Cultures of Relating: Contextual Therapy and Family Novels in American Literature of the 21st Century Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Würde des Doktors der Philosophie in der Fakultät Kulturwissenschaften der Technischen Universität Dortmund vorgelegt von Ariane Theis Dortmund 2011 1. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Walter Grünzweig 2. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Christoph Ribbat Herzlich bedanken möchte ich mich bei meinen beiden Gutachtern Prof. Dr. Walter Grünzweig und Prof. Dr. Christoph Ribbat sowie allen Dortmunder Amerikanist_innen für ihre Unterstützung und ihr konstruktives Wirken. Mein besonderer Dank gilt auch meinen Freund_innen und meiner Familie für ihre Geduld, Hilfsbereitschaft und Unterstützung. To my parents, Christa and Ernst & Anneliese CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 5 CHAPTER 1 8 The Theoretical Framework of Contextual Therapy 8 CHAPTER 2 31 Injuries of Justice and Intergenerational Family Dynamics in The Corrections 31 CHAPTER 3 76 Parentification in The Sleeping Father 76 CHAPTER 4 112 Existential Guilt and the Politics of Race in 112 The Time of Our Singing 112 CHAPTER 5 145 Exoneration and Multidirected Partiality in Love 145 CONCLUSION 169 WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED 188 Introduction Introduction Recent American literature shows that family has become a significant topic once again. The revitalization of the – never well-defined – genre of the family novel suggests that writers are interested in the fictional investigation of the cultural and social significance of the family in contemporary American society. This development is not a result of disenchantment with politics and a retreat into the private realm, nor is it an escape into fictitious worlds that should teach us the ideal design of familial relationships frequently so painfully missed in society. Instead, this interest in the significance of the family is a conscious turn towards the literary subject as an agent integrated into a tight-knit network of familial relationships, which are commonly regarded as responsible for the socialization of an individual. Indeed, authors such as Richard Powers, Matthew Sharpe, Jonathan Franzen, and Toni Morrison rethink the role of the literary subject. In an interview with Dave Weich for Powell’s Books, Jonathan Franzen stated that “after the much talked about generation of postmoderns a lot of us are looking again at character and, in particular, at family”. The family models these writers present vary from novel to novel. At first sight, the traditional Midwestern family in Franzen’s novel The Corrections (2001) seems to depict the nuclear white middle class family as being in a fatal crisis from which it cannot recover. At the same time, this crisis may also usher in a newly defined notion of family, providing equilibrium between individual and ‘collective.’ And there are much more dynamic models of families such as the Jewish/African American family in Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing (2003). This family struggles to survive the loss of relatives in the Holocaust and times of segregation in the U.S. of the 1940’s and 50’s. They fight against pressure from the white supremacist society as well as racial discrimination among the black communities, as many of their members did not accept interracial marriages. 5 Introduction The Schwartz family in Matthew Sharpe’s The Sleeping Father (2003), whose divorced father falls into a coma which suddenly leaves the two adolescent children in the role of caretakers, represents a single-parent household concept of the family that can be often found in today’s U.S. society. The conflict here consists of false notions of freedom and a negation of familial ties as a protective measurement. Toni Morrison’s Love (2003) offers an introspective view on a black community before and after the times of desegregation. Here the unity of the family is endangered by sexual abuse, class-consciousness, jealousy, and a thwarted friendship between two girls. However different in topic and setting these novels may be, they have one thing in common: they all reveal the conventional notion of family to have reached its end. The narrative of the family as the center of stability has been doubted, decentralized, fragmented, and yet still contains remnants of the old vision attached to it. It is still about experiencing love, a feeling of security and at times painful intimacy — but the acting out of these feelings is different. Characters no longer seem to be dependable agents with definite roles associated with them. For them, family no longer provides a matrix for comfortable continuity and identity. The family’s role as a mediator for values that guide a person through the rest of her life has been abandoned. One does not receive answers; instead one accumulates even more questions. As these models of fictional families become more and more dynamic, the question arises as to how literary criticism is able to analyze the cultural work the family novels perform. At the same time it needs to be able to do justice to the re-discovered role of the character acting in the network of close family relations. The families represented in my chosen novels contain a distinctive constellation of intergenerational relationships that shows the vulnerability of human relationships but also resources of change in the family system. They critically engage in the discussion about the function and relevance of the family for U.S. society and challenge the traditional notion of the nuclear family as an ideal design and object of adulation. 