"Identification inhabits, organizes, instantiates identity. It operates as a mark of self-difference, opening up a space for the self to relate to itself as a self, a self that is perpetually other. . . . Identi-fication is, from the beginning, a question of relations, of self to other, subject to object, inside to outside" (2-3).
Diana Fuss, Identification Papers
"Language is a grid on time and the conception of the self is the event" (61)
--Leslie Scalapino, Objects in the Terrifying Tense
"'The subject' . . . is a series of events within language, a procession of turns, tropes and inflections" (76).
--Malcolm Bowie, Lacan
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I have always thought that ME could be my initials, EM, backwards. Or, in that fast-moving turn of the head glance, ME could be the first letters of my last name: ME(ESE). The letters serve as my mother's initials too, Mary Edith, a connection to me. But the question of the remainder remains, always trouble, like when the meat or the baked potatoes, the pickle or the grilled cheese sandwich, the salad or the quiche run out ahead of the other.
ME often exists for me in Roman capital letters. I get the angular, straight up letters without graceful turns or tails, nothing below the line. Stable structures. Monumental. Official. I read me in the letters, the jagged waves of M, the unlucky thirteenth, sign for 1000. M is wide, containing its specular other, reduplicative, as though "I" had a twin in ME, a fusion of opposites as in the night ^ separated from day ^ in mu ^^. Proliferation continues in E, the letter used so often that Georges Perec, following the tracks of E.V. Wright's Gadsby, wrote the novel A Void, a lipogram, to do without -- "If only you could jump for joy, jump up and down, find a way out of this linguistic labyrinth, this anagram of signification, this sixty-four-thousand-dollar conundrum" (26). (Where did all those e's go? Perec at least collected up his left over e's and put them in The Exeter Text, leaving the other vowels, worn out from A Void, behind: "The telephone clerk preened her teeth, redressed her tresses, deterged her scent-cells then respelt the skew-lettered texts strewn between her ledgers" [p. 62])
The spirit of the vowel E in the body of the consonant M. Both E and M mark five points, and E solidifies its fiveness as the fifth letter of the alphabet. Victor Hugo called E "the foundation, the pillar and the roof -- all architecture contained in a single letter" (quoted in Firmage, 84), and Zolar claimed that, in modern mysticism, "It is used to denote everything crooked, low, and perverse" (quoted in Firmage 84). Surely a letter for me, the perverse eeeee of thrill and fear, the e of the first Eve. When I scream eeeee.... (as I often do), I might as well be crying meeeee . . ., the m disappearing so quickly. Me, filtered through letters, abstraction captured in a vowel. In the eighteenth century, Gebelin linked E and M through Etre, E as Vie (life) or Existence, and M as Arbe (tree) or Etre productif, the tree of life (Drucker 222). My name begins and ends in e, long ones, short ones, I've got both epsilon and eta. In my proper name, the e's outnumber all other letters. Breathing, breathing, breathing. Vie.
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Elizabeth Meese is a professor of English and adjunct professor of women's studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author of CROSSING THE DOUBLE CROSS: THE PRACTICE OF FEMINIST CRITICISM (Univ. of North Carolina, 1986), (EX)Tensions: RE-FIGURING FEMINIST CRITICISM (U. of Illinois Press, 1990), and (SEM)EROTICS --THEORIZING LESBIAN : WRITING (NYU Press, 1992). She co-edited with Alice Parker THE DIFFERENCE WITHIN: FEMINISM AND CRITICAL THEORY (JOHN BENJAMINS, 1989) and FEMINIST CRITICAL NEGOTIATIONS (John Benjamins, 1992). Her most recent work is a collection of "family fictions" entitled "What the Dreamer Dreams," chapters of which have been published in Northwest Review and Feminist Studies.
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