Read Online Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions by Regina Barreca - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Regina Barreca
Tags: General, Social Science, History, Literary Criticism, European, England, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, 20th Century, Women Authors, womens studies, test, Women and Literature
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1984.
. The Fat Woman's Joke . London: Coronet, 1982.
White, Emily. LA Weekly . 10 July 1992.
Whitemore, Hugh. Stevie . Oxford: Amber Lane Press, 1984.
Wollen, Peter. "Bitter Victory."
Woodcock, George. AnarchismA History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements . London: Penguin, 1975.
Page 37
Classic Weldon
Margaret Anne Doody
It would sound very odd to refer to Fay Weldon as "classic." A classic is a book written a long time ago. Booksellers sometimes use the heading "Classics"but what writer would not prefer to be in that other and bigger section labeled simply "Fiction"; or even "Popular Reading"? This is certainly preferable to the authornot least because the author of ''classics" is, or is assumed to be, long dead. Fay Weldon is very much alive, and kicking. We depend on her to give us reports from our own world, and the contemporary is not classic, usually, save in disaster or misfortune (as in "a classic case of pneumonia" or "the classic symptoms of recession").
It would be probably even odder to refer to her as a classical writer, or a writer in a classical style. Weldon is not elegantelegance is not what she is trying to achieve. She is certainly not controlled and balanced in the Jane Austen manner. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." This is precisely not the kind of sentence that Weldon would ever write. Weldonesque sentences find it their duty most of the time to parody and trounce such elegance by bursting through the restraints of style and taste. Take, for example, the opening three sentences of Little Sisters (1978):
We all have friends who are richer than ourselves and they, you may be sure, have richer friends of their own. We are most of us within spitting distance of millionaires.
Spit awayif that's what you feel like. [P. 5]
That's what happens in Weldonstyle when elegance is acknowledged; the parodic elegance works on a simple level, customarily through formulae of repetition, until it is just big and visible enough (like a balloon being
Page 38
blown up) to be effectively punctured, when it explodes with a little bang. We are not to be puzzled or teased by subtle meanings; the sentences do not shimmer in midair, demanding our sustained attention. Austen's sentences are more like icicles or prisms; they do not balloon and bang.
The demotion of elegance in Weldon, the eschewal of certain kinds of subtlety, the delight in violencethese qualities are very far from what we think of as Austen's, and make Weldon a surprising choice as the dramatizer of Pride and Prejudice for the 1980s television production. Surprising, but not boringWeldon's product was memorable, unlike some of the dusty and pulverized versions of novels offered on British telly. Her product was in some ways refreshingjust as it would be refreshing to have Mark Twain dramatize Nathaniel Hawthorne. Or what about getting François Rabelais to dramatize Chrétien de Troyes?
Rabelais, once he has come to mind, offers some happy comparisons. Weldon's physical comedy, and her sentences that turn onor turn tothe physicalhave much in common with the manner and meanings of Rabelais. Here is a typical passage of Rabelaisian description:
Panurge estoit de stature moyenne, ny trop grand, ny trop petit, et avoit le nez un peu aquilin, faict à manche de rasouer; et pour lors estoit de l'eage de trente et cinq ans ou environ, fin à dorer comme une dague de plomb, bien galand homme de sa personne, sinon qu'il estoit quelque peu paillard, et subject de nature à une maladie qu'on appelloit en ce temps-la "Faulte d'argent, c'est douleur non pareille"toutesfoys, il avoit soixante et troys manières d'en trouver tousjours à son besoing, dont la plus honnorable et la plus commune estoit par façon de larrecin furtivement faict ... [ Pantagruel, ch. xvi, p. 280]
Panurge was of middling height, neither too large nor too small, and his nose was a little aquiline, shaped
. The Fat Woman's Joke . London: Coronet, 1982.
White, Emily. LA Weekly . 10 July 1992.
Whitemore, Hugh. Stevie . Oxford: Amber Lane Press, 1984.
Wollen, Peter. "Bitter Victory."
Woodcock, George. AnarchismA History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements . London: Penguin, 1975.
Page 37
Classic Weldon
Margaret Anne Doody
It would sound very odd to refer to Fay Weldon as "classic." A classic is a book written a long time ago. Booksellers sometimes use the heading "Classics"but what writer would not prefer to be in that other and bigger section labeled simply "Fiction"; or even "Popular Reading"? This is certainly preferable to the authornot least because the author of ''classics" is, or is assumed to be, long dead. Fay Weldon is very much alive, and kicking. We depend on her to give us reports from our own world, and the contemporary is not classic, usually, save in disaster or misfortune (as in "a classic case of pneumonia" or "the classic symptoms of recession").
It would be probably even odder to refer to her as a classical writer, or a writer in a classical style. Weldon is not elegantelegance is not what she is trying to achieve. She is certainly not controlled and balanced in the Jane Austen manner. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." This is precisely not the kind of sentence that Weldon would ever write. Weldonesque sentences find it their duty most of the time to parody and trounce such elegance by bursting through the restraints of style and taste. Take, for example, the opening three sentences of Little Sisters (1978):
We all have friends who are richer than ourselves and they, you may be sure, have richer friends of their own. We are most of us within spitting distance of millionaires.
Spit awayif that's what you feel like. [P. 5]
That's what happens in Weldonstyle when elegance is acknowledged; the parodic elegance works on a simple level, customarily through formulae of repetition, until it is just big and visible enough (like a balloon being
Page 38
blown up) to be effectively punctured, when it explodes with a little bang. We are not to be puzzled or teased by subtle meanings; the sentences do not shimmer in midair, demanding our sustained attention. Austen's sentences are more like icicles or prisms; they do not balloon and bang.
The demotion of elegance in Weldon, the eschewal of certain kinds of subtlety, the delight in violencethese qualities are very far from what we think of as Austen's, and make Weldon a surprising choice as the dramatizer of Pride and Prejudice for the 1980s television production. Surprising, but not boringWeldon's product was memorable, unlike some of the dusty and pulverized versions of novels offered on British telly. Her product was in some ways refreshingjust as it would be refreshing to have Mark Twain dramatize Nathaniel Hawthorne. Or what about getting François Rabelais to dramatize Chrétien de Troyes?
Rabelais, once he has come to mind, offers some happy comparisons. Weldon's physical comedy, and her sentences that turn onor turn tothe physicalhave much in common with the manner and meanings of Rabelais. Here is a typical passage of Rabelaisian description:
Panurge estoit de stature moyenne, ny trop grand, ny trop petit, et avoit le nez un peu aquilin, faict à manche de rasouer; et pour lors estoit de l'eage de trente et cinq ans ou environ, fin à dorer comme une dague de plomb, bien galand homme de sa personne, sinon qu'il estoit quelque peu paillard, et subject de nature à une maladie qu'on appelloit en ce temps-la "Faulte d'argent, c'est douleur non pareille"toutesfoys, il avoit soixante et troys manières d'en trouver tousjours à son besoing, dont la plus honnorable et la plus commune estoit par façon de larrecin furtivement faict ... [ Pantagruel, ch. xvi, p. 280]
Panurge was of middling height, neither too large nor too small, and his nose was a little aquiline, shaped
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