Land of a Thousand Dances, the subtitle of the second section and the cover version of Fats Domino’s 1963 hit song. In the midst of a crazy two-beat dance called watusi, Johnny meets ‘I’. Then Johnny and ‘I’ step out of that orgy and come to a quiet forest. This is the beginning of the third section, which is subtitled La Mer (de).
40In the forest, ‘I’ sees a black mare with shining yellow hair and puts its fingers through the mare’s shining hair and finds a staircase. The stair here corresponds to the ladder in ‘WĪTT,’ which ‘I’ climbed before the white eagle’s cock descended from its belly. The difference from ‘WĪTT’ is that ‘I’ immediately climbs the stairs. This is a significant change: the act of climbing up changes the role of the stairs, to insertion (of penis) from (penis) being inserted. The stair embodies invasion, a positive attack. Placed in a gender issue context, ‘I’ no longer plays the role of a passive woman but is now an active man. Put another way, ‘I’ as a woman now moves into the male position of controlling a penis as a symbolic tool for invasion. Then ‘I’ climbs up to the top stair and sees ‘a sea of possibilities,’ followed by the phrase, ‘There is no land but the land. . ./ There is no sea but the sea.’ These words precisely rephrase the passage about spiders and angels in ‘WĪTT’. Here again, penetration turns into insight, the power to see the intrinsic nature of the world.
41Next, Johnny experiments with a blade: ‘He picked up the blade and he pressed it against/ His smooth throat and let it dip in [the veins]/ Dip in to the sea the sea of possibilities’ (Smith, Patti Smith Complete, 37). This passage implies that Johnny’s throat is part of the sea of possibilities. In another poem, ‘babel field,’ Smith more clearly relates the throat and the sea by writing of ‘the smooth throat of the sea of possibility’ (Smith, Babel, 198). After this, toward the final climax, Johnny and ‘I’ gradually converge into one image. The process is described in a written form of voice-over, with parts of the body cited in parentheses [] as in the lines below:
He opened his throat [your eyes] his vocal chords
Started shooting like [of a horse] mad pituitary glands
The scream he made [my heart] was so high
[My heart] pitched that nobody heard no one heard
That cry no one heard [Johnny] the butterfly flapping.
(Smith, Patti Smith Complete, 38)
42Finally, the story ends with the image of a man with ‘everything around unraveling like some long Fender whine,’ who is ‘ [d]ancing around to the simple rock and roll song’ (Smith, Patti Smith Complete, 38). As in the passages discussed earlier, it is the notion of penetration that holds the fragmented images together. But this raises a question: Why does Smith, who challenges the gender divide, dare to use this phallocentric notion at the core of her linguistic experiment? What is her real message? In her prose poem ‘Grant,’ she writes, ‘I recognize the tower of babel as a symbol of penetration. The symbol of a moment when mans desire to be close to god was so intense that he invaded his dreams’ (Smith, Babel, 26).
43The Tower of Babel was a symbolic architectural feature: because the entire world population spoke a common language, it threatened god’s power and authority over the world. From a different perspective, however, the tower symbolizes the potential for a common global language to facilitate mutual communication worldwide. Indeed, Smith describes the Tower of Babel as ‘being of one tongue and of one mind’ (Smith, Babel, 24). A plausible hypothesis here is that the tower embodies a certain kind of language, which functions as penetration. Of the word play between language and the body, Smith writes this in ‘Chain Gang’: ‘the architect climbed lingua/. . . he then translated the ladder/ as the letter and law of power/ this translation was then made/ into a body/ of motion, a vertical line./ a tower’ (Smith, Babel, 170).
44Assuming that lingua means both language and a physical tongue, as part of the biological body, the Tower of Babel can be read as the symbol of language. In turn, the expression ‘a body of motion’ leads us to see language as a biological entity with a certain will. Taken together with the above passage from ‘Grant,’ the description ‘the architect climbed lingua,’ in ‘Chain Gang,’ implies Smith’s intention to give language an active role: A symbolic function to destroy the pre-existing divide. This also applies to the ladder in ‘Land,’ which implies penetration. In other words, it is language that demolishes the divide. Therefore, I suggest, she uses the symbol of penetration symbolically, as the destruction of the divide that creates differences.
