Literature and Psychology: Writing, Trauma and the Self 9781527520110

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Literature and Psychology: Writing, Trauma and the Self

Literature and Psychology: Writing, Trauma and the Self Edited by

Önder Çakırtaş

Literature and Psychology: Writing, Trauma and the Self Edited by Önder Çakırtaş

This book first published 2019 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2019 by Önder Çakırtaş and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-2011-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-2011-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. viii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Antolin Trinidad, MD, PhD Part 1: Psychological Writing-Writing Psychological Chapter One ................................................................................................. 8 Psychology and Literature Nurten Birlik, PhD., METU, Turkey Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 18 Peripheral Writing: Psychosis and Prose from Ernst Herbeck to W. G. Sebald Melissa S. Etzler, PhD., Butler University, USA Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 49 Beowulf: A Creative, Psychological Commentary Ken Silvestro, PhD., Capella University, USA Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 76 Dostoevsky’s Gentle Spirit and Andre Gide’s The School for Wives: A Lacanian Analysis M. Önder Göncüoğlu, PhD., Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University, Turkey Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 107 The Great War, Psychobiography and the Narrativization of Trauma in Hemingway and Freud Antolin Trinidad, MD, PhD., Yale University, USA

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Part 2: Writing-Narrating Trauma Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 134 Nihilistic Determinism or Hopeful Testimony: Time, Trauma, and Narrative in Slaughterhouse-Five and The White Hotel Kyle Mox, PhD., Arizona State University, USA Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 154 Agency in Complicity: The Aesthetics of Trauma in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Miss Grief” Theodora Tsimpouki, PhD., National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 175 Writing Dance: Narrating Trauma Marie France Forcier, MFA., University of Calgary, Canada Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 198 Healing Community Trauma Using Literature: Southeast Asian Refugees and Immigrants Dan Thanh Nguyen, Graduate Student, University of Colorado Denver, USA Farah A. Ibrahim, PhD., University of Colorado Denver, USA Part 3: Psychology of Self and Others Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 214 Worded Selves Megan C. Hayes, PhD., Teesside University, UK Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 237 Memory, Narrative, and Violence in Palestinian Resistance Literature Worded Selves Manal al-Natour, PhD, West Virginia University, USA Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 271 Collective Memory from the Aspects of Time and Place Ingrida Eglė Žindžiuvienė, PhD., Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania

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Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 292 An Ethical Construction of the Self in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life Magdalena Flores-Quesada, PhD Candidate, University of Málaga, Spain Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 314 Houses as Representations of Their Inhabitants in George Eliot’s Middlemarch Eva Oppermann, PhD., University of Kassel, Germany Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 338 Autobiographical Fiction or Fictive Autobiography? Georges Perec's Unique Testimonial Mode Dana Amir, PhD., University of Haifa, Israel Compilation of References ...................................................................... 352 About the Contributors .................................................................................. Index ..............................................................................................................

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My utmost debt is to my contributors whose comeback to an uncommon notion was both original and co-operative. There are others, less noticeable, who have made this book promising. I would like to express my warm thanks to the Cambridge Scholars Publishing team who made it possible to include photographs in the book. Sophie Edminson, my editor at Cambridge Scholars, was immensely helpful and patient in tracking down the editorial steps—her clear-sighted guidance always detailed and welcome. Also Courtney Blades, the designer, was really co-operative in the assistance in book cover design. Special thanks must go to Antolin C. Trinidad at Yale University for his kindness in writing the introduction and patience in answering my tiresome emails for the requests, and providing the overview for another collection which I was unable to thank for – though I am late to show appreciation. I want to thank Nurten Birlik at Middle Eastern Technical University whose enthusiasm was infectious and her commentaries on distinct chapters serenely enlightening. And my greatest thanks go to my wife Kubra, and my daughter, Zeynep Erva. Without their support and patience, this collection would never be as targeted.

INTRODUCTION ANTOLIN TRINIDAD, MD, PHD

Somewhere in the period after the peak of deconstruction as a literary/ critical method of textual analysis, a trend towards interdisciplinary crosspollination occurred. This trend is buttressed by the academic tearing down – usually by humanities departments – of the special status heretofore accorded to texts produced by disciplines that utilize the scientific method as their primary sources of new knowledge, disciplines such as psychology and the social and natural sciences. These special statuses have now been questioned, and scholars now feel free to examine texts produced in the name of science as just like any text, subject to a new perspective with each effort at close reading. The advantage of this stance includes a greater accountability for and scrutiny of “truth” claims, a sort of check-and-balance. The disadvantage includes possibly diluting a rigorously built intra-discipline knowledge base, such as when a humanities department with inadequate grasp of physics or chemistry or the science of psychology critically interrogates these disciplines’ tomes without adequate intellectual preparation. Michael Clune, who eviscerates literary criticism as an example of this disadvantage, names this tendency as “humanities reductionism:” …whereby literature scholars largely ignored the knowledge and methods of social and natural scientific disciplines in an ill-fated attempt to colonize them. [. . .] In the 80s, avant garde scholars came to see the existing discipline of literary studies — rooted in the practices of close reading developed by I.A. Richards, William Empson, and the New Critics in the first half of the 20th century — as an antiquated silo, preventing critics from engaging the most urgent questions of their time. We understand language, literature professors told themselves, we understand representation — we can go beyond literature! Language and representation became the wrecking balls which tore down the discipline’s confining boundaries, and made all language, all representation — which is to say, all human life, knowledge, and thought — the proper domain of the liberated critic.

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Introduction

Clune paints an extreme interpretation of the participation of the humanities disciplines in the methods of other disciplines. But not all interdisciplinary cross-talk is as vampiric as Clune suggests. Psychiatry, historically considered a specialty of medicine, has long enjoyed, or suffered, an interstitial reputation, meaning it has by its methods a reputation for interdisciplinary methods – it is the most “liberal arts” of the medical specialties. While it uses knowledge from neuroscience and biochemistry in its understanding of mental processes, it also identifies itself as a linguistic discipline, mired in the analysis of discourse as discourse is embedded in the culture that surrounds it. Psychiatry’s genealogy has Freudianism as its main antecedent and in particular, American psychiatry was, for a long period of time, dominated by psychoanalysis. Because psychiatry has a status as healing discipline accorded with the requisite privileges, it has always been a fascination to scholars of language. What factors underpin its dominance and what exactly is the relationship between linguistic practices and authority, if not healing? These issues have been fodder to recent literary debates. Beginning in the 1990s, and well into 2017, the literary critic Frederick Crews has been making Freudian tenets, especially Freud’s ideas on both the process of repression and his seduction theory, as subjects of his critical gauntlet. Along with the former psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, their disillusionment with Freud’s theories illustrate the readiness of nonspecialists to tackle the minutiae of another discipline’s theories, to be loudly critical of them, and to contribute to a debate that rattles that discipline’s (psychoanalysis’s) very foundation. The rattling of those foundations has contributed in some ways to its obsolescence as a mode of clinical psychotherapy practice, if not its continuing utility as a tool for literary analysis. Crews and Masson, in their critiques of Freud’s repression and seduction theories, essentially indicted Freud long after his death as partly responsible for the tragedy of the epidemic of false memories of childhood abuse in the United States in the 1990s. We can say then that changing the subject of literary criticism from creative literature to psychoanalytic essays can, evidently, have real life consequences beyond intellectual jousting or academic tenure-chasing. The surprising hardiness of literary studies taking psychological constructs as subjects continues in the field of literary trauma studies. Indeed, it can be argued that trauma studies as a field has been enriched by the new attention. While the concept of post-traumatic disorder (PTSD) has been useful in the service of empiricism and the search for effective treatments, it is also reductionist. It gives an illusion of a binary dynamic: pathology and non-pathology. Cathy Caruth’s use of the deconstruction’s

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aporia, the unclaimed psychic injury that cannot be put or cohesively narrated by language, has been one of the most intriguing concepts in the field of trauma studies. A new possibility emerged, the possibility that the unclaimed experience finds representation in other ways – hidden in literary tropes, or in biographies, ripe for discovery using the very techniques at which literary critics are very good: close reading, aesthetic scrutiny, historicizing and contextualizing the ways by which text interacts with the living human experience. To be sure, Caruth has her critics. And to be sure, these critics will fault manners of analysis that do not comport with the critical lenses they like to use. Foucauldian reading may contradict Derridean or Yale or Johns Hopkins-school inflected deconstructive analysis, as what Ruth Leys demonstrates in her strident critique of Caruth. We have the psychiatrist Judith Herman to thank for constructing an approach that is not binary. She, helpfully, put forward the notion that traumatic experiences produce a variety of sequelae depending on the extent, the repetitiveness of the trauma and how individuals can manifest extreme vulnerability while others may survive the trauma with little disturbances in the way they function. In other words, there are a number of psychological reactions after a trauma – some subjects will have traumatic amnesia, some will not, some may manifest dissociation while others may be resilient enough to go on with their lives with little evidence of impairment. Here, we see the differences between how a psychologist or a psychiatrist would approach trauma versus a literary critic. They would rely on observation, recording all that which are seen. The categories they construct would speak for themselves at first, interpreted only with caution. By contrast, literary critics construct cohesive but thoroughly explored interpretations of texts, sensitive to a genealogy of ideas, rather than observational notes on emergent mental and behavioral events. The resulting text that literary critics produce can be considered creative literature in and of themselves, subject to secondary and tertiary levels of critique. Geoffrey Hartmann ponders this, what he calls the “literary turn” of traumatic knowledge: You may have sensed my literary turn, as the question of how knowledge of extreme experiences is possible moves from epistemological baffles to an underconsciousness deeply involved in story, speech act, and symbolic process. This shift does not leave the cognitive behind but puts us in a different relation to it. It leads to an unsentimental acknowledgment of the human condition, and a view of art as at once testimony and representation. The force of that acknowledgment tempers our tendency to find an ultimate explanation for trauma, that is, to "see through" to its biological or metapsychological base. Indeed, this temptation to explain, even to demystify, as it becomes a "fever," may itself be an effect of traumatic

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Introduction dissociation, a compulsive, belated effort to master the split between experience and knowledge by asserting in theory the convergence of a phenomenal cause (see-able) and a trauma (not see-able, or else "piercing" the eyes).

The morphing of traumatic experience to literary works then, according to Hartmann, connotes a different relationship to the cognitive and the literal in that the art that is produced becomes the main representation. Dissociation may then be an intermediary step in this morphing from experience to the production of literature. Dissociation is a psychological phenomenon. It is evident that the conversation between literary criticism and psychology continues, and this, our volume, speaks to this enduring engagement. Human experience is a common subject for both. In trauma literary studies, the sub-subjects are negative and catastrophic life experiences. These experiences have distinct effects on language: language spoken, language written and language represented in conscious and unconscious thought. Language recognized and language not formed, as in a speechless reaction after traumatic experiences, are the wells upon which latter day literary trauma theory draw from. These wells are deep and dynamic, reflecting the very dynamism of language function and the creative and interpretative processes. Here, Jacques Lacan’s concept of the abstruse real as only approximated by the symbolic in an unbreachable asymptote becomes ever more prescient. Language has limits. Interpretation and criticism continue to attempt to bridge that limit. In the same way that Judith Herman outlined the various ways by which the mind reacts to trauma, literary trauma theory posits that literary works may not only be interpreted through the lens of trauma but also that there is unique language emerging from a traumatic experience – whether as a narrative of that experience, or a work of fiction. In this volume, we also posit that psychobiography, and a body of work, may be intuited from the traumatic experiences of the author. As Geoffrey Hartmann writes, trauma experience “stays longer in the negative and allows disturbances of language and mind the quality we give to literature.” Literature is a form of perpetual troping of it by the psyche, through figurative language. In this book, we also posit that a life narrative, as in psychobiography, may be seen as perpetual troping as well, in this case, to use a phrase that came out of the Freudian corpus, “repetition compulsion.” Literary trauma studies now have a recognizable genealogy. And genealogies could be understood by describing it as a series of waves. The first wave might be Cathy Caruth. The next waves could be studies of trauma in non-catastrophic experiences or discontinuities in identity and

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subject-formation, such as what Greg Forter describes as the “mundanely catastrophic:” I am speaking here of the trauma induced by patriarchal identity formation rather, say, than the trauma of rape, the violence not of lynching but of everyday racism. These phenomena are indeed traumas in the sense of having decisive and deforming effects on the psyche that give rise to compulsively repeated and highly rigidified social relations. But such traumas are also chronic and cumulative, so woven into the fabric of our societies, that they cannot count as “shocks” in the way that Nazi persecution and genocide do in the accounts of Caruth and others.

Here, Forter writes subtly about a chronic form of trauma that, on the surface, seems silent but conceivably seeps in to the bedrock of personality and identity formation over a number of years, the result of which may, in the end, be as catastrophic as a single trauma. Forter therefore brings our attention to a critical discourse that splices knowledge gained from trauma theory with queer studies, for instance, or postcolonial studies. Other issues that could be included in later waves of literary trauma theory include intergenerational transmission of trauma, exemplified in the possibility of racism’s effects through the generations as articulated by J. Brooks Bouson in Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison where the question of the transmission of shame by racism by transgenerational learning is posed – the memory of violence, transmitted through different generations, becomes part of shared racial identity. Later waves of trauma theory would doubtless explore some more the issue of whether literary turns become useful in healing, or in the process of psychotherapy, during the after effects of trauma. I would predict that part of that inquiry would include more essays from psychologists interrogating the production of literature as traumatized subjects look for ways to feel better, to change their affects, their world views, their engagements with reality. Can we rely on the creation of literature to feel better? These new forms of inquiry will provide new ways of looking at extreme human experiences using new metaphors and rhetoric away from Freud, Lacan, Caruth, Felman and Laub, and into new authors and thinkers. The essays in this volume have been curated to represent the continuing dynamism of the relationship between critical studies, literature and the psychological facets of trauma while riding the various waves of literary trauma theory. Antolin Trinidad, MD, PhD Department of Psychiatry Yale University, School of Medicine

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Introduction

Bibliography Caruth, Cathy, Ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. —. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Print. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Crews, Frederick. Freud: The Making of An Illusion. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017. Bousson, J. Brooks. Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture). Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999. Clune, Michael. The Bizarro World of Literary Studies. The Chronicle of Higher Education. October 26, 2018. https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Bizarro-World-ofLiterary/244938. Retrieved 11-11-2018. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1991. Forter, Greg. “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form”, Narrative, 15:3, October 2007, p. 259-285. Hartman, Geoffrey H. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies”, New Literary History, 26:3, 1995, 537-563 Herman, Judith, Trauma and Recovery (1992), London, Basic Books, 2001 Leys, Ruth, Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

PART 1: PSYCHOLOGICAL WRITING-WRITING PSYCHOLOGICAL

CHAPTER ONE PSYCHOLOGY AND LITERATURE NURTEN BIRLIK

Peter Brooks in his Psychology and Storytelling says that, in 1951, “it was possible for Cleanth Brooks to declare with confidence that the critic’s job was to describe and evaluate literary objects implying the relevance for criticism of the model of scientific objectivity.” Brooks also states, “[n]ow the possibility of value-free scepticism is itself in doubt…” (vi). He calls this turn in literary studies “the theoretical revolution” (vii). We can go further than Brooks’ views and say that there is a big difference between the literary conceptions and critical practices before and after this theoretical revolution. While the former practice is logocentric and assumes a Cartesian self both in the author and the characters created by the author, the latter problematizes any possible centres that might be assumed by a “logos” or any unified, stable selves that act on a stable ground or that achieve coherence due to an essence they embody before their encounter with culture/ideology/discourse. Before the theoretical turn, objectivity was a taken-for-granted notion; however, in 2018 it would almost be blasphemy to take a position of “objectivity” in literary and critical practice. One’s position of objectivity might merely be taken as a naïve form of liberal humanism after all the theoretical vantage points like postcolonial, poststructuralist or psychoanalytical which emphasize the constructed/ ideological nature of the self or identity. These vantage points after the theoretical turn underline that, in the absence of human essence, the systems (discourses, ideologies, cultures, etc.) configure/construct the subjects. Rather than an autonomous, stable and self-knowing Cartesian subject of humanism, these vantage points take the fluid, constructed nature of the subject as their starting point, and put under scrutiny the subjectification process and the material conditions of being of these configured subjectivities which are always in the making. The convergences and influences between psychology and literature started before the theoretical turn due to metapsychology of Freud, which was one of the central elements that triggered and also contributed to this turn. In

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this chapter, I aim to explore the reasons for this interaction between literature and psychoanalysis by putting the critics who occupied themselves with the issue in dialogue with each other to prepare an initial frame for the forthcoming chapters. At this point, we might ask, why this theoretical turn in general, psychoanalytical breakthrough, in particular, happened in the 20th century rather than in the previous centuries. The answer to this question comes from Terry Eagleton right at the beginning of his chapter titled “Psychoanalysis” in his Literary Theory. Eagleton states that there are “relationships between developments in modern literary theory and the political and ideological turmoil of the twentieth century.” Dismissing a simplistic approach, he emphasizes that “such turmoil is never only a matter of wars, economic slumps, and revolutions,” and it is “a crisis of human relationship and of the human personality, as well as a social convulsion” (131). Eagleton states that anxiety, fear of persecution, and the fragmentation of the self had been there throughout recorded history, but they were put under scrutiny and made into a focus of scientific study in the late 19th and early 20th century in psychoanalysis due to Freudian doctrines. In Seminar II, Lacan too underlines the significance of Freud in the 20th century and says that the revolutionary breakthrough offered by Freud was that he located the truth in the unconscious and started metapsychology. Freud’s “notion of the ego is so upsetting as to warrant the expression Copernican revolution” (3). We can explore the implications of what Lacan calls the Copernican revolution on a broader scale and say that with his metapsychology, which implied a model of psychodynamics beyond the control and grasp of the self, Freud started a hermeneutics of indeterminacy. His ideas that are also reflected in his clinical practice functioned as a gateway to a clinical conception of postCartesianism as, in his context, we can speak of not unified selves but fluid subjectivities, which are doomed to be shaped by the forces the subject cannot comprehend. Along with Eagleton’s and Lacan’s views, we can also refer to the weakening, thus, visibility of the ideological apparatuses in/of modernity. The organising principles of the dominant discourse can no more formulate a naturalised version of the dominant ideology. At the turn of the century and particularly after the Great War, Western intellectuals questioned different forms of the impasse in modernity, and with the influence of the significant figures like Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein and Bergson, new ways of formulating the truth started to attract them. In such a context, in the early 20th century in the West, the dominant discourse, which was supposed to establish the suitable framework for the correlation between power and knowledge, was

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radically challenged. From the late ’60s onwards, its ideological tools reached the weakest level concerning achieving invisibility, and this gave way to the poststructuralist movement, which engaged in radically different conceptions of the self and its psychology.

Why psychoanalysis and literature? Although there are many other branches of psychology like ego psychology or cognitive psychology, psychoanalytic psychology is most of the time what the literary critics consult in their analysis. Paraiso states that “[o]f all the different schools of modern psychology, psychoanalysis seems to be the most significant concerning literature; indeed Freud's legacy to that respect constitutes a whole literary theory” (qtd in Jauregui 1170). Freud's discovery of many of his theories in his self-analysis went parallel to his reading of literature, and he ended up borrowing and recontextualising vocabulary and concepts from literature. Freud was a widely read intellectual who knew the seminal texts of Western literature and who was familiar with the leading philosophical figures of his time. Jauregui in his article titled “Psychology and Literature: The Question of Reading Otherwise,” extensively underlines Freud’s indebtedness to literature and says that “Shakespeare was Freud’s Bible” (1170). Lionel Thrilling too underlines the same point on a different level, and he claims, “Freud has had an effect on literature as much as literature had an effect on Freud” (Jauregui 1170). Like Freud, Lacan has put psychoanalysis in touch with other disciplines; therefore, it would be unrealistic to attempt to understand Lacan without prior knowledge of literature, Hegel, Heidegger, Live-Strauss, Jacobson or Saussure, and many others. Like Freud, he borrowed terms and recontextualised them in his epistemology in configuring the coordinates of his psychoanalysis. Both Freud and Jung attached significance to humanities, particularly to literature, in the training of the psychoanalysts. Due to their attitude, a humanist heritage entered psychology in such a way that literature became a valid source for understanding different phenomena in the human psyche. Freud resorted to literature in an attempt to validate his theories and went so far as to say: “The poets and the philosophers discovered the unconscious before I did…What I did discover was the scientific method through which the unconscious can be studied” (qtd in Jauregui 1172). Freud tried to convert psychoanalysis into a natural science but for this aim, interestingly enough, he “returned to the library, encouraging us to read ancient religious, mythic and literary texts. Thanks to Freud and Jung, a humanist heritage was given a place in the field of psychology, and

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myths and literature were transformed into valid sources for the comprehension of the human condition” (Jauregui 1169). Lacan too was aware of the significance of literature in Freudian psychoanalysis: “Indeed, how could we forget that Freud constantly, and right until the end, maintained that such a background was the prime requisite in the training of analysts, and he designated the age-old universitas litterarum as the ideal place for its institution?” (2006: 413). Lacan too stressed the need for interdisciplinarity and the incorporation of the humanities into the psychoanalytic training programme. Like Freud, he thought that the analyst has to be an artist himself, schooled, in a wide range of disciplines, including mythology, comparative literature and history of ideas, and linguistics (Bär 534). Freud, Jung and Lacan’s familiarity with literary and philosophical figures and their re-employment of their concepts both enriched their psychoanalysis and attracted the critics and readers from these nonpsychological fields. After Freud, Jung, and Lacan, the same interdisciplinarity continued in the case of the other psychoanalysts as they borrowed from and collaborated with neuroscience, semiotics, etc. One can count different reasons for this interaction. Norman Holland says that psychoanalysis is the “science of human subjectivity” and it “offers insights into the mind’s ways of thinking, dreaming, imagining, wanting, and especially the mind’s ways of hiding from itself” (2). As the “laboratory of this science” is the human psyche, it becomes inevitable to borrow concepts or terms from psychology while dealing with nonpsychological texts like literature, which are also about “human.” Freud’s reference to psychoanalytical practice as the talking cure and the emphasis he puts on free associations of the words in his analytic training might be another motivation for the interaction between psychology and literature. In Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the emphasis is put on the language of the analysand and the pivotal role of different forms of slips in the sessions. Words are the only material of the unconscious because the subject is nothing other than a construct of words to which only words can give access. Lacan says that “whether it sees it as an instrument of healing, of training, or of exploration in depth, psychoanalysis has only a single medium: the patient’s speech” (2006: 40). Due to the similarities between what the ego does in the production of a text and real life, as Simon O. Lesser states, psychoanalysis might offer a pathway to have access to "the deepest levels of meaning of the greatest fiction" (297). Sarup too thinks that the symbiosis between meaning and narration is pivotal in both fields:

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Chapter One Both psychoanalysis and literature are concerned with narrative, with telling stories. Psychoanalysis reads the past to make sense of the present. Like a detective story, it starts with effects and traces these effects back to origins. The reader, too, has to find causes and connections and, like the analyst has to work again through time to recover meaning. (161)

In a similar line of thinking, another reason for this interaction might be the tendency among the psychoanalysts which takes the field not as a field of science but as a hermeneutics since psychoanalysis too is characterised by a creative narrative construction: Lacan sees psychoanalysis more as a calling than as a career. He personifies a conception of analysis not as a quasi-medical technique focussed on ‘cure' but as a scientific discipline and a process of individual research and self-discovery. (If a cure comes at all in psychoanalysis it comes as a bonus or secondary gain.) For Lacan, psychoanalysis is not a system of treatment, it is not a method of explaining or guaranteeing knowledge, but is a series of techniques for listening to and questioning desire. (Sarup 11)

The emphasis put on the metaphors and the act of writing in Jungian criticism is another element that generates affinity between psychoanalytical practice and literature. Moreover, in modern Jungian criticism, in Kugler, in particular, the interrelation between consciousness, language (text) and images is emphasized: “Consciousness is continually being imagined (imagined, in-formed) by the metaphors in the very text it is writing or reading” (Holland 42). Likewise, in cognitive psychology, the linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson say; “Our minds work through a metaphorical logic,” in their Metaphors We Live By (198). It is possible to expand this list of possible reasons for the interaction between psychology and literature, but it is hard to specify any one of these motivations as the exact reason since none of these justifications can exhaust or contain the whole endeavour. The basis for this interaction might also be a combination of all the above-given arguments. Emig puts all these points in a nutshell, therefore, it would be appropriate to quote the closing remark of this section from him: “Text-based in its methods, psychoanalysis shares with literature the poiesis of images and expressions, the poetics of their arrangement, the grammar of narratives, but also a theory of interpretation” (Emig 175). Whatever the reason is, one thing is clear that there has been a close dialogue between literature and psychology through the psychoanalytical psychology of Freud, Jung, and Lacan. This parallelism between

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psychology and literature has been fruitful and has developed into a new field of literary theory and critical practice.

Freud and Lacan Due to Freud, psychoanalysis has colonised vast areas of culture (Sarup xvi). He dominated psychoanalytical literary critical practice with his metapsychology and with his concepts and topology that offered a conceptual toolbox for the literary critics until the appearance of Lacanian ideas. Lacanian ideas occupy a considerable place in the second part of the twentieth century as he influenced many of the prominent figures of philosophy and literary criticism. Lacan became a gigantic figure as he was welcomed by the intellectuals more than the medical institutions. Therefore, it is possible to see his influence as a reaction or counteraction in his audiences. In 1963, Louis Althusser invited Lacan to bring his weekly seminars to (academia) the Ecole Normale Superieure from the Saint Anne Hospital. From this move onwards, Lacan’s seminars became a meeting place for most of the poststructuralist thinkers and prominent figures in Parisian intellectual circles, like Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Claude-Strauss; “after the 1966 publication of Lacan’s Ecrits, as many as a thousand people tried to get into his seminars” (Sarup xvi). Both Freud and Lacan put forward ideas about the symbiosis between the subject and the culture it is born into. For them, this symbiosis leads to a conception of psychodynamics which is not a given but which is constructed and always in the making. Both of them foreground the external factors and intra/intersubjectivity in the formation of the subject. Lacan offers us a structuralist reading of Freud and foregrounds the constitutive potential of language in the cognitive and psychic development of the infant. He insists on “the primacy of language” not “the primacy of events” (Mellard 6). He even goes so far as to say that language precedes the subject as “it was certainly the Word (verbe) that was in the beginning” (2006: 61). Lacan claims, “what the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language," which means that the unconscious can be understood as the way language is appreciated since the unconscious is structured like a language (2006: 47). He explains the unconscious mechanisms through the terms he borrowed from Roman Jacobson, metaphor and metonymy. Lacan also rewrites Freud’s Oedipal model in linguistic and sociocultural terms. The Freudian idea of castration to be achieved by the biological father metamorphoses to the linguistic castration implemented

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by the Law of the Father or the paternal metaphor (which is more than and beyond the biological father). In fact, he metaphorizes many of literal expressions in Freud and formulates his theory of the registers on a linguistic model. Therefore, for him, the symbolic entry to which the infant is integrated from the Oedipal stage (linguistic castration) onwards is the structure of language itself. The individual has to enter into this structure to become a speaking member of the symbolic. As in Hogan's words, "[s]ociety is born only with language," and it functions only through the symbolic (18). On the significance of the linguistic structure for Lacan, Lemaire maintains, “[l]anguage is the vehicle of a social given, a culture, prohibitions, and laws. The child who enters in this symbolic order with its multiple dimensions will be fashioned by this order and will be indelibly marked by it without being aware of it” (54). Therefore, “the symbolic register of language is particularly vital for the ‘subject’” (Lemaire 57). With language, the infant is integrated into a social and ethical system, and then this process can be taken as the acculturation process. Language is already there before the infant is born, and it regulates both the unconscious, conscious, and social mechanisms. That is, language constitutes both the internal and the external, therefore, “the law of man has been the law of language” (2006: 225). In other words, for Lacan “it is the world of words that creates the world of things” and man “speaks but it is because the symbol has made him man” (2006: 229). Lacan also maintains that: Symbols in fact envelop the life of man with a network so total that they join together those who are going to engender him “by bone and flesh” before he comes into the world; so total that they bring to his birth, along with gifts of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so total that they provide the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and beyond his very death; so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the last judgement, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it- unless he reaches the subjective realization of being-toward-death. (2006: 231)

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, linguistic turn triggered by structuralism merges into the intellectual revolution Brooks speaks. Not only the subject but also the society is a linguistic construct or an effect of the signifier. However, this signifier in Lacan is a free-floating linguistic element which determines the course of things in signification on both subjective and communal level but which is also impossible to put under control. “This recognition of the impossibility of mastering the signifier sets Lacanian literary theory apart from earlier Freudian criticism” (Britton 217).

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In a Lacanian context, the constitution of the subject cannot be achieved in the absence of the identificatory processes and the intersubjective conditions of being which are linguistic. While he locates intra-subjectivity (imaginary processes) in the (m)Other’s domain, he associates intersubjectivity, the state of acculturation, with the realm of language. Because of the emphasis put on linguistic mechanisms and identificatory processes in his epistemology, sexuality becomes psychosexuality: “Lacanian ego is a network of identificatory and linguistic relations. In such a context, there is a reciprocal relationship between the Lacanian subject and its social environment which functions as a mirror” (Birlik and Çankaya 2). The significance of linguistic processes in deciphering the recesses of subjectivity and the emphasis put on culture/ symbolic/ external space in the configuration of the subjectivities create a symbiosis between the internal and the external. The Lacanian idea of the Mobius strip might be a metaphor to refer to this symbiosis as it implies the close correlation between the internal and external mechanisms. This correlation takes the external as the precondition for the internal or vice versa, therefore: “Lacan’s theory holds out promise of a new style of materialist social criticism- one that is able to make coherent connections between the structure of the unconscious and the interactive signifying practices that constitute a given culture” (Sarup 163). This metaphor also leads us to the idea of a fluid, centreless (or multicentred) conception of psychodynamics which we call the “human.” Due to the unbridgeable gap between the logic of the unconscious language and that of the social, there is an unbridgeable gap between conscious and unconscious meaning, “[t]o the extent that what is spoken rarely coincides with what the ego intends to communicate” (Schneiderman 3). Unconscious, as an estranged system of a network of signification and representations, is structured like a language but these representations as pure signifiers function on their logic. This split or dividedness in the psyche, or Lacan’s reference to it as a barred S, brings him closer to a poststructuralist ground of thinking. In Lacanian theory, the rules of language or the logic of the signifiers are also regarded as the Law of the Father. Entering the symbolic necessitates subjecting oneself to its regulations, and to prohibitions of language as the symbolic representation of reality. If the individual refuses to obey this command or if s/he chooses to submit to other images of reality, s/he is taken as a misfit or is pathologized by the symbolic s/he is born into. In this process, language becomes a "house of being" in the Heideggerian sense, as for Lacan, language is crucial for acculturation/humanization of the infant. As part of the theoretical turn, we see similar attempts to explore the psychic processes in linguistic terms in

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post/ anti-Lacanians too. Although some of them accuse Lacan of being a phallocentric thinker or a phallocrat, they base their alternative readings of the psyche on a linguistic model/ challenge, too. A case in point is semiotic chora in Kristeva or the idea of the ecriture feminine in Cixous. In their case, too, the process of configuration or construction of the subject in a phallogocentric context or the subversion of it is explored concerning linguistic processes. In recent years, however, in psychoanalytical studies there is a reaction against the idea of psychoanalysis “merely as a system of interpreting language”: Some psychoanalytic thinkers are trying to connect the psychoanalytic model of the human being with ‘cognitive science,’ that is, with cognitive psychology (the principles developed from experiments in perception, cognition, and memory): with the simulation of intelligence on computers; and with neuroscientific research into the functioning of the brain. This merger represents a return to the scientific origins of psychoanalysis, as against the recent claim that psychoanalysis is merely a system for interpreting language. (Holland 12)

Despite this reaction, it seems to be impossible to undo what Freud, Jung and later Lacan did in humanities in general and in literature in particular. What Sarup says for Freud is also applicable to all three of them: It has been said that Sigmund Freud contributed to something much broader than merely the growth of a scientific discipline. He has contributed to the whole cultural milieu of the twentieth century in that he has given us a way of seeing things. He fashioned a new image of what it is to be human. Freud, by the power of his writings and by the breath and audacity of his speculations, revolutionised the thought, the lives and the imagination of the age. (Sarup 1)

Likewise in Lacanian epistemology, "[t]he basic idea that the subject is constructed in language provides a radically new way of looking at fictional characterisation and narrative point of view and has regenerated this whole area of literary criticism" (Britton 212). By way of conclusion, one can say that the close dialogue between psychoanalytical psychology and literature proved fertile ground in literary theory. Psychoanalysis generates ideas about the working and structure of the human psyche, which creates a common ground between literature and the human world. This common ground implies that psychoanalysis might give us a conceptual roadmap while analysing literary texts or literary texts might supply a lexical resource or conceptual toolbox for psychoanalytical theories. Literature can translate itself easily to psychoanalysis or vice versa as in Schweiser’s words: what Euripides did in Ancient Greek

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Drama is echoed by Freud, as “Freud’s case histories are modern tragedies, transformations of suffering into a narrative event, ‘a significant whole’” (11).

Bibliography Bär, Eugen. “Understanding Lacan.” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science. Vol 3. Eds. L. Goldberger & V.H. Rosen. New York: International UP, 1974. 473-544. Birlik, N & T. Çankaya. Introduction. Lacan in Literature and Film. By N. Birlik, T. Çankaya& T. Aydın. Bethesda, Dublin & Palo Alto: Academica, 2015. Britton, Celia. “Structuralist and Poststructuralist Psychoanalytic and Marxist Theories." The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 8. Ed. R. Selden. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 197-252. Brooks, Peter. Psychoanalysis and Storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. Holland, Norman. Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-andPsychology. New York & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: Norton, 1988. —. Écrits (1st complete edition in English). Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Lakoff, G. &M. Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago & London: Chicago UP, 2003. Lesser, Simon O. Fiction and the Unconscious. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1957. Jauregui, Immaculada. “Psychology and Literature: The Question of Reading the Otherwise.” International Journal of Psychology 83 (2002): 1169-1180. Sarup, Madan. Jacques Lacan. Hertfordshire: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Mellard, James M. Using Lacan, Reading Fiction. Urbana and Chicago: Illinois, 1991. Schneiderman, Stuart. Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1980. Schweiser, Harold. Introduction. Psychoanalysis and Storytelling. By Peter Brooks. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994.

CHAPTER TWO PERIPHERAL WRITING: PSYCHOSIS AND PROSE FROM ERNST HERBECK TO W. G. SEBALD MELISSA S. ETZLER

In the fall of 1966, a twenty-two-year-old Germanist-in-training,1 Winfried Georg Sebald sat at one of the oversized desks in Ryland’s Library in Manchester dutifully penning pieces of what would become his master’s thesis “Carl Sternheim: Critic and Victim of the Wilhelminian Era.”2 The revisionist portrayal of Sternheim created by Sebald, who had already revised his own identity by adopting the moniker Max to distance himself from his inherited German history,3 lands him squarely within the field of German Studies as a provocateur. Many had problems with the content of the work since Sebald associates this Jewish writer with fascist ideology (McCulloh 2003, 176). Sebald’s unconventional approach to Sternheim’s literature was also problematic. Based on Sternheim’s fictional texts, Sebald conducts a psychiatric evaluation of the man himself and creates a case study of Sternheim revealing a pathology resulting from his failed attempts at assimilation within the German bourgeoisie. The genesis of Sebald’s discovery of this approach lies in his desire for

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Though Sebald taught European literature, he published about ten essays on German authors and almost thirty on Austrian writers. For an in-depth study of Sebald’s controversial academic career, see (Schütte, “Against Germanistik”). 2 Carl Sternheim: Kritiker und Opfer der Wilhelminischen Ära, all translations from German into English throughout this article are my own unless otherwise noted. 3 “The name with which family and friends addressed him, Max, had been given to him by himself in the 1960s while he was still a student––a means of separation and starting over.” “Den Namen, mit dem ihn später Familie und Freunde anreden, Max, hat er sich als Student Mitte der sechziger Jahre selbst gegeben––ein Mittel zu Abgrenzung und Neuanfang” (Schütte, W. G. Sebald, 17).

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distraction. Fed up with the writing process and with Sternheim, Sebald lays his work aside to focus on much more stimulating material: Leo Navratil’s Schizophrenia and Language (1966). That Sebald read this text while simultaneously writing his Master’s Thesis is apparent in not only Sebald’s insertion of quotes from Navratil’s book in footnotes but also in his adoption of Navratil’s methods of scrutinizing his schizophrenic patients’ language. In examining Carl Sternheim’s linguistic choices, Sebald pronounces Sternheim schizophrenic based on the qualities of his writing that resemble the characteristics pointed out by Navratil in Schizophrenia and Language. The magnetism of Navratil’s text kept Sebald enthralled as a young academic and continued to exert a force over roughly the next three decades. Sebald alludes to Navratil and his patients in his critical academic writings and his internationally acclaimed prose fiction. Navratil’s text features a variety of short written works by diagnosed schizophrenics and residents of the psychiatric institution, Landesnervenheilanstalt Maria Gugging, just outside of Vienna where Navratil served as director beginning in 1946; he remained active at this institution until his death in 2006. Navratil would give his patients a postcard and then ask them to write a short response to a term such as “giraffe” or “home.” Navratil quickly recognized the aesthetic value of the pieces and argued in his book that the texts written by his patients linguistically mirror canonical poetry by the German greats such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Friedrich Hölderlin. One of the most well-known writers from Navratil’s collection is Ernst Herbeck “Alexander” (19201991) who was consulted beforehand neither regarding his pseudonym nor the publication of his works. Nonetheless, once Herbeck and the other patients were aware of the release, primarily because they were turned into pop stars overnight since several of the most prominent literary figures of the late 1960s, 70s and 80s wanted to come and visit them, they embraced the idea of also being literary authors and visual artists. A few of the authors that travelled to Gugging to meet the artists were Peter Handke, Gerhard Roth, Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker. Navratil took advantage of the fact that many established authors wanted personal contact with his patients and, considering himself a parttime psychiatrist and full-time friend to the patients of his institution, Navratil re-vamped the housing situation for his artists-in-residence. Navratil devoted one home on the property explicitly to the patients who wished to pursue the artistic pursuits that they had initially begun as therapy work. The artists painted a variety of landscapes and abstract, child-like people on the outside of the house in primary colours. Both the

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playful nature of the images as well as the extravagance of the larger-thanlife images have been preserved. Today, one can visit The House of Artists [Das Haus der Künstler] in Maria Gugging as well as the museum in an adjacent house that features visual works created by residents of this institution as well as rotating exhibitions from other institutions. Visitors can purchase the poetry collections as well, including Navratil’s volumes which so fascinated Sebald and many other writers of his generation and beyond, and even watch the 1981 documentary film by Heinz Bütler, Zur Besserung der Person [For the Betterment of the Person], featuring Navratil, Herbeck, from whom the title originated, and the other artists. Before continuing with Navratil and his artists/patients, let us return to Sebald, who we left sitting in the library procrastinating on writing his master’s thesis by reading Navratil’s Schizophrenia and Language instead. Sebald recounts his impression of reading Navratil’s book and how he finds himself particularly drawn to the writings of Ernst Herbeck or “Alexander”: “I first came upon Herbeck’s eccentric figures of speech in 1966. I remember sitting in the Ryland’s Library in Manchester […] every now and then, as if to refresh my mind, [I picked] up a little volume published by dtv […] and [found] myself amazed by the brilliance of the riddling verbal images […]” (Sebald 2005, 125).4 The fact that Sebald emphasizes the location, the Ryland’s Library, in this context is crucial as it draws attention to the academically established contrast between canonical literature that was deemed relevant “culture” by those in privileged positions or elitist groups, Sternheim’s works fall into this camp, and “profane” Outsider Art.5 The library, which typically is home to standard canonical literature, symbolically demonstrates what Sebald would aspire to do in all of his forthcoming projects––give a voice to the marginalized minority by constellating outsider voices with those works labelled canonical, thereby collapsing a well-established border in academia. It seems Sebald arrived in Manchester at just the right time, as

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“Meine erste Begegnung mit den exzentrischen Sprachfiguren Herbecks geht zurück auf das Jahr 1966. Ich entsinne mich, wie ich in der Ryland’s Library in Manchester […] immer wieder das dtv-Bändchen Schizophrenie und Sprache zur Hand nahm und staunte über den Glanz.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (8 Dec. 1992) and (Sebald 2003, 171). 5 For more on the exclusivity of literary works which were deemed worthy of being taught at the university in the mid-1960s, see (Sheppard 2011, 45). In 1972, art critic Roger Cardinal coined the term and published a book on “Outsider Art.” While Cardinal’s term refers to art by the mentally ill created outside of commercial culture and the art institution, it also includes art by people who feel inspired to create despite the lack of any official training or education in the field.

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his colleagues at the university, where Sebald was not only working on his master’s thesis but also working as a German Assistant (Lektor), were like-minded thinkers. For example, one colleague, Professor Raymond Furness, often voiced his preference for “the ‘off-beat, outré and stuff outside the canon’” (Sheppard 2011, 72). Although Sebald would ultimately incorporate the poetry found in Navratil’s book within his own academic and prose writing, at this stage Navratil’s own style of psychiatric analysis and his attempt to dissipate the border between genius and sanity is what seems to impress Sebald the most since he conducts a reading of Sternheim’s literature in a decidedly Navratilian manner.

W. G. Sebald, a Brief Biography A concise outline of Sebald’s life grants an understanding regarding why he would be so intent on not only becoming intimately familiar with Navratil’s work but also making personal connections with Navratil and Herbeck. Born in Wertach, Germany at the end of World War II (18 May 1944), Sebald demonstrates that tendency so often found in writers of his generation––a compulsive literary return to the war in an endless process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past. Sebald unusually positions himself as a child born of trauma, the victim of an abusive and malfunctioning parental society. He states: To this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war, I feel as if I were its child, so to speak as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me, and one from which I shall never entirely emerge. […] I know now that at the time when I was lying in my bassinet on the balcony of the Seefeld house and looking up at the pale blue sky, there was a pall of smoke in the air all over Europe. (Kaufmann 2008, 108)

Despite Sebald’s lack of direct experience with the war, “Sebald argues that through imaginative empathy, he has somehow experienced more than others have and has been truly scarred by events while the others have skated by on the surface of memories they have repressed” (Ibid.). His ability for “imaginative empathy” is what will ultimately enable Sebald’s alignment of himself with marginalized individuals at the cost of turning his back on his home country. Criticisms of post-war German society pepper Sebald’s prose works, despite his popularity in Great Britain and the United States, his works are comparatively under-researched within Germany.

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Because Sebald believed his father, who was in the German army and was released from a prisoner of war camp in 1947, to be a culpable figure of the Second World War, he transferred his resentment of his father to the entire generation and Germany.6 Sebald was frustrated by the collective madness of his father’s generation that demonstrated willful amnesia and normalized silence when it came to the war. He also loathed how Germany tolerated former members of the National Socialist Party continuing in official governmental and state positions after the war had ended. Sebald sought an escape from the corruption he viewed throughout mainstream Germany and also from the guilt he felt he had somehow inherited by his birthplace, nationality and the fact that his family remained untouched in their rural home throughout the war. Despite his attempts to learn more about the war, during his undergraduate studies at the University of Freiburg, his frustration increasingly grew as he discovered the issue to be taboo. He was shocked by the lack of information available, especially since his time there coincided with the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt (1965). The experience in Freiburg was, however, not entirely negative. It was here that Sebald met Albert Rasche, who later became a distinguished psychoanalyst. Rasche, like Navratil, was interested in overlapping the fields of psychology and literature. Rasche participated in literary and artistic circles, but his primary area of interest remained psychiatry. Although Sebald transferred to the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and then immigrated to the United Kingdom in 1966, their friendship survived. They exchanged several letters over the next thirty years,7 and followed each other’s work. It is therefore likely that several of Sebald’s ideas and continuing interest in psychiatry stem from this early friendship. Feeling himself an outsider in Germany because of his inability to move beyond the Germans’ collective guilt, Sebald fled the country. After

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“Although Georg Sebald [Max’s father] was never a member of the National Socialist Party, Sebald saw his father as a follower and at the same time an accomplice of the Nazi regime not least on the basis of his participation in the general swearing to silence which was the common means of dealing with the past during the Adenauer era” [Obgleich Georg Sebald nie Mitglied der NSDAP gewesen war, sah Sebald in seinem Vater als einem Mitläufer zugleich einen Komplizen der Naziherrschaft, nicht zuletzt durch dessen Teilnahme an der allgemeinen Verschwörung des Schweigens, die den Umgang mit der Vergangenheit in der Adenauer-Ära prägte] (Schütte, W. G. Sebald 19). 7 Included in Sebald’s literary remains at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv [German Literary Archive] in Marbach, Germany are letters ranging from the early 1980s up to 1997.

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finishing his master’s thesis at Manchester, Sebald accepted a permanent position teaching European Literature at the University of East Anglia in 1970 and remained at this university until his premature death in a car accident near Norwich on 14 December 2001. While teaching, Sebald wrote many academic essays, but today he is most known for his prose fiction, including Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001). Around the time of his passing, many regarded Sebald as a strong contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. All of Sebald’s works deal not only with war, memory and traumatic displacement, but also with psychiatry, madness, and creativity. Throughout Sebald’s oeuvre, he particularly contemplates the mentality that allowed for the atrocities of the Second World War and which continues to this day in varying degrees. Ironically, to comprehend the madness ruling Germany at that time, Sebald found a logical, if inherently ambiguous, explanation in the writings of diagnosed schizophrenic Ernst Herbeck. Most scholars have approached Sebald by way of his works of prose fiction in which mental illness is perpetually looming between the lines, and yet, it is rarely thematized as explicitly as in his academic essays in which one finds an omnipotent fixation on creativity borne of psychosis. Focusing on the inspiration Sebald gained from said creativity borne of psychosis, Sebald located an answer to the madness of his parents’ generation within the voice of the marginalized outsider Herbeck. Sebald wrote more academic essays on Ernst Herbeck than on nearly any other writer. While Sebald initially read Navratil’s Schizophrenia and Language in 1966, the text made such an impression on him that he also purchased Navratil’s Alexander’s Poetic Texts [Alexanders poetische Texte] upon its release in 1977. This text ultimately inspired Sebald to travel to Vienna in 1980 to meet Ernst Herbeck (Alexander) and take him on an outing. In a letter Sebald wrote to Navratil thanking him for a visit, he claims that although the two only went for a walk and drank coffee together, this experience helped him gain a better understanding of Herbeck’s poetry through their conversation. The meeting also taught Sebald something about himself as, in his later prose fiction, he often assumes Herbeck’s worldview as his own. Sometimes, an exploration of the psychological construction of one’s self can only be conducted by constellating one’s perspective with that of the other. Encouraged by Navratil to publically share his interpretation of Herbeck’s poetry, Sebald began drafting his ideas which he would then send back to Navratil for review. Although it seems to find the correct venue for publication kept Sebald’s work on Herbeck on the backburner, years later they managed to appear in journals,

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newspapers and Sebald’s collected volumes of his academic essays. Sebald composed two scholarly essays on Herbeck and the semifictionalized account of their 1980 encounter in his novel Vertigo (1990).8 That books like Leo Navratil’s Schizophrenia and Language gained such a widespread audience that Sebald possessed it the year of its release demonstrates this work was part of a new and expansive trend. Namely, it is indicative of the multinational revolution launched by the antipsychiatry movement ushered in with the release of Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness (1961). The goals and ideas of the antipsychiatry movement expanded beyond the field of psychiatry into art, one of the most commonly cited works being the book, and Miloš Forman’s cinematic adaptation (1975), Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). Next, I will briefly outline how the worlds of art and psychiatry managed to collide.

The Myths of Mental Illness: Antipsychiatry and the Critique of Capitalism The intersection of psychiatry and art is due in part to the “antipsychiatry” movement, coined by the South African Marxist psychiatrist David Cooper, which questioned the foundations upon which the psychiatric institution was based. The “antipsychiatry” debate was also a derivative of a larger conversation that had to do with capitalist critiques. It is no coincidence that the criticisms which targeted both capitalist and psychiatric institutions appeared and then escalated around the 1960s and 1970s. As tension over the Vietnam War rose, this period saw endless protests and demonstrations. People demanded equal rights and many witnessed the mental health issue as emblematic of the repressive tendencies of capitalist society since “it always comes down to the domination of the ‘healthy’ over the ‘sick.’”9 Following the publication of “The Myth of Mental Illness” (1960) by psychoanalyst Thomas Szasz, many began to wonder how the mentally ill were treated behind the walls of the mental healthcare facilities. Many asked if mental institutions could

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The first article Sebald wrote following his visit to Herbeck was “Eine kleine Traverse. Das poetische Werk Ernst Herbecks” [A Small Traverse. The Poetic Work of Ernst Herbeck] which has not yet been translated into English. This was originally published in Manuskripte. Zeitschrift für Literatur 74 (1981): 35-41. The essay "The Little Hare" followed this article. Finally, the chapter “All’estero” from Vertigo fictionalizes Sebald’s visit to Herbeck at the end of October in 1980. 9 “Es geht immer auch um die Herrschaft der ‘Gesunden’ über die ‘Kranken’” (Gorsen 1977, 13).

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be fostering an unjust and oppressive power relation between the physicians and their patients, a consideration which prompted further explorations since the psychiatric institute was merely one of many potentially corrupt institutions. Thus, the displacement of power in the psychiatric system was increasingly viewed by the public as a representation of a defect inherent in capitalist society. This attack upon the overarching structure of the mental health care system became an extended metaphor indicating that it was not the individual that was (mentally) ill, but rather the system itself: “The (mentally) ill individual accordingly appears as a victim of misguided societal developments. The so-called madness of the individual corresponds to a pathological social context.”10 It was no longer merely a biological defect which made an individual mad, but rather a conglomerate of contributing factors, all of which could be located in “normal” daily life such as a flawed familial upbringing or coming of age within a corrupt societal system. What was considered to be normal suddenly was questioned and looked suspiciously abnormal. Because psychiatry was placed under a microscope, a call for revolution against unjust capitalist states that used power relations to control the citizens rapidly developed. Winfried Kudszu’s quote evidences this: “in the double-bind, Ronald D. Laing recognizes the antinomy of a social structure that entangles individuals systematically within contradictions to manipulate them more easily.”11 By the 1970s, the antipsychiatry movement had gained international recognition and support. A general trend of employing the abnormal as a way to analyze and question the norm became widespread, including within the art world: “the antipsychiatry movement had, with its critique of normal behavior patterns, sharpened views of the productive abnormality of art and literature which decidedly distanced itself from the normal sense of reality.”12 While art by the mentally ill pointed out idiosyncrasies of the norm, it also revealed the border separating normal from abnormal to be liminal at best. Throughout Sebald’s works on Herbeck, he utilizes

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“Der Kranke erscheint dementsprechend als Opfer gesellschaftlicher Fehlentwicklungen, sein sogenannter Irrsinn entspricht einem pathogenen Sozialzusammenhang” (Kudszus 1977, 3). 11 “Ronald D. Laing etwa erkennt nicht zuletzt im Double-Bind die Antinomien einer Gesellschaftsordnung, die das Individuum systematisch in Widerspüche verstrickt, um es dann leichter manipulieren zu können” (Ibid.). 12 “Die Antipsychiatrie hat mit ihrer Kritik normaler Verhaltensweisen auch den Blick für die produktive Abnormalität einer Kunst und Literatur geschärft, die sich entschieden vom normalen Wirklichkeitsverständnis entfernt” (Ibid.).

