SOUNDING MADNESS: THE ETHICS OF LISTENING IN JANET FRAME’S FACES IN THE WATER CHRISTINA FOISY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN HUMANITIES, YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO APRIL 2021 © CHRISTINA FOISY, 2021 ABSTRACT Sounding Madness: The Ethics of Listening in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water is a transdisciplinary sonic exploration of the historical, cultural, and theoretical concerns surrounding electroshock’s (AKA electroconvulsive therapy or ECT) impact on memory, its controversial accusations of erasure and its current revival as a “miracle” (Peck 2) treatment for complex trauma (PTSD). My project employs “sound as a verb” (Voegelin 17) for voicing claims of “memory erasure” (Andre 6) by women ECT survivors that have been named “groundless” (Fink 17) by psychiatrists. To do so, I propose a sonic interpretation of Janet Frame’s 1961 novel Faces in the Water, a fictional account of her twelve-year stay in New Zealand mental institutions and 200 electroshock treatments in the late 1940s-1950s, because it depicts a rich sonic landscape of shock (treatment as trauma) and “madness as a new kind of music” (77). Since Frame prioritizes sound as a literary device, I weave her voice within a larger historical sonic context, dating back to Victorian medical electricity, the soundscape of the asylum and the sounds of contemporary Mad activism. Utilizing sound art as a Research- Creation method that employs and embodies diverse theories of listening (from psychoanalytic to phenomenological), I aim to create a sonic space for “listening otherwise” (Levinas, Lispari, Voegelin, Todd) towards Mad dialogical and epistemological justice. ii DEDICATION In loving memory of my father, James Foisy, who passed away while I was writing this dissertation on September 5th, 2020. I am forever grateful for his offbeat wisdom and encouragement throughout my creative process. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii DEDICATION iii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv PREFACE v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Histories of Erasure: ECT Medical History and Survivor Narratives 17 CHAPTER 2 Madness Cannot Speak and the Ethics of Listening Otherwise in Psychiatry 85 CHAPTER 3 Janet Frame’s Life Writing and Faces in the Water 124 CHAPTER 4 Sounding Madness: My Sound Art in Response to Faces in the Water 212 CONCLUSION Future Possibilities for Sounding Madness and Listening Otherwise 250 POSTSCRIPT Critique as an Act of Love 258 WORKS CITED 262 iv PREFACE “(...) the violent orchestration of unreason that seemed like a new kind of music of curse and cry with the undertones of silence flowing through (...)” (Frame 77). The fragmented layers of memory that I retrace in this project are both personal and political. They are transgenerational and bring me back to a place where I have no words, only sounds that trigger a sense of déjà-vu, a dreamscape I cannot fully understand. This project began as a conversation with my aunt, a psychiatric survivor, who received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in the early 1990s and told me one day on the phone that the procedure did not erase the right memories. Her words made me think about the family history that had been erased from our collective memory: suicide, domestic violence, abuse, incarceration, psychiatric confinement. The list goes on. The stories we have hidden in boxes in the attic, in sentences we can’t finish. Listening to my aunt made me think about how I cannot remember my mother’s voice, her suicide always in the background like a distant murmur. I never met my grandmother, who died young from cancer and at the hands of a violent husband. Another story buried. I was curious about what my aunt meant by the right memories and how any treatment could erase the right memories with any precision or ethical clearance. How could erasure be the cure? Erasing memories sounded unethical, in fact, impossible. The promise of a miraculous new life without any burdens or weight from the past seemed unlikely, unscientific, and unsound. How could any psychiatric treatment erase memories of abuse, poverty, violence with an electric current passing through the brain? They didn’t erase the right memories lingered in the back of my mind like a ghost haunting, reminding of past injustice in need of reparation, in need of attention. This v conversation happened the same year I first read Michel Foucault’s poignant allusion that madness cannot speak1 which made me pause. Whether my aunt was exaggerating about memory erasure or not, her complaint was not taken seriously by the experts responsible for her care, and so I was confided in. It was her diagnosis, not her word choice, which prevented her from being genuinely listened to, believed, and validated. The truth is, she never consented to ECT, and