45The next question is why the image of the blade relates to penetration. In ‘Chain Gang,’ Smith writes of the blade as follows:
the people still attempt to connect. some become slaves to the post-relics of commune. what they once had made behind their eyes they were now fashioning with their hands. wordsmiths present it in the shape of good luck. a knife.18 a maker. a worker in metal. alchemists cracking the code egg of babel. (Smith, Babel, 172)
46The passage above describes the world after the Tower of Babel collapsed. People no longer make things behind their eyes; now they use their hands. Wordsmiths use the shape of a knife to replace the now-absent tower. Assuming that the tower represents penetration, and that the knife equals the tower, that knife could also represent penetration. By the same token, the alchemists could be the alter ego of the wordsmiths, and it could be that the knife cracks the egg. The next passage reads: ‘so it occurred and so it goes on/ miles of wire shaped like a chain/ the oe of a shoe and the ou of a soul/ dust of the word that shakes from a tale’ (Smith, Babel, 172).
47A chain, and the dust of a word, overflow out of the crack. If we see a crack as an act of destruction, what happens after the destruction, via penetration, is the regeneration of words. The chain of wire coming out of the egg of babel can be seen as a regenerated image of the tower. ‘Dust of the word’ may be a mark, which would endorse the intrinsic nature of the tower as language. In other words, the penetration represented as the Tower of Babel takes on two contradictory roles: destruction and regeneration. As in ‘the possibility was a blade’ (Smith, Patti Smith Complete, 38), however, the destruction only heralds the regeneration. As indicated by the crack in the egg of Babel, after the regeneration comes the destruction. There is no end to such a chain of reactions.
48One final point to discuss is her images of regeneration and destruction, which can be fluid (blood), or linear (chain-like wire).19 In the last scene of ‘Land,’ Smith writes: ‘His vocal chords shot up [possibility] like mad pituitary glands/ It was a black tube he felt himself disintegrate/ [There is nothing happening at all] and go inside the black tube’ (Smith, Patti Smith Complete, 38). In this passage, Johnny somehow feels himself disintegrating inside the black tube. The key word here is the tube. In ‘AFTER/WORDS,’ Smith refers to the tube:
. . . her delicate hands worked small miracles. slender celluloid tubes were swiftly inserted into the pores of the victim, a virgin. the tubes were tentacles melding w/her veins her dreams and deeper into the virginal light, the pool beneath memory. a ruby flux where no words were formed. the queen was a goddess strapping to herself a love mechanism—a device, designed for penetration.
(Smith, Babel, 54)
49Thus the tube is part of a device designed for penetration. If we hold this idea and return to ‘Land,’ we notice that penetration causes Johnny to feel himself disintegrating. When he feels himself going inside the tube, he is also entering the Tower of Babel as the embodiment of language. It looks like he might merge into language itself. In other words, Johnny, Smith’s alter ego, is turning into language itself. As a result, language becomes some kind of living thing with a will, which she calls ‘the physical hieroglyph; a dance or diagram of sound and movement’ (Smith, Babel, 176). This is exactly what she explored in her gender performance and what babelogue is all about. And finally, what was once called ambiguous distance or relationship now creates a new language and succeeds in finding its phantasmagoric identity, which is not enclosed in the totality but instead destabilizes it. Naturally, it provides a perfect escape from the system of knowledge, which creates the notion of gender identities as given.
Conclusion
50Smith’s ‘Land’ has shown itself to be a good example of Butler’s strategic gender performance, though it preceded Butler’s theorizing. On the other hand, Smith’s exploration eventually points to Butler’s theoretical limits. In turn, what Smith evolved was the notion of penetration that I have elaborated on here. In general, because the notion of penetration implies phallocentric imagery, feminist arguments tend to avoid discussing it, or even deny it. In her belief that ‘being any gender is a drag,’ Smith actively used this notion in her performances. By doing so, she challenged the gender divide and demonstrated that any possibilities of artistic creativity, including gender, lie dormant, between those pre-existing notions as given. As a biological female, Smith made what was, at the time, a profoundly significant move, by using a phallocentric word. Smith was one of the first female icons in popular culture to establish herself as a manlike woman. On the other hand, she never denied the existence of gender differences in masculinity or femininity, including their stereotypes. That is what allowed her to distinguish her argument from those of the feminists. Instead, as I have shown, Smith emphasized gender differences in her performance of drag. One plausible reason for her doing so might be the social taboo on sexual images, especially decades ago, which has long led artists to challenge such imagery for the sake of artistic creativity. In fact, Smith’s ‘Land’ is so full of sexual imagery that it almost suffocates the reader. The question is how to deal with it.
