MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School
Certificate for Approving the Dissertation
We hereby approve the Dissertation
of
Adam Burkey
Candidate for the Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
______Director Timothy Melley
______Reader Madelyn Detloff
______Reader Andrew Hebard
______Graduate School Representative Robert Thurston
ABSTRACT
PRISONERS OF LOSS: MELANCHOLIA IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
by Adam Burkey
This dissertation traces the recurrence of melancholia in post-1980 American culture and literature about the psychological consequences of atrocity and sudden loss. Narratives within this subset often concern Vietnam combat, slavery, rape, the Holocaust, the perpetration of violence, the attacks on September 11, or the suicide of loved ones, and critics have frequently analyzed such works within the context of trauma studies. I argue that such a critical lens, with its postmodern attention to representation, deemphasizes subjective states of ambivalence, reality-testing, mourning, and self-negation, which are major components of melancholia that Sigmund Freud described in his 1917 essay, “Mourning and Melancholia.” After demonstrating how these subjective states uniquely surface in novels by Tim O’Brien, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Don DeLillo, I reveal how melancholia emerges within the contemporary cultural mindset as a symptom of postmodernism’s rejection of the reality principle—a metaphysical foundation necessary for mourning. Mourning, these writers all demonstrate, is simultaneously wanted and rejected within a postmodern milieu composed of overlapping realities, infinite translation, and representational aporia. From this argument I thus bring the following postulates to the surface: that the framework of melancholia has an ethical advantage when it comes to addressing the subjectivity and complicity of victims of atrocity and loss, especially as it concerns their individual recoveries; that the framework of melancholia has an analytical advantage when it comes to theorizing mourning, loss, and the management of desire; and that the framework of melancholia reveals an underlying cultural condition of impossible mourning within the period known today as the postmodern.
PRISONERS OF LOSS: MELANCHOLIA IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
A DISSERTATION
Submitted to the Faculty of
Miami University in partial
fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
by
Adam Burkey
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
2013
Dissertation Director: Timothy Melley
©
Adam Burkey
2013
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER ONE KILLING THE FATHER FOR DYING: TIM O’BRIEN’S IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS 26
CHAPTER TWO SETHE’S FANTASTIC CRYPT: TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED 53
CHAPTER THREE JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S MELANCHOLIC HYMNALS 87
CHAPTER FOUR THE VIRTUAL UNDEAD: POSTMODERNISM AND GRIEF IN DON DELILLO’S THE BODY ARTIST 106
WORKS CITED 135
iii
INTRODUCTION
I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.
ROBERT BURTON, The Anatomy of Melancholy
PRELUDE: EXPOSING THE LOSS OF SADNESS In The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder (2007), a study that examines modern considerations of the psychological condition known as depressive disorder, Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield take direct aim at the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). The American Psychiatric Association has been publishing this manual since 1952, and is currently finishing a fifth edition that will be available May 2013. The manual catalogs all mental disorders while documenting their symptoms for the entire mental health community. Horwitz and Wakefield are well aware of the importance of the DSM, noting that it is widely regarded as “the bible of psychiatry,” which also acts as the leading authority for mental health matters as they surface in “epidemiological studies of disorder in the community, in research studies of treatment outcomes, in marketing of antidepressant medications, in preventive efforts in schools, in screening in general medical practice, in court proceedings, and in many other settings” (7). Horwitz and Wakefield argue that this manual, with its monopoly on mental nomenclature, is at least partially responsible for transforming what may once have been “normal sadness” into Major Depressive Disorder. Their claim: that the manual’s broad classification method conflates “normal sadness” natural to certain life contexts (such as losing one’s job) with other “depressive disorders” that are “without cause” and therefore the products of “the failure of a person’s internal mechanisms” (6, 9, 17). They describe this conflation as psychiatry’s failure to distinguish “between depressions that are endogenous (i.e., spontaneously caused by internal processes, having no external trigger) and reactive (i.e., triggered by some external event)” (18). For them, this is like using the same terms to address a computer’s software and hardware malfunctions, even though it is often the case that “computer software [like the human psyche] can malfunction in hardware [the human body] that itself is working properly” (19). In sum,
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Horwitz and Wakefield believe healthcare providers can more effectively treat depression by making contextual distinctions clearer in diagnoses and diagnostics manuals like the DSM. Horwitz and Wakefield long for an articulation of sadness now unavailable in today’s cultural and medical discourses. They are not alone. With them is Jennifer Radden, whose The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (2000) offers one of the most extensive histories of melancholia since Stanley Jackson’s Melancholia and Depression (1986). In her latest work, Moody Minds Distempered: Essays on Melancholy and Depression (2009), Radden expresses a need for distinguishing subjective states of melancholia that seem to occur “without cause” as kinds of “moods” rather than emotions (14-15). Radden adopts Horwitz and Wakefield’s critical attitude toward the endogenous “without cause” status of depression that erroneously directs attention away from the subjective, individual properties of normal sadness. While drawing from Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Radden justifies this focus on the “moodiness” of melancholia by underlining how melancholia, along with other kinds of depression, also seems “without cause” (in the contextual sense) because an object of melancholia is not known to those experiencing it (Moody 154-155). Should people consider melancholia a mood rather than an emotion, Radden seems to be saying, they can better distinguish between psychological depressions that are “without cause” because of repression and chemically-oriented depressions that are “without cause” because of a lack of contextual stimuli. I will return to Radden and Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” shortly. For a more popular and controversial criticism of modern attitudes towards sadness and depression, one may look no further than Irving Kirsch. Kirsch is currently Associate Director of the Program in Placebo Studies at the Harvard Medical School and has recently upended the entire psychiatric community after claiming that the productive effects of antidepressants such as Paxil, Prozac, and Zoloft are all, for the most part, due to the placebo effect. In a series of journal articles that culminate in The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth (2010), Kirsch reports the findings of a meta-analysis that compiles the results of pharmaceutical company clinical drug trials made available by the FDA by means of the Freedom of Information Act. In addition to detecting other factors that would explain the positive results of any given
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anti-depressant drug test,1 Kirsch’s findings especially revealed “relatively little difference between the effects of antidepressants and the effects of placebos. Indeed, the effects were so small that they did not qualify as clinically significant” (53). Kirsch’s point is not to prove that anti-depressants don’t work; rather, he shows that they work quite well, but only because of the placebo effect. In the trials this powerful placebo effect occurs after subjects “break blind.” Because administrators are required by law to disclose all side effects before beginning a double- blind drug trial, subjects in most active groups, according to Kirsch, are able to detect these side effects and thus determine early on when they are taking an active drug (and not the placebo), thereafter generating what Kirsch calls “an enhanced placebo effect” (14-17). After examining foundational studies on the function of serotonin in the brain, which would lead to the justification of the chemical imbalance theory of depression (the most popular theory today), Kirsch builds on his placebo claim by concluding “there is no convincing evidence that depression is due to a chemical imbalance in the brain” (99). A strong advocate for psychotherapy (particularly cognitive behavioral therapy), Kirsch makes clear, in ways that echo Horwitz, Wakefield, and Radden, that depression is very real and most likely involves the brain, but that rather then being because of a faulty brain, it is more likely that the condition “may result from a normally functioning brain, containing neural networks that have been shaped by life events and that respond to current life demands in a way that is experienced subjectively as sadness and despair. It may be the events themselves that make us feel lost and hopeless, or it may be the way in which we have learned to interpret those events” (100, emphasis added). Once again the subjective and context-based nature of depression surfaces in direct opposition to a diagnostic paradigm that privileges a chemically related disorder.
HERE COMES MELANCHOLIA! This dissertation is rooted in the observation that mourning and melancholia particularly haunt the late twentieth and early twenty-first century cultural imagination. My focus is on postmodern American literature, and I begin with the above examples to demonstrate the present
1 Other factors for the tests’ successful results include the failure to account for the natural recovery of depression during lengthy trials and the inability of drug companies to properly distinguish between statistical significance and clinical significance. 3
state of melancholia, which scholars have traced from ancient Greece into the present day.2 As the above examples suggest, the category of depression has subsumed the conditions of normal sadness and melancholia, which were once thought to be generated by subjective, context- oriented states of mind. Along with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the DSM officially recognized depression as a psychological disorder in its third edition, published in 1980.3 Despite the seemingly progressive transformation of melancholia into depression, it is important to follow the suspicions of the abovementioned scholars by noting several variables that have been lost. Missing in the analytic framework of depression, along with context-driven sadness, is a consideration of ambivalence, reality-testing, mourning, and self-negation, which are major ingredients of melancholia that Sigmund Freud described in his 1917 essay, “Mourning and Melancholia.” After holding up melancholia’s transformation to more recent developments in American literature, I argue that these missing variables continue to occupy our cultural imagination, not as melancholia, but as a precondition of postmodernism. In much contemporary literature, characters endlessly negotiate the representation of traumatic memories and historical losses in the form of hallucinations, ghosts, and surrogates. These powerful instances of melancholia, I argue, reveal a cultural impulse to mourn that is incompatible with the contemporary logic of depression and trauma. One of the major implications of this argument is that people now discuss melancholic states in terms of depression because of their inability to reconcile the presence of a disorder alongside a postmodern mindset that they have learned to embrace. Melancholia, I argue, has moved from an inward to outward state and from an individual disorder to a collective mindset. It is from studying postmodern literary narratives, particularly those about trauma, history, and loss, that I will further explore this melancholic production. Before explaining the value Freud’s theory of melancholia has for understanding contemporary, postmodern culture and literature, I will first provide a brief history of the concept. I wish to note that, while I will pause at greater lengths on thinkers like Hippocrates, Robert Burton, Freud, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler, this
2 For one of the earliest histories of melancholia, see Robert Burton’s monumental Anatomy of Melancholia (1621, 1624, 1628, 1632, and 1638). For more recent histories, see Stanley Jackson’s Melancholia and Depression (1986), Jenifer Radden’s The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (2000), and Laura D. Hirshbein’s American Melancholy: Constructions of Depression in the Twentieth Century (2009). 3 Laura D. Hirshbein has recently traced out this development of depression within the DSM in American Melancholy: Constructions of Depression in the Twentieth Century (2009). See particularly pages 38-46 for more information on this development. 4
history is very much abridged and in no way attempts to compete with what I consider the major histories of melancholia by Jackson and Radden. Jackson and Radden have exhaustively demonstrated how melancholia has survived for thousands of years and how its definition continues to buckle and transform today. I also want to make a note on terminology. As these major histories also make evident, the term melancholia is often thought to come into popular circulation after the term melancholy. Some scholars have even attempted to distinguish between melancholy, as a “normal condition,” and melancholia, as something “abnormal” (Radden The Nature 48).4 I will not be making this distinction and, following this brief history, will primarily refer to melancholia, using the Freudian articulation that sometimes draws from earlier descriptions of both melancholy and melancholia. Melancholy’s earliest manifestation was in the ancient Greek writings of Hippocrates (5th-4th century B.C.E.), who diagnosed melancholy as one of a variety of diseases involving four liquid humors, which are, according to Robert Burton, the “liquid or fluent part[s] of the body, comprehended in it, for the preservation of it; and [are] either innate or born with us, or adventitious and acquisite” (147). Such humors consist of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile (or melancholy), the latter of which is “cold and dry, thick, black, and sour, begotten of the spleen, is a bridle to the other two hot humours, blood and choler, preserving them in the blood, and nourishing the bones” (Burton 147-148). The four humors also correspond to qualities and the seasons: blood being warm and moist and associated with the Spring; phlegm is cold and moist and aligned with Winter; yellow bile, also known as choler, is warm and dry with a Summer association; and black bile, or Melancholy, is associated with cold, dry Autumn (Jackson 7-9). Melancholy, as Stanley Jackson explains, is derived from the Greek “µελαινα χολη (melaina chole), translated into Latin as atra bilis and into English as black bile” (4). Most scholars of the humoral origin of melancholia usually associate the disorder with the quantity of black bile in the body. Burton, however, while reading the 6th century physician, Trallianus, also instructs that melancholia, as a condition, may result from any of the four humors, and even from a special combination of all four (399-404). Radden cleverly compares this humoral imbalance explanation of melancholy with the chemical imbalance theory of today,
4 While some make this distinction between melancholy and melancholia, others like Judith Butler, as Radden points out, “reblur[] the distinction between normal and abnormal melancholic states” (The Nature 48). Regardless of the distinctions, as Radden continues, and as I demonstrate at the onset, “the term depression, of more recent origin, . . . largely replaces melancholia” (The Nature 48). 5
a theory by which one is thought to be depressed, not because of invisible humors, but from an under- or overabundance of neurotransmitters in the brain (The Nature 49).5 From Hippocrates’ humoral paradigm, melancholy evolves as a concept and makes several appearances throughout medicine and philosophy. Some of the more notable writings, as Radden traces out in her history, include Aristotle (4th century B.C.E.), Galen (165 C.E.), John Cassian (416 C.E.), Marsillo Ficino (1482), Timothie Bright (1586), and Robert Burton (1621- 38) (Radden The Nature 55-155)6. Of all these intellectuals from the ancients to the Renaissance, it is easy to distinguish Burton as the pre-Freudian scholar with the greatest influence on all later theorists on the subject. (It is difficult to find a single study on melancholia today that does not at least epigraph Burton). By the time Burton wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy (which, in its latest edition spans over 1300 pages, divided into three partitions) people had broadened their discussions of melancholy to include so many causes, symptoms, and cures that it really isn’t surprising when Burton, at one point, concludes that “from these melancholy dispositions, no man living is free” (Burton 1:143). Resulting from his analysis of hundreds of documents, Burton shows how melancholy’s broad-ranging umbrella (resembling a kind of DSM focusing only on melancholy) covers nearly all life experiences, including habit and disposition, that transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorry, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dullness, heaviness, and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing forwardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, solitary, anyway moved or displeased. (1:143) In addition to humoral imbalance, Burton’s Anatomy includes God (1:179), spirits (1:180), ghosts and omens (1:195), possession (1:201), witches and magicians (1:203), stars (1:207), old age (1:210), inheritance from parents (1:213), bad diet, such as the consumption of pork,
5 Radden explains that “While no longer humoral, biomedical analyses depend on the presence of deficit, excess, or dysfunction in biological states to explain the presence and persistence of at least the more severe, intractable, ‘endogenous’ depression without apparent psychological origins” (49). 6 Corresponding works from these thinkers include Aristotle’s Problems, Galen’s On the Natural Faculties and On The Affected Parts, Cassian’s The Foundations of the Cenobitic Life and the Eight Capital Sins, Ficcino’s Three Books on Life, Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholy, and Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. 6
venison, milk, carp, and certain spices (1:217-225), drunkenness (1:227), bad air (1:237), immoderate exercise (1:241), and force of imagination (1:253) as causes of melancholy. It seems anything can cause this condition, and everyone may be to some degree melancholic. Burton does not even exclude himself from the grip of melancholy; he satirically begins his anatomy by assuming the persona of Democritus, the laughing philosopher, and also the prototypical melancholiac. Burton’s own cure (which joins a list that includes exercise, diet, and medicine) is staying busy, and writing about melancholy (1:20). After Burton is another expanse of melancholy writers that include Herman Boerhaave (1735), Philippe Pinel (1801), Benjamin Rush (1812), Wilhelm Griesinger (1867), Henry Maudsley (1867), Emil Kraepelin (1909-1915), and, of course, Sigmund Freud (1917) (Radden The Nature 173-294).7 Noteworthy to the present study is Kraepelin, who, as Radden explains, distinguishes between five kinds of melancholia: melancholia simplex, melancholia gravis, paranoid melancholia, fantastic melancholia, and delirious melancholia. Kraepelin’s “strong disease model” contributed to the de-emphasis of “the subjective distress and suffering that had for so long characterized melancholic states,” and his system of classifying mental diseases also influenced the first editions of the DSM (as well as the International Classification of Diseases) (Radden The Nature 48, 260-279). Most significant to this second generation of melancholy scholars, however, is Freud, who, maintaining that older interest in subjective melancholia, reimagined melancholia as a condition involving object-relations, loss, ambivalence, reality- testing, and mourning. Unlike scholars before him, Freud strongly emphasized melancholia’s relation to mourning and the economic investments by which individuals associate their libidos with the outside world of people, objects, and ideals. “In mourning,” Freud explains, “time is needed for the command of reality-testing to be carried out in detail, and . . . when this work has been accomplished the ego will have succeeded in freeing its libido from the lost object” (46). Mourning, in this case, is a graduated process by which a person revises her associations between her lost love and the outside world in accordance to the reality of the individual loss. In
7 Corresponding works from these thinkers include Boerhaave’s Aphorisms: Concerning the Knowledge and Cure of Diseases, Pinel’s A Treatise on Insanity, in Which are Contained the Principles of New and More Practical Nosology of Maniacal Disorders Than Has yet Been Offered to the Public, Rush’s Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind, Griesinger’s Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, Maudsley’s The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, Kraepelin’s Textbook of Psychiatry, and Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia.” 7
reality-testing, “[e]ach single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it” (39). This process of testing reality is painful, and even Freud is sometimes uncertain as to the nature of such pain. It is only after such a painful process, however, that one can fully complete the work of mourning after which “the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (40). Freud determines that a person becomes melancholic whenever he fails to achieve the reality-testing necessary for mourning. The person’s inability to execute reality-testing usually results from ambivalent associations toward his lost object, associations that were most likely formed when the object was actually present. The person, Freud explains, “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious” (“Mourning” 40, emphasis original). It is the melancholiac’s inability to know her loss (as if in a particular way) that interests me the most. Object relations, reality-testing, and ambivalence now function as the key variables in this centuries-old disorder, melancholia. As noted by Freud and others, ambivalent states of mind often develop whenever a person attempts to grieve the loss of someone who, for a number of reasons, was never in life what the person believes he is in death. An example of this is when a victim (who does not yet identify as a victim) fails to process the reality of a traumatic shock coming from a loved one (such as abuse, violation, or breach in trust), and then later attempts to mourn the loss of the offender as if s/he were nothing more in life than a loved one. “In melancholia,” Freud explains, “the occasions which give rise to the illness extend for the most part beyond the clear case of a loss by death, and include all those situations of being slighted, neglected or disappointed, which can import opposed feelings of love and hate into the relationship or reinforce an already existing ambivalence” (45). Another example of ambivalence would include the person who experiences guilt after blaming himself for a loss. Such guilt could stem from an earlier experience in life, perhaps even involving another loss from which the patient has never fully recovered. Or, more simply, the guilt could come from a false narrative to which the patient ascribes the cause of his loved one going away. The patient, for example, might feel responsible for doing or not doing something that caused the loved one’s departure. Key to understanding melancholic ambivalence
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is seeing how it often involves a person’s conflicting assessments of his loved one that prevent him from accounting for his libidinal investment after the loved one has died. The ambivalence of not knowing what one has lost in an object, which leads to a failure in reality-testing, continues throughout melancholia, but also develops into much worse conditions that make up what I consider melancholia proper. By failing to test reality and declare the lost loved one dead and gone, Freud continues, the patient ends up “devouring” the impossible loss to the point of actually identifying with the lost person (44). The patient keeps the lost object alive in her ego and begins to think that she, like her loved one, is also dead and gone. “In mourning,” Freud asserts, “it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (40). This exchange of identities (the dead for the living) often results in “painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (39). “The melancholic,” Freud continues, “displays . . . an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, [and] an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. . . . The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable . . .” (40). Finally, Freud concludes, the melancholiac “abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so unworthy. He is not of the opinion that a change has taken place in him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past; he declares that he was never any better” (40). Freud’s melancholiac, here, combines the past and the present into a single state. The most severe conclusion to this melancholic state is suicide, a riddle regarding the desire for self-destruction that Freud attempts to solve by suggesting that it is not the ego that the ego thinks it is killing. Rather, the ego wants to destroy the object with which the ego now identifies (45-46). Freud’s conceptualization of melancholia as a disorder involving loss and self-negation (from a failure of reality-testing) is groundbreaking, for sure. And yet, as Radden’s history indicates, “Mourning and Melancholia” really only captures the gaze of a handful of philosophers and theorists following its 1917 publication (The Nature 44, 49). Not long after the essay’s advent, Radden writes, “at least in the English language tradition, melancholia becomes an increasingly rare disorder category, little more than a footnote to nosological schemes and, as the years go by, less and less frequently described in clinical case material. In its stead we find
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emphasis on the condition today known as clinical depression” (The Nature 49, emphasis original). Medicine and psychiatry’s attitudes toward mental health were beginning to change, as demonstrated by the American Psychiatric Association’s publication of the first DSM (1952), and also the invention of the first antidepressant, iproniazid, in 1957, a “psychic energizer” that was originally developed in 1951 from discarded German rocket fuel (Kirsch 83). Taken as a whole, those scholars still interested in Freud’s articulation of melancholia relocate the significance of the disorder from the fields of psychiatry and medicine to the fields of philosophy, language, critical theory, literature, and feminist scholarship.8 Some of the more notable works are by Melanie Klein (1940), Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1987), Julia Kristeva (1989), Juliana Schiesari (1992), and Judith Butler (1990, 1993, 1997).9 Of these recent scholars, I turn briefly to Abraham and Torok, Kristeva, and Butler, who each uniquely characterize “the turn” of the melancholiac’s psychic energy from the outside world of investments to an inside world of fantasy, self-destruction, and even self-formation.10 It is from such considerations of this turn inwards to a fantasy reality that I will, in the last section of this introduction and throughout the four chapters, explore the melancholia generated by postmodern narratives. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s major contribution comes especially from the way they fortify Freud’s theory of melancholia with the language of antimetaphor, intrapsychic tombs, and inclusion topography, while reimagining older terms, incorporation and introjection. Abraham and Torok find it, first, important to distinguish between introjection and incorporation, concepts that earlier theorists often confuse.11 Going back to Sandor Ferenczi’s introduction of introjection in 1909, Abraham and Torok pair introjection with mourning, and consider both
8 Radden particularly notes how “The explosion of feminist sensibility and scholarship in the late twentieth century was a remarkable catalyst for studies in melancholia and depression. Within the psychoanalytic tradition, it instigated further elaboration of loss theories and even the revival of interest in melancholia in work such as that of Irigaray, Kristeva, and Butler. Outside psychoanalytic traditions, it led to an expanded empirical and theoretical focus on cultural causation and also incorporated ‘loss’ theory, more loosely understood, to develop explanations of depression acknowledging gender roles and women’s socialization” (The Nature 50). 9 Corresponding works include Klein’s “Mourning and It’s Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” Abraham and Torok’s The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Kristeva’s Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Schiesari’s The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature, and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies That Matter, and The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. 10 Of these thinkers, I credit Butler for being the first to really label this psychic event as “the turn.” 11 According to Abraham and Torok, after Sandor Ferenczi’s first delineation of introjection, thinkers like Melanie Klein, Karl Abraham, even Freud, “muddled” the meaning of the term and at times employed the term “to denote a mechanism characterized by the impossibility or the refusal to introject, at least in the sense originally intended by Ferenczi” (111). 10
concepts to involve “growth” (113). “By broadening and enriching the ego,” they argue, “introjection seeks to introduce into it the unconscious, nameless, or repressed libido. Thus, it is not at all a matter of ‘introjecting’ the object, as is all too commonly stated, but of introjecting the sum total of the drives, and their vicissitudes as occasioned and mediated by the object” (113). Later on, they refer to introjection as a “process,” which relates to Freud’s reality-testing by which a person gradually, albeit painfully, declares her loss dead and gone while concurrently turning toward her ego for reassessment. This declaration of loss and return of the libidinal investments to the ego denotes revision (in the writing sense) as all parts of the libido (including those not directly connected with the lost object) are slowly given a new value. Different from mourning and introjection, incorporation is “magical,” involves “hallucinatory fulfillments,” “denotes a fantasy,” and aims to “transform the world rather than inflict injury on the subject” (Abraham and Torok 113,125). As another term for melancholia, incorporation occurs whenever the person is unable to fully grasp the nature of his relationship with the lost object, and the result also entails an ingestion of the object within the person’s body. It is upon exploring this point of ingestion that Abraham and Torok use the language of incorporation to emphasize the unique turn that takes place in both mourning and melancholia. With mourning and introjection, the turn involves the painful assessment of reality with which parts of the libido are preoccupied, followed by a reassessment of the ego as one rebuilds it in a new way. With melancholia and incorporation, on the other hand, the turn begins with an assessment of reality, and ends with a turning against the ego to avoid the painful process of mourning. To keep painful mourning and introjection at bay, Abraham and Torok theorize that the person “fantasize[s] swallowing (or having swallowed) that which has been lost” (126). From the way they imagine this point of swallowing, Abraham and Torok add another dimension to Freud’s melancholiac who keeps her loved one alive inside her at the expense of her own self. The patient, according to Abraham and Torok, keeps the loved one alive on the inside in the form of “inclusion topography” by which the inside space resembles a vast “intrapsychic tomb.” Not only does the melancholiac swallow the lost loved one (as Freud seems to suggest); she swallows with it the entire world that once corresponded to the loved one when it was alive. To keep reality-testing and mourning at bay, the fantasy has to seem real, and the melancholiac thus incorporates with the loved one “its own topography. The crypt also includes the actual or supposed traumas that made introjection impracticable” (130). This intrapsychic
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tomb is not unlike the set of a reality television show. Despite its being equipped with pretend furniture, rooms, buildings, actors, and intricate scripts, the intrapsychic tomb simultaneously operates under the assumption that everything inside is real. To maintain this fantasized, painless tomb-world, the melancholiac also eschews linguistic substitution with which Abraham and Torok believe a mourner would typically understand loss. During the first experience of mourning and introjection, this linguistic substitution occurs as the child transitions from a “mouth filled with the breast to a mouth filled with words” (Abraham and Torok 127). At first, “the initial stages of introjection emerge in infancy when the mouth’s emptiness is experienced alongside the mother’s simultaneous presence. The emptiness is first experienced in the form of cries and sobs, delayed fullness, then as calling, ways of requesting presence, as language” (127). All other losses from this point forward follow a similar process of substitution. Choked by the fear of pain that goes along with linguistic substitution (the cries and sobs), the melancholiac adopts a different program: “antimetaphor.” “Incorporation,” Abraham and Torok explain, implements the metaphor of introjection literally when the usually spontaneous process of introjection becomes self-aware, that is, when it undergoes reflexive treatment, as it were. This form of reflexive treatment occurs only if the barely initiated or expected work of introjection encounters a prohibitive obstacle. The obstacle is found in the mouth, in the seat of the phenomena steering introjection. Because our mouth is unable to say certain words and unable to formulate certain sentences, we fantasize, for reasons yet to be determined, that we are actually taking into our mouth the unnamable, the object itself. (128) As demonstrated here and above, introjection involves substituting the loss with language and the trope of an empty mouth. “I have lost you,” the mourner is likely to think, “And you have left a void in my mouth. I will use this mouth to talk about you and the pain I am feeling.” The melancholiac, on the other hand, imagines the mouth in another way. She denies the cavity that a loss will leave behind and, with a full mouth, has no way of talking about the reality of the loss. After swallowing her loss (which continues to fill her mouth) it is also as if she no longer has a mouth (or has need for a mouth). The melancholiac keeps her loved one alive at the expense of her own voice and sustenance (along with words she also cannot put food or other objects of
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desire into her mouth). The melancholiac, in Abraham and Torok’s vision, thus negates herself by taking literally the metaphors used in mourning to distinguish between the self, her libido, her objects of desire, and their departure. Unlike Freud, Abraham and Torok consider ambivalence, which denotes an unconscious attitude toward a loss, to be less instrumental to melancholia than the creation of this inner space they call “topography inclusion” (135). Despite these theoretical differences, however, both involve a resistance to the articulation of what one has lost, an impediment that prevents reality- testing and leads to melancholia. With their focus on language, Abraham and Torok also usher in a postmodern attitude toward melancholia, one on which Julia Kristeva builds to explain the melancholic tendencies of women who, because they identify with their mother, are unable to achieve the initial matricidal gesture necessary for becoming autonomous (27-29), and also an attitude that Judith Butler pushes to the limits of discovering incorporation and melancholic identification as essential for letting an object go and forming the subject (134, 171). I will now briefly turn to these two philosophers. One of Julia Kristeva’s central claims has to do with relating the linguistic properties of mourning and melancholia to gender and what Kristeva calls “feminine depression.” Kristeva particularly notes how women are susceptible to melancholia because their identification with the mother (the first loss) prevents the same kind of maternal substitution by language found in males (28-30). Even without a later loss in life for which they might avoid linguistic substitution, women, for Kristeva, are already predisposed to the condition of melancholia.12 While focusing on Freud, and occasionally gesturing back towards the work of Abraham and Torok, Kristeva particularly imagines mourning and melancholia (for both females and males) in terms of ambivalence and linguistic representation. Linguistic substitution, for Kristeva, brings about mourning as a person simultaneously negates and replaces a loved one with language: “‘But no,’” the mourner says in response to having lost an object of desire, “‘I
12 Kristeva’s focus on gender is appropriate, given melancholy’s frequent gender associations throughout its long tenure as a recognized affect. Earlier melancholiacs were often thought to be philosophers and poets, and therefore, not surprisingly, men. Later, when melancholy became more negative, it became a female malady. With her focus on gender and language, Kristeva joins one of the larger, ongoing conversations about melancholia that includes Judith Butler, Julian Schiesari, Jennifer Radden, and Laura Hirshbein. For more on the connection between melancholia and feminist theory, see Schiesari’s The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature, Hirshbein’s American Melancholy: Constructions of Depression in the Twentieth Century (77-125), and Radden’s The Nature (50). 13
have found her again in signs, or rather since I consent to lose her I have not lost her (that is the negation), I can recover her in language.’” (Kristeva 43). The person who mourns notes both that she has lost someone and that she can negate this someone after substituting her with language (43). The melancholiac (to whom Kristeva also refers as the depressed) is more skeptical of the representative media of language and speech. While she may use language to communicate (both talking and hearing), the words are empty and far from reality. “[W]ith melancholy persons,” Kristeva notes, “meaning appears to be arbitrary, or else it is elaborated with the help of much knowledge and will to mastery, but seems secondary, frozen, somewhat removed from the head and body of the person who is speaking” (43). Unlike the mourner who uses language to negate the loved one through substitution, melancholiacs “disavow the negation: they cancel it out, suspend it, and nostalgically fall back on the real object (the Thing) of their loss, which is just what they do not manage to lose, to which they remain painfully riveted” (43-44, emphasis original). Much of Kristeva’s explanation of melancholia falls in line with Abraham and Torok. By “the Thing,” Kristeva means “the real that does not lend itself to signification, the center of attraction and repulsion, seat of the sexuality from which the object of desire will become separated” (13). In light of Abraham and Torok, the breast, with which a mourner substitutes an empty mouth, crying, and finally words, is a good example of this notion of “the Thing.” Such a “Thing,” on which the melancholiac fixates, “interrupts desiring metonymy, just as it prevents working out the loss within the psyche” (Kristeva 14). “The Thing” is outside the representation of language, and it is this disbelief in language that causes melancholiacs to be “affectionate, wounded to be sure, but prisoners of affect. The affect is their thing. / The Thing is inscribed within us without memory, the buried accomplice of our unspeakable anguishes” (14). Not unlike the traumatic experience that becomes imprinted on the person’s brain, only, as contemporary scholars note, to return later, against the person’s will, “the Thing” continues to survive, despite language and reality’s insistence that it is dead. This is essentially a semiotic explanation of Freud’s melancholiac who knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in the person. Not trusting the signifier of her lost object (for reasons related to ambivalence), the melancholiac acknowledges a loss while sensing something else separated from the loss that is, because it is not fully represented, very much alive.
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Despite the fact that it is almost impossible to avoid by women and those skeptical of linguistic substitution, melancholia is still an unwanted condition for Kristeva in need of treatment. For Judith Butler, on the other hand, melancholia’s characteristics denote something less debilitating and more revealing of the processes of regular mourning, social institutions, and subject formation. Returning once more to the melancholiac’s “turn” toward the ego after failing to adequately test the reality of her loss, Butler asks “But what is this ‘self’ that takes itself as its own object? Is the one who ‘takes’ itself and the one who is ‘taken’ the same?” (168). How, Butler wonders, can an act of turning be simultaneously by and against a self? In answer to this question, Butler suggests that it is this “turn from the object to the ego [that] produces the ego,” meaning both that melancholia may be necessary for subject formation and that mourning cannot take place without melancholia (168). Butler arrives at these questions and conclusions after pausing on Freud’s second analysis of melancholia in The Ego and the Id (1923). In this very brief return to melancholia, Freud notes that “the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices” (The Ego 24), while later revealing that “in melancholia the object to which the super-ego’s wrath applies has been taken into the ego through identification” (The Ego 52). It is from these insights (published six years after “Mourning and Melancholia”) that Butler suggests “Freud himself acknowledged that melancholy, the unfinished process of grieving, is central to the formation of the identifications that form the ego. Indeed, identifications formed from unfinished grief are the modes in which the lost object is incorporated and phantasmatically preserved in and as the ego” (132). Unlike Abraham and Torok, Butler seems to rethink the possibility of distinguishing between incorporation and introjection; both processes seem to involve ambivalence and topographic inclusion. Recall for a moment Freud’s description of the ambivalent person who “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” (“Mourning” 40). This unknown investment, for Freud, prevents reality-testing and mourning, and it shows up in Abraham and Torok in the form of antimetaphor and the inability to substitute an empty mouth and words for the lost object. With Kristeva, the same ambivalence takes the form of “the thing” that endures despite linguistic attempts to represent a lost object. For Butler, this ambivalence also arises in the forms of
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“unspeakability and unrepresentability,” only this time it is with regards to “social life” (183). It is not so much that the person swallows her loss because she, herself, has failed to keep track of the nature of her investment in this loss. Instead, as Butler contends, the melancholiac’s inability to know her loss occurs after “forms of social power emerge that regulate what losses will and will not be grieved” (183). No longer, for Butler, is ambivalence about an unknown investment; it is about being told what is grievable and how such grievances are to be grieved. Ambivalence and melancholia therefore come not from one’s internalization of a love/ hate relationship with a lost object but from one’s love/ hate relationship with the social apparatuses responsible for regulating desire and mourning. “Loss in a world that cannot be declared,” Butler explains, “enrages, generates ambivalence, and becomes the loss ‘in’ the ego that is nameless and diffuse and that prompts public rituals of self beratement” (185). The subject, as I read Butler, really isn’t swallowing the loss at all. Rather, in ways that still resemble Abraham and Torok’s inclusion topography, she swallows the very social conditions that prevent her from articulating and therefore mourning her loss. “Melancholia,” Butler explains, “appears to be a process of internalization, and one might well read its effects as a psychic state that has effectively substituted itself for the world in which it dwells. The effect of melancholia, then, appears to be the loss of the social world, the substitution of psychic parts and antagonisms for external relations among social actors . . . (181). And it is this substitution of self-berating for the berating of a social order that turns melancholia, for Butler, into a “representation of psychic life” (177). In its present state, articulated by Abraham and Torok, Kristeva, and Butler, melancholia has clearly oscillated from a disorder involving failed reality-testing and impossible mourning to a condition involving social and linguistic representation. Within these more postmodern frameworks in which reality can only be tested and processed through language, melancholia starts to seem inevitable. How now is one to consider the implications of melancholia’s intersection with postmodernism? I will explore this question by now turning toward the writing and reception of contemporary trauma, history, and depression narratives.
