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Freud, Argentina, and the Literary Uses of Paranoia

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Freud, Argentina, and the Literary Uses of Paranoia UNCANNY INFLUENCES: FREUD, ARGENTINA, AND THE LITERARY USES OF PARANOIA BY GEOFFREY SHULLENBERGER B.A., SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE, 2001 M.ST., OXFORD UNIVERSITY, 2004 A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2009 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2012 © Copyright 2012 by Geoffrey Shullenberger This dissertation by Geoffrey Shullenberger is accepted in its present form by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date _________ _____________________________________ Esther Whitfield Recommended to the Graduate Council Date__________ _____________________________________ Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg Date__________ _____________________________________ Stephanie Merrim Approved by the Graduate Council Date__________ _____________________________________ Peter Weber iii CURRICULUM VITAE Geoffrey A. Shullenberger was born in Northampton, Massachussetts on May 20, 1979. He earned a B.A. in Literature from Sarah Lawrence College in 2001, an M.St. in European Literature from Oxford University in 2004, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 2009. He received the Alfred Spaulding Cook Essay Prize in Comparative Literature in 2007, and was awarded a Tinker Field Research Grant for research in Argentina in 2010. His scholarship examines modern Latin American literature and culture in a transnational context. He has published articles in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and Romance Studies. He currently teaches at Monterey Peninsula College in Monterey, California. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My dissertation director, Esther Whitfield, provided exemplary support and guidance at every stage of this project. Esther has been an inspiring mentor throughout my graduate career, and her expertise, patience, and generosity have seen me through on many an occasion. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg was gracious enough to become part of this project late in the game and has been an invaluable guide on the treacherous intellectual terrain of psychoanalysis. Stephanie Merrim’s intellectual rigor, demanding standards, and attention to detail are as remarkable and salutary as her good humor and generosity. I am also indebted to other Brown faculty: to Nicolás Wey-Gómez, for leading me into unimagined realms; to Ken Haynes, for being challenging and supportive in equal measure; and to Dore Levy, for kindness in dark times; and to teachers who shaped my thinking, reading, and writing at earlier stages, especially Jim Reed, Tony Phelan, Danny Kaiser, Ilja Wachs, Roland Dollinger, Fred Smoler, and Walter Schneller. The Department of Comparative Literature has given me exceptional support throughout my studies, and I am especially grateful to Charlie Auger and Carol Wilson-Allen, who keep the ship afloat. Brown’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and The Tinker Foundation provided generous funding for a highly fruitful research stint in Argentina and Uruguay in 2010; special thanks go to Susan Hirsch at CLACS. Many people have enriched my life over the past seven years and beyond. Comp lit colleagues provided unflappable solidarity and excellent company: in particular, Nora Peterson, Greg Baker, Susan Solomon, Signe Christensen, Derek Wong, and Yumi Tanaka. Other friends helped make Providence a real community: special mention goes to Dánisa Bonacic, Glenn Rawson, Marília Scaff Rocha Ribeiro, Guilherme Ribeiro, Marimar Patrón, Kurt Wootton, Julia Garner, Luca Prazeres, Joe Bush, Daniella Wittern, Teresa Villa-Ignacio, Robert Newcomb, Niki Clements, Andrew Peterson, and Michael Stewart. Farther afield, I am thankful for the friendship and conversation of Sean Francis, Nick Nelson, Rachel Eley, Amanda Cadogan, Michael Esveldt, and Tom Boylston. I am very fortunate for my family: Bill Shullenberger, Shannon and Perry Mihalakos, Doris Lowry, Jay Alexander, Lynn Bengston, and Dave Riegel have all provided encouragement, inspiration, and support in various forms; Paul Shullenberger, Peter Hawkins, and Sheila MacAvey have also been there from the beginning. I am also immensely grateful for my second family, especially Patty Hatch, Zoë Whittle, and Louisa Hare. Finally, Charlotte Whittle’s love, companionship, brilliance, humor, imagination, and strength have made this and everything else possible. I dedicate this dissertation to the memory of three extraordinary people whose influence on everything I do I will never have any anxiety about acknowledging: Sam Potts, Benson Whittle, and Bonnie Shullenberger. