What Is The Word

Now that the quarter is blessedly winding down (my two seminar papers are in the proofreading stages), my brain is staggering a bit from being consistently hammered with theory. I think I’m at the point – and maybe have been there for a while – where I can’t enjoy pop culture without picking it apart with a pretentiously fine-toothed comb (can a comb be pretentious? I think so).

Take Sex and the City, for example. I’m not quite sure why I watch the reruns whenever I happen to catch them, heavily edited, of course, on TBS (as a side note, why do I always only catch the episode where Carrie needs $30,000 to put a down payment on her apartment?). My boyfriend runs from the room when he hears the theme song, usually with a snide comment about Sarah Jessica Parker, but I stay, somewhat apologetic.  SatC doesn’t approach the intricacies of female relationships with the quiet brillance that Big Love, another HBO show, does; it’s often reductionist, ridiculous and even – the worst sin – poorly written.

Yet it does add something to a necessary conversation. It’s one of the few consistantly sex-positive series (though there’s something to be said for the critique that Samantha’s cancer is an effective punishment for her unapologetic sex life). It celebrates the power of female friendships (though it’s still unclear precisely why, for example, Charlotte and Samantha are close; would they be friends without Carrie as glue?). And I was moved by the message of one episode’s final scene: as a new bride throws a bouquet towards them, the four women let it fall to the ground at their feet, then turn together and walk away. It’s a powerful message of solidarity and a clear rejection of the marital norm. Yet this scene, while resonant, is not truthful to at least one of the characters, Charlotte, who at this point in the series is obsessed with finding and marrying her soulmate. Ultimately, Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and even Samantha end up with significant others.

So there are numerous contradictions here; the series tells the viewer one thing and then ricochets to the opposite. It’s not surprising or unique, but it is, I think, fairly honest. We all have conflicting views surrounding our sexuality, our relationships with our friends, how we’re living up to certain norms; it’s a disengenous person who says she doesn’t struggle with the expectations others have for her, and that she has for herself. SatC is heavily flawed, but it’s flawed in a way to which I can relate.

By the way, I’m a Miranda, with a generous pinch of Charlotte thrown in for good measure.

(The title of this post comes from The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee’s description of SatC.)

I took this blog’s title from Samuel Beckett’s final poem.

While I generally dislike interpreting texts biographically (Roland Barthes’s “Death of an Author” successfully seduced me several years ago), there’s something to be said for knowing that this is Beckett’s deathbed work. This profound question, that of course within the text is never posed as a question, that works on multiple levels (“what” is the word, what is the word?) seems to me to be the major problematic within the study of literature. Beckett repeats it, over and over again; we all repeat it. It’s the question we ask in every critique and essay, and the statement we always return to: the word that matters.

Of course, we could make a case for “how is the word”, too.

The full poem is underneath the cut.
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