Although the protagonists' verbal hygiene enacted as escape from language in Lisa Tuttle's story may ultimately entail the dissolution of identity (and risks a fall into
inchoateness), it interrogates the centrality of language in the constitution of female subjectivity.
One might expect here a degree of
inchoateness or inconclusion, a sense of the "excess," of the difficulty of "phrasing" of the Shoah (Friedlander, "Trauma, Memory" 262).(2) Yet just in this, one of the most traumatic sites in the Holocaust archive, the film overloads the screen and the soundtrack with cinematic effects.
A NOTE ON SOLICITATION, COMPLICITY, AND
INCHOATENESSLike Gertrude Stein, Dickinson "broke the codes that negated her" (My Emily 12), and she did so (rather like Anne Hutchinson, thinks Howe) by rejecting the "fluent language of fanaticism" (Articulation 31) for one that enlisted the alleged
inchoateness of women's speech as precisely a strength rather than a weakness.
For instance, of twelve objections levelled against Collingwood, quibbles over his views concerning the initial
inchoateness of the emotions an artist expresses, or whether good actresses need have `the ability to weep real tears', take up as much space as discussion of his far more significant and influential claims about the distinction between art and craft, and the essential internality of the artwork--neither of which receive anything but the most cursory treatment.