THE POSTMODERN PRECESSION OF MELANCHOLIA As I mapped out above, part of melancholia’s diminution from popular and scholarly discourse derives from the increasing focus on depressive disorder and chemical imbalance
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theories. But some of melancholia’s departure can also be attributed to the emergence of trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), one of the dominant analytic frameworks of the last thirty years. Several contemporary descriptions of trauma and PTSD closely overlap Freud’s description of the melancholiac, and it is also not uncommon for people to utilize the titles “trauma” and “PTSD” to describe psychological responses to loss. In addition to trauma’s close relation to melancholia within the cultural imagination, the methods used to theorize, describe, and narrate traumatic experiences bear striking resemblance to the logic used by Freud’s melancholic patients. As I will soon demonstrate, this logic is closely connected to a postmodern compulsion to conflate absence with loss and abjure the routine of reality-testing necessary for mourning. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud takes note of earlier theories about traumatic neurosis that “attribute the cause of the disorder to organic lesions of the nervous system brought about by mechanical force,” such as railway disasters (10). Freud then revises this theory to describe a more subjective (and psychological) phenomenon by which certain mental states, such as dreams, “repeatedly bring[] the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright” (Beyond 11). Contemporary writers like Cathy Caruth have followed Freud’s lead and described trauma as “the unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind” (Caruth 2). Such a reenactment or return often takes the form of a hallucination, dream or flashback, and Caruth argues in Unclaimed Experience (1996) that this experiential return occurs outside language; it is beyond signification and experienced during the flashback exactly as it occurred historically. Ruth Leys (2000) describes PTSD as “fundamentally a disorder of memory” (2). Genealogically speaking, the disorder, as Leys explains, originates with John Erichsen in the 1860’s, is established in psychology by theorists like Morton Prince and Sigmund Freud during the 1890’s, dissipates after 1945, and is revived in the 1980’s “largely as the result of an essentially political struggle by psychiatrists, social workers, activists and others to acknowledge the post-war sufferings of the Vietnam War veteran” (5). This revival, Leys adds, prompted the DSM to include “traumatic disorder” in its third edition, published in 1980 (5), the same edition that first included depression as a psychological disorder. Dominick LaCapra has uniquely contributed to this conversation on trauma by questioning the ways that people write (or narrate) traumatic history. In Writing History, Writing
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Trauma (2001), LaCapra detects what he sees as a shift between two popular models of historiography, documentary and radical constructivism, the latter of which has a powerful influence on contemporary, postmodern narratives of trauma. The earlier model, documentary, maintains that “gathering evidence and making referential statements in the form of truth claims based on that evidence constitute necessary and sufficient conditions of historiography” (1). Such an historical approach, as LaCapra points out, seems to gain popularity during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a method to “professionalize history under the banner of objectivity and to distance, if not dissociate, it from literature . . .”(2). The model of documentary, LaCapra continues, is thus reduced to writing up the results of research, and style is limited to a restricted notion of mellifluous, immediately readable or accessible, well-crafted prose . . . in which form ideally has no significant effect on content. In other words, writing is a medium for expressing a content, and its ideal goal is to be transparent to content or an open window on the past—with figures of rhetoric serving only an instrumental role in illustrating what could be expressed without loss in literal terms. (3) The documentarian narrates a traumatic experience (which LaCapra detects as a special kind of history) in a way that makes the reader forget (or never acknowledge in the first place) that subjects with political agendas are representing such experiences.13 All information in the documentary is supported with footnotes and any information that is not “factual” enough is relegated to introductory and conclusion pages (5-6). LaCapra also associates documentary writing with the modernist period and, citing Frank Ankersmit, notes that “if we take seriously the text and its narrative substances we will become postmodernists; if we see only the statement we will remain modernist” (10). Structuring their questions within an epistemological framework, documentaries are likely modernist because they treat the written medium as something capable of revealing an underlying truth.14 A competent documentary would thus
13 In these documentaries, the readers are not supposed to ask questions like: Who is and who is not being narrated? The traumatized war antagonists? Or just the protagonists? Average people? If so, who is average? Wealthy Americans or the disenfranchised underclasses? What kinds of figurative language choices are being made? What kinds of literary analogies are being made? 14 For more on the connection between modernism and epistemology, see Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction 1- 11. 18
direct the reader’s attention to this truth and away from its own linguistic and rhetorical properties. Following a different agenda, the radical constructivist model of history regards truth claims as ironic at best. Unlike the documentarians, radical constructivists are more postmodern in that referential statements making truth claims apply at best only to events and are of restricted, indeed marginal significance. By contrast, essential are performative, figurative, aesthetic, rhetorical, ideological, and political factors that “construct” structures—stories, plots, arguments, interpretations, explanations—in which referential statements are embedded and take on meaning and significance. (1) Because there is no way to directly access and represent the historical referent, radical constructivists often center their writing on the subject of impossibility. Following this methodology, radical constructivists expose other, documentary, narratives that make truth claims while also experimenting themselves with the historical medium (diction, structure, point of view) in ways that illuminate for the reader the representative barriers of history and language. With regards to contemporary attitudes toward trauma, which often fall under the radical constructivist category, LaCapra also detects a logical error that directly intersects melancholia, trauma studies, and postmodernism. Crucial to mourning a loss, particularly one that stems from a collectively shared traumatic event, is distinguishing the historical loss from more absent concepts or foundations such as innocence, the Fall, the primal crime, or even the entry into language (52). A growing number of people, LaCapra argues, often confuse and conflate historical loss and absence, particularly at the level of representation. “When absence is converted into loss,” LaCapra explains, one increases the likelihood of misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified community. When loss is converted into (or encrypted in an indiscriminately generalized rhetoric of) absence, one faces the impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning, and interminable aporia in which any process of working through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed or prematurely aborted. (46) This aporia and impossible mourning resembles the melancholia Freud anticipates when suggesting that one necessarily fails to test reality and trace the expenditure of his libido because
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he “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” (40). LaCapra’s conception of this ambivalent dilemma (involving a whom and a what) also resembles Abraham and Torok’s description of antimetaphor by which a person takes literally the metaphors normally used to substitute the lost object in mourning. One conflating absence and loss, in other words, generates melancholia by treating a narrative of absence (such as a loss of innocence) as if it were real, and not merely as a way of describing a historical loss. “Paradise absent,” LaCapra notes, “is different from paradise lost . . .” (57), and it is likely that a person will fail to mourn a lost paradise when, during the early stages of libidinal assessment and reality-testing, she cannot determine the extent to which paradise was ever possessed. Besides Freud’s greater emphasis on reality-testing, the big difference between LaCapra’s and Freud’s understanding of melancholia is where LaCapra detects alongside the impossibility to mourn a historical loss a coinciding impossibility to mourn a foundational absence. Mourning, as Abraham and Torok put it earlier, entails “reclaim[ing] as our own the part of ourselves that we placed in what we lost” (127). Should a person, LaCapra’s theory seems to suggest, attempt to reclaim this part of ourselves from an absence instead of, or in addition to, a historical loss, then mourning may, (perhaps must) become impossible and turn continually back into endless melancholy. The approximation or even conflation of absence and loss induces a melancholic or impossibly mournful response to the closure of metaphysics, a generalized “hauntology,” and even a dubious assimilation (or at least an insufficiently differentiated treatment) of other problems (notably a limit event such as the Holocaust and its effects on victims) with respect to a metaphysical or metametaphysical frame of reference. (68) Thus, for LaCapra, two kinds of melancholia emerge when conflating absence with loss. One involves the impossibility to mourn a historical loss that resembles an absent ideal or narrative; the other involves the impossibility to mourn an absent ideal or narrative that resembles a historical loss. One of the major reasons melancholia occurs from conflating loss and absence (corresponding with mourning and trauma) is that desire starts to operate in two very disagreeing ways. “Desire,” LaCapra explains,
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has a different impetus and configuration with respect to absence and to loss or lack. In terms of loss or lack, the object of desire is specified: to recover the lost or lacking object or some substitute for it. . . . By contrast, the object or direction of desire is not specified in relation to absence. (59) As I mentioned earlier, desire for a historical loss involves a foundational libidinal economy that must constantly reorient itself as objects come and go. This reorientation involves reality-testing and also resembles introjection. As I read LaCapra’s explanation of loss doubling as absence, desire becomes unmanageable because the person tries and continuously fails to test the reality of an inaccessible target. This is like testing the reality of a lost horizon by estimating what one’s distance to it must have been when it was present. The object of desire now doubles as a reality that the person can never test beyond its linguistic representation. Introjection also becomes impossible as the libido (which never really obtained anything other than language) loses any motivation to reorient itself; it thinks as though it never really had or lost anything. Incorporation thus becomes the only option and the melancholiac, who has conflated her loss with an absence, will necessarily negate herself by swallowing her loss in lieu of the impossible process of mourning. I believe LaCapra is especially important, both for providing an understanding of melancholia as a product of conventional trauma frameworks, and for inadvertently revealing a striking similarity between Freud’s conceptualization of melancholia and some of the major tenets of postmodernism—a similarity that the rest of this project sets out to magnify. While not always about loss and mourning, postmodern narratives generate melancholia with their overt rejection of the reality principle and repetitive declarations of, as Frederic Jameson notes, “the end of the bourgeois ego . . . [and] the psychopathologies of that ego” (15). Just as the melancholiac negates herself by avoiding the pain of reality-testing and mourning, the postmodern character undergoes a “waning of affect” at the expense of an ego that might otherwise be affected (Jameson 15). Furthermore, the postmodern narrative often “eschews temporality for space” (Jameson 134), resembling the melancholiac’s substitution of a present world, in which his loved one has perished, for the topographical inclusion of a past world, in which his loved one freely roams. As Brian McHale determines in Postmodernist Fiction (1987), “the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. . . . [and] deploys strategies which engage and foreground
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questions like . . . ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?’” (10) McHale later describes this postmodern dominant as an “ontological plurality or instability” (11), which I believe may be the driving force of melancholia in several works of contemporary literature. Echoing Baudrillard’s explanation in “The Precession of Simulacra” (1981) of the map that precedes the original territory (1), the melancholic fantasy worlds in postmodern narratives precede both loss and mourning along with any promise of a world in which a healthy ego and reality principle remain intact. Just as Freud noted of the melancholiac, the postmodern character who fails either to mourn or test reality “declares that he was never any better” (“Mourning” 40). Moreover, I argue that the postmodern character and Freud’s melancholiac each assume the fantastic posture of Sethe, from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and together pronounce: “Whatever is going on outside my door ain’t for me. The world is in this room. This here’s all there is and all there needs to be” (Morrison 183). Instead of expending libidinal energy on the outside world of new objects, melancholiac and postmodern characters paradoxically denounce an outside world while also swallowing it, so that they might embrace it from an inside/outside space. In the process, they negate themselves and use up everything they have to maintain the fantasy of this inner/ outer world. Beloved, a slave narrative in which a dead child returns to her mother’s house in the form a ghost, and later as an adult representing both the child and the traumatic history of slavery (particularly the Middle Passage), is but one of several examples of postmodern narratives that generate this kind of melancholia. With it I would include the works of Tim O’Brien, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, as well as Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist. Unique to these particular works is not just their use of postmodern tropes such as performativity, self-reference, aporia, historiographic metafiction, ontological instability, heterotopia, and cyberspace to represent characters suffering from recurring traumatic experiences. These postmodern representations may by themselves resemble certain melancholic mindsets, however, several of these narratives also include characters that are unable to mourn specific, historical losses, toward which they express deep ambivalence. In the Lake of the Woods, for example, pairs a man’s war trauma with his frequent lamentations, guilt, and anger towards his abusive father who died when he was a child. Along similar lines, Everything is Illuminated combines a Jewish man’s never-ending search for a
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woman thought to have saved his grandfather from the Nazis with a story of a man who is unable to mourn a wife that abandoned him. Narratives like these generate melancholia by combining an endless negotiation of the representative barriers of traumatic history with what should be a temporary negotiation of desire and reality during the act of mourning. With regards to postmodern fiction, McHale has argued that if we “push ontological questions far enough . . . they tip over into epistemological questions” (11). With this in mind, it may be the case that these trauma narratives continue to venture into the realm of melancholia because their underlying postmodern inquiries may (or must) continue to “tip” towards certain questions about reality traditionally asked by people in mourning. I will explore the possible reasons for this “tipping” in the chapters that follow. In the following chapters, I analyze similar and dissimilar intersections between melancholia and representations of trauma, memory, history, and loss as they appear in postmodern, American, fiction. Although I will continue to return to my central argument that the logic of postmodernism uniquely ushers in and even embraces that of melancholia, a condition Freud considered a mourning disorder, I will also demonstrate how each of the selected works generate such melancholia in very different ways. In chapter one, “Killing the Father for Dying: Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods,” I examine O’Brien’s unique combination of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder related to combat with melancholia related to loss. In the Lake, I argue, demonstrates how the conditions of melancholia and PTSD instigate each other as its protagonist, John Wade, experiences his Vietnam War trauma while already in a melancholic state of mind, which stems from an abusive father who committed suicide when he was a child. By including a character with a favorite pastime of performing magic, the novel also presents the melancholiac’s self-negation (described by Freud, Abraham and Torok, et al.) as a form of labor from which the melancholiac expresses complete devotion toward specific tricks. The novel, I conclude, compels its readers to utilize alternative theories of desire and ambivalence to address a cultural impulse to mourn historical losses in the midst of a postmodern crises of representation, magic, and deception. In chapter two, “Sethe’s Fantastic Crypt: Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” I examine Morrison’s unique personification of melancholia as a kind of loneliness “that roams,” and comes and goes “of her own free will” (274, 200). The novel, I argue, represents melancholic ambivalence, in the Freudian sense, by articulating desire and love in terms of thicknesses,
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colors, and containers that are nearly impossible to manage and sort through. Beloved is the perfect example of Abraham and Torok’s theory of incorporation, inclusion topography, and antimetaphor. The novel sets out to imagine melancholia from the perspective of the patient, while showing how the topographic fantasy world resembles an actual house (lacking a back door) to which one’s loss returns as a dependent in need of total care. Finally, I argue in this chapter that Morrison combines the logic of trauma with mourning to both imagine how outsiders interact with melancholiacs (as if they were both familiar and strange) and to consider the concept of collective melancholia, by which several affected subjects interact within the same fantastic, topographic spaces. Chapter three, “Jonathan Safran Foer’s Melancholic Hymnals,” continues to examine the relationship between traumatic historical experiences, which are both intrusive and inaccessible, and the management of historical loss. By conflating absence and loss, I argue that Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close both situate the ambivalent object of mourning at the same level as the inaccessible referent in language. These novels together demonstrate how the postmodern production of melancholia begins with a misuse of the frameworks of desire and historical representation. From this confusion, I demonstrate how characters suspend their historical losses in a logic of empty coffins, darkness, uncertainty, and mistranslation, while regarding history as a lost possession in need of mourning. Lastly, in chapter four, “The Virtual Undead: Postmodernism and Grief in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist,” I analyze DeLillo’s recovery narrative in which a woman, Lauren Hartke, attempts to grieve the loss of her husband, Rey, who commits suicide. Unlike the mourning and recovery narratives that I examine in previous chapters, this one does not generate melancholia by pairing a historical loss with the representation of a collectively shared trauma (such as Slavery, the Holocaust, or the Vietnam War). Rather, the novel does so by pairing Lauren’s historical loss with an unrepresentable trauma (Rey’s suicide) and, more emphatically, her mindfulness of reality’s suspension within media such as newspapers, telephones, and cyberspace. With such a unique combination of mourning, trauma, and representation, I argue, the novel particularly reveals how mourning and recovery (along Freudian lines) is incompatible with the postmodern condition. The novel, I argue, finally presents readers with an ultimatum. To avoid painful melancholia one must fully commit to a postmodern logic that does not specify
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objects of desire and loss. Otherwise one must mourn, which will require the reestablishment of an investment-oriented reality principle alongside postmodern theories of representation.
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CHAPTER ONE
Killing the Father for Dying: Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods
Ever since the publication of If I Die in the Combat Zone (1973), a memoir that discusses his one-year tour in Vietnam, critics have hailed Tim O’Brien as one of the principal figures of a body of narrative that concentrates on American soldiers’ inability to cope with their Vietnam War experiences. Such a brand of storytelling combines the Vietnam experience with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which was officially recognized by the American Medical Association in 1980. With this combination in mind, these narratives thus focus on characters who uncontrollably revisit, or have delayed reactions to, overwhelming Vietnam experiences. These reactions typically prevent them from carrying out the functions necessary for living healthy and socially congruent lives. Literary examples include Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (1976), Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country (1985), Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story (1986) and Philip Caputo’s Indian Country (1987). This model of storytelling has also garnered cultural capital in films such as Martin Scorsese’s The Taxi Driver (1976), Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Karel Reisz’s Who’ll Stop the Rain (all released in 1977), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), four Rambo movies (1982,1985,1988,2008), Oliver Stone’s adaptation of Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder (1990), and Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump (1994). It has become nearly impossible to talk about the Vietnam War veteran without painting a picture of what O’Brien has once called “the violent vet,” the crazy man who responds to his severe trauma with heavy drug usage, detachment from the outside world, and physical and mental abuse towards those around him (“Violent Vet” 96). The traumatized veteran surfaces again in O’Brien’s 1994 novel, In the Lake of the Woods. After completing a tour of duty in Vietnam, protagonist John Wade suffers from flashbacks and severe anxiety that may lead him to murder his wife, Kathy, though the novel does not reveal whether he actually perpetrates this act. But while the novel clearly depicts Wade as a traumatized Vietnam veteran, In the Lake is not simply about trauma, as many critics have asserted. It is also a tale of melancholia, for Wade’s problems stem not simply from Vietnam but also from Wade’s inability to mourn the death of his abusive father. Wade’s ambivalence and
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guilt in relation to his father’s suicide produce a classic form of melancholia that Sigmund Freud outlined in his 1917 work, “Mourning and Melancholia.” Because the novel dwells on Wade’s melancholia, it cannot be completely or adequately explained through the model of PTSD. Indeed, as I argue in what follows, In the Lake demonstrates that the logic of PTSD (which is also influenced by the logic of postmodernism) eschews the psychological routine of reality- testing necessary for mourning and subsequently ushers in melancholia as a necessary product of its own way of thinking. In the Lake ultimately sets the stage for an intervention in trauma studies that prompts the use of alternative theories of desire and ambivalence to address an unending cultural compulsion to mourn real losses in the midst of a critical moment where the past persists in the present.
AN EXCEPTIONAL BRAND OF TRAUMA Tim O’Brien explicitly invites a reading of his fiction within the framework of trauma theory. If I Die in the Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973), for example, ends with O’Brien looking into a mirror as he changes back into civilian clothes while traveling home to Minnesota. The gesture represents the soldier’s re-acclimatization to society, an adjustment that O’Brien characterizes as never complete: “You grin, beginning to know you’re happy. Much as you hate it, you don’t have civilian shoes, but no one will notice. It’s impossible to go home barefoot” (209). On one hand, O’Brien is amused and content with the fact that he will never again be able to tailor his identity to fit comfortably with society. On the other hand, O’Brien longs to adjust back into society after knowing that he will always be wearing the previous traumatic experience somewhere on his person. He still has the army shoes. No one will likely notice, but he will always know they are down there. With few exceptions, the traumatized Vietnam War veteran is hardly present in O’Brien’s next three books, Northern Lights (1975), Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Nuclear Age (1985), 15 and it is mostly with the publications of The Things They Carried (1990), In the Lake
15 It is possible to detect PTSD in Northern Lights when Harvey, who has just returned from Vietnam having lost an eye, keeps refusing to talk about his “secret” injury after frequent requests to do so from his new girlfriend, Addie, a girl who associates war injuries with war heroes (53). Furthermore, the post-traumatic routine somewhat surfaces in Cacciato when Paul Berlin describes his mechanical march through the Vietnamese country as a march that is all body and no brain, which was sleeping (199). In this chapter, Paul is described as “dull of mind, blunt of spirit, numb of history, and struck with wonder that he could not stop climbing the red road toward the mountains” (204)— 27
of the Woods (1994), Tomcat in Love (1998) and July, July (2002) that Tim O’Brien begins to engage more openly with the trauma movement. Most critics have interpreted this gesture towards trauma in one of two ways: these texts either openly participate in the trauma movement that includes Born on the Fourth of July and Rambo, or they do something strangely different. I will begin with the first kind of criticism. Central to the trauma-centered interpretation of O’Brien’s later works are Judith Herman and Mark Heberle. In Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1992) Herman interprets the traumatic moment as one that “becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciousness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep . . . with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event” (37). Herman cites O’Brien’s The Things They Carried four times when attributing this disorder to combat veterans. As exemplars of the disorder, O’Brien’s characters, for Herman, demonstrate intrusive memories “lack[ing] verbal narrative and context,” a loss of selfhood, a resentment of the general public’s failure to acknowledge their horrific experience, and traumatic transference as veterans lash out at their therapeutic care-givers (38, 53, 70, 137). Following Herman’s lead, scholars like David Jarraway and Mark Heberle take up this classification of PTSD in their analyses of Tim O’Brien’s other works. 16 In his often-cited A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam (2001) Heberle interprets O’Brien’s first seven books as examples of post-traumatic stress and makes the argument that Tim O’Brien is not so much a Vietnam writer as he is a “trauma writer,”
a description that might suggest, should we find out what happens to Paul when he gets back from Vietnam, that the experience that his mind missed will revisit Paul in the form of a post-traumatic flashback. It is interesting to note that the exact quotation that I am paraphrasing here, which reads: “. . . tissues moving like a machine. His body marched and his brain slept. He would climb until the machine stopped.” (199), is significantly altered from the 1979 to the 1999 edition to read “. . . tissues moving like a machine. He would climb until the machine stopped” (164). The parts that suggest a missed experience due to a slumbering mind are removed in the later edition, almost as if O’Brien or the editor in 1999 did not want the reader to interpret the book within the, then very popular, discourse of trauma. In A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam (2001), Mark Heberle also applies the post-traumatic interpretation to a scene in Cacciato in which Cacciato plays a joke on his squad by detonating a smoke grenade, which they think is real, at close range, an incident that causes the protagonist to release his bowels. As far as The Nuclear Age goes, however, while William Cowling does mentally and physically abuse his family after his extreme paranoia about nuclear fallout reaches its climax, it is likely more appropriate to interpret Cowling, who never actually experienced nuclear fallout, in terms of fear or paranoia rather than post-traumatic stress. 16 In his essay, “‘Excremental Assault’ in Tim O’Brien: Trauma and Recovery in Vietnam War Literature” Jarraway briefly relies on Herman’s influential book to support his own argument about O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which associates excremental characteristics to “that moment when ‘life starts’” just after Norman Bowker’s traumatic Vietnam experience (Jarraway 700, while quoting in part from Georges Bataille’s Visions of Excess).
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“Trauma artist” and writer of “post-traumatic culture” (Heberle xiv, xix). Despite his occasional indifference to Herman’s approach, Heberle supports his own associations of O’Brien with trauma by overviewing Herman’s definition of trauma and alluding to her diagnosis of parts of The Things They Carried as examples of PTSD (9-14). Heberle also supports his diagnosis by citing O’Brien’s own quotation from Herman’s Trauma and Recovery in one of the “Evidence” sections of In the Lake of the Woods as a justification for “[John Wade’s] trauma-centered characterization” (226). Another group of scholars concentrates on the sometimes paradoxical postmodern logic that propels O’Brien’s narration of traumatized people. In “Postmodern Amnesia: Trauma and Forgetting in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods” (2003), for example, Timothy Melley argues that In the Lake of the Woods “exemplifies” a current theoretical dilemma in trauma theory as it presents us with “a profoundly amnesic character to critique the collective forgetting that has erased My Lai and other massacres from American historical consciousness” (112). Melley later describes O’Brien’s fashioning of John Wade’s traumatic amnesia as “unusual” (115). The inclusion of this kind of character is problematic for Melley because it seems to suggest that O’Brien, similar to trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth, maintains a theory of trauma that “converts memory into experience. It makes amnesia a precondition to recovering the truth of the past with an immediacy that cannot be obtained through ordinary remembering” (110, emphasis original). Such a paradox, for Melley, exposes a dilemma in the postmodern conception of traumatic history. “Trauma,” that is to say, “. . . seems to permit an end-run around the representational barriers of the postmodern condition” (111).17 John Wade, as a sufferer of PTSD, is both unable to remember the traumatic experience of the war and is also frequently visited by these experiences in a fashion so unmediated by the representational medium that they seem just as vivid and overwhelming as they were when they originally occurred. Melley is not alone with his detection of O’Brien’s unique representation of PTSD. With him are T.J. Lustig and Claire Stocks, who build from Melley’s article, question the function of referentiality in O’Brien’s approach to trauma, and ultimately suggest that O’Brien’s narrations
17 Melley explains that “John Wade’s amnesia . . . is less a representation of individual forgetting than an expression of profound dismay about the ahistoricity of the present generation—an expression that has been central to the visions of postmodernity offered by Jameson, Harvey, Baudrillard, and others” (122). In other words, O’Brien’s agenda is one that suspects the present generation’s efforts to heal historical wounds of being responsible for a kind of collective forgetting of violent pasts. By molding John Wade in the image of PTSD, O’Brien can help his readers see the importance of not forgetting violent pasts just because they no longer seem to be empirically present. 29
of PTSD function uncomfortably within the more general discourse of trauma theory.18 In “‘Which way home?’ Tim O’Brien and the Question of Reference” (2004), T.J. Lustig takes up Melley’s question of “referential complexity” to interpret If I Die in the Combat Zone as “a calculated subversion of an influential strand in trauma theory” (401). In this analysis, Lustig underlines the rather Freudian inclusion of dreams and paternal relations to suggest that “[t]he paradox of O’Brien’s work . . . is predicated upon the return and not the disappearance of the author” (402), a predication that I also think helps to connect O’Brien’s characters’ PTSD with their more subjective dreams, desires, and losses. In addition to Tim O’Brien himself returning to the position of author, O’Brien’s traumatized characters also begin to have some amount of authorial control over the manner in which their traumatizing experiences return to them later in life. Joining these other scholars, Claire Stocks reads July, July to highlight “a challenge to what might be seen as out-dated approaches to war and trauma as [O’Brien] attempts to situate trauma in a specific historical space (187).” Stocks is mostly interested in the way trauma related to the Vietnam War functions in this novel on historical and cultural levels (affecting everyone alive during the war’s occurrence) instead of on an empirical level that would only relate to particular soldiers experiencing the trauma first-hand. “[T]rauma,” Stocks argues with regards to July, July, “is equally accessible to all subjects,” an assertion that situates a breast cancer survivor, a survivor of the accidental drowning of a lover (with whom she was having an affair), and a Vietnam war veteran within the same category of Vietnam trauma (187). Stocks’ work is especially innovative in the way she detects, within trauma, sites of loss that instigate a work of mourning, a phenomenon to which I will return shortly when discussing O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods.19
18 To a lesser extent, Samuel Cohen belongs to this list of scholars. Also referencing Melley, Cohen illuminates in “Triumph and Trauma: In the Lake of the Woods and History” (2007) certain contradictions in O’Brien’s trauma narrative. Cohen reads the open-endedness of the novel as O’Brien’s way of “call[ing] attention to the persistence of our desire to close these gaps, to capture the truth about the past and to move on” (225). By highlighting the reader’s desire to close gaps and move on, Cohen seems to suggest that O’Brien interrupts the reader’s participation in a tradition of trauma theory that treats the victim’s traumatic experience as an inaccessible, and unlocatable wound for which a traditional sense of closure is not an option. In the Lake of the Woods, as Cohen reads it, differs from the general trauma narrative by “historiciz[ing] the way we historicize” (225) after exposing or interrupting our participation (whether it is active or passive) in the contemporary trauma movement.
19 To make her argument, Stocks refers to Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s concepts of introjection and incorporation in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis (vol. 1). Abraham and Torok show how people (through incorporation) are unable to mourn unspeakable traumatic events. O’Brien’s characters in July, July 30
I believe these critics are on the verge of teasing out of O’Brien’s PTSD narratives the interruption of a contemporary brand of trauma theory by a theory of mourning. Having close ties with postmodernism, trauma theory is particularly interested in explaining complications that arise when representing and recovering from overwhelming experiences, such as combat or abuse. A theory of mourning, on the other hand, distinguishes itself by concentrating on the ego’s ability to recover (in an economic sense) from the loss of once desired objects (usually people). As I will make clearer in the next two sections, O’Brien’s work demonstrates how both these theoretical attitudes are incompatible with each other. Despite making only cursory glances (if any) toward theories of mourning,20 it is nevertheless at this same site of incompatibility that scholars like Melley, Lustig and Stocks have all seemed to pause while analyzing PTSD in O’Brien’s fiction. While employing a Freudian theory of mourning from his 1917 “Mourning and Melancholia,” I will now revisit this site as it arises in O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods.
KILLING THE FATHER FOR DYING John Wade explicitly acts in accordance with the contemporary logic of PTSD. In several ways he represents “the violent vet.” The violent vet is the typical Vietnam veteran that cultural, literary and cinematic narratives all portray as “bonkers. Outright dangerous: a shell- shocked, frazzle-brained, doped-out psycho” (“The Violent Vet” 96). Influencing this veteran’s dangerous behaviors are the unspeakable acts that he has witnessed while in the field of combat.
succeed in mourning through a kind of introjection (a healthy way of dealing with loss) made possible with a class reunion.
20 Melley comes close to addressing a theory of mourning when noting how post-trauma theory “seems to permit an end-run around the representational barriers of the postmodern condition,” a run around that exposes traumatic memory as being “as open as ordinary memory to influence, suggestion, and contamination” (111), i.e. subjectivity, desire, and power. So too do Lustig and Cohen summon a theory of loss when arguing that O’Brien predicates the traumatic disappearance of reference on the return of the author (Lustig 402) and that he fails to resolve stories like In the Lake of the Woods as a way of exposing the reader’s (and society’s, I might add here) “desire to close . . . gaps [and] capture the truth about the past and to move on” (Cohen 225)—an exposure that sheds light on the politics related to the reception of trauma narratives but also on the more subjective agendas (whether historical or psychological) driving the ways in which the narrator of trauma tells his story. Maybe, as O’Brien would say, it happened this way. Maybe that way. Maybe it involves the loss of my father with whom I could never get along. Finally, Stocks gestures towards a theory of loss and mourning when proposing that we read trauma in O’Brien’s July, July as a socio-historical phenomenon dependent on some kind of cultural value (and economic) system instead of as an empirical site dependent on a particular place (Vietnam) and witness (the soldier) (175,187). Stocks’ utilization Abraham and Torok’s theory of incorporation and introjection to explain the function of “unspeakable events” in the lives of O’Brien’s traumatized characters is about as close as anyone can get to abandoning a theory of trauma for a theory of mourning and melancholia.
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Through a haze of uncertainty, the violent vet typically comprehends these acts in terms of violence he and his colleagues committed toward others and violence others committed toward him. John Rambo is an example of this unstable character, as are Colonel Kurtz and Captain Willard from Apocalypse Now and Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump. It is this portrait of the Vietnam veteran that O’Brien argued to be inspired not by facts but instead by the need to mythologize what we do not know (“Violent Vet” 98). And rather ironically, this is pretty close to the way O’Brien describes John Wade nearly sixteen years later. Wade’s violent future emanates from his killing of two people during the 1968 massacre at the hamlet of Thaun Yen (also known in the US as My Lai, where US troops killed over 300 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians). The first of these murders is of “an old man with a wispy beard and wire glasses and what looked to be a rifle” but would later turn out to be “a small wooden hoe” (109). The second is PFC Weatherby, another soldier whom he shoots from within a corpse-filled irrigation ditch: “He was caught up in the slime. PFC Weatherby found him there. ‘Hey, Sorcerer,’ Weatherby said. The guy started to smile, but Sorcerer shot him anyway” (110). Wade kills both men after witnessing his fellow soldiers annihilating the village, slaughtering its livestock, and murdering (possibly even raping) the civilians within. Among the ruination inflicted by his company, PFC Weatherby “shoot[s] two little girls in the face” while trying to “kill[] whatever he could kill” (107). “The dead,” the narrator explains, “lay very still. The almost-dead did twitching things until PFC Weatherby had occasion to reload and make them fully dead” (107). Other soldiers act in similar ways. It is either during or after witnessing this devastation that Wade begins to “glide away,” “give himself over to forgetfulness” and perform “the most majestic trick” of making “the little village . . . vanish inside its own rosy glow” (108). Assuming the role of his nickname, Sorcerer, Wade performs a trick to make this overwhelming event go away: “This could not have happened. Therefore it did not” (109). In addition to his actual experience of the massacre, which he seems to make vanish while it is still unfolding, Wade magically alters both his mental and official records of the event. Wade transforms his memory of shooting PFC Weatherby into “an accident, the purest reflex— he tricked himself into believing it hadn’t happened the way it happened. He pretended he wasn’t responsible. . . . He was convincing. He had tears in his eyes, because it came from his heart. He
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loved PFC Weatherby like a brother” (68).21 By considering his actions a reflex, Wade undermines his own sense of authorship and relocates all agency from within to without. Wade performs his second trick by taking advantage of a desk job to access and manipulate his military records two months before the conclusion of his tour of duty. Carefully, Wade removes himself from his former, and dishonorable, Charlie Company, and inserts himself into the less scandalous Alpha Company. “The trick now was to devise a future for himself,” which he anticipates to be a career in politics (269). He begins to liken this trick to one of “redrafting,” and by coupling this trick with his memory trick, the novel divulges similarities between the forging and redrafting of counterfeit documents and the process of manipulating overwhelming experiences during and after an actual traumatic event. “The forgetting trick mostly worked,” but Wade soon discovers that his ability to make the past vanish from his memory and military records is only temporary (109). The old man with a hoe, for example, would sometimes materialize “[i]n the ordinary hours after the war, at the breakfast table or in the babble of some dreary statehouse hearing” (109). More regularly, the image of dead and dying villagers and the death of PFC Weatherby interrupt his thought processes later in life. Several chapters and chapter sections about alternative topics loop back around to the image of PFC Weatherby staring down at Wade from the brim of the irrigation ditch. So often does this looping happen that Wade’s trauma begins to resemble the irrigation ditch at Thaun Yen—a resemblance by which all traumatic experiences, like shooting PFC Weatherby, keep finding him—looking down at him so that he can engage them once more. Also temporary is Wade’s redrafting of his official records. After advancing a political career to the point of competing in a Democratic US Senate primary, Wade gets crushed by his competition when word gets out about his real military past. With this political loss the narrative continues to represent the traumatic return by employing popular metaphors typically used to describe the management of disagreeable, personal information in political settings. For Wade to succeed in the primary he must, as his campaign manager Tony Carbo insists, be “clean,” have “no ghosts,” and nothing terrible “in [his] closet” (154). Carbo later suggests that Wade, after going so long without sharing his Vietnam experience with other people, becomes somehow
21 The narrator explains later that shortly after the event Wade “did mind-cleansing tricks” and “punched an erase button at the center of his thoughts” (212-213).
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“trapped” in an identity void of this experience, a snare that thwarts his ability to communicate the experience even if he decides to do so in the future (196).22 Much like the traumatized, violent veteran, John Wade eventually loses his career, loses his mind, and loses Kathy, his wife, whom he may or may not kill with boiling water while repeating “Kill Jesus.” Tony Carbo later articulates Wade’s returning trauma as the “shit” that “had to come out: a principle of politics. And so we get pulverized and he’s right back to square one. Shattered again” (196, emphasis original). In the Lake suggests that the traumatic experience will always actively return to shatter its passive victim, despite the victim’s attempts to keep it contained. And similar to Wade’s reluctance to settle on “original” memories of his past in favor of revisionary alternatives, so too does his murder of Kathy spin out into a loop of frequent redrafting. After the novel describes the murder in a chapter called “How the Night Passed,” it immediately transforms Wade’s homicidal actions into a collection of possibilities found in chapters called “Hypothesis.” Violent vets like Wade are just as aloof during their traumatic recollections as they were during the traumatic events. Having convinced himself that he also glided away during the night when Kathy disappeared, all Wade can do now is hypothesize and re-hypothesize about what happened—like the discursive redrafting of a letter that is nowhere to be found. Unlike standard violent vet narratives, however, In the Lake makes use of pervasive paternal elements to uniquely splinter the traumatic, repetitious circuit of being shattered again and again from an earlier (even original) event. For just as much as My Lai and PFC Weatherby haunt John Wade, so too does the memory of his father, who committed suicide when Wade was fourteen. A chapter entitled “The Nature of Loss” (the first of six chapters that detail Wade’s relationship with his father) explains how Wade would, as a child, “invent elaborate stories about how he could’ve saved his father” and how he would make up games that would involve Wade looking in various places for a father that is not dead, merely misplaced (15): John would go back in his memory over all the places his father might be—under the bed or behind the bookcases in the living room—and in this way he would spend many hours looking for his father, opening closets, scanning the carpets and
22 In Dispatches, Michael Herr similarly figures the traumatic experience as one that haunts soldiers (62) and one that is stored in some kind of personally inaccessible container. “The problem,” Herr explains, “ was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes. Time and information, rock and roll, life itself, the information isn’t frozen, you are” (19).
