Resemblant Lineaments of Kindred Birth . . . a Study of Asexual Twinlife.

What marvel then if thus their features wore 

Resemblant lineaments of kindred birth?

                            — Robert Southey

‘She has sex, but no particular gender.’

                                                           — Marlene Dietrich on Greta Garbo

(Detail.) A sixteen-year-old girl contemplates herself uncomprehendingly in front of a dressing table mirror.  Adolescence (1932), a mezzotint by Gerald Leslie Brockhurst RA, caused a scandal when first shown. The artist was forty-two when the print was made, and the sitter was a life model with whom he began an affair when she was only fifteen about four years earlier.

Listen Close to Me (an extract)

‘The term, normal,’ my father asserted, ‘so far as physical signs may be seen, is purely a relative one.’

             My father was an Associate Lecturer in Cognitive Robotics. At that time we lived on the garrison campus near his Department of Artificial Intelligence and Applied Neural Computation, and he was determined to reduce all human impulses to algebraic brevity.

             In his view it was more shameful to be morally neutered than for a girl to lack the grosser anatomical features of sexual dimorphism.

             For, embarrassingly, it was my fate, when I was fourteen, to exhibit none of the distinguishing attractions shared by other girls of my age.

             Reed-thin, flat-chested, lanky, and hopelessly wooden, I was aware I was less than graceful; yet more painful to me than this compromised girliness was my problematic asexuality.

             ‘She isn’t too bright in the dating department,’ I once overheard an ex-classmate say to her best friend, less than a year after we’d parted at our school-leaving dance.

             The remark was answered by the vilest giggle.

             ‘Nor in the desirable man department either!’

             Some moments passed before I fully apprehended they were not talking about our local Departmental store, and I shuddered as I realised the true perilousness of my position.

             For I began to see that asexuals like myself are caught in the never-ending crossfire of the Sex War, destined to be stranded, paralysed with dread, stark in the middle of No Man’s Land with nowhere to hide.

             Truly, I thought, asexuality must be very like bearing the mark of an hereditary disease if schoolgirls could so easily guess at it.

A Tragedy of Errors.

You should know I am the younger of consobrinal twins, a strange kinship between cousins which I have no doubt anthropologists have categorised as a particular dynastic blood class.

             Let me tell you frankly, my cousin Vernon and I bear a disturbing resemblance to each other and, since our births, our strange twinship has been furthered by an upbringing indistinguishable from that of siblings.

For my Case History, Listen Close to Me, the physical appearance of Vernon and that of his first cousin, the narrator, summoned up a memory of the movie star, Montgomery Clift, and his twin sister, Roberta, who as children were inseparable. It is recorded that both children expressed fears of loss of identity, common to twins, and ‘experienced moments of uncertainty’ as to which twin they were sexually. Even when aged forty, the actor is said to have asked his personal physician, ‘Did I start off as a girl in Ma’s womb?’  

•

‘How does that grab you?’

             The pretty blonde girl of sixteen who kissed me forcibly on the lips I’d never encountered until that moment. She gave me no opportunity to protest.

             It was as if two calf livers, slaughter-warm, had been pressed to my mouth.

             The occasion was a clandestine bottle party in a derelict house to celebrate my pseudo-twin-brother’s seventeenth birthday.

             I’d retreated from the candle-lit revelry of his school-pals to an upper room so she must have followed my shadow up the stairs.

             Cornered in a musty recess, I’d heard a far door open and the rustle of her skirt had announced her determined approach. Yet the weak shaft of moonlight on the landing that illuminated the dusty floor must have been too dim for any certain recognition of my silhouette.

             But she seemed to have no hesitation. She was quite natural and very deliberate. She appeared to know quite well what she wanted as she approached me, her eyes glittering with eager communicativeness.

             She closed the inner door, turning the key behind her, then crossed the room and took me in her arms, with a powerful lock of possession, as if there were no question about it; as if she knew the market value of her attractiveness.

             The kiss was as spontaneous and natural as my rejection of it.

             There was an involuntary contraction of her little pale fingers and we drew apart. We faced each other for an instant, and she re-examined me with a franker admiration than could be decently tolerated.

             ‘Tomorrow night,’ she whispered, before she darted away. Her kiss tasted of sweet cider. ‘Seven o’clock. The Vault.’

             It was a page of my life I would have wished to tear out completely.

