ABSTRACT
Our case studies until now have been of authors who have spoken from beyond the pale. Each of these women has, in her own way, questioned both the bounds of gender and and the norms of social exclusion. Each has used her illegitimacy to reach that threshold position of which Serres speaks (1987:90), and which permits the energies of social and discursive freedom to be exploited. Each has refused the name of the Father and appealed for a different law. This dynamis of the border, this emancipation from the seemingly immutable laws of convention, has always been the goal of the artist as much as the revolutionary. Indeed, in the case of a poet like Aragon (1897-1982), his actual experience of illegitimacy and its social stigma is the factor, I would contend, which keeps the two strands of art and revolution firmly combined, often to the detriment of the art and in the service of a revolution already turned to tyranny. It is time to look more closely at the artists, and I begin with the autobiographical or semi-autobiographical texts of four male artists who, in different modes, choose the way of the mother.