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Influence, Authority, Paranoia: Latin American and Psychoanalytic Models 1 CHAPTER ONE The Paranoid Apprentice: Horacio Quiroga’s Poe-etics of Persecution 45 CHAPTER TWO Borges “by Lacan”: Cultural Antagonisms and Paranoid Agency in Modern Argentina 100 CHAPTER THREE Romancing the Influencing Machine: La invención de Morel and the Psychoanalysis of the Machine Age 155 WORKS CITED 203 vi INTRODUCTION Influence, Authority, Paranoia: Latin American and Psychoanalytic Models “My nerves are influenced by the rays to vibrate according to certain human words; their choice therefore is not subject to my own will, but is due to an influence exerted on me from without.” -Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of my Nervous Illness “Platón dijo que los poetas son amanuenses de un dios, que los anima contra su voluntad, contra sus propósitos, como el imán anima a una serie de anillos de hierro.” -Jorge Luis Borges, “El escritor argentino y la tradición” Borges’s “Subaltern Sublime” In “La flor de Coleridge,” an essay published in the 1952 collection Otras inquisiciones, Jorge Luis Borges examines the uncanny recurrence of a literary image across a heterogeneous set of texts. His meditation begins with an obscure fragment by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he translates as follows: “Si un hombre atravesara el Paraíso en un sueño, y le dieran una flor como prueba de que había estado allí, y si al despertar encontrara esa flor en su mano . ¿entonces, qué?” (639).1 Borges’s interest in the fragment appears, at least initially, to center less on the flower motif itself than on the textual network constituted by its repetition. He details its reappearance in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in which the protagonist brings back a flower as the only proof of his voyage into the future. Although Borges refers to the flower motif in Wells’s novel as 1 This and all subsequent quotations from works by Borges are from his Obras completas unless otherwise indicated. 1 “la segunda versión de la imagen de Coleridge” (640), he tells us that Wells “desconocía el texto de Coleridge” (640). In light of the absence of a genetic relationship, the functioning of the textual network connecting Coleridge and Wells turns out to replicate the fantastic logic of the texts themselves – the logic, that is, by which an entity, be it a flower or a literary image of a flower, may travel inexplicably between two spaces between which no form of transit can be traced. The flower, traditional symbol of organic life and proliferation, becomes in the two texts and in the promiscuous transit between them an impossible, undead simulacrum of itself, no longer obedient to recognizable laws of filiation. The exposition of a network of recurring textual elements serves here, as in many other essays in Otras inquisiciones, as evidence for a view that Borges states explicitly in the book’s epilogue: “el número de fábulas o de metáforas de que es capaz la imaginación de los hombres es limitado” (775). The motifs, images, and metaphors contained in this finite set, Borges proposes, travel indiscriminately between texts and recur in potentially infinite variations. In this account of literary production, the individual writer figures as little more than an involuntary conduit of the utterances of an anonymous generative entity to which Borges refers as “el Verbo” (alluding to the gospel of John) or “el Espíritu” (citing Paul Valéry), or simply “la literatura.” As with the image of the flower, this idea turns out to be subject to the logic that it describes, since it is itself one of the motifs whose repetition, in texts by Valéry, Emerson, and Shelley, it claims to explain. In the epilogue of Otras inquisiciones, Borges describes this logic as “pantheist,” but the stance he is describing is interchangeable with what, in many other places in his oeuvre, he calls “idealism.” In the key ficción “Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius,” 2 the “idealismo total” (435) of the inhabitants of Tlön entails a view of literature identical to that promulgated in Otras inquisiciones: “En los hábitos literarios también es todopoderosa la idea de un sujeto único. Es raro que los libros estén firmados. No existe el concepto del plagio: se ha establecido que todas las obras son obra de un solo autor, que es atemporal y es anónimo” (439). This “idealist” framework permits the literary critics of Tlön to engage in fantastical attributions and tracings of influence that closely resemble those undertaken by Borges himself in his literary essays. Harold Bloom, who judges Borges “a profound student of literary influence” (Western 432), has placed Borgesian “idealismo” in a simultaneous relation of continuity and contrast with his own idiosyncratic approach to literary power relations. Specifically, Borges’s “realization that all literature is plagiarism” (439) and concomitant understanding
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