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‘The Personal is Political’
is a well-known feminist phrase, coined by Carol Hanisch in the title
of her 1969 essay. This dictum could also very well be used to
describe the American crime writer Sara Paretsky’s recent book of
memoirs from 2007, entitled Writing
in an Age of Silence.
Paretsky is of course well-known for her series of hard-boiled crime
fictions, written with a strong feminist twist coupled with a social
consciousness, admirably fronted by the gutsy female private eye
detective, V.I. Warshawski. In this fiery and funny autobiography,
Paretsky explores the social and cultural developments which led her
to become a crime writer, and which continue to inspire her and
inform her storytelling. Reading Writing
in an Age of Silence,
I became fascinated by Paretsky’s voice, and by her persona in the
book, and I was disturbed, and frequently moved in equal measure, by
her astute reflections on American contemporary culture post 9/11. I
was also excited by her use of life writing strategies as a means to
interrogate the contexts of the genre of crime writing. Writing
in an Age of Silence
seeks to trace two
parallel journeys, between developments within the crime novel genre,
and Paretsky’s personal quest for self-expression as woman writer.
Paretsky herself makes this connection, between her life writing and
crime fiction, explicit. Her book Writing
in an Age of Silence
foregrounds the ongoing ‘conversation’ between the individual and
the collective, and between what may superficially appear as quite
distinct and rather different literary genres. Paretsky’s book is
an excellent demonstration to scholars of the writer’s art of
rendering history a felt process through their engagement with a
personal development, and with their political and creative
‘journey’.
In Writing
in an Age of Silence, Paretsky
makes a stand for the noble American tradition of ‘dissent’, as a
strategy for resistance against a repressive dominant ideology. The
notion of ‘dissent’ has, of course, a long-standing tradition
within American thought and letters. The 19th-century
transcendentalist writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of
the first to articulate this idea, of making a stand, of resistance,
as emblematic of an alternative re-visioning of the American self.
Similarly, Edgar Allan Poe, the first modern crime writer and
explorer of criminal psychology, showed that writing about crime
could be a dark and Gothic antidote to the more saccharine aspects of
‘the American Dream’ which tended to gloss over the
contradictions at the heart of American culture. Susan Glaspell, the
early 20thC modernist woman writer, wrote a one-act play called
‘Trifles’, a text which is structured like a crime narrative, and
which suggests that, for women, silence can be a form of resistance
and dissent, as can creativity and sisterhood. Paretsky’s
determination to channel such quintessentially American
counter-cultural ideas into her crime writing has contributed in no
small way to her questioning of ‘Americanness’ in both her
autobiography and her crime fiction. In Writing
in an Age of Silence, Paretsky
explains how she: ‘grew up with a very idealized vision of what the
country should be and could be...believing in the America of the
Statue of Liberty.’ Importantly, Paretsky’s response in Writing
in an Age of Silence,
and her emphasis on the significance of ‘voice’, should also be
seen in the context of post-9/11 fuelled American anxieties about
civil liberties. Thus, Paretsky’s autobiography is part of a larger
outpouring of texts and debates, in the wake of 9/11, about American
values and identity. In Writing
in an Age of Silence,
Paretsky insists that writers ‘must bring their work to an outside
world where the market, or public outrage, or even government
censorship can destroy our voice.’
Paretsky explores the importance
of voice/words/writing in Writing
in an Age of Silence,
and not just through the title of her book, or through examining
American cultural and literary responses to international crime such
as terrorism, but also by paying attention to American women’s
changing access to public life and speech over time. Paretsky notes
that her memoir ‘traces the long path [she] followed from silence
to speech’ or as she also puts it, ‘focusing on questions of
voice and voicelessness’. In order to emphasise the enormity of
that experience, and the effort it takes to overcome silence,
Paretsky openly admits that this issue ‘dominates my writing,
because they dominate my emotional life.’ This acknowledgement of
the crushing power of silence for women is powerfully worded, and
serves as a reminder that, far from glibly dismissing crime fiction
as popular culture pulp, the genre may encompass pertinent and
powerful forms of social and cultural critique, as in Paretsky’s
case. Writing in an
Age of Silence is a
wonderful autobiography, told with wit, passion, rage, empathy. It
brims with thoughtful observations about the links between
socio-cultural events and the politics of crime writing, described
from the vantage point of one individual writer in the midst of it
all, trying to make sense of their life’s work and the culture they
live in. Paretsky’s voice is nuanced and intelligent, and for all
avid readers of her crime fictions, Writing
in an Age of Silence
contextualises her body of work convincingly. This is especially so,
since, in Writing in
an Age of Silence,
Paretsky describes growing up with ‘the feminine mystique’, and
pitting herself as a woman writer against ‘the Angel in the House’,
stating that: ‘In Kansas during the fifties, in a society where
everyone had a defined place, where everyone knew right from
wrong...girls often saw limited horizons in the future.’ She
comments on the significance of feminism in shaping her creative path
as a writer, saying: ‘It was feminism that triggered my wish to
write a private eye novel, and it shaped the character of my
detective, V.I. Warshawski,’ and, ‘I wanted to create a woman who
would turn the table on the dominant views of women in fiction and in
society.’ In Writing
in an Age of Silence
Paretsky defends her own sexually liberated fictional characters,
positing their stories as a counter-discourse against what she
perceives as an increasingly woman-hostile climate in America in the
1990s and 2000s, concluding that: ‘We are in a peculiar state of
mind in America these days. We want untrammelled capital markets. We
think speed limits, handgun controls and taxes are an un warranted
intrusion into personal liberty. But we feel an overwhelming need to
control women’s sexuality.’ The personal is political, but the
fictional is also political, according to Paretsky. Her Writing
in an Age of Silence
is an exploration, as well as an embodiment, of the ‘body politics’
of American women’s life writing and crime writing.
CHARLOTTE BEYER
University of Gloucestershire
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