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sidewalks and lawns as if in search of a lost nickel. Maybe in the garage, he’d think. Maybe under the cushions of the sofa. It was only a game, or a way of coping, but now and then he’d get lucky. Just by chance he’d glance down and suddenly spot his father in the grass behind the house. “Bingo,” his father would say, and John would feel a hinge swing open. He’d bend down and pick up his father and put him in his pocket and be careful never to lose him again. (15) Only Wade does lose him again, an inevitable misplacement that causes him to repeat the game each time he feels the need to cope with the actual loss of his father. When Wade was fourteen, for example, he performed “tricks in his mind” before falling asleep that entailed making his father materialize at the bedside for a late-night conversation (31): “‘Well, I’m back,’ his father would say, ‘but don’t tell your mom, she’d kill me.’ He’d wink and grin. ‘So what’s new?’ And then they’d talk for a while, quietly, catching up on things, like cutting a tie and restoring it whole” (31-32). Just as a magician creates the illusion of restoring a tie he had moments before severed, so too does Wade perform mental tricks to create the illusion of a living father who had days before taken his own life in the garage. As they begin to relate to loss, it is difficult to ignore the resemblance Wade’s games and tricks have with a game Freud relates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) to a child who lived in an apartment above him. The game, famously known as the fort/ da game, involves a child and a small toy (tied to a string) that he conceals by tossing underneath or behind different furnishings in the room. Once the toy is concealed he yells “fort” (gone), only to soon shout “da” (there) after pulling the string and making the toy appear once more. Freud begins analyzing this game with a curiosity about its repetitious characteristics, part of the chapter’s investigation of the nature of traumatic neurosis and other phenomena that could possibly be driven by something other than an economy of desire and pleasure. Failing to find in this game an alternative to the mechanism of desire, Freud instead interprets the behavior as the boy’s way of making active the passive experience that involves A) the unpleasurable loss of his mother when she leaves for work and B) the pleasurable reunion with his mother later in the day (15). The game not only gives the child control over the pleasure he receives with his mother’s return (da), it can also, Freud adds, “satisfy an impulse of the child’s, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge
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himself on his mother for going away from him” (15). 23 It is especially important to note that, while Freud is the first to point out his uncertainty regarding the exact nature of pleasure this child wishes to control with this game, the activity more assuredly demonstrates the child’s active participation in a personal and social economy of desire and loss. Against his will, the child loses his object of desire (his mother) creating a deficit in his libido (which we can think of as a repository of desire) when he is unable to control her return. Against his will again, his mother returns, erasing the deficit and balancing out the libido. By his own will, the child creates a game that simulates this passive loss in a way that facilitates (because it is active and he controls the fort and da) the painful process of mourning that many children undergo when first separated from their parents for a long period of time. With some very important exceptions, John Wade’s games and tricks involving his dead father follow the same rules and motivations as this child’s game. Similar to the child, Wade makes active a passive experience in a way that involves A) the unpleasurable loss of his father after he hangs himself in the garage and B) the pleasurable return of his father “under the bed or behind the bookcases in the living room” (15). The glaring difference is that, unlike the temporary departure of the child’s mother, Wade’s father is permanently lost. Wade is unable to separate his playful game from the deathly reality in which retrieval is not an option. After using his tricks to make active this passive reality of loss, the very concept of mourning becomes unnecessary for Wade. Wade supersedes loss and the need to mourn by cultivating the power of retrieval—tying a string to his father just as the child does his toy. Now his father will only be lost if Wade stops talking to him in the mirror. Despite his ability to start the game over, there is still a downside to Wade’s newfound abilities because he now assumes the role of killing his father each time he walks away from the mirror. Having this mental dilemma of murdering the one he loves, Wade begins to resemble the ambivalent melancholiac from Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” who narcissistically identifies his ego with the abandoned object and expresses grief in the form of “self-reproaches to the effect that the mourner himself is to blame for the loss of the loved object, i.e. that he has willed it” (“Mourning” 45).
23 Freud later notes the child’s adaptation of this revenge game to his father’s absence from the home as he is off fighting in the front lines of the war. Because the father is gone, the child takes pleasure in having his mother all to himself (Beyond 15-16).
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According to Freud, mourning can commence only after “[r]eality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists” (39). After reality-testing, mourning unfolds as a slow and gradual process that usually becomes less painful as time passes. During mourning, “each single one of [the person’s] memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect to it” (39). In theory, mourning is complete whenever “the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (40). When applying some of these criteria for mourning to Wade, one will first note Wade’s actual ability to find his father whenever engaging in his games and magic tricks, an ability that closely resembles a failed attempt at reality-testing. Wade, that is to say, is unable to accept the reality of a lost father after thinking of this father as someone he can continue to resurrect and pocket again and again. At first, Wade seems to test the reality of his loss straightforwardly by “go[ing] back in his memory over all the places his father might be—under the bed or behind the bookcases in the living room,” etc. (15). Where reality-testing fails is when he actually finds his father, a kind of “hallucinatory wishful psychosis” that Freud also notices even in “normal” cases of mourning before “respect for reality [eventually] gains the day” (39). For Wade, respect for reality does not gain the day in part because he continues to find his father throughout his adult life. Respect for reality also fails because Wade originally seems to desire something else in his father that is different from the father he thinks (or is told) he lost. Resembling Freud’s description of the melancholiac, Wade “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in [it] (“Mourning” 40, emphasis original). Freud best characterizes this dilemma as a form of ambivalence—an unresolved love and hate relationship that interferes with the way a person withdraws his libidinal attachment from his object of desire. Likewise, it is because Wade is and has always been unsure of what he desires in his father that he is now equally unsure of what was lost and how to mourn such a loss. The novel is explicit with this ambivalence in scenes before Wade’s father’s death during which Wade performs tricks in the mirror so as to be “no longer a lonely little kid” (65). With these tricks Wade is able to redraft his negative relationship with his father into one that is positive, and more ideal. “In the mirror,” for example, “he could read his father’s mind. Simple affection, for instance. ‘Love you, cowboy,’ his father would think” (65). Wade uses the mirror to obtain a kind of love his father would not (or did not seem to) provide him in reality. “The
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mirror made things better. The mirror made his father smile all the time. The mirror made the vodka bottles vanish from their hiding place in the garage, and it helped with the hard, angry silences at the dinner table” (66). The reality, for Wade, is that his father is far from ideal. His father called him “Jiggling John” and argued with his mother that Wade was by no means merely “husky” (67). “Holy Christ,” he would say, “look at the kid stuff it in, old Jiggling John” (67). Wade’s father also referred to Wade’s favorite hobby as “[t]hat pansy magic crap” and ask him “[w]hat’s wrong with baseball, some regular exercise?’ he’d shake his head. ‘Blubby little pansy’” (67).24 Wade’s ambivalence, then, derives in part from his inability to distinguish between the derisive father at the table and the smiling one in the mirror. Wade’s ambivalence also comes from his suspicion that the rest of the world sees his father as a much more loving person than he actually is. The narrator admits that “[i]n all kinds of ways his father was a terrific man, even without the mirror. He was smart and funny. People enjoyed his company—John, too—and the neighborhood kids were always stopping by to toss around a football or listen to his father’s stories and opinions and jokes” (66). This loving assessment shifts, however, when one of the neighbor kids delivers a speech to his sixth grade class about how great Wade’s father is: “what a neat guy he was, always friendly and full of pep and willing to spend time just shooting the breeze. At the end of the speech Tommy Winn gave John a sad, accusing look that lasted way too long. ‘All I wish,’ Tommy said, ‘I wish he was my father’” (66-67). The narrator explains how this envious accusation is deluded because “Tommy Winn didn’t know some things” regarding Wade’s father’s abusive domestic behaviors (67). From this envious and accusatory outside assessment of his father, the novel also characterizes Wade’s ambivalence as a suspicion of false reality mixed with a paranoid sense of conspiracy. How can people envy him for having a dad who calls him names and drinks in the garage? Why would others want this abuse also? Either his father is working to make others believe he is an ideal father, a deception that will reflect badly on Wade’s underwhelming display of paternal appreciation, or Wade is wrong about his assessment of his father as a man who is far from ideal. Perhaps even the abuse was not really abuse.
24 Or see later where Wade rationalizes his father’s “Jiggling John” remark as a case of “the booze talking.” The narrator explains that even though Wade understood this alcoholic source, “[Wade] still felt baffled and ashamed. Sometimes he wanted to cry. Sometimes he wondered why his father hated him. More than anything else John Wade wanted to be loved, and to make his father proud . . . ” (208).
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One of the key consequences of Wade’s conflation of the figurative fort/ da game with the literal attachment and detachment of his father involves Wade’s inability to take apart his ambivalence and distinguish between who his father was from who he wants his father to be. Performing a trick or playing a game involving a father who is no longer dead makes active more than the experience of loss; it also makes active the passive psychological abuse to which Wade’s dad exposed him while he was alive. Alongside his narcissistic internalization of loss, Wade can blame himself for this abuse, or he can change it. After all, he has to do more to bring his father back than just make his father talk to him in the mirror; he also has to decide what it is his father will say to him (which could be interpreted as a strange reversal of the child’s indoctrination into the Father’s symbolic order of language). Giving speech to his newly resurrected father, Wade is torn between the abusive things his father used to say and the things his ideal father would have said instead. So, for example, when Wade participates in the Vietnam war to capture the love and pride of his dead father, he imagines his dad saying after his tour is over: “‘Well, you did it, you hung in there, and I’m so proud, just so incredibly goddamn proud’” (59). It is because Wade cannot, or does not, acknowledge his ambivalence toward his father that he, at his father’s funeral, “wanted to kill everybody who was crying and everybody who wasn’t” (14). Those who were crying deserved to die because they were mourning the loss of a man who was once abusive toward Wade. They should have been crying for Wade, not his father. Those who were not crying deserved to die for not caring enough that Wade’s ideal father is in the casket, no longer able to bring pleasure to Wade. In addition to making him want to kill others, Wade’s ambivalence also makes him want to “take a hammer and crawl into the casket and kill his father for dying. But he was helpless. He didn’t know where to start” (14). Wade doesn’t know where to start because the father in the casket is unaccountably plural. His understanding of his love for his father represents a mathematical impossibility not unlike his understanding of his and Kathy’s love for each other that resembles two snakes eating each other’s tail: “‘The mathematics get weird’ . . . ‘one plus one equals zero!’” (61) Most of the good thoughts John has towards his father are really thoughts towards an ideal father who loves him, does not call him jiggling John, teaches him how to throw the perfect fastball, and does not drink in the garage. This, I suggest, is the ideal that he projects onto the abusive man in the casket—an ideal that, because it was never present in the first place, is never actually lost. Part of the
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complication to his mourning, then, involves his inability to part with an imaginary ideal after it takes the form of the loss of something else that was once real. Freud’s model of mourning and melancholia thus reveals that Wade’s funereal dilemma is one from which Wade attempts and fails to balance the loss of a real investment in an abusive father and a magical investment in an ideal father. Similar to the melancholiac’s magical denial of a painful reality, Wade also prefers the pleasure of the trick to the disappointment of knowing. “To know,” the narrator teaches us, “is to be disappointed. To understand is to be betrayed. All the petty hows and whys, the unseemly motives, the abscesses of character, the sordid little uglinesses of self and history—these were the gimmicks you kept under wraps to the end. Better to leave your audience wailing in the dark, shaking their fists, some crying How?, others Why” (242). Wade, in this case, is his own audience, wailing in the dark. The magician, as is becoming more evident here, may not achieve the same results when manipulating his own mind as he does when manipulating an audience of friends, politicians, media, or voters. With social trickery, Wade actively manipulates unsuspecting officials and voters to support him and to elevate him in rank and power. Wade constructs himself by magically “devis[ing] a future for himself” (269). With mental magic, on the other hand, Wade turns against himself to alter his own position of agency. Should he actually succeed in being as unsuspecting as the political audience, he may end up distorting himself (like holding a mirror in front of a mirror) to the point of self-destruction not unlike the “self-reproaches and self-revilings” that Freud observes in the melancholic patient (“Mourning” 39).25 To better understand Wade’s process of self-destruction it will help to recall once more that the fort/ da game makes active the passive situation of a mother’s coming and going. By substituting the toy for his mother, the child successfully sets up a manageable account for his desire that is not exclusively (and thus frighteningly) controlled by outside forces. I have already begun to note some similarities with Wade and his ability to control his father’s abuse or to redraft his military records. As magician Robert Parish instructs in one of O’Brien’s “Evidence”
25 Along with self -reproaches and -rivilings, Freud underlines the melancholiac’s “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, [and] inhibition of all activity” (39). Other characteristics include narcissistic identification with the object (44) and mania (47). With the exception of the “disturbance of self-regard,” most of these melancholic symptoms are also present in the process of mourning. One key difference, Freud notes, is that the mourner does not typically have the same “disturbance of self-regard” as the melancholiac (39).
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sections, “In every trick there are two carefully thought out lines—the way it looks and the way it is. The success of your work depends on your understanding the relationship of these lines” (In the Lake 97). This may also be the success of the fort/ da game: to satisfy the child’s control of desire without actually taking control of the uncontrollably absent and present parent. That is to say, the child succeeds by keeping visible the line separating the game and the actual departure of his mother. Where one may begin to notice striking differences between Wade’s magic and the child’s game of making active the passive parental departure is when Wade also tricks himself into understanding his participation in My Lai as a passive reflex or some kind of non- participation. I noted that the logic of trauma helps to interpret the confusion of passive and active situations like PFC Weatherby’s frequent return as traumatic flashbacks. But after appending to the novel’s composition the magical return of Wade’s father toward whom he demonstrates obvious ambivalence, one can note yet another striking difference between magic and the child’s game. Again, a confusion of the active and passive position seems to be at stake. This time the confusion surfaces when Wade transforms a passive situation of loss into a game within which the loss never occurs or is only temporary. To perform this trick, Wade does not manipulate a toy to make himself active during his father’s disappearance. Rather, and paradoxically, he manipulates himself to make his father active and present once more. Substituting the reality of the loss for the reality of the game, Wade reconfigures the active/ passive roles of traditional game-playing by which the player is thought to manipulate the passive components in the game. It is now as if the game world, in which his father is still alive, has the power to manipulate the real world in which he is now just a passive component. Wade’s recompense for this reversal is that his loss will remain living and he will not be required to mourn. Similar to the melancholic subject, Wade is only able to set this up by negating himself. As I noted earlier, mourning comes after the disappointing acknowledgment of the reality of loss and displaced desire. The disappointment that Wade feels whenever a good trick is explained might actually resemble the work of mourning—a painful work that Wade avoids at all costs by keeping secret to others and himself the hidden wires that allow the trick to succeed. Either because of his inability to address his ambivalence or because of his devotion to the logic of magic (or some combination of the two scenarios), Wade does not mourn or succeed at the magic trick along the self-empowering lines of Parish’s logic. This is because he is unable to
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distinguish the real world of personal desire and loss from the venue of a magic show. Like two snakes eating the other’s tail, Wade swallows his loss and allows it to swallow him. The end result is a mathematically and melancholically confusing zero.
DINNER TABLE AMBIVALENCE: MELANCHOLIA’S INTERRUPTION OF TRAUMA It is not uncommon for Tim O’Brien to write about characters who have ambivalent relationships with their dead fathers or for him to combine such relationships with the PTSD narrative. In a 2005 interview with Tobey Herzog, O’Brien sketches the relationship he had with his own father (who died of illness in 2004) in a way that echoes Wade and his father. O’Brien mentions that his father had alcoholic mood swings and that “dinner would be especially rough because [his father] would sometimes begin drinking after work” only to be “sullen and way inside himself” by the time the O’Brien family would sit down to eat (94). Furthermore, O’Brien describes his feelings of being “never good enough for [his father]” and being unable to “win his love, affection, and esteem . . . no matter what I did in the world” (93). And finally, like Wade, O’Brien explains that his father, too, would taunt O’Brien about his weight and about his anxiety over his alcoholism (93-94). Besides In the Lake of the Woods, this ambivalent attitude of a son toward his father surfaces familiarly in Northern Lights in the persona of Paul Milton Perry. Perry, a self- proclaimed melancholiac, frequently reflects on his inability to get along with his father: “If they’d only talked,” Perry ruminates much later in life after his father is long dead, “He could think of a million things to say now” (202). Unlike O’Brien or Wade, Perry is not a Vietnam veteran (his brother is) but the narrative peculiarly starts off by framing Perry’s psychological disposition in a way that resembles post-traumatic bedroom scenes from In the Lake of the Woods, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and Caputo’s Indian Country:26
26 See for example O’Brien’s first narration of Wade murdering Kathy in a chapter called “How the Night Passed:” “Twice during the night John Wade woke up sweating. The first time, near midnight he turned and coiled up against Kathy, brain-sick, a little feverish, his thoughts wired to the nighttime hum of lake and woods. A while later he kicked back the sheets and said, ‘Kill Jesus.’ It was a challenge—a dare” (47). Or compare to the wording of Wade’s troubled sleep just after the My Lai massacre: “Restless and wide awake, Sorcerer did mind-cleansing tricks. He thought about Kathy, her curly hair and green eyes, the way she smiled, the good life they would someday have together. He thought about the difference between murder and war. . . . He leaned back and punched an erase button at the center of his thoughts” (212-213). A similar bedroom scene unfolds at the beginning of Apocalypse Now as Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) lies awake in Saigon, jumpy, unstable, and unable to distinguish between where he’s at and the jungle. Finally, in Indian Country, Christian Starkmann similarly wakes up frozen, startled, and scared from one of his traumatic flashbacks (Caputo 63). 42
Wide awake and restless, Paul Milton Perry clawed away the sheets and swung out of bed, blood weak, his fists clenching and closing like a pulse. He hadn’t slept. He sat very still. He listened to the July heat, mosquitoes at the screen windows . . . . What he did not hear, he imagined . . . . He sat still. He was naked and sweating and anaemic and flabby. Thinking first about Harvey, then about the heat, then the mosquitoes, he’d been sailing in a gaunt nightlong rush of images and half-dreams, turning, wallowing, listening like a stranger to the sounds of his father’s house. (Northern 3) This angst-filled passage is more in reference to Perry’s inability to adapt to the unfamiliar domicile of his father than it is the trauma of combat. The returning experience of Vietnam, if it is present at all, takes the form of Perry’s brother, Harvey, who, despite having lost an eye in the war, seems to adjust quite smoothly upon his return. There are no flashbacks, nightmares, or nostalgic reunions with other war veterans for Harvey; rather, most of the personal and social drama in the novel centers on their deceased father (who favored Harvey the most) and the patriarchal property that they eventually sell in a manner that resembles a funeral ritual. Also similar to John Wade’s father is William Cowling’s father in The Nuclear Age who frequently teases William for his unshakable paranoia about nuclear fallout. Among other preventative measures, Cowling converts his basement Ping-Pong table into a bomb shelter by layering it with “lead” pencils, lumber, bricks, rugs, charcoal briquettes, and an old mattress. Cowling continuously returns to this shelter for protection until his parents eventually sit him down at the dinner table to discuss their concern for his mental health: “‘And you guys,’” Cowling vociferates back at them, “‘act like I’m bonkers. Like I’m loony or something.’ My father clicked his spoon against the chicken platter. ‘Easy does it,’ he said. ‘It’s true! Laughing at me, telling stupid jokes. I heard you’” (27). After a pause, his father does admit that they are amused and have talked about him behind his back, but only because a Ping-Pong table could never seriously protect anyone from a nuclear bomb. Through a noticeable smile, his father then instructs Cowling that pencils do not contain “real lead. They call it lead, but in fact it’s graphite or something” (28). “Down inside,” Cowling explains after going back-and-forth with his father about what he does and does not know,
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. . . I felt like strangling myself. Graphite, I thought. Parents could be absolutely merciless. They just kept coming at you, wearing you down, grinding away until you finally crumbled. ‘Graphite,’ I said. ‘I knew that.’ My dad nodded. He was a decent man—an ideal father—but for an instant I felt killing rage . . . . That stone- hard face of his. And those eyes, so smart and unyielding. I loved him, but I also hated him.” (28) Obviously, Cowling’s father, who communicates his love and concern for Cowling on a number of occasions, is not as psychologically abusive as John Wade’s father. And while Cowling’s love for his father continues to be blemished by this early moment of humiliation, his ambivalence toward his father derives itself more uniquely from his reaction to his father’s performance as General Custer each year in the town’s annual celebration and historical reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand. As a result of this repetitiously heroic, yet inevitably fatal characterization, Cowling responds to his father in a way that resembles Wade’s relationship with his father: “I worshipped that man. I wanted to warn him, rescue him, but I also wanted slaughter. How do you explain it? Terror mixed with fascination: I craved bloodshed, yet I craved the miracle of a happy ending . . . . Every summer he got scalped . . . . The spotlights dimmed, a bugler played Taps, then we’d head out to the A&W for late-night root beers” (10- 11). After his father actually dies while Cowling is still on the run as a Vietnam draft-dodger, the protagonist comments that “He [his father] always died so beautifully,” only to soon recall how angry his father made him when he played the role of Custer: “‘I was just a kid,’ I would’ve told him, I hated it, every fucking summer you always died.’ I would’ve pinned him down. I would’ve demanded answers. The Ping-Pong table—better than nothing, wasn’t it? Why the jokes? Why bring up graphite? What about the bombs? Real or not? Who was right? Who was wrong?” (248-49). Like John Wade, Cowling, too, combines his impulse to kill his father for dying with his ongoing confusion about reality. Finally, it is useful to consider Thomas Chippering’s relationship with his father in Tomcat in Love—a relationship that similarly grounds ambivalence in a childhood humiliation connected with the linguistic uncertainty of reality. Chippering, who later becomes a professor of linguistics, frequently returns to a childhood event in which his father provides him and Herbie (his neighborhood friend) with a turtle named Toby instead of the engine that he had earlier promised: “If anything was said between my father and me, I cannot remember it. What I do
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remember—vividly—is feeling stupid. The words turtle and engine seemed to do loops in the backyard sunlight. There had to be some sort of meaningful connection, a turtleness inside engineness, or the other way around, but right then I could not locate the logic” (3). The promised engine was for a homemade plane that the boys constructed out of two plywood boards. The next day, Chippering’s mother catches the boys moments away from nailing Herbie’s sister to the plane, which, turned vertically, now functions as a cross. This leads to Chippering’s father expressing anger towards the boy that evening at the dinner table: My father studied me as if I’d come down with polio. ‘The hammer,’ he said. ‘You see the hammer?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘Is it real?’ ‘Naturally,’ I said. He nodded. ‘And the nails? Real or unreal?’ ‘Real,’ I told him, ‘but not like . . . I mean, is Toby a real engine?’ My father was unhappy with that . . . . Even as a seven-year-old, I already knew the difference—it was obvious—but sitting there at the kitchen table, feeling wronged and defenseless, I could not find words to say the many things I wanted to say: that I was not a murderer, that events had unfolded like a story in a book, that I had been pulled along by awe and wonder, that I had never really believed in any of it, that I was almost positive that Herbie would not have hammered those nails through Lorna Sue’s pretty brown hands. (6-7) Unlike the real and fictional paternal attacks at the dinner tables of Tim O’Brien and John Wade, Chippering’s father rebukes his son for using language not just as a medium of representation, but also as a means to an alternate reality. Like Wade’s magic tricks, about which his father often teased him, Chippering begins to distort and control reality using language, a strategy he will employ with greater frequency as he gets older. T.J. Lustig has aptly read Chippering’s founding linguistic experience involving the confusion of words like engine and turtle as both a resounding of the “bell of poststructuralist anthropology” and a “peculiarly unsatisfactory induction into the symbolic order” (397). “For Chippering,” Lustig explains, “. . . the signifier/ signified relation gestures towards a transcendent referent while the order in which he finds himself lacks all ‘logic.’ Chippering’s
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delivery into language at the hands of his father is therefore a fall” (397). Lacking his father’s logic of linguistic substitution (which merely resignifies reality without actually altering it), turtle, for Chippering, becomes an actual substitution for a real engine, just as plywood became an actual substitution for an airplane during his and Herbie’s childhood game. Moreover, reality, for Chippering, is not merely represented by words like engine and turtle; it exists in them, which is why Chippering eventually sounds the important question: “Does language contain history the way plywood contains flight?” (18). Lustig springs from Chippering’s question about language and history to an analysis of the way metaphors serve as vessels for pre-linguistic traumatic experiences. But this question also reveals the novel’s formulation of another question: Does language, at least for characters like Wade and Chippering, contain within it the objects of desire and loss? For just as Wade uses magic to alter the reality of both his tour in Vietnam and his father’s loss, so too does Chippering eventually use language to keep his father alive. In a chapter entitled “Substance” Chippering makes the argument that “any object, any person, any human event” is a kind of substance that he can conjure up to the present reality whenever he wishes. He begins explaining this claim by reflecting on a 1952 memory in which his father coincidently is performing a magic trick for Chippering and his childhood friends. After finishing the description of the magical event, Chippering makes clear that this is much more real than a representative memory: All this is like concrete. It has a dense, solid, ongoing durability. Granted, my father died in 1957, of heart failure, yet he has substance even without substance. He lives in the chemistry of thought, an inhabitant of the mind, his flesh reconstituted into those organic compounds we so lamely call memory. I do not mean this in a figurative sense; I mean it literally: my father has substance. Hit a switch in my head, fire up the chemistry, and there he is again, in the backyard, wincing as he inserts a Lucky Strike into his right ear. (44-45) What others “lamely” think of as memory, Chippering thinks of as reality, one that he has the power to turn on and off like a switch and one that exists quite literally (like chemicals) in his head. The dead, for Chippering, like engines and turtles, are part of an immortal reality that he controls with relish like a child would his toys during a fort/ da game.
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Much later in the novel, Chippering reflects again on his childhood and delivers a rhetorical question to what could be either the reader or himself: “Have I yet mentioned that my father died of heart failure in 1957?* That my mother passed away during my freshman year in college? That loss and abandonment were always my most faithful companions?” (231). In the footnote he elaborates on the paternal loss, remarking that “The details are irrelevant. He dropped dead in the gutter. He deserted me. At his funeral, I yelled, ‘Why a goddamn turtle?’ No use. He was dead” (231, emphasis original). Not only does Chippering’s reflection on his father’s funeral evoke Wade’s desire to murder his dead father in the casket and Cowling’s desire to confront his father for his Custer performance. As it functions alongside Chippering’s additional reflections on his father, the passage once more demonstrates within O’Brien’s oeuvre a relationship between the strategic performance of language (a turtle for an engine) to magic (the backyard Lucky Strike trick), while revealing the capacity of both to delude the reality of loss and abandonment (Chippering’s most faithful companions). Furthermore, O’Brien highlights ambivalence by showing how Chippering’s consideration of the details of his father’s death along with the details of his contempt for his father are both “irrelevant.” The ambivalent condition, it seems, occurs when one like Chippering impulsively repeats something that does and does not matter. Instead of staving off his unpleasant experiences and paternal abuse with magic, as John Wade does, Chippering subjugates the humiliation of his father to a kind of footnote of the written text. The only solution, if there can be one, may be for these characters to reveal to themselves how they accomplish their own tricks or to pull up their footnotes into the more visible (and subjective) body. Before returning to In the Lake of the Woods, I briefly want to note how Chippering’s ability to use language to substantiate his father also resembles O’Brien’s logic of story telling and story-truth in The Things They Carried. In the chapter entitled “Good Form,” O’Brien makes a distinction between “happening-truth” and “story-truth.” Happening-truth relates to one’s often-clouded experience of an event, whereas story-truth resembles a seemingly more accurate truth that a soldier composes much later from the sway of recollection and grief. As a way of getting others “to feel what [he] felt,” O’Brien prefers to communicate with story-truth because it “is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (179). “What stories can do . . .” O’Brien concludes, “is make things present” (180). In an earlier chapter O’Brien recasts this concept of historical presence in terms of converting “remembering” into “rehappening” (32). While the
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historical immediacy of “rehappening” and “story-truth” occasions a return to rather than a reproduction of the event, it also serves O’Brien by keeping the dead alive, which he explains toward the end in a chapter called “The Lives of the Dead.” While reflecting on the death of a childhood friend, Linda, O’Brien explains that “in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world” (225). Essentially, for O’Brien, one can use stories to avoid the reality of loss. “That’s what a story does,” he explains. “The bodies are animated” (231). At one point O’Brien even likens this storied animation to a magic trick (244), and much as Wade and Chippering do with their fathers, O’Brien uses these tricks to redraft Linda, Kiowa, and Curt Lemon into living manifestations incompatible with a reality of death, loss, and therefore mourning. Not only does In the Lake of the Woods reproduce the abovementioned melancholic features involving paternal ambivalence and reanimation, it also magnifies a strange relationship between ambivalence, melancholia, and PTSD, a relationship that I have only begun to explore and interrogate. Is it possible that melancholia is somehow a product of the very logic of PTSD that attempts to “convert[] memory into experience” (Melley 110)? In addition to converting memory into experience, might In the Lake equally convert dead loved ones into “living” bodies? Or, to ask this a little differently, instead of trauma “permit[ting] an end-run around the representational barriers of the postmodern condition” (Melley 111), might the logic of trauma also permit victims like Wade an end-run around the barrier of reality-testing necessary for declaring loss dead and gone and commencing with mourning? In order to entertain these questions, I once more turn to some of the logical similarities O’Brien makes between the conditions of trauma and melancholia. Common to both trauma and melancholia, O’Brien seems to suggest, is the idea of repetition compulsion, which he describes as “the loop” towards the end of In the Lake as Wade floats away in the Chris-Craft towards Canada: Yet he could not stop returning. All night long he revisited the village of Thuan Yen, always with a fresh eye, witness to the tumblings and spinnings of those who had reached their fictitious point of no return. Relatively speaking, he decided these frazzle-eyed citizens were never quite dead, otherwise they would surely stop dying. Same-same for his father. Proof of the loop. The fucker kept hanging himself. Over and over, the bastard would offer shitty counsel at the dinner
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table—“Stop stuffing it in”—and then he’d slip out to the garage to climb aboard a garbage can and leap out into endless returning, his neck snapped by no point in particular, all points unknown. (283)27 As a form of war trauma, the loop in this passage refers to Wade’s inability to move forward from the “frazzle-eyed citizens [who] were never quite dead.” Instead of dying, Wade’s trauma suspends the people of Thuan Yen in a state of being murdered by him and his fellow soldiers. As a symptom of melancholia, the loop in this passage also refers to Wade’s ambivalence and inability to mourn the loss of an abusive father whom he never really loved as he thought he did. Rather than mourn the loss, Wade uses magic to keep it alive in an endless, self-negating returning motion. Of course, the logic of PTSD can also explain Wade’s father’s repetitive suicide. The experience of a parent’s suicide, after all, is also overwhelming and capable of returning as a flashback. That Wade expresses guilt from thinking he might have saved his father reinforces this traumatic outcome. But, as this and other passages help to demonstrate, the novel places a melancholic emphasis on this suicide the moment it begins to highlight Wade’s ambivalence toward an abusive father. It is not just a father who commits suicide; rather it is a “bastard” father who “would offer shitty counsel at the dinner table” that “leap[s] out into endless returning” (283). After staring at O’Brien’s loop, it seems that the obvious difference between the logic of trauma and melancholia is that trauma relates to complications of representing and remembering shocking experiences, while melancholia relates to the management of desire and mourning. Both conditions address different forms of knowledge, and both conditions emphasize a kind of error or aporia that occurs whenever certain barriers prevent people from possessing this knowledge. Being related to the logic of postmodernism, while being also driven by certain ethical motivations, the theoretical framework of trauma often works to facilitate (and thus represent) the voice of the individual victim in a world where everything seems to be lost in collective translation. When these experiences become suspended and lost in figurative language, as Kali Tal suggests, the immediacy of the violence and pain involved will similarly dissipate
27 The loop also makes a similar appearance in The Nuclear Age when William Cowling, who is about to kill his wife and daughter in the bottom of a hand-dug bomb shelter, imagines that his ex-girlfriend, Sarah, comes back to life: “Later in the dark, she says, ‘Why did I die?’ I don’t have the answer . . . Then comes a long silence. ‘Sarah?’ I say, but she doesn’t speak. She’s dead. Like my father, like all of them, she died and dies and keeps on dying, again and again, as if repetition might disclose a new combination of possibilities” (305).
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(Lustig 399), sometimes to the point of devaluing the victim’s experience in the collective mind. This dissipation of the experience by the representative medium is what causes the experience frequently to loop back into the victim’s present. PTSD and its many features, especially flashbacks, are the haunting result of this disintegration and return of this “real” experience of violence. Melancholia, on the other hand, as demonstrated earlier, is the byproduct of another kind of logic predicated on an internal, psychological economy of desire and pleasure, where a central subject (an ego with libidinal drives) invests in a world of outside objects. According to this logic, when one of these objects dies, the person must balance out his libido in a way not too different from an accountant doing his books. This slow, and usually painful, process known as mourning can only occur after testing and accepting the reality of loss. Melancholia occurs after ambivalence or self-deception prevents people from realistically determining their losses dead and gone. In melancholia, the mathematics do not work out; one plus one keeps equaling zero and the dead keep returning until the numbers cooperate. In the Lake of the Woods demonstrates how the loop-like conditions of melancholia and PTSD also incite each other in a loop-like fashion. From a position of melancholia, for example, Wade uses tricks to keep his father alive. When in this state, he can make his dad smile and love him the way he wanted to be loved. Because John goes to war “not to hurt or be hurt” but “to be loved,” especially by his dead father (59), his actual murder of others (a traumatic experience for him) may function as the result of a melancholic distraction and withdrawal from the outside world. Dreaming his father alive, Wade reduces his participation in Thuan Yen to a passive reflex; in a traumatic fashion, the event becomes the only thing left to do the acting, interrupting Wade’s later years whenever it pleases. Another loop-like relationship between the two conditions surfaces when Wade reuses the same bag of tricks (the same magic) to animate his father and redraft Vietnam. Melancholia leads to trauma, which may lead to melancholia once more when he fails to mourn the loss of Kathy. Like Wade, the narrator represents this failure by constantly transforming the loss of Kathy into a collection of “Hypotheses” that may or may not be real. Finally, O’Brien’s entanglement of trauma and melancholia exposes new ways of talking about ambivalence outside melancholia. Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” is appropriate for understanding mourning because of its strong focus on the desire and loss of particular objects,
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such as a parent. On the surface, however, it seems difficult to apply this logic to the unwanted and overwhelming experiences such as combat or rape—experiences that we typically address using the logic of trauma and PTSD. But focusing on the function of ambivalence and melancholia in texts like In the Lake of the Woods highlights similar forms of ambivalence in PTSD. Rather than only relating to desired objects, as Freud contends in “Mourning and Melancholia,” ambivalence may also relate to forms of historical representation and narration.28 This kind of ambivalence will likely involve a conflict between an earlier experience and the person’s later assessment and narration of this experience that is often influenced by others. “Narrative ambivalence” might be a fitting term for this phenomenon. The difference, now, is that instead of succumbing to a kind of aporiatic loop after “know[ing] whom [one] has lost but not what [one] has lost in him” (Freud 40), the person with narrative ambivalence will keep returning to an event after knowing what he experienced but not what he has experienced in this experience. Such a theory of narrative ambivalence will make more sense after returning to O’Brien’s negotiation of story-truth and happening-truth in The Things They Carried. In this work, narrative ambivalence develops after O’Brien’s later assessment of his tour in Vietnam puts a face on the “faceless grief” that he had originally encountered because he was young and “afraid to look” (172). As an operation involving narrative ambivalence, O’Brien’s theory of story-truth emphasizes the fact that it is always the traumatized victim’s older, wiser self who implants a face onto his “faceless grief.” Implantation, here, functions along the same lines as a narration. Should the traumatized not do enough to separate this future narrative revision from the earlier experience, he may continue to generate guilt and ambivalence by thinking that he was also wide-eyed and full of awareness at the time of these violent acts. The theoretical tools of ambivalence and melancholia, then, might alternatively help victims recover from trauma by enabling them to evaluate and distinguish between the faceless narratives of the past and the thoughtfully composed narratives of the present. Should these original and revised experiences also involve lost objects of desire (such as a parent or child), the tools will also help the patient distinguish between the very distinct objects of revision related to trauma and mourning. With trauma, the object of revision is the shocking experience from which
28 To make this application of ambivalence to the traumatic experience and PTSD, however, one will still need to do additional work to determine how pleasure and desire, related to mourning and melancholia, convert to matters of historical representation. 51
the person must distinguish narrative revisions at a later date. With melancholia, on the other hand, the object of revision is the libido itself—a revision, also known as mourning, of one’s investment of desire that will be slow and painful after reality-testing has proven an object to be dead and gone. It is only after a person, like John Wade, resolves any ambivalence he has toward this object that he will successfully test reality and begin this painful process of libidinal revision.