•

Next evening, heavy with misgivings, I approached the so-called Vault; actually, it’s a collapsed limestone sarcophagus on the very edge of the vast burial mound that is Stoneburgh cemetery. It’s a solitary nook with every surface scrawled over or carved with penknives. The sunken lid of the monument forms a seat from which one has a wide view of the unending gloomy fens.

             The girl with fair hair had arrived early; she was hunched with her elbows resting on the parapet, looking indifferently into the distance over the floodplain, where white smoke rose lazily from a marshman’s bonfire.

             ‘If I were a man I would bash your filthy mug,’ she wept, when I tried to explain the misunderstanding sparked by my peculiar twinship with Vernon.

             She could not understand why, perversely, I’d envied my cousin’s sleek, closely-cropped head, or why, the previous week, I’d visited his barber and repeated his demand. (Vernon was, at that time, in regular training as a dedicated long distance runner, and he was convinced his military cut was an aid to streamlining his performance.)

             The girl’s glance took in my meek, downcast appearance and her manner turned from a slow anger to a look amounting to furious contempt.

             ‘Freak!’ she suddenly shrieked. ‘I will grow up thinking I have been out with a girl!’ Then she burst out brokenly, ‘I’ll believe my first serious date was with a girl! You make me wish I’d never met you or your cousin!’

             She advanced in an access of rage and, without warning, slapped my face.

             ‘I wouldn’t have kissed him if I’d thought Vernon was a girl,’ she added confusedly, and ran off into the shadows.

For more concerning consobrinal twins and monochorionic identical twins, see . . . 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/consobrinal-twinship-esau-and-de.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Doctor! Doctor! An interpretess’s problems with grammatical gender in possessives . . .

A man and his son are in a car accident. The father dies. The son is rushed to hospital. The surgeon arrives, but says ‘I cannot operate on this boy because he is my son.’ Who is the surgeon?

Gender assumption unmasked?

As you’re probably aware, this conundrum has great currency in the bear pit of gender politics. It’s frequently quoted as an example of the pre-conditioning of the mind, which commonly perceives any person in authority in the medical profession as a commanding presence in a wholly male preserve.

Gender assumption unmasked.

The ‘trigger’ words ‘surgeon’ or ‘doctor’ can often lead to ‘gender assumption’, since historically these were exclusively male professions . . . and, of course, the answer to the puzzle – if puzzle it is — reveals the unmasked surgeon to be the boy’s mother. 

(Even so, I believe this trick question also artfully baffles us by posing another parallel brainteaser: the question of the Hippocratic Ethics of Medicine, under whose precepts the provision of medical care by close relatives is interdicted by most representative bodies advising Physicians and Surgeons in the western world.)

However, it was NOT the ambivalences of gender pre-conditioning that led me to these musings but my chancing upon some recent observations on the pitfalls of French translation by one of modern French literature’s most distinguished English interpretesses, an award-winning Cantabrigian who thoughtfully demystifies the problem of Englishing an account of an unreliable narrator (in excelsis) whose gender is never disclosed. 

An unreliable narrator in excelsis.

Here the translator kindly provides a crib for a bemused English reader challenged by a perplexing French novel from 2003:  

I’m so glad you noticed [viz. the translated French author’s calculated smoke-screen as to the narrator’s sexual identity]! Yes, it is entirely deliberate; the narrator in the book has chosen as the name of a spouse one of the very few names that can be used by either sex in French. And because in that language grammatical gender in possessives is attached to the gender of the thing referred to, not the sex of the person possessing it, it is a lot easier to work that bit of mystification in French than in English (or indeed German, where grammatical gender is attached to the possessor; I remember meeting the German translator of the book). We have several bisexual first names in English: Evelyn, Hilary, and so on. In French, my half-French niece tells me, there are only three: Claude, Camille and Dominique. It was an interesting exercise to keep the pretence going, although of course it becomes clear quite early that the narrator is a gay man who has never before acknowledged his inclinations. 

Marlene Dietrich famously said of Greta Garbo, ‘She has sex, but no particular gender.’ Similarly, the English language more and more it seems to me is on a headlong course to neuter the distinctions that once elegantly defined the sexual identity of individuals in most fields of human endeavour or wilful enterprise:

            Actor/Actress

            Adulterer/Adulteress

            Aviator/Aviatrix

            Editor/Editrix

            Equestrian/Equestrienne

            Giant/Giantess
            Hero/Heroine

            Murderer/Murderess

            Ogre/Ogress

            Seducer/Seductress

            Sculptor/Sculptress
            Tempter/Temptress
            Villain/Villainess

            Warrior/Warrioress

            etc. etc.

