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, 1 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 2 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