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CHAPTER TWO
Sethe’s Fantastic Crypt: Toni Morrison’s Beloved
There were two rooms and she took him into one of them, hoping he wouldn’t mind the fact that she was not prepared; that though she could remember desire, she had forgotten how it worked; the clutch and helplessness that resided in the hands; how blindness was altered so that what leapt to the eye were places to lie down, and all else—door knobs, straps, hooks, the sadness that crouched in corners, and the passing of time—was interference. TONI MORRISON, Beloved
It should be remarked that as long as the crypt holds, there is no melancholia. It erupts when the walls are shaken, often as a result of the loss of some secondary love-object who had buttressed them. Faced with the danger of seeing the crypt crumble, the whole of the ego becomes one with the crypt, showing the concealed object of love in its own guise. Threatened with imminent loss of its internal support—the kernel of its being—the ego will fuse with the included object, imagining the object is bereft of its partner. Consequently, the ego begins the public display of an interminable process of mourning. The subject heralds the love-object’s sadness, his gasping wound, his universal guilt—without ever revealing, of course, the unspeakable secret, well worth the entire universe.
NICOLAS ABRAHAM AND MARIA TOROK, The Shell and the Kernel
Quite consistently, critics situate Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) within the analytical framework of trauma,29 a framework that dates back to the 1860’s,30 gained popularity after Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), 31 and transformed into its present day articulation after 1980, the year the American Psychiatric Association (APA) recognized Post-traumatic
29 For examples of this criticism, see Jean Wyatt’s “Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (1993), Caroline Rody’s “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: History, ‘Rememory,’ and a ‘Clamor for a Kiss” (1995), Pamela Barnett’s “Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved” (1997), J. Brooks Bouson’s Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame Trauma, and Race in the novels of Toni Morrison (2000), Clifton Spargo’s “Trauma and the Specters of Enslavement in Morrison’s Beloved” (2002), Jeffrey Weinstock’s “Ten Minutes for Seven Letters: Reading Beloved’s Epitaph” (2005), Naomi Mandel’s Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (2006), Dean Franco’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Beloved” (2006), Michael Kreyling’s “‘Slave life; freed life—everyday was a test and trial’: Identity and Memory in Beloved” (2007), and Victoria Smith’s “Generative Melancholy: Women’s Loss and Literary Representation” (2008). 30 Ruth Leys credits John Erichsen, a 19th century British physician, for our present articulation of trauma (3). 31 In this work, Freud determines the traumatic neurosis to come from “any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield” (33)—the shield being corporeal and located in the cerebral cortex for the purpose of protecting the more inner layers of the “living organism” from external stimuli (30). Freud also explores how traumatic neurosis seems to operate independently of the pleasure principle; it represents, in other words, a compulsion to repeat an earlier state before life, a compulsion by which the individual paradoxically drives towards death and not pleasure (43). The paradox comes from desiring a pre-living existence that is incapable of desiring anything; in short, it is the paradox of desiring non-desire. Freud is never conclusive about whether trauma is actually beyond the pleasure principle. 53
Stress as a mental disorder.32 In more recent years, Cathy Caruth has described trauma as a missed experience that returns as a crying wound attempting to communicate to its victim “a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (4).33 A consideration of trauma along Caruth’s line of thinking has become, in many respects, central to the writing and criticism of contemporary literature about slavery, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, or any other experience that we would consider overwhelming. Beloved is no exception to this analytical trend. As a trauma narrative, Beloved reimagines the true story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who, upon re-captivity in 1856, killed her daughter to prevent her from experiencing an all- too-familiar life of slavery. The novel’s protagonist, Sethe, similarly, and also traumatically, sacrifices her own child, Beloved, who later returns to her as a disruptive ghost and then as a dependent, grown woman representing the slain child and the history of slavery. Scholars like Pamela Barnett traditionally read the character, Beloved, as a “figure[] [for] the persistent nightmares common to survivors of trauma” (Barnett 418).34 The novel, as J. Brooks Bouson has argued, “Dramatiz[es] the physical and psychological abuse visited on African Americans in white America . . . show[ing] that, as some trauma theorists have argued, trauma can result not only from a ‘single assault’ or ‘discrete event,’ but also from a ‘constellation of life’s experiences,’ a ‘prolonged exposure to danger,’ or a ‘continuing pattern of abuse’” (3).35 Along similar lines, Jeffery Weinstock argues that Beloved uses the gothic trope of a ghost story to imagine trauma as a possession and also “to address a contemporary haunting, the social trauma
32 In the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) the APA describes Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as one that follows “a psychologically traumatic event that is generally outside the range of usual human experience,” and thus causes symptoms that “involve re-experiencing the traumatic event; numbing of responsiveness to, or reduced involvement with, the external world; and a variety of autonomic, dysphoric, or cognitive symptoms” (236). Causes of the disorder include but are not limited to rape, assault, military combat, floods, earthquakes, car and airplane accidents, large fires, bombings, torture, and death camps (236). Exclusions of the disorder include more common experiences like “simple bereavement, chronic illness, business losses, or marital conflict” (236). 33 Moreover, trauma, for Caruth, remains outside language, which means that all of history might be considered traumatic. Caruth explains, “For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” (18). 34 Barnett makes frequent references to Cathy Caruth to argue that “Sethe is traumatized both by the past and by the present task of surviving it” (419-420), and that African Americans in the novel, while free of slavery, are now slaves to “the recurrent experience of trauma” (425). 35 To make this argument, Bouson draws from some of Kai Erikson’s theoretical views of trauma. Bouson also utilizes Cathy Caruth and Bessel van der Kolk to show how Morrison “depicts the nightmarish world inhabited by victims of trauma, using the device of the ghost to convey the power of trauma to possess and trap its victims” (134). She later applies Judith Herman’s trauma theory to Beloved to suggest that the novel “presents . . . the ‘dialectic of trauma,’ the oscillation of ‘opposing psychological states’—those of intrusion and constriction—which is ‘perhaps the most characteristic feature of the post-traumatic syndromes’” (149). 54
of slavery that lives on in American culture” (148, 136).36 Moreover, Michael Kreyling, acknowledges the effects trauma has on most characters in Beloved while characterizing Sethe’s rape as an emblem of traumatic recollection by which traumatic experiences always gesture back toward an “original trauma,” the original trauma in this case being slavery (121). Without a doubt, Morrison quite overtly locates the horrific experience of the African Diaspora and slavery within this discourse of trauma. Nevertheless, critics like Caroline Rody have also detected areas of tension between Beloved’s poststructuralist attitude toward impossible traumatic representation and a lingering commitment to concepts of desire, which, I argue, would normally involve an intact ego that directs itself towards objects of love, loss, and mourning. For while the novel clearly situates traumatic history as something that can return to victims, overpowering them with its own agency, Morrison also endows Sethe with “awesome authority,” as Rody puts it, suggesting that the “historiographic project enacts a relationship of desire, an emotional implication of present and past” (94).37 On the table now, it seems, after detecting a relationship of desire and traumatic history in Beloved, is a consideration of ideological compatibility or how, in other words, a postmodern strategy for representing traumatic history works (or fails to work) alongside a psychological strategy for processing the objects of this history. Following Rody, scholars like R. Clifton Spargo and Naomi Mandel evaluate this compatibility issue as it relates to traumatic recovery and personal attitudes toward suffering. Spargo, for example, measures “the explicit tension between trauma as a trope for recovered history and those therapeutic, empiricist-minded narratives that require a subject to progress beyond and locate herself rationally outside the traumatic moment” (113). Beloved, for Spargo, is a text that “recovers an untold history of suffering” at the expense of its characters’ more subjective positions of agency capable of “intervene[ing] in their own and others’ histories” (113, 116). With the discourse of trauma, which ethically tries to recover untold and disenfranchised histories of suffering, comes a sacrifice of an ethical consideration of “self-love” and psychotherapy (119). Beloved, for Spargo, particularly illustrates a tension between these discourses involving traumatic representation and internal suffering.
36 Weinstock draws from Cathy Caruth to make this connection between trauma and the ghostly possession. 37 From this observation, Rody suggests that “we integrate an ideological reading of historical fiction with a reading of the inscribed psychological project of reimagining an inherited past” (95). 55
Naomi Mandel shares with Spargo a concern for ethics related to traumatic representation and personal suffering. In Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (2006), Mandel suggests that the logic of trauma “separate[s] the wounded from the wounding . . . ascribes passivity to the former, activity to the latter, identifies one as victim, the other as perpetrator, and encourages a rigorous distinction between the two” (54). This logical separation and distinction, for Mandel, while useful for obtaining justice and vilifying those who hurt others, also causes people to suspend the acts of both perpetrator and the victim within linguistic representation. Such a linguistic suspension endows language with undeserved agency: “Once language is perceived as culpable for the evil into which it has been forced” Mandel argues while citing Berel Lang, “‘the process of representation becomes morally accountable,’ and the limits of language and representation—what I have been calling here the unspeakable— are invested with ethical weight” (Mandel 58). As this applies to Beloved, Mandel reasons that the popular contextualization of the novel within the discourse of unspeakable trauma also “forecloses its multiple evocations of complicity” and causes readers to “lose sight of the characters’ complicit actions—be they forced or chosen—a willed blindness that enables us to ignore how reading and writing about the novel posits similar pitfalls for its critics” (203). Along with a project that posits the representation of traumatic experience as impossible or forbidden, in other words, is an oversight of subjective articulations of violence that are necessary for sorting through such experiences. Complicity, for Mandel, thus “differs from collaboration (a charge) or culpability (a verdict) by being the condition of possibility for the articulation of both” (64, emphasis original). That is to say, in order to do anything about traumatic history (their own and others), people must learn to stand behind rather than away from their representations of such histories. Given some of trauma’s added shortcomings for understanding a novel like Beloved, it may be more productive to situate the novel within an analytical framework that focuses on mourning and melancholia. In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud describes melancholia as a self-deprecating condition that occurs after a subject fails to fully test the reality of her loss, a failure that prevents mourning from ever happening. Being unable to test reality is usually due to the patient’s ambivalence toward the lost object when it was alive, which prevents her from properly managing her desire after the object is gone. Failing to manage this desire, the patient thus ingests her loss, keeping it alive at the expense of her own ego. Mourning and melancholia
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relate less to linguistic representations of horrific experiences and more to the personal articulation and management of desire. I believe this concentration on desire generates more cogent explanations for Beloved’s expression of authority (Rody), historical agency (Spargo), and complicity (Mandel), as well as the novel’s central theme of a lost child, a haunted house, and a grieving mother overcome with guilt. Prior to my own reading of Beloved, scholars like Jean Wyatt and Victoria Smith have also demonstrated a need for characterizing the novel as a representation of the melancholic condition. Although not focusing on melancholia, Wyatt analyzes Sethe’s resistance to linguistic substitution, which causes a “‘literalization’ of spatial metaphors,” and a “denial of loss [that] is fundamentally antimetaphorical” (475, 477) —a description that falls in line with the melancholiac who fails to substitute a lost object for words, and thus takes the object into her mouth instead.38 More explicitly, Smith reads Beloved as a “doubled enactment of melancholia” consisting of “a melancholy of race and a melancholy of gender” (105-6). While drawing from theorists like Juliana Schiesari, Judith Butler, and Dominick LaCapra, Smith reads the character, Beloved, as “both a function and a person,” and as a representation of female and African American “excess and loss that cannot quite be covered, cannot be fully spoken” (105). Characters that interact with Beloved, like Sethe, in other words, are melancholic, not just because ambivalence prevents them from fully accounting for their losses (as Freud would have it). Rather, Smith attributes this melancholia to the social and cultural constraints that prevent females and African Americans from articulating “the worth of [their] loss,” making the loss equally impossible to mourn (102). Instead of representing the traumatic return, the character, Beloved, thus represents “a supersaturated figure of loss” and a “container, holding a loss, a pain, a loneliness that can be held, but also one that cannot be held, that never dies . . .” (Smith 103, 107-8). Beloved, as I read this, represents the unarticulated object of desire from which mourning is impossible, and also the interactive, reification of the resulting psychological disorder, melancholia.
38 Wyatt’s reading could easily fall in line with other literary trauma critics; at one point she uses one of Cathy Caruth’s explanations of trauma to explain “a social order that systematically denie[s] the subject position to those it define[s] as objects of exchange” (478; 486)—the potential subject, here, being Sethe. Where Wyatt begins to drift closer to melancholia, I think, is when she characterizes Sethe’s failed linguistic substitution and denial of loss as a “refusal to displace libido onto words,” followed by a reference to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s distinction between mourning and incorporation (485-86). This is a brief moment for Wyatt, but one worth noting because incorporation, for Abraham and Torok, is a kind of melancholia by which the subject contains her loss (along with all its traumatic associations) within an intrapsychic tomb or crypt. 57
While Sethe’s inability to articulate loss and mourn on her own terms is clearly related to her gendered and racialized social status, I argue in what follows that Beloved more distinctively represents its characters’ melancholia as conditions developing out of ambivalence and mismanaged desire. The novel painstakingly presents its characters’ mixed feelings toward Beloved, Sweet Home, slavery, freedom, and each other alongside their ungainly configurations of desire that resemble thicknesses, colors, and containers. I read this mismanagement of desire as the catalyst for losses to return to their owners who have never rightfully claimed them in life or in death. Moreover, the novel, I argue, takes this return of unclaimed loss further by reifying along with the loss the entire intrapsychic space in which one would imagine a melancholiac to interact with her loss. The novel, in other words, represents the internal world of the melancholiac, which Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have called a “crypt” and an “intrapsychic tomb,” as an actual house (lacking a back door) to which Beloved returns as a dependent in need of total care. Finally, I maintain in what follows that Morrison’s combination of melancholia and trauma renders an innovative portrait of the way outsiders interact with melancholiacs (as if they were both familiar and strange) and even helps readers to imagine a concept like collective melancholia (instead of collective trauma), by which several affected subjects interact within the same fantastic, psychic spaces.
THE MELANCHOLIAC AND HER CRYPT Morrison writes in the closing pages of Beloved that “[t]here is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin” (274). The victim suffering from this kind of loneliness seems to have some degree of control over her situation. She can soothe her loneliness, as one would an upset child, and through this pacifying act, the victim herself is soothed. This kind of loneliness entails a cooperation; the victim envelops her loneliness just as it envelops her, and it is the distinction that she makes between herself and this loneliness that enables her gradual recovery. And then there is a kind of loneliness without these distinguishable boundaries, one that cannot be contained by a language of rocking or by the idea of slumber. This second kind of loneliness, Morrison explains, “roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off
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place” (274). This kind of loneliness is alive, perhaps more alive than the people it affects; it is the only one doing the rocking. Furthermore, this second kind of loneliness has an agency with which the individual cannot compete. It ambushes the person from the outside, coming and going as Beloved eventually does “of her own free will” (200), while at the same time distorting its victim’s distinctions between binary concepts like coming and going; past and present; time and space; and reality and fantasy. The victim continues to experience the past within a present mental landscape that represents (she thinks) the only reality. Moreover, the victim will necessarily assign newer experiences a role within this elaborate mental topography, or else she will dismiss them as if they, in fact, were the products of fantasy. It is interesting to note how these two kinds of loneliness resemble Freud’s description of mourning and melancholia. Like the first kind of loneliness, a mourner can be rocked and does the rocking as she tests the reality of her loss so that “all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object” (“Mourning” 39). Like the rocking of a crib and the nursing of an infant, Freud describes this process as slow, involving at times a resistance to abandoning the object and even a “turning away from reality” as the person clings to her object “through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis” (39). The orders from reality, Freud explains, “cannot be obeyed at once,” and are instead “carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychologically prolonged” (39). Slow as this rocking might be, the person eventually gains enough control (she starts to rock back harder than the loss rocks her) and “respect for reality gains the day” (39). The task of mourning thus resembles a person’s economic readjustment of desire by which she relies on a reality principle to account for present and absent objects of desire. When desire is not reconstituted this way, something akin to melancholia and the second kind of loneliness sets in. Like mourning, Freud explains, melancholia seems to be “the reaction to the loss of a loved object” by means of a death or some kind of desertion (“Mourning 40). Unlike the mourner, the melancholiac often “cannot consciously perceive what he has lost,” most likely because the loss is somehow unconscious (40). The person, as Freud famously states, “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him . . . suggest[ing] that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious” (40, emphasis original). Even when the melancholiac thinks she has addressed the lost object, she winds up
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withdrawing the roaming economic remainder (Freud calls this the “free libido”) “into the ego” where it “serve[s] to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object” (43). Finally, the melancholiac ends up eating the loss, “incorporat[ing] this [desired] object into [her]self . . . [by] devouring it” (44) in such a self-damaging way that it is really the melancholiac who is devoured by the unresolved loss. It is this second kind of rocking, resembling melancholia, that prominently encumbers the female protagonist of Beloved. Arguably, Sethe’s process of mourning fails, turning into melancholia, because her child keeps returning to her. Just as Freud witnessed of the melancholiac, this return occurs in part because Sethe is unable to distinguish between whom she has lost and more unconscious associations that she makes with this loss. These unconscious associations fall under the categories of additional losses and abstractions—both associated with slavery and infanticide. Additional losses include Sethe’s husband, Halle (who disappears after witnessing Sethe’s rape), her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs (who gives up and dies after the infanticide), and Sethe’s two sons, Howard and Buglar (who vacate out of fear of the baby ghost). Parallel abstractions involve Sethe’s personal experience of slavery, rape, and having killed a child to free it, while becoming free herself from the murder. That is to say, because Schoolteacher is unable to enslave a dead child and now “mentally ill” mother, Sethe’s infanticidal action abstractly represents the child’s and her own freedom, not to mention the freedom of Howard, Buglar, and her daughter, Denver. 39 All of these entangled losses and abstractions seem to implicate each other, forcing Sethe to make several distinctions when managing any of these losses in relation to her desire for them, especially the loss of Beloved. Falling in line with Freud’s melancholiac, everything Sethe attempts to love after the infanticide is filtered through the solitary red light of her loss. Eventually her loss comes back “of her own free will,” first as a ghost, and later as a grown woman (200). In this manner, Sethe seems to merge with her loss, feeding it as one would a parasite at the expense of her own wellbeing: the bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became; the brighter Beloved’s eyes, the more those eyes that used never to look away became slits of sleeplessness. Sethe no longer combed her hair or splashed her face with water. She sat in the
39 In “Beloved’s Claim” (2006), Christopher Peterson has described Sethe’s abstract feeling of profit as a “gift of death,” and “as a form of resistance against the slave master’s claim” (554). 60
chair licking her lips like a chastised child while Beloved ate up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it. And the older woman yielded it up without a murmur. (250) Sethe does not murmur because, unlike a victim of a parasite, Beloved serves a vital function: as long as Sethe keeps feeding her, Sethe can continue to avoid the painful process of reality-testing that goes along with mourning. The return of Beloved, first as a ghost, later as a grown woman requiring total care, certainly provides a striking representation of the melancholiac’s preservation of her lost object, which Freud describes in terms of an ingestion. While closely reading Freud’s essay on melancholia, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok further explore how this damaging ingestion works—a description that is especially edifying to an understanding of Beloved. For Abraham and Torok, both introjection and mourning are necessary for psychic growth after loss. From this growth, they explain that the ego “introduce[s] into it[self] the unconscious, nameless, or repressed libido. Thus, it is not at all a matter of ‘introjecting’ the object, as is all to commonly stated, but of introjecting the sum total of the drives, and their vicissitudes as occasioned and mediated by the object” (113). With melancholia, on the other hand, which Abraham and Torok describe as a form of incorporation, a “prohibited object is settled in the ego in order to compensate for the lost pleasure [which has been repressed] and the failed introjection” (113). They later describe this prohibited object in terms of a secret, usually a shameful one involving the lost object and sexual pleasure (131), which is similar to the ambivalence with which Freud attributes the mismanagement of desire for a lost object. Also similar to Freud’s description of melancholia, incorporation is “instantaneous and magical,” and its “ultimate aim . . . is to recover, in secret and through magic, an object that, for one reason or another, evaded its own function: mediating the introjection of desires” (113,114). Incorporation, then, is the refusal to account for these drives, and “reclaim as our own the part of ourselves that we placed in what we lost . . . [and] the refusal to acknowledge the full import of the loss, a loss that, if recognized as such, would effectively transform us” (127). Thus, incorporation, along with melancholia (and different from mourning and introjection), involves the inability to fully recognize one’s attachment to a lost object, a recognition that would otherwise permit a productive reorganization of the ego.
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Beyond its ability to elucidate mourning and melancholia in terms of a management and mismanagement of desire, a theory of incorporation, for Abraham and Torok, also facilitates a spatializing topography useful for considering a melancholiac’s relation to her loss that she somehow ingests.40 Instead of just swallowing the loss, that is, the melancholiac entombs the loss by identifying with and containing the loss. Abraham and Torok explain that the victim of loss provides the lost object a mask of her own ego to wear. This masking resembles an “endocryptic identification,” which involves “exchanging one’s own identity for a fantasmic identification with the ‘life’—beyond the grave—of an object of love, lost as a result of some metapsychological traumatism” (142). It is important to note that this fantastic space in which the victim entombs her loss (with which she also identifies)—the crypt that is also called an “intrapsychic tomb”—far exceeds the dimensions of the lost object. For it is not enough that the victim keeps her loss alive by clothing it in her own identity; the victim also, as Abraham and Torok suggest, contains with her loss an entire world that is agreeable to the fantasy of her loss being alive. To maintain the fantasy of her loss being alive—a fantasy by which the victim can postpone the painful process of reality- testing and mourning—the victim also swallows “everything . . . along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved” (130). Along with the lost object, the fantastic crypt is thus “[r]econstituted from the memories of words, scenes, and affects” and thus “A whole world of unconscious fantasy is created, one that leads its own separate and concealed existence” (130). It is within this vast, cryptic space, then, that the melancholiac is able to interact with her loss without being constantly (and painfully) reminded by “more real” people and objects that her interaction is merely fantasy. By subsuming all within the walls of her fantastic crypt, the melancholiac defers the painful process of reality-testing—a deferment that will continue as long as the walls of the crypt remain intact. Some critical rearranging is in order. If one is to read Sethe as a melancholiac who preserves her loss, Beloved, along with an entire world that maintains the reality of Beloved’s vitality, then one must also do more to account for the crypt (as well as its maintenance) within which such a preservation is possible. A reading of Sethe’s crypt is significant because the crypt,
40 Abraham and Torok also describe the process of ingestion and swallowing of a loss in terms of antimetaphor. By this, they mean that the person fails to substitute her lost object for words, and instead places the loss in her mouth— the same place where words would have formed. From this process, “a new figure of speech” called antimetphor arises that involves “the active destruction of representation” (132). 62
in many ways, precedes Beloved as a figure for the traumatic return (Barnett, et al.), or “a kind of supersaturated figure of loss” and a “container, holding a loss, a pain,” etc. (Smith 103, 107-8). As a space that contains Sethe, Beloved, and all others, it is the crypt, in fact, that acts as the container in which Sethe’s pain and loss may roam and rock. Beloved especially represents this crypt with the house on 124 Bluestone Road. While once a gathering space for free and escaped African Americans, under the care of Baby Suggs, 124 Bluestone Road is now the gathering space for Sethe’s secret desires as well as her losses. The structure lacks a back door, which is because it once served as a passageway for slaves to get to an outside kitchen—an association that prompted Suggs to board up the passage because “she didn’t want to make that journey no more” (207). As a crypt and intrapsychic tomb, 124’s lack of a rear passage becomes the means by which Sethe, ironically, is enslaved by her loss. Swallowing her loss into her psychic crypt, Sethe has no way of expelling them, as one would when mourning.41 Instead, she and her secret desires and losses live together within the crypt, which is how readers encounter 124 at the beginning of the novel: “spiteful. Full of baby’s venom,” and “packed to the rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (3, 5). By the time Paul D encounters the crypt, it is full of “red and undulating light” with the power to hold him at the threshold (8). Rather than exclude Paul D from her crypt, Sethe tries to incorporate him (Denver is already inside), asking him first to “pardon my house,” then urging him to “just step through” (8). Like a melancholiac within her crypt, Sethe is “not a normal woman in a normal house” (40). Sethe lives within her own intrapsychic tomb, along with a ghost, her daughter, and anyone else who threatens to bring her loss into reality, which is why Beloved often refers to Sethe and the house in terms that double as descriptions for places and people. When Paul D, for example, attempts to exorcise Sethe’s baby ghost from the house, his angry mandate that the ghost “Leave the place alone!,” functions both as a command for the dead to stop haunting a house and Sethe’s psyche (18).
41 Sethe’s last expulsion of waste comes the moment she sees Beloved waiting outside 124: “the moment she got close enough to see the face, Sethe’s bladder filled to capacity. She said, ‘Oh, excuse me,’ and ran around to the back of 124. Not since she was a baby girl, being cared for by the eight-year-old girl who pointed out her mother to her, had she had an emergency that unmanageable” (51). As a final expulsion before ingesting Beloved, Sethe returns to find everyone inside 124, and also to find Beloved consuming “cup after cup of water” (51). Beloved’s consumption of Sethe’s resources will only intensify as the novel unfolds. 63
As demonstrated by the ghost’s return as Beloved, it is never up to others like Paul D to rid Sethe’s crypt of its secrets and losses. Paul D “wanted [Beloved] out, but Sethe had let her in and he couldn’t put her out of a house that wasn’t his” (66). Part of his reasoning for this is that, banished from the house, Beloved will be vulnerable to the racist violence of the Klan; but Paul D’s reluctance to remove Beloved is also due to his inability to reveal the very secrets of the crypt responsible for Beloved’s containment. For Sethe, as long as these secret desires remain intact, it will be as if there is nothing real other than the fantastic contents of her crypt; it will be as if “Whatever is going on outside [her] door ain’t for [her]. The world is in this room. This here’s all there is and all there needs to be” (183). Swallowing her loss, her desire, and an outside world that keeps her loss vital, Seth’s crypt stays intact as a space that is both inside and out—a space in which she can interact with the outside as if it were all accumulating inside 124. Sethe and the melancholiac alike both exhibit a dangerous propensity to hoard, a complex behavior to which figures like Paul D are almost completely ineffectual.
SETHE’S SECRETS There is more to be said about Sethe’s containment of loss within the cryptic space of 124. As Abraham and Torok reason, preceding and overseeing the formation of the intrapsychic tomb (the crypt), is a secret, which, as Nicholas T. Rand explains, “designates an internal psychic splitting . . . [by which] two distinct ‘people’ live side by side, one behaving as if s/he were part of the world and the other as if s/he had no contact with it whatsoever” (Abraham and Torok 100). Abraham and Torok describe this splitting secret as a form of “excluded reality” and “preservative repression,” from which they distinguish Freud’s notion of dynamic repression (18, interpreted by Rand), and even his reading of ambivalence as a defining feature of melancholia (135).42 Regardless of their differences, both the splitting secret described by Abraham and
42 For Abraham and Torok, as well as Rand, “the secret” as well as preservative repression denote a more intricate, and less polarizing, version of Freud’s concepts of dynamic repression and ambivalence. One can detect preservative repression’s intricacy with its many inclusions within the melancholic crypt alongside the lost object. I too question the efficacy of ambivalence as it applies to what Freud describes of the melancholiac. It may be the case that a term like ambiguity is more befitting of the behaviors of the melancholiac. The OED defines ambivalence as “[t]he coexistence in one person of contradictory emotions or attitudes (as love and hatred) towards a person or thing.” The word comes from the German, ambivalenz, meaning equivalent or equivalence, and it is also the word Freud seems to prefer in “Mourning and Melancholia” to describe the equal presence of oppositions such as a painful loss that one also desires. The word ambiguous, when not being used to define something that is merely unclear, addresses not just conditions with opposite and equal meanings but, more generally, words and conditions with “more than one interpretation, or explanation; of double meaning, or of several possible meanings; equivocal” (OED, emphasis 64
Torok and the ambivalence described by Freud provoke the melancholiac to swallow and encrypt her loss because she is unable to manage the desire she has invested in this loss. To better understand this mismanagement, I now turn to the novel’s articulation of Sethe’s ambivalence and secret desire. Morrison especially articulates the melancholic precondition of ambivalence and secret desire when connecting the manifestation of Sethe’s loss to “the way” Sethe desires her baby. Sethe explains early on that the ghost, which is a manifestation of the baby, is “no more powerful than the way I loved her” (4).43 It is the complexity of this “way,” much like the complexity of the melancholiac’s relationship to a loved one because of an associated “slight or disappointment” (“Mourning” 43), that a large portion of Beloved sets out to address. Just as the melancholiac tries and fails to mourn her loss because she is unable to understand what it is in the lost object that she desired in the first place, so also does Sethe try and fail to mourn because the reality of her loss does not match “the way” in which she loved (i.e. desired). Perhaps Sethe’s first failure to sort through “the ways” of her desire occurs when she pays an engraver with sex to write “Beloved” on her child’s headstone: Ten minutes for seven letters. With another ten could she have gotten “Dearly” too? She had not thought to ask him and it bothered her still that it might have been possible . . . But what she got, settled for, was the one word that mattered. . . . That should certainly be enough. Enough to answer one more preacher, one more abolitionist and a town full of disgust. (5) For one to mourn one must have lost something; Freud calls this an object of desire (object cathexis); Morrison calls it beloved. Such an object functions as a site of desire, and what one added). While ambivalence is useful for its implications of a psyche that simultaneously pulls in more than one direction, ambiguity is useful when trying to avoid abbreviating this convoluted confliction into a binary. 43 I derive this concept of “the way” from Mandel, who reads this passage to argue that “the way” Sethe loved represents Sethe’s attempt to gain agency by speaking the unspeakable, an agency that I instead attribute to reality- testing when mourning. “As the murdered baby’s given name is replaced by ‘the way’ Sethe loved her,” Mandel explains, “Sethe speaks the unspeakable: not by naming that which has no name, but rather by replacing an existing name silenced by a community’s reluctance to utter it with an expression of her (Sethe’s) personal response to this silencing” (173). Mandel encourages us to re-imagine the concept of speaking the unspeakable in terms of power relationships involving Sethe and the surrounding community. “Thus,” Mandel explains, “when Sethe claims that ‘Beloved’ is ‘the one word that mattered,’ begging the question, mattered to whom? The answer is, mattered to Sethe: this word serves as her response to the community that condemned her . . . . Speaking the unspeakable, then, says more about the speaker herself than about what had been rendered unspeakable in the first place” (174). By reading “the way” within the context of melancholia, I argue that Sethe’s engraving is a failed attempt to articulate the way she loved her child. While I agree with Mandel when understanding the engraving as Sethe’s “response to the community that condemned her,” I argue that it does not address the secret ways of her loss; her love within the word “Beloved” is articulated in a way that satisfies others and not herself. 65
desires in it is not necessarily the same as what others desire in it. The object of desire, that is to say, is an object of desire in specific ways. One of Sethe’s regrets when reflecting on this graveyard experience is that she did not articulate this specific way of desire on the headstone in the form of Dearly Beloved, instead of just Beloved. Whether the articulation is complete or not, however, both words, dearly and beloved, are words she heard others say, and her motivation to engrave them has more to do with appeasing the judgmental community (proving to them that she loved her dead child) than it does her attempt to articulate the way her loss meant to her. Regardless of Sethe’s motivation or the success of her gravestone utterance, this scene helps to exemplify the importance of personally acknowledging and sorting through “the ways” in which one loved something before being able to mourn the loss of this something. It is whenever the mourner does not (or cannot) articulate these “ways” that melancholia emerges and begins to roam freely, unrockable, and independent of the person. Beloved also makes the relationship between Sethe’s desire, mourning, and melancholia more understandable by representing desire in the form of textures, consistencies, colors, and quantities. For example, Paul D describes Sethe’s infanticide-causing love as “too thick,” to which Sethe responds by arguing that “love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all” (2).44 Later on Sethe similarly refers to her love as being “tough,” accrediting the return of her unnamed daughter to this toughness (184). Being too thick and tough, Sethe’s love makes ambivalent associations with her children; it takes on a bulky conceptual consistency of reproduction, accomplishment, companionship, and inheritance, as well as enslavement, torture, rape and infanticide. Unlike Sethe’s flour that she uses for making biscuits, the consistency of Sethe’s love is difficult to part and resistant to being separated into small hills and ridges so as to allow one to inspect it for mites (16). When not thick or tough, Sethe’s love takes on a certain color: red as the color of her baby’s blood, pink as the color of the traditional headstone—colors between which she must distinguish while testing the reality of her loss. Something other than a quality distinction occurs, however. For after paying the funeral engraver with sex—“pressed up against the dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as the grave” (5)— Sethe becomes “as color conscious as a hen:”
44 See also later when Sethe declares: “My love was too thick” (203). 66
Every dawn she worked at fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest. And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or a yellow squash. Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color. There was something wrong with that. It was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it. (39) Sethe’s multiple dawns—the beginnings of her days of work feeding others at a restaurant down the road—are colorless and forgetful. Her last experience of a colorful dawn involves the pinkish dawn of Beloved’s gravestone, a stone with which she wished to mark an ending by articulating with it her desire for her lost child. Instead of endings, however, dawn, desire, and their many colors are now frozen in a melancholic state of beginnings and ends, each confusing the other to the point of irresolution. This confusion of binaries from a failure to recognize a color (which doubles as a time of day), carries over into Sethe’s consideration of old and new objects. Immediately following the description of Sethe’s loss of colors, 124 becomes “so full of strong feeling” that it seems Sethe might be “oblivious to the loss of anything at all” (39)—a form of oblivion that also prevents Sethe from making room and accounting for newer love-objects, namely Paul D. “Would it be all right?” Sethe asks herself upon waking up next to Paul D. “Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something? She couldn’t think clearly, lying next to him . . .” (38, emphasis original). Paul D represents a new color that Sethe’s confusion of red and pink prevents her from registering. Furthermore, ambivalence is articulated here as a guilt-driven question about feeling and counting (economically) on something other than the object of desire that Sethe has entombed inside herself. Now, only this entombed desire is capable of feeling. Beloved contrasts Sethe’s inability to manage desire and new colors with Baby Suggs, who “go[es] to bed to think about the colors of things” (177). Unlike Sethe, Suggs does more to expound on the network of personal and social “ways” associated with the murder and loss of Sethe’s baby: Her authority in the pulpit, her dance in the Clearing, her powerful Call . . . all that had been mocked and rebuked by the bloodspill in her backyard . . . Strangers and familiars were stopping by to hear how it went one more time, and suddenly
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Baby declared peace. She just up and quit. By the time Sethe was released she had exhausted blue and was well on her way to yellow. (177) For Suggs, it seems, the infanticide represents the loss of authority, power, and control. She exhibits this same behavior earlier in her life after repeatedly having and losing children: “Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized” (23). After having and losing so many children to slave owners who often gave Suggs their word that she could keep them, Suggs stopped loving the children she continued to have. One child, for example, conceived with a slave owner who sold two of Suggs’ girls, “she could not love and the rest she would not. ‘God take what He would,’ she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn’t mean a thing” (23). Freedom is meaningless because Suggs gave up on desiring new things, with the exception of maybe Halle, who was the child she got to keep the longest. Baby Suggs’ desire for Halle, however, is reduced to a delayed “whoop” that she eventually releases even when he does not return to her. Suggs almost invests this whoop in her grandchildren—“the first and only she would know: two boys and a little girl who was crawling already” (135). When Sethe arrives at 124, “the idea of a whoop moved closer to the front of her brain, and finally, twenty days later, after there was no sign of Halle, Suggs submits to pleasure once more, which materializes into “a feast for ninety people” (136). Shortly after Suggs’ willingness to share colors with people in her life (biblically turning two buckets of blackberries into a dozen pies to which others added “turkey enough for the whole town pretty near, new peas in September, fresh cream but no cow, ice and sugar, batter bread, bread pudding, raised bread short bread” [137]) the four horsemen come into her yard and transform her pleasure into a dead baby and the unredressable violation of boundaries (“they came in my yard”) (148-153). Instead of discarding the ways of desire, as Sethe does by becoming oblivious to colors that do not resemble her loss, Suggs gives up on the objects of desire, focusing now only on the potential qualities of such objects. From this shift in focus, Baby Suggs is not exactly melancholic in the way that Sethe is; she knows how to detect and work through the ways (and colors) of loss. Instead, Suggs’ actions have more to do with political resignation; she refuses to associate her color coded desires with anything more in the future so as to never experience the frequent pain of mourning that is brought about by white people.