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Herbeck’s writings to illustrate the idiosyncrasies of the norm hyperbolically. Moving beyond an erasure of the border between sanity and insanity, Sebald turns the tables to demonstrate sanity is much more prevalent in insanity than the sane societal structure (which Sebald and antipsychiatry followers see as insane) would like to admit. While the antipsychiatry movement turned the mainstream gaze onto mental health facilities, this was made possible because interest in art by patients of psychiatric institutions had already been gaining steam. After World War II, artist Jean Dubuffet began promoting, using a term he coined, art brut. Dubuffet was a staunch opponent of the regulations and standards of institutionalized art and sought out an art form that had not been tainted by cultural and historical influence. As such, he travelled to various psychiatric institutions intending to collect aesthetically pleasing ahistorical pieces. In an interview from 1956, Dubuffet stated: “In delirium, I see salvation […] I am very taken by madness […] in it I see our only chance […] Art only interests me insofar as it is an exercise in this direction. Reasoned art makes me laugh. It is nothing in my opinion” (Da Costa and Hergott 2006, 140). In this turn against reasoned art, the tendency of the mentally ill to create works out of found objects, namely whatever happened to be on hand, intrigued Dubuffet: […] the idea of creating an entire environment out of objets trouvés, as pioneered in Dada and Surrealism, was also explored by amateur builders sometimes grouped together under the term art brut […] Many of the smaller examples of art brut collected by Jean Dubuffet consisted of large quantities of found objects. (Gale 2009)

This method mirrors what Claude Lévi-Strauss would refer to in his book Das wilde Denken (Wild Thinking, 1962) as bricolage: art which was made out of odds and ends or recycling of materials from objects which have fallen into disuse. Despite the fact that Lévi-Strauss employs this term in an anthropological connection with the mode of creation demonstrated by native tribes, this is the definition Sebald turns to describe his own and also Ernst Herbeck’s methods. Bricolge, in the production of literary works, brings fragmented objects together, yet instead of collecting actual discarded objects, the literary bricoleur accumulates fragmented words and ideas from the past and conjoins them in the present in a novel way. They still simultaneously memorialize the time from which they originated: “the tinkerer’s work is pieced together from refuse and object fragments, the fossilized witnesses of the history of

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an individual or a society.”13 Wilful or not, Sebald is endlessly driven to remember and reconstitute the past in meaningful ways in the present and adapting what he sees as Herbeck’s bricolage method, he can constellate the past, through objects, with his present. Within this presentation is the implication that the artwork and the fragments of the past contained therein will soon be again broken apart, perhaps to take on new meanings based on interpretations from varying socio-historical contexts if recombined.

Ernst Herbeck, A Brief Biography Born in Stockerau, near Vienna, in 1920, Ernst Herbeck’s childhood was marked by exclusion. Herbeck suffered from a variety of physical ailments, but the most detrimental to both his health and acceptance in his community were his poor vision in his left eye and his cleft-lip. He underwent several operations for his lip, but even the most successful surgery left him with a speech impediment.14 While he worked industriously as a student, his medical visits required he be held back in school and he became increasingly isolated from his peers. Herbeck had no poetic training and only the most basic exposure to literature. At the age of twenty, he went to a psychiatric clinic for the first time. He experienced severe mood swings and claimed a girl had been attempting to hypnotize him through Morse code. Herbeck was treated with electroshock therapy in several hospitals for his psychiatric issues over the next few years until he was transferred to what would become his most permanent residence in 1946, the psychiatric institution in Gugging. Leo Navratil had started there that same year. Although Herbeck was released for a brief period to live in a nearby housing complex with limited supervision (which was where Sebald picked Herbeck up for their outing), in 1981, Herbeck felt uncomfortable in these unfamiliar surroundings and elected

                                                             13

“Das Werk des Bastlers, das sich aus Abfällen und Bruchstücken, aus ‘den fossilen Zeugen der Geschichte eines Individuums oder einer Gesellschaft’ zusammensetzt” (Sebald “A Small Traverse,” 138-39). 14 An example of Herbeck's speech patterns can be viewed in the documentary film Zur Besserung der Person in which, on one occasion, Herbeck meets a visitor for a cup of coffee and the visitor of obviously perplexed by Herbeck's statements. Winfried Kudszus, who visited the institution in Maria Gugging on several occasions, verified the struggles Herbeck faced in making himself verbally understood. This did not impede Herbeck's desire, however, to read his works aloud and one such public reading (although the audience’s reaction remains ambiguous) is also featured in the film (Kudszus 1984).

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to return to Maria Gugging where he remained until his passing in September 1991. Herbeck’s poems continue to appear and, as recently as 2012, Ugly Duckling Press released Everyone Has a Mouth, a collected volume of poems by Herbeck translated by Gary Sullivan and in 2016 the Museum Gugging organized a special exhibition devoted entirely to Herbeck.

The Mutation of Mankind To shift gears at this stage to ease into an explanation of the most prominent element that Sebald gathered from his readings of Herbeck’s poems and then recreated in his prose fiction, I’ll focus on how Sebald revamps the animal-human hybrids which Herbeck created in his poems in two ways. Sebald draws attention to both a negative and positive societal turn in developed Western countries after World War II. The decidedly negative characters that Sebald includes in his works are amphibianhuman-machine creatures that show a devolutionary stage that has increased since our ushering in of high capitalism.15 The prioritizing of material objects over humanitarian concerns results in a lack of empathy with one another and a collapse of our harmonious identification with nature. As we exploit the natural environment for the sake of convenience and we neglect to consider strategies for sustainability, we are demoted on the evolutionary scale, as Sebald argues and sees metaphorically, if inadvertently, expressed in Herbeck’s poetic creatures. The positive direction for which we can strive is an embracing of our mammalian nature: Sebald idealizes and attempts to adopt Herbeck’s close identification with animals: Herbeck believed he had a familial relationship to hares due to his cleft lip. Herbeck’s outlook regarding the natural world demonstrates an empathy that Sebald feels to be lacking, especially in post-war German society. Readers of Sebald’s prose fiction cannot help but be struck by the uncanny appearance of unusual human characters that seem more like atavistic hybrids. While these figures are partly inspired by Sebald’s anthropological readings, a similar hybrid character created by Herbeck is analyzed by Sebald in his essay “A Small Traverse” (“Eine kleine Traverse”). It is therefore likely that Sebald was equally inspired by

                                                            

15 While the positive animal-mammal figures Sebald creates seem to be most inspired by Herbeck, these amphibian creatures put the reader in mind of Sebald’s writings on Franz Kafka, in whose works Sebald also located creatures that point to humankind’s demise. For more on this Sebald-Kafka connection, see (Sebald 1986).

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Herbeck when composing such figures for his books. Concerning anthropological writings which were circulating at the time and to which Sebald (but not Herbeck) was exposed, it seems the most influential for Sebald was French Germanist Pierre Bertaux’s book The Mutation of Mankind (Die Mutation der Menschheit, 1963).16 Bertaux argues that the regression of reason, illustrated by our reckless industrializing of nature and mechanization of humankind, is reflected in our corporeal structure. Bertaux claims the regressive tendency of man, which is already underway, will result in more noticeable physical malformations and mutations. Eventually, the world will see the origination of an entirely new species, assuming we do not destroy ourselves first of course. The members of the Frankfurt School posed a similar theory on regression that they expressed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno claim humankind began a process of deterioration that started during the Age of Enlightenment and culminated during the Second World War when instrumentalized reason created industrialized mass killing. Humanity is “thereby forced back to more primitive anthropological stages, since, with the technical facilitation of existence, the continuance of domination demands the fixation of instincts by greater repression” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 28).17 Sebald sees this downward turn as an ongoing process that continued after the war into capitalist society. In hyperbolic form, Sebald incorporates mutated, atavistic creatures to demonstrate the continuing degeneration of humankind in the second half of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Sebald locates a similar, witting or not, tendency in Ernst Herbeck’s writings. Thus, the mutations which Sebald incorporates into his prose works in the 1990s are partially inspired by figures from Herbeck’s poems which Sebald analyzed in his academic writings in the 1980s. Many of Sebald’s German characters are hyperbolically atavistic mutations to critique the lacking empathy of Germans after World War II. Sebald sees this deterioration as propagated by the German tendency to repress any emotional relation to the past, especially guilt, and by the shifting priorities from humanitarian concerns to a capitalist prioritizing of

                                                             16

This work has not been translated into English. There is a copy of this text in Sebald’s library, housed at the German Literary Archive in Marbach (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach). 17 “Die Menschheit, deren Geschicklichkeit und Kenntnis mit der Arbeitsteilung sich differenziert, wird zugleich auf anthropologisch primitivere Stufen zurückgezwungen, denn die Dauer der Herrschaft bedingt bei technischer Erleichterung des Daseins die Fixierung der Instinkte durch stärkere Unterdrückung” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969, 42).

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material goods. For example, in Sebald’s Vertigo, the semiautobiographical narrator returns to his hometown and describes the setting at the train station as: “now and then some vehicle would crawl slowly along the gleaming black roads, the last of an amphibian species close to extinction, retreating now into deeper waters. The ticket hall was also deserted, apart from a small chap with a goiter wearing a green loden cape” (Sebald 2000, 172).18 The man with the goiter in the green raincoat is undoubtedly meant to evoke a visualization of a frog; thus Sebald comments that, through the industrialization process, machines and the humans that created them have both regressed to that primordial state from which we have progressively evolved. Similarly, in the final chapter of Sebald’s The Emigrants, the painter Max Ferber attempts to tell the likewise semi-autobiographical narrator as much of his life story as his memory will permit, but he admits he cannot recall much from his childhood other than a series of images from Munich between 1933 and 1939. Visually, society from the child’s perspective was a common mass engaged in endless processions, marches, and parades. Different uniforms and insignia were the only signifiers of individuality. Regarding societal transformation, Ferber retrospectively recalls the emerging uniformed mass of Nazi Germany in evolutionary terms. He states: “it was as if a new species of humanity, one after another, was evolving before our very eyes” (182). Although Ferber claims his memory of the period is limited since he has lost his mother tongue, the reader knows it is not only Ferber’s linguistic ability that has devolved but also the German language itself. This points to another cultural phenomenon subject to mutation and regression: language. Sebald often alludes in his writing to the monstrous language that was connected with Nazi ideology. As Ruth Vogel-Klein has argued, for Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, he replicated the monstrous terms provided as a glossary at the beginning of H. G. Adler’s book Theresienstadt. Some examples of the pseudotechnical jargon used in concentration camps include  Entwesungsübersiedlung (relocation for disinfestation), Bagatellreparaturstätte (a repair shop for small items), or Küchenbeschwerdeorgane (the body/office for complaints about the kitchen) (Vogel-Klein 2014, 186). Thus, the German language itself had morphed to mirror and embody the regressive political ideology.

                                                            

18 “Ab und zu bewegte sich langsam irgendein Fahrzeug über die schwarz glänzenden Straßen. Letzte Exemplare einer im Aussterben begriffenen amphibischen Art, die nun zurückzogen in die Tiefe des Wassers. Auch die Schalterhalle war leer bis auf einen kleinen kropfigen Menschen in einem Wetterfleck” (Sebald, Schwindel. Gefühle, 188).

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In The Emigrants, the narrator journeys by train through Germany to Steinach and takes note of: […] a fat, square-headed man of about fifty had plumped himself down […]. Puffing noisily, he dug his unshapely tongue, still caked with bits of food, around his half-open mouth. There he sat, legs apart, his stomach and gut stuffed horribly into summer shorts. I could not say whether his physical and mental deformity […] was the result of a long psychiatric confinement, some innate debility, or simply beer drinking [...]. To my relief the monster got out at the first stop.” (Sebald 2002, 218-19)19

With a man this gluttonous, he is essentially a stuffed sausage. Rather than presenting the reader with another regressive figure here, Sebald uses him to critique consumer culture by illustrating its enabling of excessive physical ingestion, to the point that we become what we eat. In this character, one sees the negative reciprocity of capitalism, and the man is content to consume, so much so that he is emotionally unaffected by this mutation of his own body. The narrator wonders if this physical (selfwrought) and mental deformity (the unreflective continuation along a destructive path as evidenced by his mouth being half-open expecting more) is the result of psychiatric confinement. Here psychiatric confinement is of course not referring to what Sebald knew of institutions like Navratil’s, but rather a metaphorical application of Foucauldian theories of mental institutions as systems of power serving as a means for society to tame its members through institutionalization. In this sense, the German passenger can be seen as a victim, and he is unaware of society’s coercion encouraging his consumptive desires. On the other hand, the narrator still recognizes a masochistic tendency, calls him a monster and is overjoyed at his departure. While Sebald’s characters in his prose fiction tend to degenerate into amphibian-like creatures or gluttonous monsters, Herbeck peppers his writing with devolutionary human-animal hybrids. Much like the final

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“Mir gegenüber hatte sich […] ein dicker, querschädliger Mann von vielleicht fünfzig Jahren hingehockt [...]. Schwer vor sich hin schnaufend, wälzte er in einem fort seine unförmige Zunge, auf der sich noch Essensreste befanden, in seinem halboffenen Mund herum. Die Beine gespreizt, saß er da, Bauch und Unterleib auf eine grauenerregende Weise eingezwängt in eine kurze Sommerhose. Ich hätte nicht zu sagen gewusst, ob die Körper- und Geistdeformation meines Mitreisenden ihre Ursache hatte in einer langen psychiatrischen Internierung, in einer angeborenen Debilität oder allein im Biertrinken und Brotzeitmachen. Zu meiner beträchtlichen Erleichterung stieg der Unhold gleich in der ersten Station nach Gemünden aus” (Sebald, Die Ausgewanderten, 328).

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example given of Sebald’s gluttonous man who is encouraged by the establishment in his degeneration, Herbeck also includes a character in his poem “Blau” [“Blue”] that Sebald reads as a commentary on our devolution under the control of the mechanized state-system. In “A Small Traverse” [“Eine kleine Traverse”], Sebald performs a close reading of Herbeck’s “Blue” to highlight the unusual juxtaposition of the natural, environmental world with the artificiality of the bureaucratic, industrialized state system. Blue.20 The Red Color. The Yellow Color. The Dark green The Heavens ELLENO The Patent-ender The Sock-l, the Ship. The Rainbow. […]

In his interpretation, Sebald first focuses on the kaleidoscope of colors Herbeck conjures in the first two sentences that then become slightly muted by the dark green as the focus moves from primary colors to objects. The switch takes the reader from the heavens to the earth with “ELLENO” a word without clear meaning in English or German, but one that sounds reminiscent of the alphabetical ordering L-M-N-O. This would bring the reader into the world of paperwork and bureaucracy. Although there is no clear-cut appearance of either bureaucrats or animals in this poem, Sebald reads one particular figure as an embodiment of both. Examining the Patent-ender, Sebald writes: “[…] the mysterious, tiny figure of the Patentender puts one in mind of a half-stag, half-public servant […].”21 Inherent within the term is the one who draws patents, but since Sebald specifies this is a “tiny” (winzig) figure, one can assume he is not the person responsible for the inventions requiring a patent but rather an intermediary of sorts. He may deal exclusively with the paperwork, and this paperwork would be divorced from meaning and content as the sentence prior places the focus on the alphabet and singular letters. The

                                                            

20 “Blau. / Die Rote Farbe. / Die Gelbe Farbe. / Die Dunkelgrüne / Der Himmel ELLENO / Der Patentender / Das Sockerl, Das Schiff. / Der Regenbogen” (Navratil 1977, 159). 21 “[…] und die mysteriös winzige Figur des Patentenders, der halb an einen Hirsch, halb an einen Beamten erinnert […]” (Sebald, “A Small Traverse,” 145).

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term “Sock-l underscores the diminutive.” The word can be translated on the one hand as “small sock,” but because of the audible resonance between Herbeck’s “Sockerl” and the German word “der Sockel” (pedestal), the reader also envisions a rather absurdly small stool upon which the patent writer must precariously balance while conducting his work. Herbeck hybridizes his public servant by combining him with the animalistic term “-ender.” In German, Acht Ender refers to eight-point deer antlers. Thus, this half-man, half-deer figure balanced on his stool also causes the reader to think of a rather absurd and grotesque trophy: a head of a bureaucrat adorned with deer antlers. The transition from “The Patent-ender / The Sock-l” to “the Ship” in Herbeck’s poem should indicate a hope that the Patent-ender may flee from his situation, and yet, because of the author’s situation and Sebald’s perpetual association of ships with endless searching and longing, this freedom is limited. The next line of the poem severs the focus on the objects by inserting the overwhelming colors of the rainbow. With this, Herbeck highlights the beauty of the environment but also its allencompassing nature and thus our connection to it. We simultaneously distance ourselves from nature via the mechanization of our lives (signified in the paperwork of the patents) and must embrace it (the figure writing the patents is still graced with a set of antlers which demonstrates an inherent interconnectedness in how we embody nature). Because Herbeck’s “Blue” sporadically features bursts of colors that undercut and interrupt the reader’s ability to ponder the meaning of the objects in the poem, the focus remains on nature so that, while the reader thinks of the bureaucratic side of the patenter, the lasting images are colors and the man-animal relationship. Perhaps Herbeck’s linking of the patenter with the stag is a side-effect of his own, personal association of himself with rabbits. In any case, it seems this association at least partially inspired Sebald’s identification of himself and the semi-autobiographical characters of his prose fiction with the canine realm.

Becoming Animal Although Sebald signifies devolution in his prose fiction by the regression to a creaturely, amphibian-like state in which man and machine appear as hollow objects, he locates a positive alternative in Herbeck’s poetry: an embracing of our mammalian nature. This comes naturally to Herbeck, who identified and equated himself with rabbits, and it is this close identification with the animal realm that critics of the increasing mechanization of humankind in capitalist societies encouraged. As a

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foundation for Sebald’s interpretation of Herbeck’s close association with the animal realm, he turns again to the writings of Pierre Bertaux. In The Mutation of Mankind, Bertaux claims that poets are most aligned with humans from the Paleolithic Age (Bertaux 1979, 12) since it was during this time that people demonstrated “poetic temperaments” [Dichtertemperamente] and began to hold spiritual beliefs and create artworks (Ibid., 11). While Bertaux’s poets are positive figures because they are most inclined to encourage strategies for a sustainable future by reminding us of our close ties to nature, they are decidedly in the minority and do not possess the power required to bring the actions of the consumptive others to a halt. Bertaux believed the drive to consume the earth’s resources has solidified our rapid course towards destruction, or in the most hopeful case, mutation. Bertaux writes: While consumptive demands and the earth’s population increase, the natural resources which we collect decrease, as does their regenerative abilities. At the intersecting point of these curves, something will happen. An event awaits us which will be characterized by mutation or catastrophe.22

Inspired by Bertaux, Sebald looks at Herbeck’s poetic temperament and his identification with rabbits as emblematic for the way everyone should empathize with mammals, and thereby the natural world as a whole. Sebald imitates this via his identification with the canine realm. While this identification with animals is positive, Sebald also highlights the negative ramification of Herbeck’s identification with rabbits. As a child, Herbeck was forced to eat a rabbit that his family had slaughtered for dinner. In the long-term guilt Herbeck suffered following this incident, which is apparent in Herbeck’s return to this incident so many years later in his poems, Sebald reads the key to understanding both the particular victimperpetrator duality of the Germans following the Second World War as well as the innate consumptive tendency of humankind. In the chapter “All’estero” from Vertigo, Sebald recounts, as a semiautobiographical narrator, the events of the fall day in 1980 when he met Herbeck personally. The two go for a walk together, observe the landscape, come across a dog which seems to have gone mad due to

                                                             22

“Während die Erdbevölkerung und ihre Konsumansprüche wachsen, gehen die von der Natur angesammelten Rohstoffe ihrer Erschöpfung entgegen. Am Schnittpunkt der beiden Kurven wird etwas geschehen. Ein Ereignis steht bevor, das entweder die Züge einer Mutation oder diejenigen einer Katastrophe tragen wird [...]” (Ibid. 12).

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confinement, and end the outing in a café where Herbeck composes a poem for Sebald/the narrator. In the sequence, Sebald decidedly establishes a dichotomy between himself and Herbeck on the poetictemperament side, by showing their empathy and identification with the confined dog, and the consumer-oriented world of the majority who are currently in their homes eating lunch, represented by the sounds of silverware on plates, on the other. The fact that the animal for identification is a dog stems from Sebald’s career as a Germanist. The desire to include a figurative use of dogs in his works is likely connected with his familiarity with a speech given by author Elias Canetti as part of author Hermann Broch’s 50th birthday celebration. Sebald states: “Canetti equated the essence/temperament of the true poet with that of a dog in a speech given in 1936.”23 A close reading of the mad dog scene shall reveal that Sebald and Herbeck’s identification with meeker creatures enables their understanding of their ambiguous position in the world. I support this argument by explaining Sebald’s interpretation of Herbeck’s worldview based on his identification with rabbits. The crux of Sebald’s interpretation, which appears in his “The Little Hare” essay on Herbeck, is that humankind, like the animal kingdom, is simultaneously victim and perpetrator. This victim-perpetrator position is universal and yet the majority of people in society, and especially in post-World War II German society, according to Sebald, are blind to this state.

The Canine Perspective For Sebald to adopt the canine perspective, a mode that comes naturally to Herbeck, he must adjust his worldview to mirror Herbeck’s. Sebald sets to achieve this through the way he conducts research, like a dog, and by adopting Herbeck’s method of writing, in the manner as mentioned above of bricolage. In Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological study Wild Thinking (Das wilde Denken, 1962),24 he explains that the primitive mode of gathering information was conducted in an animalistic manner. Namely, it resembled the tracking methods of dogs: “[LéviStrauss] defines the verb ‘bricoler’ as the performance of a movement which was not previously mapped out, similar to the roundabout way a

                                                             23

“Canetti hat, in einer im November 1936 gehaltenen Rede zu Brochs 50. Geburtstag, das Wesen des wirklichen Dichters dem eines Hundes verglichen” (Sebald 1972, 282). 24 This work has not been translated into English.

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dog searches after picking up a scent.”25 Sebald often claimed he was inspired by the canine methods when seeking out information for his next book. Sebald says his doctoral research was likewise conducted in this anti-systematic method, mirroring the way a dog runs through a field following the advice of his nose. Sebald explains that he is much like a dog that “traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable matter. And he invariably finds what he’s looking for. I think that, as I’ve always had dogs, I’ve learned from them how to do this” (Cuomo 2007, 94; Cuomo 2001). While a humorous description of academic pursuit, it is also an anarchistic stab at the hypocrisy of academia and certain educational systems. Continually seeking to establish his path in academia, Sebald always maintained a critical stance. As previously mentioned, during Sebald’s years of study at the University in Freiburg, he first recognized how much information concerning Germany’s actions during World War II was suppressed. Not only was information that Sebald believed should be public inaccessible, he also found it impossible to force himself to conform to the formalities and expectations of academia such as the conventions of writing articles in a certain way for publication, or the avoidance in his field of German Studies to take a critical perspective on canonical authors. Sebald furthermore states that, when he sees dogs in their tracking process, he cannot help but feel a familial tenderness: “And when I observe them, I have the feeling that they are my brothers.”26 Those familiar with Sebald’s oeuvre will recognize that, in this alignment and perceived brotherhood, Sebald is not only establishing a connection between himself and dogs but also between himself and Herbeck. In Sebald’s essay “The Little Hare,” he demonstrates Herbeck’s way of perceiving himself as the twin brother of rabbits. In one particular poem, Herbeck attempts to express the story of his birth. In his metaphorical understanding of the biological process of birth, he aligns the human sexual act with that of rabbits. In Sebald’s article “The Little Hare,” he includes a poem by Herbeck which discusses the wonder of the magician who can produce rabbits by simply reaching into his top hat. The conjuror conjures things up: little hares. Scarves. Eggs.

                                                            

25 “Er definiert das Verb ‘bricoler’ als das Vollführen einer ‘nicht vorgezeichneten’ Bewegung, ähnlich der eines suchenden ‘Hundes, der Umwege macht” (Mosbach 2007, 84). 26 “[...] und wenn ich sie betrachte, habe ich das Gefühl, dass sie meine Brüder sind” (Rondas 2008, 357).

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He keeps on doing magic. He puts the scarf in the top hat and brings it out again with a tame hare in it. (Sebald 2005, 129-30)27

Sebald sees the tame rabbit that comes out of the hat at the end of the poem as “undoubtedly the totem animal in which the writer sees himself” (Ibid, 130). Using the phrase “totem animal” is Sebald’s way of demonstrating that he reads Herbeck’s outlook as similar to what LéviStrauss described in a passage on Native American beliefs regarding the hare: […] in Native American myth, the harelip was viewed as a symbol of a twin birth that was not brought to completion. It is this duality in one which makes the hare with its cloven face into a supreme deity, into an intermediary between heaven and earth. (Ibid, 131)28

While the quote has to do with deities, Sebald finds it applicable in a clarification of Herbeck’s view of his origin due to the association of the hare with twin births, due to the magical nature (much like the realm of myths, Herbeck believes the magician can produce a hare out of nothing), and also due to its liminality (as the hare is between heaven and earth, so too is Herbeck simultaneously inside and outside society). Thus, Sebald reads into Herbeck’s poem an expression of his duality and what he views as the separation at birth from his other self, his brother, the hare. To underscore his theory, he mentions another poem by Herbeck in which he was supposed to write about an embryo but instead writes about an “unborn fabulous animal more closely related to him, which he calls the empyrum” (Ibid., 130). In Herbeck’s poem, he writes: Hail to the mother! A future child in the mother’s womb. When I was an empyrum, she operated on me. I can’t forget

                                                            

27 “Der Zauberer zaubert Sachen: / Kleine Hasen. Tücher. Eier. / Er zaubert wiederholt. / Er steckt das Tuch in den Zylinder / und zieht es wieder heraus / es ist ein zahmer Hase dabei” (Sebald 2003, 175). 28 “[...] die Hasenscharte in den amerikanischen Indianermythen [gilt] als der Ansatz zu einer nicht vollendeten Zwillingsgeburt. Es ist diese Zweiheit in einem, die den Hasen mit seinem gespaltenem Gesicht zu einer allerhöchsten Gottheit macht, zu einem Vermittler zwischen Himmel und Erde” (Ibid., 177).

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The trauma Herbeck suffered due to his cleft palate, which not only set him apart from others physically but also made it difficult for him even to communicate normally, remained with him throughout his life. Herbeck reflects on his birth with regret because this moment is indicative of the irreparable separation from what could have been his harmonious coexistence with the animal realm, all the more painful since he was denied a harmonious co-existence with the human realm.

Symbiotic Relationships versus Self-Consumption When the narrator of Vertigo and Herbeck are confronted with the mad dog in the chapter “All’estero,” the reader sees a clear instance of the semi-autobiographical narrator’s attempt to assume an empathy with animals that comes naturally to the schizophrenic Herbeck. Due in part to the nature of his illness, Herbeck’s poetry reveals that in his observation of the world, there is a decided lack of differentiation between the animal and human realms. Because of Herbeck’s peripheral position within society, he can look at the world with an objective or naïve eye, and this perspective contributes to his ability to identify and communicate with animals and objects that would normally be overlooked. The mad dog scene, which is only one paragraph (fourteen sentences) long, begins with the narrator and Herbeck heading towards a village on foot after visiting the medieval fortress, Castle Greifenstein, at the top of a cliff. The narrator comments: Downcast we strode on in the autumn sunshine, side by side […]. Of the people who lived [in Kritzendorf] not a sign was to be seen. They were all having lunch, clattering the cutlery and plates. A dog leaped at a greenpainted iron gate, quite beside itself, as if it had taken leave of its senses.30

The narrator and Herbeck are equally horrified by the vision of the confined black Newfoundland with its “natural gentleness broken by illtreatment, long confinement or even the crystal clarity of the autumn day.” The two wish to move on, but find themselves hypnotized by the dog’s gaze: “again and again the animal ran up and hurled itself at the gate, only

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“Heil unserer Mutter! Ein werdendes / Kind im Leibe der Mutter. Als ich / ein Empyrum war, hat sie mich / operiert. Ich kann meine Nase / nicht vergessen. Armes Empyrum” (Ibid., 176). 30 All of the quotes in this paragraph are from (Sebald 2000, 42-43).

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occasionally pausing to eye us where we stood as if transfixed […] As we walked on I could feel the chill of terror in my limbs. Ernst turned to look back once more at the black dog.” The narrator considers that maybe he should have let the animal out of the gate as “it probably would have ambled along beside us, like a good beast, while its evil spirit might have stalked among the people of Kritzendorf in search of another host, and indeed might have entered them all simultaneously, so not one of them would have been able to live a spoon or fork again.” While it may seem like a subtle detail, the fact that the mad dog scene begins and ends with sounds of the town eating alludes to issues of consumption. In this sequence, Sebald expresses his anti-consumerist perspective and, since the primary goal of consumerism is possession and consumption, what the reader sees here is Sebald's accurate portrayal of the negative consequences of the over-consumption which renders one blind to considerations of the object/animal being consumed. To understand how Sebald first came upon such considerations, one must analyze this brief passage in the context of both the social movements to which Sebald bore witness beginning in the 1960s and also Sebald’s reading of Elias Canetti. Considering the sociological situation of Sebald’s post-war generation, this era witnessed a dramatic rise in the consumption of meat due to both advances in refrigeration and to a steadily improving economy.31 This development resulted in the formation of activist groups and comprehensive discussions on animal rights.32 While Sebald rarely represents his opinions on this movement directly in his works, there are subtle references to his vegetarian tendencies33 and his hatred for institutions that encourage the mechanization of the farming industry. For example, in The Rings of Saturn he writes: “no longer able to decide on a place to eat, I bought a carton of chips at McDonald’s, where I felt like a criminal wanted worldwide as I stood at the brightly lit counter, and ate

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Such as Germany’s Economic Miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) of the 1950s. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was founded in 1980, and there were various popular publications such as the Diet for a Small Planet (1971), Animal Liberation (1975) and the magazine Vegetarian Times in the late 1970s. 33 Thus far, Uwe Schütte is the only Sebald scholar I have noticed to have commented on Sebald’s vegetarianism. In his chapter on Austerlitz, Schütte discusses Sebald’s negative attitude towards the industrial production of meat: “Dass ein Vegetarier wie Sebald ausgerechnet die emblematische Fastfood-Kette zum Ort der Handlung macht, ist ein offenkundiges Signal, dass er etwas markieren will” (Schütte, W. G. Sebald, 200), 32

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them as I walked back to my hotel” (Sebald 1999, 81). Thirty pages prior, Sebald had set the tone for this scene with his description of the depletion of herring. The fish which was once so plentiful that it “[afforded] the terrible sight of Nature suffocating under her surfeit” had quickly become a vanishing breed (Ibid., 55). He concludes his observation on herring with the comment: “but the truth is that we do not know what the herring feels” (Ibid., 57). The hubris of humankind which propels both the desire to hunt and the need to mechanize nature results in the exploitation of the animal kingdom, and it is this fact which haunts the white spaces between the lines in the mad dog scene in Vertigo. That Sebald wishes to establish an alliance between himself and Herbeck is evident in the explicit physical description of how they walked “side by side.” This physical connection also intimates an intellectual bond that solidifies their mental correspondence with one another and yet sets them apart from the general population of the town. Once the dog confronts the two, Sebald further suggests a comparison should be drawn between Herbeck and the Newfoundland. That Sebald wished to identify with such an animal was already illustrated in the example mentioned above. This particular dog has apparently “taken leave of its senses,” having incurred a madness as a result of “ill-treatment,” “long confinement” or the “crystal clarity of the day.” Each aspect resonates with particular points made in Sebald’s brief biography of Herbeck provided at the beginning of “All’estero.” Sebald alluded to the poor treatment Herbeck experienced due to his father’s “incisive thinking” and also his long confinement of “thirty-four years” within the mental institution. The “crystal clarity” is arguably the ideal of transparency which was brought to the foreground during the Age of Enlightenment. Ironically, at this time the attempts to understand the mentally ill Other led to confinement of these voices, a phenomenon which Michel Foucault discusses throughout his book Madness and Civilization, a work he refers to as an “archaeology of silence” (Foucault 1969, 8). This “crystal clarity” could additionally be an allusion to an apocalyptic scenario. The townspeople sit comfortably in their homes, oblivious to what is occurring in the outside world; namely, evidence of the natural history of destruction revealed by the dying sun. Ritchie Robertson’s quote is applicable in this interpretation: “Sebald frames the death of the individual and the death of humanity within a wider picture of entropic decline. Since, as the second law of thermodynamics tells us, heat loss is invariable, the universe is running inexorably down towards annihilation” (Robertson 2011, 318). Even the breed of dog, Newfoundland, points ironically to enlightenment and discovery since

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historically the “discovery” of new territories by “civilized” Westerners inevitably resulted in the confinement of the natives of the area. Finally, the connection between Herbeck and the canine is underscored when the narrator mentions that, if he were to let the animal out, he probably would have calmly ambled along beside him, like Herbeck (walking “side by side”), like “a good beast.” This is a typical reversal seen throughout Sebald’s prose: the true madness exists on the outside, and not in those who/which have been confined. This idea also underlies the message implied in the townspeople’s clattering of silverware; namely, this scene points to the madness of mainstream society’s blindness to their hubris and destructive tendencies. In the mad dog scene, the readers see Sebald's critique of the people of Kitzendorf by way of their “clattering cutlery.” Knowing of Sebald’s profound familiarity with Elias Canetti’s works, one can deduce that because the only sound emanating from the town is related to consumption, a lack of spirituality is implied. The goal of moving beyond sole sustenance of the physical body to incorporate the spiritual body was a recurring topic in Canetti's writings. Like Sebald and Herbeck, Canetti believed an ideal worldly outlook requires sympathy for all other beings: “the deepest purpose of the ascetic is that they uphold mercy. The Eater has ever-decreasing mercy and in the end none at all.”34 Canetti was concerned with this topic after he had seen a section of a human’s stomach that had been the recently dissected. In this contemplation of the piece of flesh in front of him, he wrote: Ever since I saw a human stomach […] I understand even less, why one eats. It looked exactly like a piece of meat that people roast up in their kitchens, even the size was the same as a typical Schnitzel. Why does flesh endlessly need to pass through the digestive tract of another flesh?35

Because of Ernst Herbeck’s presence in the mad dog scene, one can assume that the people in the town eating in the background are not only there to intimate a critique of the destructive tendencies of consumerist culture, but also as an indicator of what this ultimately points to that one is

                                                             34

“Der tiefste Sinn der Askese ist, dass sie das Erbarmen erhält. Der Essende hat immer weniger Erbarmen und schliesslich keines” (Canetti 1965, 172). 35 “Seit ich einen menschlichen Magen gesehen habe, neun Zehntel eines menschlichen Magens, wie er keine zwei Stunden zuvor herausgeschnitten worden war, weiß ich noch weniger, wozu man isst. Er sah genauso aus wie die Fleischstücke, die die Menschen sich in ihren Küchen abbraten, sogar die Größe war die eines gewöhnlichen Schnitzels. Wozu kommt dieses Gleiche zum Gleichen? Wozu der Umweg?” (Ibid., 171).

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eating oneself. Perhaps this is why Herbeck neglects to eat the food with which he is presented with Vertigo. In “All’estero,” there are two references made regarding Ernst Herbeck and food. In the first, the narrator recounts Herbeck’s reluctance to eat even the pastry in front of him, “for minutes on end he left his fork sticking upright in his pastry,” and in the second “Ernst declined to eat anything” at the café” (Sebald 2000, 41-42, 47). As evidenced in Sebald’s work on Herbeck, he connected Herbeck’s outlook on dietary habits to this imminent threat when one engages in the process of eating. One particular example from Herbeck’s poetry reveals his neurosis regarding the hunter and the hunted and thereby demonstrates his awareness of the symbiotic relationship between the eater and the eaten. In Canetti’s works, he examines our natural environment to formulate his theories concerning psychology and the dynamics of power relations. His ideas on mythology, mania and melancholy are of particular importance concerning Sebald’s work on Herbeck. In Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power, 1960), Canetti describes various mythological tales in which the hunted (be it an animal or even an individual) manages to transform just before being captured by the hunter. This process continues until the roles eventually reverse and the hunted captures the hunter (Canetti 1960, 397). As previously mentioned, Sebald, in aligning Herbeck’s way of thinking with ideas posed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, assumed that Herbeck adhered to the ancient rules governing the totemic imagination: Herbeck answered questions regarding his origin and identity employing identification with that animal, the hare (Sebald 2005, 131). This identification, as well as the hunter-hunted role reversal explained by Canetti, appears in several of Herbeck’s poems, perhaps most exemplary is the poem “The Squirrel” (“Das Eichkätzchen”). Gisela Steinlechner notes that there is a collapse in this poem occurring between the hunter and hunted and also between animal and man (Steinlechner 1989, 25-28). She looks at the plot of the poem in which a hunter and a fox are seeking out their mutual prey, the squirrel. She explains how, despite the seeming powerlessness of the squirrel, one recognizes in Herbeck’s linguistics that there is a role reversal between hunter and hunted. The verbs associated with the hunter (der Förster) are “fright” (“schrack”) and “frozen” (“fror”) while the fox “looked about, there and there” (“sah hin und wieder”) as if he were gazing around in fear as opposed to confidently pursuing his prey. Steinlechner sees Herbeck’s identification with the squirrel in the alternating pronouns. The poem begins with a first-person narrator: “In the forest and in the heath / there I

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found my friends.”36 Once the animal begins to recognize that he is being hunted, this identification is distanced by way of the pronoun “it”: “The hunter collapsed in fright / when it was on the tree / the squirrel.”37 One, therefore, sees an attempt at flight from danger via the distancing indicated by a pronoun–the animal switches from an “I” to become an “it.” The way Herbeck writes from the animal’s perspective in his poetry indicates he also used this way of becoming-animal as a defence mechanism when he felt confronted by thoughts of his illness or his entrapment within the institution. At the end of the poem, a complete reversal and triumph for the squirrel occur as it manages to escape when the hunter, who has also diminished in stance from the “hunter” to the pronoun “he,” shoots at him and yet “he missed it.”38 Regarding psychology, Canetti recognizes the mania of the hunter who is in a frenzy of desire to capture his prey and the melancholy of the hunted. This melancholy is first experienced during the final phase of transformation in which the hunted realizes endlessly transforming is in vain since the inevitable fate of the hunted as prey has already been sealed. The hunted cannot repress feelings of guilt at this point because, despite the permanence of the position as hunted, during periods of transformation the hunted became the hunter. Canetti concludes his thoughts by reflecting on what occurs during the final stage of this pursuit: consumption. Looking beyond the perspective of the hunter who has captured, killed and can now cook and consume his prey, Canetti declares that whether one feels the guilt of the hunter or the melancholy of the prey, in the end, this individual will lack a desire to eat because they will have the feeling that is themselves being eaten. Canetti writes: “if one forces him to eat, [...] it is as if one is holding up a mirror. He sees therein a mouth, and he sees it is eating. But that which is being eaten is actually himself.”39 In a conversation with Piet de Moor, Sebald demonstrates his ongoing concern for these issues regarding power relations and melancholy as discussed by Canetti. Sebald says:

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“Im Wald und auf der Heide / da fand ich meine Freude.” “Der Förster schrack zusammen, / als es auf dem Baume war, das Eichkätzchen.” 38 “Er traf es nicht.” 39 “Zwingt man ihn zu essen, so erinnert man ihn daran: sein Mund richtet sich gegen ihn, es ist, als hielte man ihm einen Spiegel vor. Es sieht darin einen Mund, und er sieht dass gegessen wird. Aber das, was gegessen wird, ist er selber” (Canetti 1960, 397-98). 37

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Chapter Two From a rational point of view, I do not see why another being that wanders this planet should have less right to exist than ourselves. It is the relationships of power that decide who gets locked up and who gets eaten, and who does the eating and the locking up. We stand right at the top, the supreme parasites. (De Moor 2011, 351)

With “we” as supreme parasites, Sebald is referring to the majority of people who hold bureaucratic jobs and rely on others for their survival. The parasitic condition describes the hubris of individuals who are in the aforementioned devolutionary state. They rely on those who are not as far progressed in their devolution for habitual assistance. This is an exploitive relationship and, ironically, typically members of society who have degenerated the most still hold power over those less degenerate beings (who do not follow the rules of the state blindly). In the “All’estero” scenario, these individuals are represented by the people sitting in their homes who are the parasites, consuming what the earth has to offer; while the natural world, represented by the caged animal, the mad dog, is gradually dying out due to ill-treatment and neglect. Keeping all these ideas in mind, I conclude with a return to Herbeck’s understanding of the relationship between the hunter and the hunted to clarifying the melancholy nature of the mad dog scene. Sebald ends his essay “The Little Hare” with a description of one of Herbeck’s childhood experiences. He retells the story of how Herbeck’s mother received a rabbit. In German, Herbeck says “sie bekam” a rabbit which means she received and yet the phrase simultaneously linguistically aligns the mother’s procurement of the rabbit with the event of Herbeck’s birth. The phrase used in German for “she had a child” is she “bekam ein Kind.” The father eventually slaughters the rabbit in the presence of the mother and prepared for their meal of roast hare. Herbeck participates in the act of consumption and exclaims afterward that the meal “tasted too good” (“schmeckte mir zu gut”). Sebald interprets this scene: The true extent of his involvement in the dark machinations of social life is that he was involved in the common family crime not just as a victim but as a perpetrator, having helped to consume his likeness and namesake. To those who can understand it, the legend of the poor hare used by Herbeck to explain his sad fate is an excellent tale of suffering. (Sebald 2005, 133)40

                                                            

40 “[...] daß er solchermaßen an dem gemeinsamen Familienverbrechen beteiligt war, nicht nur als Opfer, sondern auch als Täter, indem er nämlich mithalf bei der Verspeisung seines Ebenbilds und Namensvetters, das ist das wahre Maß seiner Verstrickung in die finsteren Machenschaften unseres gemeinschaftlichen Lebens” (Sebald 2003, 178).

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The resonance with Canetti’s theories on why we continually eat ourselves is clear. Herbeck, in the act of consuming his namesake, has entered the liminal position of both perpetrator and victim. That Sebald described this passage as “an exemplary tale of suffering demonstrates his concerns regarding the ambiguous position in which Germany found itself during and immediately following World War II. While certain Germans were enactors of one of the greatest crimes of history, as Sebald addresses in his essay On the Natural History of Destruction, many Germans also were placed in the role of victim. While the majority of German citizens existed in a state of amnesia following the Second World War, equally ignoring both their crimes as well as their suffering, Herbeck serves as an exemplary figure of mourning as he is fully aware of this ambiguous position. Herbeck, like many of his generation and the generations before, is inducted within communal rituals which are endlessly and thoughtlessly perpetuated by the generations of our fathers. In eating his namesake, Herbeck has engaged in the act of violence against his twin brother, this other creature which is indeed a reflection of the self. The appearance of the mad dog, Sebald’s brother, accompanied by the sounds of clattering silverware signifies Sebald’s empathetic identification with the melancholic Herbeck who, like Sebald, is painfully aware of our inescapable, liminal position as perpetrator and victim. The people in their homes remain blissfully ignorant in their consumptive state, unaware that in this exploitation of themselves and their Others, they are paving the way for inevitable historical catastrophes.

Conclusion Pierre Bertaux wrote: “life today brings such an abundance of information with it that the ability to forget becomes an asset protecting the balance of the soul. Forgetting becomes a rule to maintain one’s mental hygiene” (Bertaux 1979, 32). The quote encompasses much of what has been mentioned here concerning Sebald, thanks to the cannibalistic victim-perpetrator dynamic he discovered in Herbeck. An overflow of information can create blind spots, in an increasingly technologically developed world where information is available with the click of a button, one can see how a generation can forget its history, or at least maintain the hope that forgetting will enable a brighter future. Sebald fears that the priority of “mental hygiene” would continue to that forgetting he witnessed after World War II, that forgetting can erase that that is unclean to maintain a purity of the soul. Here, we see the failure of

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that hope since the mutations in Sebald’s and Herbeck’s writings point to a physical reflection of a lack of “hygiene” in the spiritual and mental state of post-World War II German society in which cannibalistic drives found their apotheosis in the madness of self-consumptive, capitalist culture.

Bibliography Bertaux, Pierre. Mutation der Menschheit. Zukunft und Lebenssinn. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1979. Canetti, Elias. Aufzeichnungen 1942-1948. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1965. —. Masse und Macht. Hamburg: Claassen Verlag, 1960. Cuomo, Joseph. “A Conversation with W. G. Sebald.” In the emergence of memory: conversations with W.G. Sebald, edited by Lynne Sharon Schartz, 93-118. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press, 2007. —. “The Meaning of Coincidence–An Interview with W. G. Sebald.” The New Yorker (3 Sept. 2001). Da Costa, Valérie and Fabrice Hergott, eds. Jean Dubuffet: Works, Writings, and Interviews. Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2006. De Moor, Piet. “(I) Echoes from the Past: A Conversation with Piet de Moor.” In Saturn’s Moon’s: W. G. Sebald – A Handbook, edited by Jo Catling and Richard Hibbitt, 350-55. Oxford: Legenda, 2011. Foucault, Michel. Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft. Eine Geschichte des Wahns im Zeitalter der Vernuft, translated by Ulrich Köppen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969. Gale, Matthew. 2009. “Objet trouvé.” Oxford University Press. Accessed March 1, 2014. http://www.moma.org/collection/details.php?theme_id=10135. Gorsen, Peter. “Literatur und Psychologie heute. Zur Genealogie der grenzüberschreitenden bürgerlichen Ästhetik.” In Literatur und Schizophrenie. Theorie und Interpretation eines Grenzgebiets, edited by Winfried Kudszus, 13-68. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1977. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. —. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1969. Kaufmann, David. “Angels Visit the Scene of Disgrace: Melancholy and Trauma from Sebald to Benjamin and Back.” In Cultural Critique 70 (Fall 2008): 94-119.

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Kudszus, Winfried. “Einleitung. Literatur und Schizophrenie. Forschungsperspektiven.” In Literatur und Schizophrenie. Theorie und Interpretation eines Grenzgebiets, edited by Winfried Kudszus, 1-12. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1977. —. “Sprachprozesse in moderner Lyrik: Herbeck, Celan, Hölderlin.” In Anstösse (1984): 137-43. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Das wilde Denken. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1968. McCulloh, Mark R. Understanding W. G. Sebald. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Mosbach, Bettina. “Schauer der ungewohnten Berührung: zur Tieranalogie bei W. G. Sebald.” In Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 126 (2007): 82-97. Navratil, Leo, ed. Alexanders poetische Texte. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977. —. Schizophrenie und Sprache. Zur Psychologie der Dichtung. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1966. Robertson, Ritchie. “W. G. Sebald as a Critic of Austrian Literature.” In Journal of European Studies 41, no. 3-4 (2011): 305-22. Rondas, Jean-Pierre. “‘So wie ein Hund, der den Löffel vergisst’: Ein Gespräch mit W. G. Sebald über Austerlitz.” In Literatur im Krebsgang. Totenbeschwörung und memoria in der deutschsprachigen Literatur nach 1989, edited by Arne De Winde and Anke Gilleir, 35163. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Schütte, Uwe. “Against Germanistik. W. G. Sebald’s Critical Essays.” In Saturn’s Moons: W. G. Sebald–A Handbook, edited by Jo Catling and Richard Hibbitt, 161-82. London: LEGENDA, 2011. —. W. G. Sebald. Einführung in Leben und Werk. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2011. Sebald, W. G. “Des Häschens Kind, der kleine Has. Über das Totemtier des Lyrikers Ernst Herbeck.” In Campo Santo, edited by Sven Meyer, 171-78. Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003. —. Die Ausgewanderten. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994. —. “Eine kleine Traverse. Das poetische Werk Ernst Herbecks” [A Small Traverse. The Poetic Work of Ernst Herbeck]. In Die Beschreibung des Unglücks. Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke, 13148. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994. —. The Emigrants, translated by Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002. —. “Gedanken zu Elias Canetti.” In Literatur und Kritik 8, no. 65 (June 1972): 280-85.

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—. “The Little Hare, Child of the Hare: On the Poet Ernst Herbeck’s Totem Animal.” In Campo Santo, translated by Anthea Bell, 125-34. New York: Modern Library, 2005. —. The Rings of Saturn, translated by Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions Book, 1999. —. Schwindel. Gefühle. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994. —. “Tiere, Menschen, Maschinen–Zu Kafkas Evolutionsgeschichten.” In Literatur und Kritik 21 (July-August 1986): 194-201. —. Vertigo, translated by Michael Hulse. NewYork: New Directions, 2000. Sheppard, Richard. “The Sternheim Years: W. G. Sebald’s Lehrjahre and Theatralische Sendung 1963-75.” In Saturn’s Moons: W. G. Sebald–A Handbook, edited by Jo Catling and Richard Hibbitt, 42-108. London: LEGENDA, 2011. Steinlechner, Gisela. Über die Ver-rückung der Sprache Analytische Studien zu den Texten Alexanders. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, Universitäts-Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1989. Vogel-Klein, Ruth. “History, Emotions, Literature: The Differential Representation of Theresienstadt in H. G. Adler’s Theresienstadt 19411945 and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” In Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald, edited by Helen Finch and Lynn Wolff, 180-200. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014.

CHAPTER THREE BEOWULF: A CREATIVE, PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY KENNETH SILVESTRO

Before presenting the didactic tale between Grendel and the Dragon, and Grendel’s personality and emotional character, the following translated excerpts from the actual poem are meant to provide a context and foundation for the next section—The Tale. Thus, the transition from the poem, to Gardner’s explication, to the Dragon’s narration, to the psychoanalytic commentary in The Tale should be more easily understood. The commentary is enclosed in a lined border while the text is not. Translations are always subject to the translator’s understanding and abilities; nonetheless, the symbolism and character dynamics in Beowulf, which are most important, reveal much of the dominant social structure of the period. More critically, psyche provides us with poietic and mythological expressions meant to move and inform the social fabric. Our current psychoanalytic comprehension helps us to review the critical depth of expression and mythical meanings applicable then and now. The monstrous Grendel completely disrupts descriptions of a peaceful clan. Grendel’s attacks and destruction transform the clan into fearful chaos. No one and no approach can match Grendel’s strength and relentless aggression. The king, Hrothgar, and his followers attempt to overcome Grendel but to no avail. For many years, twelve to be exact, Grendel’s onslaught of the Scyld clan continued with no end in sight. Insults and aberrations to God and religious beliefs are considered the cause of this horrid aggression; yet, the true causal factors remain elusive and hidden within Grendel's instinctual nature. Also, John Gardner’s portrayal of Grendel’s psychology provides us, but not the unfortunate people Scyld, with personality and developmental characteristics that influence Grendel's thoughts, emotions, and actions. Psyche’s meaning becomes amplified through the poem and The Tale that follows.

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Early in the poem, we are introduced to the current Christian view and Grendel. the Almighty made the earth1 fairest fields enfolded by water, set, triumphant, sun and moon for a light to lighten the land-dwellers, and braided bright the breast of earth with limbs and leaves, made life for all of mortal beings that breathe and move. So lived the clansmen in cheer and revel a winsome life, till one began to fashion evils, that field of hell. Grendel this monster grim was called, march-riever mighty, in moorland living, in fen and fastness; fief of the giants the hapless wight a while had kept since the Creator his exile doomed. On kin of Cain was the killing avenged by sovran God for slaughtered Abel. Not late the respite; with night returning, anew began ruthless murder; he recked no whit, firm in his guilt, of the feud and crime. They were easy to find who elsewhere sought in room remote their rest at night, bed in the bowers, when that bale was shown, was seen in sooth, with surest token,— the hall-thanes hate. Such held themselves far and fast who the fiend outran!