she doesn’t remember signing any papers, reading any brochures, or watching any videos about the treatment. It was her brother who consented, and because she was a danger to herself and her family, she no longer had any agency in determining her future. This adds another layer about the ethics of listening in the psychiatric industrial complex2: Whose voices matter when it comes to deciding which treatment is best, which treatment will resolve the root cause? In my aunt’s case, ECT did not resolve her problems; it only gave her new ones to deal with. Searching for the right memories, I was eager to learn and listen to all of the stories I could find about the intersecting tensions of gender-based trauma, memory, and ECT by those who have survived the psychiatric industry. Building upon my previous sound-art based phenomenological research, A Sound Memoir: Sound Collage for Listening to Suicide Survival Narratives (2011) that developed theories of listening to soundscapes to restoratively work- 1 Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. “In the midst of the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on one hand he is the man of reason, who delegates madness to the doctor, thereby authorizing no relation other than to the abstract universality of illness; and on the other is the man of madness, who only communicates with the other through the intermediary of a reason that is no less abstract (…). There is no common language: or rather it no longer exists (…). My intention was not to write the history of that language, but rather draw up the archaeology of that silence.” (xxviii) 2 The psychiatric industrial complex is “an industry that is involved in the creation of an “at-risk” population is also the creation of a market for technologies of classification, surveillance and intervention. Psy policing circulates to make citizens, delineate monsters, expel threats, project anxieties, do nation, and push profits all galvanized by the construction of “risk-factors” that are soaked in (bio)politics, statistically spun into populations, thrown into bodies and struck down with fear.” (Holmes et al. 5-6) vi through the trauma of my mother’s suicide, I delved into memoirs and autobiographical accounts of ECT by women writers while working on a sound piece that could encapsulate my findings symbolically. This is when I found Janet Frame’s writing. I read her autobiographical trilogy An Angel at my Table and later her novels Faces in the Water and Towards Another Summer, and I found that her writing was sound-based and lyrically inflected, and that she was writing about her experience with ECT to re-member it (assembling information in a new, perhaps, shocking way) differently. Her voice was an electric current that ran through my body, connecting me to my past and possible futures in the present. She was my entry-point, teacher, and collaborator in this project. I worked to channel the energy in her novels that resonated with the generations of women in my family that had been psychiatrized against their will and whose voices were systemically silenced. She taught me how to listen to madness in a new way. As a sound artist and humanities scholar, I wonder, what can psychiatry learn from the arts when it comes to listening? How do sound artists relate to listening as a process: is it a core component of one’s ethical capacity to receive the other compassionately and humbly? Salome Voegelin discusses how sound artists often create a world of possible futures for their listeners (Voegelin 34), and this seems quite ambitious and noble. How is listening part of one’s artistic and ethical research process? Along this tangent, my work is grounded in a research-creation practice that finds itself listening and following questions that drive curiosity, passion and love. As Natalie Loveless eloquently says in her manifesto Making Art at the End of the World, we, as artist-researchers, must be guided by the “heartmind” (3) to expand the field of knowledge-making and world- making (39). We can no longer be solely guided by institutionally defined disciplines given the vii existential quandaries and urgencies in equity we collectively face. At this time in history, our job is to allow: ourselves to be drawn by our loves, our intensive and extensive curiosities attentive to what and whom we are driven to explore and examine the complex web of relations that inherit thereby that we might inhabit research questions ethically. (39) My work is an act of love that is undisciplined and wild, it is research-creation guided by madness as methodology (Gale) and listening otherwise (Levinas, Lispari, Voegelin, Todd). I aim to create a space for audiences to explore their discomfort with what exists beyond the parameters of language and understanding, to engage with the discomfort of memory erasure and to imagine new ways of listening to distress.