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After Sethe kills her baby, Suggs completes her resignation by retreating to her bed where she vows never again to invest in objects that can be transformed (against her will) from sites of pleasure to sites of harm. “I want to fix on something harmless in this world,” Suggs explains to Stamp Paid, who is trying to convince her to preach “the Word” once more from the clearing: “What world you talking about? Ain’t nothing harmless down here.” “Yes it is. Blue. That don’t hurt nobody. Yellow neither.” “You getting in bed to think about yellow?” “I likes yellow.” “Then what? When you get through with blue and yellow, then what?” “Can’t say. It’s something can’t be planned.” (179) By focusing only on “the way” of desire and no longer on the objects of desire that can be taken away from her, Suggs avoids being hurt by loss and gains access to a kind of power that would otherwise be monopolized by God and white people. This shift in focus results in Suggs’ complete removal from the community and eventual withering away as she consumes only the colorful ideas of the world instead of a world that she can desire and potentially lose.
COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND MELANCHOLIA As I have argued thus far, Beloved represents mourning in terms of qualities of desire one can sort through so as to digest loss, and melancholia in terms of unsortable qualities that result in the ingestion of loss within a crypt that lacks a back door. Given her complete inability to manage her loss, as made evident by contrasting demonstrations of management by other characters, Sethe is arguably the novel’s primary melancholiac. Nevertheless, the novel does more to demonstrate how other characters partake in Sethe’s melancholia, as opposed to being model examples of mourning. The novel quite innovatively gathers each of its characters within and around Sethe’s intrapsychic space of 124 to demonstrate how the methods by which characters manage their desire are able to converge at the intersection of loss and trauma. Such a convergence divulges a contagious nature to melancholia and also a shared, collective quality to the disorder that resembles collective traumatic memory. One example of this convergence I noted already with Baby Suggs, who is driven by Sethe’s impossible mourning (or at least its unmanageable circumstances) to becoming herself
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immobile and disinclined to desire anything that she might lose. Another example is with Paul D, who becomes unable to desire Sethe in a space that also contains her reanimated loss, Beloved, and simultaneously develops an attraction toward this undead loss. Such an attraction to the object of another’s melancholia eventually disturbs Paul D’s management of his own desire as well as his management of tightly contained memories of Sweet Home: Paul D never worried about his little tobacco tin anymore. It was rusted shut. So, while [Beloved] hoisted her skirts and turned her head over her shoulder the way the turtles had, he just looked at the lard can, silvery in the moonlight, and spoke quietly. . . . She moved closer with a footfall he didn’t hear and he didn’t hear the whisper that the flakes of rust made either as they fell away from the seams of his tobacco tin. So when the lid gave he didn’t know it. What he knew was that when he reached the inside part he was saying, “red heart, red heart” over and over again. Softly and then so loud it woke Denver, then Paul D himself. (116-117) Just as Sethe’s melancholia distorts her perception of time and space, so does Beloved interfere (without him knowing until it is already finished) with Paul D’s ability to contain and redistribute desire. Moreover, Paul D’s containment of desire resembles Baby Suggs’ refusal to associate color to objects. Having him scream out the words “red heart,” Morrison overlaps Paul D’s memory of Sweet Home with Sethe’s memory regarding her dead baby. Red, being the color of baby’s blood, is the color with which Sethe struggles the most, partly because the community around her refuses to define the infanticide as anything other than murderous and brutal (“You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” Paul D tells Sethe [165]). Having Paul D’s sensations of Sweet Home take on the same color of Sethe’s ambivalence, Morrison invites us to associate the phenomenon of melancholia to a returned loss as well as a returned traumatic experience. Another example where ambivalence seems to intersect loss- and trauma-related melancholia is Paul D’s attitude toward the scar on Sethe’s back. This scar, which Sethe calls a chokecherry tree because of its shape, is the product of several acts of violence to her person ranging from rape, the robbery of her breast milk, and being whipped. Instead of being exclusively sad or painful, the scar is also attractive, having, for example, “wide trunks and intricate branches. . . . like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display” (17). In addition to being a marker for pain, the scar stimulates Paul D’s arousal for Sethe, which he can only settle by pressing his cheek “into the branches of her chokecherry tree” and “touch[ing]
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every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth” (17-19). Paul D’s foreplay consists of fondling Sethe’s breasts and scars, desirously associating the two in a way that makes the past a thing that he can erotically expose. But Paul D is never consistently aroused by this breast-scar combination either; his arousal soon converges with repulsion after complete exposure and the act of intercourse: Out of the corner of his eye, Paul D saw the float of her breasts and disliked it, the spread–away, flat roundness of them that he could definitely live without, never mind that downstairs he had held them as though they were the most expensive part of himself. And the wrought-iron maze he had explored in the kitchen like a gold miner pawing through pay dirt was in fact a revolting clump of scars. Not a tree, as she said. Maybe shaped like one, but nothing like any tree he knew because trees were inviting; things you could trust and be near; talk to if you wanted to as he frequently did since way back when he took the midday meal in the fields of Sweet Home. Always in the same place if he could, and choosing the place had been hard because Sweet Home had more pretty trees than any farm around. (21) As soon as Paul D mentally incorporates Sethe’s breasts into a daily routine (something with which he would have to live) the breasts and scar become unattractive to him and his thoughts return to an earlier routine, that of eating meals amongst the pleasant trees while unpleasantly enslaved at Sweet Home. Similar to Sethe’s inability to manage the loss of her baby, her and Paul D’s inability to manage the memory of Sweet Home arises from a kind of ambivalence that they never fully address during and after Sweet Home. This ambivalence, also resembling a shameful secret, involves an experience of Sweet Home that is unmanageably plural, one that resists the more dominant binary of sweet and bitter memory. Sweet Home, Paul D says to Denver, who is confused about why he and Sethe keep mentally returning to a place that was violent; Sweet Home “wasn’t sweet and it sure wasn’t home” (14). The ambivalence seems to come from their metonymic substitution of Sweet Home for the violent experience at Sweet Home. This substitution forces them to also associate the positive parts of Sweet Home (the trees, the Garners, each other) with the violence that occurred there, simulating a false experience of masochism followed by guilt with relation to their previous pain. In other words, if they desired
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anything during their enslavement, than it may seem to them that they also desired their enslavement. Lacking the ability to manage their desire associated with Sweet Home, they are left with a consideration of the place as something that is merely “where we were . . . All together. Com[ing] back whether we want it to or not” (14). That is to say, because they do not address their previous experience in terms of personal desire, from which they had some form of agency, they instead address the memory of the experience as something with its own agency, beyond their control, which interrupts their lives as and whenever it pleases. The text makes this ambivalence related to the scar of Sweet Home especially evident when paralleling the memory of slavery with the memory of Sethe’s deceased child. This is, perhaps, best exemplified by Sethe’s narration of the infanticide to Paul D. During this narration, Sethe performs the loop-like return common to traumatic memory by spinning “round and round the room.” While Sethe is spinning, Paul D sits in the middle, involuntarily playing the part of the powerless victim to whom memory comes and goes as it pleases. “Once and a while,” the narrator explains, as Sethe remembers the Sweet Home experience that precipitated the infanticide, [Sethe] rubbed her hips as she turned, but the wheel never stopped . . . It made [Paul D] dizzy. At first he thought it was her spinning. Circling him the way she was circling the subject. Round and round, never changing direction, which might have helped his head . . . Circling, circling, now she was gnawing something else instead of getting to the point . . . Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn’t get it right off—she could never explain. Because the truth was simple, not a long drawn-out record of flowered shifts, tree cages, selfishness, ankle ropes and wells. Simple: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher’s hat, she heard wings. . . . And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. (159-163) Even if the truth about what happened is somehow simple (something happened in a particular way), the novel suggests that Sethe’s memory and psychic consideration of what happened is not simple and requires a more complex form of management. Being more complicated, Sethe’s memory of the infanticide, for example, really does involve desire; she acted in a way that she
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thought would benefit her and the things she loves the most. That Sethe gnaws at something without ever getting to the point demonstrates how there are multiple points involved in a story thought by others to have a point and by the melancholiac to have a simple truth that is not grounded in desire or ambivalence. Sethe tries to articulate her simple, fantasy truth about the infanticide without words. Lacking genuine words, Sethe performs her past experience, both physically as she spins around the room, and narratively as she jumps from topic to topic, stirring together her memories of the dead child and her other children with those of Aunt Phyllis, Sweet Home, the Garners, her escape, and the murder of her baby. When talking about the baby when it was alive, Sethe shifts and changes expressions, smiling at the memory of her dead child in a way that causes the “smile [to break] in two and bec[o]me a sudden suck of air, but she did not shudder or close her eyes. She wheeled” (160). Wheeling enables Sethe to suspend a fantasy in the center of a circle that she forms from real (albeit secret) associations of desire. It seems, then, that the melancholiac performs a magic trick on herself by visualizing a simple truth at the center of unmanageable losses and memories. Melancholic vision, as Sethe’s wheeling performance suggests, consists of staring at the inside of a circle that is pantomimed and/or simulated by the circular movement of several other experiences at the circumference. Should the outer experiences stop moving or change direction (as Paul D wishes Sethe would do) the circle will lose its shape and the melancholiac will redirect her focus to these outer elements that, until now, have been peripherally blurry. Having this kind of vision, Sethe continues to wheel because the truth, being at the center, really does seem simple to her, a simplistic vision that likely started when she first attempted to mourn the loss of a baby that was far from simple. Despite her best efforts, Sethe’s special effect does not work on Paul D, who instead directs his attention two the splitting of Sethe’s psychic identity: The prickly, mean-eyed Sweet Home girl he knew as Halle’s girl was obedient (like Halle), shy (like Halle), and work-crazy (like Halle). He was wrong. This here Sethe was new. The ghost in her house didn’t bother her for the very same reason a room-and-board witch with new shoes was welcome. This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone. This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw. This here new Sethe didn’t know where the world stopped
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and she began. Suddenly he saw what Stamp Paid wanted him to see: more important than what Sethe had done was what she claimed. It scared him. (164). It is shortly after Paul D’s reevaluation of Sethe that he distinguishes her action as something only a creature with four legs, and not two, would do, a distinction that prompts “a forest [to] spr[ing] up between them; trackless and quiet” (165). As a guest inside Sethe’s fantastic crypt, Paul D continues to make distinctions that relate to a reality outside the crypt—a reality that involves human qualities and decrees set-up to prevent infanticide, regardless of the circumstances. Sethe’s mismanagement of desire is thus once more reinforced as Paul D continues to make it socially impossible for Sethe to sort through the thicknesses of her desire in a personal, rather than social, way. Beloved suggests that whenever one person’s melancholia interacts with another’s, one or both persons involved will begin to doubt the reality of the other, just as a cynic would when pointing out the hidden wires used in a magician’s magic trick.45 “What you did,” Paul D contends after Sethe justifies her murder, “was wrong.” Rather than killing her children, Paul D thinks there could have been “some other way” for Sethe and her children (164-165). It is when they start to challenge each other’s ways that Paul D, out of frustration, likens Sethe to a creature with four legs, a gesture that causes him to think about some of his less simple memories of Sweet Home in relation to Sethe’s infanticide and his cold-house rendezvous with Beloved: “Later he would wonder what made him say it. The calves of his youth? Or the conviction that he was being observed through the ceiling? How fast he had moved from his shame to hers. From his cold-house secret straight to her too-thick love” (165). Here Morrison demonstrates the discursive wave of confusion created whenever one melancholiac attempts to evaluate another melancholiac. Paul D’s “tobacco tin” management of memory is not that different from Sethe’s “is or ain’t” and “simple truth” approach to love and loss. Because of their similarities, Sethe’s melancholic performance coerces Paul D into a state of self-evaluation, whether he decides to accept Sethe’s simple truth or not. Accepting Sethe’s simple truth forces Paul D to acknowledge the forest of language that prevents people from ever articulating complicated memory and desire to themselves and others —a realization that would force Paul D to reevaluate the possibility of sweetness existing amongst the bitter violence of slavery just as he understands
45 This form of skepticism also resembles a conversation between two people in different hypnotic states. 74
how Sethe can love someone with a handsaw.46 Similarly, rejecting Sethe’s simple truth would prompt Paul D to reflect on the complex thicknesses (the ways at the circumference) that move about to form his own illusions. Accepting and rejecting Sethe’s simple truth, I wish to suggest, results in Paul D’s reevaluation of memory strategies involving a “tobacco tin” and ambivalent emotions regarding Sweet Home. Having to reevaluate these memory strategies scares Paul D just as much as the knowledge “that what Sethe had done was what she claimed” (164). This fear, I argue, is what prompts him to immediately retreat to the porch steps of a Church of the Holy Redeemer where others find him with “[h]is Tobacco tin, blown open, [and its] spilled contents . . . float[ing] freely and ma[king] him their play and prey” (218). The contents resemble his memory of Sweet Home, his botched escape, his time in Alfred, Georgia, the flood, his escape to the Cherokees, and his relocation up north. All of this had been previously contained: “And then she moved him. Just when doubt, regret and every single unasked question was packed away, long after he believed he had willed himself into being, at the very time and place he wanted to take root—she moved him. From room to room. Like a rag doll” (221). The “she” here relates to both Sethe and Beloved. It is the contact Paul D makes with Sethe’s melancholia that forces him to rationalize away the logic that helps to keep his tobacco tin rusted shut.
CONFRONTING MELANCHOLIA As I have been arguing, regarding Sethe and Paul D’s interaction, Beloved visibly juxtaposes the mismanagement of desire, loss, and memory in a manner that extends the limitations of Sethe’s fantastic crypt beyond her own psychic relations. I now wish to conclude this analysis by looking at the way others, such as Denver, interact with Sethe’s melancholia—an interaction from which they eventually confront the crypt of 124 and Beloved as one would a disorder, a performance, and a possessive devil. As the daughter of Sethe, sister to Beloved, and as a child who will never remember a first-hand experience of slavery or a murder that was supposed to include herself, Denver is full of shifting expectations regarding her relationship to her mother and the past. While she technically was born into slavery, Denver was much too young to remember the experience, and
46 Furthermore, merely accepting Sethe’s simple truth with a kind of blind faith would also make him reflect on his own “tobacco tin” logic of memory as something equally inarticulate and based blindly on faith. 75
while she was right there beside her slightly older sister during and after the murder, “swallow[ing] her blood right along with my mother’s milk,” Denver only remembers what people tell her about the incident. Her brothers, Howard and Buglar, when still around, tell her stories about what they remember from the day of the murder. In these stories, Sethe “missed killing [them],” stories that fuel Denver’s fear that “the thing that happened that made it all right for [her] mother to kill [her] sister could happen again” (205).47 Having more patience than her brothers, who ran off “as soon as looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar) [and] as soon as two tiny handprints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard),” Denver continues to live at 124, in part because she is too young for independence, but also because she seems challenged to figure out what it is that keeps returning to worry her mother to distraction (3). “For a baby,” Denver remarks early on in her inquiry into the haunting of 124, “she throws a powerful spell,” to which Sethe replies that the spell is “no more powerful than the way I loved her” (4). Much like the psychoanalyst who attempts to reveal the hidden and unacknowledged ways about a person’s sleeplessness, disillusionment, and other non-productive behaviors, so does Denver set out to reveal the mechanism responsible for Sethe’s frequent fixation on Sweet Home and the lost “crawling- already” baby girl. Unlike the psychoanalyst, however, Denver is much more obligated to understand a patient who is also her mother with whom she can either live (with the fear of being tormented or even murdered by the thing that possesses Sethe) or abandon (with the fear of surviving on her own and the guilt of walking out on the person who loves her the most). Denver has her theories about her mother and her relationship to the past. To understand Sethe’s close connection to Beloved, Denver argues that “Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw [and] Beloved was making her pay for it” (251). Beloved, for Denver, represents Sethe’s way of managing the reality of loving and killing a child in ways that are not recognized by the available discourses on loving and killing. “Sethe’s greatest fear,” the narrator explains, “was the same one Denver had in the beginning—that Beloved might leave . . . before Sethe could make her understand what it meant—what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin” and, perhaps more importantly, how something can be worse than this murderous motion, “[t]hat anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind (251). As her own form of psychological reality-testing, it is possible that Denver sees Beloved as
47 Denver also describes this “thing” as “something else terrible enough to make her do it again” (205). 76
Sethe’s attempt to postpone the understanding of loss and memory in favor of the more simple truth. Like melancholia, as long as Beloved does not leave, mourning (and the pain associated with it) will be postponed. And it is questionable, as I will discuss in the conclusion of this chapter, whether or not the manner of Beloved’s departure ever allows for this kind of mourning and reality-testing to take place. Sethe seems to articulate Denver’s position best when characterizing Denver as the only thing in between “the tree on my back and a haint in my house” (15).48 Having a traumatic memory of slavery on one side of her, Denver functions as the only observer (before Paul D comes along) who can actually see and feel the scar on Sethe’s back. Having a ghost at her other side, Denver is the only one (even after Paul D arrives) who understands the ghost as something that is not evil, as Paul D suspects at first, or sad, as Sethe suggests instead. The ghost, for Denver, is alternatively “[r]ebuked. Lonely and rebuked” (13). Despite Sethe’s theory that something that “spend[s] every minute with us like it does” cannot be lonely, Denver reads the ghost (i.e. the loss of the baby girl) as something that is not receiving the attention it requires (13). Being lonely and rebuked in response to a mother who thinks she is interacting with it, the ghost occupies a condition of being visible but not seen, heeded but disregarded. Unlike Sethe, Denver is able to make the ghost her “secret company until Paul D came . . . [and] threw her out” (105). But this does not make the ghost any less lonely; this is a ghost that is lonely and rebuked by Sethe, who does not address her loss as it really is. Being a rebuke, Sethe’s treatment of her loss takes the form of a scathing correction by which she can avoid testing the reality of her love for which she killed. Denver is thus a character who can better understand how Sethe’s failure to assess her loss is also what stimulates (and simulates) her magical resuscitation and life support of her dead child. And reading Denver as someone in between Sethe’s ghost and her scar also suggests that the rebuked ways of Sethe’s love and loss correspondingly involve the rebuked ways of Sethe’s memory of slavery, Sweet Home, and even Halle. As her secret company who wishes only for Sethe’s companionship, the ghost “helped [Denver] wait for [her] daddy. Me and her waited for him” (205). The father, Halle, with whom Denver never remembers interacting, but whom Denver is also expected to love, represents one of these outside ways that might un-complicate Sethe’s loss should he make his way home.
48 Her exact words after Denver breaks down in frustration of the haunted house and her mother’s poor community reputation are “I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running—from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth” (15). 77
Perhaps this makes Denver’s companionship with the ghost about a shared concern for the reclamation of Sethe’s psychic economic order. Or perhaps Denver just misses a father whom she never knew and the ghost, on whom Sethe completely fixates, is all Denver has to communicate with. It is also interesting to imagine how being the only thing between a ghost and a scar situates Denver within a reality that excludes Sethe. Where, I wish to ask with this statement, is Sethe if Denver is the only one in between Sethe’s complicated loss and trauma? Reading the ghost, Beloved, and the crypt-like 124 as Sethe’s manifestation of melancholia might suggest that melancholia is all that is available to others who wish to communicate with people like Sethe. This reminds me of Freud’s suggestion that “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (40). Being emptied out by her inability to manage her desire, Sethe becomes more of a site—crypt-like and lacking a back door—in which people like Denver and Paul D can dwell without ever really interacting with Sethe. To get to Sethe, then, it seems logical that one might first go through (and sort through) Sethe’s condition, helping also to explain why outsiders like Denver and Paul D often desire Sethe’s melancholic manifestations as they should Sethe. Paul D, for example, has sex with Beloved less because he desires her and more because she represents “something in disguise” (127), a disguise I take to resemble the melancholic patient who makes herself as empty as the loss that absorbs her.49 This suggests that Paul D is really “fucking” and “not fucking” Sethe outside in the cold house. Being that there is really “no world outside [Sethe’s] door” (184), Beloved is all there is for Paul D to fuck, just as Sethe is all that is left for Beloved to fuck (“Beloved did not look at Paul D; her scrutiny was for Sethe” [130]). Similarly, Denver “loves” Beloved, but only as “a strategist . . . [who] has to keep Beloved by her side from the minute Sethe leaves for work until the hour of her return when Beloved begins to hover at the window . . .” (121). Through Beloved, Denver can get to Sethe, but just as Beloved excuses Paul D, Beloved excuses Denver in complete favor of Sethe.50
49 “What?” Paul D ponders, “A grown man fixed by a girl? But what if the girl was not a girl, but something in disguise? A lowdown something that looked like a sweet young girl and fucking her or not was not the point, it was not being able to stay or go where he wished in 124, and the danger was in losing Sethe because he was not man enough to breakout, so he needed her, Sethe, to help him, to know about it, and it shamed him to have to ask the woman he wanted to protect to help him do it, God damn it to hell” (127). 50 “‘She is the one,’” Beloved says to Denver who doesn’t understand why Beloved would try to exclude someone who is on her side. “‘She is the one I need. You can go but she is the one I have to have’” (76). 78
When not playing the part of analyst, Denver is an audience member of the melancholiac’s cryptic performance. Unlike some performances, the performance Denver attends is one that does not believe (or is not aware of) theaters and stages. Instead, Sethe’s performance wheels (as it did around Paul D) in and around 124 without ever thinking of itself as a performance. Being one of the only audience members watching a performer who believes her act is real, Denver witnesses the ghost of her dead sister in her own home and the embodiment of this same sister in a grown woman named Beloved. What Denver witnesses, however, is not merely Sethe playing the parts of ghosts and strangers on the front lawn; Sethe believes these creatures are real. Should they stop being real, then the loss of Sethe’s child and the trauma of Sweet Home will take on a realness that Sethe must sort through. As a person who is lonely, Denver keeps company with these performances in substitution for her absent father and empty mother. As an analyst in between the memory of loss and violence, Denver questions these creatures to see where they come from and how they acquired their names. And as an audience member to a performance that does not know it is a performance, Denver often plays along as if she were another actor and not an observer. (When the performance is so real that it fails to notice its performativity, the distinction between audience and actor can be dismissed as well.) In these instances, being the only thing in between Sethe’s two kinds of memory allows Denver to become an actress to the same degree as Sethe; whatever way Sethe remembers, so does Denver. Sethe, who does not think any of this is make-believe, presumes Denver will play along in the same way that she thinks Paul D should get the point of her murder “right off” without involving a “drawn-out record” of details and ways. With this expected participation, Sethe not only unwittingly convinces Denver that she really can interact with her dead sister; Sethe also makes Denver believe she can remember things that never happened to her. After Denver tells Sethe about the white dress she saw holding onto her mother while she was praying, which Denver thinks is the baby ghost, Sethe admits that she was, instead of praying, “talking about time:” “It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay . . . If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. . . . I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”
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“Can other people see it?” asked Denver. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. . . . The Picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there.” (36) As Paul D suggests later, Sethe does not “know where the world stop[s] and she beg[i]n[s]” (164), making Denver just as responsible for Sethe’s memory as Sethe is. Disregarding the boundaries between living and dead; real and fantasy; and self and other, Sethe expects that what she is remembering is something much more than memory. What she remembers is so real that if anything has agency, for Sethe, it is the memory of her child and Sweet Home; they are the agents remembering Sethe. Because memory, for Sethe, is something that is more than a representation (a signified unblemished by a signifier), she teaches Denver that “nothing ever dies,” a belief in the undead that I have been comparing with melancholia. Just as Sethe considers herself lost from being unable to mourn her child, so does Sethe consider herself and Denver passive victims of a violence that is no longer passive, dead, and accessible only through active individuals. As Beloved unfolds, Denver goes from a state of docile participation in Sethe’s performance to a state of skepticism resulting from her concern for the nourishment and income of herself and her mother.51 At first, Denver seems to believe in floating, independent memories when suggesting that whatever made her mother kill “comes from outside this house, outside the yard, and it can come right on in the yard if it wants to. So I never leave this house and I watch over the yard, so it can’t happen again and my mother won’t have to kill me” (205). This fear of leaving the yard, as I read it, comes from her mother’s warning that Denver “can’t never go there” (36) because what happened to Sethe can just as easily happen to Denver if she stands in the right place. Denver continues to participate in Sethe’s performance when conversing with
51 Beloved, after all, consumes most of their food and all of Sethe’s time with which she could be earning money to buy more food. Not believing in time, Sethe seems to not notice any of this. It is up to Denver to stop pretending and risk leaving the yard to find some form of income. 80
Beloved about “what[] it [is] like over there, where [Beloved] [was] before,” to which Beloved responds in a way that conflates the memory of a dark and buried coffin with the dark and cramped bowels of a slave ship crossing the Atlantic: “Dark,” Beloved says. “I’m small in that place. I’m like this here” (75). As her dead sister, Beloved comes back to share with Sethe, and through Sethe, Denver, what it’s like to be dead and buried; as the perpetual actions of the past, Beloved comes back to share with the mother and daughter what it’s like to be stacked in the belly of ship with no water to make tears, sweat, or morning water. “In the beginning,” Beloved’s soliloquy explains, “we could vomit now we do not now we cannot” (210). Beloved’s inability to expel vomit closely resembles Sethe’s inability to work through the loss of her child and the memory of Sweet Home. Denver’s inquiry into Beloved’s dark experience echoes Sethe’s statement about “where I was before I came here,” an application of Sethe’s language that indicates Denver’s early participation in the performance of dead children and past experiences. That Beloved responds to Denver’s question by saying that not only was it dark where she came from but also that it is “like this over here” positions Denver and Beloved in the same dark place. The performance of this dark place occurs once more when Denver loses Beloved outside in the dark cold house, a loss that is described as “ungovernable” and Denver considers to be just as magical as Beloved’s “magical appearance on a stump” (122-123). Denver describes Beloved’s disappearance as something worse than death,52 and when she finally decides to “let the dark swallow her like the minnows of light above,” Beloved returns (123). It is interesting to note how Denver manages to break away from her preoccupation with Beloved and the performance of darkness demonstrated in the cold house. One reason, the text suggests, is because Denver becomes hungry, which “[n]either Sethe nor Beloved knew or cared about” (239). Another reason involves the transition from the many games the three women used to play together to the many arguments that only included Sethe and Beloved. Beloved eventually consumes Sethe to point that it no longer matters whether or not Denver is included in the cryptic space. The primary reason for Denver’s break seems to come from her realization that “her mother could die and leave them both” (243). “Denver knew it was on her. She would have to leave the yard; step off the edge of the world, leave the two behind and go ask somebody for help” (243). Doing so, she gradually allows Lady Jones to help, then she accepts the help from other women in the form of food placed on the stump outside 124 (the same stump on which they
52 “Death is a skipped meal compared to this” (123). 81
originally find Beloved sitting). Finally she gets a job with the Bodwins during the nights, explaining to Janey Wagon (the other person working for them) that her mother is sick and that an equally sick cousin (Beloved) was “plagu[ing] her mother” and “bother[ing] them both” (255). This gradual distancing from Beloved resembles the gradual testing of reality during mourning and, as Beloved invites readers to include, traumatic memory. By talking to others about her mother, Denver learns that it could possibly be “Sethe’s condition” that is more interesting than the visitor in their house, a new perspective that allows Denver to once more be a non-participatory audience member to her mother’s life-threatening performance (255).53 Both Denver (who is in-between her mother’s haint and scar) and Paul D (whose own melancholia is disquieted by Sethe’s) function in ways that imagine melancholia as something that can be interruptive and interrupted. Having less physical and social power, it seems, Denver is mostly interrupted by the ghost and Beloved, subtly interrupting it back in inquiry-based (psychoanalytic) ways such as talking to them to figure out where they “learned to dance,” “why [Beloved] call[s] [her]self Beloved” or “what’s it like over there, where [Beloved] [was] before” (74-75).54 Similar to the way it interrupts Denver, the ghost especially interrupts Paul D’s advancement into Sethe and Denver’s house, serving as a “pool of pulsing red light” through which he must step (9). In a way that is less patient and much more forceful, however, Paul D interrupts this melancholic visitor by “bashing” back, fighting with the table and “wrecking everything, screaming back at the screaming house” without checking to see what it is that motivates the house to howl so much (18). Order is only temporarily restored from Paul D’s less- then-rational display (which analogously amounts to someone telling a melancholiac to “Stop it!”), and the condition first associated with the lost child returns to everyone still involved in the form of a grown woman. This second manifestation of melancholia is more complicated than the first, and now, instead of being the mouthpiece for the lost child, Beloved speaks also for the history of slavery (particularly the middle passage), much of which Sethe (let alone anyone that
53 “Janey,” the narrator explains, “seemed more interested in Sethe’s condition, and from what Denver told her it seemed the woman had lost her mind. That wasn’t the Sethe she remembered. This Sethe had lost her wits, finally, as Janey knew she would—trying to do it all alone with her nose in the air” (254). 54 Denver’s story often reminds me of the popular narrative about the invasive love interest (Paul D) in a single parent household who threatens to take the place of a dead or missing parent (Halle). This narrative evokes one of Freud’s melancholic examples about a bride who is abandoned at the alter. In a way that is less patriarchal, however, Beloved gestures towards and alters this substitute father convention by making the substitute a ghost and a grown woman (which takes the place of the lost child/sibling) in addition to a real person, Paul D (who takes the place of Halle). 82
is alive at this time) has never experienced. As it balances Denver’s and Paul D’s interactions with Beloved, the novel thus cautions readers of the potentially harmful consequences of confronting another’s melancholia. This cautionary element of the narrative, I believe, fully materializes when the women of the community attempt to force Beloved out in a way that is just as careless of Sethe’s desire as Paul D is when wrestling with the kitchen table. While vacillating back from the memory of slavery to a “dead daughter” who “had come back to fix [Sethe]” (255), the visitor at 124 begins to move others in the form of gossip. In the midst of this gossip is Ella, who is the one to first decide “rescue was in order” (256). Unlike the other women, who take a Christian opposition to the baby ghost by likening it to something evil (as Paul D does when first arriving to 124), Ella, a recovered trauma victim, reads Sethe’s visitor through the lens of her sexual abuse as a child. Referring to the father and son who had raped her as “the lowest yet,” Ella “understood Sethe’s rage in the shed twenty years ago, but not her reaction to it, which Ella thought was prideful, misdirected, and Sethe herself too complicated” (256). Ella, as the text explains, is a “practical woman” and evidence suggests that she does not believe in magic and melancholia. “Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn’t like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present. . . . The future [for Ella] was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out” (256). In many ways, Ella is the only person in Beloved who thinks about loss and traumatic memory as something that should be worked through. Such a working through is reflected in Ella’s practical belief in chewing or not chewing certain roots to calm an ailment (256). Understanding why Sethe would murder her daughter, Ella is aware of the secret desire driving a person’s actions, and by interpreting Sethe’s reaction to her murder as the prideful misdirection of a complicated woman, Ella also demonstrates an awareness of the simple truths people adopt when being evasive of this desire. Ella, in other words, understands what it means to be ambivalent. “Nothing,” Ella believes, “could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem” (256), a belief that defines ambivalence and melancholia as something caused and cured by the person affected by it. This is not to say that Ella (or I, for that matter) is arguing that the violence and losses related to melancholic vision are somehow caused by the affected person.55 Just like Sethe, Ella was violated against her will; the agency, Ella
55 On numerous occasions, Mandel is also careful to address how the concept of unspeakable trauma is often misconstrued as a challenge to the victim’s status of victimhood. “[E]voking language’s limits,” she explains, “is 83
seems to suggest here, comes from the way one processes this experience. Sethe, Ella seems to suggest, is capable of actively working through the loss of her child without associating this action to the violence that precipitated the judgment used when committing the infanticidal act. In other words, Ella is unhappy with the way Sethe avoids feeling anything out of fear that if she feels satisfied or happy (“Would it be it be all right to go ahead and feel?” [38]) she will be equally content with the violence that drove her to do what she did to her child. Despite her understanding of working through traumatic memory, Ella’s greatest function in the novel has to do with her inability to help Sethe manage her own traumatic memory. Rather than instructing Sethe on how to also understand (in a less simple way) her “rage in the shed twenty years ago” (256), Ella’s method of intervention makes the same mistake of treating Beloved as if she were a physical agent that abuses Sethe just as others have abused herself in the past. As part of the narrative’s warning about melancholic intervention, Ella’s confusion of Sethe’s condition for an abusive object divulges the counter-productiveness related to imposing one person’s method for recovery onto another. Despite her sturdy demeanor, that is, it may be the case that Ella’s “stomping out” management of trauma is just as vulnerable as Paul D’s tobacco tin management whenever interacting with another person’s melancholia. By representing Ella as one going along with the other women to “rescue” Sethe from the condition that is killing her, the novel also resists what could easily be a psychoanalytic solution to a condition that only Sethe can undo. Ella, that is, understands how unproductive and physically damaging it is to allow the past to take possession of the present. Such an understanding, however, which might treat Sethe as if she were clinically sad, fails just as much as the other women’s religious explanation of Sethe’s condition as evil. It’s “not evil,” as Denver would interject, “But not sad either” (13). Rather, Sethe’s condition is a loneliness that has consumed so much of her that it resembles a “pregnant woman, naked and smiling in the heat of the afternoon sun. Thunderblack and glistening [it] st[ands] on long straight legs, [its] belly big
often invested with an ethical injunction that prohibits ‘speaking the unspeakable’ with the argument that to do so is to perpetrate a violence that may further wrong the victim” (6). After placing violence into the category of the unspeakability, the logical mistake is to disvalue the violent act whenever attempting to disvalue the discourse of unspeakability. Mandel later cautions that conflating violent atrocities with the unspeakable “enables the masquerade of rhetorical performance (evoking the unspeakable) as ethical practice (protecting survivors, respecting the memory of the victims . . .),” a masquerade that often influences the belief that speaking the unspeakable “violate[s] the integrity of historical truth, . . . desecrate[s] the memory of the victims, [and] . . . perpetuate[s] the survivors’ pain. Don’t speak the unspeakable, for to do so may render you complicit in that very violence you so eagerly eschew” (209). 84
and tight. Vines of hair twist[] all over [its] head. Jesus. [Its] smile [is] dazzling” (261). Instead of obtaining (from this religious and psychoanalytic intervention) the tools to break down the ways of her desire, loss, and traumatic memory that consume her so much, Sethe reacts by “lower[ing] her eyes to look again at the loving faces before her” in a way that causes her to “see[] him” (261-262). The act of looking past these interruptive women (into the past) is all it takes to set Sethe and her melancholia in motion. With this motion, Sethe mistakes Edward Bodwin’s hat for Schoolteacher’s, grabs an ice pick and runs away from Beloved, causing Beloved to “disappear” and “explode” before everyone’s eyes (263). This disappearance, however, is not that different from Paul D’s banishment of the ghost from the same house, and it is interesting to note how Paul D is the first person to intimately reassess 124 as being “clear of [Beloved]” (263). Overall, Beloved punctuates melancholia with a willingness to evade any management that is more simple than the ways of desire, loss, and traumatic memory that carry it (as one would a mathematical remainder) into existence. It is most likely because of this slippery trait that Ella suspects Beloved “could be hiding in the trees waiting for another chance” (263), a suggestion that situates Beloved’s exodus within a discursive chain of magical thinking that continues to find new illusions for keeping dead people and violent experiences alive in the present. Just as the ghost comes back in the form of a grown woman, so this ending suggests that Beloved can return in a form that is more complicated and difficult to “bash” or “stomp out.” That Beloved “could be hiding in the trees waiting for another chance” suggests that she has been pushed by a kind of forceful rehabilitation into the same forest that springs up, “trackless and quiet,” between Sethe and Paul D (165). Sethe’s only hope, it seems, is to be able to rock back on her loss and violent experience while she lies in bed lamenting her “best thing” that left her (272). The “best thing” to which she refers is somewhat ambiguous, for it could be that this best thing is her baby girl whom she is finally starting to mourn in ways that do more to address her libidinal investment. Sethe’s best thing, however, could also be her fantasy, Beloved, who, having recently been expelled from the front door of the crypt, is now waiting in the trees. Failing to fully “pass on” and reclaim the part of herself that that she invested in beloved objects, Sethe may once more be in the position to pluck these objects from the forest, merely by renovating the crypt so that the objects of fantasy can once more seem realistic. Given the
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expandable nature of her crypt, Beloved teaches us that even a forest is not too large for a melancholiac to swallow.