The blissful God created life—this lack of conscious discernment— precedes Grendel's presence. Descriptions of life without difficulties, without fears, with one-sided experiences, exist in many different literary sources, myths and fairy tales. These descriptions present an idea and wish for the ease, comfort, and security of early childhood.

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The poem extracts are from Beowulf. Translated by Francis B. Grummere. (New York: The Heritage Press, 1939).

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When the bliss, considered under God’s control, ends and the absent Grendel, who is closely associated with Cain and his aggression, returns the state of idyllic existence changes. Why, then, does Grendel return with the freedom to ravage the Scyldings? Is it God's change of heart or psyche's never-ending "urging" of the dark element—the Shadow—to become consciousness? Grendel’s ability to kill at will and his seemingly non-existent guilt described from the Scyldings’ perspectives present a ruthless, savage and beastly creature. In The Tale that follows, we are treated to a more indepth perspective of Grendel. Twelve years’ tide the trouble he bore, boundless cares. There came unhidden tidings true to the tribes of men, in sorrowful songs, how ceaselessly Grendel harassed Hrothgar, what hate he bore him, what murder and massacre, many a year, feud unfading,— refused consent to deal with any of Daneland’s earls, make pact of peace, or compound for gold: still less did the wise men ween to get great fee for the feud from his fiendish hands. But the evil one ambushed old and young death-shadow dark, and dogged them still, lured, or lurked in the livelong night of misty moorlands: men may say not where the haunts of these Hell-Runes be. This heard in his home Hygelac’s thane, great among Geats, of Grendel’s doings. He was the mightiest man of valor in that same day of this our life, stalwart and stately. A stout wave-walker he bade make ready. Yon battle-king, said he, far o’er the swan-road he fain would seek, the noble monarch who needed men! The prince’s journey by prudent folk was little blamed, though they loved him dear; they whetted the hero, and hailed good omens. And now the bold one from bands of Geats comrades chose, the keenest of warriors e’er he could find; with fourteen men the sea-wood he sought, and, sailor proved, led them on to the land’s confines.

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Chapter Three LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped, we have heard, and what honor the athelings won! Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes, from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore, awing the earls. Since erst he lay friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him: for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve, till before him the folk, both far and near, who house by the whale-path, heard his mandate, gave him gifts: a good king he! To him an heir was afterward born, a son in his halls, whom heaven sent to favor the folk, feeling their woe that erst they had lacked an earl for leader so long a while; the Lord endowed him, the Wielder of Wonder, with world’s renown. Famed was this Beowulf: far flew the boast of him

For twelve years, Scyldings lived in fear of Grendel’s attacks. No one and nothing seemed to affect his aggressive destruction. Grendel indiscriminately selected one victim after another with undaunted freedom, raising havoc among the people. As a dark assailant instilling fear in the entire clan, Grendel’s literal and symbolic presence belongs to the collective psyche of the people of Scyld. What could this destructive force within psyche mean to the Scyldings? Meaning is the key! This question, along with psyche’s dynamics, scream-out for attention. Just as Grendel cannot be ignored or denied, psyche’s symbolism cannot be ignored. The Tale, the next section, provides psychological commentary regarding both the symbolism and meaning. Beowulf heard of Grendel’s killing rampages and the chaos that prevailed in Hrothgar’s clan. With fixed intent, Beowulf prepares for a long journey across the sea to a strange and unfamiliar land. Hrothgar, Scyld’s king, does not know of his impending visitor who plans to slay Hrothgar’s nemesis. Once again, the meaning of Beowulf’s intent greatly influences the psychological understanding of the poem. Beowulf ‘s introduction gently reveals his symbolic prowess and confidence, and therefore, the symbolism brewing within the psyche.

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We see that Beowulf’s reputation precedes him. Endowed with special power, strength and with extensive capabilities, Beowulf’s character stands-out among his clan and soon among the people of Scyld. These gifts, understood to be provided by God, are the makings of a welcomed hero. Heroes so many ne’er met I as strangers of mood so strong. ‘Tis plain that for prowess, not plunged into exile, for high-hearted valor, Hrothgar ye seek!” Him the sturdy-in-war bespake with words, proud earl of the Weders answer made, hardy ‘neath helmet:—”Hygelac’s, we, fellows at board; I am Beowulf named. I am seeking to say to the son of Healfdene this mission of mine, to thy master-lord, the doughty prince, if he deign at all grace that we greet him, the good one, now. O sovran Hrothgar, to seek thee here, for my nerve and my might they knew full well. Themselves had seen me from slaughter come blood-flecked from foes, where five I bound, and that wild brood worsted. I’ the waves I slew nicors by night, in need and peril avenging the Weders, whose woe they sought, — crushing the grim ones. Grendel now, monster cruel, be mine to quell in single battle! So, from thee, thou sovran of the Shining-Danes, Scyldings’—bulwark a boon I seek,— and, Friend-of-the-folk, refuse it not, O Warriors’—shield, now I’ve wandered far,— that I alone with my liegemen here, this hardy band, may Heorot purge! He forces pledges, favors none of the land of Danes, but lustily murders, fights and feasts, nor feud he dreads from Spear-Dane men. But speedily now shall I prove him the prowess and pride of the Geats, shall bid him battle. UNFERTH spake, the son of Ecglaf, who sat at the feet of the Scyldings’ lord, unbound the battle-runes.— Beowulf’s quest,

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Chapter Three sturdy seafarer’s, sorely galled him; ever he envied that other men should more achieve in middle-earth of fame under heaven than he himself.

Beowulf announces his respect for Hrothgar and requests a meeting, believing he has much to offer the king of Scyld. His focus remains the destruction of Grendel, whose exploits are an extremely worthy challenge for a hero. Beowulf’s formidable presence will impress the king and his followers. During their meeting, Beowulf presents his background as a warrior and hero, requesting to be granted permission to stay and slay Grendel. He and his band of “liegemen” are confident that Grendel will die. Beowulf’s confidence and mastery of life further reveal his character, unique experiences and lack of fear. How could Hrothgar not be influenced by this man, this hero. Beowulf continues to present his intent, claiming that Grendel’s lack of fear and dominance will soon meet a comparable opponent, one completely unfamiliar to him. Then, Grendel, submission to the hero from Geats will be inevitable. Unferth is introduced. He has been Hrothgar’s choice among conquerors and heroes. His competitive spirit reveals his hero-like qualities. ireful he strode; there streamed from his eyes fearful flashes, like flame to see. He spied in hall the hero-band, kin and clansmen clustered asleep, hardy liegemen. Then laughed his heart; for the monster was minded, ere morn should dawn, savage, to sever the soul of each, life from body, since lusty banquet waited his will! Straightway he seized a sleeping warrior for the first, and tore him fiercely asunder, the bone-frame bit, drank blood in streams, swallowed him piecemeal: swiftly thus the lifeless corse was clear devoured, e’en feet and hands.

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for the hero reclining, — who clutched it boldly, prompt to answer, propped on his arm. Soon then saw that shepherd-of-evils that never he met in this middle-world, in the ways of earth, another wight with heavier hand-gripe; at heart he feared, sorrowed in soul,— none the sooner escaped! For him the keen-souled kinsman of Hygelac held in hand; hateful alive was each to other. The outlaw dire took mortal hurt; a mighty wound showed on his shoulder, and sinews cracked, and the bone-frame burst. To Beowulf now the glory was given, and Grendel thence death-sick his den in the dark moor sought, noisome abode: he knew too well that here was the last of life, an end of his days on earth — To all the Danes by that bloody battle the boon had come. From ravage had rescued the roving stranger Hrothgar’s hall; the hardy and wise one had purged it anew. His night-work pleased him, his deed and its honor. To Eastern Danes had the valiant Geat his vaunt made good, all their sorrow and ills assuaged, their bale of battle borne so long, and all the dole they erst endured pain a-plenty.— ‘Twas proof of this, when the hardy-in-fight a hand laid down, arm and shoulder,— all, indeed, of Grendel’s gripe,—‘neath the gabled roof’ horribly seething, with sword-blood hot, by that doomed one dyed, who in den of the moor laid forlorn his life adown, his heathen soul,--and hell received it.

During his nightly travels, Grendel spies the warriors, the liegeman, from Geat. He laughs, knowing the ease with which he overwhelms humans. His usual plan in mind, Grendel will devour each stranger, forthwith. This lot looks no different from all his past conquests. His first victim confirms his expectations. As they sleep, Grendel begins his slaughter of the liegemen. Eating, devouring and laughing with

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delight, and repetitive familiarity, even boredom, Grendel goes about his slaughter. Or is it duty? Then, when seizing his next victim, surprisingly a hand reaches out and grips his arm with such strength and force, that for the first time Grendel’s flight is more important than his fight. Beowulf’s focus begins to be realized. Grendel’s demise! The Geat hero has made good his promise to Hrothgar and the Scyldings. Grendel’s arm is pulled from its socket with such force, only possible by a hero such as Beowulf. This promises to lead to Grendel’s death. What will become of Grendel, the clan, Hrothgar and most importantly Beowulf? Grendel dies in his cave, never to ravage Scyld again. Or does he? The Tale, in the following section, introduces the Dragon, Grendel and the imaginings of both, extending the poem and offering surprising conclusions.

The Tale Imagine a Dragon whose wisdom extends beyond the reach of your millennia and whose intuition boundlessly leaps into your tomorrows. A Dragon feared by people, beasts and lovers alike with fiery exhalation and unlawful fury unleashed upon those near and far. Your imaginings serve to introduce me; for I am this Dragon. My wisdom and my vision, both overtly and covertly, direct mankind and beast alike. But at present, I have a tale to tell about life, destruction, and universal importance. It is a tale of a tale. Where to begin? I am an element of timelessness, of natural sources, of universality, lying behind the threshold of conscious life. I exist beyond ethics, social contract, and political conformity; yet, I remain a crucial collective and personal aspect of each person and all existence. Enough about me! The tale must be told. There is one, Grendel, who resides in the unconscious darkness—a seam in its tapestry, an associate through which I see, experience and function. In the beginning, neither Grendel nor the humans realized that each required the other. For Grendel, the humans were adversaries, considered a source of disgust and intrigue. During his early life, Grendel

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roamed through the caverns of darkness, avoiding the sun-filled days. Essentially alone. He was too unconscious to realize that he was a shade or shadow to his adversaries, the collective human race; for him, like me resided within the universal collective darkness that humankind seldom seeks. As a shade, he instilled fear and terror even without being seen or heard. "Until my first encounter with you, Dragon, I continually asked:2 Why am I here? Why do I live in this putrid, stinking hole? And though your words brought truth to me, and our unlawful natures overlap, I could not comprehend our association." The truth that you seem to understand provides some meaning, but it remains only a partial truth with partial meaning. As for our association, we are unlike the others in the human world. It remains for us to follow no established morals for humankind, no protocols of righteousness. I am as you are, but more, the Dragon informs Grendel. Grendel's first encounter with the conscious realm, with the Scyldings and Hrothgar, was a reenactment of an ageless process, a genesis, a 'time' when I and others were not pushed to the background of darkness but lived more openly and expressively with humankind. Gradually, this changed as their conscious strengths became more selfish, overcoming my influence and others of the collective archetypal realm, shifting us to the depths of the darkness to live as shadows of yesteryear. "As a youngster, a monster for humankind, living with mother alone in our cave my adventurous spirit took me into every crevice of the cave. One day, I ventured further. At the threshold between our cave and the upper world, at the pool of fire snakes, I sensed that something lay beyond. I jumped into the pool to discover a door within the water. Passing through the door brought me to the surface of the earth and my first glimpse of moonlight.

                                                            

2 Grendel quotes are extracted from Gardner’s book: John Gardner, Grendel (New York: Vintage Books, 1985).

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The Dragon introduces itself as the narrator and a major influence on humankind and beast, alike. The Dragon symbolizes an element of psyche common to everyone and unique to each person—the Self. As the center and peripheral of psyche, the Self is not the ego and is greater than any social constructs. It is an unconscious source. Grendel’s introduction presents him as a shadow figure instilling fear in the people of Scyld. Both collective and personal Shadow elements in the unconscious psyche are repressed and unwanted characteristics. Symbolic of the collective Shadow, Grendel doesn’t know himself nor do the Scyldings know him—their Shadow. Grendel reveals his unconscious world and lack of ego-consciousness when addressing the Dragon. The symbolic Self, the Dragon, informs Grendel that they share something, yet to be revealed—an unconscious influence on humans and existence in the collective unconscious psyche.   Apparently, the Self, Shadow and other elements of psyche were once conscious experiences. Human ego-conscious discernment oppressed repressed each element to the unconscious. Grendel, as a burgeoning Shadow element, begins to tell his developmental story. Symbolically, he describes how the Shadow remerged from the unconscious to eventually influence humankind at the collective and personal levels. Grendel also describes his early experiences of the conscious level of humankind. This world was as wondrous as it was new, and now it was accessible. I climbed the trees and jumped from one to the other until dawn. Then I returned to my cave. My mother seemed inordinately concerned when she heard of my adventure. This puzzled me. Nevertheless, I continued to transcend from the depths to the world above. "One day I managed to get my leg caught within the juncture of two tree trunks. I could not get loose, and daylight was on the rise. My pain and fear mounted with each hour. There I remained for three days, hoping

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that my mother would rescue me. Instead of my mother, I encountered humans for the first time. “Beleaguered and exhausted, they still expressed a profound fear, which was curious. After being poked and prodded, and my attempt to communicate, they realized I was a life force unto myself. Their fear increased and with it, their decision to kill me. Only my mother's raging screams prevented my death. "I came to understand the world was nothing -- a mechanical chaos of causal, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood this with absolute resolve. I alone exist. I create the whole universe, blink by blink ... these humans were crazy!" Grendel's experiences reveal the inability of the collective human clan to accept that which they fear, that which appears horrid and distasteful, regardless of its capacities. It symbolizes their rejection of something of far greater value than their horses or gold; alas, they reject a part of themselves. "Years passed, and I watched from afar as men fought for gold and territory. They killed and ravaged for the sake of possessing or so it seemed. One day, I made another attempt to communicate. Again, my words were beyond theirs. Their fears and scowls resulted in an aggressive attack. I was slightly injured as I ran from that encounter. With a greater realization, I understood I could not join them; therefore, I began eating them." Yes, their insistence on keeping you, the darker, uglier god of their existence, at bay was a painful realization for you. You then began living more of your nature. To eat them is commonplace for those of us relegated to the darker realm. To overpower them is trivial. “Dragon, it is with the people of Scyld and their King Hrothgar that I battle. A battle, I call it, for lack of a better description. The battle is more like a personal characteristic that expresses my meaning. The Scyld people pray to sticks and fabricated structures, whimper and whine, fearfully pleading when I am present. They throw sticks and stones to dissuade their fear and deter me. Imagine! The King has his theories for my demise. But theories are useless."

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As you say, Grendel. The people, the King, and his theories are feeble attempts to understand and control the energic forces that are beyond them. Nature, you and I, and the other unconscious, collective elements, cannot be packaged into a concise explanation, a constricted theory, tamed or abolished. While exploring the conscious existence of the Scyldings, Grendel gets stuck in a tree. The symbolic tree of life represents the unconscious and conscious realms. The image of being stuck represents the tension of the polarities of the two psychic realms. This tension introduces much anxiety and many different experiences between the two realms. Grendel’s shadow qualities are developing for him and the humans. The realization that the Shadow’s influence and power are absolute qualities fills Grendel with a sense of maturity, as a growing psychic force. The Scyldings’ collective conscious realm cannot acept the dark nature of the unconscious. Consciousness considers causality and reason to be the essence of life and mind, ignoring the full psyche. The Dragon confirms and addresses Grendel’s realization. Thus, the Self assists Grendel with his development as a collective, archetypal Shadow. Observing humankind for years and attempting to integrate with it, the Shadow is denied. As a result, fear and instinctual aggression dominate humankind. Again, Grendel develops his Shadow qualities and begins expressing his dark aggression with focused intent and much vitality. Grendel, as an unconscious collective archetype, now realizes that he is part of the Scyldings’ collective psyche. The Self, the Dragon, reinforces Grendel’s realization, indicating that rational theories and explanations are not appropriate for unconscious symbols and archetypal energies representing by the symbols. Grendel’s experiences follow from his initial self-development, as he begins to discover his personal meaning in life. The deep Self within the psyche expresses meaning for Grendel and humankind whenever an open and accepting relationship to the Self occurs.

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Consciousness is symbolized by the light and is one of the goals of personal development. Grendel, being an unconscious archetype, cannot remain in the conscious realm of human beings. That contradicts his meaning and teleological development as orchestrated by the Self. "It was at about this point that I had my first sensation of a calling from afar. As if there was an invisible presence all around me, watching, enveloping me. There was no sound. I moved. It followed. 'What,' I screamed? I was alone but certain that something was near. Following me. Then, nothing. Was my mind playing tricks on me?” Well, reader, can you wager a guess as to whom, or what, Grendel experienced? The presence was I, the Dragon. Although Grendel had begun eating humans, he was losing himself to the light before he had completely developed himself. Wretched fool. I must have my say, and Grendel must understand. “Some evil inside me pushed out into the trees. I knew what I knew— the mindless, mechanical brutality. The darkness of what is, and always has been, reached out and snatched my feet. This evil was centuries old, a presence all around me. This presence was calling me, now, and I had to follow." Grendel, with certainty and clarity you recall our first meeting. "Deeply ingrained it is; not ever to be dismissed or forgotten, Dragon." My intention was to awaken you to your nature and mine and reveal my power, wisdom, and vision. To have you experience me as an initiatory rite of passage.” "My heart shook as your eyes met mine. I felt myself grow weak in muscle and stature. Do you remember? I fell upon all fours. My confusion grew when you announced: 'We have been expecting you.' For I wondered who could the 'we' refer to? Your gestures, though abrupt and gruff, held a tone of serenity. Although I feared you, I felt your strength and the bond between us. But from where or how, I knew not. Your reference to me as a young innocent served to put me in my place as the initiant. This much I knew. "As if mesmerized by your presence and power, I responded to your statements and questions from a trance-like condition. At one point, as if shaken out of the trance, I became aware of my body position and found

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myself kneeling with arms and hands outstretched. A peculiar posture for a monster. I attempted to apologize for my ways with the humans, to express atonement. 'It is one thing to eat one from time to time; it is natural, but to scare them for sport?' This I thought was wrong but you disregarded my sentiments as worthless; stupid, I believe you said." I knew you were sorry for your deeds; that was but a foolish flickerflash in the long, dull fall of eternity. I was not impressed. I had to give you the word, that is, my advice if your initiation was to be binding. Grendel only saw present and past, no future. I see the future. My vision of the future is not a causal relation, something on which the surface world of humans is so fixated. I simply see what is there. Should a gesture or a directive be instigated by me, or someone else, it was already there. This paradox for Grendel and humanity was in part the mystery that Grendel received during his initiation. We, the collective, extend beyond time and space, into the whole of reality; we see all and influence others from this all-inclusive vision. "The initiation and your exposure of humanity were exceedingly useful for me, Dragon. I learned from your words: 'Humans play games and construct theories. They think. They are thinkers, but there is no total vision, only schemes with vague family resemblances, no more identity than bridges and spider webs. They map out roads to Hell and back with their crackpot theories and paltry facts. Facts in isolation, and facts to connect the facts, but they miss the point. It is insanity; the simplest ever devised. Connectedness is the essence of everything, not facts about connectedness! They have no idea of complete reality. If they had a sense of total reality and natural connectedness, then the collective unconscious psyche, as they refer to us, would not be disavowed.’ Grendel’s calling symbolize the realization of his true meaning as expressed from the Self. The darkness within symbolizes the inner nature of the Shadow. In everyday life, the personal Shadow can have positive qualities but Grendel, a symbol of the collective Shadow, carries historic qualities that span all of time and all cultures. A vital energy accompanies the Shadow, be it collective or personal, as depicted in Grendel’s energy. The calling provides Grendel with a rite of passage, which is a critical step in the developmental process.

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Grendel reflects on the encounter with the Dragon, the Self, during that eventful experience when he came to know his deepest meaning. A Self encounter varies from person to person but it always involves a form of spiritual expression. For Grendel, it was a posture, a trance, and realizations that transcend daily values and beliefs. Such numinous experiences raise doubts and questions, and sometimes difficulties accepting psyche’s powerful influence and change. Although difficult to perceive, the unconscious collective psyche is timeless—past, present and future simultaneously exist. The Self orchestrates all of existence, all the possibilities in dreams, visions, creativity, synchronicities and more. The Dragon reinforces Grendel’s comprehension of himself with a new emphasis. The vitality that the Shadow brings to collective consciousness cannot be dismissed from human experiences. It can be both life-giving and destructive, depending on the degree of integration. Grendel speaks of one mystery revealed to him during his initiatory period; that is, the wholeness or interconnectedness of all existence. Psyche’s wholeness forms a completeness that only differentiates to individual experiences due to consciousness. Consciousness forms theories, differentiates the whole and introduces causality. All of which are contra naturum to psyche but, nonetheless, valuable in its own right. “This shocked me, greatly. So much so that I remember your very words to this day: 'You improve them! Can't you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last. You are the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves. You are humankind, or a human condition, inseparable as the mountain climber and the mountain.’ "The clarity was exhilarating, for I had long thought that they and I were inseparable, one and the same. My meaning is locked up in them, as their meanings are locked up in me. What a revelation! This initiatory experience brought me remarkable insights, and as if by a spell, from that moment forward, no weapon could harm me. I was invulnerable to their weapons but not their souls.

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"Though I scorned them, even hated them, there always has been something between me and the people I fought. From then on, only a deeper soul-like contact with them could influence me. Killing and eating them took on a different meaning—my meaning, not regret but an understanding as to the necessity of these gestures." The weapons used against you were no longer lethal. For the mysteries of the initiation provided you with insights into your collective, or universal, nature and its relation to humanity. And, as you said, from that moment on only a relationship from the soul-level, or the spirit-level, with humankind could affect you. "Three or four nights later, I launched my first raid since coming to terms with my existence and the mysteries. I burst in when they were all asleep, snatched seven from their beds, and slit them open and devoured them on the spot. I felt a strange, unearthly joy. It was as if I'd made some incredible discovery, like my discovery long ago of the moonlit world beyond the surface world. I was transformed. There existed a new focus for the clutter of space I stood in. If the world had once imploded on the tree where I waited, trapped and full of pain, it now exploded, away from me, screeching terror. I had become myself! But that merely hints at what I mean. I had become something as if born again. I had hung between possibilities before, but now that was done. I was Grendel, Ruiner of mead halls, Wrecker of Kings! But also, as more than ever before, I was alone." This sense of being alone accompanies such a transformation. It cannot be avoided. The passage into Self-existence, however, brings the realization of how truly related one has become with the others of our collective world, the archetypal forces that have persisted in their passage throughout nature's timeless dance with the world of light from historic antiquity to the present moment. This experience is available to humanity as well. Each initiatory experience is different, but humans can enter a relationship with our world and its mysteries as well. Grendel’s confirmation of his intuition concerning the interconnectedness between his meaning and that of humans provides an immunity to, a knowledge about, their aggression. Their souls or the Self within each human remain a vulnerable strength for Grendel, a source of empathic connection.

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Grendel’s purpose, his meaning as a collective Shadow, becomes his duty. He understands with greater depth the interconnectedness between him and humans but not the dual purpose of the interconnectedness—the raw and primitive aggressive force he brings to human nature and the potential integrative transformation for both human consciousness and him. Finding the direction and meaning of one’s life transports the discoverer from mundanity to an exhilarating clarity. Becoming one’s Self and living its meaning transcends all doubts and questions; yet, since so few uncover this relationship with the Self, a sense of being alone cannot be avoided. But only at first! The Self, the Dragon, further confirms Grendel’s understanding and teleological meaning of his existence. The most critical piece of wisdom from the Dragon in this passage informs Grendel that humans can experience what Grendel experienced—a relationship with the Self and the teleological direction and meaning that follows. Understanding the value of the relationship with the Self, Grendel presents an example of a Scylding, Unferth, who attempted to integrate the Shadow, which is the first step toward a relationship with the Self. Integration occurs in the form of recognition and confrontation. How unusual for a human to attempt personal development! It happens, but not on a broad scale or a mass level. Unferth continues to attempt to meet and integrate the Shadow but falls short. Grendel’s surprise at his persistence indicates how few Scylds and other humans make this attempt to truly meet the Shadow. "One who called himself Unferth, hero among the Scylds, attempted to bridge that gap between his world and ours. My confrontations with him have been numerous and memorable. He, unfortunately for him, was unable to attain the treasure of the mysteries to which you refer." Initiatory wisdom is achieved through struggle, pain, and endurance. It also involves openness and coming to terms with the unknown mysteries that lie like treasures waiting to be discovered, but not possessed. Not all who journey on this quest, the heroes, and heroines of the surface world, find their way.

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"One night, during another of my banal encounters, Unferth announced himself to me as I ravaged the meadhall. He stepped forth from the fearful group holding up his sword. 'Tell them in Hell that Unferth, son of Ecglaf, sent you, known far and wide in these Scanian lands as hero among the Scylds. For many months, unsightly monster, you've murdered men as you pleased in Hrothgar's hall. Unless you can murder me, as you've murdered lesser men, I give you my word that those days are gone forever!' As I responded to his weak gestures in a mocking tone, to my surprise he understood my words. This was the first time a human had managed to unravel my meaning. Clearly, this encounter was to be different. But how? "You knew then, Dragon, what difference Unferth brought to me. Slowly did it become apparent. This 'hero' challenged me, directly. He didn't merely attempt to defend himself from my strengths. If successful, he would have overcome me; I suppose tamed me is more appropriate. Of course, he was of little challenge. I antagonized and played with him as a child might with a toy. In the end, he was crying like a boy, poor miserable virgin. Such is life; such is dignity. I returned to my cave with the contentment of having humiliated the 'hero.' There was no need to eat him, this time. To my surprise, he followed me arriving three nights later. “He spoke to me of heroism, and once again I mocked him and defused his ridiculous notions. I could have crushed him like a fly, but I didn't. His boring words grew tedious, as he spoke of '… heroes seeing values beyond what's possible. That's the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile.' I decided I would not kill him but simply carry him back to his King and the embarrassment he deplored." Indeed, a character of a different sort, this Unferth. He, in fact, attempted to go beyond the boundaries of the surface world, of their daily complacency and pleasure-seeking values, to become your slayer. For them, this gesture is nothing less than an effort to live more consciously with us in the realm of the collective darkness. A noble gesture but not one we can succumb to without a struggle. And so it goes with those who dare to step beyond, as Unferth stated. For him, it was not meant to be. Time and again he challenged you, but to no avail. "I roamed, night after night, tearing off heads and bathing in blood without rhyme or reason, except for Grendel's law: there is no limit to desire but desire's needs. My law, my nature, clearly is lawless. Humanity

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has not an inkling of what lies beneath their surface world until I announce myself. So, let the heroes or the heroines try their hand at me." Unferth’s attempt, yet again, to meet and integrate the Shadow. To Grendel’s surprise, Unferth understands his words. Unferth’s meaning has penetrated deeper into the psyche and has begun to integrate the Shadow. Psyche, using the Shadow, appears to respect this human’s persistent fortitude and attempts at integrating the Shadow. As a result, Unferth remains alive to make additional attempts. He must move through the symbolic embarrassment, the recognition of the personal Shadow, to further his process to the collective Shadow and the Self. The Dragon indicates the necessity for humans to become more conscious, symbolized by moving beyond the surface world. The struggles to achieve this consciousness require no less than an heroic effort as represented by the symbol of Unferth. Although Unferth’s attempts are futile, the importance of each attempt cannot be understated. His individual attempts can contribute to a collective level of integration and transformation along with other humans attempting this integrative process. The result would affect both the collective conscious and collective unconscious psyche. “There is no limit to desire but desire’s needs.” That statement reveals the vitality and power of the collective unconscious or the unconscious in general. As Grendel mentioned earlier, humans must “tame” the Shadow and archetypal forces to integrate the unconscious, develop a different consciousness and begin a relationship with the Self. The Dragon, the symbolic Self, reiterates this process and dynamic power. Grendel’s reaction to seeing the queen, Wealtheow of Scyld, introduces an additional archetype from the unconscious. The Self attempts to illuminate Grendel about the additional forces. Of course, humans also experience these archetypal influences from the unconscious. Grendel is becoming familiar with more of the expansive collective unconscious. His reality. Grendel, at once myself and not, vision and wisdom are everywhere present. You need only open yourself to your nature. Our collective realm with its images, emotions, and qualities, is creative wisdom. Bound to nothing; expressive in its own right; it moves through us all who are

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comprised of an archetypal character. This is to be noted in every experience. Your encounter with Hrothgar's wife is an example. The essence of your experience, upon seeing Wealtheow, was orchestrated by an archetype. Many archetypes perform in the making of that symphony called love. Your experiences of myriad emotions and passions were as powerful as anything you will ever live through. This, too, was initiatory. It brought you face-to-face with soul, Eros, and heartfelt sorrow; it brought you face-to-face with collective elements that simultaneously are you and not you. You came to know our realm and yourself more expansively, more completely. "I was becoming increasingly aware of humanity as well. For as you so often told me, I am humankind or humankind's condition. Still, it was not until I broke into the mead hall that eventful night and grabbed Wealtheow from sleep that my condition changed. I was determined to eat her, destroy her, and thus not allow her a chance of the heroine's quest for integration. But on spying her dark hole, deep within the recesses of her private nature, I awakened to her right as a woman of humanity, as an individual of means. A heroine. I let her go and returned to my world to relate to the universal. “Having come to grips with this new emotion and to realize love from both worlds, some may question how I could continue to ravage King Hrothgar and his clan. I have no answer except, perhaps, this: Why should I not? Has he made any move to deserve my kindness? Has he attempted to integrate his world and mine as did the hero Unferth? If I give him a truce, will the king invite me in for a kiss on the forehead, for a cup of mead? This nobility of his, this dignity, isn’t that my doing? I made him what he is. Have I not a right to test my own creation? Enough! Who says I have to defend myself?" Then came from afar an adversary the likes of whom Grendel never encountered. A hero, perhaps a hero's hero. Beowulf was his name. "I remember. It was December when nights are cold and dark. I sensed his presence from miles away. Something was coming, strange as spring. I felt afraid. But when the strangers arrived, I thought what joy this brings; it's an entirely new game. Fourteen glorious heroes, proud in their battle dress, fat as cows!

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Their leader was as big as a mountain. His voice, though powerful, was mild. He had a strange face that, little by little, grew unsettling to me. It was a face, or so it seemed for an instant, from a dream I had almost forgotten. His eye's slanted downward, unfeeling as a snake's. He had no more beard than a fish. It was as if the gentle voice and the childlike, yet faintly ironic, smile were holding something back, some magical power that could blast stone cliffs to ashes as lightning blasts trees. He and his band of men were Geats, and he had come to give Hrothgar advice concerning me. “His chest was as wide as an oven, and his arms were like beams. His shoulders were grotesquely muscled. As he introduced himself to Hrothgar, it suddenly became clear to me that this muscular being was insane! He was dangerous. Yet I was excited, suddenly alive.” Not only was he strong, but he was shrewd. Take my word on that; Dragon's know all. The tales of his superhuman strength were all factual. Hrothgar, Wealtheow and many of the others put their faith in this stranger to do away with you. This hero inspired trust in those around him. Hrothgar's speech is worthy of repetition: "Heroism is more than noble language, dignity. Inner heroism, that's the trick! Glorious carbuncle of the soul! Except in the life of the hero, the whole world’s meaningless." Grendel indicates another revelation attributed to human nature. Grendel’s description of the physical features of the queen symbolically represents one aspect of the feminine archetype in the psyche. Grendel, now, with self-assurance experiences other archetypal influences and asserts himself as a collective Shadow; that is, with qualities that are the central characteristics of his meaning, his soul. There are two feminine archetypes besides the mother archetype—the anima and the goddess. The former is projected on potential partners until a person forms a greater relationship to it. Then it functions as a bridge to the Self. The latter is a deeper psychic element, equivalent to the god archetype—sacred, spiritual and divine. Meeting the feminine archetype is a numinous experience for Grendel and any human. Another hero will attempt to integrate the collective Shadow. Beowulf’s physical features symbolize his level of consciousness, which differs from Unferth’s.

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Fourteen men from Geat traveled from afar to assist Hrothgar. The fourteen, as a collective group, represent a cultural collective consciousness that differs from the Scyldings and introduces new challenges to the Shadow. The hero archetype constellates in many ways. Grendel presents the different characteristics of this form of collective consciousness. Frightening, foreign, gentle and powerful, even magical, this unknown consciousness must be met in new ways. Singling out one individual, Beowulf, reflects a symbolic focus on one aspect of the collective consciousness. Common values, beliefs, thoughts and behaviors form a collective; yet, there can be individual nuances among the group. Beowulf’s insanity, described by Grendel, represents the unfamiliar conscious nuances that appear more developed than others in the collective. The Dragon speaks of the nuances and its influences on other members. "As I watched through the mead hall cracks, I grew more and more afraid of him, and at the same time, more and more eager for the hour of our meeting." Your fear and anticipation, your eagerness and readiness, intuitively symbolize your knowledge of the potential that lay between the two of you. Recall that the hero makes the gestures that can promote the integrative process of our two worlds. This you most assuredly anticipate, not with submission, but with a painful longing and dread, with hope and with despair. "Could this hero be the one?" The thought races through your mind with ceaseless repetitiveness, until you become numb with fear or twisted evermore tightly with obsessive readiness like an over-coiled spring. "Yes, yes, Dragon, that is exactly what possessed me. A new emotional binding enveloped me. It was beyond the language of words; images were my only recourse. “And so I went into action, for I could resist no longer. At night, as usual, I made my way to the mead hall, where they were staying, and with a single blow, the mead hall door burst into splinters. Poor fools, to believe their meagre structure could protect them. I trampled over the planks that once formed a door. The broken hinges rattled like swords against timbered walls. The Geats are stones, and whether it's because

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they're numb with terror or stiff from too much mead, I cannot tell. I am swollen with excitement, bloodlust, and joy; strange fears mingled in my chest like the twisting rage of a bonfire. "They're all asleep, and my wild heart laughs, but I let out no sound. Swiftly, softly, I move from bed to bed and destroy them all, swallow every last man. I am blazing, half-crazy with joy. I seize up a sleeping man, tear at him hungrily, bite through his bone locks and suck hot, slippery blood. He goes down in huge morsels: head, chest, hips, legs, even the hands, and feet. My face and arms are wet. The dark floor steams. I move on and reach for another one. As I seize a wrist, a shock goes through me. It is Beowulf. "His eyes are open; were open the entire time, watching my frenzied feast without the slightest revulsion or retort. His eyes nail me now, as his hand nails down my arm. Now he's out of bed; his hand still closed like a dragon's jaws on mine. Nowhere have I encountered a grip like this. My whole arm is on fire, incredible, searing pain as if his fingers are charged like fangs with poison. I scream. I begin to hallucinate with the pain. Grendel, Grendel, hold fast to what is true! "Regaining the reality with which I'm familiar, I establish a plan. I will kick him. But when I attempt, I slip on the blood covered floor. He now twists my arm behind me. I have given him a greater advantage. He has me pinned and begins speaking into my ear: '... as you see it is, while the seeing lasts, dark nightmare history, time as coffin; but where the water was rigid there will be fish, and men will survive on their flesh till spring. It's coming, ... though you murder the world, turn plains to stone, transmogrify life into me and it, strong searching roots will crack your cave and rain will cleanse it ... my promise ... by my hand I kill you.' Grendel describes to the Dragon, which is symbolic of the relational associations between all archetypes and the Self, his actions and emotions as he ravaged the Geats. Grendel, the Shadow, expresses an unconscious anticipation of the potential integration with a different consciousness. The Dragon’s wisdom clearly reveals the anticipation and possibilities. These vivid descriptions of eating the Geat warriors, of the blood flowing and the emotional joy experienced are not to be literally understood. Like any myth, fairytale or dream, these images are symbols from the

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unconscious psyche. Actually, the Self orchestrates these dynamics, utilizing archetypes and associated archetypal symbols to create the images. The ego-conscious experiences and thoughts often intermix with the deeper psychic structures and symbols as well. The devastation, the devouring of each warrior symbolizes the inability of consciousness to meet the Shadow and build a relationship of acknowledgment and integration with this archetypal source. Grendel encounters Beowulf, or more appropriately the reverse. Grendel struggle;, riving with pain and anguish, he must endure this level of consciousness represented by Beowulf. In an unequivocal challenge, greater than any past conquest, this consciousness meets the Shadow with recognition, acknowledgment and integrative strength. The conscious expression makes certain that the Shadow “hears” it. This may be the first time Grendel, the collective Shadow, must hear how a consciousness readies for further development. The language symbolizes the meeting of the Shadow and the occurrence of a potentially deeper form of integration. The Shadow begins to relinquish to the integrative process as it faces the possibility of losing the engagement. Meeting the Shadow continues symbolized in the imagery of the Shadow facing further pain and harm. Symbolically, the Shadow receives similar “destructive acts” that it imposed on many other attempts to integrate with it but these attempts lacked the fortitude to remain vigilant, observant and the readiness for change. I respond: “If you win, it's by mindless chance. Make no mistake. First, you tricked me, and then I slipped. Accident. "With a twist that hurls me forward screaming, I fall against a table and smash it. He speaks again: 'Grendel, Grendel! You make the world by whispers, second by second. Are you blind to that? Whether you make it a grave or a garden of roses is not the point. Feel the wall; is it not hard? (He smashes me against it; breaks open my forehead.) Hard, yes! Observe the hardness; write it down in careful runes.' "Not even the charm of the Dragon's gift of initiation can counter this madman. For he speaks more on my terms than any other human before him; thus he penetrates deeply, reaching me with each word and gesture.

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Have I met my match? Is this the combining, the integrative process which the Dragon spoke of? "I howl in pain. You're crazy; you're a lunatic. He's crazy, and I understand him, make no mistake. Nevertheless, I attempt to convince myself that it was an accident; he penetrated no mysteries. It is my only means of combating him and this impending doom. "Suddenly, as if struck by lightning, excruciating pain. He has torn off my arm at the shoulder. Blood pours down. I cry and run for the door as he stretches his arms in victorious delight. I run through the dark forest, mad with pain. I will die. No, I mustn't. But I will. My imagination begins showing me my descent into the abyss, but to what end? Ah, the process the Dragon spoke of; that is the end. This hero, this madman, has accomplished what Unferth could not. I and he will transform, exist in and between the two worlds more freely and expressively. And this will influence others. But the others will have no idea of the struggle and pain, or the extent, to which my/his existence has traversed and transmogrified. Is it joy I feel? Poor Grendel's had an accident, I whisper. So may you all." Grendel, your expressions are appropriate. There is more to be told, for I see beyond your vision. This I will leave empty as a blank page in a diary. The experiences will come and the pages written upon, all in due time. My tale has come to a close, dear reader. If you find solace from my tale, perhaps we shall engage each other again, sooner than you anticipate. As for me, I will be here, with Grendel and the others. Waiting. Grendel understands the entire process and more and more, even more eagerly, relents to the inevitable symbolic integration. He prepares himself. Actually, the initiation rite that moved Grendel to greater maturity held the potential for greater development. That is development for humanity’s unconscious dark, destructive side, which at a fundamental level forms the basis for all wars and atrocities imposed on humans by humans. Grendel, the collective Shadow, being a human condition has the potential to wage horrid storms in human nature but also be tamed to a degree, shifting his energic expression.

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Overcoming Grendel’s aggression means nothing less than the integration of the Shadow. The death and rebirth theme or archetype ushers in the transformation. As indicated, this process requires much effort, careful astute recognition and observation, and continual openness and honest assessment. Even then, as Grendel indicates, the integration is never complete—“I and he will transform, exist in and between the two worlds…” Nonetheless, we can do no better and a collective effect follows. In this way, each individual’s integrative process contributes to the betterment of the human condition and life. Could anyone consider this accomplishment anything other than a monumental achievement?

Closing Commentary Beowulf reveals many interesting psychological components attributed to the psyche. Any literary or creative expression introduces us to new, and sometimes new ways, of the understanding psyche. Each word, each phrase, opens our vision to psyche's naturalness of promoting conscious development. Psyche's language is symbolic. Even though words are used in literary formats, this need not inhibit the symbolism that underlies each phrase. In other words, if we avoid getting fixated on the literal meanings of the words and expressions, the opportunity to engage and meet the rich, symbolic world of the unconscious opens to us. The unconscious psyche appears to be without bounds. It isn’t a surprise to realize that symbols emerging from psyche are also boundless. Thus, the creative energy and meanings cannot be limited, which requires all of us to expand ourselves, to expand our consciousness, when reviewing dreams, reading literature or artistically creating. The anonymous author presented us with a period expression full of symbols and the collective consciousness of the time. As indicated in the psychological commentary, the shadow was and remains a source of human destruction. Full of psychic energy and a myriad of symbolic expressiveness, Beowulf assists us to understand the mysteries associated with this pervasive dynamic of human nature. Individually and collectively the shadow brings life forward but how it manifest has much to do with the many other psychological components associated with the individual and collective. As a vital source, there always remains the potential for less destructive, even constructive human development when engaging the shadow. Of course, as noted in this chapter the engagement is essential. Not only the engagement but a relationship between the ego and shadow brings a greater balance and the potential constructive dynamics to life. As clearly presented in this chapter, the struggles, the recognition, the

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relationship and the sustainability and nothing less, are required for a transformation of the collective shadow that influences each of us at a collective level. The importance of this transformation cannot be overstated, for the unmet collect shadow expresses itself through wars, mass shootings, repetitive forms of stasis and destruction and even in natural physical expressions such as horrific storms and disasters. As Grendel came to realize, something the Self already knew, transformation requires death and rebirth primarily of the individual “heroes” and the group mentality. It’s the psychic energy and dynamics that transform as a result. Just like Unferth attempted and Beowulf managed to do, we all must find our hero or heroine archetype and utilize it with ourselves and the collective expression to affect critical change before Grendel-like psychic forces overcome.

Bibliography Gardner, John. Grendel. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. Jung, Carl Gustav. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. —. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969a. —. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton: Princeton Unive rsity Press, 1969b. Beowulf. Translated by Francis B. Grummere. New York: The Heritage Press, 1939.

CHAPTER FOUR DOSTOEVSKY’S GENTLE SPIRIT AND ANDRE GIDE’S THE SCHOOL FOR WIVES: A LACANIAN ANALYSIS1 M. ÖNDER GÖNCÜOĞLU

Introduction This chapter discusses both Andre Gide’s The School for Wives (1929) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Gentle Spirit2 (1876) through Lacan's view of imaginary and symbolic realms with a particular emphasis on the female characters of these works. The characters in these stories seem to struggle to claim a recognizable identity in an environment governed under the control of the phallic order. The human world, a symbolic world by nature, is strictly reduced to a phallic world where the individual is unconsciously inducted into this phallic order through his/her cognitive speculations concerning both his/her place and the others' presence in the same world. The others the individual talks to, observes and listens to, or merely the others with whom the individual both establishes and maintains a dialogical relationship whereby his/her desires, fears, and anxieties are formed, also function as a means of mediator with whom the individual attempts to fix the gap emerging with his/her entry into the symbolic realm. The others in this respect experience a similar traumatic process as an individual does, because the others are only a plural representation of every single individual. All together, they represent a spokesperson of a body of social law adjusted by the name of the father, and ironically, they concurrently recognize and live by its rules, as there is no other alternative.

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Some parts of this article were presented at the 16th Cultural studies Symposium at Ege University on 10-12 May 2017 2 Sometimes also translated as A Gentle Creature -- The Meek One

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In terms of the limits of the symbolic realm, from a Lacanian perspective it seems to be certain that individuals in general, as well as Dostoevsky's and Gide's characters in particular, who attempt to regain their selfhood lost with their entry into this symbolically formed lingual world, will try to fix their sense of privation in vain. Their attempts will be performed through the discursive maneuvers that will confine them inside a symbolic realm whereof symbolic castration is already immersed. Symbolic castration--the impossibility of recognizing that the rules of a language through which one dreams, thinks, and speaks; possesses fears, desires, and secrets immersed in that same realm of castration--is problematically experienced. In this light, this chapter foregrounds how the symbolic realm is displayed through the characters of particular novellas where the merits of their struggle to claim a recognizable identity in such a symbolic world are discussed via their discursive representations, thereby subconsciously revealing their desire to fix the gap emerging with their entry to the symbolic realm. I will, therefore, explore and discuss the possibility of getting rid of the confines of a symbolic realm via the struggles of the characters of the novellas mentioned above. To this end, through a Lacanian view of reality, I will also initially clarify some essential terms, such as symbolic realm, castration, and the phallic order.

The Symbolic Realm Immersed in Symbolic Castration Entry into language for Lacan is a kind of castration, for a language’s symbolic nature is a barrier opposing an individual to see reality. Undoubtedly, no human being is naturally born into reality, as reality is only an artificially designated spectacle to replace authentic reality. We humans, therefore, are bound to obey the codes establishing and maintaining the majority's sense of reality. All of that which we know about our existence, including our perception of our selfhood and identity, is an outcome of our cognition of anything concerning humanity, starting with our entry into language. Language as the primary ground for symbolic order cannot be imagined without the evolution of the cognitive merits of a human being's ability. The factual reality, however, can never be achieved through our cognitive abilities as the real-real precedes the symbolic realm of human consciousness and cognition. It is not only beyond language but also before it. It precedes language that precedes an individual who is castrated within the symbolic order. Therefore, the real for Lacan is impossible because it brings up a cut in the real. The real in

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this respect implies the phase before an individual meets the symbolic order. When met with this world of language, an infant accordingly begins to both acquire and exchange meaning through its dialogical relations with others. Thus, s/he learns how to be a human subject from within the construct of language. This might be reminiscent of Derrida's perception of meaning, as he believes that meaning is only what is left for us after the play of signifiers consisting of a never-ending chain of relations between signifiers and the signified. A signified in his view comes to represent another signifier from within the construct of itself. Therefore, the meaning, supposedly residing in a word through the play of signifiers, defers and postpones itself through the differences it creates in a domino reaction-like chain of meanings.3 Although there is a continual struggle to stabilize meaning, the nature of the language as an outcome of socially determined codes, rules, mores, bias, fears, and desires--which are likewise apt to evolve into different forms of feelings to bring out new social teachings both through conscious and unconscious ways--makes it almost impossible to achieve, to put it in Lacanian terms, a self that is stable and out of the influences of others. This 'others' functions as a means of mirror reflection through what a self tries to achieve: his/her selfhood, despite its vainness. It is for this reason that Lacan believes that the unconscious is the discourse of the other made up of symbolic order introduced to an infant with its first entry into the realm of cognitive speculation. However, to elaborate on his theory of symbolic order, Lacan distinguishes three different stages an infant goes through in the course of its acquiring its selfhood: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The imaginary represents the stage where an infant's "preverbal and pre-social interaction with the mother is actualized.”4 At this phase, an infant is still in a symbiotic relationship with its mother and has no idea about its selfhood separate from its mother.5 Hook elaborates on this as such: 3

Derrida believes in Language having two critical features: one, its play of signifiers continually defers, postpones, meaning and the other the meaning it seems to have is the result of the differences by which we distinguish one signifier from another. Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today (2006), 253. 4 Derek Hook, “Lacan, the meaning of the phallus and the ‘sexed’ subject.” London: LSE Research Online, (2006), 61. 5 “An animal remains stuck at the imaginary level; it is caught in the mirrorrelationship to its environs, while the man is able to transcend this closure by being engaged in the process of symbolization.” Slajov Zizek. The Plague of Fantasies, (Verso, 1997), 94.

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"There is no clearly defined ‘I' at this point, rather a loosely bounded and undifferentiated mass of sensations in which the body, much like the emerging ego, has not taken on a coherent form. We have here a ceaseless exchange where the ‘self' seems to pass into objects and objects into it.”6 Therefore, this is the stage where an infant has not been traumatized yet by separateness from the others. It will recognize the gap between the self and the others firstly with its departure from its m(O)ther. Sensing its separateness from the m(O)ther in particular, and then the others in general, denotes a traumatic experience providing the infant with selfhood always missing, but demanding its completeness having been lost with its entry into the symbolic realm.7 This is when the symbolic castration begins to be actualized. Learning its difference, separateness, and loneliness through its entry into the symbolic realm, an infant then is psychically castrated and forced to feel itself symbolically missing. From this phase onward the infant strives toward achieving its lost completeness. The infant who is introduced into the symbolic realm operating with the order of symbolic codes, all of which are shaped around lingual signs is therefore traumatized with its selfhood built on its own cognitively oriented symbolic castration. As Qazi remarks "the symbolic order or the world known through language, ushers in the world of lack. Hence, the Symbolic order8, as a result of the experience of lack, marks the split into conscious and unconscious mind.”9

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Hook, “Lacan, the meaning of the phallus,” 61. This stage, which lasts roughly between the 6 - 18 months and when the child begins to learn the rules of the symbolic realm, is also "when the child starts to realise the desire of the m(O)ther. It is this desire, directed at the child, which provides a mirror to him/her. This moment is fundamental to the child realising, albeit somewhat erroneously, that he/she is in control of their motor and sensory skills. To put it another way, the child finds a degree of certainty and jubilation in the image reflected back at him/her even though there is a degree of illusion to the image." For more about the Lacanian stages see the link https://www.academia.edu/3825763/Meaning_of_the_phallus_in_Lacanian_theory .Ramis Cizer Kamil, “Meaning of the phallus in Lacanian theory,” 1. 8 Referring to Lacan’s Seminars, Tyson explains how the symbolic order functions as follows: “Lacan’s famous statement that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language (Seminar, Bk. VII 12)’ implies among other things, the way in which unconscious desire is always seeking our lost object of desire, the fantasy mother of our preverbal experience, just as language is always seeking ways to put into words the world of objects we inhabit as adults that didn’t need words when we felt as preverbal infants, one with them” (Tyson 2006), 30. It is only in the absence of the desired object that language becomes necessary and through the use of 7

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Lacan elaborates on this with his well-known theory of the mirror stage, where an infant as a human animal experiences its first recognition of lack and gap between self and the other. During the mirror stage, the establishment of ego through the images reflected in the mirror is actualized. In other words, the identification of an infant itself with both its self-image and the other's image next to itself results in the greatest rupture in self-recognition, thereby causing a gap never to be fixed throughout an individual's life. It is a stage where the images are questioned to consolidate a sense of an ‘I’ and the other. Eagleton remarks as follows: The image in the mirror both is and is not itself, a blurring of subject and object still obtains. It has begun the process of constructing a center of ‘self.' This ‘self' as the mirror situation suggests, is essentially narcissistic, we arrive at a sense of an ‘I' by finding that ‘I' reflected back to ourselves by some object or person in the world. This object is at once somehow part of ourselves – we identify with it – and yet not ourselves, something alien. The image which the small child sees in the mirror is in this sense an ‘alienated' one: the child ‘misrecognizes' itself in it, finds in the image a pleasing unity which it does not actually experience in its own body.10

Initiating the greatest rupture in a human’s life, this mirror stage represents the process of how an infant is taken into the symbolic realm and abandoned: the infant alone within the order of symbols. Qazi argues that [t]he Symbolic order is the structure of language itself, and we have to enter into it in order to emerge as speaking subjects, and to designate ourselves by "I." The foundation for having a self lies in the Imaginary projection of the self onto the specular image; the other in the mirror and having a self is expressed in saying "I," which can only occur within the Symbolic.11

Then it could be stated that the first two Lacanian stages such as Imaginary and Symbolic are intertwined because there is no clear division between the two. What is clear is that symbolic stage is undoubtedly and language that a self comes into existence. The form of that existence is both desiring and linguistic. 9 Khursheed Ahmad Qazi, “Lacanian concepts – Their Relevance to Literary Analysis and Interpretation: A Post Structural Reading,” (December 2011), 8-9. 10 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory/ An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 143. 11 Qazi, “Lacanian concepts,”9.