6 Introduction Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, who founded Contextual Therapy together with his co-workers in the 1960’s, saw in the glorification of the family as something untouchable a dangerous development in western society: The reification of the family as a living creature and its mythical adoration is one of the neurotic defense games of mankind. The myth of the family has long served as a cover under which a multitude of personal needs, exploitations, and gains remain hidden and obscured. The disorder of a family is a pathogenic condition which can lead to various pathologies in the individual members. (Foundations 63) The novels analyzed in this work certainly reject any notion of mythical adoration of the family. They represent their literary characters entangled in complex and oftentimes painful familial relationships stretching across differences of race, gender, cultures, and class. The novels show their protagonists exposed to the above-mentioned exploitations, personal needs, and unilateral gains. A reading of these novels in the light of Contextual Therapy illuminates the motivations and hidden forces that lead to the destructive relationships among family members and thus leads to a new understanding of inter-human relationships beyond the individual psychologies of family members. With this investigation, I am proposing that the contemporary family novel plays an important role in the discursive ideological war between traditionalists and ‘progressives’ – and that it indeed does have a future, if only its basic groundedness in relationships is acknowledged. 7 Chapter 1 The Theoretical Framework of Contextual Therapy Chapter 1 The Theoretical Framework of Contextual Therapy Contextual Therapy is a branch of family therapy1 that aims at understanding past damages to a relationship in order to prevent further violation among family members and is thus future oriented. It is dialogical on several levels, which I investigate in order to lay the framework for my later literary analysis. First, based on Buber’s relational model of the I-Thou dyad as the smallest unit, the elemental basis of relating to the world is dialogical in nature, then on an existential level because no individual exists solely on her2 own but always builds upon her existence through relating to others. Second, in therapeutic practice, one of the main goals is to establish a constructive dialogue between the different members of a client’s family. An atmosphere of openness regarding past injuries in relationships is crucial to beginning a process of healing, from which all present and future generations of the family will profit. Third, the relationship between a client, her family, and the therapist is also dialogical, in fact multi-dialogical, because one of Contextual Therapy’s main principles is the multidirected partiality of the therapist. In contrast to many other therapeutic methods, the therapist in Contextual Therapy at some point offers partiality to each of the family members involved in the treatment, and thus ensures that the concerns of each person involved are being heard and given due consideration. At this point, “the therapist becomes advocate for all within the basic relational context, i.e., the multigenerational extended family, including the dead” (Handbook of Family 1 For an overview of the development of family therapy cf. Douglas C. Breunlin, Richard C. Schwartz, and Betty Mac Kune-Karrer. Metaframeworks. Transcending the Models of Family Therapy. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992; Laura Roberto Giat. Transgenerational Family Therapies. New York: Guilford Press, 1992; Helm Stierlin. Von der Psychoanalyse zur Familientherapie. 1975. München, DTV, 1992; Martin R. Textor, ed. Das Buch der Familientherapie. Sechs Schulen in Theorie und Praxis. Eschborn: Fachbuchhandlung für Psychologie, 1984. A general introduction to family therapy can be found in Michael P. Nichols Richard Schwartz, eds. The Essentials of Family Therapy. 2nd ed. Boston: Pearson/ Allyn and Bacon, 2005 as well as by the same editors: Family Therapy: Concepts and Methods. 7th ed. Boston: Pearson/ Allyn and Bacon, 2006. 2 In order to avoid awkward phrases such as he or she, s/he, and him or her, I have used the feminine pronoun to refer to both sexes. 8 Chapter 1 The Theoretical Framework of Contextual Therapy Therapy 178). Multidirected partiality helps the therapist to build trust and find hidden trust resources among the family members. At the same time, it prevents the therapist from becoming unilaterally attached to one person’s perspective. In doing so, the therapist gives up the authoritative meta-level, from which she is prone to judge individuals.