51In the last scene of ‘Land,’ the image of Johnny, Smith’s alter ego, dissolving into the rock and roll sound, resonates with her forthcoming attempt to be a gender-free rock and roll musician, the very embodiment of sonic language. As Smith wrote in 1976, it was an answer to her linguistic experiments. While she was working on her second album Radio Ethiopia (1976), she experienced the limits to her language-centered performances.
52Around this time she met Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith (1949–94), her future husband, who taught her to speak through her instrument. With ‘few words,’ he ‘showed me the way to draw from my instrument another language, or as he put it, to be sonically speaking’ (Smith, Patti Smith Complete, 46). Following his advice, Smith began her linguistic experiment through sonic language, which eventually meant her performance as a rock and roll musician.
53Smith’s travelogue began with her uncertain gender identity; through it she found that the notion of penetration could destroy the given order of gender differentiation, and she tried to free the creative energy that was wrapped up in gender. Smith implemented this in her drag performances as a man. As a result, her performative gender led her to become one of the first women to establish a positive image of manlike women in the rock and roll arena, which was then seen as a man’s realm.
Bibliographie
Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.
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Works Cited
Burroughs, William S. The Wild Boys: The Book of the Dead. New York: Grove Press, 1992.
10.4324/9780203902752 :Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin Books, 1965.
Green, Penny. Andy Warhol’s Interview. New York: Motion Olympus Inc., 1973, www.oceanstar.com/ Accessed September 26, 2011.
Gross, Amy. ‘Introducing Rock’N’Roll’s Lady Raunch: Patti Smith,’ Mademoiselle. September 1975: www.oceanstar.com/ Accessed September 26, 2011.
10.4324/9780203139943 :Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1988.
Hiss, Tony and David McClelland. ‘ “Gonna be so big! Gonna be a star, Watch me now!” So sings Patti Smith, legitimate poet turned rock artist. She has lived: her lyrics shoe scar tissues,’ The New York Times Magazine. December 21, 1975: www.oceanstar.com/ Accessed September 26, 2011
Jahr, Cliff. ‘Patti,’ New Times Magazine. December 26, 1975, www.oceanstar.com/ Accessed September 26, 2011.
Johnstone, Nick. Patti Smith: A Biography. London: Omnibus Press, 1997.
Lacan, Jacques. Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.
Pennebaker, D.A. Don’t Look Back (DVD). Sony Music Direct [1967], 2007.
Reynolds, Simon and Joy Press. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock’n’Roll. Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 1995.
Smith, Patti. A Useless Death. Stimula Books, 1972.
Smith, Patti. Seventh Heaven. Boston, MA: Telegraph Books, 1972.
Smith, Patti. WĪTT. New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1973.
Smith, Patti. Babel. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978.
Smith, Patti. Ha! Ha! Houdini!. London: FKN Ace Productions, 1978.
Smith, Patti. Early Work 1970–1979. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.
10.5962/bhl.title.155399 :Smith, Patti. Horses (CD). BMG Japan, 1996.
Smith, Patti. Patti Smith Complete: Lyrics, Reflections, and Notes for the Future. New York: Doubleday, 1998.
10.2307/j.ctvg254jd :Smith, Patti. Land 1975–2002 (CD). BMG Japan, 2002.
Smith, Patti. Radio Ethiopia (CD). BMG Japan, 2007.
Smith, Patti. Wave (CD). BMG Japan, 2007.
Smith, Patti. Dream of Life (CD). BMG Japan, 2009.
Smith, Patti. Easter (CD). BMG Japan, 2009.
Notes de bas de page
1 To her, black was the color of poets: ‘his clothes are black because he is a poet. black is the uniform, the skin of poets’ (Smith, Babel, 129).
2 Keith Richards (b. 1943), the English musician, songwriter, and founding member of the Rolling Stones, was one of the icons whom Smith admired.
3 Smith confessed she chose this style quite consciously: ‘A black boy’s suit jacket from Saks Fifth Avenue. Once, I went to Saks and watched a 13-year-old Catholic boy and his mother choose a suit, then I bought the same one. . . Sometimes a black schoolboy’s tie or a black ribbon satin tie. Then white shoes, a tribute to the Rolling Stones’ High Tide and Green Glass greatest hits album. Brian Jones always wore white shoes, Mick does. It’s a rock’n’roll tradition. Jeff Beck always wears white sneaks.’ (Hiss and McClelland, n.p.)