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indispensably a necessary step for an infant to recognize and claim its selfhood albeit its incompleteness. Otherwise, it brings out a dangerous situation. If the infant cannot enter into the symbolic stage, then it can never achieve selfhood despite the fact that achieving pseudo-one has its own pitfalls. Hook argues that if it [the child] remains in the Imaginary, the child will never be able to enter the Symbolic, that pre-established world, in other words, of language, culture, law (and, indeed, patriarchy) into which it is born.”12 Identifying itself with its own image along with the other images in the mirror, the infant however misrecognizes itself because the ego having been originated from his meeting with the images in the mirror also informs him about his separateness, and difference from the others, thereby symbolically teaching it the fact that it is in need of them forever in order to be able to claim its selfhood. This is when the infant traumatically learns that it is the existence of the others reflected and recognized in the mirror ensuring that the infant's very selfhood is reciprocally bound up with the others' recognition of itself. All this is actualized in the realm of symbolic order making the infant conceptualize and then to internalize the lingual codes heard around. The symbolic order, therefore, is the intrinsic part of the world of language. In the course of an individual's life, this stage of symbolic realm is galvanized through the images any individual identifies himself/herself with through cognitively oriented and verbally represented selves who are all bound to remain incomplete as the demand emerging from one's relation with the others' recognition of himself or herself will endlessly be incomplete too. One's relationship with the others will always be dependent on the language, and because each individual or subject is inscribed in language, the symbolic castration for Lacan will last for the whole life of any single individual. In other words, as Qazi points out: Being humans, we are trapped within the universe of discourse, and it is impossible to conceive or articulate or express whatever is outside without articulating it within the discursive field in one of its forms like desire. It is now evident that meaning is constantly shifting despite the fact that language always carries meaning; it is incapable of fixating it. As human beings, it is always our desire to articulate our demands in a well-formed language, but our desires never get materialized because of the slippery nature of language which makes us persistently conscious of our ‘lack' or ‘failure' to communicate. We continuously search for this lost-impossible 12

Hook, “Lacan, the meaning of the phallus,” 62.

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However, within the scope of this chapter, it is important to note that the symbolic realm that introduces an individual to his/her incompleteness is ironically also a stage forcing an individual to desire continually for the others' affirmation, acknowledgement, and recognition of his/her selfhood that has been missing since being met within the symbolic realm. Entering into the symbolic realm, any individual throughout the whole of his/her life learns both what and how to desire from his/her relations with others and, accordingly, struggles to satisfy those never-ending learned desires. The desires, therefore, cannot be some new desires that have not been felt before and likewise learned and performed by others. The old desires owned by some others in different times and places come to be the new desires owned by the late claimers in a vicious cycle. Desires will inevitably include the world of predefined social roles and gender differences, the world of subjects and objects.

The Phallic Order in the Name of the Father When regarded through a Lacanian perspective, “the name of the father”14 as a controlling tool in forming one’s desires and behaviors in such a vicious habitat seems to play the utmost importance as the name of the father comes to represent the rules of the phallic order as well. The importance of this term comes from the idea what it signifies; it is the obligation of law beginning with a “prohibition that the mother is off bounds to the child as an object of desire.” Hook argues that with this first prohibition, the infant is pushed into the symbolic realm to meet “a new system of social structure and meanings, of laws, language and regulations.”15 Hook elaborates this as follows: “Importantly, not only is it the case that the child is part of a wider familial and social network, it is 13

Qazi, “Lacanian concepts,”11. “What the Name-of-the-Father does is to force the child into the realm of the Symbolic, into a network of relationships and rules, a series of familial and social structures, in which it will have to find its feet as a speaking subject. For Lacan, this agent need not be the actual father, or even a physical person or ‘embodied actor'; the kind of castration we have in mind here is not literal, but rather symbolic in nature… for Lacan ‘the symbolic order… [is] upheld by a "Symbolic father" (the Name-of-the-Father) which is a metaphor for that which imposes the castration of language and stands for the ideal exigency of the law'” Hook, 66-67.  15 Hook, “Lacan, the meaning of the phallus,” 63. 14

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also the case that the role that it must play is already, in a sense, predetermined, laid down for it by the practices of the society in which it has been born.”16 The phallic order comes to represent a prohibition shaped by the rules of the society where an individual is first born into and then is abandoned with the image of the m(O)ther and eventually is forced to learn how to desire for a substitute for the mother. The substitute for lost completeness with the mother is organized by the name of the father dominating the symbolic realm, to put it in Lacanian words, with a phallic order. The child's entry into the symbolic realm then also means the introduction of the phallus. Then it can justly be pointed out that the symbolic order must necessarily be phallocentric because the achievement of selfhood is dependent on one's submission to the father's law. Feeling incomplete and desiring completeness, any individual with his/her gained a predefined role in the community is therefore supposed to trek in the trace of phallic order. Concerning the definition of the phallic order including the name of the father, Brousse refers to Lacan's Seminar XXII, R.S.I. where Lacan suggests three new names for the name of the father such as anxiety, symptom, and inhibition all come to set a limit in our symbolic realms.17 The world of language, the symbolic realm replacing the relation between infant and mother, within the individual’s submission to the name of the father, also provides a social programme to any individual where s/he learns “the rules and prohibitions of the society authored by the name of the father.”18 With respect to the role of the phallic order arranging the societal relations in the name of the father, Tyson posits that “our desires, beliefs, biases, and so forth are constructed for us as a result of our immersion in the Symbolic Order, especially as that immersion is carried out by our parents and influenced by their own responses to the Symbolic 16

Hook, 63. Brousse explains what we should understand from these new terms inscribed in the name of the father as follows "the name-of-the-father, is a limit. …symptom, anxiety and inhibition provide limits to the speaking being. When you are inhibited, when you can't speak in public, for example, it constitutes a limit. It protects you from something. When you feel anxiety, a phobia, for example, this too is a limit. You can't go in a place where there are certain kinds of objects. You can't watch such-and-such a movie. Symptom, anxiety and inhibition are new names-of-the-father because they provide limits without the authority of a master.” Marie-Helene Brousse. “Psychic Suffering and the Treatment Challenges of the Postmodern World.” (October 3, 2007), 17.  18 Tyson (2006), 31. 17

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Order.” Referring to Lacan’s Seminars, he underlines that “this is what Lacan means by his claim that “desire is always the desire of the other.”19 It is possible to assert that after an individual is introduced to the symbolic realm consisting of language as the primary ground for all relations conducted between the selves, the same individual learns to desire in the way s/he was taught how to desire. However, his/her learning the ways of desiring is never actualized without the permission of all others who in this respect come likewise to represent the name of the father. It should be borne in mind that the phallus is neither an object nor a reality but a sign controlling and accordingly dividing us from the symbiotic unity found in the imaginary realm, and pushing us into the symbolic realm by offering us a selfhood and a place in its phallic order, despite the fact that both our place and selfhood are bound to be missing from our predestined positions there. Therefore, Lacanian reality can never be attained. The symbolic order that controls human culture and social order also controls more specifically a society’s beliefs, values, fears, desires, biases, and ideologies, all of which are established in a society’s system of laws, institutions, and daily practices, maintained accordingly by the same members of the society in the name of the father.

Dostoevsky’s Gentle Spirit and Gide’s The School for Wives Gide’s story, which is a trilogy, consists of the recounts of Eveline, her husband Robert and their daughter Genevieve. Robert and Eveline with their recounts covertly reveal how the symbolic castration is performed within the societies. Their recounts give a social depiction of the society they lived in as well.20 It might be argued that Gide in this work highlights the pitfalls of the roles ascribed conventionally to individuals by the society itself. In The School for Wives, the readers learn about Eveline's recounts through the diary she keeps during her marriage with Robert as they promised to one another early in their engagement that they would write their diaries for one another. The diary consists of two parts, the first part is written just before her marriage during her engagement with Robert, and 19

Tyson (2006), 31. As Kennedy argues the picture represented in the story is particularly significant with respect to its displaying bourgeois marriage patterns: “It is the personal diary of the wife and subsequent letters of defense and explanation by the husband and daughter which form this trilogy of bourgeois marriage patterns” David Arnold Kennedy, “Gide’s Portrayal of Marriage and Family Life.” Master’s Thesis, (McMaster University, 1969), 100.

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the other part is written after twenty years of marriage when she is ready to leave Robert. Her diary helps the readers observe the change in her thoughts in time. Her attitude towards her husband in the second part of her recount seems to have changed to a large extent as her ideas concerning her relationship with Robert profoundly contradict with her earlier perceptions of him. In the first part while Eveline adores her fiancé, and the pureness and magnitude of her young love are in the foreground, in the second part her despair and disillusionment can easily be deduced. Despite the paramount differences concerning their personalities, Robert and Eveline's father seem to play pivotal roles in Eveline's life. In a world formed through the codes of phallic order, Eveline searches for ways to cover her loss only with the options provided by the symbolic realm. The only possibility for her to recover her incompleteness requires in this context her submission to the only male figures in her life. The first male figure and accordingly the first male inhibiting actor introduced to her during her separation from her symbiotic relationship with the mother comes to be her father who as the mediator of the phallic order also represents the idol to be worshipped. During her relationship with Robert, it is, therefore, her father she thinks to be pleased rather than her mother. Her mother is not told much in the story. As a representative of the name of the father, Eveline's father stands as much as symbolically for a border figure with his role in creating inhibition as one of the names Lacan gives for the name of the father along with anxiety and symptom. Such inhibition is actualized with her submissive role ascribed to her with societal learnings. Eveline seems to be timid and silent when the father is around despite her overwhelming feelings toward Robert. Thinking that it would not be better suited to speak more approachable than her father does, Eveline talks less when her father is with her particularly in conversations made with some strangers. She states that "personally I should have liked to talk, but I couldn't very well be more forthcoming than Papa; so I was just as reserved as he…”21 Emphasizing the role of the women in the society, Gide seems to reveal the outcomes of the symbolic castration especially through the women characters in his stories. The themes of youth, marriage, gender, and homosexuality are also employed by him within his works in general to challenge the inflictions immersed in societies that accordingly establish the individuals' sense of reality. Born into a normal acting family, Eveline in this regard seems to have already been installed within the symbolic order at the outset of the novella. She meets Robert at a young age during 21

Andre Gide, The School For Wives. (New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1929), 13.

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a trip to Italy with her family, and soon after their return to France, they get engaged. Her meeting with Robert represents one of the teachings of the symbolic realm as her desire to marry to Robert stands for the goal of her life. Having learnt that she needs a goal for her life--as taught within the confines of her symbolic world--Eveline's devotion of herself to Robert seems to be understandable. The society she is born into is only one of the many other societies shaped with the codes of the phallic order, and which in this context is frequently practiced by patriarchal teachings and thereby representing from Lacan's perspective the limits she is supposed to be entrapped from within through fears and anxieties. Her substitution her father with Robert displays how deep the individuals are immersed in a world of castration. All their choices seem to be predestined by the merits of the very society they are born into which in this sense is already castrated in its symbolic nature. While choosing Robert as a husband for herself, Eveline seems to be content with her role to make her lose her freedom as she remarks “I consider it perfectly natural that in marrying Robert I should give up my independence.”22 However, she believes that the act she performs by marrying Robert on its own is a revelation of her independence as it is a preference she makes against her father's consent. She states "(I have shown my independence in marrying him in spite of Papa), but every woman ought, at any rate, to be free to choose the slavery she prefers.”23 Despite her father’s unwillingness, she believes that her marriage with Robert ascertains her independence. Well aware of her gender-role in her society, she believes that she achieves her freedom by opposing to her father’s wish although her freedom is pre-determined by the phallic order encapsulating all her decisions and desires. The desire that is learned within the borders of the symbolic world teaches her to choose a seemingly ideal option out of all predetermined choices. She is therefore unaware that her authentic selfhood, she thinks she claims by refusing to her father, is only a selfhood inauthentically acquired through her interactions with others only within the borders of the symbolic world. Hence, it is significant to note that she does not seem to be irritated by her situation in the first part of her diary. On the contrary, she underlines that every woman must be free to choose the most suitable captivity thereby suggesting unknowingly that the borders encapsulating her are the corporal reality of her world. The world, which teaches her about gender roles, is a world under the control of the phallic order. Centred on the 22 23

Gide, The School for Wives. (1929), 47. Gide, 47.

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patriarchal teachings, her world validates the male’s dominance and thereby representing the common sense of her real world. Similar to her gender role defined in the name of father and thereby setting her limits, Robert's role in Eveline's use of language is also detailed in Gide's narration where he seems to depict ironically that a self's only chance to achieve a selfhood, albeit its vainness, can only be actualized through language. Obsessed with Eveline's usage of language, Robert charges her to speak a language he believes that fits into his symbolic world. She notes "I am often afraid of vexing Robert by using certain words and expressions in my talk, which he says, are not correct, and which I have fallen into the habit of saying because I hear them continually round about me.”24 She then adds “when we are alone, Robert takes me up and corrects me. But when we are in company, I often keep silent for fear of suddenly seeing a little sign of annoyance on Robert’s face, which, though no one else notices it, tells me that I have expressed incorrectly.”25 Fear of seeing a little sign of annoyance on Robert’s face represents how the name of the father dominates the individuals' symbolic realms and accordingly confines them to be castrated in them where the sense of fear is performed in the name of the father. Albeit Robert's world's incompleteness, the rules of his world seem to be at work as performed by the majority. Learnt and internalized her position in this incomplete but justified realm, Eveline, who searches for her completeness, accepts the other's controlling role as it seems to be the only way for her to repair her sense of loss. She, therefore, legitimizes Robert's request with her following words: "I want, however, to understand these rules thoroughly and to get into the habit of applying them; for Robert considers it ought to be women's special business to maintain the purity of the language, because they are in general more conservative [sic. conversational] than men, and for them to be slovenly in their speech is to fail in one of their duties.”26 Internalizing her role, she, therefore, wants to acquire a habit of understanding and applying these rules. It is her father who firstly opposes Eveline to marry Robert and then it is again her father who similarly refuses her demand when she decides to get divorced from Robert. He in this sense functions as the visible implementer of the rules ascribed to him by the societal expectations. He is the one who has learnt to be in control with respect to decisions concerning his daughter to some extent. Nonetheless, it seems Eveline 24

Gide, 41. Gide, 42. 26 Gide, 43. 25

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feels herself closer to her father rather than her mother. Even if she cannot find her father right in some cases, her heart is on her father’s side as she notes it in her diary: “Mamma says he [her father] is “stubborn,” but I think he has a better heart than she has and when they have an argument together… Mamma speaks to him in such a way that my sympathy goes to him rather than to her, even when I can’t feel that he is in the right.”27 Besides, Eveline's father's remarks for Robert, which depict the conflict between these two male figures, also ironically reveal the Lacanian perception of symbolic castration: "I find no fault with him, my dear; I simply don't like him. If I were to tell you why, you would object, because you love him, and when one loves a person, one doesn't see him, as he is.”28 He unconsciously seems to imply the fact that the other-metaphorically as the seen object in Lacan’s mirror offering for reconciliation with one's selfhood through the seen object's symbolic role of justification--is indeed impossible. The object hereby comes to represent a self which is, likewise, missing in the same realm of symbolic castration. Her father, therefore, believes that Robert is deceiving not only the priest, her mum, and Eveline but and even worse that he is deceiving himself: "Robert has taken you all in—the Abbe and your Mamma and you—himself too, I am afraid which is more serious.”29 Eveline refuses her father and stresses that she loves him “because Robert is what he is.”30 However, feeling weak, incomplete, missing and inferior to Robert, Eveline reveals covertly that within the confines of his symbolic world Robert's misleading interactions with the others represent the missing part that he strives to fix through his endeavours whereby desiring to get recognition by the others. Eveline's description of Robert is as follows: "I have asked him to introduce me only to his real friends; but as soon as one knows him a little, it is difficult not to become his friend, and as he is so well up in every subject, he is able to talk to anybody about anything as if it were his own special line. To tell the truth, I don't think he has any intimate friends.”31 Robert seems to desire for the others’ desire for himself and their affirmation of his selfhood. He, in this respect, comes to be an individual similar to Eveline that is missing and in need of another or some others to fill the gap met in the symbolic realm. Similar

27

Gide, 15. Gide, 24. 29 Gide, 24-25. 30 Gide, 24. 31 Gide, 30. 28

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to Eveline, his desire for recognition is related to his dedication of himself to the discursive interaction he conducts with the others. However, while Robert is engaged in almost any conversation for a goal to provide him with pseudo-completeness, Eveline keeps her silence. He is always busy with performing a forged role strengthened with his power of speech thereby representing the primary rule of the phallic order functioning through the lingual codes. Eveline remarks that “[Robert] says there is no greater pleasure than one which can be turned to some advantage. His mind is never unemployed. He is always learning and manages to find profit in everything.”32 All his discursive attempts to build an ideal person out of himself to be idolized by the others turn out to be a deception as his attempts, whether they are fraud or not, are bound to be impossible in a symbolic realm. On the other hand, as an outcome of her fear--which should recall one of the names Lacan uses for the name of the father--of not being recognized in the way she desires, Eveline keeps her silence while listening to his conversation with the influential people. She explains her fear imbued with her silence as follows "when I hear him talking to the distinguished people he introduces me to, I realize my ignorance; I hardly dare to take part in the conversation, I am so afraid of disgracing him.”33 Regarding the limits of the symbolic realm, it seems to be confident that the individuals, attempting to regain their selfhood lost with their entry to this symbolically formed lingual world, will try to fix their sense of privation in vain. All attempts will be performed through their discursive maneuvers thereby representing how the Lacanian symbolic castration functions. Symbolic castration, therefore, means the impossibility of recognition that is tied up with the rules of a language. What is seen with both Robert and Eveline is that they both struggle for achieving recognition for themselves through the others' affirmation. Predestined by the rules of the symbolic world, all relations in this regard are bound to be missing at some points. However, believing that her parents are deeply connected to one another, Eveline cannot understand how they might fall into conflict when the issue at hand mainly is not a significant matter. She thinks erroneously that her relationship with Robert will be different from all other relations because what she ascribes to Robert concerning his perfectiveness seems to fail her thereby causing her not to see Robert's weakness resulting from his privation. She remarks that "how sad such disputes are between couples as thoroughly united as my 32 33

Gide, 32. Gide, 30-32.

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parents, and about points too, on which, with a little give and take, it would be so easy to come to an understanding. In any case, there is nothing of the kind to be feared with Robert, for I have never seen him enter a church without praying, and all his ideas are generous and noble.”34 She indeed believes that all his thoughts are high and noble. However, what she seems to miss is that in such a symbolic realm any possible dialogue conducted by individuals will go beyond the intentions of the individuals as all dialogues are outcomes of a particular kind of discourse circling individual's solicitous struggles to be completed in a symbolic world they are confined to. Robert, therefore, comes to be a figure too ideal to be real in her world. She idolizes him to such an extent that she cannot realize the pitfalls he owns, she even sacrifices some of her choices and likes in her life to be able to make herself a proper partner for Robert. For instance, she gives up her talent in the piano because Robert does not like music. Her relationship with Robert seems to be built upon the negligence of her authenticity, which is generated ironically from her loss with her entry to the symbolic realm. Through Lacanian view of the mirror stage, Robert might be considered as the big other she meets in the mirror, who through her sense of incompleteness is determined by a desire to suppose him as the idealized other, and all of which might be said to be experienced subconsciously through her covert speculations belonging to symbolic realm. Robert comes to represent an object of desire whose existence formed and identified by the codes of discursive realm becomes tangential to her missing selfhood. She, therefore, cannot stop underestimating herself while devoting herself to the desire of being desired by Robert. She remarks in her diary that “Now that the only thing I want is Robert’s approval, I don’t care at all about pleasing other people—or else only for his sake and because I see what pleasures it gives him…”35 Thinking that she had no choice but to win Robert's spurs, Eveline seems to reveal the goal that is desiring Robert's desire for herself. While appraising Robert, she highly minimizes her self-esteem. The following example is only one of the many examples seen throughout the first part of her diary: "Yes, it was our conversation in the Tuileries gardens that opened my eyes to the part Woman might play in the lives of great men… I brought away this—that my whole life must be henceforth devoted to enabling him to accomplish his glorious destiny.”36 She seems to be ready to sacrifice all her ‘selfhood' for a desire for Robert's desire for 34

Gide, 15-16. Gide, 9. 36 Gide, 5. 35

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herself. Likewise, when they agree to write their separate diaries, she notes in her diary that it was easy for her to accomplish this task, as she did not have anything significant to do. However, her thoughts about Robert are entirely contradictory because Robert for Eveline, when compared to her self-affirmed inferiority and uselessness, is an extremely busy person. She notes: "But I doubt whether he will be able to manage it, even if he has the time.”37 She, therefore, remarks that she cannot have a right to ask for such an intellectual and hardworking man to be engaged in such a mundane work while there is a lot to do for him. She notes "… I think it would be a bad thing for his mind to be too much occupied with me.”38 She seems to be pleased to reveal in her diary that she has explained to him that she is aware of his preoccupations in relation to not only his professional responsibilities but also social pursuits: “I explained to him at length that I perfectly understood that he had his career, his thoughts, his public life, which my love must not interfere with.”39 She, therefore, thinks that her love for Robert cannot be an excuse to keep him away from his preoccupations. Moreover, although he stands for the whole life for her, she seems to be pleased acknowledging that she cannot expect the same from him. She notes “… if it was right for him to be the whole of my life, I could not be—ought not to be—the whole of his.”40 Her desire is to be loved no matter what it costs. Through a Lacanian view, her desire can be said to be a desire for Robert's desire, which implies that through Robert's recognition of herself as a lover she subconsciously hopes to be completed. She therefore erroneously believes that she is much concerned with her own likes. Although she complains that she spends all her time on trivial things in favor of her own likes, she desires to be desired by Robert. On the other hand, Robert's situation is not much different from that of Eveline's. He is also in search for selfhood broken with the lingual-semantic--inscriptions acquired only with his entry to the symbolic realm. His desire for the other’s--particularly Eveline’s--affirmation and also recognition of his entity is revealed through his obsessive expectations from the others. He wants to be comforted by others' interpretations of him. He desires to be desired by the others, and his desire in this respect comes to be a wish to see that his desire is being actualized. Therefore, while making Eveline to keep writing a diary, he ensures that her desire for him is being performed as long as she continues to write. He, however, does not keep a diary. Eveline remarks her disappointment when she 37

Gide, 6. Gide, 7. 39 Gide, 7. 40 Gide, 7. 38

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learns Robert has not kept his promise as follows: "And now he confesses his journal does not exist, that he only allowed me to think he was writing it for so long in order to encourage me to go on with mine.”41 Eveline's realization that Robert has never written his diary contrary to what he had promised to Eveline disappoints her to such an extent that she, feeling insulted and dumped, stops writing her diary. From then on, the second part of Eveline's story starts where she seems to have changed a lot in twenty years that passed from the last time she wrote in her diary. However, this tragic realization of hers exemplifies how the sense of incompleteness brings out a never-ending desire to be desired by the others’ desires. While Eveline's consideration of Robert's dishonesty reveals her frustration, on the one hand, Robert's continual desire to claim Eveline's desire for himself is pathologically revealed in his fraudulent game. Through a Lacanian perspective, Robert's case might be regarded as an obsession to pursue the others' concerns about himself for the sake of achieving an I42. This is where the individual desires to achieve a selfhood and accordingly claims the others’ recognition of him/her as an I that is bound to be missing no matter how much s/he desires to acquire an authentic I because I is pushed/born already castrated into the symbolic realm functioning primarily in the name of the father and thereby maintaining the symbolic realm's castrating effect. Therefore, the idea of being born seems to occur two times from a Lacanian perspective. While the first one is a biological birth into a real physical world, the second one denotes a rebirth via an infant's entry into the symbolic world met roughly between the first six and eighteen months of an individual's life, and from where the rebirth is consolidated increasingly through interactions conducted with the others in the course of an individual's life. Having changed on a large scale, Eveline in the second part of her diary seems to be feeling sorry for the years she wasted trying to satisfy Robert’s desires. It is worth noting that the years spent for satisfying Robert’s desires which she remembers to have been some erroneously conducted deeds, however, concurrently come to represent, regardless of what she calls them now, some deeds through which she likewise desired Robert’s love or more specifically that she desired his desire for her desire 41

Gide, 51. A more modernized form of this unconscious need for recognition by the others can be found in social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. as a means of pursuing the ‘likes' for the posts sent by individuals who might be desiring for being recognized though the numbers of ‘likes' thereby providing them, albeit their possible erroneous affirmations, with a selfhood to be recognized as an ‘I.' 42

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to be desired. The problem of being incomplete seems to be experienced by all characters that are missing of an authentic self and therefore struggling to achieve one with their subconscious desires for being desired, that is for an I to be recognized by the others. Having defeated in her attempts to fill the gap created with her entry to the symbolic world and where she attempted to regain her selfhood through her relationship with Robert, Eveline now with her two kids seem to be carrying on her pursue to achieve her completeness through some new trails. She starts the second part of her diary with a confession as follows: “I can still hear those remarks of Robert’s that filled me with such joy and love and pride – but I now interpret them differently.”43 Interpreting Robert's behaviours from a different angle, Eveline now seems to be irritated by Robert's similar behaviours which she once was appraising obsessively. She, therefore, would like to see only for once that he defends a case that could make his situation worse, that he takes no advantage of a situation, or that he has ideas providing him with no profits. She remarks as follows: "Ah! How I wish I could see him if only for once, defend a cause for which he would have to compromise himself, experience sentiments from which he could derive no advantage, have convictions which would be of no benefit to him!..."44 Feeling herself now spiritually distant from Robert, Eveline with her two kids chases for other alternatives to help her repair her sense of loss. However, her son’s--Gustave--behaviors, which bear some similarities with those of his father's, seem to frustrate Eveline. She notes "though, under a new aspect, they are the same; it is impossible to mistake them.”45 Through her observation, we are informed that Gustave does not learn anything just because he wants to learn but to create an impression that he knows. Similar to his father it is more important for Gustave to impress others rather than learn something as Eveline remarks: “he never learns anything out of the simple desire to learn and cares less about knowing a thing than about giving the impression he knows it”46 Gustave seems to be very similar to his father in his treatments to others. As a ‘cultural malebeing,' Gustave practices what he has obtained culturally in his family by taking his father as his role model. He, therefore, desires others' dependence on him. Seeing his son's treatment to his friend, Eveline notes: "he [Gustave's friend] is a warm-hearted boy and adores Gustave, and when I see him in admiration over his friend's sayings and doings, I feel 43

Gide, 60. Gide, 65. 45 Gide, 67. 46 Gide, 67. 44

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inclined to warm him, to say: ‘My poor boy, don't deceive yourself. It is not you Gustave is fond of; it's your devotion.’”47 Functioning as a means of phallic order, family as an institution seems to play a significant role introducing individuals with the codes of the symbolic realm that are commonly shared by the majority. Gustave's father, therefore, becomes a means of model instructing his son how to act, desire and behave. In other words, Gustave seems to learn how to repair his incompleteness through his learnt desires inherited by his father albeit they are not workable. Concerning the role of institutions running in the name of the father and accordingly for the benefits of the majority, Gide also employs religion as a means of the implementer of phallic order. In such a symbolic world Christianity, as an institution seems to function in favour of the patriarchal teachings. When Old Abbe Bredel as a representative of Christianity talks to Eveline, he seems to convey messages for Eveline which surpass the expectations of solely Christian religion Eveline trusts in. The religion itself with its pervasive role in forming individual's codes of behaviors is, therefore, depicted by Gide as a means of controlling institution defending in this sense the name of the lord-father. Eveline notes: “he [Abbe] violently defended Robert, denied me all right to doubt his sincerity, and refused to see in my grief and what he called my “selfish” complaints anything but a manifestation of the most lamentable pride—a pride which the neglect of my religious duties had fostered and developed.”48 In her conversation with Eveline, the priest because of her disobedience to the divine order finds Eveline guilty. Although she defies the priest’s allegation highlighting that Eveline is committing sin by turning her back to God’s command, the priest’s advice represents to a further extent that how the symbolic realm is--under the influence of the teachings in the name of the father--manifested and practiced concurrently by the majority. Only then does the real come to be something tangible in a world that is completely missing in its symbolic nature. Eveline expresses their conversation as follows: “Well,” said he gravely and in a voice which had grown suddenly softer, “in that case, my child, your duty is to help him [Robert] hide that emptiness… from all eyes,” he added more gravely still, “and especially from your children’s. It is of the utmost importance that they should continue to respect, to honour, their father. It is for you to help them by

47 48

Gide, 69. Gide, 71-72.

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covering, hiding and palliating his deficiencies. Yes, that is your duty as a Christian wife and mother; a duty you cannot shirk without impiety.”49

Feeling frustrated, Eveline after this conversation reveals how the symbolic realm functions with the help of support taken from the societal institutions. Christianity with its inflictions imposed by its symbolically formed codes through myths, stories, sermons, and teachings come to be the real encapsulating the masses. Eveline's following words, therefore, can justly be taken as a revelation of the fact that the priest and Robert share a common perception of the majority's world, which despite its deficiencies seems to be real as performed by the majority. This is where the name of the father can be regarded as an agent implemented by the majority in our symbolic realms thereby surpassing the dominance of a physical authority but designating limits with its role in creating anxieties. Eveline notes "in reality, the Church and he [Robert] care only for the outside of things. The Abbe is very much better pleased with a sham that is of service to him than with my sincerity, which disturbs and irks him.”50 Feeling discouraged with her experiences at home particularly in her relationship with Robert, then with Gustave and also her frustration with Christian teachings, Eveline is finally led to turn onto her daughter Genevieve. Feeling disappointed, Eveline who seems to be decisive to leave her husband seems to be still missing in her pursuit to fill the gap in a world governed by the institutions favouring the name of the father. Any attempt to repair her sense of loss seems to cause her to sacrifice herself. Trying to move away from the phallic order's oppressive influence, Eveline's devotion of herself to a wartime hospital for a dangerous contagious illness, therefore, brings out another kind of sacrifice. As Kennedy remarks, Eveline "can no longer bring herself to carry out this self-sacrifice on behalf of her husband and his false values, but she is equally unable to pursue a career of self-fulfillment.”51 Her departure for the hospital at Chatellerault in this context represents her self-sacrifice performed desperately in a realm she can find no remedy for her loss because her wish now is neither pursuing Robert's desire nor achieving a career of self-fulfillment. Feeling sorry for her daughter whom she will leave behind in a world imbued with disillusionment, Eveline hopelessly wishes Genevieve to feel safe in such a world of loss where it seems to be impossible to move away from the disillusionment embedded naturally in this world. Aware of the misleading aspects of the appearances, she still 49

Gide, 72. Gide, 74-75. 51 David Arnold Kennedy, “Gide’s Portrayal of Marriage and Family Life.” 108. 50

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pretends to surrender the appearance of being in perfect safety by hoping that her daughter may find another possibility to repair her sense of loss in her world. However, it is implied in her note that Genevieve knows more than Eveline desires: "Tomorrow I shall go off quietly to the hospital at Chatellerault; it is behind the lines, and I shall have the appearance of being in perfect safety, which is what I want. Genevieve is the only person who knows the truth. How did she find out the kind of illness that is nursed there? I do not know.”52 Her final words seem to suggest a farewell to the symbolic world she was castrated into through being born into it symbolically through the codes of phallic order structuring her desires, fears, anxieties, and her sense of loss. Her final words accordingly suggest a farewell to her daughter Genevieve she leaves behind in such a world of castration.

The Meek One in Purgatory between Imaginary and Symbolic Realms Dostoevsky’s female character in Gentle Spirit represents some differences as well as some common similarities to Gide’s Eveline. In this novella, the readers observe the character-bound narrator's remarks about the incidents both back in the past and the present. What is at hand through his dialogues with absent addressees is that he is in extreme agony for the loss of his wife who seems to have just committed suicide. From the very beginning, the readers observe that the narrator cannot understand the reasons leading his wife to commit suicide. The story, therefore, begins with a crisis characterized by the ambiguities the narrator feels inside. He recounts all the experiences he conducted with his wife from the first date to her death. In the first part of the story, the meek one who is told to be a sixteenyear-old young woman seems to be out of her parents' protective care. Contrary to Gide's Eveline, the meek one in Dostoevsky's story seems to be abandoned in a symbolic realm even before she attains some predefined roles to ascribe her some goals to follow. While Eveline seems to devote herself to Robert soon after her meeting with him, the meek one cannot even come to the point of choosing somebody to devote herself. As a very young individual, she seems to be too immature in a world where her priority seems to secure her survival. The first time she meets the narrator-her future husband a pawnbroker--, the meek one’s misery along with her naivety is narrated by the narrator as follows: “It was that she was terribly 52

Gide, 116.

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young, so young that she looked just fourteen. And yet she was within three months of sixteen… I had a presentiment that she would come soon. When she came, I entered into affable conversation with her… H’m. It was then I guessed that she was soft-hearted and gentle.”53 Aged sixteen and lost her parents three years ago, the meek one lives “in slavery at her aunt’s for those three years.”54 Living with her horrid aunts and being about to get married to an old shopkeeper, the meek one's story from the very beginning becomes a story of castration in several aspects leading her to be confined in silence almost throughout all story. Silence plays a pivotal role in her story thereby foreshadowing her silentend as a revelation of her self-sacrifice with her suicide. Language as a means of recognition of both the other and the selfhood through dialogical interrelations practiced through lingual signs represents the only realm any individual can exist within as Bakhtin remarks “a person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another.”55 When silence overwhelms sound as seen in the meek one’s story, neither her desires nor anxieties can easily be interpreted. However, we learn about her silence only through the narrator's remarks all which he recites only after her suicide. She seems to have tried to build a bond with the narrator at the beginning of their relation suggesting her attempts to establish a mutual recognition with him in accordance with the tenets of a human-world albeit its shiftiness in nature from a Lacanian view. The narrator reveals when and how the possibility of the meek one's entry into the symbolic realm is ruined as follows: [f]rom the very beginning, she rushed to meet me with love, greeted me with rapture, when I went to see her in the evening, told me in her chatter (the enchanting chatter of innocence) all about her childhood and girlhood, her old home, her father, and mother. But I poured cold water upon all that at once, that was my idea. …she could quickly see that we were different and that I was — an enigma.56

Seeking for recognition in his relation with the meek one, the narrator, now after her suicide, in an extreme agony seems to recount the story with 53 Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Gentle Spirit. Translated by Constance Garnett. 6-7. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/dostoyevsky/d72ge/contents.html 54 Dostoevsky, Gentle Spirit. 12. 55 Morson, G. Saul, and Emerson Carly. Mikhail Bakhtin, Creation of a Prosaics. (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990),51. 56 Dostoevsky, Gentle Spirit. 17.

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the eyes of another thereby reminding of Bakhtin's interpretation that of any individual has no internal sovereign territory. Feeling disappointed, hopeless and regretful, the narrator in a sense seems to make the reader consider that the narrator himself as one of the agents of the symbolic realm did not allow her to establish a connection with the symbolic world and instead caused her to be lost within the borders of her purgatorial territory. His confusion imbued with disappointment is seen in his recount as follows: "taking her into my house I wanted all her respect, I wanted her to be standing before me in homage for the sake of my sufferings — and I deserved it. Oh, I have always been proud, I always wanted all or nothing!"57 No matter what his explanation is about his relationship with her, it is apparent that the narrator himself is hurled with frustration in a symbolic world where he tries to survive through the dialogical notes he practices. The meek one's pervading silence in her relationship with the narrator functions to remind that language as a mediator of symbolic realm proves to be the only disclosure to reveal one's caches including that person's anxieties, fears, and desires. When there is no language to be mentioned, it comes to mean that there is almost no chance to observe one's insight. Symbols as a mediator providing one to get engaged in the symbolic realm likewise enable one to maintain the rules of that symbolic world. The meek one who is depicted with her silence, therefore, seems to be lost in the purgatory before she gets lost in a world symbolically organized. Despite the fact that the state of silence might be considered as an outcome of symbolic realm to some extent with its relation to the symbolic realm's inhibitory effect generating an emotion of loneliness out of commonly performed symbolic interactions, silence on its own comes to represent a state of purgatory situation as it symbolizes a broken relation partly experienced with the real world. A story of silence can be considered as a good example of being in between the symbolic and imaginary stages. One who cannot survive in symbolic realm through the tenets of this symbolic world can choose to commit suicide as the imagery stage standing for a chance for survival has already been abandoned. In the meek one’s story, both her meeting with the narrator and her acceptance to marry him present a compulsorily taken act. Contrary to Eveline’s goal for her life, the meek one’s goal seems to survive. Her acceptance to marry him is related to necessity rather than love. She accepts his proposal due to her deprivation. The narrator reveals her 57

Dostoevsky, Gentle Spirit. 18.

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hardship with her hesitation to say yes: “out there at the gate; she said ‘yes.' But . . . but I ought to add: that out there by the gate she thought a long time before she said ‘yes.’”58 He, in a sense, seems to be aware that her consent to his proposal is not an act of her authentic inclination. However, the narrator's expectancy from the meek one seems to share some salient similarities with Robert's relation with Eveline. Referring to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus, Alvarez and Lopondo justly argue that "in the protagonist's universe, the androcentric behaviour represents a notion crystallized by the habitus, that is, reproduced by the ruling agents and institutions (family, Church, State, etc.), admitted by the system as the ―natural World.”59 The narrator’s universe that is made up of his symbolic imbibition represents the commonly practiced behaviours and brings about androcentric behaviours. This symbolic realm becomes a natural world of androcentricism governed by the name of the father60. While desiring her desire to love himself, the narrator becomes a controlling figure as inculcated within the borders of his world. From the very beginning of their relationship, he puts the limits she is supposed not to go beyond. He remarks that “I told her straight out that she would have enough to eat, but that fine clothes, theatres, balls — she would have none of, at any rate not till later on, when I had attained my object.”61 Therefore, while the unnamed narrator seems to be “guided by the pride sustained by the idea of superiority towards the other,”62 the narrator manipulates her in accordance with a societal expectation defining the wife’s role in the family structure. He dominates the relationship with the meek one including her likes and speech. He becomes the decision maker particularly in the first part of the narration. The narrator’s representation in this sense can be likened to Robert’s role in Gide’s story as both come to disclose their subconscious desires to be loved by their partners no matter how much mistaken they are, and misleading their conducts are. In need of someone to validate his identity, the narrator, similar to Robert, desires to achieve recognition of himself with the help of an other. The other that fits well to complete his missingness met with his entry into the symbolic world and grew during his lifespan comes to represent the 58

Dostoevsky, Gentle Spirit. 14. Alvarez, A. G. Ruiz and Lopondo Lilian. “Dialogue on the threshold and diatribe: construction mechanisms of the individual’s self-consciousness.” 13-14. 60 . This symbolic realm’s being a natural world of androcentricism does not necessarily mean that because it is a world of androcentricism, it is governed by the name of the father. 61 Dostoevsky, Gentle Spirit. 13. 62 Alvarez, A. G. Ruiz and Lopondo Lilian, 9. 59

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meek one. While she represents a source to fill the gap found in the symbolic world, the role ascribed to her, however, runs in the name of the phallic order. Although her desire for him is desired by the narrator to help him recognise his selfhood, she without an affirmation for her entity is enslaved by the submissive role ascribed on her by this symbolic realm thereby inducing her to lose touch with an other's image to be filled with. She is therefore enforced to stay in her silence. However, it is worth noting that the danger of silence cutting one from a dialogical relationship with another also results in one's traumatic loneliness. The narrator himself who seems to have suffered from loneliness for a long time in his own life regains his sound with the meek one's devotion of her sound to his salvation. He remarks "all my life I have spoken without words, and I have passed through whole tragedies on my account without words … I wanted her to be standing before me in homage for the sake of my sufferings…"63 His regaining his sound through an other's silence, however, brings out a traumatic finality for both characters. When the meek one ends her silence with her suicide, the narrator's sound regained through his entanglement with the meek one's silence likewise ends with her suicide. This is where the narrator seems to lose his touch with the symbolic realm as there is no one to collaborate with him for a self-recognition. After the meek one's suicide, he is therefore entrapped in a silent realm imbued with his loneliness thereby returning the story to the point where it has started. The readers envision the first scene where the narrator had begun to tell the story while his wife's dead body was lying on a table before him. Desiring for the meek one's desire for himself, the narrator in his recounts seems to be frustrated as he desperately expects her to recognise him in the way he believes he deserves. Feeling defeated and incomplete with a sense of anguish in life he lived until he met her, the narrator desires to be recognised by the meek one albeit her inexperience and naivety due to her age. Frustrated with the life, the narrator reveals his disillusionment as follows: We are all wretched creatures and cannot hear the truth, or I do not know why. …“You have rejected me, you — people, I mean — you have cast me out with contemptuous silence. My passionate yearning towards you you have met with insult all my life. Now I have the right to put up a wall against you.64

63 64

Dostoevsky, Gentle Spirit. 18. Dostoevsky, Gentle Spirit. 22

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Desiring her with a vengeance towards the society, he both desires to justify the causes of his being a pawnbroker in the meek one’s eyes and also to achieve a recognition he has been deprived of during his life. He, therefore remarks: “Sixteen years old, the earliest youth — yes, what could she have understood of my justification, of my sufferings? Undeviating straightness, ignorance of life, the cheap convictions of youth, the hen-like blindness of those “noble hearts.”65 However, what he misses is that the meek one's silence is more about her being in a purgatory situation rather than a silence generated out of vengeance. From a Lacanian perspective, it is possible to argue that he misconceives her position in her symbolic realm. Without parents and having been enforced to choose someone for marriage at a very young age, the meek one's short life seems to have bestowed her some traumatic experiences rather than enough symbolic engagement. This is where her story primarily differentiates from Eveline's. In retrospect, one could remember that no human is born into reality because the reality is only a cultured spectacle to replace the reality lost after Lacanian Imagery stage. Therefore, we are dragged into a symbolic space to be human beings. Only then can we act like normal people living in the space of social reality--a symbolic space--. We all are bound to be installed within the symbolic order of this space. As the meek one's proper dwelling within a symbolic space is disturbed very early in her life, her socalled reality disintegrates before it comes to be imbibed within the borders of a space of social reality. She, therefore, seems to be cramped in purgatory between Lacanian Imaginary and Symbolic Realms. Although she seems to have entered biologically into the symbolic world, the shortness of her familiarity with this world to provide her with a space to build her own recognition, and the misfortunes she experiences-such as her compulsorily conducted act when she marries to the narrator-altogether cause her to be entrapped between imaginary and symbolic world. Otherwise, the symbolic world she enters into would enable her to maintain a role in it. However, being in the purgatory, the meek one cannot show much interest in the narrator's desires emerging out of his symbolic world. He, therefore, considers her as a tyrant "that exquisite creature, that gentle spirit, that heaven — she was a tyrant, she was the insufferable tyrant and torture of my soul! I should be unfair to myself if I didn't say so! You imagine I didn't love her? Who can say that I did not

65

Dostoevsky, Gentle Spirit. 23.

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love her! Do you see, it was a case of irony, the malignant irony of fate and nature!"66 Having been disappointed with his relations with the others regarding achieving a self-recognition, the narrator's obsessive desire for the meek one's love for himself is a revelation of his need for completeness. He indeed loves her as he notes above. His love for her is intertwined with his obsessive need to be recognised by an other in a symbolically ordered and castrated/ing realm. The meek one’s existence imbued with her youth and naivety, albeit her missing insight seems to endorse the narrator’s sense of existence. However, because of their missing dialogical relationship, the narrator, unaware of the meek one’s insight, considers her only as a mediator to justify his self-recognition disturbed by the society where he has been symbolically injured. Similar to Robert, the narrator desires to be desired by his wife. However, having been defeated in life up to his meeting with the meek one, he wants to see that his desire is being actualized with the meek one's submissive role. Functioning as a means of affirmation for his selfhood, the meek one indeed is not represented as a figure with authentic selfhood. On the fringes of his disillusioned world, she works as not more than a mirror image to witness and justify his entity with her silence. He, therefore, seems to move frenzy after the dialogue that discloses his secret. When he learns that she is seeing an officer –Efimovitch—he knew back from the days when he worked in the regiment, his disillusionment is noticeable. Having been defeated in life, he firstly finds the meek one with whom he believes that he could achieve his completeness, however now after his secret is divulged, and learning that she is seeing Efimovitch at times without his knowledge, the narrator's disillusionment foregrounds how he desired her to be in his symbolic world when he goes to see whether the meek one is cheating on him: "I had gone… believing not a word of it, not a Word said against her, though I did take the revolver in my pocket — that is the truth.”67 Realizing that he was not erroneous in his perception of his wife, the narrator returns home with his wife. The meek one seems not to have cheated on him. However, from then on, a tenser period starts in their relationship; they almost never speak and sleep in different beds. Frustrated, lost and unhappy, the meek one before she commits suicide seems to attempt to murder the narrator while he is pseudo-asleep. This is the climactic moment of their story from where the tragic end gets close. 66 67

Dostoevsky, Gentle Spirit. 23. Dostoevsky, Gentle Spirit. 29.

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However, it is noteworthy to remark that the narrator's explanation of her attempt to murder him is the only information the readers can have about her. The readers are left with an image of her killing attempt of the narrator told by the narrator himself whose explanation likewise does not provide us with any satisfying answer to the incident. Later on, no other explanation is made, or any dialogue between them concerning the event is given. In other words, the readers can never have any access to the meek one's insight. What is left for them is to witness repentance of the narrator who seems to have been defeated in his struggle to gain recognition by the meek one. Instead, he seems to surrender to what he was fighting against that is taking revenge from the society and gaining self-esteem with the help of the meek one's role. He remarks as follows: Nevertheless, the gloomy past and my ruined reputation fretted me every day, every hour. But then I married. Whether it was by chance or not, I don't know. But when I brought her into my home, I thought I was bringing a friend, and I needed a friend so much. But I saw clearly that the friend must be trained, schooled, even conquered. Could I have explained myself straight off to a girl of sixteen with her prejudices? … [s]he was everything for me, all the hope of the future that I cherished in my dreams! She was the one person I had prepared for myself, and I needed no one else…68

Now defeated and in awe, the narrator this time shows some overwhelming reactions to her. Sensing that he has been losing not only what he has struggled for but also the meek one, he tells her about his dreams, kisses her feet, and becomes frantic with sorrow, and in delirium tells her what she meant to him from the first day. Although she seems to be drawn to him, he still knows that this is not natural. He notes: "in fact, for the most part, I talked as though in delirium. She herself took my hands and made me leave off. "You are exaggerating . . . you are distressing yourself," and again there were tears, again almost hysterics!"69 Aware of his situation, the narrator also adds “she only smiled. And I believe she smiled chiefly from delicacy, for fear of disappointing me. I saw, of course, that I was burdensome to her, don’t imagine I was so stupid or egoistic as not to see it. I saw it all, all, to the smallest detail, I saw better than anyone; all the hopelessness of my position stood revealed.”70 The meek one, however, soothes the narrator and even tells him that she will 68

Dostoevsky, Gentle Spirit. 38. Dostoevsky, Gentle Spirit. 48. 70 Dostoevsky, Gentle Spirit. 49. 69

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be his faithful wife and the next day she commits suicide by flinging herself out of the window. Before she commits suicide, her attempt to kill the narrator in his sleep in this context might be considered as her attempt to end her disappointment about her relationship with the symbolic realm for which she could not find ways to establish a bond. Devastated and distressed, she seems to have lost her sense of meaning about her life shaped around the inscriptions of the outer effects such as her loss of parents, the role of her aunts, her being dragged into a preference between the narrator and the old grocer, and her immaturity not letting her have enough experience to make the commonly practiced real to be her real as well. Therefore, before she commits suicide, close to the end of the novella, the narrator hears her singing on her own. This is the final hint implying that having no interrelation with the symbolic world, she seems to be content about her existence only when she is alone suggesting her nostalgia lost when she left the Lacanian imaginary stage and was dragged into the real corresponding to a symbolic realm with which she has never established some ties successfully.

Conclusion When analyzed comparatively, all characters in novellas mentioned above seem to be in search for selfhood broken with the lingual inscriptions acquired only with their entry to the symbolic realm. Their desire for the others' affirmation and also recognition of their entity is revealed through their problematic and at times obsessive expectations from the others. The School for Wives by Andre Gide tells the story of Eveline narrated around the idea of marriage, love, and dominance, and represents how symbolic castration is literally actualized under the patriarchal understanding of social roles moulding not only culturally pre-determined identities but also desires that seem to be neither achieved nor realized. The meek one in Gentle Spirit is bound to be lost in the purgatory before she gets a chance to get lost completely in the symbolic realm. Not having been born into a world similar to Eveline’s symbolic world where Eveline desperately performs her self-sacrifice with her departure for the hospital at Chatellerault by leaving her daughter behind as a sign of hope, the meek one feeling herself in the purgatory from the very beginning hopelessly ends her own life with no one behind she has been tied up with from the birth or with no one to hold onto as a means of mirror image where she could maintain her desire to be worth living for. Her state of despair, therefore, presents her loss in the confining fringes of nowhere. This is

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where her situation differs from that of Eveline's. Both stories tell how their women characters sacrifice themselves. While Eveline sacrifices herself with a hope that her daughter could achieve to survive in her symbolic realm, the meek one sacrifices herself desperately without any hope for the ones left behind. Last but not least, it could justly be pointed out that both stories represent insightful exploration of some human psyches questioning the mishaps of getting involved in the symbolic world which as discussed above is indeed a step to be taken compulsorily to achieve a selfhood both being desired by the owner and recognized and affirmed by the others. However, what is apparent is that gaining selfhood in the reality of symbolic world cannot ensure that that selfhood is no longer incomplete because every individual met with the symbolic world is to be castrated through its rules and likewise alone as the narrator bound character in Gentle Spirit remarks in agony at the end of the story. Oh, blind force! Oh, nature! Men are alone on earth — that is what is dreadful! “Is there a living man in the country?” cried the Russian hero. I cry the same, though I am not a hero, and no one answers my cry. They say the sun gives life to the universe. The sun is rising and — look at it, is it not dead? Everything is dead, and everywhere there are dead. Men are alone — around them is silence — that is the earth! … The pendulum ticks callously, heartlessly. Two o'clock at night. Her little shoes are standing by the little bed, as though waiting for her. . . . No, seriously, when they take her away tomorrow, what will become of me?71

Bibliography Alvarez, A. G. Ruiz and Lopondo Lilian. “Dialogue on the threshold and diatribe: construction mechanisms of the individual’s selfconsciousness,” Bakhtiniana, Rev. Estud. Discurso Sao Paulo Volume 7, Issue 2 (July/Dec. 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S2176-45732012000200002 (accessed March 9, 2017). Brousse, Marie-Helene. “Psychic Suffering and the Treatment Challenges of the Postmodern World,” Lacanian Compass Volume 1, Issue 11 (October 3, 2007): 1-52. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Gentle Spirit, trans. Constance Garnett. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/dostoyevsky/d72ge/contents.html (accessed May 9. 2017).