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CHAPTER THREE
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Melancholic Hymnals
When we got to the grave and they lowered the empty coffin, you let out a noise like an animal. I had never heard anything like it. You were a wounded animal. The noise is still in my ears. It was what I had spent forty years looking for, what I wanted my life and life story to be. Your mother took you to the side and held you. They shoveled dirt into your father’s grave. Onto my son’s empty coffin. There was nothing there.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Historical losses call for mourning—and possibly for critique and transformative sociopolitical practice. When absence, approximated to loss, becomes the object of mourning, the mourning may (perhaps must) become impossible and turn continually back into endless melancholy.
DOMINICK LACAPRA, Writing History, Writing Trauma
In earlier chapters I have questioned why trauma narratives like Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods or Toni Morrison’s Beloved are so inclined to entangle unrepresentable experiences of combat and slavery with ungrievable losses involving a mismanagement of desire. It seems possible, I suggested in chapter one, to tell a story about John Wade’s memory of his experience in Vietnam without returning frequently to his abusive father, whom Wade magically resurrects. And, with perhaps a little more difficulty, it also seems achievable to tell the story about Sethe and Paul D’s memory of Sweet Home without Sethe’s ambivalent loss returning as a ghost and a grown woman in the front yard. In their entangled form, I argued, these narratives generate kinds of melancholia by which trauma and impossible mourning incite each other, and also by which characters entomb and collectively share melancholia, as they would physical spaces. I now turn to a similar, yet equally distinctive, example of melancholia, this time coming from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005). Much like the works I analyzed earlier, Foer’s novels generate melancholia by entangling the impossible task of historical representation with that of impossible mourning stemming from ambivalence. The historical events involved in these novels include the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, and 9/11. Foer makes it clear that it is impossible to ever represent such traumatic events as his characters constantly search for and fail to find objects, people, and places that might somehow shed light on the past. All searches terminate in some
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form of uncertainty by which characters are unable to proclaim, translate, or see their discoveries—an uncertainty that also doubles as an empathic performance of the historical referent. The characters equally extend these performances to actual losses that, once animate, are nearly impossible to mourn. From this double animation of history and loss, these characters, in the words of Dominick LaCapra, “face[] the impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning, and the interminable aporia in which any process of working through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed or prematurely aborted” (46). After situating the ambivalent object of mourning at the same level as the inaccessible referent in language, these novels together reveal a traumatic performance of melancholia that begins with a misuse of the frameworks of desire and historical representation. By means of this misappropriation, Foer ultimately suspends historical losses within a logic of empty caskets, darkness, performance, and mistranslation, while regarding history as a lost possession in need of mourning.
GOING AFTER AUGUSTINE As critics have been quick to point out, Everything is Illuminated takes several cues from preceding narratives and theories about postmodernism and trauma.56 As a postmodern text, Everything represents the trauma of the Jewish Holocaust by making very clear to the reader that such representation can never be accomplished. Much like Tim O’Brien’s depiction of Vietnam in Going after Cacciato, Everything depicts the Holocaust as a never-ending search. In place of Cacciato (the young, foolishly-wise soldier who one day goes AWOL) Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything’s protagonist, goes after a Russian woman named Augustine, who he thinks saved his Jewish grandfather from the Nazis. Everything represents the unrepresentable Holocaust by deconstructing the theoretical principles of genealogy, transplanting the search for origins from a model dealing with time to that concerned mostly with space. Treating it as a spatial
56 In “Foer’s Everything is Illuminated” (2007), Robert Kohn frequently draws connections between Foer’s project and some of the agendas of postmodernism as described by Bryan McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction. In “Philomela Revisited: Traumatic Iconicity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (2007), Philippe Codde also situates Foer at the intersection of postmodernism and trauma by connecting Foer’s traumatic themes with “the failure and inaptness of language for historical reconstruction” (244). See also Francisco Collado- Rodriguez’s “Ethics in the Second Degree: Trauma and Dual Narratives in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated” (2008) in which the author examines Foer’s ability to illuminate a kind of ethics and traumatic immediacy by using dual narratives and combining realism, modernism, and postmodernism. 88
phenomenon, Everything folds the experience of the Holocaust onto the present day (the late 1990’s) and 1790’s Russia, when an unnamed town developed into Trachimbrod.57 The narrative’s primary strategy for making these pasts bump into the present (which resembles the way Beloved permits others to bump into Sethe’s memory) is its consideration of violent experiences as unrepresentable, unspeakable, and unimaginable. For the characters involved, the traumatic past is “not a thing you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining” (188). While being well aware of more indirect representations of these experiences, Everything shares a postmodern endeavor to gesture towards an unobtainable history that is more real, raw and, as its title suggests, illuminated than the standard linguistic narrative would ever support. The novel illuminates by dwelling on the misgivings it has about what to put into such a narrative.58 By combining multiple narrators with an unwavering emphasis on the writing and translation of historical trauma, Everything attempts to make the past just as immediate as the present, a narrative project that performs the Holocaust rather than pointing back towards it. Key to the way the novel performs the Holocaust is the way Foer promptly distances himself from his own creation.59 Tim O’Brien, as witnessed earlier, creates a similar distancing by frequently commenting on and questioning the “facts” about his own novel, usually within footnotes or in the form of multiple scenarios depicting what may or may not happen to his own characters. Foer’s device for this authorial distancing resembles a translation feedback loop by which the past is re-presented over and over to the point of making the reader aware of reality’s distortion within its own representational medium. Foer loses himself and his position as a subject/author in this distortion by dividing the novel up into 34 chapters, 18 of which are presumably narrated by Foer about the history of his ancestors in the Russian town, Trachimbrod. The other 16 chapters are supposedly narrated by Alex Perchov, Foer’s Russian translator and tour guide who aids him as he conducts research for the first 15 chapters. Seven of these 15 chapters are in the form of letters to Foer, in which Alex reflects on other letters from Foer (which are excluded from the novel) and what seems to be Foer’s earlier drafts of the first 18 chapters that he (Foer) mails to Alex during his own writing process. Eight of the remaining
57 “In this novel,” Kohn points out, “the twenty-first and eighteenth centuries become what McHale calls ‘Worlds in Collision’ with their ‘intrusion into’ the twentieth [59,60]” (246). 58 This moment of epistemological hesitation is what some postmodern theorists have called aporia. 59 This distancing, as Fredric Jameson would likely point out, contributes to the postmodern consideration of novels as authorless and subject-less texts as opposed to works of fiction with a more centered meaning (Postmodernism 77). 89
Alex chapters journalistically narrate Alex’s life in Russia and his encounter with Foer. The English in these 15 chapters is rudimentary and due to Alex’s overuse of a thesaurus supplied to him by Foer, much of Alex’s writing is difficult to read. Using unfamiliar and oftentimes inappropriate words from this thesaurus, Alex dedoxifies, as Linda Hutcheon might suggest (following Roland Barthes), what might otherwise seem like familiar and/or truthful historical events.60 The 34th (and final) chapter adds another layer of translation. It consists of a suicide note from Alex’s grandfather to Foer, which has been translated into English by Alex. Foer continues to compromise his position as author by including translated and oftentimes negative descriptions of himself. In several places, for example, Alex refers to Foer as “an ingenious Jew,” a person with “low-grade brains,” “half-witted,” “a very spoiled Jew,” “an American Writer,” or simply “the Jew” (3, 6-7, 24, 57-58). By making his own characters critical of himself, Foer manufactures comedy, irony, and epistemological uncertainty. At one point, for example, Alex comments that he thought “Jewish people were having shit between their brains” until he meets Foer, forcing readers to judge the authenticity of what Foer is ever telling them (3). Much like the ancient and aporiatic Greek statement by which a Cretan declares, “All Cretans are liars,” Everything removes its Jewish author and its representation of the Holocaust from the barrier of its own linguistic discourse by similarly suggesting (with tongue firmly in cheek) that all Jewish people are having shit between their brains. Foer makes a similar narrative maneuver later on when suggesting that he (as a character) is “still very young” and “learning how to write” (69)—a statement that, because Foer is both writer and protagonist, encourages readers to do away with the categories of developed and undeveloped writing along with the writer/ reader and fiction/ non-fiction binaries attacked earlier on.61 Within these spaces of logical uncertainty, translation, and mistranslation, Foer simultaneously makes the Holocaust
60Deleuze and Guattari would likely call this a deterritorialization. Adding also to this defamiliarization of Foer’s search for origins is Perchov’s self-confessed “not-truths” regarding his extravagant lifestyle—lies that he “manufacture[s] . . . because it makes [him] feel like a premium person” and because they make his life conform more to the lifestyle his abusive father expects him to live (144, 215). “With writing,” Alex explains, “we have second chances,” a comment that easily tempts the reader to reflect on the second (or third or fourth) chances that historians take when narrating traumatic past events (144). Also adding to things being lost in translation is the way Alex speaks Russian to his grandfather (who only speaks Russian) and the way he intentionally mistranslates his grandfather’s negative comments towards Foer so as not to upset their benefactor. For example, Alex translates “I hate the Jew in the backseat of this car that I hate . . .” and “The Jew must be silenced” as “the trip will perhaps be longer than we are desiring (57-58). 61 In the 2005 movie version of Everything is Illuminated, directed by Liev Schreiber, the character, Foer, completely rejects the label of writer, preferring instead to be considered only as a collector. The entire book, the film suggests in its conclusion, is written by Alex, which perhaps is the only way to negotiate the absence of reading and writing within the filmic medium. 90
subjective (for how can anything be objective if all we can obtain are self-evident translations?) and objective (for how can everything be subjective if we can still talk about real referents that have been mistranslated?). The end result is a depiction of the Holocaust as a failed (but somehow successful) search for Augustine and the town, Trachimbrod, in which she supposedly resides. Instead of finding the woman who helped save Foer’s grandfather from extermination, Foer and his Ukrainian guides end up finding Lusta. At first, Alex determines Lusta to be Augustine (and therefore the end of their search) after showing her a picture of Augustine with Foer’s grandfather and repeatedly asking her if she has “ever witnessed anyone in the photograph,” to which Lusta frequently says “No,” but eventually answers with an affirmative “You are here. I am it” (118). The “it,” to which Lusta refers, is Trachimbrod, and Alex comments that he feels particularly cruel to continue to ask Lusta about the picture after she clearly communicates her unfamiliarity with its content: “. . . I felt like an awful person, but I was certain that I was performing the right thing” (118). It is only by means of such a performance, the novel seems to dispute, that a recollection of an event as horrible as the Holocaust (much like the impossible search for Augustine) can ever be successful.62 Alex’s performative success, however, is also short-lived. Much like the traumatic flashbacks that dissolve as soon as sufferers attempt to articulate them using language, Alex’s discovery of Augustine loses some of its potency as soon as he and the other characters begin interrogating “Augustine” further inside her house. Once inside, the three searchers learn that Augustine is really Lusta, that “[t]here is no Trachimbrod anymore,” and that “everything that still exists from Trachimbrod is in [her] house” (154). Trachimbrod, it seems, existed five kilometers away before it was completely destroyed by the Nazis. Lusta is one of the few survivors. While she has no recollection of Augustine, she does recall Foer’s grandfather, Safran (posing in the picture next to Augustine), in addition to Grandfather’s friend, Hershel. Lusta has crammed these memories, and everything else connected to Trachimbrod, into hundreds of boxes that overwhelm the insides of her living space. Alex’s performative discovery of the past thus
62 In “‘You Who Never was There’: Slavery and the New Historicism, Deconstruction and the Holocaust” (1996), Walter Benn Michaels explains that trauma victims can testify their past experiences only by means of the performative utterance (i.e. speech act). “The essence of the performative,” Michaels explains, “is . . . its irreducibility to ‘mere sense,’ and it is precisely this irreducibility that makes it appropriate as a technology for what Lanzmann calls the ‘transmission’. . . rather then the representation of the Holocaust” (11). In the case of the above scene with Alex and Lusta, the narrative also transmits the encounter with Augustine and Trachimbrod rather than merely situating them as the end result of a search. 91
reifies into a house full of signifiers that merely gesture toward a past, bringing the performance to an intermission. As a model for traumatic recovery, Everything suggests that people can gain access to traumatic and historic referents only when suspending them in a series of short-lived performances. Although the pervious performance might stay alive in the form of Alex’s active translation of Lusta’s Russian, most of the performance’s earlier magic seems to dissipate. This dissipation gives way to a new performance of traumatic history that the searchers commence by slowly driving the five kilometers to the site of Trachimbrod—a drive that requires them to follow Lusta, who is on foot because cars go with “too much speed” (181). Despite it being close to dusk at the beginning of the trip, the searchers “persevere[] to pursue [Lusta] . . . through many fields and into many forests . . . over roads made of rock, and also over dirt, and also over grass . . . past three stairs, which were very broken and appeared to have once introduced houses” until it becomes so dark that it is “almost impossible to witness her” (183). It is at this point of being impossible to see Lusta, that they get out of the car and Alex’s grandfather requests that Lusta describe (as a witness) what had happened to Trachimbrod when she was here. Instead of a direct act of testimony, Alex translates Lusta’s remembered history to Foer in a way that makes the traumatic story partly Alex’s: “You cannot know how it felt to have to hear these things and then repeat them, because when I repeated them, I felt like I was making them new again” (185). With the act of translation and repetition, much as when Alex earlier repeats over and over his inquiry regarding the picture, Everything once more presents the traumatic past as something that is alive, not just to Lusta and the translator, but also to the reader who, being denied a stable binary distinction between writer and reader, is obliged to participate in the same traumatic performance. Traumatic memory, Everything reiterates with this scene, is accessible and/or understandable only after searching for it terminates in darkness and darkness is then translated to Foer by a person unaccustomed to his native tongue. Everything is Illuminated thus treats trauma and history as subjects to which one can only do proper justice by showing how they persist in a kind of darkness that makes them (like a missing referent) impossible to fully signify or represent. Paradoxically, the lack of vision is key to the way the novel confirms history’s visual intensity, a representative strategy that the novel reinforces by undoing Foer’s position of authorial agency, making him just as much a part of the text as the novel’s characters and the Jewish Holocaust. The novel presumably carries out this
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philosophy of blind illumination primarily with the interest of paying respect to victims of the Holocaust that might otherwise become lost (and vulnerable) to some form of linguistic representation.63
FALLING IN LOVE WITH LOSS In addition to illuminating traumatic memory with darkness while breaking down the distinction between author and reader, Everything is Illuminated engages the topics of loss and mourning in scenes involving Alex’s grandfather and Yankel D. One of Grandfather’s key functions in the novel is driving Alex and Foer as they search for Augustine. From the start, Alex describes Grandfather as “very melancholy,” “blind,” and “deranged,” because his wife, Anna, died of brain cancer two years before their encounter with Foer (4-5, 31). Grandfather frequently cries throughout the story, and several times he awakens from sporadic naps by vocalizing the name “Anna” (5, 25, 34, 53, 64, 102, 143-45). While blind from his melancholy, Grandfather’s blindness is of a special nature, which requires him to have, in Alex’s words, “a Seeing Eye bitch . . . for people who pine for the negative of loneliness” (5). To accommodate Grandfather’s melancholic form of blindness, Alex explains that the “Seeing Eye bitch,” named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, necessarily originates from “the home for forgetful dogs . . . and is also mentally deranged” (5). Because Grandfather insists on bringing the dog “to help me see the road,” Alex and his father try to maintain a professional appearance by dressing the dog in a shirt that says “OFFICIOUS SEEING-EYE BITCH OF HERITAGE TOURING” (29). Thus the novel adds more layers to its ongoing trope of vision, demonstrating here how a blind and lonely man escorts Foer’s search for history (Augustine and her hometown, Trachimbrod) with the aid of a forgetful and mentally deranged dog. To top off this vision metaphor, Foer turns out to be “afraid” of Sammy Davis Junior, Junior because of a previous incident resulting in a dog bite, and also because his “mother is afraid of dogs” (35). Trauma, for Foer, now also resembles an inheritance and a scar, both of which have the power to transform blindness into a tool for locating earlier traumatic experiences. By itself, Grandfather’s blindness and loneliness resulting from a lost spouse does not purport a psychological orientation that is drastically different from the other survivors of trauma
63 As mentioned earlier, Naomi Mandel suggests that this practice of deconstructing the author and making traumatic histories unspeakable is most likely a form of “ethical practice [that endeavors to] protect[] survivors [and] respect[] the memory of victims” (209). 93
in the novel. The death of a spouse is certainly a horrific experience that can, like any other trauma, haunt its victim later in life. What makes Grandfather’s melancholy related to Anna peculiar, however, is that the novel slowly reveals that Grandfather is also depressed about his perceived agency in the murder of his Jewish friend, Hershel, by the Nazis—a depression that eventually leads to Grandfather’s suicide. The novel, in other words, provides Grandfather’s Holocaust-related trauma with the signifier of an actual person; even if his dreams are forever marred by this traumatic past, “Anna” is the name he utters whenever he wakes up. Besides functioning as another effort to distance (and therefore illuminate) the Holocaust from authorial and linguistic interference, the employment of spousal mourning as a trope for traumatic unrest also announces a distinction between memory related to mourning and that related to violent histories. In one of the letters to Foer, for example, Alex remarks that at least one of the connections between Grandfather’s troubled sleep and Anna is one that Foer “commanded” Alex to make (53)—one that was missing from an earlier draft. 64 That Foer commands Alex to characterize what Lusta calls unimaginable (188) within the framework of mourning suggests that mourning is more agreeable to linguistic representation than trauma, which, as I already noted, can only be performed. Why, I think we should ask, does Foer not tell Alex to make Grandfather’s utterance “Hershel,” which would bear a closer resemblance to the traumatic memory affecting Grandfather the most? It is almost as if the novel utilizes the mourning trope to reinforce its argument that trauma (unlike mourning and similar to melancholia) is unnatural, unmanageable, and unexplainable. Everything is Illuminated more prominently couples these conventions of trauma and mourning in the Foer sections about the beginning of a Russian town called Trachimbrod and the genealogical origins of his own family. Resembling the Alex chapters that submerge all acts of searching, authorial intention, and representation within the murky waters of uncertainty, the facts presented in these Trachimbrod chapters are intentionally far from clear. Foer’s great-great- great-great-great-grandmother, Brod, for example, originates at the beginning of the novel as the newborn and sole survivor of the sinking of Trachim B’s double-axle wagon in the Brod River. The townspeople can only speculate as to how the wagon broke apart and sank; it “either did or did not pin [the baby’s parents Trachim B and his pregnant wife] against the bottom of the Brod
64Alex writes to Foer, “And after the sentence ‘ “Oh,” Grandfather said, and I perceived that he was still departing from a dream,’ I added, as you commanded, ‘About Grandmother?’” (53). Because of Alex’s fondness of thesauri, it is likely that this is merely a recommendation rather than a command. 94
river” (8), and the key witness to the event is a madman named Sofiowka. Sofiowka is known to tie pieces of string all over his naked body, the first to “remember something terribly important,” the next to remember to look at the first, and so on, until he remembers only the string (15). The key witness and source of all other memories of the wagon accident is thus mad and forgetful. “Is this,” the narrator asks, “someone to trust for a story” (15)? Others in the town function as secondary witnesses to the event; they did not see the wagon go under, but they arrived to the scene shortly after. While they are not “crazy,” like Sofiowka, the townspeople are riddled with grief, unable to let things go, and equally unable to settle on the reality of past and present events. Shloim W, for example, sells antiques but must “survive[] off charity, unable to part with any of his candelabras, figurines, or hourglasses since his wife’s untimely death” (10). The grieving Shanda T continuously mourns the loss of a deceased philosopher Pinchas T (11, 75). The town’s physician, Menasha, certifies the death of Trachim B by “remov[ing] several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees . . . [to] fall with the leaves that September . . . [and] with the trees generations later” (12). And the Well-Regarded Rabbi proclaims that they proclaim Trachim D’s death, but then suggests that the town may never “HAVE TO SETTLE THE MATTER AT ALL” (13). “WHAT IF,” the Rabbi asks, “WE NEVER FILL OUT A DEATH CERTIFICATE? WHAT IF WE GIVE THE BODY A PROPER BURIAL, BURN ANYTHING THAT WASHES ASHORE, AND ALLOW THE LIFE TO GO ON IN THE FACE OF THIS DEATH?” (13). The town is forever uncertain: “The less a citizen knew, the more adamantly he or she argued. There was nothing new to this” (12). A deathly event such as the wagon accident is no exception to this behavior. Following the chaos and confusion about how to remember this deathly incident, the people from the town (soon to be named Trachimbrod, after the probably deceased Trachim and the river that may have taken his life) decide to remember the fateful date in the form of an annual performance-based festival called Trachimday. Each Trachimday consists of a parade, special treats, costumes that resemble the key witnesses of the event, and a diving competition in the Brod for bags full of earth and one with gold. The singular bag full of gold resembles Trachim D’s body which the town, in reality, never managed to find. Because the aquatic search for the body occupied such a large portion of the “original” event, the townspeople integrate it into the celebration, thus resurrecting Trachim B and the traumatic event once a year. The
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memorial for the speculated event reads: “THIS PLAQUE MARKS THE SPOT (OR A SPOT CLOSE TO THE SPOT) WHERE THE WAGON OF ONE TRACHIM B (WE THINK) WENT IN. Shtetl Proclamation, 1791” (268). The memory of the wagon accident is always uncertain but is, nevertheless, just as important (if not more) than the authenticity of the memorial. “It is most important that we remember,” the character Didl S explains at one point to the congregation of a religious division of the town called the Slouchers. “The what,” he maintains after being questioned about the referent of such a memory, “. . . is not so important, but that we should remember. It is the act of remembering, the process of remembrance, the recognition of our past . . . Memories are small prayers to God . . .” (36, emphasis original). After trailing off into a kind of meditation on memory, Didl S eventually forgets the point he is trying to make about memory, as if memory is something that should only be performed (like a prayer) and never analyzed too closely. The accuracy of the performance’s contents is thus left mostly to faith. After retrieving the baby from the wreckage, the Well-Regarded Rabbi finally announces that he will make a decision regarding who should have custody of the child. This decision prompts citizens to write him so many convincing notes petitioning their suitability as parents that the rabbi decides to make his decision by not making a decision: “THE BEST DECISION,” he proclaims, IS NO DECISION,” resulting in his placement of all the notes around the child’s crib, making the child’s guardian “the author of the first note [the infant] grabbed for” (21). Resembling Foer’s own writing style, the rabbi thus undermines the authorship of both the notes and his own decision by disregarding the linguistic content of these notes, leaving the decision to a child who is incapable of understanding her role as decision maker. Perhaps most ironic about this indecision-making process is that the rabbi, after being unable to stand the growing stench of feces from the synagogue’s cellar, eventually chooses a note for the indecisive child, hastily declaring “IT APPEARS THAT THE BABY HAS CHOSEN YANKEL AS HER FATHER!” (22) The novel, as I read this, undermines its own attempt at imagining authorless decisions by driving the decision of the child’s parents with an intense biological and psychological discomfort towards the smell of shit. Yankel D is very instrumental in maintaining this narrative turn from actions involving indecisive representation to those driven by the psychological management of desire and distaste. Just as Everything entangles Alex’s Grandfather’s traumatic sacrifice of Hershel to the Nazis with his inability to mourn the loss of his wife, Anna, so too does it entangle the history of a
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town that will later be demolished by Nazis with Yankel D’s complicated loss of his wife. Also referred to as the disgraced usurer, Yankel D randomly adopts Brod as if she were an interruption to his fixation on a series of losses: “Yankel had lost two babies, one to fever and the other to the industrial flour mill, which had taken a shtetl member’s life every year since it first opened. He had also lost a wife, not to death but to another man” (44). The other man “was called in to help mediate the messy proceedings of Yankel’s shameful trial,” a trial that resulted from “unfit practice[s]” as the town usurer and that led to him losing his usurer’s license and his good name (46). The narrator of this chapter, entitled “Falling in Love,” explains in great detail how Yankel attempts to cope not just with his lost career but also with the loss of his wife. Unlike Anna, Yankel’s wife does not die; rather she leaves him in a fashion that resembles the jilted betrothed girl in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia.”65 This makes Yankel’s loss “a more ideal kind. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love (e.g. in the case of a betrothed girl who has been jilted)” (“Mourning” 40). As a melancholiac, Yankel knows whom he has lost but not what it is in the loss he has desired in the first place, which can be supported when he later makes up positive and untruthful stories to tell Brod regarding his wife who, instead of leaving him, died “painless, in childbirth” a story that makes painless the pain Yankel feels regarding his abandonment (48). Prior to the arrival of Brod, Yankel, then named Safran, attempts to forgive his wife, especially for embarrassing him by announcing her departure in a note that she places on the welcome mat for the whole town to read: “He could have hated her for leaving it there in plain sight, and he could have hated her for the plainness of it, a message without adornment . . . But his wife was his first and only love, and it was the nature of those from the tiny shtetl to forgive their first and only loves, so he forced himself to understand, or pretend to understand” (44). It is by pretending to understand his loss out of respect for the collective fabric of his community that Yankel, like the melancholiac, is unable to individually mourn the loss of someone (a cruel and hurtful wife) who does not match up to the ideal wife he has in mind. Yankel’s false pretense of mourning, which prevents him from ever accounting for the nature of his loss and making adjustments to his psychic economy of desire, is not that different from the way John Wade
65 This is a wonderful reversal of Freud’s melancholic example that several scholars of melancholia have previously criticized for its sexist implications. See for example Juliana Schiesari’s The Gendering of Melancholia where she points out that, unlike the Hamlet example that Freud uses for the male melancholiac, his examples of women melancholiacs, such as the deserted bride, are only “mere types,” and not subjects (10-11). 97
makes up stories regarding a loving father. This is also similar to the way Sethe confuses her loss with the public perception of murder and the trauma of Sweet Home. In a way, all three of these characters are failed usurers who, having misplaced or mismanaged certain psychic investments, go through life maintaining a book of false numbers. Such maintenance becomes so tasking for these characters that it leaves little room for them to make and record new investments. Knowing whom he has lost (a wife) but not what it is he has lost in her, Yankel exhibits a state of ambivalence and self-destruction: I don’t know what to do, he thought. I should probably kill myself. He couldn’t bear to live, but he couldn’t bear to die. He couldn’t bear the thought of her making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn’t bear to keep it, but he couldn’t bear to destroy it . . . So he tried to lose it . . . But it was always there . . . But like his life, he couldn’t for the life of him lose the note. It kept returning to him. It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn . . . . (45, emphasis original) Instead of addressing the ambivalence he has towards his wife, Yankel tries to get rid of the note, which to him represents the only counter narrative to his ideal wife. Trying to lose the note, however, Yankel only maintains his state of ambivalence, which continues to prevent him from ever mourning what he cannot address. Yankel also seems to think of the note in terms of a linguistic signifier that gestures not towards a condition of desire but towards an unobtainable referent. As an unobtainable referent, his wife is unmournable. Rather than mourn his loss, Yankel performs her back to life in the form of a hymn, which suspends reality in words and notes while maintaining all his possessions and losses in a state of presence and absence. When Yankel does not manage the desire associated with his loss, he turns his libido inwards, swallowing the loss so that, as witnessed, it becomes “like a part of him.” 66 Once this happens, “[h]e change[s] his name [from Safran] to Yankel, the name of the bureaucrat who ran away with his wife, and ask[s] that no one ever call him Safran again” (47). Yankel thus preserves his lost wife by discarding his name and becoming the person responsible (in his mind) for making his wife leave him. This form of self-annihilation temporarily subsides “when the
66 Abraham and Torok have referred to this kind of inward turn as an incorporation by which the victim encrypts his loss and everything associated with this loss. 98
black-hatted men gave him the baby” to make him “fe[el] that he too was only a baby, with a chance to live without shame, without need of consolation for a life lived wrong, a chance to be again innocent, simply and impossibly happy” (47). Such a rebirth or interruption in the midst of Yankel’s melancholia resembles what Julia Kristeva has called (regarding pregnancy and motherhood during a state of melancholia) “parenthesis within the depression, a new negation of that impossible loss” (91). The entrance of Brod into Yankel’s life, in other words, serves also as an interruption to melancholia. Yankel’s happiness and rebirth is only temporary, however, and he soon incorporates within his bond to Brod the complicated loss of his wife. “It was inevitable,” the narrator states after Yankel begins to make up stories about his ideal wife for Brod: Yankel fell in love with his never-wife. He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too real chest, making his widower’s remembrances that much more convincing and his pain that much more real. He felt that he had lost her. He had lost her. At night he would reread the letters that she had never written him. (48-49) Much like John Wade, who loves a never-dad that supports him instead of berating him, Yankel falls in love with a fantastic never-wife. Being unable to mourn this never-wife as a legitimate investment, Yankel is forced to return once more to his real wife’s departure note, which Brod eventually finds and places at his bedside table. Yankel’s made up never-wife stories “almost worked. He had repeated the details so many times that it was nearly impossible to distinguish them from the facts. But the real note kept returning to him, and that, he was sure, was what kept him from the most simple and impossible thing: happiness” (49). Yankel the usurer blames his unhappiness on a note that, like the linguistic signifier, stands as the only remainder of an ambivalent relationship that he is never willing or able to sort through. For Yankel, discarding the note in favor of a fantasy wife is just as good as making economic distinctions between his ideal investments and a wife who failed to return interest. In the end, however, Yankel’s fantasy keeps faltering whenever the note returns.
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FLIPPING THE DEAD TO LIFE Everything is Illuminated is not Foer’s only attempt at performing traumatic history, nor is it the only time Foer interweaves ambivalence-related melancholia with trauma. As critics have pointed out, Foer’s second book, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, participates in the analytic frameworks of both trauma and mourning, this time regarding the 1945 bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima and the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.67 Much like the first novel, Extremely Loud narrates a search, the object of which is “inaccessible” (Codde 242). Just as Foer searches for Augustine and Trachimbrod, Oskar Schell, the precocious child protagonist of the second novel, searches for a lock that goes to a key he finds in an envelope, which is inside a vase stashed in his father’s closet. As a desperate attempt to find out how his father, Thomas Jr., died in one of the World Trade Center Towers two years ago, Oskar searches New York City for everyone with the last name “Black,” which is all that is written on the envelope containing the key. During the search, Oskar makes several new friends with the last name Black. He also discovers his estranged and similarly traumatized grandfather in his grandmother’s spare bedroom. His grandfather, Thomas Sr., abandoned his wife and then unborn son after being unable to cope with the bombings of Dresden, which claimed the life of his lover, interestingly named Anna, and unborn son. Anna, we are told is the sister of Oskar’s grandmother, whom Thomas Sr. marries years after the Dresden attack. Just as Foer (the protagonist from the first novel) never finds what he originally sets out to find, Oskar never finds a use for the key after the lock’s owner, whom he does manage to find, turns out to be a man also searching for the key. This man wants the key because it goes to his deceased father’s safety deposit box. Oskar never learns what is in the safety deposit box (it becomes unimportant) and, as it turns out, his father most likely never knew that the key was in this vase, which he had purchased at an estate sale as an anniversary gift shortly before his death. Nevertheless, Oskar does discover several traces of his father that seem to give him the audacity to finally dig up his father’s casket with his newly discovered grandfather to reveal his father’s absence and to prove, once and for all, “that he’s dead” (Foer 321).
