Laura (Riding) Jackson's ‘co-operative hostility’

Abstract

Laura (Riding) Jackson's early collaborations with Robert Graves are well known, as is her renunciation of poetry to embark on a lifelong linguistic project with her second husband, Schuyler B. Jackson. The centrality of collaboration to her theory of language has not, however, been properly expounded. In the later work, especially, she puts forward a notion of intense collective effort in which personalities are to be changed through labour on words and meaning. Collaboration is both the means and the ends of an improved understanding of language and its potential. Critics and biographers have pointed to the ways in which her collaborations tended to involve conflicts of authority, and she is often charged with a desire to dominate. Focusing too much on personality, however, misses the more fundamental contradictions of her work. This paper argues that (Riding) Jackson's gendered notion of ‘co-operative hostility’ offers a sharp critique of masculine domination, cultural capital, and appropriation, as well as a speculative notion of social transformation based on mutual exploration and use. These elements of her work run into conflict, however, with her explicit and absolute commitment to private property.