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Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory/ An Introduction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Gide, Andre. The School For Wives, trans. Dorothy Bussy. New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1929. Hook, Derek. “Lacan, the meaning of the phallus and the ‘sexed’ subject,” London: LSE Research Online, (2006): 60-84. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/960 (accessed Feb 10, 2017). Kamil, Ramis Cizer. “Meaning of the phallus in Lacanian theory,” https://www.academia.edu/3825763/Meaning_of_the_phallus_in_Laca nian_theory (accessed Feb 4, 2017). Kennedy, David Arnold. “Gide’s Portrayal of Marriage and Family Life,” Master’s Thesis, McMaster University, 1969. Morson, G. Saul, and Emerson Carly. Mikhail Bakhtin, Creation of a Prosaics, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990. Qazi, Khursheed Ahmad. “Lacanian concepts – Their Relevance to Literary Analysis and Interpretation: A Post Structural Reading,” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, Vol. II. Issue. IV, (December 2011): 1-12. http://www.the-criterion.com/V2/n4/Qazi.pdf (accessed May 16, 2017). Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, London: Routledge, 2006. Zizek, Slajov. The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, 1997.

CHAPTER FIVE THE GREAT WAR, PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY AND THE NARRATIVIZATION OF TRAUMA IN HEMINGWAY AND FREUD ANTOLIN TRINIDAD

Introduction Trauma entered suddenly and unexpectedly, as a subject of study, in literary criticism and other fields in the humanities. The publication of literary critic Cathy Caruth’s book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (UC) in 1996 in part spurred the escape of psychological trauma out of the academic/semantic/medical boundaries conventionally defined by the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) whose clinical definition has been codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders (DSM).1 The DSM, published by the American Psychiatric Association, now on its 5th edition, is influential worldwide as a codified text outlining the psychiatric and the psychological professions' definitions of clinical "caseness," that focal area signifying impaired psychological functioning (presumably,) potentially amenable to treatment. The narrative is where the convergence between clinical disciplines and literary criticism can happen. The production of the narrative is an outcome after a traumatic event – although Cathy Caruth's implied thesis is precisely on absence, or seeming impossibility, of the narrative after trauma (at least an organized, conventionally linear narrative tracing the expected cause/effect relationship). Literary criticism, with its focus on the construction, structuration, contextualization and individualized dynamic reading of narratives, in taking up trauma as an

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American Psychiatric Association. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th Edition. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association Press, Inc. 2013).

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area of investigation, has enabled a multi-faceted understanding of the aftermath of a traumatic experience well beyond the narrow confines of the PTSD diagnosis. There is much to celebrate in this convergence of disciplines. It has, among other things, restored the centrality of individual stories to the constructs of mental suffering and whatever systems of nomenclature exist for constructs of mental pathology. While it seems a truism that narrative, or the art/act of telling a story, is a central part of the practice of psychiatry, in recent years, it has become less and less the truism that it was – narratives have now been marginalized by the increasingly dominant influence of neuroscience. In recent years, neuroscience-dominated psychiatry has tendentiously shepherded narrative into a new binary of pathology (as defined by neuroscience) and "life experience." The latter phrase has become a catchall category for a wide range of human experiences that would not fit the codified categories of illnesses whose boundaries are drawn by biological constructs. A subject, however, still turns to narrating as a way of structuring experience and sharing the experience with another person. The act of listening to a narrative as a way to co-construct the meaning of the experience is a different task compared to listening to it as a way of diagnosing. Listening to a person has a similarity with the act of “listening” to a text. In this way, there is a natural kinship between psychiatry and literary criticism. In this essay, I will explore the following hypotheses: • Trauma can be understood as a trifecta of an event, experience, and narrativization • The Great War affected both Ernest Hemingway and Sigmund Freud. These effects can be limned not only from elements of their individual psychobiographies but also from their literary works • Repetition compulsion, a symptom that is first and foremost a trauma-effect, first conceptualized by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is a useful tool in understanding literary works as they shadow the contours of psychobiography relatable to the experience of trauma. In other words, trauma as an experience is expressed as narrativization through the creation of literature.

Freud and Hemingway: Traumatized Writers of Trauma Narratives Ernest Hemingway’s psychobiography, especially in the short segment of time right after his near-death in World War I, gives a vivid background to his early, published work, In Our Time (1925). The configuration of the trauma experience in these fictional stories are interesting because they

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consist of both visible and invisible parts – what is said becomes as important as what is left unsaid, similar to what Caruth posits as the inexpressibility of trauma: the experience often does not comport with the ability to narrativize it. Hemingway’s literary corpus may also be read as instances of repetition compulsion – the themes of war and the constructed masculine iconography that results from these wars could be read as imperfectly repressed trauma repeated over and over. This essay also looks at Freud’s psychobiography, in parallel with Hemingway’s, at around that same time as an event and experience grounded in trauma whose textual representation may be partly limned in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1926; 1961) where, aptly enough, he theorizes repetition compulsion. The location of the author’s trauma could be palpated not only in the texts he writes and in his psychobiography, but also in what he does not write in these texts. Caruth also underscores that the act of bearing witness to trauma is a creative act.2 In the case of Freud, and psychoanalysis for that matter, the creation of the essay itself seeking to interpret observed clinical phenomena is an attempt to record experience mediated by interpretation. It is a creative act. It creates something new not only through what it includes but also what it represses or excludes. Caruth discusses Jacques Derrida's essay on Freud's use of the metaphor of psychoanalysis as an archaeological dig in which Freud likens the unconscious to a buried city, a city that eventually re-emerges during analysis. Derrida notes however that in the analysis, there is also buried writing: "Installing itself often in the scene of the archaeological dig, its discourse concerns, first of all, the stock of ‘impressions' and the deciphering of inscriptions, but also their censorship and repression." 3 Why Ernest Hemingway? The intimate entwining of psychobiography and the creative product of a writer’s life on the subject of tragedies of early twentieth century manifests (from a scholar’s point of view) satisfyingly in the extant body of knowledge about Hemingway – his life, haunted by his and his father’s suicides, strongly suggests the effects of the residues of his traumatic experiences in the Great War along with residues of earlier traumas. To the extent that the literature written in association with the experiencing of traumatic circumstances may be interrogated using present-day systems of knowledge about trauma, Hemingway offers this chance. In re-reading and re-situating Hemingway’s writings (in this chapter, I confine myself to In Our Time [1925]), the fresh critical ground that makes it possible to approach the

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Caruth, Cathy. Literature in the Ashes of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) 5. 3 Ibid. 77.

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Great War and the writing of literature is PTSD. With PTSD as a new concept, familiar literature, and biographies, in their re-reading, are pregnant with new insights, specifically given the adage of PTSD as consisting of symptoms that intrude in the time after the trauma: flashbacks, hallucinations and dissociative reactions that abduct the subject away from the linear configuration of psychological time. Writing that emerges out of trauma may be classified at least into two typologies: writing as a record of experience (testimony), or as a post-hoc, textualized mental activity that has been awakened after a delay in an event's registration as a trauma. According to Caruth, the experience of trauma happens not at the point of injury but sometime after: "In its most general definition, trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which response to the event occurs in the often delayed, the uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena”.4 It is this delay of the attempt at narrativizing the traumatic experience that allows for a fresh reading of Hemingway’s familiar texts. At least in the case of In Our Time, Hemingway wrote it some years after his experiences as an ambulance driver in the Great War. In Hemingway, the literary work that emerges after the traumatic experience is neither factual nor strictly referential, but creatively allusive of and morphologically similar to the traumatic mental phenomenon itself, one that leaves many details unsaid. This same approach applies to Freud who, it must be remembered, coexisted with Hemingway in the first three decades of the twentieth century, in the very same European theatre that staged the Great War. His sons all went to fight in the Great War, almost miraculously returning alive, and a daughter died of the Spanish flu that devastated the world shortly after that war. His post-Great War essays Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) extended his focus beyond the individual unconscious onto society and civilization at large, a widened field that made transparent his views on society, views that are seen by many as having darkened. In The Future of an Illusion, his professed atheism obviously crystallized, an effect that is apparent in his view that religious beliefs are illusions, that the belief in God becomes more powerful in direct proportion to the magnitude of the intrinsic neurotic insecurities of the person holding such a belief. In Civilization, he even implicates alcoholism and other addictions to a despairing need for a release from the painful effects of the repression that civilization requires of its citizens, that such dictates are not only painful

                                                             4

Cathy Caruth, UE, 11.

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but also inevitable, akin to the contortions an organism does to escape being trapped. To practicing theists, these decidedly atheistic convictions, especially wedded with the suggestion that all forms of religion are neurotic (and therefore practically hysterical) in nature, could sound like the musings of a man embittered by his own tragic reactions to catastrophic losses. Thus, in these essays after the Great War, the effects of that war on Freud could be conjectured, part of what is "unsaid," a large category of biographical incidents that are traumatic, including his own, painful process of dying from cancer. As in clinical work, manifestations of trauma not only can be limned from what is being narrated but also from what has been (un)consciously skipped by the subject in his narrative. If historical events – and the traumas contained therein – find representation in individual subjects, representations that could be mapped through the literary output of these subjects, then what the concept of PTSD catalyses is to insist on a reformulation of Hemingway and Freud as writers of trauma narratives, and also authors/subjects whose lives can be framed using the constructs of trauma and repetition compulsion. Placing the works of the traumatized Hemingway and the traumatized Freud in conversation with each other may not only throw light on the reliability of the construct of trauma's symptoms but also on the reality of trauma's relationship with personal histories and the larger history that ultimately gives context to lived lives. But Hemingway as a subject of a study in trauma is, on the surface, antithetical to his familiar image in the study of masculinity, of a scholarly sub-section of "manly" studies. Trauma is about injuries, big and small. To wear one's injuries on one's sleeves is not manly. Injuries must be silently, courageously endured. And there is evidence that silently enduring the effects of trauma was the expected norm. Judith Herman writes that one treatment for war neurosis right after the Great War was a method practiced by the psychiatrist Lewis Yealland who advocated shaming, threats and punishments including electric shocks. Some were threatened with court-martial. Yealland exhorted these patients to be the "hero" they were expected to be, people who had "better control of themselves" which was the moral imperative of the time.5 Control meant putting the outward symptoms of distress in a closet – being a hero is to be in this closet. Or viewed in other ways, it was a form of controlled or suppressed suffering. This historical vignette supports the possibility of trauma by gender, in this case, the proscription against deviation from a strictly defined set of

                                                            

5 Judith Herman. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. (New York: Basic Books, 1992) 11.

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codes for manly behaviours. In Paul Fussell’s account of the written documents about the Great War, both literary and archival, the rule was to gloss over the dirty nature of the war in public discourse by the use of euphemisms and the passive voice, always avoiding the apparent truth that, as Lloyd George said (in Fussell’s accounts), “the thing is terrible and beyond human nature to bear, and I feel I can’t go on any longer with the bloody business.”6 Reports of the war were couched in jargon, and verbal delicacy, proceeding "in an atmosphere of euphemism as rigorous and impenetrable as language and literature skilfully used could make it." A description of a dead soldier in a newspaper read as follows: "even as he lied on the field, he looks more quietly faithful, more simply steadfast than others." This account was published nine days after the Somme attack had ended, and so most likely this corpse had partially decomposed. Whatever serenity the writer reads in the corpse is likely mediated by a need to see heroism with a patina of peaceful conquest.7 Fussell cautions that euphemisms are not confined to descriptions of the Great War alone during the twentieth century, but he claims they originated in the Great War. The reasons may have been that it was the first time in history that such shockingly violent events had to be regularly published and made known to the public in mass quantities that their presentation required delicate handling.8 But what is important for this discussion is that whatever trauma occurred in connection with the war, the language of the time airbrushed its ugly sides. Fussell quotes the historian Barbara Tuchman who studied British accounts of their involvement in Burma in the Second World War: No nation has ever produced a military history of such verbal nobility as the British. Retreat or advance, win or lose, blunder or bravery, murderous folly or unyielding resolution, all emerge alike clothed in dignity and touched with glory… everyone is splendid: soldiers are staunch, commanders cool, the fighting magnificent. Whatever the fiasco, aplomb is unbroken. Mistakes, failures, stupidities, or other causes of disaster mysteriously vanish. Disasters are recorded with care and pride and transmuted into things of beauty . . . Other nations attempt but never quite achieve the same self-esteem.9

                                                             6

Paul Fussell. The Great War and Modern Memory. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1975) 174. 7 Ibid. 175 8 Ibid. 178 9 Ibid. 175

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It seems clear from the zeitgeist of the time that overt mental symptoms were not ideal for public consumption. This is on the surface at odds with that era's modernist sensibility in the arts and literature when the focus on the everyday, lived experience called for the placement of non-traditional subjects such as anguish and despair associated with city life as subjects for aesthetic representation. Beyond art and literature, the codes of behaviour associated with war and being a soldier remained rigidly policed and in line with traditional expectations: going to war is heroic, getting injured in the war and surviving is even more heroic, but exhibiting the mental injuries is not. The criteria in this system of iconography have been carried through the subsequent decades and have been made subject to idealization even by Hemingway's fellow writers such as John Cheever who said, in his Journals, that the most important thing Hemingway did for me was to legitimize manly courage, a quality that I had heard, until I came on his work, extolled by Scoutmasters and others who made it seem a fraud. He put down an immense vision of love and friendship, swallows and the sound of rain. There was never in my time, anyone to compare with him.10

Cheever shows a Rorschach Inkblot Test-like encounter with Hemingway – what he is to another person tells more about that person (and his needs) than about Hemingway. It remains abstruse what the phrase "legitimize manly courage" signifies and how, to a population of writers, such a well of abstraction quenched a thirst for identifying with this stereotype in literary works. Or it could be that Cheever was reacting against feminist protests about idealizing hegemonic, courageous masculinity. Given Cheever's now well-known closeted homosexual desires, it is a question whether in his admiration of Hemingway he also idealized stoic endurance of undisclosed trauma, the art of saying what could not be said. In other words, could Cheever be displacing his own trauma onto an idealized, masculinized Hemingway? At least part of this masculine icon is drawn from the peculiar historical moment between the two World Wars. The historical moment may have beclouded a close examination of the injuries of the war veterans, a cloud consisting of misty but hardy ideas of heroism and toughness. Joshua Goldstein (2001) implies that being a soldier requires many years of preparation even before a war – “gender training” is what societies who prepare for the eventuality of war must do to motivate their

                                                             10

John Cheever. The Journals (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 152.

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citizen for future participation in war efforts.11 To hawk ideal masculinity is to entice generation after generation of men to be soldiers. Alex Vernon (2007) points to war as the defining event in Hemingway, and how his war writings cast shadow on future generations of writers, mostly men, who locked in their minds the inter-relatedness of war, gender, and masculinity. This renegotiation happened restlessly through the critical trends of feminism and the reactive "Iron John" phases of American cultural studies. The following remark from John Raeburn (1989) captures the critical influence of Hemingway in terms of the conventional feminine-masculine bipolarities: Oddly enough, though, the influence of the feminist criticism seems to have been most instrumental in reviving interest in Hemingway's life and work. For his macho posturing and the insipidity of some of his heroines, he was the man feminists loved to hate when they began in the 1970s to resurvey the cultural meaning of American literature. But this criticism ultimately also led to a fresh examination of his fiction and to the discovery in some of it of a heretofore neglected strain, one which was unusually alert to female sensibilities.12

Whether or not the Hemingway corpus and biography have been toxic or kind to certain genealogies of critical literary trends is a question whose answer has been and still is unstable. That same assertion could be made about Hemingway's personal tragedies and how those tragedies, such as his failed marriages, his attraction to violent sports and his eventual suicide, have been corporeal representations of the historical traumas in which his life was embedded, including the trauma of being fenced-in within the bounds of a narrow sense of a masculine self – these events trace the contours of a problematic epistemology. If historical events – and the traumas contained in them – inevitably find representation in individual subjects, then placing the traumatized Hemingway and the traumatized Freud in conversation with each other may not only throw light on the reliability of the construct of trauma’s symptoms but also on the issues of repetition compulsion, a concept that endured throughout the twentieth century and found its way into the categorical criteria of PTSD. Even despite Freudianism’s nearly mortal decline in the field of mental health studies at the point of PTSD’s formulation in the 1980s, repetition compulsion as manifested in the

                                                             11

Joshua Goldstein. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 403. 12 John Raeburn. “Skirting the Hemingway Legend.” American Literary History. 1.1 (1989), 208-209.

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flashback (one of the criteria formulated for PTSD) is the one piece of Freudianism that has survived, a conceptual scar worth scrutinizing because of its very tenacity.

Repetition, Memory, and Freud One of the most enduring givens of memory is its ability to fade. Even though something may seem poignant and indelible in the first few instances of recollection, the emotional accompaniments of their revisualization often fade during time’s passage. But in certain forms of trauma, the fading does not occur. Memory recurs accompanied by the same emotional effects, resisting the buffering function of time. Moreover, the memories intrude, un-bidden and un-welcome. These acts of haunting are at the heart of Freud’s inquiries in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (BPP). Baffled by the phenomenon at first, Freud is puzzled by its contradiction to the pleasure principle – in other words, if seeking pleasure motivates subjects, why repeat a traumatic memory, which does the opposite?13 To Freud, there is a simple arithmetical formulation to the understanding of pleasure. It follows a basic thermodynamic principle of physics: energy flows from high tension to low-tension states. Such a simple view is at the heart of the whole theory of neurosis. The prime motivation of psychological states is to flow southward from high to low, and Freud maps the vector of this flow in parallel with pleasure – to him, pleasure equals low tension. It is with puzzlement, then, that he encountered war neurosis. To Freud, the term war neurosis is, in fact, a misnomer because it is precisely the lack of neurotic repression that is baffling. Stressful occurrences in the Freudian economy, an economy that is grounded in ontology, almost automatically become transformed, through repression and various other mechanisms, in response to the pleasure principle. The transformation especially attains its apogee in dreams, for in the symbolic ability of dreams to catalyse a metamorphosis of anxiety into digestible narratives encrypted in sub-text, the stressful event is acceptably metabolized and assimilated and therefore relieved of some tension. But in traumatic neurosis, the memory (and the dreams) that attends the memory of the traumatic event is not only whole and un-transformed in its almost eidetic and painful originality. Why? Freud has two possible explanations. He concluded that this repetition

                                                             13

Sigmund Freud, BPP, 3

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is an attempt at mastery.14 Repetition, in other words, is the act of practicing – to repeat is to master not only the task but also the affects associated with the task. Freud then speculates on a second explanation for repetition compulsion in the same essay. Firmly planting himself in his organic orientation where the mind functions like a cellular organism, Freud draws a similarity between a traumatic memory and an irritant that abruptly breaches the cellular wall and the cell's life thereafter is consumed by the extrusion of this foreign presence through peristaltic, repetitive motion. That most traumatic memories must ease with time as their sharp edges become blunted through the process is an idea that contradicts PTSD, where the symptoms of flashbacks and repetition are at the core of its urgency. From Freud's essay, it can be said that PTSD is a disorder of memory where the factor of time fails at effacing the trauma. The person unable to let go of this memory, therefore, wraps his life around the memory and bends the arc of his life accordingly to accommodate the permanent presence of trauma. The teleological arc of these explanations points out to Freud's view of the mental economy as one that is constantly at work in surviving against a constant onslaught of potentially lethal experiences, be it the premature disappearance of a mother or the unwanted intrusion of a noxiously foreign memory inflicted by the sights and sounds of battle. It is while wrestling with this difficult paradox of traumatic memories contradicting the idea of the mental economy as a pleasure-seeking entity that Freud entertained the idea of the death drive. Ever the original biologist drawing from biological explanations, Freud saw repetition compulsion as similar to the return of salmon to their original breeding grounds, swimming against the currents towards certain death, in order to spawn. He describes these events as an “organic compulsion to repeat”15 which implicate the role of instincts. If there is an instinct to live, there has to be an instinct/drive towards death, a death that is a return to the basic, elemental condition of the organism before there was ever life, a dead pile of organic and inorganic compounds. The toggling forces of life and death instincts constantly operate throughout life without the concluding domination of one instinct over another. Freud says: It may be difficult, too, for many of us to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development

                                                             14 15

Ibid. 15-16. Ibid. 44.

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into supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. . . . The repressed instinct never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction, which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction.16

Precisely because of this unceasing need of the instincts/drives to be satisfied is the act of repetition needed in the psychic economy. Freud's pessimistic aperçu, in fact, completes his model of repetition compulsion – that the (human) psyche is always a battlefield.

Death, Meaning, and Symbolization Although Freud staged the issue of death as a drive that propels the traumatic memory to repeat itself over and over, he made no mention of the act of surviving death as possibly a meaningful second act to his sketch of repetition compulsion. In a conversation between Cathy Caruth and Robert Jay Lifton (1995), the starting point is Freud's essay. The impact of the Great War on Freud not only lies in the stark encounter with death, heretofore an issue that has been under-theorized by Freud, but also the very act of survival. Lifton contends that the Great War also made psychoanalytic theory at risk for demise, and Freud felt compelled to think not only about death but also about the very survival of the psychoanalytic movement. As it were, the possibility of death and its eventual survival has somehow made the psychoanalytic theory more meaningful to Freud. The question of meaning, when surviving death, becomes the most obvious question. Lifton connects the act of surviving near-death with the idea of the hero. The hero is someone who, through acts of the repetition of survival, may have mastered death but "not quite”.17 Lifton names Oedipus as an example of this type of hero, someone who brings back to his people the knowledge of death, but also of life. Although there is some mastery of the encounter with death with each iteration, there is always the “not quite” aspect of the “mastery” intuited from the encounter – death can never really be mastered completely. Death is anticipatory, that is, even though one has survived an encounter with it, there is always another encounter to be experienced, if only the encounter with that final demise at the end of life. Lifton then relates this to the idea of numbing, a more complicated

                                                             16

Ibid. 50-51. Cathy Caruth, Ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) 135. 17

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symptom than repression, denial or other mechanisms of defence. Numbing is the cessation of feeling. Its relationship to the forward-looking direction of death is the unimaginable component because it lies outside the bounds of ordinary experience.18 Writing is a manifestation of the process of symbolization, a symbolization that subsumes survival and the groping for meaning in the aftermath of the encounter with death. In Hemingway’s story “Indian Camp,” Nick Adams accompanies his father to a difficult breech delivery of a pregnant Indian woman. At the conclusion of the delivery, the baby’s father is found recently dead after having slashed his own throat. On the boat ride back, Nick and his father grapple with the reason for why the Indian father killed himself. His father had no answer, at which point Nick concludes that he “would never die.”19 Nick in fact obviously metabolizes the memory into imaginary invincibility. The act of symbolization of the trauma is transduced in a child's interpretative apparatus as the illusory denial of death. What is obvious is the quickening dynamic of mental metabolism in the processing of traumatic memory. Jeffrey Meyers (1988) expounds on Hemingway's engagement with primitivism. In "Indian Camp," the visceral facets of the difficult, breech birth complicate the mystery of the Indian father's suicide. Nick's father had to use a jack-knife to perform a Cesarean operation. Meyers highlights the possibilities that the Indian father could not tolerate such an abnormal birth in his wife, and that the suicide was the only honourable thing to do. Meyers claims that primitive people had always fascinated Hemingway. As Jean Jacques Rousseau suggests, the further one goes back, including further back in civilization, the simpler things become.20 The reverse direction of this argument from civilization to primitivism echoes Freud's thoughts on the death drive and the direction of the drive to return to earlier, more elemental components of life's structures, as in the case of the salmon swimming back to its birthplace. In Hemingway, repetition compulsion is represented in his literary output, and, insofar as literature reflects the symbolizing abilities that are unique to him, the writing of literature may be itself an act of repetition compulsion. In “Indian Camp,” what is being repeated is not the witnessing of the suicidal death, though the story does not indicate a (likely) possibility of recurring dreams and flashbacks, but the story implies repetition of the physician’s act – the doctor is ministering to a

                                                             18

Ibid. 136-137. Ernest Hemingway. In our Time (New York: Scribner, 1932/2003) 19. 20 Jeffrey Meyers. “Hemingway’s Primitivism and Indian Camp.” Twentieth Century Literature. 34.2 (Summer, 1988) 215. 19

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pregnant woman as he has ministered to other patients before, as he has witnessed other scenes of death. The story implies that the young Nick may accompany his father again on similar rounds. There is repetition as there is a repetition of the experience of witnessing, and surviving, death, acts that require mental metabolism and symbolization, be they eventually become narrativized or not, or turned into grandiose fantasies of invincibility in a boy’s mind. Hemingway found writing early in his life along with other preoccupations that he shared with his father as a boy – fishing, an adventurous attitude and a repeated engagement with the ill, the brutalized or the mangled human body. With Hemingway, life and literary work closely traced the marginal outlines of the other as if he was a living enactment of the fictions he wrote, or as if he constantly drew from his own life materials he needed for the construction of his fiction. The different domains of his life and fiction are a pastiche of repeating injuries and mutilations, both corporeal and (presumably) psychic. His long fascination with bullfighting is worth revisiting as a representation of trauma. A controlled and ceremonial dance with death, bullfighting figures early in Hemingway's writing, specifically in his first novel The Sun Also Rises where he attempts to sketch its practitioner – the matador – into cultthemed silhouettes. It is a romanticized mirage, a teasing, of death by goring. Bullfighting could represent a wish to master the encounter with injury and death – its appearance early in the fiction of Hemingway suggests an even earlier fascination with dark and brooding themes not usually associated with a bucolic boyhood. From boyhood throughout most of his life, Hemingway, like a matador, exposed himself to the morbid, the injurious and – again, because of his own suicide – to the fatal. Along with Hemingway’s oeuvre, if we are to consider Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as itself a literary work written in the same historical context, it becomes an example of a work that stares at death and symbolizes the encounter in the pessimism of bringing down humans to their basic organismal, organic origins, no more, no less than the salmon swimming to its death, pulsed by a self-destructive drive. In this rendering, Freud and Hemingway share a common penchant for troping the nature of humans as mere flesh. Michael Reynolds (1996) characterizes Hemingway’s literary output as replete with the fragmented remnants of the human anatomy: Battered heads, broken bones, auto accident, gunshot wounds to the spine, legs, stomach, head, horn wounds, gangrene, venereal disease, dysentery, shell shock – the Hemingway canon reads like Saturday night at the emergency room. A Farewell to Arms, in many ways, epitomizes this

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This quote augurs with the significance of Hemingway’s war injuries. It has to be remembered that Hemingway’s war injuries were significant. Hemingway writes to his family, in a letter dated July 21, 1918: This is a peach of a hospital here, and there are about 18 American nurses to take care of 4 patients. Everything is fine, and I'm very comfortable, and one of the best surgeons in Milan is looking after my wounds. There are a couple of pieces still in, one bullet in my knee that the X-Ray showed. The Surgeon, very wisely, is after consultation, going to wait for the wound in my right knee to heal cleanly before operating. The bullet will then be rather encysted, and he will make a clean cut and go in under the side of the kneecap. . . . All the other bullets and pieces of shell have been removed, and all the wounds on my left leg are healing finely. My fingers are all cleared up and have the bandages off.22

In this letter, Hemingway draws a line-drawing self-portrait lying down, his legs looking pockmarked, swollen and inflamed. On a leg is written “227 wounds” and coming out of his mouth is a dialogue balloon that says “gimme a drink!” The mutilated anatomy, similar to what he incurred in the war, is a recurring or repeating theme in his early works. The act of attending to the sick and injured figured in many of Hemingway’s pieces as a cub reporter assigned to cover the beat at the General Hospital. It was not clear whether the paper assigned him this beat or whether he chose or volunteered to do it (one of the assignments was to report on the activities of the undertaker).23 The following extract was from a piece he wrote on January 20, 1918, for the Kansas City Star:

                                                             21

Michael Reynolds. “A Farewell to Arms: Doctors in the House of Love.” Ed. Scott Donaldson. The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 114. 22 Carlos Baker, Ed. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961 (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons) 12. 23 Carlos Baker. Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Collier Books, 1969/1988. (Flyleaf).

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One night they brought in a negro who had been cut by a razor. It is not a mere joke about negroes using the razor – they really do it. The lower end of the man's heart had been cut away, and there was no hope for him. Surgeons informed his relatives of the one chance that remained, and it was a very slim one. Surgeons informed his relatives of the one chance that remained, and it was a very slim one. They took some stitches in his heart and the next day he had improved sufficiently to be seen by a police sergeant. 24

Hemingway wrote other journalistic pieces after the war for the Toronto Star Weekly that hint at mutilation – for example, a piece about a man courageously volunteering for a shave by a novice, student barber 25– echoing the daring stance(and triumph) of a matador over the bull. In these instances, one swift, victorious (or catastrophic) movement causes death. All these pieces underscore reinvention of the attitude towards death. For someone who has survived 227 machine gun bullets, these injuries and mutilations are nothing daunting invoking a familiarity with (the possibility of) death, if not as an experience, then as a recurring image.

Survival and Repetition The nature of the traumatic flashback is such that it is a vision that has been avulsed from the narrative – in other words, it is a repeating, looping memory that has not been integrated into a story with a plot. This nature is the source of both its capability to induce distress and its prescience, its unfading quality as if the event has only very recently occurred. Its temporal dimension has itself been distorted. Pierre Janet26 first distinguished traumatic memory from narrative memory. Janet used the example of a woman who, as a child, witnessed her mother's death by tuberculosis and also watched her corpse accidentally fall off the bed. This woman later did not have a memory of her mother dying, but at the same time, she would periodically assume a trance state where she mimicked the motions of someone caring for an ill person. The memory is, therefore, both absent and hyper-present insofar as she was actually acting out the

                                                             24

Ibid. 30-31. William White, Ed. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades. (New York: Scribner Classics, 1967). Kindle Edition, Loc. 410-460. 26 Cited in Bessel Van der Kolk and Otto Van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma. In Cathy Caruth, Ed. 1995, op. cit. 160-162. 25

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memory.27 What is peculiar about traumatic memory is that its cognitive component – the memory itself – has been dissociated from the motions and the affects accompanying the original memory of the traumatic event. In the case of Janet's patient, the dissociation repeated itself over and over in the same compulsive phenomenon that Freud describes, meaning there was a persistent absence of the memory (a repeating absence) as well as a repetition of the trance state. It is not only the repetition of the affect that characterizes dissociation, but also the absence or the substitution of affect when faced with a stressful situation. A traumatized subject will deal with subsequent traumas by dissociating, by eliminating affect from experience – the subject repeats, therefore, the dissociating defensive strategy she deploys in the original and most severe trauma. Dissociation also happens even in small instances of everyday stress as if the whole system has been so sensitized that it engages very easily to the act of dissociating. Dissociation in Hemingway replaces the horror with flippancy. He writes another letter addressed to his family dated August 18, 1918: In the trenches during an attack when a shell makes a direct hit in a group where you're standing. Shells aren't bad except direct hits. You must take chances on the fragments of the burst. But when there is a direct hit your pals get splattered all over you. Spattered is literal. . . .The 227 wounds I got from the trench mortar didn't hurt a bit at the time, only my feet felt like rubber boots full of water on. Hot water. And my knee cap was acting queer. The machine gun bullet felt like a sharp smack on my leg with an icy snowball. However, it spilled me. But I got up again and got my wounded into the dugout. I kind of collapsed under the dugout. The Italian I had with me had bled all over my coat, and my pants looked like somebody had made current (sic) jelly in them and punched holes to let the pulp out.28

The reference to currant jelly may serve to dull the inherent personal catastrophe being experienced by the person in the midst of these scenes. Other attempts to occasionally make light of grave situations recur in Hemingway’s writing. In the two foregoing letters that are closest in the time of their writing to the actual time of his war injuries, the injuries and the deaths read like party chatter: offhanded and constructed to blunt the edges of the narrative. Like the somewhat unexpected magical pose of invincibility of the child protagonist in “Indian Camp,” the encounter with death recruits a mode of psychological experiencing that becomes

                                                             27 28

Ibid. 160-162. Carlos Baker, 1981, op. cit. 14.

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conscious of the moment of survival, and the need to grope for meanings, but in the end comes out as an odd stance of invincibility or flippancy. The following extract from “On the Quai at Smyrna” demonstrates the unfolding of a traumatic mirage: The worst, he said, were the women with dead babies. You couldn't get the women to give up the dead babies. They'd have babies dead for six days. Wouldn't give them up. Nothing you could do about it. Had to take them away finally. Then there was an old lady, most extraordinary case. I told it to a doctor, and he said I was lying. We were clearing them off the pier, had to clear off the dead ones, and this old woman was lying on a sort of litter. They said, "Will you look at her, sir?" So I had a look at her, and just then she died and went absolutely stiff. Her legs drew up, and she drew up from the waist and went quite rigid. Exactly as though she had been dead overnight. She was quite dead and absolutely rigid. I told a medical chap about it, and he told me it was impossible. 29

The main problem of the unreliable narrator in this passage is the issue of the perception of time. In order for dead bodies to develop rigor mortis, several hours must lapse. The incredulity of the narrator at witnessing an instant rigor speaks as much about the macabre and the surreal scenarios of war as it does about the loss of the usual perception of time. In other words, time attains a differently perceived period of lapse. Experiencing the passage of time is very much influenced by the editing functions of the mind so that significant segments of time could be obliterated and the cut ends could be pasted together as if the removed segment never happened. The woman in Hemingway’s story could have died a slow, agonizing and painful death, which the narrator could have witnessed but not registered. Instead, the narrator dissociated. The reader in fact also experiences the dissociated unreality of the experience being narrated. The prose allows the sharing and transmission of the trauma in ways that demonstrate how this kind of literary language performs, moves and produces an effect that goes well beyond the strict referential function of language. The figurative functions of language go beyond the visual imagination; they also trigger the workings of a unique emotional imagination. The following is the concluding paragraph of “On the Quai at Smyrna”: The Greeks were nice chaps too. When they evacuated they had all the baggage animals they couldn't take off with them, so they just broke their forelegs and dumped them into the shallow water. All those mules with

                                                             29

Ernest Hemingway, 1932, op cit. 11-12.

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their forelegs broken pushed over into the shallow water. It was all a pleasant business. My word yes a most pleasant business. 30

The visual image suggested is the most powerful inducer of the shock. The ironic sarcasm of it being a "pleasant business" reacts to the effects by its tone of high irony. What is demonstrated is not the only dissociation, when the expected affects do not accompany the horrifying events, but an image that is thickly condensed in terms of the meaning it contains. The visual image is an important subject not only in trauma studies but also in its association with memory. Freud, in an earlier paper published in 1899 titled “Screen Memories,” first directly connected visual images to the workings of the unconscious. To Freud, recurring (non-traumatic) childhood memories replete with visual images contain disguised anxieties and insecurities. In this paper, Freud describes a patient whose recurring memory of childhood consists of an idyllic, playful romp on a field lush with yellow flowers. His difficult subsequent life spent doubting the choices he has made as an adult somehow forces him to escape to this visual memory as an unconscious idyll. The nature of these visions is similar to motion pictures, indeed like flashbacks, and the subject is poised as a spectator – Freud called these images “screen memories.” He will later develop this same inquiry in Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Freud writes that the peculiarity of the dream work is the modification into pictorial form. Furthermore, all of these efforts to condense and displace are ultimately a manifestation of repression. By definition, repression helps the subject by disguising the real conflict so completely that the magnitude of the original anxiety is reduced. Notably, the traumatic flashback is, like screen memories, pictorial. In Hemingway’s works, the flashback-like image may be described through writing, but because it is integrated in a coherent narrative, the images suggested lead to a rational-sounding set of expected effects in the reader – in other words, Hemingway’s writing approached from its arrangement of visual and verbal cues, functions at times like a partially successful repressed traumatic memory. “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” may be an example of fiction extracted in reality as a way to externalize the memory of tensions observed from the difficult relationship of Hemingway’s own parents. In this short story, the doctor comes home after a verbal altercation with a day worker:

                                                             30

Ibid. 12

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“Was anything the matter?” “I had a row with Dick Boulton.” “Oh,” said his wife. “I hope you didn’t lose your temper, Henry.” “No,” said the doctor. . . . Her husband did not answer. He was sitting on his bed now, cleaning a shotgun. He pushed the magazine full of the heavy yellow shells and pumped them out again. They were scattered on the bed.31

The vision of the doctor pushing the magazines away as he cleaned his gun, the idea of "showing and not telling" as a more effective way to narrate, is accomplished expediently by this character whose brooding reticence, it is implied, could easily accelerate into a physical if not violent outburst. To clean one's gun after a verbal row is a familiar example of a series of graduated manly gestures in the face of conflict. Guns, as instruments of death and violence, must be cleaned for them to function properly; dirty guns are prone to failure and to backfiring that could be fatal to the user. This gendered gesture contrasts sharply with his wife who retreats to reading in her bedroom. The condensation of conflicted relations into a series of visually suggested gestures follows the outlines suggested by Freud's construct of repression – there is, in fact, no violence at the end of the story, only a hint of a desire for such in the doctor's gestures. If the doctor actually shot Dick Boulton, the (fictional) repression would have been a failure. Repression is all about gesturing or hinting without acting out another motion that is socially unacceptable such as violence. Hemingway writes a different version of gendered differences within the marital situation in Mr. and Mrs. Elliot. In the latter story, the husband has never had any sexual experiences before his marriage. He is a poet. To cap these de-masculinized attributes, he and his wife have been having a difficult time having a child, a difficulty that is itself pregnant with the insinuation of sexual ineptitude if not impotence. Despite their affluence, the sadness is obvious. Hemingway ends the story in his now familiar tongue-in-cheek ironic way: Elliot had taken to drinking white wine and lived apart in his own room. He wrote a great deal of poetry during the night and in the morning looked very exhausted. Mrs. Elliot and the girlfriend now slept together in the big medieval bed. They had many a good cry together. In the evening they all sat at dinner together in the garden under the plane tree and the hot evening wind blew, and Elliot drank white wine, and Mrs. Elliot and the girlfriend

                                                             31

Ibid. 20-25.

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made conversation, and they were all quite happy.32

Hemingway plays with queering stereotypes to emphasize an effete man: the white wine instead of “real” drink, poetry, the failure to impregnate a wife and the virginal state before his marriage. His wife turns to another woman for intimacy, emotional if not physical. These are condensed symbolisms compacting a plenitude of ironic meanings whose semiotic trajectory could have helped build the masculine iconography around Hemingway. But the story itself is about despair, and about the ennui contained in that very semiotic. Hemingway, even while he is painting gendered stereotypes, already questions their meaning and plays with the very ambiguities of the iconography that he may (unwittingly) have helped construct.

Narrative Displacement and the Question of the Unsaid What is unsaid is nevertheless manifest in the aftermath of trauma. Often, the horror itself could not be described in the usual way. The experience of the reliving of the horror cannot be described, as if the familiar rules of discourse suddenly elude the subject. There are ways of explaining the unsaid after a trauma: the amnesia for all or part of the events, the numbness that follows as if there is amnesia to the accompanying feelings and the lack of ability to speak of the trauma because of shame, repression, or the sheer paucity of known descriptors to what was experienced. The unsaid therefore could equate with not only Caruth’s construct of the unrepresentability of facets of trauma but also the repression that Freud posits, and finally the phenomenon of dissociation. And there is a type of the unsaid that stems from the subject’s sudden irrelevance to the narrative that pre-existed before the trauma. In “Soldier’s Home,” many things are unsaid – here, the laconic mien of the Hemingway style is in full exhibition. There is no catalogue of injuries suffered or the particulars of the battles in which Krebs fought. There is no explanation of why Krebs fails to fit right back in – he went to war and came back abstractly, invisibly misshapen, in a form that could not be described, unable to fit the familiar schemas. Krebs came back to his Kansas hometown some months after the others did, missing the heroes’ welcome. His arrival was un-climactic, made worse by an indescribable feeling of being a misfit. Being pressured by his mother to find work: “Is that all?” Krebs said.

                                                             32

Ibid. 88.

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“Yes. Don’t you love your mother, dear boy?” “No,” Krebs said. His mother looked at him across the table. Her eyes were shiny. She started crying. It wasn't any good. He couldn't tell her; he couldn't make her see it. It was silly to have said it. . . .33

The “it” that Krebs could not explain precludes the profession of what was love for his mother before the war. That “it,” because it could not be put in words, precludes its communal sharing with another person. It precludes the experience of love. There would be no other explanation. Freud said that trauma is an experience that cannot be assimilated. If it cannot be assimilated, it is impossible to describe, to narrate, and to deploy familiar signifiers in describing it. In "Soldier's Home," Krebs left and returned to almost exactly the same place with little change except to him. Especially disorienting is the foreignness of what he knows after the war, a piece of knowledge that cannot be assimilated by his old context. The enigmatic simultaneity of knowing and not knowing how to talk about it ultimately expels the subject out of the narrative context in which he was a participant before the trauma. The story of Kreb's life before the war is in the first paragraph of the story: he was attending a Methodist college. "Nothing was changed in the town except the girls have grown up"34 is a statement in the story that tells of the tedious continuity of town life allowing for the imagination of how things could have been for Krebs. In a sense, it is everything that he has lost.

Trauma and Modernism in Hemingway and Freud For all of Hemingway’s associations with a modernist sensibility, the fascination with Spain and the bullfighting tradition indeed argues for nostalgia about a past when men were stoic about their injuries despite courting these injuries repeatedly. The stoicism may be a performance (because it hides the underlying torment – the central purpose of compulsion, according to Freud, is the isolation of affect), but such a performance requires repression. Many events in Hemingway’s biography, echoed in many examples of his writings are re-enactments of this ethos when dangerous acts are compulsively repeated, acts that also repeat the encounter with death. This returns us to the idea of the death drive. Returning to Freud’s text

                                                             33 34

Ibid. 75-76 Ibid. 75.

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in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, "death" does not exclusively refer to the one act of ceasing life. It refers to a reflex to return to elemental origins. Death and decomposition expose the elemental, while the figurative meaning of it all induces existential anxiety, perhaps part of what is unsayable, in that moment of being face to face with death. The revolting sights, sounds and smells of death – such as dismembered animals and corpses in rigor mortis – have not been common subjects of imaginative art and literature, but in a dramatic break with what was there before, Hemingway, along with many so-called modernists, showcases them. The instincts as mapped by Freud belong to this elemental category. Modernism has been associated with the ability to talk and write openly about the drives such as sex, aggression and murderous instincts existing in previously unspoken interstices of personal and public life – in short, what were collectively repressed were suddenly legitimate subjects for literature. James Applewhite (1986) describes the accepted modernist cliché that art should, in fact, deal with the "ugly" and that modernism is about the aesthetics of ugliness. Though the Great War has helped the public to be conscious of the ugliness inherent in armed conflicts, Applewhite (correctly) claims that these modernist aesthetics have already been put in place even before. Sigmund Freud, whom many regard as a modernist, was already publishing his works on the instincts before and during the Great War, works that not only sustain his abiding faith in his constructs of the drives and the need to repress these drives if subjects were to function in a civilized society, but also documenting a personal road-map, a philosophy for survival. What Freud repeats is the dogma that repression is the price one has to pay to be a member of society. Similar to Hemingway’s metaphoric faith in the abiding earth as he articulates in The Sun Also Rises, Freud's secular belief is grounded in a faith that repression allows a subject to fit in civilization, a faith that the drives – including the death drive – could be tamed. Freud embodied his own declarative in the taming of his own drives through intellectualization. The trauma associated with the birth of psychoanalysis at least in terms of its temporal coincidence was the pervasive and increasingly sinister anti-Semitism of Vienna and Europe. At the end of the nineteenth century, a resurgence of antiSemitism occurred in Vienna, which had enjoyed a long period of liberalism before that. John Toews (1991) recounts that Freud reacted by joining B'Nai B'rith Lodge after it became clear that assimilation into the non-Jewish society was impossible, an act that embraced his Jewish identity even as it disavowed the theistic aspects of being a Jew. He even

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delivered psychoanalytic papers to an audience of lodge members.35 Jay Geller (2007) affirms this split identification with his Jewishness. Geller recounts that in his 1926 address to the Vienna lodge of B’nai B’rith, Freud said he avowed his Jewishness because it was “foolish” to deny it. Freud further said: What bound me to Judentum was – I hate to admit it – not the faith, not even the national pride, for I was always an unbeliever [and] have been brought up without religion . . . But there remained enough to make the attraction of Judentum and the Jews irresistible, many dark emotional powers [,] all the stronger, the less they could be expressed in words, as well as the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the familiarity of the same psychological structure. 36

Geller’s project was to highlight that despite the avowals and disavowals of aspects of his Jewishness, his Judentum was inscribed in his body as if the anatomy (the marked penis) were the final arbiter of the ambiguous split of identifying with Jewishness. As a medical student, one of his professors of surgery openly and publicly humiliated Jewish students, declaring them unfit to be physicians, decidedly inferior to real Germans. 37 Because of the association of Jewishness with psychoanalysis, Freud's other fear was for its survival especially in its infancy, and it may have made it necessary, among other reasons, to secularize his Jewishness painstakingly. In 1938, Freud literally fought for his survival. He fled Vienna in the wake of the rise of Nazism and settled in London. His nephew Ernst Waldinger (1949) provides an illuminating account of Freud’s last days in Vienna. Already marked for imprisonment as soon as the Nazis took over Vienna, Freud was given a last reprieve and allowed exile to London after the Gestapo confiscated his beloved home of fifty plus years. Already in significant pain from his cancer, he packed the contents of his home, his office and lovingly wrapped his precious artefacts sitting on his desk.38 Jack McCrue and Lewis Cohen (1999), both physicians, published an account of Freud's physician-assisted death. He was to die a painful death shortly after his arrival in London. At 83 years old, after having endured 30 different surgeries, many of them botched and in some instances almost

                                                             35

John Toews. “Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in His Time and for Our Time.” The Journal of Modern History. 63.3 (1991). 526-528 36 Jay Geller. On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcision (New York: Routledge) 2-3. 37 Ibid. 14-15. 38 Ernst Waldinger. “My Uncle Sigmund Freud.” Books Abroad 15.1 (1941): 3-10.

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killing him by hemorrhage, he was wearing prosthesis in his mouth to be able to communicate (he continued to see patients, as many as six psychoanalytic hours per day), he said that his life has been reduced to being a "little island of pain within a sea of indifference." The odour of cancer in his mouth was foul, and anyone in the same room with him could easily detect it. His terminal illness occurred after many previous family losses. McCrue and Cohen write: It is probable that Freud's attitudes concerning the prospect of a lingering, painful death were influenced by wishes to avoid the bad deaths he had witnessed in friends and family. In 1920, 3 years before he developed mouth cancer, he watched Anton von Freund, a younger colleague, and friend, die a painfully slow, wasting death from metastatic cancer. Freud wrote that "Toni [was] peacefully delivered from his incurable illness. He bore his hopelessness with heroic and clear awareness and was no disgrace for psychoanalysis." Within a few weeks of von Freund's death, Freud's 27-year-old daughter, Sophie, died of influenza pneumonia, and the father of friend and colleague Ernest Jones, his American biographer, and archivist, died of cancer.39

He asked to be euthanized and died of a morphine injection at 83 years old. In the sense that this was a voluntary death, he shared the manner of his end with Hemingway. In the throes of these upheavals, Freud was completing the much-criticized essay Moses and Monotheism where he declared that the father of the Jews was a non-Jew. If the compulsion to keep soldiering on with one’s work despite the suffering is a sign of stoicism, then Freud showed it adequately while theorizing, in addition to the radical idea of Moses’s non-Jewish origins, the idea of the death drive, perhaps an illustration of the defence mechanism of displacement. The essay is jarring to many, a radical idea that upends the identity of Moses as Jew. In the end, ensconced in his exile, Freud may also have been unconsciously motivated, in his writing of Moses and Monotheism, by a fractured identification with Jewishness and the loss implied in the lack of one, cohesive identity. Freud’s “in and out” stance in terms of his Jewishness leaves a checkered personal identification with a filial and genealogical history. The Moses in Moses and Monotheism could be read as a summative, imaginative fictional personification of the author's own conflicts. Similarly, in Hemingway, the loss is a central thematic of his life, starting with the loss of his relationship with his father, and the loss of him when his father committed suicide. One could read his life as a series

                                                            

39 Jack McCue and Lewis Cohen. “Freud’s Physician Assisted Death.” Archives of Internal Medicine. 159 (1999), 1521-1522

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of motions aiming at representing the controlled suffering through the literature he wrote, until it became, finally, as it had for Freud, too difficult and then impossible.

Bibliography American Psychiatric Association. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th Edition. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association Press, Inc. 2013. Applewhite, James.” Modernism and the Imagination of Ugliness.” The Sewanee Review 94.3 (Summer, 1986): 418-439. JSTOR. Web. 12 August 2012. Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Collier Books, 1969/1988. —. Hemingway. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1972. —. Ed. Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters, 1917-1961. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. Caruth, Cathy, Ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. —. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Print. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. —. An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton. In Caruth, 1995. —. Literature in the Ashes of History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Cheever, John. The Journals. (London: Jonathan Cape),1991. Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. 1917. In Gay, Peter. Ed. 1995. 481513. —. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. James Strachey, Ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1926 (1961). —. “Interpretation of Dream.” In Strachey, James, Ed. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII, 1901-1905. New York: Vintage (1953/2001). —. “Screen Memories.” In Strachey, James, Ed. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III, 1892-1899. New York: Vintage (1961/2001). —. Civilization and Its Discontents.1930. Transl. Joan Riviere. Ed. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1979. —. Moses and Monotheism.1937. Reprint. New York: Vintage. 1964. Gay, Peter, Ed. The Freud Reader. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1995. Print.

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Geller, Jay. On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Goldstein, Joshua. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. 1926. New York: Scribner, (2006). —. Death in the Afternoon. 1932. New York: Touchstone, (1960). Print. —. In Our Time. 1932. New York: Scribner, (2003). Print. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of ViolenceFrom Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Kissane, David. Letter. Archives of Internal Medicine 160 (2000): 117. McCue, Jack D. and Cohen, Lewis. “Freud’s physician-assisted death.” Archives of Internal Medicine. 159 (1999): 1521-1525. Google Scholar. Web. 30 October 2017. Meyers, Jeffrey. “Hemingway’s Primitivism and Indian Camp.” Twentieth Century Literature. 34.2 (Summer, 1988): 211-222. —. Hemingway: A Biography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 1999. Raeburn, John. “Skirting the Hemingway Legend,” American Literary History 1.1(1989): 206-218. Reynolds, Michael. “A Farewell to Arms: Doctors in the House of Love.” Ed. Scott Donaldson. The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Stewart, Matthew C. Modernism and Tradition in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time: A Guide for Students and Readers (Studies in American Literature And Culture). Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001. Van der Kolk, Bessel A., van der Hart, Otto. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility Of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” In Caruth, 1995. 158-182. Vernon, Alex. Soldiers Once and Still: Ernest Hemingway, James Salter and Tim O’brien. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007. Waldinger, Ernest. “My Uncle Sigmund Freud.” Books Abroad 15.1(1941): 3-10. JSTOR. Web. 30 October 2017. White, William, Ed. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades. New York: Scribner Classics, 1967. Kindle Edition.