67 See for example Philippe Codde’s “Philomela Revisited: Traumatic Iconicity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (2007), Sien Uytterschout and Kristiann Versluys’ “Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (2008), and Matthew Mullins’ “Boroughs and Neighbors: Traumatic Solidarity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (2009). 100
Extremely Loud, as Philippe Codde argues, articulates the inaccessibility of traumatic memory with narrative devices such as ellipses, “total blackness,” blank pages, and characters who can only speak using note cards. Such an exploitation of the inadequacy of language helps us to understand that “the aporia at the heart of the traumatic experience can, indeed, only be filled with words to ease the pain . . . but the words can never really capture or represent the traumatic past” (Codde 245-246). Similar to his first novel, Foer imagines the traumatizing past as a persevering presence that people may only perform and never articulate using conventional language. Even the title of the second novel gestures back to the first, replacing the impossible possibility of traumatic illumination with the paradoxical noise and nearness of a silent and distant past. To elaborate further on Extremely Loud’s representation of trauma, Matthew Mullins argues that the failure of language prevents certain characters from “talk[ing] truthfully and accurately about past traumatic events” (316). Oskar’s grandfather, Thomas Sr., for example, begins to lose his spoken words one by one to the point of only using (and palimpsestically reusing) written notes and tattoos to communicate. Thomas Sr. even loses the word “loss,” a loss from which the working through of trauma becomes impossible because, as Dominick LaCapra has theorized, it is now indistinguishable from absence (Mullins 316-17). Mullins does not elaborate on this point as it relates to LaCapra, but it is worth noting how working through, for LaCapra, is tantamount to mourning, and in opposition to acting out, which he likens to melancholia (LaCapra 65).68 It is whenever one conflates absence with loss that “mourning may, (perhaps must) become impossible and turn continually back into endless melancholia” (LaCapra 68). Thus, Thomas Sr. becomes melancholic by treating a lost object (which was present) as if it were nothing more than a lost word (which denotes an absence). Thomas Sr. more prominently conflates absence and loss during his arrival in the New York airport shortly after the attacks on 9/11. After an airport worker asks Thomas the purpose of his visit, he replies by writing on a card “‘To mourn,’ and then, ‘To mourn try to live’” (268). Living, here, becomes a form of mourning under erasure. Unlike Mullins, Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys have more patiently applied LaCapra’s theory of acting out and working through to Foer’s Extremely Loud, ultimately
68 In “Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (2008) Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys more elaborately engage Extremely Loud with LaCapra’s theory of absence, loss, mourning, and melancholia. 101
suggesting that the novel displays instances of mourning and melancholia, while arguing that Oskar conclusively works through his trauma after his drawn-out search. To make this argument, they map out two categories of traumatic sufferers. The first category suggests that, like grievers in the earlier states of mourning, Oskar Shell and his grandmother “adhere to the ‘mixture’ of acting out and working through” (219). While they are both “burdened with survivor guilt,” they both gradually begin to participate in social networks that allow them to share and analyze their grief-driven anxiety instead of allowing it to overwhelm them completely (225, 234). In terms of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” Oskar and his grandmother, as Uytterschout and Versluys are reading them, increasingly test their traumatic memories with the present realities around them. Thomas Sr., on the other hand, is unable to test reality in this way and, because of his failure to distinguish between traumatic pasts and the present, he continues to go through life seeing Dresden in the space of New York City and Anna in the body of his wife. By classifying Thomas Sr. as melancholic, Uytterschout and Versluys explain that his loss of all words, including the word “Loss,” is a result of his fear that “using language suggests at least some form of coming to terms or comprehension” with his traumatic past (222). Without language, Thomas Sr. can only “act out” his past without ever really knowing what kind of production he is performing in. There is more to be said about how Foer’s conflation of working through and acting out relates to his admixture of traumatic representation and the mismanagement of desire in melancholia. As I observed above, Everything is Illuminated accompanies the traumatic memory of the Holocaust with Yankel D.’s ambivalent and melancholic attitude toward his lost wife. In a similar manner, Extremely Loud partners the memories of the Dresden and Twin Tower attacks with stories about the complicated losses of partners, unborn children, and fathers. Even if Thomas Sr.’s loss of language does precipitate his inability to distinguish between the past and present, a melancholic phenomenon that Mullins derives from the conflation of absence and loss, why also include in such a narrative Thomas’ inability to mourn the loss of Anna? Why, to ask a more precise question, include within a narrative about the inability to articulate 9/11 or the bombing of Dresden a boy like Oskar Schell who, like Freud’s classic melancholiac, always has “heavy boots” (35,142), is unhappy when others around him attempt to mourn too quickly (35),69
69 “What [Oskar] really wanted to tell [his mother’s new friend] was ‘You’re not my dad, and you never will be’” (3). Shortly after this, Oscar resists the urge to tell his mother that “she shouldn’t be playing Scrabble yet” (35). This 102
plays the part of Yorick (a dead person) in the school production of Hamlet (142), believes that “Nothing is beautiful and true” after the loss of his father,70 desires to stunt his own growth out of fear of dying (154), frequently mutilates his body in the form of self-inflicted bruises (172), and goes to sleep inventing devices that will prevent loss and even bring lost objects back to life? Foer’s inclusion of complicated losses within narratives about unspeakable traumatic pasts thus sheds light onto an impasse in the traumatic framework that cannot be negotiated without the inclusion of the psychological conventions of desire and ambivalence. This gravitation of traumatic narratives toward melancholic relations to real losses is, as I see it, part of what LaCapra really means when discussing the conflation of absence and loss. Such a dynamic can be better understood after returning to Foer’s erasure of mourning and LaCapra’s additional ideas regarding desire. As mentioned earlier, Thomas Sr. does not speak after the bombing of Dresden kills his pregnant lover. Believing that Anna is “locked inside of [him]” (16), Thomas loses his words one by one: “I was the last word I was able to speak aloud” (17). After losing all his words, including the word “lost,” he only communicates by writing on note cards and in his daybook. To make this easier he has tattooed the words “yes” and “no” on his hands. It seems that his writing of these and other words is not as direct as speaking. Using written words, Thomas Sr. addresses several letters to Thomas Jr. in which he describes his life before and after Dresden as a way of justifying why he’s not where his son is. He only mails one of these letters, which Thomas Jr. heavily edits with a red pen, and at the end of the novel he and Oskar place these letters in Thomas Jr.’s empty coffin before covering it over once more with dirt. With the exception of the one edited letter, the novel implies that only the readers of the novel get to read these letters. As far as the characters in the book are concerned, all of Thomas’ elaborate thoughts are undeliverable. This is not the only time that letters, notes, and written words interact with lost bodies. I have already explained how Yankel D’s letter from his wife prevents him from mourning her loss. Similar to this note’s interference, individual words, such as “Loss,” are capable of interfering with Thomas Sr.’s psychic negotiations of real losses. For example, upon returning to New York Thomas Sr. also tells an inquiring airport worker that his visit is “neither” business word game also functions as Oscar’s understanding of language (word making) as something that is inappropriate after the loss of his father. 70 This one also echoes the post-traumatic notion of their being no poetry after Auschwitz and 9/11. 103
nor pleasure and that he will be trying to mourn and live “for the rest of my life” (268). At the same airport, Thomas points towards a prewritten page of his planner (‘To mourn try to live’) and explains to the reader: “I declared nothing, I called your mother but couldn’t explain myself . . .” (273). Having nothing to say, Thomas has nothing to declare, which I take to also suggest that he cannot declare things that he does not desire. Another way of putting this is that he has no way of addressing his desires if he declares nothing. “‘I’m so afraid of losing something I love,’” he explains in the only letter that his son received, “‘that I refuse to love anything’” (216). And so Thomas’ only purpose of living comes from not mourning. The standard Freudian melancholiac is unable to mourn because of an ambivalent obstruction to his understanding of what he desired in a loss. Thomas has an additional obstruction regarding language and its inability to articulate what he is feeling. This addition, I believe, is what makes the narrative confuse absence with loss and drift towards a format of melancholia after making mourning, like a missing referent, something that is impossible to achieve. Unlike traumatic representation, which calls for the negotiation of a historical referent, mourning calls for the negotiation of desire. Trauma deals with the absence of representation; mourning deals with the management of a psychic investment. Confusing the two frameworks generates melancholia because, as LaCapra has argued, “desire has a different impetus and configuration with respect to absence and to loss or lack. In terms of loss or lack, the object of desire is specified: to recover the lost or lacking object or some substitute for it . . . By contrast, the object or direction of desire is not specified in relation to absence” (59). Foer demonstrates that this direction of desire is not specified in relation to absence and trauma because searching for this desire always terminates in moments of darkness, uncertainty, mistranslation and, well, aporia. This climate of defamiliarization creates (perhaps insists) on melancholia should one attempt to mourn the loss of a partner, parent, wife, or relative. Because of this climate, Oskar and Thomas Sr. only have murky access to an empty coffin that will never contain anything more than their undeliverable words.71 To mourn is to bring an end to the suffering of melancholia. But because of the trauma narrative’s weariness of endings for fear of doing injustice to the traumatizing event, “there is no
71 Quite literally, Oskar and Thomas Sr. unearth Thomas Jr.’s grave at night using flashlights that eventually run out of batteries, leaving them to dig in the dark until replacements arrive. 104
end of suffering” (Extremely 33) and therefore no end to melancholia.72 And so characters like Yankel D. and Oskar are left grieving in darkness, repeatedly acting out their losses in cooperation with their traumatic performances. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close thus concludes, not with a conclusion or an instance of working through and mourning, but with Oskar continuing to invent ways of reversing time so that his father would have never died. This conclusion, which resembles a melancholiac acting out, is followed by an interactive flipbook with which the reader can make the unforgettable falling man fly back up the side of a burning Twin Tower. Just as the traumatic representation temporarily reverses or recreates trauma (depending on which way we flip the pages), so too do both of Foer’s narratives generate melancholia by rewinding the events of time, over and over, so that losses like Oskar’s father only change status by becoming not-losses (losses). Oskar, or even Wade and Sethe, are thus left waiting around for these losses to return from lakes, woods, and towers. Caught up in these traumatic performances, the melancholic protagonists continue to resurrect their losses only to watch them die again and again. Finally, as readers of their own trauma-laced losses, these characters often become magically complicit in these deaths. As melancholic murderers racked with guilt, they also continue to flip their loved ones to their impossible endings.
72 This passage by Thomas Sr. reads in full: “The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am . . .” (33). 105
CHAPTER FOUR
The Virtual Undead: Postmodernism and Grief in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist
The wind came harder now and they turned away from it. She amused herself by thinking he’d come from cyberspace, a man who’d emerged from her computer screen in the dead of night.
DON DELILLO, The Body Artist
The abrupt appearance of a nameless and disheveled man in a rented vacation house boldly punctuates Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001). Protagonist and recently widowed Lauren Hartke names this visitor Mr. Tuttle, after a former schoolteacher. It is soon made evident that Mr. Tuttle, whom Lauren at first regards as an intruder, is just as welcome and unwelcome to Lauren as she is herself to this house. Both occupy a borrowed space; the only real difference is that Lauren and her now deceased husband, Rey Robles, have paid the rent in advance. For the moment, Lauren is only using the house because she needs a place in which she can be alone while recovering from Rey’s recent suicide. Her plan, the narrator explains, is “to organize time until she [can] live again” (45). This tidying of time is, in part, the way the novel theorizes Lauren’s management of loss, a mental process that she may or may not accomplish after Mr. Tuttle unexplainably disappears and after staging a live performance piece, entitled Body Time, in which she “shake[s] off her body” to act out a series of bodies belonging to other real-life people (131). As criticism of The Body Artist helps to make clear, the novel predominately undertakes two narrative projects. On the one hand, critics like Peter Boxall, Joseph Dewey, Laura Di Prete, David Cowart, Michael Naas, and Robert Ziegler have all intimated that the novel represents the stages of loss and recovery. As a novel about bereavement and working through, the novel presents a sequence of events that demonstrate how Lauren progressively heals from the loss of her husband.73 Lauren has breakfast with Rey, experiences the trauma of his suicide, and
73 Dewey, for example, argues that after a period of avoiding the “the reality of her grief” while not “acknowledging her husband’s absolute absence” (131), Lauren eventually is “restored” (133), “reclaims the now,” “reclaims her identity” and is “liberated into the immediate” (138). Cowart imagines Lauren to “work through” her trauma using the form of bodily representation (Don DeLillo: The Physics 206), while in another work he suggests that Lauren’s performance piece at the end “signals the recovery of her mental equilibrium” (“DeLillo and the Power” 157). Di Prete also reads the novel as a representation of the “working through” of trauma (484), while Boxal analyzes the novel’s sequence of healing strictly in terms of mourning. Boxal, however, does not mention the phenomenon of 106
finally—after mental exercises that include obsessive house cleaning, fasting, and performative body art—Lauren partially or completely recovers from her loss. On the other hand, as many of these same critics have also examined, The Body Artist, in an explicit postmodern fashion, works diligently to challenge the limitations of language within the contexts of trauma theory, identity politics, representation, and technology.74 Similar to the characters from DeLillo’s other novels, Lauren is frequently consumed with the uncertain task of distinguishing between real experiences and the media that represent them (newspapers, radio newscasts, telephones, and cyberspace). Even time and memory, as devices used when representing history, become unstable at best in a postmodern narrative such as this. After conceding with these critics that The Body Artist represents the conditions of mourning and postmodernism, I argue that the novel more importantly reveals a unique relationship between postmodernism and melancholia, prompting the following questions: How might postmodernism’s challenge to representation resemble the same hesitation by the melancholiac to test reality and declare her loved one dead and gone? If the resistance to reality- testing in melancholia stems from ambivalence felt toward the dead, as Freud discusses in
melancholia, nor does he at all utilize Freud’s ideas laid out in “Mourning and Melancholia” when addressing Lauren’s mourning work. Rather, mourning, for Boxal, is the same as trauma. The inverse of this similarity (trauma as mourning) is often the case with other critics. See also Naas’s essay, where he argues that “Without ever pronouncing the word ‘mourning,’ The Body Artist is a novel about the work of mourning, the necessity and impossibility of incorporating the absent other into oneself” (95). Besides Naas, who fleetingly considers Lauren’s bodywork as “the answer to mourning and melancholia” (101), Ziegler is perhaps the only critic of The Body Artist to directly connect Lauren’s recovery process to Freud’s concepts of mourning and melancholia, arguing that Lauren “succumbs to a mourning disorder,” which he likens to melancholia (8). Sequentially, though, Lauren’s healing process, as Ziegler sees it, is not that different from the vision of other critics, and in the end, “the stranger [Mr. Tuttle] vanishes, heralding the healthy conclusion of the grieving done by DeLillo’s heroine” (9) 74Di Prete and Cowart, for example, compare Mr. Tuttle to Toni Morrison’s Beloved character, reading him as a “projection of a troubled mind” (Cowart, Physics 205-206) and as “a phantomlike figure in full flesh that makes the workings of traumatic memory accessible” (Di Prete 483). Boxall similarly reads Mr. Tuttle as “an apparition conjured by Lauren’s mourning” (221). Although DiPrete does the most to situate her analysis within the discourse of trauma theory (extensively making use of Cathy Caruth’s ideas), it is difficult to make drastic distinctions between her trauma-based analysis and those written by other critics, like Cowart, who are interested in the ways The Body Artist engages discourses of postmodernism and poststructuralism. While validating Di Prete’s reading of the novel as a “meditation on mental trauma,” Cowart also suggests that Mr. Tuttle “lingers as the trace of something beyond the phantasmatic embodiment of trauma. He embodies a primitive idea of language, the medium in which Lauren must come to terms with—and articulate—painful experience” (“DeLillo” 157). Cowart especially makes evident the parallel projects of trauma theory (after its rebirth in 1980) and poststructuralism. Readings of literature through the lenses of trauma, postmodern and poststructuralist theory share a common interest in exploring the representational barriers of historical events, and experiences, all of which are always mediated through language. See also Naas’ examination of the novel’s ability to “test[] the boundaries of both space and time” (96-97) while also collapsing and confusing the centered subject, as represented by a voice, as it exchanges itself (in a deconstructive manner) with other subjects around it (93, 99).
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“Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), might the postmodern hesitation to represent reality stem from similar ambivalence? If so, ambivalence towards what? These questions emerge from The Body Artist’s association of melancholia and postmodernism. But one can also see that DeLillo’s linking of impossible mourning (melancholia) with impossible representation implies that the condition of melancholia is also the logical consequence of the postmodern condition. That is, The Body Artist demonstrates that melancholia is not just structurally akin to postmodernism; it is also a byproduct of the postmodern view of reality that makes the objects of loss impossible to mourn. How can the bereaved test the reality of a loss when reality is no longer a stable concept? Against which reality should they test such a loss? By drawing a character who cannot distinguish between simulations and reality while simultaneously failing to distinguish between her husband’s real death and his imaginary presence, The Body Artist presents mourning as a behavior incompatible with the postmodern condition. Like melancholia, postmodernism is a space where reality-testing and mourning are impossible. The novel finally reveals that Lauren can only resolve this postmodern interference to mourning by either committing herself to one episteme or another (which may be impossible) or by consciously separating the two, designating the tenets of mourning to her losses and the tenets of postmodernism to representation.
A SPACE FOR EATING AND GRIEVING Lauren’s only previous connection with the rented house comes from sharing it with Rey as a vacation residence. The novel makes this especially clear in the first chapter, where it presents a peculiar breakfast scene between the two. Later chapters provide evidence that this is the last living conversation they have before Rey drives to his ex-wife’s apartment in Manhattan to fatally shoot himself with a gun. Lauren is his third wife and his junior by 28 years. Rey is 64 and a retired movie director from the 1970’s. That this is their last meal together before he goes off to kill himself is not what makes this breakfast scene peculiar.75 The unusualness of the scene comes not from what happens next,
75 While the narrator explains before the breakfast scene unfolds that “it happened this final morning that they were here at the same time, in the kitchen . . . ,” this first chapter provides no substantial evidence to indicate what kind of finale the third person narrator has in mind(7, my emphasis). For all the reader knows, it is the final time they stay in this house, or the final time they see each other for different reasons. His newspaper obituary in the next section reveals what has happened to him.
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but rather from the way the breakfast happens now, as if their breakfast together is somehow already infected with what happens next. What might otherwise be a normal breakfast routine, consisting of coffee, cigarettes, kitchen appliances, a newspaper, and idle chitchat, instead assumes an often-used DeLilloesque style marked by a hyperawareness (by narrator and characters alike) of everyday objects and experiences. While Lauren examines her breakfast soya granules, for example, she becomes fixated on the way they “ha[ve] a smell that d[oesn’t] seem to belong to the sandy stuff in the box” (15-16). Moreover, rather than focusing on the unidentifiable voices and very non-specific “traffic and talk” (11) coming from the radio, Lauren and Rey are mostly fixated on recollecting “who turned it on, [or] who turned it off” (11,17). Equally significant to this last meal that begins the first chapter is the narrative’s inability to stay focused, represented in part by Lauren and Rey’s intermittent and somewhat amnesic conversation. Both the narrative structure and their conversations take the malleable form of a vague memory that one talks through and continuously revises until it is clearer. “I want to say something but what,” Rey starts the conversation, not as a question but as a statement (8). After several narrative interruptions regarding objects in the kitchen, birds at the window, designations of objects based on what belongs to whom, and the origin of the house, this “something” germinates into information that Rey has heard a familiar noise in the house that they both thought had gone away. Something might be in the house with them; or it could just be the sounds of an old house. Rather than dwelling on this striking revelation, the narrative moves back to their breakfast items, some of which they share, to a foreign hair Lauren finds in her mouthful of cereal, to their own commentaries on how edgy either one of them may or may not be, and back to the noise in the house. The narrative and characters alike treat the representation of feelings and experiences with great analytical distance, and conversing, eating, newscasts, and the sounds of an old house together become nothing more than distant forms of information on display. Later, after Rey’s suicide, Lauren returns to this rented house during what the narrator frequently describes as “the first days back” (38). These days are for reestablishing routines and order. It almost seems as if the house had been abandoned for years. While recalling all she did in the house before Rey’s death, Lauren immediately gets to work, cleaning and filling birdfeeders, to put everything in its right place. “It felt like home,” the narrator explains, “being here, and she raced through the days with their small ravishing routines, days the same, paced
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and organized but with a simultaneous wallow, uncentered, sometimes blank in places, days that moved so slow they ached” (38-39). The novel especially shades such a “wallow” with Lauren’s desire and grief for Rey: “She wanted to disappear in Rey’s smoke, be dead, be him, and she tore the wax paper along the serrated edge of the box and reached for the carton of bread crumbs” (41). Routine is laced with loss, which, with significant reciprocation, is also laced with routine. These are the first days back, a line that DeLillo echoes later on in Falling Man (2007) to describe the way survivors measure time after the attacks on the World Trade Center.76 They are also, for Lauren, the days of meditation, and it is during her postmortem meditation that she discovers Mr. Tuttle, “smallish and fine-bodied” and nearly naked, in one of the house’s many rooms (51). Her discovery comes after she hears the same noise in the house discussed in the first chapter. Similar to this noise, with which Lauren is both familiar and unfamiliar, Mr. Tuttle’s existence quickly demonstrates itself to Lauren to be one of newness and a return of something past. As it turns out, his fragmented speech resembles the voices of Rey and herself in conversation. Lauren is only able to explain this similarity by assuming that Mr. Tuttle must have been listening to their voices on tape-recorded notes that Rey had made while writing a book. After deliberating the origins of his ventriloquism, Lauren interprets Mr. Tuttle as a man from cyberspace (54), a man without a reference (55), and a “man [who] experiences another kind of reality” that lacks the familiar obstacles of “identity,” “language,” “time” and “narrative quality” (81). She also takes note of his qualities as a man “defenseless against the truth of the world,” and “living in another state” outside time with an unnamed future (96). Mr. Tuttle “live[s] in overlapping realities” (103) and can “slide . . . from his experience of an objective world, the deepest description of space-time, where he does not feel a sense of future direction . . . into her experience, everyone’s, the standard sunkissed chronology of events” (104). By lacking the common barriers of language, time, and space, Mr. Tuttle acts as a vehicle through which Lauren connects to her late husband. This connection, she muses in several instances, is not “outright impersonation” (62) or some kind of “communication with the dead” (76). Rather, communicating with Mr. Tuttle was a way of making herself and “Rey alive” (76) in a past that
76 “These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after” (138). Unlike physical loss, traumatic experience is the subject of the “after” in this instance. DeLillo does, however, eventually connect this “days after” state of mind to an earlier loss, conflating the loss of Lianne’s father (also from suicide) with the loss of both memory (from Alzheimer’s) and Keith’s overwhelming experience of being in the towers during the attacks. 110
is equally present without the memorializing and representational interference from the categories “past” and “present.” After Mr. Tuttle one day mysteriously disappears, Lauren’s meditation culminates in her creation and exclusive performance of a work of body art, entitled Body Time. The novel provides readers with information about this performance piece in the same manner that it does the information about Rey’s death, using the medium of a titled, unnumbered chapter. This section, entitled “Body Art In Extremis: Slow, Spare and Painful,” conveys its subject matter through an art review and interview that will presumably, like the obituary, occupy the pages of a periodical. In Body Time, the review explains, Lauren tries to “shake off [her] body” (131) while acting out, on a stage, a collection of characters. One of these characters resembles Mr. Tuttle. The other two, a Japanese woman and a woman in business attire, come from interactions and observations that Lauren makes before and during her contact with Mr. Tuttle. Lauren’s body art never tells its audience to what extent or degree these acted out characters are real or imaginary. Similarly, the piece is intentionally careless of the rules of time, the composition being determined to “think of time differently . . . Stop time, or stretch it out, or open it up” (135). While the piece is frustratingly “slow and repetitious,” Lauren suggests that “it ought to be three fucking hours,” if not longer (134). When the review of Body Time finally draws to a close, the novel makes its own denouement with Lauren’s return to the house, where she eventually stares out the window with the deep longing for the “feel[ing] of the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was” (157).
THE STORM OF REALITY AND THE CALM OF SELF-NEGATION Reading The Body Artist as a narrative about mourning and recovery, one will necessarily pay close attention to its emphasis on time and Lauren’s slow, but graduating, process of moving through the states of bereavement, disillusionment, timelessness, and finally to that of embracing time and accepting loss. “Time is the only narrative that matters,” the narrator explains during one of Lauren’s body art workouts that involves contorting the body (usually in the nude) before exfoliating and sanding it of impurities (116). As a narrative, time “stretches events and makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it. But not for him. He is in another structure, another culture, where time is something like itself, sheer and bare, empty of shelter” (116). A distinction surfaces, here, between an ideal form of mourning
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using time and an alternative one involving Mr. Tuttle. To make recovery a reality, Lauren must make her loss conform to the familiar structure of time and its parameters of past, present, and future. Lauren’s distinction between time and Rey (the “him” that seems to occupy another kind of structure) also resembles the early or middle stages of reality-testing, a key component to mourning that Freud discusses in “Mourning and Melancholia.” During these stages, Lauren works to distinguish between the real world (that lacks Rey) and what is now only history (a world with Rey). “In mourning,” Freud theorizes, “time is needed for the command of reality- testing to be carried out in detail, and . . . when this work has been accomplished the ego will have succeeded in freeing its libido from the lost object” (46). Mourning, in this case, is a graduated process by which a person revises her associations between her lost love and the world in accordance to the reality of the individual loss. In reality-testing, “each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it” (Freud 39). Other forms of Lauren’s reality-testing include the tape recordings, Mr. Tuttle’s ventriloquism, and Lauren’s acting out of different characters—instances in which Lauren resurrects and hypercathects memories of her loss so as to finally detach from them. It is only by analyzing (and in Lauren’s case, embodying) these memories that Lauren can complete her mourning and accomplish, as Freud puts it, a “detachment of the libido” from the object (39). As a narrative about mourning and recovery, Lauren progresses from a state of loss and uncontrollable fixation on this loss, to reality-testing and mourning, and finally to a state in which she can organize the loss as something that happened to her in the past out of which the present now strides, rejuvenated and wiser. But while it gestures towards this psychological recovery, The Body Artist more forcefully undermines all attempts at reality-testing (necessary for mourning), which generates melancholia after making impossible an intact ego capable of desiring objects in specific ways. As Freud explains in “Mourning and Melancholia,” such failed reality-testing is usually the result of ambivalent associations a patient has toward a lost object (both when it was present and after it is lost), which causes him to know “whom he has lost but not what [s]he has lost in him” (Freud 40).77 By not knowing what one has lost in the loss—a kind of knowledge concerned with
77 This is not that different from a linguistic dilemma involving a signifier with either a missing or false referent. 112
an orientation of desire—the patient fails at reality-testing because she can only distinguish between an immeasurable object and a world without this object. For example, after repressing some kind of traumatic offense associated with a lost object, the patient might fail to comprehend the reality of her loss because, as far as she is concerned, she has lost nothing other than a loved one. Instead of declaring her loss dead and gone, the patient thus “devour[s]” the impossible loss within her ego to the point of believing that she, like her loved one, is dead and gone. (44) “In mourning,” Freud asserts, “it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (40). This exchange of identities (the dead for the living) results in “painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self- reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (39). Finally, the melancholiac “abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so unworthy. He is not of the opinion that a change has taken place in him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past; he declares that he was never any better” (Freud 40). The melancholiac, here, combines the past and present into a single state. The most severe conclusion to this melancholic state is suicide. As a melancholiac, Lauren’s inconsistent knowledge and ambivalence stems in part from discovering that her knowledge of Rey (alive) does not match up with what she finds out about him after he dies. At one point during her solitary stay at the rented house, Rey’s first wife, Isabel, calls Lauren to explain why Rey killed himself and why he chose to drive as far as Manhattan to do it in her chair. It almost seems as if she is calling to ensure that Lauren will not feel accountable for Rey’s death, or even so that she won’t be suspicious of his close relationship with an ex-wife: “I also accept what he did,” Isabel tells Lauren, “because I know him forever . . . . We all knew this about him. For years he was going to do this thing. It was a thing he carried with him.” “But don’t you understand,” Lauren interrupts. “Please,” Isabel returns, as if to be disclosing to Lauren a secret that the entire world already knows, “Who understands but me? . . . I went through things with him I could not begin to tell you. Don’t think I am not sparing you. I am sparing you everything. This man, it was not a question of chemicals in his brain. It was him who he was. Frankly you didn’t have time to find out” (72-73). Lauren reacts to this disclosure of inconsistent knowledge with jealousy, surprise, and disinterest. The gun, Isabel tells her after she inquires its origin, is one that he always carried. After Lauren tells Isabel that
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“I don’t want to hear this,” Isabel concludes their conversation by assuring Lauren (in a way that is equally unassuring) that Rey only chose to die in her apartment because he considered her “a woman I know forever. And maybe she will not mind the mess” (74, my emphasis). This conversation forces Lauren to question what it is in Rey that she thinks she lost. Not only did he not know her enough to kill himself in vicinity of her person, but she also apparently never knew him enough to realize his suicidal and gun carrying tendencies. Not knowing these things, she is now left to ponder whether she could have done something to prevent the suicide. As a kind of ambivalence, Lauren’s lack of knowledge produces guilt and prevents her from testing reality. The guilt comes from her having conflicting feelings toward Rey. “I love Rey,” this conflict pronounces, “and I killed him.” Just as she is a renter, in charge of another’s property, so is Lauren now the caretaker of Rey and in charge of his suicide. This condition of ambivalence and guilt surprisingly materializes once more in the third to last paragraph of the novel where the narrator makes its first reference to Lauren’s mother: “her mother died when she was nine. It wasn’t her fault. It had nothing to do with her” (156). The meaning of this statement is rather vague; there is no follow-up and never again does the novel provide information about Lauren’s mother. Perhaps, as Joseph Dewey suggests, this reference to Lauren’s mother functions as “a wrenching liberation from some unspecified, long- buried guilt, apparently, over her mother’s too early death, a guilt surely exacerbated by the suicide of her husband” (137). Within the context of ambivalence this liberation would also involve her finally figuring out what it is in her mother that was lost. In other words, the liberation would come from Lauren finally managing her lost mother in terms of desire—a management for which the novel provides nominal evidence. Lauren’s maternal reference also resembles Melanie Klein’s idea that “In normal mourning, as well in abnormal mourning and in manic-depressive states, the infantile depressive position is reactivated” (120). For Klein, the psyche establishes an inner world early in life filled with good and bad objects that usually correspond to those in the outside world (113). Such an inner world, populated by one’s first external desires, the parents, begins to function later in life as a kind of matrix within which one sorts, measures, and accounts for all future acquisitions and losses. When an actual loss occurs later in life, this inner world becomes temporarily destroyed, and it is only when one manages to rebuild this inner world (in accordance to the reality of a new loss), that mourning becomes a success (Klein 114). It is when a person is “unable in early
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childhood to establish their internal “good” objects and . . . feel secure in their inner world,” Klein suggests, that the person will likely to be manic depressive and “fail at the work of mourning” (120). I follow Klein by reading this “failure” as a kind of melancholia. In light of Klein’s theory, Lauren’s feelings of accountability related to the loss of her mother in youth prevent her from rebuilding her inner world whenever later losses, like that of Rey, occur. As Laura Di Prete has noted, the maternal reference is also one that “hints at once at an early trauma not completely worked through and the possibility of transgenerationally transmitted secrets, conflicts, and traumas within the mother” (489). Although De Prete’s focus is on the performance and narration of trauma, it is also possible to associate this earlier trauma to the epistemic barriers that prevent Lauren from successfully testing reality and commencing mourning. I would also note, using Dominick LaCapra, how this earlier trauma stages the loss of Rey as a “founding trauma.” As a founding trauma Rey’s loss “paradoxically become[s] the valorized intensely cathected basis of identity for an individual or a group rather than events that pose the problematic question of identity” (23). That is to say, as a founding trauma, rather than considering Rey’s loss in terms of a historical event (a suicide that made him no longer present in Lauren’s life), Lauren imbues the loss with the significance of her mother’s death when she was a child. The founding trauma thus exemplifies another way in which Lauren fails to know and test the reality of her loss, leading to melancholia. Even if this maternal reference fails to represent Lauren’s inner world (Klein) or a founding trauma (LaCapra, Di Prete), it does, at the very least, allow (perhaps even insists on) a comparison of the way Lauren manages one death (her mother’s) for which she may or may not be accountable with another (Rey’s) for which she thinks she is. The maternal reference thus illuminates Lauren’s feelings of guilt and ambivalence that are responsible for her inability to test the reality of Rey’s loss, and loss in general.78
78 It is also important to designate Lauren within a group of DeLillo characters that all exhibit signs of ambivalence toward a lost person. In Underworld (1997), Nick Shay continues to fixate on his father who, when Nick was eleven, abandoned his family—a narrative Nick continues to ambivalently overwrite with one that has his father going out for a pack of Lucky Strikes and getting abducted. This fantasy narrative allows Nick to go through life thinking that his father will “com[e] back. From the dead” (121). In Falling Man (2007), DeLillo superbly demonstrates this ambivalent condition with the character of Florence Givens, who continues to have a psychological “mark” from the loss of her ex-husband, who died in a drunk-driving accident (caused by his own intoxication) months after they dissolved their marriage. Her ex-husband’s mother, she tells the protagonist, Keith, “blamed Florence because if they’d still been married he wouldn’t have been in that car on that road and since she was the one who’d ended the marriage the blame was hers, the mark was hers” (91). This mark, similar to melancholia, is the result of overwriting a reality (a man she did not love who drank too much and fatally wrecked his car) with a false one (where she is to blame) fuelled by a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy (or, after this, therefore resulting from this). Also from Falling Man, Lianne Neudecker fixates on her father who, like Lauren’s mother, fatally shoots himself because he 115
Compounded with Lauren’s ambivalence is her consideration of Mr. Tuttle as an incarnation of Rey to which she is “deathly devot[ed]” to the point of complete self-negation (120). From such an attitude Lauren desires to “disappear in Rey’s smoke, be dead, be him,” while similarly “believe[ing] she [can] deliver herself into his reality” (41,143). As an autophagic melancholiac, Lauren resembles Sethe, from Toni Morrison’s Beloved.79 Just as Sethe continues to feed Beloved until she is plump while she becomes smaller,80 so too does Lauren nurse and feed Mr. Tuttle as one would a child while eating less and less herself. Assuming the resurrected form of her internalized loss, Mr. Tuttle defies the logic of language, time, and space, a contradiction in reality that Lauren can only maintain at the expense of her own health. Lauren thus reduces herself with her body work, which consists of sanding, trimming and cutting at her body (95-96) with the notion of working “to disappear” while taking “pleasure[] [in the] extraction” (105-106). Similarly, with Lauren’s actual body art performance, entitled Body Time, Lauren tries to “shake off [her] body” (131) while disregarding the rules of time, which she instead attempts to “stop,” “stretch . . . out,” and “open . . . up” (135). Other signs of self-denigration and malnourishment emerge when the interviewer describes Lauren’s appearance after her performance as being “wasted,” “colorless, bloodless and ageless” (129- 130).81 During this interview, when Lauren attempts to eat food, she does so “stabbingly, like she’s mad at it,” (129). When she attempts to eat after she returns home she thinks, “I’m not hungry” (142). Lauren also negates herself through obsessional cleaning. At first, Lauren exhibits this frequent behavior in a manner that resembles what Klein calls the “obsessional mechanisms” of
“did not want to submit to the long course of senile dementia” (40). Lianne exhibits ambivalence in the way she “want[s] to believe that the rifle that killed him was the one he’d braced against her shoulder” to teach her how to shoot as a child (41). Lauren seeks comfort in her adult life by directing a support group for Alzheimer’s patients that she believes “were the living breath of the thing that killed her father” (62). She holds herself accountable for her father’s death by suggesting that he “shot himself so [she] would never have to face the day when he failed to know who [she] was” (130). 79 Cowart and Di Prete are the first to connect The Body Artist to Morrison’s Beloved, noting that both novels imagine trauma as something that can only be represented bodily and/or through “the emergence of a ‘foreign body,’ a phantomlike figure in full flesh” (Cowart 206, Di Prete 483). The significant difference between the two novels, I argue, is that unlike Beloved, who is driven out of the house on 124 Bluestone Road by other people and her own fear of Schoolteacher, Mr. Tuttle one day disappears without any explanation.
80 “The bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became . . . Beloved ate up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it” (Morrison 250). 81 Compare this deathly devotion and wasteful appearance to Sethe’s devotion to Beloved that results in “Sethe’s eyes [appearing] bright but dead, alert but vacant, paying attention to everything about Beloved . . .” (242-243). “Neither Beloved nor Sethe seemed to care what the next day might bring (Sethe happy when Beloved was; Beloved lapping devotion like cream)” (243). 116
normal mourning. “Some people in mourning,” Klein observes, “tidy the house and re-arrange furniture, actions which spring from an increase of the obsessional mechanisms which are a repetition of one of the defenses used to combat the infantile depressive position” (106). But this obsessional mechanism soon eludes normal mourning when Lauren transpositions the target of such cleansing from the dirt in the house to herself: She cleaned the bathroom, using the spray-gun bottle of disinfectant. Then she held the nozzle of the spray gun to her head, seeing herself as doing what anyone might do, alone, without special reference to the person’s circumstances. It was the pine-scent bottle, the pistol-grip bottle of tile-and-grout cleaner, killer of mildew, and she held the nozzle, the muzzle to her head, finger pressed to the plastic trigger, with her tongue hanging out for effect. (143) By holding the “muzzle” of the spray-gun bottle to her head, Lauren simulates Rey’s suicide while staging her own, a twofold gesture driven by the ambivalence of wanting to kill herself and Rey, whom she preserves within herself.82 Perhaps one of the most pronounced descriptions of melancholia occurs when the novel addresses Rey’s loss as something that should conquer Lauren: “Why not sink into it?” the narrator asks. “Let death bring you down. Give death its sway. Why shouldn’t the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don’t know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give- and-take” (145-146). Similar to the obsessive cleaning, these questions at first demonstrate what could be part of healthy mourning. That she questions the notion of letting grief consume her is demonstrative of a kind of reality-testing by which she measures the practicality of a life of embracing the dead against a life of declaring her loved one dead and gone. The act of “knowing” surfaces once again in this passage, which might also suggest that Lauren is working towards figuring out what it is that she really lost. In spite of possible mourning, however, this semblance of the reality-testing quickly shifts to an attitude of impossible reality-testing, giving way to additional iterations of melancholia: “Why shouldn’t his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending
82 Joseph Dewey refers to this simulated suicide as “a creepy gesture that fuses self-destruction with self-tidying” and a “hissing away that is a harrowing parallel to her husband’s own suicide” (136). 117
grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach? Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you” (146). “I am Lauren.” this melancholic mind concludes, “But less and less” (147). From her commitment to loss, Lauren not only fails to distinguish between a reality where Rey is dead and one where he is alive; she does not want to. Why should Lauren surrender to the painful disintegration and reorientation of the ego (Klein’s inner world) during reality-testing and mourning when her melancholic simulation of Rey in the form of Mr. Tuttle is just as good as the original? Lauren, as Freud put it, might not be “of the opinion that a change has taken place in h[er], but extends h[er] self-criticism back over the past; [s]he declares that [s]he was never any better” (Freud 40). And if she was never any better, she is also, at the moment, not in a condition that is any worse and deserving of recovery or change. Furthermore, because she is now under the impression that she never actually knew Rey (which seems to trigger further misgivings about the possibility of ever knowing anything), Lauren does not feel obligated to challenge an imaginary reality with another toward which she is equally ignorant. After looking at Lauren’s melancholic preservation of loss within herself, a maneuver by which she negates her own ego while blurring the boundaries of past and present, I now want to return to the first chapter to note how Lauren and Rey’s unusual conversation actually fails to resemble a historical representation of their last meal together. Rather, the breakfast scene better resembles the recreation of a past meal from a future melancholic state of mind that does not consider itself to be in the future at all. Although minimal, evidence for this conflation of past and present first takes the form of a reference to the time of the breakfast as being “a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness” (7). The storm of Rey’s suicide has already passed. This self-awareness takes the reflective form of seeing and knowing events in the past differently after Rey has already abandoned Lauren. At a different point during the breakfast, Rey admits after offering Lauren some of his juice that he is not sure if she drinks juice (12).83 Lauren responds by telling Rey that she “‘never drink[s] the stuff. You know that. How long have we been living together?’” Rey’s answer is that they have not lived together “‘long enough for me to notice the details’” (12). Being more than a third- person, historical account of Lauren and Rey’s last meal together, this opening scene takes the
83 “Do you want some of this? . . . Tell me because I’m not sure. Do you drink juice?” (12) 118
form of Lauren’s personal meditation on and resurrection of history. Such a meditation and resurrection is filtered through her awareness of having not known Rey the way she thought she did, making the historical event conform to a particular state of mind at a later date. In addition to Lauren’s focus on the way she did not know Rey from what must be a period after his death, her conversation with Rey also resembles a conversation that one might have with a dead person. After accusing Lauren of being “edgy,” Rey informs her that “‘I’m the one to be touchy in the mourning. I’m the one to moan. The terror of another ordinary day,’ he said slyly. ‘You don’t know this yet’” (18). Much like the weather reports, her knowledge of Rey is delayed, while his forecast of the future is much more direct and accurate than a person would make before these events ever happen. Later on, after Lauren expresses her fondness of the house (noises and all), Rey then remarks that Lauren, who to him seems to love everything, is his “‘happy home’” (21). Compounding Lauren’s designation as a home with later information that Lauren is “making this up” (25) and also missing a friend (31), The Body Artist thus challenges the notion of a realistic historical account. Instead, the novel substitutes a historical breakfast scene in a rented house with a grieving state of mind, resembling a house that is off the map. It is in this uncharted, mental house that Lauren, the melancholiac, keeps Rey alive like a persisting noise.
