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Homage to Joanna RussJune 17, 2006
Chip Delany's phone interview with Joanna Russ was probably the single event of the con I was most looking forward to. Why? Not just because Joanna Russ wrote some of the most essential, most enduring f/sf of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, and not just because her lit and culture criticism, most of it published in the '70s and '80s, is still challenging me to get off my intellectual duff and think. Joanna Russ has been out of literary commission for (how many? I'm guessing) at least 15 years because of chronic fatigue syndrome. At first her voice was conspicuous by its absence, but for many years now I've taken its absence for granted. How to assess the loss caused by the absence of something, or someone? All I can say is that it's huge. Russ's role was more than crucial; it was unique. She linked f/sf, especially feminist f/sf, with feminist theorizing, especially lesbian feminist theorizing. She wrote from both the academy and the grass roots, combining the rigor of one with the grounded vitality of the other, and had all of us running hard to catch up. Sinister Wisdom, founded in the mid-1970s as a journal "for the lesbian imagination in all women," took its name from a line in Russ's The Female Man. What a perfect symbol of Russ's role as a bridge between two worlds with so much to offer each other. Unfortunately, there were few other such bridges, and none of Russ's stature. There's still traffic between the worlds, but most of the travelers are sightseers, oohing and aahing at the wonders on the other side but unable or unwilling to follow Russ's lead and synthesize the two. I was disappointed by the interview. First I blamed it on the technical setup, and on Chip Delany's less than incisive questions. I got pissed off at the audience because for many of them the high point of the interview was when Russ said she loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer. No problem with loving Buffy -- plenty of my friends do, and I probably would if I had a TV -- but when Buffy is the high point of an interview with Joanna Russ, something is out of whack. I noted my own high points in my journal book: Chip Delany noting that "feminism is to Joanna Russ as Marxism was to Brecht." Joanna Russ identifying the "double bind." "It's not the writer's fault," she noted; "it's the economics of publishing." For so many writers, she said, the early stories are the best. But those successes lead to pressure to produce, especially when the writer wants or needs to make a living from writing. "Stories should be felt through," she said. When you're cranking them out to a succession of deadlines, this becomes difficult (impossible? unnecessary? Why pour your guts into a story and give it the time it needs if a so-so version will fulfill the contract and earn the check?). The alternative is to keep your day job and get exhausted. This is what Russ did, teaching first at Cornell and later at the University of Washington. I'm fighting hard not to make illness into metaphor. The metaphor I'm fighting against is "circuit breaker." But in the English language, not to mention my own life, "exhaustion" and "fatigue" are not unrelated, and Russ has been suffering for years from chronic fatigue syndrome. Russ, speaking of the niche marketing of contemporary publishing: "You used to have to make do with what was written, and some of it was crummy -- but not this kind of crummy." Russ again: "Writing takes an enormous amount of energy, and concentration." She used to wonder why she was so exhausted after writing. She said she hadn't done any writing in about ten years, and that the cessation came after eight or nine years of attempting to write.
I wrote in my journal book right after the interview: "All I can think is that if Joanna Russ had been able to remain active in the field, the lesbian feminism would have been stronger and the feminism more pungent. She was a bridge between f/sf and feminism both grass roots and academic. Her essays were right up there with those of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and Marilyn Frye in opening my eyes and snapping my head around and generally kicking my butt. She talked about the double bind -- that the writer has to choose between writing for the market in order to earn a living or keeping your day job and taking forever to finish anything. She also faced the bind of being both deeply feminist and deeply f/sf, which some on both sides see as oxymoronic." Of Joanna Russ's voice I wrote earlier that "for many years now I've taken its absence for granted." That's not quite true; it stopped being true the moment I read in one of the WisCon progress reports that this phone interview was going to happen. I desperately hoped -- on some level I even assumed -- that Chip Delany was going to interview the Joanna who disappeared under the hill many (some multiple of 7, of course) years ago; that she was going to emerge from Elfland and read us the riot act. It didn't happen. We're on our own, kids.
Joanna Russ, The Female Man
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