PART 2: WRITING-NARRATING TRAUMA

CHAPTER SIX NIHILISTIC DETERMINISM OR HOPEFUL TESTIMONY: TIME, TRAUMA, AND NARRATIVE IN SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE AND THE WHITE HOTEL KYLE MOX

Listen: in a 1977 interview for the Paris Review, Kurt Vonnegut commented that, as far as he could figure, only one person on the planet had benefitted from the 1945 Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany: “Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that.”1 Depending on whose math we use, Vonnegut’s resulting profit could have been from $25,000 to $900,000. Considering that most of the deceased were either immolated in the bombings or unceremoniously cremated after the fact, exact numbers are hard to come by.2 So it goes. 3 The inference of his macabre statement is that Vonnegut had long suffered conflicting emotions over the commercial and critical success of his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five. On the one hand, the novel's popularity established him as an icon; on the other, the only reason that he was able to write it was that he had witnessed one of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century. Vonnegut’s internal struggle is not an isolated case, and writers who seek to address the numerous atrocities, traumas, and genocides of the early 20th Century often find themselves ill-equipped, 1

Vonnegut, “Kurt Vonnegut,” 56. The most conservative figures come from German historians. See Reichert, Friedrich. Verbrannt bis zur Unkenntlichkeit. Die Zerstörung Dresdens 1945. Altenburg, 1994. 3 This phrase, uttered in the Tralfamadorian fashion after reference to death, is repeated 106 times in Slaughterhouse-Five. 2

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regarding conventional narrative. As they struggle to represent the “unrepresentable,” to testify an experience that cannot be fully assimilated, authors who would write about atrocities must bring to bear innovative narrative technologies, which most often result in seemingly chaotic, juxtaposed thematic arrangements or other temporal manipulations.4 These “adaptive” strategies can be likened in many ways to the psyche’s attempts to reconcile events; therefore, an analysis of the subconscious machinations of a narrative’s structure can present some useful observations about the function of the relationship between trauma and memory and narrative and fact and fantasy. Barbara Foley asserts that contemporary writers in this milieu generally fall into one of two camps: 1) writers who “willfully distort the data of the past in order to convey a chaotic sense of historical process” and to convey the “necessarily subjective nature” of history; and 2) writers who “graft a range of novelistic techniques onto a factual account . . . to evoke the bizarre atmosphere of our cluttered, alienated culture.” Either approach, Foley argues, “posit that history is ultimately unknowable.”5 In the following essay, I will examine these sorts of distortions and novelizations, specifically focusing on three primary qualities of my chosen texts: 1) artistically, as innovative works of fiction; 2) intellectually, as challenging works of psychoanalytic fiction; and 3) morally, as testaments to crimes against humanity. Specifically, I shall use as my “case studies” Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel. Both works are often held up as examples of postmodern fiction; but simply shelving Slaughterhouse-Five or The White Hotel as fine examples of "Pomo" fiction disregards the works' real value: as explications of how singular human traumas situate themselves within the larger, collective history of trauma. Although a short novel, the thematic mass of Slaughterhouse-Five far exceeds what one would expect from its volume, for the structure of the novel itself carries as much, if not more, meaning than the story alone. Beyond a simple self-conscious work of art and a playful attempt to reestablish the parameters of the avant-garde, Vonnegut's novel is, and more importantly, indicative of his struggle to construct a comprehensible narrative about an incomprehensible event. Faced with the task of relating his experience in Dresden, Vonnegut had, as Joseph Schopp argues, his choice of three conventional narrative forms: reportage, historiography, 4

My use of the word technology is deliberate; as advancing technology has made genocide more efficient, authors have been forced to innovate new narrative technologies to keep pace. 5 Foley, “Fact, Fiction, Fascism, 331.

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and historical novel/romance.6 Each of the preceding three choices is subject to the pitfalls described by Foley in my preceding section. Vonnegut spent over 23 years trying to decide how to craft his testimony. He writes in the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five that the best outline that he “ever made, or anyway the prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper… [using his] daughter’s crayons, a different color for each main character.7 Later in the first chapter, he apologizes to his publisher, Seymour “Sam” Lawrence, “It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again.”8 Whatever the length or organization, the final product is a darkly funny, completely absurd, remarkably innovative novel. The narrative is comprised of three, perhaps four, main plots: 1) Billy Pilgrim’s past – his experiences in World War II as a prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden; 2) Billy Pilgrim’s present – his marriage and career as an optometrist; and 3) Billy Pilgrim’s “future,” in which he is captured by the Tralfamadorians, a powerful extraterrestrial race who see in four dimensions and resemble toilet plungers. To make matters worse, Billy Pilgrim has “come unstuck in time” and travels without control between all three eras of his life, often phasing between each of the three major plot lines within one chapter. The fourth plot line is Vonnegut’s, as the narrator-author, who also tells the tale of how he came to write the book and who periodically appears as a character in his novel. One approach to interpreting Slaughterhouse-Five is to read it as a “trauma narrative,” operating under Cathy Caruth’s definition of trauma as “an overwhelming experience of sudden, or catastrophic events, in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.”9 Making the case that Billy Pilgrim has post-traumatic stress disorder is neither novel nor challenging; most smart readers would assume that Billy is not travelling through time. If instead, Caruth’s definition provides a vantage point from which to reconsider the relationship between trauma, memory, and narrative, one may draw some larger and more useful conclusions about the relationship between structure and meaning in trauma narratives in general.10 Caruth argues that by approaching the 6

Schopp, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” 337. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 6. 8 Ibid., 24. 9 Caruth, “Unclaimed,” 181. 10 From this point forward, unless otherwise specified, I use the term “trauma” as shorthand for collective trauma—events such as genocides, atrocities, mass 7

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notion of “history” from the perspective of trauma, “we can begin to recognize the possibility of a history which is no longer straightforwardly referential.”11 Caruth’s argument rests mainly on her reading of Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. As a historical project, Freud’s work is often discredited, given that it is highly fictionalized; it does, however, raise several ongoing questions about the relationship between trauma and history. Mainly, Freud uses his re-imagined history to illustrate the concept of latency or the "incubation period" between the traumatic event and the symptomatic reactions to it.12 As Caruth suggests, “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.”13 In other words, the lacuna between the witnessing of a traumatic event and the psychic repercussions of that witnessing makes the establishment of "cause and effect" difficult, so concerning narrative, latency renders traditional, linear structures useless. If Vonnegut’s singular traumatic experience (and his testimony) provides a text for understanding the nature of collective trauma, one may then draw parallels between “traumatic neurosis,” or post-traumatic stress disorder, in which the traumatic event is unwillingly repeated in the subject’s mind, and the seemingly repetitive nature of historical events. Freud suggests that the recurrent nature of history is akin to singular trauma, wherein the actual traumatic event is often hidden in or repressed by the unconscious; in the case of human history, the repeated event is the murder of the father by his rebellious sons, an event repeated in the murder of Moses (as described by Freud) and the death of Christ (which, in Christian dogma is traditionally interpreted as sacrificial atonement for Original Sin). History itself is a trauma narrative, one in which the traumatic events, the exact origins of which are lost to prehistory, endlessly repeat themselves.14 The modern conception of time is linear—that is, we perceive events as the effects of preceding causes (e.g., Christ dies because Judas betrays him). Because we view history as directly referential (and, therefore, sequential) we are psychically uncomfortable with the notion that history is discontinuous, that a given atrocity cannot be rationally explained by analyzing the preceding events. To explore further the relationship between trauma and time, consider that, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud suggests that the development of the psyche is a means by which the murders, and other violent events considered “crimes against humanity.” 11 Caruth, “Unclaimed,” 182. 12 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 67. 13 Caruth, “Unclaimed,” 187. 14 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 80.

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consciousness protects “the little fragment of substance suspended in the middle of the external world” from excessive stimulation, just as our bodies separate us from the exterior world and protect us from harm.15 Our psyches buffer us from harmful stimulation by “placing stimulation in an ordered experience of time.”16 In contrast, Freud suggests that “unconscious mental processes are in themselves ‘timeless’” and are not “ordered temporally.”17 An event becomes traumatic, therefore, not because it is unfathomably atrocious, but because of the subject’s inability to prepare for it. Because we are unprepared, the event bypasses the defenses of our consciousness, which normally protects our "little fragment of substance" by assimilating stimuli into our temporal understanding of the world and infects our unconsciousness, which describes the world through thematic associations. This phenomenon of thematic association is illustrated in Chapter 8 of Slaughterhouse-Five, when Billy Pilgrim, while at a party, watches a barbershop quartet and finds “himself upset by the song and by the occasion” and has a “powerful psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque….”18 The sight of the singers’ mouths gaping open immediately transports Billy to Dresden, where he had witnessed a similar scene. Vonnegut is careful to note that Billy “did not travel in time to the experience. He remembered it shimmeringly….” Vonnegut goes on to describe what Billy (and, presumably, Vonnegut) experienced during the bombing of Dresden: "He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was a very safe shelter.”19 During the bombing, the few German soldiers guarding the American prisoners “drew together” and “experimented with one expression and then another, said nothing, though their mouths were often open. They looked like a silent film of a barbershop quartet.”20 In this scene—what would in a conventional narrative be the climax—the thematic structure of Slaughterhouse-Five becomes clear. In most cases, this sort of cross-indexing is not unsettling—everyone has heard a song or smelled an odor that triggered 15

Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 27. Caruth, “Violence,” 25. 17 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 28. 18 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 220. 19 Ibid., 226. The relevance of Billy remembering, rather than traveling is relevant if one reads Billy’s time travel as an escape tactic. 20 Ibid. 227 16

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vivid memories of childhood, for instance. The difference in the case of singular trauma is that the subject is, for all intents and purposes, returned to the traumatic event, regardless of the temporal separation and against his will. Those who are traumatized often experience a “folding” of time; they are transported to the event, as though witnessing it for the first time. Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity extends the concept of thematic connections beyond singular unconscious to the collective unconscious.21 Jung writes, in “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious,” that the collective unconscious is a part of the psyche that “can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not…owe its existence to personal experience and is consequently not a personal acquisition.”22 While classical Freudian psychoanalysis looks internally and to the past to explain a neurosis, the Jungian approach considers the effects of our external culture. On the point of “coincidence,” or, in literary terms, “thematic juxtaposition,” Jung proposes a unity between physical and psychical events, as evinced by observed “meaningful coincidences” that are related conceptually, but not temporally. Fundamental psychoanalytic theory, as per Freud and Jung, leads us to consider that if we are compelled to relate, to bear testimony, to traumatic events, we are forced to innovate around the limitations of our conscious, temporal ordering of events. As trauma theorists Caruth, Laub, Leys, LaCapra, and Felman, et al., have suggested, the witnessing of a traumatic event is not necessarily the trigger the compulsion to bear testimony—this compulsion is the result of the "peculiar and perplexing experience" of having survived the event, which results in urge to cast the occurrence as a unique experience. 23 This desire is in tension with the knowledge that our individual traumas are necessarily situated within collective, historical trauma: “I” am not the only person to have escaped the Nazi death camps, “I” am not the only surviving Armenian, “I” am not the only one to walk out of Hiroshima alive.24 Furthermore, as Kelly Oliver asserts, there is also a tension 21

The term collective unconscious is not used here in the precisely Jungian sense—I merely mean to offer separation between singular traumatic events—i.e., those of importance only to the individual—and collective traumatic events—i.e., historical events of such magnitude as to have long-lasting cultural resonance. 22 Jung, “Collective Unconscious,” 42. 23 Caruth, “Violence,” 25. “Survivor Syndrome, or "Survivor Guilt," is classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV not as a specific diagnosis, but as a primary symptom of PTSD. 24 Likewise, in the cases of “non-historical” traumatic events, “I” am not the only woman to have survived domestic violence, “I” am not the only child to have

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“inherent in the notion of witnessing,” between the desire to simultaneously bear accurate testimony to historical events while “bearing witness to a truth about humanity and suffering that transcends those facts.”25 Concerning the latter tension, we can see the logic in opting for "fiction" as the preferred mode for bearing witness to traumatic events. Doing so absolves the author/narrator of any omissions and justifies any modifications made to the “real” story. In regard to the former tension— the desire for novelty—in case of Slaughterhouse-Five, as in many trauma narratives, Vonnegut resolves it by abandoning conventional linear structure in favor of anachronistic structure and thematic subplots that radiate outward from a central traumatic event. By abandoning the conventions of sequential time and referential history, the structure of a trauma narrative comes to symbolize the witness’s endless attempt to reconcile his own survival, the incomprehensible “facts” of which reside not in the temporal consciousness, but the atemporal, symbolic unconsciousness. As stated earlier, however, the repetitive nature of history suggests that the trauma is not unique, our survival is not unique, and we are not unique. When attempting to testify about atrocities, we seek to emphasize the novelty of the event and to disavow that the given event is similar in most ways to other atrocities—not only those that have come before, but also the atrocities that no intelligent person can deny will happen in the future. Genocide is a cliché. If one views time as linear, as modern humans do, then one assumes that the events that immediately precede an event contribute to the event that follows. This idea of causality, in many ways, informs the ethics of the “now,” as we assume that we can prevent future atrocities by recognizing the originating patterns of behavior and intervene. The Tralfamadorian view of time, however, presents us an alternative view in which time is perceived not linearly, but in its totality. “Earthlings are the great explainers,” the Tralfamadorians tell us, “explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided.” In comparison, Tralfamadorians see “all time as you might see the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations.” “Only on earth,” the Tralfamadorians tell us, “is there any talk of free will.”26 Nearly all of Vonnegut’s works explore the motif of determinism to some degree, but Slaughterhouse-Five is his most extreme work in this sense. The subtitle of the novel, for instance, survived sexual molestation, and “I” am not the only one to have lived through a near-fatal car accident. 25 Oliver, “Witnessing,” 81. 26 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 109.

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refers to the “children’s crusades” of the 13th Century, an allusion to the cyclicality of history. Further, the inevitability of war (and, thereby, atrocities) is also suggested by Chapter 1, when Vonnegut references a conversation that he once had with a filmmaker, who asked if he was writing an anti-war book. When Vonnegut replied that he supposed so, the mogul stated, “You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?’… ‘I say, “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”27 As suggested earlier, the structure of the novel buoys the implicit thesis that atrocities are inevitable and that if the novel is disorienting, it is precisely because life is disorienting, seemingly controlled by forces far beyond our understanding. Not only has Billy Pilgrim become “unstuck in time,” he has no control over where or when he goes. At the mercy of grand cosmological powers, he bobs in time helplessly, just as he bobs helplessly on a missing boot heel through the trenches of Luxembourg. Vonnegut could not be any clearer when he tells us, “Listen: Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.” Even the Tralfamadorians, with their inconceivable ability to “see” all moments at once, know that the end of the universe will be the result of their own experiments with new fuel sources. Yet, they will not— cannot do anything to prevent it, since that moment, like all other moments, was “structured that way.”28 Slaughterhouse-Five presents us the following dilemma: Is it more depressing to believe that forces beyond our control determine our events or to acknowledge that the bombing of Dresden, World War II in general, and the Holocaust were the products of rational thinking and free will? ### If Slaughterhouse-Five illustrates the struggles of survivors to reconcile their experiences and bear testimony to atrocities, D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, as a Holocaust narrative, illustrates the difficulties encountered by third-party subjects—i.e. the non-witness— who wish to offer testimony. As Foley comments, the critical community agrees that “the experience of the Holocaust has altered not only the nature of historical reality but also the possibility of embodying that reality in artistic representation.”29 In Vonnegut’s case, the struggle was an internal one—he could not be told that his representation was “wrong,” since the 27

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 149. 29 Foley, “Fact, Fiction,” 330. 28

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experiences were his, and he owned them. For a writer like Thomas, however, the act of artistic creation is a treacherous ethical minefield, fraught with not only aesthetic challenges but with intellectual and moral quandaries. The White Hotel is an aesthetically ambitious work of literature; intellectually, it is daring in that it subtly critiques a dominant philosophy of the 20th Century. In terms of morality, that the Holocaust and its causes, effects, and cultural relevance is worthy of examination is not to be debated. At the center of the ethical debate surrounding Thomas’s work, however, is his narrative methodology, for he blends factual accounts with fictional techniques. At one end, many outraged critics and readers have accused Thomas point blank of plagiarism. As one reader put it in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement: “no writer has the moral right to take the experience of a real human being and attach it, for his or her own ends, to a made-up character.”30 Many critics felt this “borrowing” was an act of weakness and an obvious display of Thomas’s ineptitude. The outrage is more intense (or at least more complex), at the abstract end of the spectrum, which focuses on Thomas’s attempts to fictionalize (read: trivialize) the Holocaust. As Elie Wiesel has famously declared, “a novel about Auschwitz is either not a novel, or not about Auschwitz.” More directly, Michael Wyschogorod offers that, "Art takes the sting out of suffering…It is therefore forbidden to make fiction of the Holocaust…Any attempt to transform the Holocaust into art demeans the Holocaust and must result in poor art.”31 So into these turbid waters treads The White Hotel. I argue that Thomas, is not only fully aware of the controversies, but he also uses them to his advantage by manipulating our expectations of fiction: The White Hotel is separated into a prologue and six chapters, each written in a different narrative mode. Thomas moves freely from an epistolary mode to poetry, case history, and third-person omniscient point of view (both dreamlike and conventional). To take on so many narrative viewpoints and styles, the act itself must have significance; as with Vonnegut, the form of the novel cannot be separated from its meaning. The novel follows the psychological journey of Lisa Erdman, a Ukrainian-born opera singer, as she overcomes bouts of hysteria (which includes chronic asthma, frequent pain in her left breast and pelvis, an exaggerated fear of motherhood, and violent hallucinations during sexual intercourse) in pre-world war II Europe. Seeking treatment from Sigmund Freud, she achieves a satisfying recovery and weds happily, only to perish 30 31

Qtd. in Wirth-Nesher, “Ethics of Narration,” 23. Both quotes are taken from Foley, "Fact, Fiction,” 344.

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later in the massacre at Babi Yar. As Mary F. Robertson comments, “For the first half of the novel, The White Hotel seems nothing so much as a piece of surfictionist formalist adventurism,” with the shifting narrative modes intended to “show the arbitrariness of forms and signs.”32 For instance, the prologue consists of several letters exchanged between Thomas’s fictional Freud and his colleagues. Conventionally, the epistolary mode allows the reader insight into a specific character’s perspective and heightens the suspension of disbelief. In terms of our expectations of narrative fiction, however, we may encounter some conceptual discomfort, as the letters are written by “fictional” versions of “historical” figures, and Thomas’s versions of the letters differ very little from the real versions. The first chapter, "Don Giovanni," is a lurid epic poem, established in the prologue by the fictional Freud's letter as an excerpt from one of his patient's notebooks, "an extreme of libidinous phantasy combined with an extreme of morbidity.”33 Chapter two, “The Gastein Journal,” is a prose version of the preceding poem, a third-person account that transforms the surreal imagery of “Don Giovanni” into narrative form. The following chapter, “Frau Anna G.,” shifts to a first-person point of view (with Freud as our narrator), a narrative mode that has the effect of inviting the reader to become the analyst, the psychiatrist attempting to piece together the whole story from various fragmented elements to form a coherent narrative.34 Chapter four, “The Health Resort,” is a fairly conventional third-person account that also integrates correspondence written by Lisa Erdman to Freud. Chapter five, “The Sleeping Carriage,” being the account of the massacre of Babi Yar, is a minimalist third-persona account, almost documentary in tone. The final chapter, “The Camp,” returns to the surrealistic prose of “The Gastein Journal.” As Wirth-Nesher suggests, one such benefit of this protean approach is that the disjunction of the separate sections and the general fragmentation of the novel calls into question the ability of fiction to convey history.35 It could be argued that Thomas is “trying on” different modes, as if attempting to find the appropriate way in which to tell the impossible story of the horrors of man’s cruelty, a struggle well documented by Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five. To repeat, if the novel is disorienting, it's precise because life is disorienting, seemingly controlled by forces far beyond our understanding. In the face of such disorientation, the reader is eager to 32

Robertson, “Hystery, Herstory,” 460-461. Thomas, White Hotel, 8 34 Granofsky, “Pornographic Mind,” 54. 35 Wirth-Nesher, 16. 33

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grasp any available compass, and the most logical compass in this terrain is Freudian psychoanalysis. In fact, before the narrative even begins, Thomas, in his “Author’s Note,” doffs his cap to the historical Freud, the “discoverer of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis.”36 From the beginning, or rather, before the beginning, the reader is prepared to apply a Freudian reading to the text. The Freudian analysis is certainly attractive, if, faced with historical traumas such as the Holocaust, we are wont to believe in a sort of nihilistic determinism. While certainly not deterministic in the omnipotent fashion of the Tralfamadorians, Freudianism would have us believe that our behavior is largely governed by events that precede our consciousness. A careful reading of The White Hotel, however, will reveal that Thomas, despite his declarations otherwise, seeks to undermine the conservative Freudian determinism upon which, it would seem, the novel is structured. Experimental fiction often seeks to dissolve the boundaries between fact and fiction by toying with such conventions as linearity, narrative perspective, suspended disbelief, and the “fourth wall.” As Robertson suggests, “Modernist art and psychoanalysis in its classical form share the prejudice that significant reality is to be found not in empirical fact but in a complex inference drawn from mediating and disguising signs.”37 Many postmodern authors employ metafictional techniques—e.g. authorial intrusions, direct reader address, historical “characters”—to inspire the reader to contemplate the boundaries of fact and fiction and the meaning and purpose of each in our culture. The chapters of The White Hotel crisscross the conceptual fact/fiction line so often that it soon becomes indistinct, if not entirely irrelevant. In The White Hotel, as with Slaughterhouse-Five, the surreality of the narrative has one precise function: as a contrast intended to sharpen reader’s perception of the core historic reality of the text. As Oliver argues, the inherent tension between “eyewitness testimony” and “bearing witness,” that is “historical facts” and “psychoanalytic and phenomenological truths” is a necessary one, moving us beyond the “melancholic choice between either dead historical facts or traumatic repetition of violence.”38 Vonnegut achieves this feat by actually injecting himself into his text. Thomas achieves this end by more dramatic means: he appropriates a firsthand account of the massacre at Babi Yar.39 As with Vonnegut’s insertion, 36

Thomas defines his use of the word myth to mean “a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth” (vii). 37 Robertson, “Hystery, Herstory,” 452. 38 Oliver, “Witnessing,” 80. 39 Thomas’s depiction of the massacre at Babi Yar comes directly from Anatoli

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critics are unsure as to how to classify this strategy.40 Some have referred to the chapter as “historical,” others simply as “non-fiction.” The most assertive label is Robertson’s appropriation of Foley’s category of “pseudo-factual.”41 In comparison to the other chapters of the novel, the tone of "The Sleeping Carriage" is matter-of-fact, almost documentary; here, and the narrator relates the facts through the camera of Lisa's eye: Everyone on the hillock was silent, crazed with fright. Lisa found she could not take her eyes off the scene which was being enacted in front of them. One group of people after another came staggering out of the corridor, screaming, bleeding, each of them seized by a policeman, beaten again and stripped of clothes. The scene was repeated over and over again. Some were laughing hysterically. Some became old in minutes.42

Thomas could not have possibly made the scene at Babi Yar more horrific with any stylistic manipulations; no metaphors can accent these horrors. “The Sleeping Carriage” is the nexus of the controversy surrounding The White Hotel. In his defense, Thomas argued that changing the words of the original reports would have “…been untruthful. The only person who could speak was the witness.”43 So, while some may consider Thomas’s appropriation to be immoral, Thomas would have considered it immoral to alter the original descriptions, the truth. While many critics find fault in Thomas’s decision to abandon fiction at this point in the novel, others, such as Wirth-Nesher, commend him for it: “what is worthy of respect in Thomas’s approach to this problem is his awareness of it, visible in the deliberate rupture in the fictional text.”44 Thomas’s narrative points to this exact intention: “No one could have imagined the scene, because it was happening.”45 As with Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrative of The White Hotel orbits this central traumatic event. While Vonnegut is more overt in emphasizing a radial structure in his novel, however, Thomas’s novel, despite its stylistic virtuosity, is, for the most part, a Kuznetsov’s 1966 documentary novel Babi Yar, particularly the first-person accounts of the lone survivor of the massacre, Dina Pronicheva. 40 The convention among Vonnegut’s critics seems to be to treat the literal, historical Vonnegut as the “author-narrator” character. This convention further illustrates our refusal to disavow the overlap of fantasy and fact. 41 Robertson, “Hystery, Herstory,” 459 42 Thomas, White Hotel, 242. 43 Quoted in Wirth-Nesher, “Ethics of Narration,” 23. 44 Ibid., 25. 45 Thomas, White Hotel, 243-244.

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sequential novel. It is not until the "Sleeping Carriage" that we realize that this linearity was an illusion. This rupture of time urges the reader to consider the essential paradox of free will vs. determinism. The structure of Slaughterhouse-Five suggests that, in light of humanity’s capacity for atrocity, free will may actually be undesirable. In other words, while we do not want to accept the fact that our behavior is not within our control, we also do not want to acknowledge that free will would allow individuals or, even worse, collective groups to commit atrocities. The White Hotel presses the point a bit further—by asking an unexpected question: what if our future determines our present? My simple question is deceiving, since it is not necessarily the future that works backwards to influence our present; rather, The White Hotel implies that, given a heightened awareness of collective consciousness, one might conceivably forecast such events. In terms of the narrative, as the climax, “The Sleeping Carriage” unites the symbols and signs from throughout the book. Most significantly, the reader comes to realize that the hysteria for which Lisa Erdrman had sought treatment was not a result of her past, as Freud would conclude, but her future. Her asthma is a premonitory symptom of her suffocation in the pile of bodies at the bottom of the Babi Yar ravine, her aching breast and pelvis is a kick from a jack-booted soldier, and her sexual anxiety is the result of the gruesome sexual attack from a bayonet.46 In addition, her fear of motherhood can be described as a subconscious defense mechanism against the dark cloud of Nazi atrocity looming in her future. In the end, we are left with a question no less disturbing than the one posed by Slaughterhouse-Five: if the symbols had been correctly interpreted could the atrocity have been prevented? As with Slaughterhouse-Five, if one is to derive a sensible ontology from The White Hotel, a strictly Freudian reading must be discarded. Freud’s worldview is teleological in that all present phenomena have a preceding referent, even if the causal event is not temporally sequential. In psychological terms, classic Freudian psychoanalysis contends that all neurosis stems from repressed traumatic events that are hidden in the atemporal unconscious; further, the traumatic event and the symptomatic responses to it are normally separated by time—i.e. latency—therefore making it difficult to perceive the nature of trauma as it occurs. For instance, in the chapter "Frau Anna G.," written from Freud's own case studies, (fictional) Freud theorizes that Lisa's hysteria stems from 46 Note that in the narrative, the fictional Freud was never able to explain the significance of the left-sidedness of Lisa’s pains.

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repressed childhood trauma. In this case, the trauma in question is Lisa's viewing of her mother, aunt, and uncle engaging in sexual intercourse and her mother's later death in a hotel fire while engaging in a clandestine meeting with the same man. Thomas’s Freud theorizes that the pains in her breast and ovary result from her unconscious hatred of her distorted femininity, and the asthma is “perhaps a mnemic symbol of choking in a fire.”47 It can also be assumed that Lisa’s fear of motherhood also stems from the same hatred, and her hallucinations of mass destruction in response to sex with her husband more than likely relate to the inferno in which her mother perished. Freud’s historical case studies are entertaining reading, as he placed a great deal of emphasis on the connection between a cohesive narrative and psychic well-being. Freud was known even to guide his patients as they constructed their own narrative, and, usually, the turning point in Freud's treatment was the revelation of a dream that he could interpret, thereby reconstructing the offending "primal event," and forcing the patient to deal with this so-called "memory.”48 Freud’s patients are healed when they come to possess their own story; once testimony has been offered and the event situated within our temporal consciousness, we can, as the Tralfamadorians do, “concentrate on the happy moments,” or, at the very least, master a degree of “selectivity” in how, when, and how often we revisit the event in question.49 Whether or not their reconstructed narrative is accurate, however, is another matter. The construction of history based on cause and effect is largely dependent on available information. Latency can obscure the connection between a causal event and the resulting phenomena; a linear trauma narrative, then, is an artificial construct. Furthermore, external factors can also influence the subject’s testimony. For instance, in a long letter to Freud, Lisa admits to having withheld information from him, or at least incorrectly remembering the events of her life. She confesses that her boathouse story was, in fact, a screen for something else, as Freud had surmised; in her earlier testimony, she had related that after her mother’s death, she had been attacked and sexually molested by a group of sailors who she claimed had read accounts of her mother’s indiscretions in the newspapers. In reality, the sailors had attacked only because she was 47

Thomas, White Hotel, 140, 139. Wirth-Nesher, “Ethics,” 20. For example, in Slaughterhouse-Five, this primal event would have been the gaping mouths of the German guards; in The White Hotel, the primal event would have actually been Lisa’s murder at Babi Yar, which would have been in the future. 49 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 249. 48

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Jewish. Lisa confesses: “. . . from that time I haven’t found it easy to admit to my Jewish blood. I've gone out of my way to hide it, and I think that may have something to do with my evasiveness and generally lies—earlier in my life and particularly with you.”50 Lisa admits that through her entire life she has hidden her religious heritage and harbored hatred against her father for his own Jewishness. This identity struggle was a concern especially in regard to her first husband, who was anti-Semitic. Lisa suggests that her fear of having a child and her violent hallucinations are a response not to her repressed emotions or memories, but to her ethnic shame. Her guilt comes not from having witnessed her mother sleeping with her uncle, but because for a brief time, she could believe that she was not her father’s daughter, and, therefore, not Jewish. The implication that her trauma is a result of her heritage disrupts a Freudian view of history. Freud’s theories (especially his early ones, which are contemporary to the events of the novel) largely ignored the patient’s cultural or ethnic context; to Freud, the cause of neurosis was sexual in that it derived from the family drama—the relationships between parents and children of opposite sexes—in some way. Our powerful Eros sets us at odds with social taboos that prohibit incest, and this conflict results in repressed emotions that cause the various neuroses. Therefore, Freudian psychoanalysis looks inward and backward, so to speak, focusing on the individual’s own forgotten history. As Rowland Wymer points out, however, “the cure offered by psychoanalysis is an adjustment to reality, but ‘reality’ in this context is a largely social reality, created by other human beings who are themselves sick.”51 As Jung writes in “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious,” neuroses are most often more than just private concerns—they are “social phenomena:” If thirty years ago anyone had dared to predict that our psychological development was tending towards a revival of the medieval persecutions of the Jews, that Europe would again tremble before the Roman fasces and the tramp of legions, that people would once more give the Roman salute, as two thousand years ago, and that instead of the Christian Cross an archaic swastika would lure onward millions of warriors ready for death— why that man would have been hooted as a mystical fool. And today? Surprising as it may seem, all this absurdity is a horrible reality. Private life, private aetiologies, and private neuroses have become a fiction in the world of today.52

50

Thomas, White Hotel, 188. Wymer, “Freud, Jung,” 61. 52 Jung, “Collective Unconscious,” 48. 51

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By placing the source of Lisa Erdman’s trauma after her hysteria, the narrative structure of The White Hotel endorses an ideology that could be typified as Jungian/Tralfamadorian in that it considers an atemporal, holistic view of history, one that looks not to an internal past, but outward to the external collective unconscious. Throughout the novel, Lisa frequently exhibits instances of “second sight,” which Thomas’s Freud dismisses as “unconscious mental telepathy.” He never considers that "she can really foretell the future or that her painful symptoms may be pointing toward the future of Europe in World War II.”53 In a letter to Freud, Lisa herself expresses her dissatisfaction with his limited thought: Frankly I didn’t always wish to talk about the past; I was more interested in what was happening to me then, and what might happen in the future. In a way you made me become fascinated by my mother’s sin, and I am forever grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to delve into it. But I don’t believe for one moment that had anything to do with my being crippled with pain.54

The White Hotel points to a perceived flaw in Freudian psychoanalysis—it focuses solely on the events of one’s personal past as the cause of neurotic symptoms and ignores the influence of the present (and perhaps even future) socio-cultural context. In other words, like Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrative structure of The White Hotel undermines the ideology that its plot and characterization would seem to promote. In similar fashion to Vonnegut’s subtle contradiction of Tralfamadorian determinism, Thomas structures his novel in such a way as to quietly undercut Freudian determinism. The last chapter of the book, “The Camp,” redeems what would have otherwise been a nightmare, a story that promotes pessimistic ontology, one that takes the nihilistic determinism implied by Slaughterhouse-Five to the extreme. “The Camp” takes place in the afterlife, a “kind of otherworldly Palestine.”55 While Thomas’s desire to transcend the horrors of Babi Yar is desirable, the final chapter can also be read as the conclusion of an argument against classical Freudian ideology in favor of a more progressive Jungian ideology, or, rather, an ideology that synthesizes the two.

53

Simonds, “Sexual Satire,” 55. Thomas, White Hotel, 192. 55 Thomas is quite clear about his intentions: “It is in fact purgatory if one wants to use the theological term” (“Freud,” 1959) 54

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Looking backwards from the end, as Freud would have us do, we can discover a hidden struggle for ideological unity raging throughout the narrative. Ironically, this schism fits nicely in the Jungian paradigm, which values paradoxes. Jung believed that wholeness could be achieved only by the acceptance of opposites—a mother must accept that she is a whore, a priest must acknowledge the desire the kill. From this perspective, "The Camp" can be read as the attempt to synthesise the most fundamental opposition: good vs. evil. Thomas himself referred to the novel as a “synthesis of vision.” Robertson adds that Thomas’s statement “must have an ethical force if we are to be persuaded…he must somehow make the atrocities seem inevitable.”56 Notably, the style and tone of the final chapter are the most conventional of the entire novel, suggesting that wholeness may only be achieved by embracing the many oppositions within the psyche. The reader has traversed many irregular terrains throughout the novel, and now, after we have examined each of the pieces, we may finally begin telling what we have come to accept as a “story.” Freud denied any possibility of an afterlife. A Freudian rebirth is one in which the patient releases his or her past—achieves “self-actualization.” As in Lisa’s case, however, powerful forces outside the individual can easily cancel this type of redemption. Jung, however, allowed for spiritual views, especially Christian and Hindu philosophies, views that Freud would describe as “mystical.” Many of the images from Lisa’s dreams have returned here: the mother’s milk, the black cat, the white hotel. It is in Thomas’s afterlife that the many antitheses of the novel are finally united: past and future, death and rebirth, body and spirit, mysticism and rationalism. We find, at the conclusion of the novel, that not only have we traveled “far in the landscape of hysteria—the ‘terrain’ of this novel,” but we have also made a philosophical journey of our own.57 Thomas’s use of a variety of fictional modes forces the reader to ponder the ability of fiction to convey reality—especially a reality that can be as horrific as Babi Yar. In addition, Thomas invites the reader to critique the dominant philosophy of the twentieth century, the "beautiful modern myth" of psychoanalysis— the myth in this case meaning "a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth.”58 This examination of hidden truths is exactly what Thomas intends for his readers, and despite the arguments over how he goes about saying it, he succeeds.

56

Robertson, “ Hystery, Herstory,” 471. Thomas, White Hotel, vii. 58 Ibid. 57

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Here are some conclusions: 1. Slaughterhouse-Five, with its anachronistic, thematic structure, suggests that time is an illusion, free will is an illusion, and the events of our lives, whether good or bad, pleasant or horrible, are predetermined and unavoidable 2. The White Hotel, with its varied narrative modes and disregard of the division between fact and fantasy, suggests that our personal neuroses may not, in fact, be personal but a reaction to the public sicknesses of our civilizations. Further, given that synthesis of oppositions creates our reality, if good is to exist in the world, so must atrocities. If both novels also imply that history is unknowable and, therefore, nothing, no amount of symbol and sign-reading, can prevent atrocities, what are we to do? If we, as singular and collective witnesses of atrocities, are to continue a meaningful existence, how do we move beyond trauma? Early in this discussion, I had suggested that our purpose in analyzing attempts to bear testimony to an atrocity and to “situate an individual trauma narrative within a history of trauma” is to assimilate it, synthesize it, and take control of our collective narrative. But if my arguments are valid, how are we to situate an individual narrative within any history, since that would assume that the traumas are actually separate events occurring unrelatedly and sequentially in linear time? Furthermore, how will we resolve the controversy over the ethics of fictionalizing trauma in general? We need not always resolve dilemmas or avoid ambiguity, for resolved conflicts have a way of disappearing from the consciousness of the present. As long as this ambiguity exists, the conversation will continue, and new artists will create new works to deal with new traumas. These attempts are culturally important. Beyond the aesthetic and intellectual achievements of both works, they, as representative of the broad class of trauma fiction, accomplish commendable moral achievements and fulfill as Robertson says, “the crucial role of artists in enabling our race’s psychic and physical survival” in the face of “psychic numbness.”59 What does matter, and what we can agree on is that we must continue to attempt to craft (and interpret) these sorts of representations, not because they will save civilization, but because they preserve the dignity of the individual. In the final chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut relates a brief anecdote about some trivia that his war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare, shares with him on the return trip from visiting Dresden in 1967: 59

Robertson, “Hystery, Herstory,” 457.

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O’Hare had a little notebook with him, and printed in the back were…key facts about the world. He was looking up the population of Dresden…when he came across this, which he gave me to read: On average, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day. During that same day, 10,000 persons, on average, will have starved to death or died of malnutrition. So it goes. In addition, 123,000 persons will die for other reasons. So it goes. This leaves a net gain of about 191,000 each day in the world. The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world’s total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. “I suppose they will all want dignity,” I said.60

This meditation on the dignity of the individual is visited by Thomas at the end of “The Sleeping Carriage,” where he writes: The soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or explored. Most of the dead were poor and illiterate. But every single one of them had dreamed dreams, seen visions and had amazing experiences, even the babes in arms ... [T]heir lives and histories were as rich and complex as Lisa Erdman-Berenstein's. If a Sigmund Freud had been listening and taking notes from the time of Adam, he would still not fully have explored even a single group, even a single person.61

So it goes.

Bibliography Caruth, Cathy. “Violence and Time: Traumatic Survivals.” Assemblage 20 (1993): 24-25. —. “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and Possibility of History.” Yale French Studies 71 (1991): 181-192. Foley, Barbara. “Fact, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narratives.” Comparative Literature 34, no. 4 (Autumn 1982): 330–360. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Stachey. London: Hogarth, 1991. —. Moses and Monotheism. Translated by James Stachey. London: Hogarth, 1991. Granofsky, Ronald. “The Pornographic Mind and The White Hotel.” 60 61

Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 212. Thomas, White Hotel, 250.

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College Literature 20, no. 3 (October 1993): 44-57. Jung, Carl G. “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious.” The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge, 1968. Main, Roderick. The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern Western Culture.” New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004. Oliver, Kelly. “Witnessing and Testimony.” parallax 10, no. 1 (2004), 7988. Robertson, Mary F. “Hystery, Herstory, History: ‘Imagining the Real’ in Thomas’s ‘The White Hotel’.” Contemporary Literature 25, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 452-477. Schopp, Joseph C. “Slaughterhouse-Five: The Struggle with a Form That Fails.” Amerikastudien. 28, no 3 (1983): 335-45. Simonds, Peggy Muñoz. “The White Hotel: A Sexual Satire.” Critique 27, no. 1 (1985): 51-63. Thomas, D.M. The White Hotel. New York: Penguin Books, 1981 —. “Freud and The White Hotel.” British Medical Journal 287.24-31 (1983): 1957 – 1960. Vonnegut, Kurt. “Kurt Vonnegut: The Art of Fiction LXIV.” Paris Review. 69 (1977): 55-103. —. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell (1999). Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “The Ethics of Narration in D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 15.1 (1985): 15-27. Wymer, Rowland. “Freud, Jung and the ‘Myth’ of Psychoanalysis in The White Hotel.” Mosaic 22, no. 1 (1989): 55-69.

CHAPTER SEVEN AGENCY IN COMPLICITY: THE AESTHETICS OF TRAUMA IN CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON’S ‘MISS GRIEF’ THEODORA TSIMPOUKI

In 1879, at the age of thirty-nine, James Fenimore Cooper’s grandniece Constance Fenimore Woolson set foot in Europe, where she remained until her suicide in 1894. Although she had acquired a taste for travelling at an early age, it was only after her mother’s death that Woolson crossed the Atlantic for the first time. Moreover, having suffered more than her share in “life’s inevitable misfortunes,”1 she abandoned the idea of a permanent home, opting instead for a nomadic way of life.2 Woolson soon became an acute observer of the cultural upheavals of late nineteenthcentury Europe, and particularly of the tensions surrounding sexuality and gender inequality. An ambitious writer, she was repeatedly frustrated by what Elaine Showalter describes as the era’s “trivialization of women

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Anne Boyd Rioux, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), 27. 2 As we shall see, Constance had many reasons to leave the USA, although at the time her decision was not considered permanent. Her family moved from Claremont, New Hampshire to Cleveland, Ohio after the death of three of her older sisters when Constance was a baby. Moving as a response to grief, says Rioux in Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, became “ingrained” in the Woolson children, most of all Constance, who would spend the majority of her adult life on the move” (5). Besides, travelling was considered an appropriate way to fight sadness and depression, at the time. Even today, “moving as a palliative for stuckness, a lifesaving response to the psychic and bodily immobility that is constitutive of chronic depression,” argues Jani Scandura in “Sad Effects,” Cultural Critique 92 (2016): 155.

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writers and bias against female ambition.”3 Such trivialization endured after her death: for despite the popularity of her novels during her lifetime,4 the pioneering nature and originality of her local colour fiction5 and travel writing,6 and her success in securing an exclusive contract with prestigious publisher Harper & Brothers, her reputation steadily declined in the century and a quarter since her death.7 Today, she is known less for her work than for her intimate relationship with Henry James (whom she met a year after her first arrival in Florence). Indeed, until very recently, both her travels to Europe and her deadly fall from a third-story window in Venice were interpreted as driven by her unrequited love for his rejection of her—most famously, in Leon Edel’s biography of James, in which Woolson is portrayed as a lovesick, “somewhat deaf spinster.”8 Since the publication of Edel’s text, a wealth of feminist scholarship has sought to refute this condescending portrait of Woolson and to recover her importance for American literature and history, emphasizing the challenge that her feminine aesthetic posed to the patriarchal values of the

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The quotation comes from the blurb of the back cover of Anne Boyd Rioux’s recently published biography on Constance Fenimore Woolson. See also, Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 4 She wrote five novels all set in the United States. Anne (1882) was one of Harper’s best-sellers. The remaining four are For the Major (1883), East Angels (1886), Jupiter Lights (1889), and Horace Chase (1894). 5 She wrote stories of life on a vanishing Midwestern frontier, Michigan in Castle Nowhere: Lake Country Sketches (1875), but also the post-Civil War South, particularly North Carolina and Florida in Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1877). She was the first post-civil war northerner to capture the poignancy and exotic sensuality of the South. 6 A selection of her travel writings can be found in Constance Fenimore Woolson: Selected Stories and Travel Narratives, eds., Victoria Brehm and Sharon L. Dean (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2004). According to Dennis Berthold, Woolson dared to challenge the gender constraints of travel writing that overwhelmingly belonged to men. Additionally, in adopting a female perspective she managed “to extend the narrative possibilities of travel writing with social satire comic dialogue, mock-romance plots [and] ironic characterization” (112). 7 Anne Boyd, “What! Has she got into the ‘Atlantic’?'” Women Writers, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Formation of the American Canon,” American Studies 39.3 (1998): 5-36. 8 Henry James Letters, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), xvi. This view is repeated recently in Carl Rollyson’s critical survey of fictional and non-fictional biographies on Henry James in Lives of the Novelists (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005), 8. 

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fin-de-siècle culture.9 Without wishing to dismiss this vital work of recovery, my aim in this essay is to provide an alternative to the assessment that this body of scholarship provides of Woolson’s depression, where it is largely seen to stem from bereavement, declining health, economic distress, or personal loss.10 Instead, I extend existing critical interpretations of Woolson as a proto-feminist critic of male exploitation to conceptualise Woolson’s depression as itself stemming from women’s socially imposed inferiority—a reading that builds on Ann Cvetkovich’s conceptualization of depression as the “product of a sick culture.”11 To this extent, I am also interested in exploring the complicated ways that gender-related limitations inflected (and were inflected by) depressive symptoms in the nineteenth century. Woolson’s suicide, I argue, cannot be read as an admission of defeat—nor does her artistic contribution end with the accusation of “gendered exclusion from the literary field.”12 Rather, both her life and oeuvre open up space for a radical reconfiguration of female subjectivity through thinking and working through individual and historical/social trauma. If we endorse a view of trauma that is not event-centered but interwoven into the fabric of

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Contemporary feminist critics, like Lyndall Gordon, Cheryl B. Torsney (1989), Sharon L. Dean (2002) and Anne Boyd Rioux (2016) have set out to challenge Edel’s portrait. See, also, Fred Kaplan’s biography of Henry James, where Woolson appears as a much more favorable figure. Woolson’s innovative fables of artists preceded those of Henry James, Kaplan notes in Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (New York: William Morrow, 1992). More generally, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues, “[I]t is the project of twentieth-century women writers to…replace the alternate endings in marriage and death that are their cultural legacy from nineteenth-century life and letters by offering a different set of choices.” In Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 4. 10 Joan Myers Weimer “Women Artists as Exiles in the Fiction of Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 3. 2 (Fall 1986), 3-15. Cheryl B. Torsney and more recently Anne Boyd Rioux also agree that her death was caused by a combination of factors and was probably a rational decision. For Rioux, Woolson’s depression was likely hereditary. Not just her father but her brother–who eventually committed suicide in 1883– too, “suffered from manic depression” (Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist 6; 101-102). Depression was compounded by failing physical health, neardeafness and financial worries that threatened to jeopardize her independence. 11 Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 12 Dorri Beam, “Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and the Figure in the Carpet,” in American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions, ed. Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 137.

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nineteenth-century patriarchal society and related to gender discrimination, then we can concur that Woolson’s life and writing involved constant manoeuvering inside or around the impasse of a culture-specific mental health condition. Her creativity enabled her to acknowledge female disappointments and failures in a way that were for the most part productive and guaranteed woman’s self-expression in her own terms. Woolson did this by depicting female resistance as inevitably oscillating between agency and complicity with heteronormative discourse. Instead of portraying her heroines as a coherent, silenced and subsidiary group, and homogenizing their experiences, Woolson conveys the trauma of her personal and lived female experience by rendering visible the overlapping, contradicting desires of the gendered self, and giving space for moments of the distinctly heterogeneous agency. Linking trauma to gender politics, then,13 I see Woolson’s writings as an attempt to narratively work through female powerlessness and vulnerability, unfolding new space between subversiveness and submissiveness in which her heroines can exist, while coming to terms with their disappointments and failures. Lastly, although it would be a mistake to define Woolson by her death, I also attempt to understand her suicide as a woman’s act of will, the ultimate assertion of freedom of choice,14 which she however never granted to the heroines of her novels and short fiction. To the extent that the very act of writing represents an exploration of her female self, Woolson’s literary activity can be regarded as a form of agency, as seeking therapeutic reformulations of the trauma of her lived female experience. Her death thus exposes her depression as not only an individual problem but a cultural one as well. The merits of such a reading are arguably born out by Woolson’s own figuration of her depression, in her personal correspondence, as a male demon with masculine traits: vivid depictions of herself join her myriad references to symptoms now associated with depression (lack of appetite,

                                                            

13 Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992), co-authored by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), edited by Cathy Caruth, and Caruth’s own monograph, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), are usually cited as the seminal books on trauma theory. Building on this vital body of research, I also make use of Dominick LaCapra’s important analysis in this context. 14 In “Reading Woolson’s Suicide,” The Bluestocking Bulletin, Jun 8, 2013  (https://anneboydrioux.com/2013/06/08/reading-woolsons-suicide) Rioux attempts to explain Woolson’s death by invoking an interesting parallel with Carolyn Heilbrun’s suicide in 2003. “Rational suicide” and “the right to choose death” in the context of feminism were two of the attempted explanations of Heilbrun’s violent death.

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distraction, low self-worth) as a “kind of warrior battling with dark spirits.”15 Her depression is “this deadly enemy of mine.”16 Having crept his way into her, “he is master”—and she admonishes a friend to “not let him conquer you.”17 Starkly at odds with prevailing nineteenth-century figurations of women weakened by and ultimately victim to neurasthenia, Woolson’s self-representations here also appear to imbue her mental illness with the features of a stifling, smothering patriarchal tradition—an embodiment of the social constraints with which her fiction battles. In what follows, I focus on Woolson’s most anthologized story, “Miss Grief” (first published in Lippincott’s in 1880), which can be considered as a full manifestation of her self-reflection in the figure of her homonymous heroine. The story is ostensibly about a male author attempting to rewrite female experience in order to domesticate its otherness and restore traditional literary order. We will see, however, how despite the narrator having pronounced her “mad,” “dejected” and exhibiting depressive traits, the heroine’s continuing oscillation between subordination and resistance to hegemonic masculinity throughout the story constitutes a guard against her depression and, what is most, ultimately forces him to acknowledge her difference rather than deny it altogether. It is precisely the heroine’s acceptance of the gendering of mental health and her concessive relation to social norms that gives her access to this privileged position and eventually results in the narrator’s change of perspective and acknowledgement of his gender bias. Rather than internalizing society’s unjust gender treatment, Woolson’s protagonist holds an ambivalent position in the process of historical othering and displacement from selfrepresentation which, as I contend, outlines a tentative strategy of agential female subjectivity, creating new and transformative possibilities for antioppressive social change. I argue that Woolson’s account of female depression offers a valuable alternative to come to terms with the effects of gender discrimination so that they will be “reconfigured in ways that make them not entirely disabling.”18 Set in Rome, “Miss Grief” is narrated by a “smug, expatriated American writer,”19 who is confounded by the visits of a strange middleaged woman whose name, Miss Aaronna Crief, he misreads as “Grief,” an

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Rioux, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, 102. Ibid. 17 Ibid., 102, 101 (emphasis added). 18 LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press 2001), 180. 19 Torsney, “‘Miss Grief’ by Constance Fenimore Woolson: Introduction,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 4.1 (1987): 11. 16

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appellation that hints at her having likely been laid low by depression. When, after seven abortive visits, she is finally admitted to his home, “Miss Grief” explains she needs his assistance to get her play, “Armor,” published. In her manuscript, he discovers “the divine spark of genius” that he himself lacks, although he also detects “numerous and disfiguring” “dark spots,” which she stubbornly refuses to correct and which eventually form the basis of rejection from prospective publishers.20 As Sigrid Anderson Cordell succinctly puts it, when the narrator attempts to “alter and improve” the manuscript himself in order to transform it into a marketable piece of work, he discovers it to be completely unrevisable.21 After some time has elapsed without his hearing any news from her, the narrator visits Grief’s abode only to find her on her deathbed. He thus lies to her, feigning that “Armor” is soon to be published. After her death, he keeps the story himself, burying the rest of her manuscripts with her as per her final instructions. This marvellous tale, customarily considered, to quote Boyd, an “indictment of the male establishment for suppressing the voices of women writers,” presents a female author in stark juxtaposition to her male counterpart.22 She seems miserably forlorn and unhappy; she looks “shabby, unattractive and more than middle-aged” (273) while he is young and handsome, and, having acquired both social prominence and literary success, he has become self-satisfied and vain. She has nothing; he has everything. In her own words: “You were young–strong–rich–praised– loved–successful: all that I was not” (290). As for the narrator, he feels entitled to deride her appearance and sneer at her lack of social skills. He

                                                            

20 Constance Fenimore Woolson, “Miss Grief,” 279. All parenthetical references to the text come from Constance Fenimore Woolson, in Scribbling Women. Short Stories by 19th-century American Women, ed. Elaine Showalter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996): 271-91. 21 Sigrid Anderson Cordell, Fictions of Dissent: Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women’s Writing of the Late Nineteenth Century (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), 41. 22 Boyd, “Anticipating James, Anticipating Grief: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “‘Miss Grief,’” in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays, ed. Victoria Brehm (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 191. In her biography on Woolson, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist Rioux repeats the same critical opinion. She argues that “[N]o other story by a nineteenth-century American woman so powerfully dramatizes the yearning for literary recognition and the insurmountable obstacles women faced in pursuit of it” (124), adding that the surprise of the story is not so much “the woman writer’s failure and death” but “the male writer’s acknowledgement of her unconventional genius” (125).