4 Dick Hebdige began the discussion on the relationship between punk culture and style with his classic study, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London, Routledge, 1988. However, his studies on British punk style centering around the Sex Pistols are different from what I discuss here as a style, except that style means a lot in punk culture and Smith is no exception.
5 Flash Gordon is a hero of a science fiction adventure comic strip originally drawn by Alex Raymond (1909–56), and first published in 1934.
6 In this paper, I often refer to Smith’s interviews published in newspapers and magazines as important resources. I do so because of her serious attitude toward the media and her use of it as her channel to reach her audience, as in her article ‘You Can’t Say “Fuck” in Radio Free America’ in The Yipster Times (March-April, 1977) to protest the refusal by WNEW-FM to air her concert because she used the word ‘fuck’ in an interview with the station (Smith, Patti Smith Complete, n.p. [45]).
7 Don’t Look Back (1967), a documentary film by D.A. Pennebaker (b. 1925), covers Bob Dylan’s 1965 concert tour in the U.K. By watching this film, Smith said, she learned to copy Dylan’s way of walking (Johnstone, 31).
8 In a magazine interview, referring to her hairstyle, she said ‘I always model it after somebody’ (Gross, ‘Introducing, ’ n.p.).
9 Her major songs released before 1979 include: debut single ‘Hey Joe/Piss Factory’ (1974), debut album Horses (1975), second album Radio Ethiopia (1976), third album Easter (1978), and fourth album Wave (1979). Her early poems published before 1979 were published in: Seventh Heaven (1972), A Useless Death (1972), kodak (1972), Early Morning Dream (c.1972), WĪTT (1973), Ha! Ha! Houdini! (1977), and Babel (1974–78). Later she published an anthology of early poems entitled Early Work 1970–1979 (1994). In 1988 she released her fifth album Dream of Life and made a comeback after a nine-year break, but the style of the songs had totally changed; therefore I exclude them from these analyses.
10 Anita Pallenberg (b. 1944) is an Italian-born actress, fashion designer, and former model. She was the partner of the late guitarist Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones and later of Keith Richards, of the same band.
11 Jones is slang for penis.
12 Load is slang for semen.
13 Them formed in Belfast in 1964.
14 In the transcription of the Japanese version of the song, ‘a sweet young thing’ is changed to ‘a sweet young boy’ and therefore is translated as bishonen, which means a beautiful boy (Patti Smith, Horses, BMG Japan, 1996). One explanation for this incorrect transcription could be a transcriber’s error; another is the widespread perception of lesbian desire that had become combined with Smith’s image. Either way, the Japanese translation probably helped to spread that image among the Japanese audience. To settle this argument, the correct transcription was printed in Patti Smith Complete.
15 In William S. Burroughs’s The Wild Boys: The Book of the Dead, a 14-year old American boy called Johnny appears as a main character and later joins the wild boys, a guerrilla gang of boys dedicated to freedom battles the organized armies of repressive police states. He describes himself as ‘I am fourteen years old a thin blond boy with pale blue eyes. My mind moves from one object to another in a series of blank factual stops.’ (Burroughs, 102) Johnny’s ceaselessly moving oneiric mind is so beautifully depicted through Burroughs cut-up texts, which constantly generates absurdities.
16 As to Burroughs’s cut-ups, Deleuze and Guattari present this argument: ‘Take William S. Burroughs’s cut-up method: the folding of one text onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity continues its spiritual labor. That is why the most resolutely fragmented work can also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 6.)
17 The Philosopher here refers to Aristotle.
18 Smith uses both blade and knife in the same context.
19 As to the linear image of the tower, Smith writes that ‘there was no actual structure save the image of two parallel lines that proceeded to point’ (Smith, Babel, 199).
Auteur
-
Ulara Toma
Aoyama Gakuin University
Ulara Toma is an associate professor at Aoyama Gakuin University School of Business, in Shibuya, Tokyo. She specializes in American popular music and her publications include American Roots Music and Rock’n’Roll (DTP Publishing, 2014), and American Popular Music (DTP Publishing, 2012).
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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