Clocky.

Namwali Serpell (what a great name!) has a NYRB piece (archived) about the perennial issue of whether women’s writing might have a distinctive “style” (as she puts it). She has a lot of interesting things to say, and I approve of her take on it, but I’m just going to quote the first few paragraphs because I like the word she builds them around:

I learned a new word the other day: clocky. It describes someone who doesn’t pass as their (chosen) gender. It originated in the trans community and comes from the idea of “clocking” or recognizing something. Its use can be dysphoric or derogatory, a way to express the disappointment of missing the mark or to throw an insult back at transphobes. But lately, as the gender spectrum expands to include more ambiguous varieties, clocky has become a bit of a compliment. What a great word! I thought. It rolls off the tongue. It’s tongue-in-cheek. It has a little bite. Plus it rhymes with cocky—which makes for a lucky pun whichever way you spin it.

Clockiness has been on my mind because of a tidbit of literary history I also recently learned. In 1857 three stories about Anglican clergymen were published anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine. The next year they were collected and republished as a book called Scenes of Clerical Life under the then unknown name George Eliot. The publisher, William Blackwood, sent copies to select members of the British literati, including Charles Dickens. Dickens knew of Marian Evans, the assistant editor of the Westminster Review who had scandalized London by living with a married man. But he had no idea that Evans had taken on a male pen name to publish Scenes of Clerical Life. He sent a letter to the writer via Blackwood, with a sly guess:

I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seem to me such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like a woman since the world began.

When I read this, I of course immediately wanted to know: How did Dickens clock her? What was the tell? Most readers at the time took the male name on the cover in good faith, so much so that some rube who happened to live near the town on which the setting in Scenes of Clerical Life was modeled started going around taking credit for it.

I am, of course, reminded of Robert Silverberg’s less successful attempt at gender analysis (the subject was James Tiptree, Jr.): “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.” (He later said, very graciously, “She fooled me beautifully, along with everyone else, and called into question the entire notion of what is ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ in fiction. I am still wrestling with that.”)

Oh, OK, I can’t resist quoting a little more (she’s discussing Judith Butler):

No one gets to dictate what a society’s current gender norms are. But in a free society, you can at least select which ones you wish to perform from the array in circulation—and when and where, too. You have, in short, limited agency. As Butler puts it, gender is “not radical choice and it’s not voluntarism…. Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify.”

How does repeating a gender norm force it to resignify, or to signify anew? Whenever you aim at gender, you miss the mark ever so slightly. This is how imitation yields change. Butler explains that it “is not a simple replication,” “copy,” or “uniform repetition” because “the productions swerve from their original purposes.” […] Being a real man, being a real woman, being really nonbinary—in each case, gender expression is an approximation, an asymptotic curve to a line we continually redraw. In this sense, everyone’s a bit clocky.

What I love about this theory is that it helps us understand other cultural expressions, too, like literary style. We know, for example, that James Joyce wanted to write like Henrik Ibsen. And that Samuel Beckett wanted to write like James Joyce. Ernest Hemingway typed out sentences from hunting magazines. (Here, to imitate a style and to perform masculinity coincide.) In turn, Ralph Ellison typed out sentences from Ernest Hemingway, a practice Ellison likened to musicians playing jazz standards. This isn’t plagiarism. It’s imitatio or pastiche, neither of which is an exact reflection. Rather, this is repetition with a swerve. Just think of how distinct Ellison sounds from Hemingway. Beckett learned the limitations of Joyce’s style precisely through his own (failed) imitations of it—he then swerved in the exact opposite direction.

And here a different example comes to mind, which I quoted from Ivan Almeida back in 2010:

“La verdad, cuya madre es la historia…”, escribió Pierre Menard, corrigiendo a Cervantes, que había escrito “La verdad, cuya madre es la historia…”. Sería interesante, pero tal vez desplazado, analizar, a la manera de Borges en Menard, las modificaciones que sufre el texto que consideramos, por el simple hecho de ser atribuido no ya a Herold sino a Stair, y no ya a Stair sino al mismo Borges.

“Truth, whose mother is history” wrote Pierre Menard, correcting Cervantes, who had written “Truth, whose mother is history…” It would be interesting, but perhaps out of place, to analyze, in the manner of Borges on Menard, the modifications undergone by the text we are considering, by the simple fact of being attributed not to Herold but to Stair, and then not to Stair but to Borges himself.

(And what if Menard was actually Marian Evans? But the mise en abyme looms…)