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calls her “eccentric and unconventional” (272) and reckons her having “sacrificed her womanly claims by her persistent attacks upon my door” (273). Likewise, he condescendingly refers to her as an “authoress” (276) and patronizes her by attempting to change, via the “sieve of [his] own good taste,” what he views to be the “barbarous shortcomings” in her work (279). As the story concludes, he admits to himself: she had “the greater power” of the two and that “the want of one grain made all her work void, and that one grain was given to me” (291). Nevertheless, despite this acknowledgment, his arrogant self-assurance and bias against women writers lead him to bury her manuscripts with her, condemning her legacy to total oblivion. The fact that the story is told through the eyes of the unnamed, unreliable narrator indicates that he has usurped not just her legacy but her voice too, her right to personally articulate her experience as a woman. Mediated by the male author, then, Miss Grief’s story seems one of “betrayal and exclusion.”23 Moreover, accentuated by the narrator’s ironically insightful recognition of her state of low-level chronic grief, issues of gender discrimination are combined with culturally sanctioned symptoms, which allow the heroine’s distress to be positioned as a female malady.24 Yet, as I contend, to the extent that, like her creator, Miss Grief does suffer from depression, her state should be viewed “as a social and cultural phenomenon,” and not as exclusively an “a biological or medical one.”25 More importantly, like Miss Woolson’s, Miss Grief’s art is also an exercise in self-healing, a means to combat her depression:26 Being an “authoress” in what was a male-dominated literary world and not being accepted in the highest rank of authors threatened Woolson (and Miss Grief) with a profound sense of powerlessness and vulnerability which emerges in her writing as the ambivalent exchange of complicity and resistance between the female self and an exclusionary patriarchal

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Boyd, “Anticipating James, Anticipating Grief,” 194. “She was a very depressing object to me” (276) the narrator says on their first encounter. He consistently misinterprets her name, “‘A. Crief’” to “‘A. Grief’” (278) adding more symptoms to her depressive state: “she has the evil eye” (278), “fragile, nerveless” (278), “thin,” “dejected” (279), “tearful” (283), exhibiting “alternations in manner” (283). Another misunderstanding that derives from her admittedly ambiguous in terms of gender first name is when she explains that her “father was much disappointed that I was not a boy, and gave me as nearly as possible the name he had prepared–Aaron” (283). 25 Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling, 90. 26 Again, unaware of his insightfulness, the narrator suggests the connection between Aaronna’s depressive state and her need to fight it, when he reads on the cover of her manuscript her name “A. Crief” and the title of the play “Armor” and comments “Grief certainly needs armor” (278). 24

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society.27 Woolson’s constant negotiating between unveiling the social construction of ideas about gender inequality and collaboration in its maintenance must have produced a systemic, chronic pain associated with her depression. At the same time, the act of recreating imaginatively that which is not acceptable by conventional standards constitutes for her a survival strategy. “‘Miss Grief’” is not Woolson’s only story depicting frustrated women artists forced to face the male literary world’s deep-seated prejudices. Upon her arrival in Europe, she wrote two more stories involving American women artists in Europe who are silenced by a successful male writer or critic (who resembles Henry James). Moreover, unlike Aaronna Crief, who sacrifices marital life and, ultimately, her life to pursue her calling as a writer, both Katharine Winthrop in “At the Château of Corinne” (1880) and Ettie Macks, the heroine of “The Street of the Hyacinth” (1882) decide to marry their male mentors—whose proposals, in turn, hinge on their renouncing their artistic ambitions. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to critique these two stories in full, a passage from each merits our scrutiny. In these, we find a highly developed sense of male prejudice toward female creativity that both extends and complicates the discussions above. In “At the Château of Corinne,”28 Katharine Winthrop’s male mentor and future husband, John Ford, seeks to dissuade his paramour from assuming her achievements might equal those of a male writer, arguing: We do not expect great poems from women any more than we expect great pictures; we do not expect strong logic any more than we expect brawny muscle... For a woman should not dare in that way. Thinking to soar, she invariably descends.29

Later in the story he further underscores women’s inferiority:

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Linda Grasso, “Thwarted Life, Mighty Hunger, Unfinished Work: The Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Women Writing in America,” American Transcendental Quarterly 8.2 (1994):97-118. “Many ‘new women’ writers…found that their newly-defined artistic endeavours were thwarted by two related sources: male colleagues who resented the threat of encroachment on their exclusive preserve, and male-dominated publishing industry.” 28 As the title suggests, the story is inspired by Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne (1807), an early nineteenth-century female Künstlerroman in which the heroine sacrifices love in order to keep her independence and faith in creative power. 29 Woolson, “At the Château of Corinne,” in Dorothy and Other Italian Stories (New York: Harper, 1896), 267.

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A similar perspective emerges in “The Street of the Hyacinth,” in which a male mentor persuades protagonist Ettie Macks, an aspiring visual artist, that she would be better off abandoning her artistic ambitions and marrying him instead. By way of consolation for her sacrifice, her husband remarks: “But the heights upon which you had placed yourself, my dear, were too superhuman.”31 While “At the Château of Corinne” and “The Street of the Hyacinth” appear, at first glance, to indulge the social and aesthetic ideals of Woolson’s late nineteenth-century audience and lay bare the gender biases that govern society, closer attention to these texts show them to be sophisticated critiques of misogynistic attitudes towards women’s creative abilities. Doubtless, the critique is difficult to detect at the level of plot, as both female artists renounce their art and succumb to male expectations of womanly conduct.32 Accepting to marry these powerful men who support them financially provided that they agree to submit to the orthodoxies of the period, relinquishing the public world of the marketplace for the private world of domesticity can indeed be interpreted as a voluntary selfsurrender, a form of internalized gendered oppression. Like Miss Aaronna Crief, these characters appear to comply with societal standards and eventually accept that the roles of woman and writer/artist are incompatible.33 These outcomes, however, neither reflect Woolson’s own doubts about women’s capacity for creative genius nor do they imply what Cordell terms “act[s] of self-censorship that conforms to contemporary

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Ibid., 263. In The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories (New York: Harper, 1895), 193. All the stories comprising the volume, including “The Street of the Hyacinth,” had been published previously. 32 For example, in her Roman Fever: Domesticity and Nationalism in NineteenthCentury American Women’s Writing (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), Annamaria Formichella Elsden argues that in these three stories male artists and critics “seek to exorcize or subdue” Woolson’s artistic characters (111). 33 Max Nelson sees this cluster of stories as “worried stories, fantasies of judgment and rejection. They could only have been written by an author afraid of suffering the same verdicts their heroines receive.” “Betrayed by Henry James,” in the New Republic, March 1, 2016,  https://newrepublic.com/article/130647/betrayed-henryjames. 31

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norms and expectations.”34 These female artists are neither victims of exclusion from the artistic map nor evidence of Woolson’s own submission to the prevailing prejudice against literary women. They constitute efforts to represent female literary identity as the “site” of “dialogic aspiration,” which “not only works by realizing the subject roles…women were made to fulfil; it likewise rewrites these allotted subject positions as elected subject positions, resulting from the coalition.”35 These statements, however, challenge much of the established scholarship around Woolson’s life and work. As Boyd has noted in Writing for Immortality, literary scholars tended to associate Woolson with the term “pioneer,” a designation that implicitly dismisses her “in a backhanded way”36 “as an author who broke ground as a post-war realist but never achieved her full potential.”37 Meanwhile, early biographers of the writer such as Rayburn S. Moore, conflated the views of Woolson’s male characters with those of the writer herself, arguing that she shared their “entire disbelief in the possibility of true and fiery genius in women” and was thus unable, herself, “to overcome the frailties of her sex.”38 To a great extent, this dismissal by contemporary critics of Woolson’s creative abilities, and downplaying of her accomplishments, is merely an extension of Henry James’s own lack of encouragement during her lifetime.39 James’s disparagement of her work is encapsulated by the views expressed in “Miss Woolson,” an essay first published in The Atlantic in 1886 and

                                                            

34 Cordell, Fictions of Dissent: Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women’s Writing, 39. 35 Qtd in María José Chivite de León’s Echoes of History, Shadowed Identities: Rewriting Alterity in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and Marina Warner’s Indigo. (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 32, 33. 36 Boyd, Writing for Immortality (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2004), 238. 37 Kevin E. O’Donnell, “Pioneers of Spoliation,” in Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894, ed. Kathleen Diffley (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011): 277. O’Donnell argues, however, that Boyd does not take into account that the term “pioneer” might be connected with Woolson by association with her famous great-uncle, James Fenimore Cooper, whose best-known work is The Pioneers. 38 Rayburn S. Moore, Constance Fenimore Woolson (New York: Twayne, 1963), n35 157, 74. 39 Boyd claims that in “Miss Grief” Woolson sends her heroine to Europe and to James as “a partial representative of herself, ahead to encounter the derision she anticipated she herself might also face for being forward and unconventional.” In “Anticipating James, Anticipating Grief,” 200.

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subsequently revised for inclusion in Partial Portraits two years later. Most likely out of concern for their friendship, James avoided any straightforward conclusion about Woolson’s books in this essay.40 Remarking that her work “breathes a spirit singularly and essentially conservative” (640) which he links with Woolson’s belief in “personal renunciation” and a “predilection for cases of heroic sacrifice,” James takes her fictional heroines’ tendency for self-abnegation and sacrifice as Woolson’s unstated conviction that women had “been by their very nature already too much exposed.”41 This provides enough proof for James that “it would never occur to [Woolson] to lend her voice for the plea for further exposure–for a revolution which should place her sex in the thick of the struggle for power” (640), the implication being that Woolson was always narrowing her female subject positions in the roles prescribed to them. James’s condescension becomes even more pronounced as he portrays Woolson as “merely a woman writer,”42 admitted “into the world of literature…in force” (639). He goes on to highlight those thematic concerns and stylistic options which he considers as typical of her gender and concludes by describing her fiction “as characteristic of the feminine, as distinguished from the masculine hand” (646).43 Despite his “‘enigmatic doublespeak’”44 Woolson was perceptive enough to understand her friend’s gender bias, realizing that “the only way she could make the

                                                            

40 Max Nelson, for example, in his article “Betrayed by Henry James” states: “Possibly worried about preserving their intimacy, James buried his doubts about [Woolson’s] books behind layers of politeness and tact.” Lyndall Gordon, on the other hand, insists that the article was “a betrayal” (234) “insidiously concealed in afterthoughts” (233) and gentle qualifications. 41 Henry James “Miss Woolson,” 640, 641. Subsequent parenthetical references to James’s essay come from “Miss Woolson,” Partial Portraits. Literary Criticism, ed. Leon Edel. Vol. 1 (New York: The Library of America, 1984). 42 Rioux, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, 219. 43 James had repeatedly expressed his disdain for women writers in his reviews of George Eliot and George Sand, which he now extended to include Woolson. In his notebook in 1886, he wrote contemptuously about the “scribbling, publishing, indiscreet, newspaperized American girl” whose desire for publicity was “one of the most striking signs of our times” (Henry James, The Complete Notebooks, 40, qtd in Rioux, 209). Their main “defect” was, according to James, their gender. As Alfred Habegger writes in Henry James and the “Woman Business,” James’s “views of American women writers had a tone ranging from condescension to outrage” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 9. 44 Rioux, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, 211.

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assertiveness of her bid for recognition palatable was to hide it behind the image of a private, traditional woman.”45 However while this critical view of Woolson’s writing in James’s essay reflects, to an extent, his own prejudiced opinion of female literary ambitions,46 it also reveals Woolson’s painful awareness that women’s self-assertion entails high costs. Against James’s contemptuous remarks of women’s entry into the literary profession, Woolson responds to the imperatives of gender stratification by “identitarian negotiation.”47 For, Woolson’s depiction of women who exhibit at once dependency and selfdetermination, self-restraint and egotistic indulgence, prudence and boldness, and both a steadfast adherence to and defiance of the convention may ostensibly present conflicting attitudes towards women’s place in society. In fact, these portrayals suggest woman being in an endless process of self-formation, having to resort to subjectivities “whose

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Ibid. In highlighting the importance of the James-Woolson relationship to both writers, Gordon has analysed Woolson’s possible reaction to James’s essay on her work insisting that it must have been received as “a calculated betrayal,” it “carried an armoury of stings in its velvet glove,” in A Private Life of Henry James, 231. Gordon goes one step further accusing the male novelist of masking his own complicity in Woolson’s suicide first, by distancing her, and then, by widely spreading misleading accounts of her “suicidal mania, her diseased brain, her perversity,” not depression, but “dementia” (emphasis in the original, 306). “She was not, she was never, wholly sane,” James wrote one of their close mutual friends, the composer Francis Boott, after Woolson’s death: “I mean her liability to suffering was the doom of mental disease,” in Henry James Letters, vol. 3, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 463. On the other hand, in her biography of Woolson, Rioux examines more carefully the two versions of James’s piece, arguing that while the earlier version comes “close to the heart of her work” (211), the revised version is a “real betrayal” as he bluntly describes Woolson as a woman writer, “who is incapable of writing to the same standard as men” (219). The latter piece fulfilled her fear that “underneath the polite criticism lingered a deep-seated distaste for women acting on their literary ambitions” (220). 47 Chivite de León, Echoes of History, Shadowed Identities, 34. According to Dorothy J. Hale, James’s “dedication to developing the novel into a high art form is understood as part of a more general effort by nineteenth-century white male writers to make up in cultural capital what they were losing in sales.” She then quotes Michael Gilmore who claims that the ideological production of the aesthetic as a “discrete entity” was the “creation of white male fiction writers reacting against the commercial triumphs of the feminine novel.” Dorothy J. Hale, “Aesthetics and New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions, eds. Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 315. 46

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fragmentariness and alterity precondition their identitarian status.”48 Following perhaps what was called the “evidence of felt intuition,”49 Woolson must have sensed the cultural components of depression and used imaginative fiction to unfold new spaces for female existence (and ultimately survival). Equally problematic may seem at first sight Woolson’s views as they are articulated in her correspondence. In a letter to James, for example, she writes that “A woman, after all, can never be a complete artist.”50 Yet, as argued above, her female literary depictions do not unwittingly reproduce social hierarchies and power structures. My contention is that by revealing the unavoidable uncertainties arising from the conflicting demands of personal aspiration and social expectation, Woolson engages in a systematic destabilization of female identity that ultimately enables her to improvise a “plural” feminine self that exceeds societal expectations for women. To the extent that they recognize the disparity between individual longings and social actuality, her heroines seem capable of handling complex situations and make ethical choices that go beyond the simple choice between a life of emotional and financial independence and the more conventional options of marriage and motherhood. Katharine Winthrop, for example, in “At the Château of Corinne” is aware of the complexities of gender performance when she taunts John Ford, telling him that she “had only to pretend a little, to pretend to be the acquiescent creature you admire, and I could have turned you round my little finger” (270). Her terrible silence at the end of the story reveals the burden of her promise not to write again, to be an obedient “true woman” in exchange for Ford’s hand. Her decision, however, is based on having already been recognized as an accomplished poet who has published a highly acclaimed poem, anonymously. From this angle, the acknowledgment of her own differential paradoxes acquires extra value and agency. Similarly, Ettie Macks, the heroine of “The Street of the Hyacinth” derives a sense of selfempowerment in accepting her mentor’s marriage proposal in her own terms and time. Her ironic acknowledgement of differentiality gives her the power to become the weaver of her own story. In their own way, both heroines move beyond the confines of self and social world and also triumphantly in control of their emotional togetherness. According to Rioux, in the case of “Miss Grief” Woolson “channelled her grief over her mother’s loss and her anxieties about fully embracing

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Chivite de León, Echoes of History, Shadowed Identities, 33. Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling, 122. 50 Woolson, Feb. 12, 1882, in The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson, ed. Sharon L. Dean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 188. 49

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the identity of an ambitious author” (123). In addition to being a semiautobiographical account of Woolson’s own internal unrest and emotional turmoil, the novella conveys the author’s creative resistance to male institutions and aesthetic standards. Read in this light, the text uncovers Woolson’s effort to cope with prescribed cultural scripts that emotionally entrap her productively. Rather than promoting an aggressive disruption of gender categories, “Miss Grief” offers a more nuanced, more complex representation of female identity, one that is plural and polyvalent, open to difference and ambiguity. For example, both the author and her heroine do not appear as threats toward their literary male counterparts but assume a very subtle attitude, one that projects a female identity fully conscious of its pluralities, ambiguities but also contradictions. Compare the two cases, one biographical, and the other fictional: In her February 12, 1882, letter to Henry James, Woolson uses the phrase “admiring aunt” to describe her intimate relationship with the Master. She writes, “But you do not want to know the little literary women. Only the great ones—like George Eliot. I am not barring myself out here, because I do not come in as a literary woman at all, but as a sort of admiring aunt. I think that expresses it.”51 Almost entirely, Woolson’s letters to James cleverly hide her literary ambition, while references to her work constantly describe it as “small” or “little.”52 Woolson, almost uncannily reiterates the same attitude, using the same term in the novella, when the unnamed narrator of “Miss Grief” positions her as an “aunt,” given their age difference and her admiration of his work. Tellingly, like her heroine, she is ready to diminish herself out of fear of generating feelings of rivalry, suspicion, and antagonism. Finally, at the heart of the novella must have been the female author’s fear that her lack of access to the narrator’s education, resources, and social status has indeed damned her to artistic inferiority. Simultaneously “othered and agent of [her] own identitarian negotiations within the symbolic order,”53 coping with social discourses and submitting to them Miss Aaronna Crief engages in constant negotiation with dominant representation. Lacking stable female substance, she embodies a paradoxical identity. As Dorri Beam succinctly points out, quoting Woolson’s text, “We might as well

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Henry James Letters, 528 (emphasis added). In her biography of James, A Private Life of Henry James, Gordon points out that Woolson “was only three years older than James, yet she pretended to be aged, fat, and unapproachable” (184-85). 52 Rioux, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, 159. 53 Chivite de León, Echoes of History, Shadowed Identities, 34.

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ask, with the wondering narrator, what is the nature of Grief’s ‘little pantomime. Comedy? Or was it a tragedy?’”54 Moreover, it is worth retracing Miss Crief’s intrusion into the bachelor narrator’s life, her guileless demands on his time and aggressive insistence on recognition. Such an attitude clearly suggests Aaronna’s effort to cultivate hopefulness and self-worth given the limited scope of her choices. In each of these four encounters with her mentor, Woolson’s heroine exhibits a mixture of self-assurance and uncertainty, vulnerability and diffidence, an awareness but also earnest indifference towards her artistic power that make it impossible for the reader to categorize her experience either as an expression of female victimization or articulation of female difference. Moreover, in spite of Crief’s mediated voice and subjectivity throughout the narrative, the impact of her ambiguous personality and manuscripts on the narrator remains strong, influencing the power relations between the two. This ambiguity and resistance to coherent interpretation has broader ramifications in its testing of clear gender roles and delineated boundaries. For example, when he first meets Crief, the narrator is confounded by her fragile appearance and selfless modesty, which contrasts starkly with her confidence in her writing abilities. After reading her play, he is startled by her simultaneous need for his approval and obstinate refusal to revise the manuscript. “‘There shall not be so much as a comma altered,’” she says “softly and still smiling” (282). His inability to pin down the nature of her indeterminate identity as it slips from humility to determination unsettles his established notions of gender roles. While he considers her lack of social skills unwomanly, her artistic superiority, in turn, renders him unable to feel altogether manly. Thus, her writing competence, in fact unsettles both characters’ ability to comfortably inhabit their assigned gender roles—as attested by his foppish blustering: “I did not know what to do, but, putting myself in her place, I decided to praise the drama; and praise I did. I do not know when I have used so many adjectives” (280). Ironically, while he claims to assert himself as “an anti-hysteric,” he responds to her dignified and selfcontrolled manner with a “cataract of language,” a “verbal Niagara” (280). Miss Grief’s brilliant text thus undermines his authority and results in a curious inversion of roles. Clearly, this destabilizing process of established sexual and literary codes and mores—what Beam calls “queering of

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Beam, “Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and the Figure in the Carpet,” 140.

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categories”—opens up room for the transformation of subordination into resistance through the refusal of reduction to the place of victimization.55 This role inversion is repeated in the contrasting gender mobility of the two protagonists: it is the narrator who receives Aaronna Crief’s calls, and it is she who visits his domestic space. “I prefer to come to you,” Miss Crief firmly repeats twice in the course of the narrative (278, 282). Not only her physical comings and goings irrespective of weather conditions or social decorum help Aaronna fight her feeling frustrated about her failure to achieve personal success, but they implicitly undermine the notion of domestic privacy and women’s confinement within the home and disrupt established ideas of male mobility and independence.56 Moreover, after his initial efforts to impose canonical aesthetic judgments of the male literary elite on her manuscripts (“for writers are...apt to make much of the ‘how,’ rather than the ‘what’” 279), the narrator is obliged to admit that they are above such criticism. Thus he remarks that “the papers before me” are “Kubla Khan, only more so” (284). Indeed, “they [are] simply unrestrained, large, vast, like the skies or the wind” (287). Aaronna Crief’s uncanny vacillation between obstinacy and compliance, agency and complicity, results in the narrator’s own gradual recognition of the self as both permeable and open to change. Woolson dramatizes this transformation of power relations between her two protagonists in the tale’s conclusion, when their positions have been totally reversed. In this final scene, Miss Crief receives for her work “the appreciative and full, almost overfull, recognition” she has given him in their first encounter (275). She is fulfilled and satisfied. “I have never known what it was…to be so fully happy until now,” she claims (289). She may not yet achieved commercial success, but she has gained the narrator’s ardent admiration and uncompromising approval. Thus, instead of subordinating differences and conflicts into a homogenized self, Aaronna Crief is able to live with her contradictions. In doing so, she does

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Beam argues that critical readings of Woolson’s “Miss Grief” as a “lesbian story” lie in her “queering of categories” rather than in the tale’s lesbian subtext (148). 56 In her article “Teacups and Love Letters: Constance Fenimore Woolson and Henry James,” Victoria Coulson makes a detailed analysis of the pattern established in the mobility of tea-makers and guests. The tea ceremonies, albeit different in symbolism in Woolson and James, enact a mute heterosexual exchange: “the hostess is capable only of an immobile appeal from her position at the table, but her guest controls his arrivals and disappearances” (89). This heterosexual ceremony is interrupted in “Miss Grief,” with the heroine assuming the role of her mobile guest.

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not accept the established social and gender conventions of her period, which ascribe her an inferior position as a woman and a writer. Rather, her peculiar practice of agency involves implicitly refusing male value systems and institutions and sets into motion an effective resistance for the disruption of gender norms. Woolson’s emphasis on the heroines’ negotiations of gender inequality and social desire registers the history of depression implicitly, capturing simultaneously how depression feels and providing an analysis of why and how its feelings are produced by social forces. Woolson’s stories about writers and artists ought to be read not as narratives of feminine submission or resignation but as pluralistic narrative spaces that make resistant agency possible and provide an escape from culture-bound depression. Having enjoyed a “bitter” triumph, Woolson allows Aaronna Crief to die of natural causes. Yet, she reserves for herself the choice of voluntary death. Indeed, Woolson’s suicide poses a “hermeneutic problem,” 57 too elusive and confrontational to interpret indisputably. For one, Woolson’s decision to will her own death seemed paradoxical to Henry James. James misinterpreted her act attributing it to “sudden dementia” “some misery of insomnia pushed to nervous momentary frenzy” explaining to his brother, William, that his friend had a “disposition which sprang in its turn from a constitutional, an essentially, tragic and latently insane difficulty in living.”58 James’s sense of propriety would forbid such an “irresponsible” act, especially coming from a woman expected to endure the numbing effects of normative white middle-class life. Surely, at the time of her death, she suffered from headaches, anxiety, insomnia, she felt vulnerable and economically insecure, but to underestimate her woman’s plight in bourgeois society is to deny the voluntary nature of such a radical act, her urge to become the protagonist of her own life story. Her death constitutes a performative utterance producing the effects that it names, a volitional and singular act which “enables the formation of a subject,” to use Judith Butler’s words. Obviously, in spite of his perceptive imagination and sensitivity, James had fallen victim of Victorian stereotypes about the feminine propensity to madness and suicide.59 “Indeed, it is startling, says

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Higonnet, “Suicide: Representations of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century,” Poetics Today 6. 1 (1985), 116. Elsewhere she notes, “To embrace death is at the same time to read one’s own life” (104). 58 Rioux, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, 310-11 (emphasis in the original). See also footnote 46. 59 See Rioux, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, 313 for Alice James’s illness. James must have projected to Woolson his understanding of his sister’s illness. But the two women only have superficial likenesses.

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Margaret Higonnet, “to realize the extent to which the nineteenth century feminized suicide.”60 Today, however, with a growing number of cultural critics and experts emphasizing the complex etiology of depression, it is worth exploring the interconnectedness of gender discrimination with depression, to evaluate the effects of gender-related limitations to female wellbeing and happiness. Whether the language of trauma is used or not, Woolson’s tormented and anguished self is encoded in the content of her texts but also in the reality of her death. As Cvetkovich has put it, depression does not allow one to engage fully with the scenes of one’s own desire until it is too often—for this question, that opportunity—too late.61

Bibliography Beam, Dorri. “Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and the Figure in the Carpet.” In American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions, edited by Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby, 137-155. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Berthold, Dennis. “Miss Martha and Miss Woolson: Persona in the Travel Sketches.” Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays, edited by Victoria Brehm, 111-118. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Boyd, Anne E. Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2004. —. “Anticipating James, Anticipating Grief: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s ‘Miss Grief’.” In Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays, edited by Victoria Brehm, 191-206. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. —. “What! Has she got into the ‘Atlantic’?'” Women Writers, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Formation of the American Canon.” American Studies 39.3 (1998): 5-36. Brehm Victoria, ed. Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Brehm, Victoria, and Sharon L. Dean. Constance Fenimore Woolson: Selected Stories & Travel Narratives. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2004.

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Margaret Higonnet “Suicide: Representations of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century,” 105. 61 Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling, 18.

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Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Chivite de León, M. J. Echoes of History, Shadowed Identities: Rewriting Alterity in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and Marina Warner’s Indigo. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Cordell, Anderson Sigrid. Fictions of Dissent: Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women’s Writing of the Late Nineteenth Century. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010. Coulson, Victoria. “Teacups and Love Letters: Constance Fenimore Woolson and Henry James.” The Henry James Review 26.1 (2005): 8298. Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Dean, Sharon L. Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton: Perspectives on Landscape and Art. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. —. Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Diffley, Kathleen, ed. Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. DuPlessis, Blau Rachel. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Elsden, Annamaria Formichella. Roman Fever: Domesticity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Gordon, Lyndall. A Private Life of Henry James: His Women and His Art. London: Virago, 2012. Grasso, Linda. “Thwarted Life, Mighty Hunger, Unfinished Work: The Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Women Writing in America.” American Transcendental Quarterly 8.2 (1994): 97-118. Habegger, Alfred. Henry James and the “Woman Business.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Hale, Dorothy J. “Aesthetics and New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century.” In American Literature’s Aesthetic

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Dimensions, edited by Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby, 313327. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Higonnet, Margaret. “Suicide: Representations of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century.” Poetics Today 6. 1 (1985): 103-118. James, Henry. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Edited by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. —. Henry James Letters. Edited by Leon Edel. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. —. “Miss Woolson.” Partial Portraits. Literary Criticism, vol. 1. Edited by Leon Edel, 639-49. New York: The Library of America, 1984. Kaplan, Fred. Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. New York: William Morrow, 1992. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2001. Moore, Rayburn S. Constance Fenimore Woolson. New York: Twayne, 1963. Nelson, Max. “Betrayed by Henry James.” New Republic, March 1, 2016. https://newrepublic.com/article/130647/betrayed-henry-james. O’Donnell, Kevin E. “‘Pioneers of Spoliation,’ Woolson’s Horace Chase and the Role of Magazine Writing in the Gilded-Age Development of the South.” Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894, edited by Kathleen Diffley, 266281. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Rioux Boyd, Anne. Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. Rollyson, Carl. Lives of the Novelists. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005. Scandura, Jani. “Sad Effects.” Cultural Critique 92 (2016): 153-167. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Torsney, Cheryl B. Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989. —. “‘Miss Grief’ by Constance Fenimore Woolson: Introduction.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 4.1 (1987): 11-25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25678982. Weimer, Joan Myers. “Women Artists as Exiles in the Fiction of Constance Fenimore Woolson.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 3. 2 (1986): 3-15. Woolson, Constance Fenimore. The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson. Edited by Sharon L. Dean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012.

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—. ed. Elaine Showalter. Scribbling Women. Short Stories by 19th-century American Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. —. “At the Château of Corinne.” Dorothy and Other Italian Stories. New York: Harper, 1896. —. “The Street of the Hyacinth.” The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories. New York: Harper, 1895.

CHAPTER EIGHT WRITING DANCE: NARRATING TRAUMA MARIE FRANCE FORCIER

Trauma narratives can take many forms, among them literary and choreographic. While those two forms’ compositional operation is the same–to write a metamorphic story– one relies on word signifiers, while the other communicates trauma directly from the bodily source: the posttraumatic body language becomes prose in autobiographical choreographic narratives. This chapter compares trauma-narrating choreography and literature on material generation methods, memory storage sources and modes of transmission, predominantly providing choreographic details via trend analysis, practice-led findings, and audience considerations. The aim of the chapter is to demystify the trauma narrative choreographic process, for the literary form to gain insight on how it may incorporate greater embodied dimensionalities to its autobiographical trauma narratives.

Introduction  Autobiographical or fictional, trauma narratives are commonly generated and processed within psychological and literary frameworks. Among many recent mainstream examples, Diary of a Stage Mother’s Daughter: a memoir1, A Little Life2 and The Glass Castle3 have contributed to further demystify the experience of psychological trauma and its aftermath for general populations, while providing familiar tales of struggle and resilience to identify with for trauma survivors. Less prevalent but 1

Melisa Francis, Diary of a Stage Mother’s Daughter: A Memoir (New York: Hachette Books, 2012). 2 Hanya Yanagiara, A Little Life (New York: Doubleday, 2015). 3 Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castles (New York: Scribner, 2005).

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fundamentally similar lenses through which those narratives may be presented and received are psychological and choreographic. Indeed, fulllength works such as late German choreographer Pina Bausch’s iconic Das Frühlingsopfer (The Rite of Spring) (Wuppertal Tanztheatre, 1975) and Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite’s Betroffenheit (Kidd Pivot, 2015) narrate trauma and its aftermath at their thematic core. Although the creation of contemporary dance theatre and that of contemporary literature require different technical considerations and yield tangibly different results, the fundamental action required in both cases appear the be the same: to write. In many ways, to choreograph is to write. Etymologically speaking indeed, the “word choreography literally means ‘dance-writing’, from the Greek words ‘χορεία’ (circular dance) and ‘γραφή’ (writing).” 4 The practical applications of this pairing are not, however, restricted to the art of choreography itself, in its traditionally understood sense: narration-through-dance. They indeed take several different forms, each serving specific purposes. Among them, dance and writing come together as constructs in the practice of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), a verbal language-based method for describing and documenting movement, devised by European dance artist and theorist Rudolf Laban in the earlier part of the twentieth century.5 Once frequently applied in support of the creation and archival of choreography but less so since the advent and democratization of videography, LMA’s vocabulary and modalities are nowadays mostly used in settings requiring the study of human movement, including physical therapy, dance science and psychology. 6 Another praxis joining dance and writing involves the combined undertaking of dance movement and descriptive writing in contemporary choreographic processes, for artists to gain insight on their own creative or performance output. Of the exercise, American postmodern choreographer Deborah Hay reflects: “When I write about the physical act of dancing, unique assemblies of thought often occur. These thoughts often re-inform my choreography and performance. My body as a performer is more inclusive in the aftermath of writing a dance.”7

4

Jane Bacon and Vida Midgelow, “Writing the self, writing the choreographic”, Choreographic Practices 2, no.1 (2012): p.3. 5 Jean Newlove and John Dalby, Laban for All (New York: Routledge), 2004. 6 Irmgard Bartenieff, Body movement: Coping with the environment (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1980). 7 Deborah Hay, My Body, the Buddhist (New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2000), 28.

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While recognizing those practices’ validity, choreography in the context of this chapter is concurrently considered as the creative act of forming and arranging movement towards the generation of bodylanguage meaning, and the performed final product resulting from this act. Written from the perspective of a practice-led researcher in contemporary choreography, the chapter aims at demystifying the post-traumatic body language as choreographic prose in autobiographically sourced trauma narratives. Choreography and literature’s distinctive strengths and challenges in communicating and disseminating trauma narratives will first be outlined with specific attention paid to distribution platforms, longevity and modes of transmission. In a second time, foundational work in contemporary choreography’s representation of psychological trauma will be discussed, most importantly through describing Pina Bausch’s seminal work Das Frühlingsopfer’s features. Following this, practice-based methodologies in choreographic trauma narration will be detailed, in regards to sourcing, movement development and compositional strategies. Lastly, the outstanding constants and implications of trauma narration as a contemporary choreographic sub-genre will be discussed, followed in conclusion by recommendations on how best choreography and literature may incorporate one another’s most relevant characteristics when writing trauma narratives.

Fig. 1-1 Chapter’s Author Engaging in Trauma-Narrating Choreographic Performance ©David Hou, 2013

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Literary and Choreographic Trauma Narratives: Communication and Dissemination Choreography and literature’s distinctive strengths and challenges in communicating and disseminating trauma narratives not only highlight the potential complementarity between the two forms, but also the latent benefits for practitioners of each discipline to better comprehend the other’s material generation methods and modes of transmission, in order to acquire and appropriately adapt strategies to begin creating trauma narratives from physical and cerebral memory, in equal parts. Fundamentally, generating a choreographic trauma narrative is similar to creating a literary one. However, the two forms’ respective potential for product dissemination differ vastly. Inherently, works of literature present clear disseminative advantages over choreographic ones. Financial considerations aside, whether in print or online, the content of published literary works can be reproduced and/or accessed at any given time, in any given place. By contrast, the receiving of choreographic materials is subject to time and space restrictions in ways that typically do not affect literature’s materials. Indeed, live choreography can only be seen by audiences of finite sizes, at pre-arranged times: whether a performance occurs in a large capacity proscenium theatre, an intimate black-box theatre or in situ, its delivery and reception must occur simultaneously, and its content can only ever be received by the maximum number of people able to congregate within viewing range of the action. Equally restricting are the human body’s limits, in that they radically impede choreographic performances’ potential for recurrence. Undeniably, a given choreographic work’s transmission capacity is largely contingent on its performers’ physical and mental stamina. Indeed, to avoid mental exhaustion and prevent injuries, a touring contemporary dance company whilst on full-time activity typically restrains its weekly full-length performances to a number below seven, delivered over a maximum period of six working days.8 Choreographic works are also challenged in their conservation through time, which directly affects their diffusion prospects. Unlike the integrally enduring ink-and-paper or byte in the case of literature, it is the dancer’s physical body that serves as archival site for sophisticated kinaesthetic and somatic information in choreographic contexts. While choreographic details pertaining to broad movement 8

“Professional Standards for Dance”, Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists- Ontario Chapter, accessed September 21, 2017, http://cadaontario.camp8.org/professional_standards_for_dance.

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strokes, dancer-to-dancer spatial relationships, staging elements and musical integration can be recorded on video or paper, the threedimensional, embodied and experiential nature of dance makes conserving a choreographic work’s qualitative substance, and therefore, meaning, extremely difficult when transferring material onto a new cast of dancers. This is especially true of state-based choreography–generally looser in structure and subtler in execution– a category within which fall traumanarrating contemporary choreographic works. During such pieces’ transfer/remount process, the physical presence and input of original dancers prove useful yet pose significant organisational challenges: a consequence of the contractual nature of dancers’ employment leading to nomadic lifestyles, and of the living body’s weakening as decades go by. Its live nature’s concrete space-time limitations and dependence on temporal human bodies for delivery and conservation may limit traumanarrating choreography’s outreach potential compared to literary trauma narratives’, but the former possesses an undeniable advantage over the later when it comes to recounting the experience of psychological trauma directly and accurately. In addition to ‘retain[ing] intrusive literary conventions such as chronology, characterization, dialogue, and a directive narrative voice’9, written accounts of trauma must rely on signifiers–words and their arrangements– to communicate information to their recipients. Meanwhile, danced accounts of trauma–especially state-based, somatically driven ones–are essentially free of such signifiers when relaying information. Psychologist and psychoanalyst Valleda C. Ceccoli confirms that “ Words alone can only hint at the depth and complexity of our emotional experience, but art and in this case, dance, accesses and transmits emotion directly, bypassing spoken language and reaching us in deeply personal ways.”10 It has been widely recognized since the beginning of the twenty-first century that memories of psychological trauma often are stored in the body-regulating parts of the brain, namely limbic and reptilian, and that this causes post-traumatic symptoms to manifest within the body itself.11 As a result, an increasing number of experts in the field agree that, given 9

Laurie Vickroy, Trauma Survival in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 5. 10 Valleda C. Ceccoli, “Feeling Pina: How the Choreographer Moved People”, Psychology Tomorrow Magazine, November 5, 2012, http://psychologytomorrowmagazine.com/feeling-pina-how-the-choreographermoved-people/. 11 Robert C. Scaer, The Body Bears the Burden: trauma, dissociation, and disease (New York: Haworth Medical Press, 2001).

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verbal communication’s origins within the neocortex rather than the brainstem, traditional talk therapies are inefficient in treating posttraumatic stress, while therapies involving somatic engagement have greater success12. A number of such approaches are Yoga-based. “Yoga-based interventions assimilate physical movement and restorative action patterns into treatment, and in doing so they endeavour to help trauma survivors build internal strengths and resources in an embodied manner. Along with similar body-based strategies, yoga is at the frontier of trauma treatment in promoting mind/body healing.” 13

For different purposes, along with Yoga itself, a number of somatic practices targeting the development of one’s ability to sense their inner bodies and to source movement from that feedback are nowadays routinely incorporated to western contemporary dance training. The Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais Method and the Skinner Releasing Technique are only a few of the myriad of influential approaches developed over the course of the last century having had an impact on theoretical and practical dance. 14 Such training allows for dancers to access and work through somatically-stored information, opening the gates for those artists to source choreographic material from bodily memory and, as an extension of this when applicable, bodily-stored trauma. This type of pre-lingual information is essential to access in the creation of full pictures in trauma narration. According to Dr. Ceccoli, “the acquisition of language relegates un-processed, non-verbal experience to that which is lived and felt as opposed to those experiences that can be verbally represented and spoken. We are thus left with experiences that carry no verbal signifier and cannot be accessed through everyday language, where words are not enough and yet meaning is present.”15 The realities of trauma being stored in the somatic body and of dance originating from that same body imply that, when crafted soundly and performed genuinely, choreography as a kinaesthetic empathy trigger can communicate trauma narratives with more accuracy and directness than literature, a neocortex-processed form based on signifier intermediates. 12

“Trauma Treatment: Psychotherapy in the 21st Century”, Youtube.com, accessed September 25, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCTd1DSp2FA. 13 Emerson, David and Elizabeth Hopper, Overcoming Trauma through Yoga: reclaiming your body (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2011), 18. 14 Martha Eddy, “A Brief History of Somatics and Dance: historical development of the field of somatic education and its relationship to dance”, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 1, no 1 (2009): 8-14. 15 Ceccoli, “Feeling Pina”.

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Prominent dance critic and scholar Ann Daly reminds us that “Dance, although it has a visual component, is fundamentally a kinaesthetic art whose apperception is grounded not just in the eye but in the entire body.”16 Alternatively worded, she argues that choreographic contents are not exclusively treated analytically, but that they are also processed through embodied cognition, and can activate kinaesthetic empathy: the understanding of another human being’s experience derived from observing that person’s movement.

Seminal Work in Choreographic Trauma Narration Western contemporary choreography’s reliance on kinaesthetic empathy for conveying meaning to its audiences is hardly a new phenomenon, as is its existence as a trauma-narrating medium. Indeed, examples of kinaesthetically communicated choreographic trauma narratives can be traced back to the emergence of the contemporary dance genre itself as we currently know it: Bausch-influenced. Western contemporary dance artists tend to consensually agree that late German choreographer Pina Bausch’s body of work of the later part of the twentieth century and early millennium has served to redefine what is aesthetically desirable and thematically appropriate in dance. As expressed by London-based dance critic Luke Jennings in his 2010 piece for The Guardian, “[n]o one had a greater influence on postwar European dance than the German choreographer Pina Bausch. [… T]oday it’s hard to find an avant-garde choreographer whose output doesn’t reflect her influence. ” 17 . This is generally recognized to be true of both her creative methods and choreographic aesthetic. When further describing the choreographer’s opus, Jennings goes on to explain that “many of [her] pieces didn’t look like dance works, in that there was little “dancing”, in the understood sense”. Most relevantly to this chapter’s topic, he also importantly recognizes that “[c]entral to Baush’s oeuvre was the traumatized interplay of its performers, who often seemed caught in conflicting narratives”, and that “[p]rofoundly troubling and occasionally beautiful, [hers] was dance as absolutist experience: the traumatised psyche of middle Europe made

16

Ann Daly, Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture, (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 307. 17 Luke Jennings, “Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch”, The Guardian, March 28, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2010/mar/28/tanztheater-wuppertal-pinabausch.

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flesh.”18 Also a dance follower, Dr. Ceccoli tells us that, “with Pina Bausch, dance emerges as the very basis of a different language, the language of human experience, a language that must access emotions directly and, through that reach, go further into the emotional resonance of others. Dance thus becomes the language of trauma re-worked and extended through our common bond–our humanity.”19 Among the choreographer’s most influential work, Das Frühlingsopfer is a thirty-five-minute, autobiographically sourced, fictionalized trauma narrative. Set to Igor Stravinsky’s originally controversial 1913 composition for Paris’ Les Ballets Russes’ Le Sacre du Printemps–an avant-garde and commotioncausing choreographic work by Sergei Diaghilev–Bausch’s Das Frühlingsopfer narrates the ritualistic sacrifice of a maiden by her tribe, or trauma, as it unfolds. First performed in 1975, the work holds fascination and currency to this day: still presented internationally, Das Frühlingsopfer was most recently performed in September 2017 for eagerly anticipating American and Canadian audiences, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the National Arts Centre, respectively20. Unfolding on a black soil-covered stage, the piece opens to the image of a nude coloured slip-wearing female laying prone on what can be distinguished as a bright red piece of fabric spread atop dirt. Directly recognizable references to the experience of trauma are not present from the start of this choreographic work: rather, they gradually reveal themselves once the work’s aesthetic and tonal contexts are clearly established. Indeed, Das Frühlingsopfer’s opening scene’s movement quality can be described as cognizant, athletic, purposeful and controlled. The material, executed by female soloists entering the stage running in rapid succession, is delivered synchronously to the percussive musical score, giving the audience the impression that the executed movement is unthreatening, known to the characters and part of their routine behavioural repertoire. What provides the first hint of the characters’ vulnerability to the tragedy awaiting them lies in their costuming: each of the female characters wears a near translucent flesh-toned slip over nude coloured underwear, making the outline of their otherwise bare breasts clearly discernable. The delicate make of their outfits strikingly contrasts their movement’s strength and vigour. The second indication that something is 18

Jennings, “Tanztheater”. Ceccoli, “Feeling Pina”. 20 “Season Calendar”, Tanztheatre Pina Bausch, accessed October 10,2010, http://www.pina-bausch.de/en/. 19

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amiss comes when a single dancer stands immobile amidst the chaos created by her surrounding cast-mates’ incessant directional movement, and lifts the hem of her slip up towards her head ambivalently as though she were about to take it off, only to change her mind once the fabric covers her face and a slow contraction of her abdominal muscles tips her body backwards, causing her to release her grip on the garment and to fall into a run, re-integrating the rest of the group’s activity. Throughout the entire work’s duration, the slip-lifting motif reoccurs with different performers, and single female characters are frequently isolated from the tribe in similar ways, whether standing in space facing the audience at an angle or performing movement that differs from the group’s unison, as if processing individual experiences in dissociative manners. Another noteworthy constant is the presence of the red piece of fabric seen at the beginning as an obvious symbol–its colour standing out against the neutral flesh toned costumes like blood against skin. As the piece progresses, the bunch of silk keeps being passed around from performer to performer, as a revered but feared object, occasionally left on the soil in a puddle. More than five minutes into the work, the male characters’ group enters the space suddenly. Unlike the interspersed female characters’ entrances, theirs is instant, unified and imposing: a front infiltrating and stilling the female pack, supported by ominous-sounding changes in the musical score. Wearing black opaque pants, the males immediately come across as being less vulnerable than their female counterparts. Although the majority of Das Frühlingsopfer’s ensuing material is not overtly descriptive of a male perpetrator-female victim dichotomy but mostly rather of prescribed, ritualistic activity, several instances of contrast in stance–male wide and erect, female narrow and slumped– and body language–male direct, female indirect– reinforce tribal male dominance throughout the remainder of the piece, suggesting power imbalances and uneven trauma potentiality between the sexes. The organised, ritualistic and directed physical material characteristic of the piece’s first section is maintained with the males’ arrival, yet gradually disintegrates moving onward–the technically placed jetés and pointed extensions are partly replaced by disorderly pedestrian runs, somatically affected hugs and audible panting by the piece’s mid-point. Insidiously, the movement impetus shifts from being essentially prescribed to being emotionally driven. Subtle muscular tensions, tilts of the head and textures in the breath are noticeable, opening the door for audience members to develop empathy for the characters. The nature of the performers’ visual focus also changes as the action evolves: from cognizant and environmentally oriented to diffused and intermittent,

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fluctuating between pointed disbelieving stares and inward withdrawals. Along with this overall shift comes a change in the physical material’s relationship to the music– while the choreography obeyed the score with astounding precision during the earlier part of the piece, instilling a sense of order, the link between notes and movements, although still very clear, becomes looser by the sixteen-minute mark, injecting uncertainty to the action and allowing for subtleties in the characters’ humanity to come across. A sense of distress builds up in the work as references to self-inflicted violence appear, most obviously in a rhythmically executed, repeated mass movement: the characters hitting themselves in the stomach powerfully with their own elbow, in synchrony, over and over again. Das Frühlingsopfer’s tension climax is however reached following a significant decrease in expended energy, a scene sparse in movement yet dense in apprehension. The women are clustered, the men facing them in a more dispersed arrangement, with a leader at their front. Taking turns, individual females take possession of the red cloth and, with variations in their terror and resignation embodiment, advance toward the male leader, offering their body for sacrifice. A maiden is eventually chosen when the leading male forcefully grabs her by the shoulders, sending the rest of the male and female dancers in an erratic movement frenzy emphasized by chaos in the sound score. Amidst the commotion, the chosen maiden is frozen in place, seemingly in shock–her breathing affected by tension in her chest muscles, her focus fixed yet vacant–while the leading male ceremoniously removes her skin-toned slip to replace it with the red fabric–at last revealed to be a bright red version of the flesh-coloured slips. From this moment until the end, Das Frühlingsopfer becomes the trauma narrative of the chosen maiden, as she is faced with her imminent rape and symbolic death. In a five-minute solo section culminating in a violent face-forward collapse on the dirt, the female dancer alternates between dissociative stares, unsteady walks, desperate violent movement outbursts and partial-to-complete falls in the dirt. Meanwhile, the rest of the pack witnesses her demise, stock-still, each dancer attentively watching the maiden from an upstage vantage point, almost imperceptibly shifting their weight once in a while; somewhat engrossed but otherwise paralyzed. The maiden’s physical appearance becomes progressively more bestial as she nears the end; the dirt accumulates on her sweaty skin, her hair is in shambles, her slip has shifted to expose her nude body. The last change indicative of trauma processing is introduced within the minute preceding her ultimate collapse: her eyes widen in horror, almost grotesquely, bringing electric tension to her final movement.

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Practice-Based Research Methods in Choreographing Trauma Narratives Choreographically, in any given trauma narrative, the emergence and development of features such as Das Frühlingsopfer’s are contingent on physical exploration often involving recall, somatic awareness and the ability to translate physical memory into movement. 21 . Of Bausch’s methods and based on her dancers’ accounts, Dr. Ceccolo reports that the choreographer “would begin many of her pieces by asking dancers for a movement that expressed a particular emotion and on that basis build a dance”. She also mentions that Bausch’s dancers were “often the authors of the dances, providing memories, experiences, bits of their lives which power[ed] the movement that follow[ed].” 22 This way of creating was breaking convention back in the 1970’s when, historically in western concert dance, the dancers’ task and creative involvement had been limited to executing prescribed physical steps created by choreographers. Practice-based methodologies such as the choreographic one outlined above, in which “practitioner researchers do not merely ‘think’ their way through or out of a problem, but rather, they ‘practice’ through a resolution”23 have relatively recently entered the academic discourse, with great impact on research endeavours in the performing arts. Western Sydney University scholars and practicing artists Roger Dean and Hazel Smith speak of the phenomenon as “an increasing trend towards documentation and self- description of creative work”.24 The practice-led approach is particularly well suited for choreography, a predominantly experiential activity yielding ephemeral artistic products. A trauma survivor and this chapter’s author, I have investigated the creation of contemporary choreography through the post-traumatic lens as a practice-based researcher for a number of years. My interest in the topic emerged organically, from a place of embodied experience. The 21

Marie France Forcier, “Creating Contemporary Choreography Through the PostTraumatic Lens” (MFA thesis, York University, 2014), 35. 22 Ceccoli, “Feeling Pina”. 23 Brad Haseman, “Performance as Research in Australia: Legitimating Epistemologies,” in Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: scholarly acts and creative cartography, ed. Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 59. 24 Roger Dean and Hazel Smith, “Introduction: Practice-led research, research-led practice: towards the iterative cycle web,” in Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, ed. Roger Dean and Hazel Smith (Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 2009), 25.

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chronology and details of this emergence, briefly outlined below, still serve nowadays as base in my understanding of trauma narratives. As a young adult, simultaneously to my ongoing engagement in professional dance training, I developed complex PTSD following the experience of a number of traumatic incidents. Through cognitivebehavioural treatment over a two-year period, I learned to cope with the condition, experienced posttraumatic growth and went on to develop a successful professional career as a dancer-choreographer. My trauma seemingly behind me, the first decade of my professional activity yielded rather formal choreographic works. I understood virtuosity as an athletic concept rather than a communicative one: my creative curiosity and resulting compositional choices of the time were driven by personal concerns with creating technically sound, peer-approved dance. Blessed with continuous presentation opportunities and positive reviews, I did not engage in evaluating my artistic practice until elements suggestive of my post-traumatic past began emerging during rehearsals, unpremeditatedly, through my directorial requests to dancers. Although out of nowhere, during the summer of 2011, I began asking performers to execute previously set physical material while “watching a horror movie projected onto their inner skull”. 25 When watching the results produced by this strategy–characterised by vacant visual foci and unsettling disembodiment–I felt instantaneously compelled, recognizing something both profoundly somatic and deeply personal, which I could not quite identify. Curious about the image and hungry to see it again, I asked different groups of performers to apply the same strategy as part of subsequent creative processes over the next year or so. The choreographic works resulting from these processes were received enthusiastically by audiences, which reportedly appreciated the psychological depth brought forth by the change. From being repeatedly exposed to these works in rehearsal and performance, the nature and significance of what I had been producing revealed itself to me with astounding clarity: I had been recreating my former dissociative symptoms of PTSD and was, for the first time, able to see them objectively.26 My academic and professional paths were altered by the psychological implications of this realization and its social and creative potentials: I have since been concentrating my research efforts on the creation, performance, presentation and analysis of contemporary choreography through the post-traumatic lens.