MANAGING LOSS FROM THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING The Body Artist also rivals the conditions of melancholia with a pervasive postmodern aesthetic—rethinking melancholia in postmodern terms. I already noted the obvious postmodern style that the narrative uses to place pressure on popular distinctions between reality and its perceptive and linguistic representations. The narrative frequently distances reality from information about reality. The soya in Lauren’s cereal, for example, “had a smell that didn’t seem to belong to the sandy stuff in the box” (15), while the incidents of the outside world always take on a form of old newspapers because “there were no deliveries here” (16). Lauren receives the weather, on which she also fixates, from radio reports and telephone hotlines, but she is also likely to “[stand] out front and look[] into the coastal sky, tasting the breeze for latent implications” (9). The difference between weather as news and weather as sensation in the
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beginning of the novel is sometimes not clear. 84 Nor is it completely clear how these examples of representational uncertainty work alongside the more pervasive instances of impossible reality-testing and melancholia. As they stand together in the same breakfast scene, one can only begin to make cautious connections between the failed reality-testing and ambivalence of melancholia and the failure to distinguish between real worlds (or truths) and their many representations in postmodernism. When moving past the breakfast scene, however, these connections become less tentative as the novel begins to interweave the failed reality-testing and diminishment of the ego with the technology of telephones and cyberspace. Both incoming and outgoing calls transpire in Lauren’s rental house. Incoming phone calls, as I observed with the communication with Isabel, mostly contribute to Lauren’s melancholic symptoms of “painful dejection [and] cessation of interest in the outside world” (Freud 39). While probably sincere, these calls are instrumental in Lauren’s self-negation and ambivalence regarding the way she knows Rey. The phone rings constantly after she gets back, and when she finally stops ignoring it, she receives her callers using “a soft voice at first, not quite her own, a twisted tentative other’s voice, to say hello . . .” (44). Some of the callers, unnamed people, question her decision to dwell in the “the last place she ought to be, alone in a large house on an empty coast” (44). Lauren also receives calls from Rey’s lawyer (regarding Rey’s profound debt) and Mariella Chapman, her friend from New York. Similar to Isabel’s call, Mariella’s call reveals a concern that the outside world has for Lauren’s well-being, while also fortifying the associations the novel makes in other places between the concepts “knowing” and “impossible mourning.” “But you don’t want to fold up into yourself,” Mariella advises, an instruction on how to cope that registers illogically to the melancholiac who thinks nothing has changed. Mariella concludes the conversation by assuring Lauren that “You didn’t know him [Rey] that long. This could be a plus” (49). For Mariella, the time and magnitude of Lauren’s mourning is directly proportionate to the amount of time she knew Rey. Mariella’s comment
84 This lack of meteorological clarity will even remind several readers of the frequently cited scene from DeLillo’s White Noise in which Jack argues with his son about whether it is raining now, despite the fact that the weather report said it will be raining later: “‘It’s going to rain tonight.’ ‘It’s raining now,’ I said. ‘The radio said tonight.’ […] ‘Look at the windshield,’ I said. ‘Is that rain or isn’t it?’ ‘I’m only telling you what they said.’ ‘Just because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.’ ‘Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they’re right . . .’” (22-23). One can also compare Lauren’s conflation of the reported weather with the “real” weather to the symptoms of Nyodene D. exposure (also from White Noise) that people only get after they are broadcast on the televisions and radios (133). One cannot be certain of anything, both novels suggest, after discovering that sensations are, like the news, mediated forms of information. 120
suggests that because Lauren did not know Rey very long, her grief should be swift and gentle. Should Mariella include the transparency of Lauren’s attachment to Rey alongside the duration of their acquaintanceship, her forecast would likely be different. This would change the equation so that the time and magnitude of Lauren’s mourning is proportionate to the duration and transparency of her relationship with Rey. If anything, Mariella may actually be adding to Lauren’s obscure understanding of how she knew Rey by suggesting to Lauren that she hardly knew him at all and that the way she did know him was so straightforward that she need not consider it at length when working through her loss. Sometimes Lauren picks up the ringing phone; other times she just looks at it. When she does pick it up, she uses “another voice” that soon develops into one belonging to Mr. Tuttle or Rey: “At first the voice she used on the telephone was nobody’s, a generic neutered human, but then she started using his. It was his voice, a dry piping sound, hollow-bodied, like a bird humming on her tongue” (128, my emphasis). While his voice that she uses is probably Mr. Tuttle’s, the passage ambiguously suggests that it could also be the voice of Rey instead of or in addition to Mr. Tuttle. The boundaries between Rey and Mr. Tuttle, one being dead and the other imaginary, are continuously blurry for Lauren, and it is Lauren’s telephone voice that now acts as the medium for this uncertainty. Lauren, on the phone, is not just a mouthpiece for the dead; she is the dead alive, talking to the world and sharing the same reality. By thinking as if she were the lost love, Lauren continues to “devour” her loss (like the melancholiac) at the expense of her own ego. It is when Lauren attempts to make outside calls that the novel more profoundly combines the melancholic and postmodern conditions. Differing from the melancholiac’s standard apathy toward the outside world, Lauren attempts to make multiple outgoing phone calls to her friend, Mariella. She mostly only gets the answering machine, but such a substitution to the actual person turns out to be far from a substitution at all: She called Mariella and got the machine. A synthesized voice said, Please / leave / a mess/age / af/ter / the / tone. The words were not spoken but generated and they were separated by brief but deep dimensions. She hung up and called back, just to hear the voice again. How strange the discontinuity. It seemed a quantum hop, one word to the next. She hung up and called back. One voice for each word. Seven different voices. Not seven different voices but one male voice in seven
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time cycles. But not male exactly either. And not words so much as syllables but not that either. She hung up and called back. (84) The dynamic of the incoming phone conversions usually consists of Lauren listening to the information of others that she “do[es]n’t want to hear” (74) while talking back to these people using the voice of the dead. Something different occurs with these outgoing calls to Mariella’s answering machine. Rather than assuming the voice of the dead to communicate with the living, Lauren assumes both the active (by means of making the call) and passive (as listener to a machine to which she refuses to talk back in the form of a message) positions. Unlike the incoming voices of specific subjects, this machine has a disembodied voice she wants to hear. Similar to the melancholic animation of Mr. Tuttle, this substitutive machine occupies a different dimension, assumes multiple voices, and vacillates within and between several cycles of time. Also similar to the way Lauren frequently badgers Mr. Tuttle to impersonate Rey,85 Lauren frequently calls back Mariella’s number (always hanging up without leaving messages) to force the machine to reiterate its simulated greeting. Her preoccupation with the machine continues until Mariella eventually interrupts by picking up the phone, presumably greeting the unknown caller with a customary, albeit more human sounding, “Hello?” Surprised at the human intervention (despite the fact that Mariella’s voice is still being mediated by two telephones and miles of wire), Lauren put[s] down the phone, softly, and st[ands] completely still” (89). The seemingly livelier person, Mariella, is not as desirable as her simulated counterpart. By having Lauren engage with this answering machine as she does, The Body Artist modifies the Freudian melancholiac (who is interested in her internalized loss while apathetic toward the outside world) so that she fixates on outside simulations just as much as she does her now internalized loss. This revision of the melancholic paradigm suggests that the simulation of reality in the real world produces an affect that is not that different to Lauren than the melancholic affect of failed reality-testing. By only knowing whom she lost and not what it is she lost in him, Lauren internalizes Rey within her ego, which she in turn negates in a barrage of “self-reproaches and self-rivalings” (Freud 39). With the disembodied voice of the answering machine Lauren experiences a similar disconnection between whom she is calling and what she hears. Instead of Rey being the subject of ambivalence against which she is unable to test reality,
85 “Talk like him,” Lauren demands Mr. Tuttle. “Say some words” (82). Shortly after this demand she tells Mr. Tuttle to “Do like him. Speak in his voice [and] Do Rey” (89). 122
it is Reality itself (the world outside Lauren’s rented house of grief) that is uncertain. Because of this similarity, manifestations of compromised reality-testing, represented by Mr. Tuttle and the machine, are just as fascinating and favorable to Lauren. That Lauren is this receptive to outside simulations while in her melancholic state also poses for her a mental dilemma by which she similarly perceives her internalization of Rey as a simulation not unlike soya cereal, weather reports, or robotic voices. When this mental dilemma occurs, I wish to argue, it becomes just as futile for Lauren to test the reality of Rey’s absence as it is when she tries to distinguish between the smell of soya and its appearance or the reported weather and the actual sensations of wind and rain. Lauren’s internalization of Rey in the form of Mr. Tuttle, in other words, now shares the same indistinguishable relationship that a reproduction has to its “original.” It is with Lauren’s use of cyberspace that this conflation of melancholia and simulated reality becomes the most remarkable. After all, Lauren theorizes that Mr. Tuttle emerged from cyberspace (54). Lauren connects Mr. Tuttle with this technological medium after spending several hours watching a “live-streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane road in a city in Finland” (46). Lauren not only occupies her time during “the first days back” with cleaning, filling birdfeeders, working her body, checking weather reports, and listening to Mariella’s answering machine. In addition to these routines, Lauren continuously gazes into “the middle of the night in Kotka, in Finland” (46). Staring at Kotka, a city that is seven hours ahead of her North American Eastern Time Zone, fascinates Lauren “because it was happening now, as she sat here, and because it happened twenty-four hours a day, facelessly, cars entering and leaving Kotka, or just the empty road in the dead times. The dead times were the best” (47). Lauren, similarly, is in the dead time of grief. By creating a ritual of watching Kotka in the evenings, Lauren’s mindset does not differ greatly from the mindset of endlessly maintaining the bathroom, pantry, and birdfeeders within the locus of her rented house. Like these other ritualistic chores, Kotka produces for Lauren “a sense of organization” (47). Varying somewhat from the way Lauren organizes the objects of domestic space is the way cyberspace-Kotka organizes multiple worlds and times. From this kind of organization, Kotka becomes, for Lauren, “a place contained in an unyielding frame, as it is and as you watch, with a reading of local time in the digital display in a corner of the screen. Kotka was another world but she could see in its realness in its hours, minutes and seconds. She imagined that someone might masturbate to this . . .” (47). Kotka, Finland, for Lauren, not only replaces her
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obsession for weather reports; it also takes on a strange form of Internet pornography. Seeing the street and cars is not what excites Lauren; rather, it is seeing them from the viewpoint of an unseen voyeur that arouses her. But this is not the same kind of voyeurism that occurs when one furtively gazes upon a pornographic space of which she can only fantasize being a part. For Lauren, what she is doing is more real than it is fantasy. This sense of reality is grounded in her ability to experience Kotka as both a visual sensation and a form of news, represented by the digital display at the corner of the screen. Just as Lauren experiences the realness of the weather by merging the radio report with the sensation of walking outside and “tasting the breeze for latent implications” (9), so too does she experience the realness of Kotka by combining visual sensations with the twenty-four hour newscast. When meteorological reality at home is modeled after the failure to clearly distinguish between weather reports and weather sensations, the spatial reality of Kotka belongs just as much to Lauren as it does the local Kotkans. As Brian McHale and other critics of postmodernism have pointed out, it is particularly characteristic of postmodern characters to “often seem confused as to which world they are in, and how they should act with respect to it” (Harvey 41). Such confusion, McHale argues, occurs after a shift from an epistemological to an ontological attitude toward reality. While epistemological concerns involve the exploration of multiple perspectives of a single reality, ontological concerns relate instead to the way “radically different realities may coexist, collide, and interpenetrate” (Harvey 41). Following Foucault, McHale designates the overlapping of multiple worlds of postmodernism as kinds of heterotopia—meaning “a space where fragments of a number of possible orders have been gathered together” (McHale 18). Once these orders and worlds begin to overlap, the postmodern character assumes a “post-cognitive” state by which she is aware of her simultaneous occupation of all the worlds, while hesitating at how to discredit one in favor of another that is more realistic (McHale 10). Such a character thus frequently asks “‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?’” (McHale 10). Writing about heterotopias (from which he contrasts utopias) in 1967 and 1984, Foucault uses the theater, cinema, and Persian gardens as examples of these juxtaposed spaces (Foucault 25). But it seems one could certainly include real-time web feeds in such a list. As a postmodern
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heterotopia, then, the cyberspace feed overlaps a street in Kotka with Lauren’s rental house to force Lauren to ask: “Which reality is this? Virtual or Actual?”86 By combining the overlapping spaces of Kotka and New York with Lauren’s sensation of Kotka’s hours, minutes, and seconds from within her own time zone, The Body Artist also demonstrates what postmodern critics like Fredric Jameson describe as an “eschew[ing] of temporality for space” by the postmodern condition (134). No longer is reality bound to particular spaces and times; the experience of Kotka is now, “twenty-four hours a day,” any place or time-zone where there is a computer and high-speed Internet access. Boxall insightfully characterizes this eschewing of time for space as a “warp in [Lauren’s temporal] continuum, a kind of bottomless gap” (228). In other words, Lauren indistinguishably overlaps distinct times and spaces by creating a coordinate (which I have been calling a heterotopia) that is neither a time nor a space. Instead, this coordinate is, as Boxall interprets it, “a time that doesn’t happen until it happens again, and then still doesn’t happen, a dead time which remains beyond the measurable or the manipulative power of the fastest computer” (228).87 It is the simulation and
86 Although he does not make use of Foucault’s heterotopias, Naas echoes the postmodern question regarding worlds and realities when explaining how The Body Artist “implicitly questions the very possibility of ever speaking with just one voice, of ever having a single, indivisible body, and of ever dwelling within a house that is one’s own” (93). The novel, Naas concludes, is one that “forces us to ask . . . ‘Whose house, whose body, and whose voice is this anyway?’” (93). As a kind of heterotopia, the novel continues to ask these postmodern questions posed by McHale, David Harvey, and Naas, while also depicting Lauren’s rented house as a psychological crisis heterotopia related to mourning. As a particular kind of heterotopia, Foucault describes the crisis heterotopia as a “privileged or sacred or forbidden place[], preserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis” (24). Foucault cites adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, and the elderly as examples of crises that merit (in the eyes of the social environment) heterotopic spaces. The crisis of bereavement should certainly be included in this list. The key difference is that Lauren’s social environment expects her to mourn within the social network, and not on the outskirts, as Lauren does. This is why, I argue, the space of the house might better demonstrate a psychological crisis heterotopia that juxtaposes a reality in which Rey is alive with one in which he is not. Unlike the external social crisis heterotopia, it is the self-abasing griever who exiles herself to a forbidden place in a psychological crisis heterotopia. In this melancholic space the patient juxtaposes her lost object onto her own present ego while also juxtaposing multiple realities and time periods (Foucault would call these overlapping time periods heterochronies). 87 In addition to some of his other astute remarks, I find Boxall’s analysis of technology and Lauren’s mourning process in The Body Artist to be quite complementary to my own. Although, similar to Naas, Boxall does not make use of the language of heterotopia. Similar to my own goals, Boxall does articulate this phenomenon of overlapping space by arguing that “the frame of the computer screen marks the temporal and spatial distinctions between the USA and Finland; but it also collapses the boundaries, breaks the geopolitical frame, brings Kotka pouring into the midst of Lauren’s mourning” (222). Where we contrast the most is where Boxall reads Lauren to be in a state of mourning. Instead of mourning, I read her to be in a state of melancholia generated by failed reality-testing. Therefore, instead of reading the novel as one that “take[s] place in the time of mourning” (216), and subsequently the live web feed as “a manifestation of [Lauren’s] mourning,” as Boxall does, I regard the novel as one that demonstrates the impossibility of mourning and the web feed as a fortification, if not a reification, of Lauren’s failed reality-testing resulting in melancholia. It is with this focus on failed reality-testing that I make similar parallels between the melancholic condition and the condition of postmodernism, which, as I will later discuss, is 125
repetition of the machine-voice and the road in Kotka that enables Lauren to occupy this heterotopia and/or dead time. But only as long as she keeps observing the constant repetition of these mechanical reproductions, a trance-like observation that prevents her from making clear distinctions between there and here, and then and now.88 Like the dubious weather that is suspended in the medium of news reports, Lauren suspends Rey in the representational medium of Mr. Tuttle, who himself emerges from the cyberspatial reality of Kotka (or some virtual place like it). Similar to the news, Mr. Tuttle speaks only in the repeated (and reported) words of an alternative reality (when Rey was alive) that may or may not be more real. Being always suspended in some form of representation, Rey never goes away. And while The Body Artist particularly demonstrates this representation with synthesized voices and cyberspace, it also makes it clear that it is the representational properties of language that keeps our dead alive, both in and out of the space of technology. Toward the end of The Body Artist, for example, Lauren drives past several signs at the side of the road. When passing the “AUTO BODY and NEW USED” signs, by which she observes stacked firewood, she contemplates that “that’s where Rey was intact, in his real body, smoke in his hair and clothes” (153). As an unobtainable reality (a signified), both the living and dead forms of Rey are intact in the signs and signifiers that float past Lauren’s vehicle. Suspended in language, Rey is also simultaneously NEW and USED, which serves as a postmodern contortion to the more manageable economies of desire in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia.” When mourning commences, in other words, a person gains a gradual “command of reality” to the point of freeing the inhibited ego of its attachment to the lost object (Freud 40). Essentially, to use economic terms, the person is able to shift her investment from the lost object to other objects, including the ego itself. This does not necessarily mean that she completely abandons interest in this lost object; it just means that she revises it, demoting it at least to the point of being able to meaningfully participate in a world of preexisting and new objects. Approached from within the postmodern condition, however, the only stable conviction Lauren
incompatible with mourning. The closest Boxall comes to thinking in terms of melancholia (he never once uses the word) is when he once describes Mr. Tuttle as “the personification of marooned bereavement” (222). While this could describe melancholia, Boxall keeps his reading within a broad definition of mourning, which he defines in more political and historical terms without the support of psychoanalytic or Freudian discourse. 88 Other instances of the postmodern eschewing of time and space into a kind of dead time continue to surface in Lauren’s performance piece, Body Time, which, as I described above, attempts to “think of time differently,” “stretch[ing] it out, or open[ing] it up,” as if it were a physical thing vulnerable to bodily manipulation.
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can make regarding her loss is that she desired something that has changed its orientation. She never knew her object of desire in a tangibly real way; her loss, instead of being represented by a body that stopped breathing, is represented by a signifier that has floated away. When all she can access of her desired objects are the signifiers of names, smoke, hair, and some clothes, the postmodern condition insists, it becomes only natural for Lauren to have an impulse to keep her dead alive in the form of alternative signifiers that will just as adequately represent the impossible. Lauren’s melancholic and postmodern reanimation of the dead is not unlike the language of waste management and recycling in DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). Nick Shay expresses ambivalence toward the loss of his father (who abandoned his family when Nick was eleven) by overwriting the reality of this abandonment with one of abduction. As Nick sees it, his father did not actively run out on his family; rather, and more passively, Nick believes he was abducted while going out to buy a pack of Lucky Strikes. This fantasy narrative allows Nick to go through life thinking that his father will someday “com[e] back. From the dead” (121). It also makes his father less of an absconder, and more an “innocent” victim (208). The novel then juxtaposes Nick’s inability to keep his father dead (or at least gone) with Nick’s occupation of waste management: “We designed and managed landfills. We were waste brokers. We arranged shipments of hazardous waste across the oceans of the world. We were the Church Fathers of waste in all its transmutations” (102). By overlapping the two phenomena, Underworld suggests that losses can be managed like waste in landfills. Unlike the mourning process, where a person manages loss by transmuting her ego with piecemeal reality-testing, Nick’s management of the world’s waste (including his own) organizes unusable items in a way that makes them usable again: “At home we separated our waste into glass and cans and paper products. Then we did clear glass versus colored glass. Then we did tin Tuesdays only. Then we did yard waste. Then we did newspapers including glossy inserts but were careful not to tie the bundles in twine, which is always a temptation” (89). In the end, nothing is wasted; all is recycled into new products. The result of this waste and recycling mindset, however, is that new products become the same, for Nick, as the old products that were never lost: “Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn’t say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make? . . . First we saw the
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garbage, then we saw the product as food or lightbulbs or dandruff shampoo” (121). Just as the melancholiac devours her loss, privileging it over present objects around her, including herself, so too does Nick consume the waste of the world that only resembles new objects in the supermarket.89 And similar to the way Lauren reaches a point where she realizes that “she could not miss Rey, could not consider his absence, the loss of Rey, without thinking along the margins of Mr. Tuttle” (103), so too is Nick unable to consider new products without thinking along the margins of waste, and vice versa. By exercising this Mr. Tuttle-attitude toward waste, Nick concurrently simulates his father in the recycled configuration of the Watts Towers at the beginning of a section entitled “The Cloud of Unknowing.” Located in Los Angeles, the “architectural cluster known as the Watts Towers” was constructed over a period of several years in the artistic medium of extra or discarded materials. While visiting these towers and studying some of the more discernable building materials such as 7-Up bottles, broken crockery, and seashells, Nick recalls a childhood memory of his father assisting some neighbors with a masonry job. His assistance, which turns into his expert commandeering of the brick-laying, surprised Nick and his mother because they “didn’t know he could do this kind of work” (277). Nick did not know this formally-dressed man, expertly laying bricks. After having this memory about the way he knew his father when he was around, Nick then experiences “the deep disturbance . . . [that his] own ghost father was living in the walls” of the Watts towers (277). While the noises in Lauren’s rental house emanate from the overlapping realities of impossible mourning and cyberspace, the living ghost of Nick’s father similarly haunts him from the melancholic “cloud of unknowing” and waste management. Loss, in both novels, becomes synonymous with a wasted possession that one can recycle into new objects like a park or Mr. Tuttle. It is with this method of loss (and waste) management that characters avoid the burden of losing anything or of ever having to part with the past.
89 Brian Glassic, Nick’s colleague in waste-management, articulates a similar vision when studying a mountainous landfill of waste that announces its presence to the surrounding community while simultaneously going unnoticed: “The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers and teamsters and local residents, a unique cultural deposit, fifty million tons by the time they top it off, carved and modeled, and no one talked about it but the men and women who tried to manage it, and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order . . . [that] would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire” (185). Similar to Nick’s vision of consuming garbage, Glassic’s vision of landfills and parks alike is only in terms of what lies behind or beneath them, so that one is indistinguishable from the other. 128
As a postmodern novel with a focus on waste management and impossible mourning (among other topics), Underworld helps to explain the self-negating characteristics of the melancholiac in terms of authorial death in postmodernism. As Jesse Kavadlo argues, with regards to Underworld, DeLillo “recast[s] the author as waste manager,” a move Kavadlo considers “self-deprecating” (131). As waste manager, the author is someone who rearranges and reuses the preexisting detritus from the surrounding world, and not someone who originally produces anything. It is with this reimagining of the author figure, Kavadlo suggests, that DeLillo “combines elements of modernism and postmodernism” in a way that almost seems inconsistent (132).90 Inconsistent, perhaps, but when comparing the postmodern return of the author as waste manager with the author function of modernistic mourning, one can see that the glaring mutual element may actually be melancholia. What is consistent is that both modernism and postmodernism have included within their epistemological frameworks the impossibility of mourning at the simultaneous expense of self and/or authorial deprecation. With modernism, this deprecation is considered a disorder connected to a person’s inability to test reality; with postmodernism it is an unavoidable consequence of living in multiple realities. Unlike melancholia, which is a psychological disorder, most people would prefer to classify postmodernism as a philosophical position or aesthetic principle. Yet it shares this same resistance to reality-testing. The key difference preventing it from being a disorder is that the postmodern condition fails to test reality without failing at all. That is to say, the postmodern condition’s failure to know and test reality comes mostly from its firm belief that the very notion of knowing reality is an impossible contradiction. While the melancholic condition imagines
90 Kavadlo is a part of a rather sizable body of DeLillo scholars who (sometimes with a tinge of unwanted obligation) have felt the need to debate DeLillo’s status as a postmodern writer. Some of these critics, like DiPrete, Christopher Douglas (2002) and Peter Knight (2008) seem comfortable with the “post-” categorization of DeLillo. Douglas argues that DeLillo is “fittingly” a “postmodern writer” and a “pathologist of postmodernism” (104) and Knight illustrates how DeLillo’s writing can be “a symptom, a diagnosis, [and] an endorsement of the condition of postmodernity” (27). Others, like Cowart, Curtis Yehnert (2001), Paul Maltby (2002), Kavadlo (2004), Elise Martucci (2007), John Coyle (2007) and Mark Osteen (2008) have clearly expressed some degree of uncertainty regarding the matter. Although I find my own interests in melancholia to be parallel to, but not necessarily for or against these categorical concerns, I do find something intriguing about the ways the more uncertain critics talk about DeLillo, his characters and/or his novels as “neither modern, nor postmodern but representations of an entirely different kind of subjectivity” (Yehnert 357-58), as “beyond . . . trauma” (Cowart “DeLillo and the Power” 157), in defiance of “attempts to make them ‘pre,’ ‘present,’ or post’ (Kavadlo 6), “conspicuously unpostmodern” by means of his “metaphysical impulse” (Maltby 73), in dis-adherence or dis-abidance to “principles” and “techniques” of postmodernism (Martucci 7), as more of a demonstration of modernism (Osteen 137) or “retro-modernist gestures” that “fl[y] in the face of other postmodern commonplaces” (Coyle 27). These critics all seem to sense the presence of something additional and almost uninvited (much like the uncanny Mr. Tuttle) in the postmodern house in which DeLillo seems to reside. His name is on the mailbox, but it seems someone or something else could be at home. 129
conquerable barriers like repression and ambivalence that prevent subjects like Lauren from testing the reality of their losses, postmodernism presupposes a permanent barrier (language) that always mediates between subjects and their losses (as well as their possessions). As Cowart explains in the introduction to his book on DeLillo and language, “The only reality knowable [in a postmodern world] is the one shaped by endlessly self-referential sign systems and by an art committed to replication, pastiche, and the commodified ‘mechanical reproduction’ that Benjamin describes in his most famous essay. In short, the age of the simulacrum” (Don DeLillo: The Physics 3-4). Because it is impossible to know reality as a stable and reliable truth with which one might compare her imaginary falsehoods, reality, in a postmodern world, becomes a concept that is both nowhere and everywhere. As an inaccessible signified, it is nowhere, and as an always changing condition of immediately present experiences, it is everywhere in multiple forms (i.e. multiple realities, overlapping like Foucault’s heterotopic spaces). Freudian mourning considers reality in singular (either/or) terms by which one must privilege a real world containing a loss over all fantasy worlds where losses continue to roam freely. With postmodernism, reality is instead a plural (both/ and) and the objective becomes less about recovering reality and more about pronouncing the impossibility of ever locating an underlying, singular reality. This postmodern change in attitude toward reality also expands the focus of reality-testing from the more dominant issues affecting psychological equilibrium (like a profound loss), to more everyday objects like groceries, weather, and answering machine voices. The shift in the hierarchy of desired objects has much to do with postmodernism’s detachment from the economic investment model of desire used by psychoanalysis and mourning. Without any chance of accessing an underlying reality, such a theory of libidinal investment/ distribution becomes irrelevant to a project set on convincing the world that one can never know what it is she gains and loses in her investments. Without preoccupying itself with an equilibrium of the mind based on an economy of desire, the objects of failed reality-testing to a postmodern character can simultaneously be a breakfast cereal and a dead spouse. Postmodernism’s simultaneous nullification and multiplication of reality is not just limited to the things one experiences outside herself; it includes one’s very understanding of herself. “The other feature of the postmodern condition . . . is,” as Jameson explains, “our old friend’ the death of the subject,’ the end of individuality, the eclipse of subjectivity in a new anonymity . . .” (174). Not only is Lauren unable to define the boundaries of the reality around
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her; she is also unable to define the boundaries of herself, which now lacks the psychological organ (the ego) responsible for instigating melancholia. Lauren is, as Deleuze and Guattari would phrase it, a “schizophrenic out for a walk,” which they believe to be “a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch” (2). As demonstrated by her performance piece, Lauren is several people, a Japanese woman, a businesswoman in executive attire, and a naked man resembling Mr. Tuttle. But by being several, Lauren sacrifices the singularity of herself, which she is now “less and less.” As a postmodern character, Lauren and her performance piece (the novel ultimately blurs the distinction between the two forms) “tries to shake off the body—hers anyway . . .” in a manner that “is not self-strutting or self-lacerating. She is acting, always in the process of becoming another or exploring some root identity” (131). This root identity, however, to follow Deleuze and Guattari again, also lacks a central subject and is therefore rhizomatic. As a rhizome, Lauren constantly moves and digs into new soil to establish an endless sequence of new plants (characters) without a central lifeline or linear genealogy. Jameson would likely characterize her self-erasing, schizophrenic attitude and body art as a kind of “surrealism without the Unconscious . . . in which the most uncontrolled kinds of figuration emerge with a depthlessness that is not even hallucinatory, like the free association of an impersonal collective subject, without the charge and investment either of a personal Unconscious or of a group one . . .” (174). The postmodern impoverishment of the self is particularly different from the melancholiac in that the melancholiac sacrifices the self after making it a vicarious stand-in for the lost object in which she has previously invested. By keeping the object alive with the nourishment designated for her self, the melancholiac avoids having to confront the painful reality of seeing her loved one in a less-than-ideal light. In other words, keeping the dead alive inside herself, the melancholiac can continue to repress the less-than-savory truth of her loved one. The abused person, for example, can avoid confronting such abuse as long as she can avoid confronting her investment in the abuser—a confrontation that is unavoidable as long as the abuser stays dead. The postmodern character, on the other hand, sacrifices the self, not by feeding another self on its nutrients, but by assuming the role of a new self with its own source of nourishment. “Without the charge and investment either of a personal Unconscious,” as Jameson puts it, this new source of nourishment will take on a different form. Rather than feeding an inner
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unconscious with outside nourishment, Lauren feeds outer selves on the same outside signifiers from whence they sprang. Finally, one should note that the melancholiac and postmodern impoverishments of self differ in their conclusions. For the melancholiac who has devoured her loss while thinking of herself as equally worthless, suicide, as Freud notes, is often a desperate solution.91 For the postmodern character, who does not seem to suffer as the melancholiac, the idea of killing the self is about as illogical as knowing reality or having a true self. Which self, the postmodern character is likely to ask, am I killing? Which self is doing the killing? Suspended in such uncertainty, then, the postmodern character is at best able to simulate the destruction of herself, as Lauren does with the spray-gun while “seeing herself as doing what anyone might do, alone, without special reference to the person’s circumstances” (143). Suicide, the killing of oneself, to the postmodern character, is nothing more than a staged reality, viewed from the outside in, without personal reference. Even self-death will fail to make reality any more accessible.
MOURNING THE LOSS OF MODERNISM The Body Artist divulges a major incompatibility of mourning and recovery and postmodernism. Such an incompatibility makes itself visible whenever Lauren simultaneously attempts to test (so as to commence mourning) and deconstruct reality. In order to distinguish between an imaginary Mr. Tuttle and a real, albeit dead and missing, husband, Lauren considers that she will have to “distinguish one part from another, this from that, now from then . . . [while] making arbitrary divisions” (115). This distinction is what is necessary for mourning her lost husband. Meanwhile, in order to maintain a postmodern posture by which the reality of subjects and others are suspended in language (always just outside her reach), Lauren deliberates that she might instead accept Mr. Tuttle as if he really were indistinguishable from Rey alive. “Go where it takes you,” she thinks, as an alternative to “accomodat[ing] [Rey’s] death” and “surrender[ing] to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement” (146). If, as the novel later instructs, “reality [is] too powerful for you,” you should “take the risk [and] believe what you see and hear” (154). The problem with this instruction is that Lauren no longer has ways of distinguishing what she sees and hears from the powerful reality of loss. Both fantasy and reality are on the same plane, and
91 One can even detect this melancholic solution in Rey, whose suicide-rendering decline is the result of “alcoholism and intermittent depression,” as his obituary claims (36). 132
so The Body Artist reaches simultaneously toward the painful adjustment of the self to reality and the full embrace of fantasy as a new kind of reality. The Body Artist thus suggests three different etiologies of melancholia. In the first, which closely follows Freud’s essay, Lauren fails to mourn her loss after being unable to “make arbitrary divisions” between real and imaginary relationships she had with Rey when alive. In the second, Lauren also fails to mourn her loss, this time after doubting that there can ever be a singular, accessible reality against which she might test her loss. In the third configuration, melancholia results not from Lauren’s failure to test and mourn the loss of Ray; rather it stems from Lauren’s failure to commit herself to a postmodern framework that is significantly different from frameworks, like modernism, preceding it. This third kind of melancholia, I wish to argue, arises out of the residual and/or persistent psychological impulses to “make arbitrary divisions” within a narrative framework that wholeheartedly sets out to dismantle such a maneuver. This kind of melancholia continues to imply a failure to mourn; the difference is that, instead of failing to mourn a person, both Lauren and the postmodern “author” (DeLillo) fail to mourn the episteme of modernism along with its psychoanalytic counterparts from which postmodern thinking has never fully detached. This third etiology of melancholia denotes an interesting impossibility to separate, as one would when mourning, the analytical frameworks of mourning/recovery and postmodernism. Cowart briefly addresses this separation phenomenon in terms of an epistemological interference that he notices in most of DeLillo’s writing: “DeLillo seems intuitively to grasp how a new épistémè displaces its predecessor. In his brilliant and disturbing fictions, DeLillo registers the vertigo that ensues when familiar paradigms of knowing warp and shift. But insofar as the emergent épistémè proves inchoate, DeLillo’s engagements with it remain enigmatic” (Don DeLillo: The Physics 8). In The Body Artist, as I have been proposing, these two epistemes surface as mourning and postmodernism—mourning being aligned with psychoanalysis and modernism. Postmodernism, being the emergent and inchoate episteme, continues to recycle mourning’s reality principle at the expense of its own principles dealing with instability and multiple realities. Thus Lauren suffers from a melancholic “vertigo” as she vacillates between the paradigm of psychoanalysis and its successor, postmodernism. Because the epistemes of mourning and postmodernism both try and fail to obtain full reign over Lauren’s mental space, they each continue to interfere with the other, preventing Lauren from completing the mourning
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and ontological work respectively suitable for each set of tools. The result is a melancholic state of mind. The Body Artist operates as a narrative about the mourning of a lost husband, the impossible mourning of a lost husband (melancholia), and the uncertain representation of a husband who may be lost (postmodernism). On the one hand, Lauren might mourn, or begin to mourn, by “making arbitrary divisions” between what is real and what is imaginary. On the other, she might “take the risk” and triumphantly overlap the multiple realities of past and present, self and other within a single, postmodern space. But perhaps more unique than these narrative functions is the way the novel fails to choose between one paradigm and another. Sharing the same uncertainty as its protagonist, the novel demonstrates how both paradigms (mourning and postmodernism) utilize melancholia as the expression of their own failure. It also discloses that both paradigms are incompatible, and that such incompatibility can lead to melancholia. Perhaps the greatest conclusion to be drawn from The Body Artist is that neither episteme is capable of being as all-encompassing as it sets out to be. The solution is a familiar one and involves once again “making arbitrary divisions,” not between the real and the imaginary, but between the theoretical frameworks of mourning and postmodernism.
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