Heroes and heroines of ludic wordcraft.

In the English legal profession, of course, Testator/Testatrix survive as a distinction recognised in testamentary law for the drawing up of Wills . . . but, as I have observed many times, this fact is hardly remarkable when you consider the survival of the ‘Fortune-Hunting’ novel of the 19th century (and is there any other kind in our own Age of Greed-is-Good?), wherein the hero and heroine in want of a fortune are invariably named Sterling and Libra.

Increasingly, though, the sustaining of precise definitions such as those cited when writing in English becomes a hard won tussle to overcome stuffiness without recourse to tiresome inelegances of construction.

Not that I am claiming the challenges of determining gender distinction with common nouns in English can compete with the magnitude of that supreme task of ludic wordcraft . . . the Lipogram (or, indeed the Palindrome).

Constrained Writing . . . Form is Function.

Recently, I took my cue from Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright (the 1939 novel  of 50,000 words written as a lipogram, which does not include words that contain the letter ‘e’), when invited to contribute to a Festschrift to celebrate the 80th birthday of the esteemed editor (and founder, in 1959) of the literary journal, Ambit, Dr. Martin Bax. The challenge was to write a fitting encomium to honour this fine novelist (and one of Britain’s foremost consultant paediatricians) . . . yet an encomium no longer than eighty words. 

As a confirmed completist, I chose to further elaborate the task by omitting the letter ‘i’, a task more formidable than I could ever have imagined but one that was devised to deliver up its constrained message by demonstrating that, in certain cases of ludic wordcraft, Form is Function. 

A True Eye Has No Ego . . . Often a false eye has more human warmth than a true one, a phenomenon some call Art. The same thought must have prompted our journal’s celebrated Founder whose agenda to suppress that thoroughly untrustworthy personal pronoun of the Ego reveals a demonstrable selflessness . . . the cut-ups of Burroughs and Ballard, for example; equally, Dr Bax’s own Ego-key when he types stays well strapped down, too. Text typed here also shares the Contra-Ego hobble for my warmest salute to a seer. 

Yes, Martin Bax, the I-suppressing seer who’s presided over more than five decades of the arts, has sustained his notable reputation as an avant-gardist. His journal has boasted not only the likes of rogue literary lions such as Burroughs and Ballard but distinguished artists such as Peter Blake, David Hockney and Eduardo Paolozzi, to name just a handful of the luminaries published in his pages.

He looked at the girl, and she looked at him, but not a word was said.

Nevertheless, on balance, I feel that practitioners of constrained writing (Hemingway included) could have learned much from a little book I found many, many years ago published as part of a series of  Abridgements in One Syllable. Particularly, Fairy Tales from Andersen and Grimm yields this gem (from The Tin Soldier) . . . 

They put him on the [toy] board. But what strange things there are in this world! It was the same board where he had stood some days since! He saw the same boys and girls and the same toys once more.                                   There was the same big [dolls’] house with the swans on the lake, and the same young girl [a doll] who still danced by the door.                                    The tin man was glad; he looked at the girl, and she looked at him, but not a word was said.                                                                                                       Then one of the boys threw him in the stove. He did not say why he did this. It might have been the fault of the Black Elf in the Snuff Box.              The tin man felt a great heat, for it was hot in the stove. He cast a look at the young girl, and she looked at him; he felt he should melt, but as he was brave he still held his gun in his hand.                                                                 Then all at once the door of the stove flew back and the draught of air caught up the young girl who danced. She flew like an elf in to the stove close to the tin man and flashed up in flame; then she was gone.                          Then the tin man did melt down to a lump, and when the maid came to light the fire next day she found him in the shape of a small tin heart on the hearth stone. No sign was seen of the young girl but the gilt rose, and that was burned as black as a piece of coal.

Well, as to constrained passion, I find this parable wonderfully unrestrained . . . after all, a banked fire burns the fiercest or, as Shakespeare reminds us, ‘Fire that’s closest kept burns most of all.’

Constrained writing . . .
a banked fire burns the fiercest.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html