week 2: the subversive text

Can art be subversive?  My first instinctual, fight or flight liberal-minded reply is a vociferous, “well, of course it can be,” yet if subversiveness entails the motivation to rebel against that which is conformist or the status quo, then does not the subversiveness eventually become void of subversion since it must, at some point, become a means of conformism (a new order) itself? 

Before I continue to rebel, or “push against [my] inner Devil’s Advocate” it may prove productive to explore when art can be subversive because it seems to me that the question is a matter of time and space as well as mode. 

I recently worked on revisions for an essay with the subject matter of subversiveness, so for the sake of convenience and relevance a text that comes to mind is Edna O’Brien’s short-story “A Scandalous Woman” (1974).  Her short story explores much by way of the private sphere of women in rural Ireland.  It is through her juxtaposition of the symbolic representations of a patriarchal system of religion with the more fecund, traditional folkways connected with time-honored female influences that O’Brien was able to expose the strangulated roles of women within the rural Irish landscape.  What fascinated me most about her short-story as a means of subversiveness is what Ronan McDonald claims to be “a subversive strategy of understatement” (249). Simply, the nature of the short-story is to withdraw from the didactic, allowing for what is not said or what is implied through metaphor to depict the author’s message.  O’Brien would have naturally gravitated to subtle subversiveness given the time frame when she wrote “A Scandalous Woman.”  Revolutionary changes in Ireland concerning women’s issues were still hampered during the early 1970’s considering the nonexistence of divorce and legalized contraception—even with the backdrop of the Western feminist movement.  Therefore, the time and space in which she wrote dictated the mode of subversiveness (it is also of interest to note that some of her earlier novels were banned in Ireland).  

The writings of O'Brien and other women Irish writers helped to promote Ireland’s recent progressive social changes, but their artistic ventures were of a kind of subversiveness.  Until the factors of urbanization, economic upswing, and second wave-feminism could truly take root in Ireland, it is only natural that subversive strategies of coding (or understatement) would be an effective modus operandi.   

This brings me back to the original question of art as a means of subversion, as a means of political change.  The slippery nature of such a question is its ability to dictate an either/or answer, a yes or no.  Can art bring about political change?  Yes, but art in and of itself is not subversive (how was that for equivocation?).  The system that envelops the art, the time and space in which it exists (if it does at all), and the language and all its history and subtexts that define and motivate it represent the intertwined nature of such an understanding.  But once subversion takes place, when does it end?  

Works Cited
McDonald, Ronan. “Strategies of Silence: Colonial Strains in Short Stories of the  
          Troubles.” Yearbook of English Studies 35 (2005): 249-263. Literature Resource   
          Center.  Web. 17 Sept. 2009. 

O’Brien, Edna.  “A Scandalous Woman.”  Stories by Contemporary Irish Women.  Eds. Daniel J. Casey and Linda M. Casey.  Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1990.  Print.