A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley
By Karen Finley
Reviewed by Ina R. Bort
From the New York Law Journal
February 6, 2001
In October 1894, the French army accused a Jewish officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, of selling military secrets to Germany. The only evidence that implicated him was a document found in a trash can, with handwriting that vaguely resembled Capt. Dreyfus's.
It proved persuasive enough for the court-martial, which condemned Capt. Dreyfus to life imprisonment on Devil's Island, French Guyana.
In 1896, solid evidence surfaced that Major Marie Charles Esterhazy was the real traitor. But the suppression of this evidence, combined with the fabrication of additional evidence against Capt. Dreyfus and rampant anti-Semitism in the French army led to Maj. Esterhazy's acquittal after a trial.
Central to Capt. Dreyfus's ultimate exoneration was the publication, shortly after Maj. Esterhazy's acquittal, of "J'accuse!", a scathing rant by the novelist Emile Zola. The article appeared on the front page of the newspaper L'Aurore on Jan. 13,1898. Mr. Zola stunned his readers with his open accusations against the highest military officials in the country, against the "evil machinations" and the omnipresent corruption that had led to the arrest and incarceration of an innocent man and the wholesale acquittal of a guilty one.
Mr. Zola paid no small price for his heroic intervention on behalf of Alfred Dreyfus. He was sued for libel — as he knew he would be — demonized by the media and subjected to mob violence on his way in and out of the courtroom where his case was heard. He was readily found guilty and sentenced to one year in jail and more than 15,000 francs in fines and damages. To avoid serving his sentence, he fled to London, where he lived in exile for the remainder of his days.
The publicity that Mr. Zola's libel trial attracted focused worldwide attention on the Dreyfus Affair, led to the reopening of the Captain's case, the re-evaluation of the "evidence" against him and — 12 years after the case had begun — the reversal of Capt. Dreyfus's conviction and his promotion to the rank of major and Legion of Honor.
Is Karen Finley, the notorious "chocolate-smeared woman," the performance artist whose case against the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1998, a modern-day Zola? Has metempsychosis transported the outrage that, 103 years ago, tormented the soul of a bearded Frenchman to the body of a statuesque feminist whose livelihood mandates that she spend her working hours in various stages of undress? Perhaps a question that only Shirley MacLaine can answer. Still, "J'accuse!" came to mind more than once while flipping through the pages of A Different Kind of Intimacy.
Ms. Finley's Capt. Dreyfus is multifaceted. For the most part, her monologues, poems and drawings express outrage against the treatment of women in our society. It is women of all sorts who are the "victims" of Ms. Finley's "We Keep Our Victims Ready." That victimization, as Ms. Finley portrays it, takes many forms. Rape. Domestic violence. Incest. Adultery. Gender discrimination, both at work and at home.
But women are hardly the sole focus of Ms. Finley's shocking, disturbing, but almost always riveting monologues, poems, photographs and drawings. AIDS victims, the elderly, veal calves and the nearly extinct American Chestnut tree are but a few of the others upon whom our culture has remorselessly turned its back. Ms. Finley's mission is to give these disempowered a voice.
And a loud, screeching voice it is. Ms. Finley employs the most graphic of imagery to convey her angry messages. In what has become her most famous performance, Ms. Finley pours chocolate over her naked body to suggest that, by definition, to be a woman is to be defecated upon. She then sprinkles candy hearts on her chocolate-smeared body, because it is only once women are humiliated that they become loveable. Finally, Ms. Finley spreads tinsel over herself, to symbolize a fancy dress. Her point? "No matter how badly a woman has been treated, she'll still get it together to dress for dinner."
Mr. Zola's "J'accuse!" ends with a resounding litany of the individuals whose depravity is, according to the novelist, primarily responsible for the Dreyfus Affair. His targets are the colonels, the generals, the War Office, the court-martial and the handwriting "experts." It is they who orchestrated the "miscarriage of justice" with their lies, their suppression of evidence, their submission of "fraudulent and deceitful reports."
Ms. Finley, in similar fashion, has compiled a list of cultural offenders. But unlike Mr. Zola's, Ms. Finley's are usually unnamed; they are types, rather than individuals. One, the subject of "I'm An Ass Man," is the man with a wife and kids at home who nevertheless cannot resist the impulse to fantasize about the women he sees on the subway. Another, "Mr. Hirsch," is the man who sexually abuses his daughter's grade school friend in the bathroom one night during a slumber party. Others are the policemen who, while looking for drugs, completely demolish the home and possessions of a black family, only to realize afterwards that they had the wrong address.
Not all of Ms. Finley's targets are fortunate enough to remain shrouded in anonymity. Public Enemy Number One in Finleyville is Senator Jesse Helms, R-N.C., perhaps the man most responsible for Ms. Finley's professional success and nevertheless (or perhaps therefore), the bane of her existence, just as she is the supposed bane of his.
Sen. Helms, who spearheaded Congress's campaign to amend the NEA guidelines to include the "decency" standards that Finley and her coplaintiffs argued were violative of the First Amendment (the U.S. Supreme Court unfortunately disagreed, 8-1), is the man to whom "The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman" is dedicated. In that newly written piece, Ms. Finley tells us: "I've come to realize that I've been in an 8-year, sexually abusive relationship with Jesse Helms. Jesse is intensely, erotically, passionately out of control in his sexual need to dominate me. And I've had enough. The sexual relationship began on the Senate floor, when he eroticized my career, my work, my livelihood. He could never just see me as a person doing my job."
Another target is Martha Stewart, on account of whom Crown Publishers refused to publish Ms. Finley's Living It Up, a parody of the domestic do-it-yourself movement. Crown was, at the time, about to publish a new Martha Stewart book. But because Ms. Stewart found Ms. Finley's "instructions for making pine-needle sachet underwear" offensive, Crown decided to pull out of the deal with Ms. Finley.
There's no love lost between Ms. Finley and the U.S. Supreme Court, either: "The visual presentation of the Supreme Court is meant to recall Mount Olympus: the steps leading up to the Court; the Ionic columns, the justices in their robes. It was more like being on a cheesy movie set than in a court of law, and the moment felt more surreal than momentous. I looked at the platform where the justices were seated and felt sickened by the hokiness of it — costuming and presenting these officials as if they were Greek gods."
Many would find a comparison of Mr. Zola and Ms. Finley laughable at best. Is it not preposterous, they might say, to equate the novelist, whose involvement in the Dreyfus Affair was described by Anatole France as "a moment in the conscience of Man," with a woman who has posed for Playboy and whose next movie is entitled Shut Up and Love Me?
Perhaps Ms. Finley has found it difficult to earn widespread respect because, in addition to playing the Zola, she insists on playing the Dreyfus as well. Ms. Finley refers to herself more than once as the "Joan of Arc" of creative expression, as the martyr of the First Amendment. With repetition, this becomes quite difficult to take, much less take seriously.
Few writings have had, or ever will have, the impact of "J'accuse!" Its words moved the world and changed the course of history, at least partially because of the fame that Mr. Zola had already achieved by the time it was published. Karen Finley has achieved no small amount of prominence (or notoriety, depending upon whom you're asking) herself. But despite, or perhaps on account of, the name she has made for herself, A Different Kind of Intimacy will ultimately be read by only a small group of readers: those who already subscribe to her agenda.
You won't see a copy of this one on John Ashcroft's night table, for instance; although it's not clear, with her naked body sprawled across the book's front cover, that Ms. Finley would want it any other way.