25 26

Forcier, “Creating”, 4-5. Forcier, “Creating”, 5.

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Fig. 1-2 Performer Engaged in Performing Movement with a Dissociated Focus ©Walter Lai, 2013

Among my body of research, a fundamental project on the choreographic creation and self-performance of trauma narratives was developed and analysed in 2013. Tonally reliant on irony and employing

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emotional dissonance, Little Guidebook for Using Your Suffering Wisely, the resulting ten-minute solo “conceptually […] unfolds as a character, closely moulded on myself, embarks on a journey towards healing her PTSD, guided by a self-help audiobook narrator. As the character struggles to find peace through the book’s step-by-step program and falls apart, it becomes obvious that the suggestion that individuals can heal the after-effects of trauma through generic and impersonal formulas is an emotionally dangerous and socially irresponsible idea.”27

The methodology applied in creating Little Guidebook for Using Your Suffering Wisely involved writing, autobiographical sourcing, and the tracking of somatic responses to trauma-related prose. Uncharacteristically of previous creative chronologies where I initially extracted imagery and meaning from improvised movement, this solo’s development began with writing a script. My intention with the writing exercise was to create seemingly innocuous–yet likely damaging–clichéd advice which uninformed individuals might provide trauma victims for healing from PTSD. At this idea’s origin were personal reflections I had been having regarding the typical lack of factual foundation underlying publications of the self-help genre, compared to the scientific strength supporting PostTraumatic Growth theory. Examples of the resulting twenty fictional guidelines I created included recommendations such as: “We do not recommend shying away from triggers” and “Celebrate. You are a survivor. The destruction of the world as you once knew is nothing but an opportunity for growth.”28 Professional actor Andrew Nolan, an artistic colleague, audio-recorded the guidelines, which were then layered onto an original New Age soundscape by composer James Bunton, a long-term collaborator of mine. I then used the recorded audiobook and its soundscape as a set structure from which to develop physical material for the piece. I started each of my thirty solo rehearsals with a period of self-directed somatic attuning, partly to warm my body up for the demands of dance movement, but mostly to help shifting my locus of awareness from external to internal. To achieve this, I would engage in body scanning–mindfully concentrating on developing feeling in successive specific body parts while laying supine, immobile– and held yoga postures while maintaining this developed internal feeling; the shift took thirty to forty-five minutes on average to 27 28

Forcier, “Creating”, 10. Forcier, “Creating”, 44.

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complete. Immediately following this, I would play the audiobook through the rehearsal studio’s speaker system, listening to the narrator and allowing my cerebral and somatic post-traumatic memories to activate in response to the meaning of his guidelines. Over the course of several listening sessions–I had at least three per rehearsal–guidelines prompted the recall of traumatic events, specific components of traumatic events (i.e. a colour, texture, sound) or post-traumatic states resulting from traumatic events. Those emerging memories were accompanied by pinpointed physical sensations: for example, the previously mentioned line “We do not recommend shying away from triggers” caused me to recall months spent avoiding proximity to wrought iron fences after having been attacked by strangers on an icy winter night. During the attack, my arms had been pinned down against my body– I had felt powerless, terrified that I would slide on the ice face-forward, towards an adjacent fence with the perpetrators’ weight on my back and without access to my hands to absorb the fall, and that upon the fall my head would get impaled on the fence pickets. The memory came with a tingling in my fingertips, as though my fingers were searching for something, independently from my sense of sight. Whenever a guideline prompted recall in process, I would make note of the memory and, in as many details as I could, of its accompanying sensation: where it lived in the body (i.e. pelvic floor, upper arms’ epidermis) and how it qualitatively manifested (i.e. type of pressure, temperature, rhythm). Over time, the somatic manifestations prompted by each guideline began recurring automatically and stabilizing in nature. From there, I used this set of manifestations as drive for movement development. Through visualisation, I increased my sense of control over each somatic sensation, and willed them to intensity until kinaesthetic impulses arose in me to “move through discomfort”. I obeyed those impulses as soon as they emerged without censoring my execution, and used their direction, velocity, trajectory and intent as conductors for setting physical material. The resulting movement phrases were then strung into a choreographic whole following compositional logic.

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Fig. 1-3 Little Guidebook for Using your Suffering Wisely: Movement Sourced from Tingling Fingers ©David Hou, 2013

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With the sonic environment and choreography established, I completed Little Guidebook for Using your Suffering Wisely’s creative process by adding conceptually symbolised lighting (in collaboration with designer April Gorday), scenography and costuming to the piece. Kept soft and fairly dark throughout, the lighting served to support the intimate and inward nature of the character’s journey. Barely perceptible, blue wavering lines were projected against the cyclorama’s black background to help situate the action within a meditative, dissociated realm. In order to create visual and emotional dissonance for the viewer, colourful confetti were released mid-way through the piece from the stage’s fly lot, cascading on the performer’s head and shoulders at a moment where she is frozen in place, forcing a smile through tears. Lastly, the skin-toned and airy costume added a vulnerable dimension to the work. Suspended midair on an invisible hook at the beginning of the piece, the button-less blouse and pants were picked up by the performer in response to the narrators’ first guideline, and put on over the nude bra and underpants she is initially seen wearing.

Trauma Narration as a Choreographic Sub-Genre: Constants and Implications Like the myriad of other existing trauma-themed dance works, the two pieces detailed above rely on similar developmental methods and compositional strategies, which can be considered as constants in contemporary choreographic trauma narration. Methodologically, sourcing from the dancers’ somatic manifestations in response to their own autobiographical recall appears to yield material optimally triggering kinaesthetic empathy. When movement emerges from a place of embodied memory and is performed with the physical qualitative nuances associated with this memory, it is perceived by the viewer as genuine rather than decorative. With such methods, the search for proper signifiers and organization of their order is taken out of the creative equation. What is left expressed is the very physical/emotional essence of an experience–in trauma narration, of a traumatic experience. When the choreographer is also the performer of a choreographic narrative, the challenge in the early stages of movement development is to approach the task from an internal perspective: to immerse oneself in what arises in the moment rather than give in to the urge to steer exploration in service to greater conceptual ideas. When the choreographer is not involved in the performance of a work but acts as the dancers’ director, their role is to provide emotionally safe environments and clear

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exploration contexts for the dancers to work in, to identify the sections or aspects of the dancers’ offerings that have most communicative resonance from a viewer’s perspective, and to guide the dancers to retain and, at times, adapt, what was identified. Compositionally, choices made in contemporary choreographic trauma narratives tend to promote the development of dissonant and fragmented aesthetics analogous to post-traumatic perceptive landscapes. Directing the performers’ visual foci to withdraw within the self or absently fixate through the audience during physical movement execution establishes the dancers’ state as detached from their immediate surroundings, emulating psychological dissociation. Additionally, irregularly fluctuating the dancers’ locus of awareness between internal and external substantiates their psychological state as unstable. This unpredictability helps keeping the viewer engaged and empathetic.29 As a performer, having the option to visually disengage oneself from external stimuli helps to hold on to one’s somatic attuning, a fringe benefit in stress-induced distracting situations, such as having to share trauma-related autobiographical information on stage, when the ability to sense and work from physical subtleties may become impaired. Incorporating outstanding elements of beauty (i.e. a delicate costume, a deftly executed balance) to otherwise emotionally distressing choreographic trauma-revealing works appears to create moral dissension for the narratives’ receivers. “How conflicting is it for audience members to allow themselves the positive feelings that come with experiencing beauty when the core of what they are witnessing is traumatic in essence and involves another human being’s distress?”30 This experience engages audience members in self-reflection to varying extents, thereby converting them from passive to active trauma narrative recipients. Similarly, the sparse addition of situational, physically responsive humour apparently opens audience members up to accepting emotionally distressing information. Early on in my research, I noted “that[,] in any performing art, there is much power in the juxtaposition of comedic and tragic moments. It creates moral and emotional dissonance for an audience: they have allowed themselves to laugh at or with a character before his/her underlying sorrowful reality is revealed. They now have to pause and re-consider their values in the face of that dissonant

29 30

Forcier, “Creating”, 14-5. Forcier, “Creating”, 14.

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reaction. This reflection holds them responsible for their experience, engaging them more deeply in a given work.”31

Fig. 1-4 Confetti Release in Little Guidebook for Using Your Suffering Wisely ©David Hou, 2013

Adding recognizable elements to choreographic trauma narratives’ scenography–in that they are not abstractly constructed but commonly part of audiences’ everyday landscapes, like the soil in Das Frühlingsopfer or 31

Forcier, “Creating”, 13-14

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the confetti in Little Guidebook for Using Your Suffering Wisely–helps to situate the narrative action in reality, reinforcing the simultaneous coexistence of actual physical environment and post-traumatic distorted psychological scenery. “Because contemporary dance is abstract, statebased work is somatic, and psychological trauma, private and internal, trauma-based choreographic work could easily look as though it portrays an alternate reality.”32 Juxtaposing the narrated experience of trauma to reality-grounding elements on stage contributes to circumvent this pitfall, solidifying trauma and its aftermath as undeniable, concrete social issues needing to be addressed. Whether or not the choreographer of a trauma narrative has a specific socio-political agenda in mind, the aim when creating and performing work is to get audiences to acknowledge one’s worldview. “By anthologizing personal traumas, [Pina Bausch for example] depict[ed] social ills or a society where attitudes need to be changed”33 Her approach was descriptive rather than prescriptive, yet the need for specificity and realism remained. This realism in contemporary choreographic trauma narration can, on the flipside, create adverse reactions in vulnerable audience members, if proper contextualisation has not been established prior to a given performance. Indeed, the instantaneous nature of dance performance and the closed and dark setting of traditional theatre can breed potential for trauma narrative recipients to feel powerless over their experience, perhaps even unsafe if prone to being triggered. In this regard, the literary form presents an undeniable advantage over the choreographic one: it grants its recipients the freedom to create distance from and/or modulate their own experience. Indeed, the literary format provides readers the opportunity to manage their emotional response by reading sections over, pausing to reflect, reading in disorder, walking away and coming back, crossreferencing, etc. This type of agency, most often absent from live art, appears significantly helpful in processing possibly triggering information.

Conclusion The high differential degree between the literary and choreographic forms’ initial generative approaches and artistic outcomes in creating trauma 32

Forcier, “Creating”, 37. Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance View; Bausch as Choreographer of social Trauma”, New York Times, published October 27, 1985, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/27/arts/dance-view-bausch-as-choreographer-ofsocial-trauma.html.

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narratives implies that the choreographic process may contain insight of the upmost relevance for literary practitioners to consider if aiming to incorporate an embodied dimension to their trauma narratives, and that supplementing the presentation of trauma narrating choreography with aspects characteristic of the literary format may help dance creators to communicate their works’ content with increased efficiency. Communicating information pertaining to stored trauma directly from the somatic source, choreography allows for more direct conduction; no nuance is lost in verbal language translation. While there is no way to circumvent literature’s reliance on its medium, the written word, I suspect that engaging in somatic attuning exercises prior or simultaneously to completing a writing session would promote an increase in articulation when descriptively writing about traumatic experiences, at least on a physical level. Based on the evidence gleaned in experiencing factual recall concurrently to somatic manifestations in the choreographic process, I expect that approaching the writing task in a state of heightened embodiment may also improve trauma narrating authors’ ability to recall suppressed factual details. Conducive to trauma narratives’ transmission, the literary form offers control and distance opportunities to the receivers, in other words, agency over their own reception. For trauma-related choreographic works– especially violence-depicting ones–to be received openly enough to create a social impact and satisfy artistic expectations, a fine balance needs to be met when creating context for potential and actual audiences. Drawing from years worth of discussions with contemporary dance artists, dance presenters, audience members, and trauma researchers from various disciplines on the matter, the consensus appears to be that the primary thing to consider when contextualizing trauma-related choreography is language specificity. As far as my experience indicates, when creating such context, it is wise to avoid terms related to disturbance, which could deter the more conservative patrons from attending the performance, and audacity, which might create unrealistic stylistic expectations for avantgarde enthusiasts. The goal when choosing contextual language for press releases and program guide notes should be to provide the necessary information for audiences to feel informed and respected when viewing trauma-narrating choreography, while avoiding to frame their experience either positively or negatively, both of which would affect the work’s potential for creating impact. Keeping the work’s description succinct and providing a standard trigger warning has thus far shown to provide audience members with the best possible context, giving them both a sense

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of control and the necessary freedom to receive a given work within their own reference frame. Whether choreographic or literary, autobiographical or fictional, narration remains narration: the account of an experience, from which details are inevitably omitted by virtue of its medium’s limitations and human memory’s finite capacity. Practical research attempting to merge literature and choreographic forms towards the production of a joint artistic outcome may provide further insight on how to improve traumanarrating means and practices, advantaging both narrators and receivers.

Bibliography Bacon, Jane, and Vida Midgelow. “Writing the self, writing the choreographic.” Choreographic Practices 2, no.1 (2012): 3-7. Bartenieff, Imgard. Body movement: Coping with the environment. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1980. Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists-Ontario Chapter. “Professional Standards for Dance.” Accessed September 21, 2017. http://cadaontario.camp8.org/professional_standards_for_dance. Ceccoli, Valleda C. “Feeling Pina: How the Choreographer Moved People.” Psychology Tomorrow Magazine, November 5, 2012. http://psychologytomorrowmagazine.com/feeling-pina-how-thechoreographer-moved-people/. Daly, Ann. Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. Dean, Roger, and Hazel Smith. “Introduction: Practice-led research, research-led practice: towards the iterative cycle web.” In Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, edited by Roger Dean and Hazel Smith, 1-40, Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 2009. Eddy, Marta. “A Brief History of Somatics and Dance: historical development of the field of somatic education and its relationship to dance.” Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 1, no 1 (2009): 5-27. Emerson, David and Elizabeth Hopper. Overcoming Trauma through Yoga: reclaiming your body. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2011. Francis, Melissa. Diary of a Stage Mother’s Daughter; A Memoir. New York: Hachette Books, 2012. Forcier, Marie France. “Creating Contemporary Choreography Through the Post-Traumatic Lens.” MFA thesis, York University, 2014. Haseman, Brad. “Performance as Research in Australia: Legitimating Epistemologies.” In Mapping Landscapes for Performance as

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Research: scholarly acts and creative cartography, edited by Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter, 51-61. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Hay, Deborah. My Body, the Buddhist. New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2000. Jennings, Luke. “Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.” The Guardian, March 28, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2010/mar/28/tanztheaterwuppertal-pina-bausch. Kisselgoff, Anna. “Dance View; Bausch as Choreographer of social Trauma.” New York Times, published October 27, 1985, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/27/arts/dance-view-bausch-aschoreographer-of-social-trauma.html. Scaer, Robert C. The Body Bears the Burden: trauma, dissociation, and disease. New York: Haworth Medical Press, 2001. Tanztheatre Pina Bausch. “Season Calendar.” Accessed October 10, 2017. http://www.pina-bausch.de/en/. Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Walls, Jeanette. The Glass Castles. New York: Scribner, 2005. Yanagiara, Hanya. A Little Life. New York: Doubleday, 2015. Youtube. “Trauma Treatment: Psychotherapy in the 21st Century.” Accessed September 25, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCTd1DSp2FA

CHAPTER NINE HEALING COMMUNITY TRAUMA USING LITERATURE: SOUTHEAST ASIAN REFUGEES AND IMMIGRANTS DAN THANH NGUYEN AND FARAH A. IBRAHIM

This chapter considers the relationship between collective community trauma and the role of healing literature in facilitating recovery; the specific goal of this chapter is to focus on marginalized Southeast Asian refugee populations to consider the role of literature within traumatized communities and to see if a collective narrative can be created for posttrauma growth and healing. This chapter will specifically address trauma among Southeast Asian refugees, review of social and psychological consequences of unresolved trauma and the role of literature for healing trauma. Within the last 40 years, various immigrant and refugee groups relocating to the United States had experienced some form of trauma such as PTSD due to war trauma, ethnic wars, famine, civil wars, etc., including, Southeast Asian refugees escaping from war and political persecution from their native countries.1 Longitudinal research has 1

Richard Mollica, Grace Wyshak, and James Lavelle, “The psychosocial impact of war trauma and torture on Southeast Asian refugees,” The American journal of psychiatry (1987); David Kinzie, James K. Boehnlein, Paul K. Leung, Laurie J. Moore, Crystal Riley, and Debra Smith. “The prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder and its clinical significance among Southeast Asian refugees,” The American Journal of Psychiatry (1990): 913.

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identified the lasting effects of trauma and suggests that mental health disorders remain prevalent among settled war refugees for decades.2 There are over 19 million Asian Americans, the majority (79%) are foreign-born.3 As a cultural group, Asian Americans do not seek formal mental health services because being stoic and privacy are very important to the cultural group. A national study reported that only 8.6 percent of Asian Americans ever sought mental health services; while 34 percent of Asian refugees and immigrants who had psychological problems or concerns received services.4 The lack of services and funding results from the popular press and the media continues to depict Asian Americans as a "model minority," this continues to undermine the complicated issues confronting the diverse Asian-American refugee and immigrant populations, and it continues to be especially detrimental to the experiences of many Southeast Asian refugees because the "model minority" myth reduces services and funding for Asian Americans, to facilitate their adjustment and opportunities for a successful and meaningful life. Our goal is to review the literature on and by Southeast Asian refugees and to use it as a tool to empower marginalized communities, by providing authentic accounts to dispel the model minority myth.

Asian American Literature While Asian literary voices have garnered attention in recent years, for example, The Joy Luck Club in the early 1990's gained mainstream success, few works have emerged from war refugees. There is a shortage of literature reflecting the experiences of Asian Americans, and the ethnically diverse population of the United States. For example, according to the Asian American Writer's Workshop, less than 1% of books published in 2008 were by Asian-American writers. Despite the dearth of literature, we will examine available works by Southeast Asian American authors as they identify or reflect on the trauma and mental health concerns from a personal perspective or as prevalent in their communities. For example, recently a notable literary work by Viet 2

Marija Bogic, Anthony Njoku, and Stefan Priebe, “Long-term mental health of war-refugees: a systematic literature review,” BMC international health and human rights (2015): 29. 3 Pew Research Center, 2014. 4 Takeuchi et al., "Use of mental health-related services among immigrant and USborn Asian Americans: results from the National Latino and Asian American study,” American Journal of Public Health (2007): 91-98.

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Thanh Nguyen titled The Sympathizer explores issues of acculturation and identity. Acculturative stress has been implicated as a major factor in depression among Southeast Asian Americans.5 Additionally, trauma due to the refugee experience and migration can have deleterious effects on identity development of individuals and the community.6 Kim (2016) recently reported that post-resettlement factors also impact refugee mental health, and sociocultural factors such as everyday discrimination should also be examined.7 Our goal is to understand the therapeutic value of first-person accounts of war, refugee camp experiences, and resettlement experiences of Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees; and consider implications of trauma resolution literature for marginalized populations. Further, we explore the similarity of first-person accounts to narrative therapy to validate and co-construct the collective traumatic experiences. Research has shown that a narrative exposure therapy model has clinically significant effects with traumatized refugee children.8 Also, group and individual interventions that have been successful using personal narratives will be explored.

Trauma among Southeast Asian refugee populations Southeast Asian Americans who survived the Vietnam War suffer from several mental health challenges; these include trauma-related disorders such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Depression as well as substance use disorder, along with unresolved culture loss and

5

Samuel et al., “Perceived racial discrimination, depression, and coping: A study of Southeast Asian refugees in Canada,” Journal of health and social behavior (1999): 193-207. 6 Rita Chi‐Ying Chung, and Fred Bemak, “Revisiting the California Southeast Asian mental health needs assessment data: An examination of refugee ethnic and gender differences,” Journal of Counseling & Development (2002): 111-119; Ibrahim, Farah A., and Jianna R. Heuer, Cultural and Social Justice Counseling, Basel, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing (2016). 7 Isok Kim, “Beyond trauma: post-resettlement factors and mental health outcomes among Latino and Asian refugees in the United States,” Journal of immigrant and minority health (2016): 740-748. 8 Martina Ruf et al., “Narrative exposure therapy for 7‐to 16‐year‐olds: A randomized controlled trial with traumatized refugee children,” Journal of traumatic stress (2010): 437-445.

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bereavement, and acculturative stress and racism.9 Overall, Asian American refugees face a host of issues that affect their overall mental health. Southeast Asian American refugees struggle with mental health issues that remain unresolved, partly due to lack of funding and services and partly due to the reticence of Asian Americans regarding mental health services. The emergence of trauma-related psychiatric disorders began in the 80's when Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was first introduced into the DSM-III. Trauma is different from everyday stress due to its intensity and other variables such as the traumatic event being linked to a specific time and place. Trauma includes the re-experiencing of the event through intrusive thoughts and dreams, avoidance of stimuli that symbolize the event, numbing of general responsiveness and increased arousal. By themselves, these symptoms do not constitute trauma or PTSD, and however, together they are features of a trauma-related disorder.10 The research literature confirms the detrimental effects of trauma on mental health which may lead to disorders such as PTSD, anxiety, depression and also subsequent substance use disorder. Studies examining the psychiatric symptoms in groups of Southeast Asian refugees who were also psychiatric patients found a high level of depression and PTSD. Refugees from Southeast Asia suffered tremendous trauma during the genocide of half the population during the Khmer Rouge. Carson & Rosser-Hogan reported high levels of PTSD (86%), depression (80%) and dissociation (96%) among Southeast Asian refugees.11 Trauma exposure was the most important predictor of mental health problems among refugees from Vietnam. One study found that although the risk of mental illness fell consistently across time, those who had been exposed to more than three trauma events had heightened risk of mental illness after ten years compared with people with no trauma exposure.12 Furthermore, research 9

Joyce P Chu., and Stanley Sue, “Asian American mental health: What we know and what we don’t know,” Online readings in psychology and culture (2011); Ibrahim & Heuer, Cultural, and Social Justice Counseling. 10 American Psychiatry Association, “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders-DSM-5.” (Washington, DC: auteur 2013) 11 Eve Bernstein, Carlson and Rhonda Rosser-Hogan, “Trauma experiences, posttraumatic stress, dissociation, and depression in Cambodian refugees,” The American journal of psychiatry (1991): 1548. 12 Steel et al., “Long-term effect of psychological trauma on the mental health of Vietnamese refugees resettled in Australia: a population-based study,” The Lancet (2002): 1056-1062.

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suggests that the effect of trauma may be passed onto the subsequent generations due reprogramming of the brain and epigenetic changes in the genes.13 A study of children of Vietnamese refugees using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), found that children of refugee parents born in Norway have significantly lower Total Difficulties Scores than their Norwegian peers; however, children's Total Difficulties Scores were positively associated with a paternal diagnosis of PTSD.14 Similarly, another study explored the transmission of trauma in Middle Eastern refugee families in Denmark found that non-traumatized children with one or both parents with PTSD symptoms were negatively affected based on their Total Difficulties Scores and Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire when compared to the Danish norms.15 These studies suggest that trauma can affect the individual who experienced the event and also impact subsequent generations.

Model Minority Myth: Lack of Funding and Resources Asian Americans are often seen as the “model minority” and thus perceived as having less mental health problems.16 Barriers to mental health services for the Asian American population includes the cultural belief that mental health service would be a source of stigma for the family, and the underutilization of mental health services despite the reported need. Among the Asian Americans who may have a mental disorder, only 17% sought mental health services.17 Intergroup heterogeneity also poses an issue within the group when exploring mental 13

Tracy L Bale, “Epigenetic and transgenerational reprogramming of brain development,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2015): 332-344; Thomas W Sadler, Langman's medical embryology (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2011); Mark Wolyn, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes who We are and how to End the Cycle, Penguin, 2017. 14 Aina Vaage et al., “Paternal predictors of the mental health of children of Vietnamese refugees,” Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health (2011): 2. 15 Nina Dalgaard, “The transmission of trauma in refugee families: associations between intra-family trauma communication style, children’s attachment security and psychosocial adjustment,” Attachment & human development (2016): 69-89. 16 Frederick Leong TL, and Anna SL Lau, “Barriers to providing effective mental health services to Asian Americans,” Mental health services research (2001): 201214. 17 Jennifer et al., "Use of mental health-related services among immigrant and USborn Asian Americans: results from the National Latino and Asian American study,” American Journal of Public Health (2007): 91-98.

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health status and utilization. Research supports the finding that Southeast Asians, such as those of Cambodian, Laotian, Vietnamese descent demonstrate poorer functioning compared to other East Asian groups such as individuals of Chinese or Japanese descent.18 Factors such as exposure to wartime trauma, socioeconomic disadvantage, and refugee status due to forced migration compared to voluntary migration contribute to Southeast Asian refugees' low psychological functioning. Thus, contrary to the perception created by the model minority myth that there is a low need in the Asian American population. Research indicates that Asian Americans report a number of psychological problems and stress due to migration such as, age at the time of migration, racism, cultural differences and challenges, and language proficiency that have been associated with mental health disorders.19

Historical Trauma Historical trauma is considered “complex and collective trauma that has been experienced over time and across generations by a group of people who share an identity.”20 It consists of three specific variables: trauma, which is shared by a group of people or a community, and it is experienced by subsequent generations, as trauma-related experiences, and is essentially collective historical trauma.21 The narrative approach of telling stories can be used to develop a community narrative on collective historical trauma. This approach can help a community to "re-tell" or reconstruct the story from their perspective to create a cohesive and meaningful narrative. Focusing on the collective historical trauma of refugees and immigrants from Southeast Asia could help them in recognizing how historical trauma has influenced their current narrative, and help provide insight into their current psychological and emotional state. Mohat et al., note that historical trauma diminishes cultural continuity by limiting collective action to preserve and 18

Edwina S. Uehara, David T. Takeuchi, and Michael Smukler, “Effects of combining disparate groups in the analysis of ethnic differences: Variations among Asian American mental health service consumers in the level of community functioning,” American Journal of Community Psychology, (1994): 83-99. 19 David et al., “Immigration-related factors and mental disorders among Asian Americans,” American Journal of Public Health (2007): 84-90. 20 Nathaniel et al., “Historical trauma as public narrative: A conceptual review of how history impacts present-day health,” Social Science & Medicine (2014): 128136. 21 Ibid.

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advance cultural legacies, which interferes with resiliency within a group.22 A unified public narrative would help to strengthen the community narrative and lead to increased resiliency within the group.

Collective Narrative and Trauma Resolution Hardy considers “narrative as a primary act of mind transferred to art from life.”23 Human experiences and interpretations make events into a story, events by themselves are not stories. Narratives, tie events together to construct meaning and are used to convey interpretations and aspirations of people.24 Plummer notes that “For narratives to flourish there must be a community to hear; …for communities to hear, there must be stories which weave together their history, their identity, their politics.”25 This comment identifies why and how collective historical and ongoing trauma can be healed by community narratives of the experiences people in a community, and these can also be used for empowerment and for enhancing resilience. Plummer provides examples of collective narratives that led to social action with both the abortion debate and the gay rights movement in the US.26 Literary trauma theory posits that trauma can create a “speechless fright” that divides or destroys the identity by disrupting attachments between self and others.27 Literature such as novels may represent the disruption between self and others by incorporating time and place such as an environment to allow the individual to explore the personal and cultural histories to make meaning of the traumatic experience.28 Narrative techniques in the trauma novels such as landscape imagery, temporary fissures, salience and narrative omission anchor the trauma to a physical place and time while withholding graphic traumatic details29. Through these literary techniques, the novel can recreate the mental confusion, 22

Ibid. Barbara Hardy, “Narrative as a primary act of the mind," The cool web: The pattern of children's reading (1977): 12. 24 Mohatt et al., “Historical trauma as public narrative: A conceptual review of how history impacts present-day health.” 25 Ken Plummer, Telling sexual stories: Power, change, and social worlds (Routledge, 2002), 87. 26 Ibid. 27 Michelle Balaev, “Trends in literary trauma theory,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature (2008): 149-166. 28 Ibid 29 Ibid. 23

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chaos or contemplation in a traumatic experience and allow the individual to create their own meaning by the re-evaluation of one's relation to society, self, and the world.

Immigrant and Refugee Literature An examination of various works of literature that represents immigrant and refugee experiences through psychological lenses, including symptoms of trauma and acculturative stress, mental healthrelated themes in immigrant and refugee experiences shows: 1. Identity: loss of extended family and community support, isolation, loss of status, etc. 2. Acculturation & inter-generational conflicts: language and cultural barriers, role-reversal for parents and their English-speaking children, value differences 3. Racism and prejudice, experiencing daily macroaggression, and microaggressions, etc.30 4. Experience of trauma from war31 5. Culture loss, cultural and religious symbols, familiar environments, culture-specific behaviour lost due to adaptation to new cultural contexts32 Various recent literary works also address these concerns, and they include: The Sympathizer & The Refugees, identifies struggles with several identities, racism, prejudices, and war trauma after the Vietnam War33; Listen slowly & inside out and back again, similarly depicts experiences of refugee children acculturating to the United States as their families struggle with cultural barriers and loss of identities after the Vietnam War.34 Most notably, a recent film adaptation of the novel First they took

30

Noh et al., “Perceived racial discrimination, depression, and coping: A study of Southeast Asian refugees in Canada.” 31 Laurence Kirmayer, et al., “Common mental health problems in immigrants and refugees: general approach in primary care,” Canadian Medical Association Journal (2011): E959-E967. 32 Ibrahim, Cultural and Social Justice Counseling. 33 Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer, (New York City: Grove Press, 2016); Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees, (New York City: Grove Press, 2017). 34 Thanhha Lai, Inside out & back again, (New York City: Harper Collins, 2013); Thanhha Lai, Listen, Slowly, (New York City: Harper Collins, 2015).

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my father gives a voice to a nonfiction account of a child’s experience with the brutality during the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.35

Trauma Resolution Therapeutic Interventions Narrative therapy is founded on the belief that people are experts on their own lives, and problems are viewed as external from the person. This approach assumes that people have many strengths and skills that can assist them to resolve or reduce the problems in their lives.36 The narrative approach recognizes the resilience of humans; therefore, it is a meaningful approach to use with refugees and immigrants who have survived significant trauma, and it shows that as survivors they possess strengths. The process of "re-authoring" one's story in narrative therapy provide individuals an opportunity to retell their story; which results in lowering the impact of trauma. Narrative techniques:  Dominant and local discourse vs. community narrative (victim and disabled as dominant discourse for some communities)  Deconstruction and reconstruction (meaning making to re-tell or reauthor story)  Externalization  Unique outcomes Herstory, or history viewed from the female perspective, uses the narrative approach to use art as a healing device. Andermahr & PellicerOrtin write that "Art in its different manifestations has frequently been used as a healing device by writers, minorities, and society in general, either because of the things that are explicitly said or because of the way in which it draws attention to what has been silenced."37 Herstory utilizes Scriptotherapy defined as the process of writing out and writing through the traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic re-enactment... “life writing might provide a therapeutic alternative for victims of severe anxiety and, more seriously of post-traumatic stress disorder."38 One of the main goals of writing about a traumatic experience would be to articulate an unbearable psychic wound that the subject or 35

Loung Ung, First they killed my father, (New York City: Harper Perennial, 2006). 36 Dulwich Centre, 2017. 37 Sonya Andermahr, and Silvia Pellicer-Ortin, Trauma narratives and her story, (United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2. 38 Ibid., 3.

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group is not able to communicate or externalize…It cannot be spoken but at least represented and mediated through cultural practices.39 This collection of essays told through the female narrative identifies interconnections between two critical fields: Feminist/Women’s Studies and Trauma Studies to illustrate the transformative power of the arts.: Narratives for Southeast Asian American refugees may be similarly structured as follows: Section I: Literary figures, narrative techniques, motifs and aesthetic forms that enable writers of this group to represent their traumatic experiences in fictional and semi-autobiographical forms; Section II: literature as a tool not only to transit the community's traumatic stories but contribute to individual and collective healing of traumatic wounds; Section III: literature potential to re-write and challenge the official version of history from a refugee perspective; Part IV: Other narrative genres, including film, which are also concerned with representation, transmission, and healing of trauma for refugees. In the same vein, Narradrama combines narrative therapy with the arts to provide a group-oriented approach for the treatment of trauma. Narradrama is an action-oriented therapeutic approach that integrates aspects of narrative therapy with drama therapy through role-playing and embodiment and transformation. Both approaches use empathy, witnessing of an audience and narrative deconstruction to discover alternative stories and "re-tell" their stories.40 Narradrama uses narrative therapy in a group format and has been useful in helping marginalized individuals deal with trauma. The community narrative is important because dominant cultures often perpetuate oppressive public narratives about marginalized groups through the media and other public communications by diminishing the value of cultural groups’ narratives and disqualifying their knowledge by limiting what may be discussed publically.41 Furthermore, psychological wellbeing is associated with the ability to process narratives and form coherent life stories and interpretations.42 Individuals who are not given the opportunity to reconcile their individual narrative with an accurate public narrative may feel isolated, further compounding mental health symptoms. 39

Ibid. Eva Leveton, Healing collective trauma using sociodrama and drama therapy, Springer Publishing Company, (2010). 41 Mohatt et al., “Historical trauma as public narrative: A conceptual review of how history impacts present-day health.” 42 Ibid. 40

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Personal narratives are contextualized within public narratives that inform how adversity is viewed within the larger cultural context. Affiliation with group identity and knowledge of the narratives for that group can be a source of resilience for marginalized groups.43 The benefits of writing about trauma on health, in general, have been well documented.44 Similarly, salutary effects of the narrative approach in the treatment of trauma-related disorders have provided a basis for the use of narrative therapy for populations that have experienced trauma. Several techniques in narrative therapy including meaning making provide the individual with the opportunity to tell their narrative and make meaning of their life experiences. A research study focused on meaning-making for trauma victims showed positive effects by reducing aversive situational meaning (as defined by their appraisals of the traumatic experience) and a decrease in intrusions and avoidance, oftentimes a symptom of trauma.45 Hutchison and Bleiker underscore the need to address and explore a spectrum of emotions, not just anger and fear but also empathy, compassion and wonder with victims of trauma in order to facilitate a lasting and ingenious form of social healing.46

Conclusion Psychological literature to heal various community trauma using a narrative lens has been effective to begin the healing process for oppressed and marginalized groups.47 Southeast Asian refugees who have survived trauma such as war and prosecution from their own countries could benefit from a community-based narrative approach.48 Current literature by Southeast Asian refugees demonstrates the power of narrative techniques to provide a scaffold, which will help traumatized refugees to explore their experiences to help externalize the trauma in order to make meaning of traumatic experiences. 43

Ibid. Crystal L. Park and Carol Joyce Blumberg, “Disclosing trauma through writing: Testing the meaning-making hypothesis,” (Cognitive Therapy and Research (2002): 597-616. 45 Ibid. 46 Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker, “Emotional reconciliation: Reconstituting identity and community after trauma,” European journal of social theory (2008): 385-403. 47 Andermahr and Pellicer-Ortin, Trauma narratives and her story. 48 Mollica, Wyshak, and Lavelle, “The psychosocial impact of war trauma and torture on Southeast Asian refugees.” 44

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Bibliography Abe-Kim, Jennifer, David T. Takeuchi, Seunghye Hong, Nolan Zane, Stanley Sue, Michael S. Spencer, Hoa Appel, Ethel Nicdao, and Margarita Alegría. "Use of mental health-related services among immigrant and US-born Asian Americans: results from the National Latino and Asian American study." American Journal of Public Health 97, no. 1 (2007): 91-98. Andermahr, Sonya, and Silvia Pellicer-Ortin. “Trauma narratives and her story.” In Trauma Narratives and Her story, pp. 1-10. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013. Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in literary trauma theory.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature (2008): 149-166. Bale, Tracy L. “Epigenetic and transgenerational reprogramming of brain development.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16, no. 6 (2015): 332344. Bogic, Marija, Anthony Njoku, and Stefan Priebe. “Long-term mental health of war-refugees: a systematic literature review.” BMC international health and human rights 15, no. 1 (2015): 29. Bruner, Jerome. “Acts of Meaning.” Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. Developmental Psychology 13, no. 4 (1990): 377-388. Carlson, Eve Bernstein, and Rhonda Rosser-Hogan. “Trauma experiences, posttraumatic stress, dissociation, and depression in Cambodian refugees.” The American journal of psychiatry 148, no. 11 (1991): 1548. Chu, Joyce P., and Stanley Sue. “Asian American mental health: What we know and what we don't know.” Online readings in psychology and culture 3, no. 1 (2011): 4. Chung, Rita Chi‐Ying, and Fred Bemak. “Revisiting the California Southeast Asian mental health needs assessment data: An examination of refugee ethnic and gender differences.” Journal of Counseling & Development 80, no. 1 (2002): 111-119. Dalgaard, Nina Thorup, Brenda Kathryn Todd, Sarah IF Daniel, and Edith Montgomery. “The transmission of trauma in refugee families: associations between intra-family trauma communication style, children’s attachment security and psychosocial adjustment.” Attachment & human development 18, no. 1 (2016): 69-89. Davis, Rocío G., and Sämi Ludwig. Asian American Literature in the International Context: Readings on Fiction, Poetry, and Performance. Lit, 2002. “What is Narrative Therapy,” Dulwich Centre,

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http://dulwichcentre.com/au/what-is-narrativetherapy/, (August 7, 2017). American Psychiatry Association. “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders-DSM-5.” Washington, DC: auteur (2013). Hardy, Barbara. “Narrative as a primary act of mind.” The cool web: The pattern of children's reading (1977): 12-23. Hutchison, Emma, and Roland Bleiker. “Emotional reconciliation: Reconstituting identity and community after trauma.” European journal of social theory 11, no. 3 (2008): 385-403. Ibrahim, Farah A., and Jianna R. Heuer. Cultural and Social Justice Counseling. Basel, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2016. Kim, Isok. “Beyond trauma: post-resettlement factors and mental health outcomes among Latino and Asian refugees in the United States.” Journal of immigrant and minority health 18, no. 4 (2016): 740-748. Kinzie, J. David, James K. Boehnlein, Paul K. Leung, Laurie J. Moore, Crystal Riley, and Debra Smith. “The prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder and its clinical significance among Southeast Asian refugees.” The American Journal of Psychiatry147, no. 7 (1990): 913. Kirmayer, Laurence J., Lavanya Narasiah, Marie Munoz, Meb Rashid, Andrew G. Ryder, Jaswant Guzder, Ghayda Hassan, Cécile Rousseau, and Kevin Pottie. “Common mental health problems in immigrants and refugees: general approach in primary care.” Canadian Medical Association Journal 183, no. 12 (2011): E959-E967. Lai, Thanhha. Inside out & back again. New York City: Harper Collins, 2013. —. Listen, Slowly. New York City: Harper Collins, 2015. Leong, Frederick TL, and Anna SL Lau. “Barriers to providing effective mental health services to Asian Americans.” Mental health services research 3, no. 4 (2001): 201-214. Leveton, Eva. Healing collective trauma using sociodrama and drama therapy. Springer Publishing Company, 2010. Mohatt, Nathaniel Vincent, Azure B. Thompson, Nghi D. Thai, and Jacob Kraemer Tebes. “Historical trauma as public narrative: A conceptual review of how history impacts present-day health.” Social Science & Medicine 106 (2014): 128-136. Mollica, Richard F., Grace Wyshak, and James Lavelle. “The psychosocial impact of war trauma and torture on Southeast Asian refugees.” The American journal of psychiatry (1987).

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Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer, (New York City: Grove Press, 2016) —. The Refugees, (New York City: Grove Press, 2017) Noh, Samuel, Morton Beiser, Violet Kaspar, Feng Hou, and Joanna Rummens. “Perceived racial discrimination, depression, and coping: A study of Southeast Asian refugees in Canada.” Journal of health and social behavior (1999): 193-207. Park, Crystal L., and Carol Joyce Blumberg. “Disclosing trauma through writing: Testing the meaning-making hypothesis.” Cognitive Therapy and Research 26, no. 5 (2002): 597-616. “U.S. Hispanic and Asian Populations Growing but for Different Reasons,” Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2014/06/26/u-s-hispanic-and-asian-populations-growing-but-fordifferent-reasons/, (June 2014). Plummer, Ken. Telling sexual stories: Power, change, and social worlds. Routledge, 2002. Ruf, Martina, Maggie Schauer, Frank Neuner, Claudia Catani, Elisabeth Schauer, and Thomas Elbert. “Narrative exposure therapy for 7‐to 16‐year‐olds: A randomized controlled trial with traumatized refugee children.” Journal of traumatic stress 23, no. 4 (2010): 437-445. Sadler, Thomas W. Langman's medical embryology. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2011. Steel, Zachary, Derrick Silove, Tuong Phan, and Adrian Bauman. “Longterm effect of psychological trauma on the mental health of Vietnamese refugees resettled in Australia: a population-based study.” The Lancet 360, no. 9339 (2002): 1056-1062. Takeuchi, David T., Nolan Zane, Seunghye Hong, David H. Chae, Fang Gong, Gilbert C. Gee, Emily Walton, Stanley Sue, and Margarita Alegría. “Immigration-related factors and mental disorders among Asian Americans.” American Journal of Public Health 97, no. 1 (2007): 84-90. Uehara, Edwina S., David T. Takeuchi, and Michael Smukler. "Effects of combining disparate groups in the analysis of ethnic differences: Variations among Asian American mental health service consumers in the level of community functioning." American Journal of Community Psychology 22, no. 1 (1994): 83-99. Ung, Loung, First they killed my father, (New York City: Harper Perennial, 2006). Vaage, Aina B., Per H. Thomsen, Cécile Rousseau, Tore Wentzel-Larsen, Thong V. Ta, and Edvard Hauff. “Paternal predictors of the mental

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health of children of Vietnamese refugees.” Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health 5, no. 1 (2011): 2. Wolynn, Mark. It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes who We are and how to End the Cycle. Penguin, 2017.

PART 3: PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF AND OTHERS

CHAPTER TEN WORDED SELVES MEGAN C HAYES

[We] use the literary work to symbolize and finally to replicate ourselves... —Norman Holland1 The novelist ventures out into words. Words venture out into the world. —Guy Walter2 The purpose of literature could be seen as the preserving, and perhaps even the widening, of... self-consciousness. Through the artistic word, we learn who we are. —Caryl Emerson3

When we commit elements of our self and experience onto paper, as we do in the creation of literary works, we are—to use an analogy—building ever-multiplying extensions onto the "house" of our individual identity. Thus, through writing, we are involved in a process, both figuratively and quite literally, of becoming more. The construction of these extensions, this chapter will propose, may, therefore, have profound implications for our psychological well-being. In what follows I outline a novel theory of the intersections between creative writing, identity, and positive psychology. At the centre of the theory is the suggestion that writing is a way of constructing worded selves. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, I consider the tripartite nature of the process I call wording the self, addressing the origin of writing in the individual mind (the self); the process of its translation onto the page 1

Norman N. Holland, “Unity Identity Text Self,” PMLA 90, no. 5 (1975): 816. Guy Walter, “Foreword: The Courage of Words," in The Novelist’s Lexicon: Writers on the Words That Define Their Work, by Villa Gillet and Le Monde, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), xi. 3 Caryl Emerson, “The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and the Internalization of Language," Critical Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1983): 259. 2

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(the wording); and its final form as a textual artefact in the world (a worded self). 4 In doing so, firstly I draw on the work of Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, in support of the inherently social view of the individual mind that I adopt here, including how minds come to form “inner speech” from “outer speech.” Secondly, I draw upon Mikhail Bakhtin to examine and discuss the act of translating this inner speech into writing. I then draw upon several contemporary researchers who have advanced the theories of Vygotsky and Bakhtin across linguistics and psychology. Finally, I advance a positive psychological view of the literary arts, supporting this discussion with a brief outline of findings from a novel qualitative study with fourteen practicing writers. Vygotsky’s essays, rather than being “historical relics,” 5 have an enduring significance in contemporary psychology. Bakhtin’s theories, too, remain of fresh interest to contemporary literary scholars and psychologists alike. Connecting these two thinkers makes it possible to construct a robust interdisciplinary theoretical framework of writing as wording the self, and to begin to unpick how this process may relate to well-being. The two theorists draw together the typically distinct fields of psychological science and literature without the necessity of relying upon psychoanalytical theories—traditionally prototypical as an approach to literature-and-psychology. Vygotsky’s theory of the mind and language acquisition is social and dialogic. Similarly, Bakhtin’s view of writing is that it is a profoundly culturally saturated and dialogic act. Both theories, then, highlight the relational nature of the writing process, whilst also supporting the view that we word the self in writing. One of Vygotsky’s major contributions to developmental psychology was the observation that children’s “egocentric speech”—that is, when children talk to themselves in the performance of an activity—is a transitional step from communicative “outer speech” with an adult, towards the eventual internalisation of this speech as thought; speech “turned inward”. He writes:

4

It is worth noting that, whilst the process I describe here appears linear in nature, any act of writing would necessarily be far more iterative than this—occurring in cycles, undergoing real-time revision and transformation, and involving the inevitable loss of ideas. 5 Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner, “Introduction," in Mind in Society: Development of Higher Psychological Processes, by Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978), 1.

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Chapter Ten The greatest change in children’s capacity to use language as a problemsolving tool takes place...when socialized speech (which has previously been used to address an adult) is turned inward. Instead of appealing to the adult, children appeal to themselves; language thus takes on an intrapersonal function in addition to its inter-personal use.6

This speech turned inward is vitally significant to a discussion of creative writing in the context of psychological well-being. In this context, writing can be viewed as an instance of the writer “appealing to” themselves as well as to any readers. Vygotsky claims that we all continue to, in essence, “talk” to ourselves as children do, but that this takes place intrapersonally, within the private inner realm of the mind. Social interaction, Vygotsky argued, is, in fact, the basis for all of what he called the “higher mental functions” whereby “an interpersonal process is transformed into an intrapersonal one.” He continues: Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals.7

Thus, Vygotsky argues, all inner speech is social in origin. He also posited that the literary arts—because language itself is inherently social— are social in origin. If we accept this persuasive theory, this has myriad implications for psychological well-being in writing. Given that identity is largely narrated or “worded”—which many contemporary psychologists concede (see discussion of Charles Fernyhough below)—Vygotsky’s view of inner speech as inherently social therefore naturally locates identity as socially mediated. Writing is a manner of Vygotsky’s problem-solving that—whilst being mediated by the socio-cultural nature of the language in which it is written—provides a tangible way of an individual negotiating with language conventions, and, by virtue of this, conventions of identity.8 6

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, Mind in Society: Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978), 27 (emphasis original). 7 Ibid., 57 (emphasis original). 8 I adopt the term “problem-solving” here to echo Vygotsky’s theory; however, I do not ascribe to the pejorative implications of speaking in terms of "problems" of identity that must be “solved.” I find “negotiation” or Wertsch’s term “mediated action” more appropriate.

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It is important to stress that this does not necessarily imply that identity is determined by the society in which it is situated, but is rather constructed within it. In other words, whilst the self may be social in origin, the individual plays an active role in their relationship with society. Indeed, the language of any society is not wholly fixed but malleable; we may not be able to invent in an established language freely, yet we each possess a certain level of autonomy in our ability to construe and contest it. Writing creatively can be viewed as a method of practising this ability, and thus, potentially, of practicing our ability to construe and contest our “possibilities for selfhood”9 within a given context, to use Roz Ivanič’s terms. Writing offers an extension of inner speech back outward where, Vygotsky claims, it originated. This implies that in writing we may enter into a kind of reciprocal negotiation between the “intrapsychological” domain of the mind and the “interpsychological," socio-cultural domain. Put another way, writing, and the page extend the realm of our intrapsychological negotiation into more tangible form. As we word the self, we become more. In wording our inner speech on the page, then, we effectively construct worded selves in writing. We are able to enter into dialogue with these selves, to shape them, to view ourselves in them, and to allow others to view us in them (if we choose to share our writing). This act of wording the self offers us the ability to enter into dialogue with diverse aspects of the self and to place ourselves in dialogue with our society, as Celia Hunt has posited.10 Indeed, any textual artefact we construct exists both as a part of us, and as a part of the socio-cultural setting in which we find ourselves. Thus, these textual artefacts operate as worded selves: they perform on our behalf as manifestations of our “inner speech” into “outer speech”; they are replicated, representative versions-of-the-self in the world. In his oft-cited essay, "Discourse in the Novel," Bakhtin, echoing Vygotsky,11 claimed that language is "a living, socio-ideological concrete thing," that it is "heteroglot" and, "for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other." He continues: 9

Roz Ivanič, Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing (John Benjamins Publishing, 1998), 10. 10 Celia Hunt, “Creative Writing and Problems of Identity: A Horneyan Perspective,” in Psycho-Politics and Cultural Desires, ed. Jan Campbell and Janet Harbord (London: Routledge, 1998), 217–33. 11 Bakhtin and Vygotsky were contemporaries although, as is generally believed, never met.

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Chapter Ten The word in a language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent when he appropriates the word... Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language... but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own.12

It is my view that creative writing is one way to, in Bakhtin’s terms, actively “take the word” and “populate” what Hans and Shulamith Kreitler call its semantic space (see below). Writing, in this sense, can be viewed as Bakhtin’s "moment of appropriation." Because Bakhtin observed that language lacks neutrality, and is in fact "overpopulated—with the intentions of others," he stressed that "Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process." Yet, this expropriation is possible for Bakhtin. He stresses: Consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language. With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, and it must move in and occupy a position for itself within it...13

In creative writing, the concrete, “literary-verbal” manner of making the word “one’s own”—having implications for consciousness in Bakhtin’s view—would necessarily have vital implications for psychological well-being, and identity. To explicate how this may occur, I now turn to some contemporary iterations of both Vygotskian and Bakhtinian theory. These are James Wertsch’s Voices of the Mind (1991); Roz Ivanič’s Writing and Identity (1998); the “dialogical self” theory of Herbert Hermans; and the “dialogic mind” theory of Charles Fernyhough. Collectively these works map together the multifarious fields of writing, creativity, psychology, dialogism, and theories of self and identity. Vygotsky’s view that the mind is social in origin is perhaps his most influential. However, Wertsch develops another of Vygotsky’s major claims: that "human action, on both the social and individual planes, is mediated by tools and signs. 14 This view is of particular import to a discussion of creative writing. Writing is an action that is both a "tool" and reliant upon "signs." In this vein, Wertsch has offered an influential 12

Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel," 294–95. Bakhtin, 295. 14 James V. Wertsch, Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 19. 13

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hybridisation of the thought of Vygotsky and Bakhtin. Underpinning his approach is what he terms the “sociocultural situatedness of mediated action.”15 In the context of Wertsch’s view, creative writing can be viewed as a situated, mediated action—with implications for the development of the individual identity. Building upon Vygotsky’s notion of the mind, Wertsch writes: Rather than something that is appropriately predicated only on the individual, or even of the brain, the mind is defined here in terms of its inherently social and meditational properties. Thus, even when mental action is carried out by individuals in isolation, it is inherently social in certain respects, and it is almost always carried out with the help of tools such as computers, language, or number systems.16

In support of this point, Wertsch outlines Vygotsky’s analysis of a study published in 1932 known as “the forbidden colours task.17 In this study, children were asked to discuss a range of coloured objects, but not permitted to use certain colour terms more than once, or at all in some cases. The children were provided with coloured cards to assist in the activity, which they could utilise as they wished. The findings were that younger children did not systematically utilise the cards, and were in fact observably hindered by them in some cases. Older children, conversely, made systematic use of the cards—for example in turning them over when they had used that term to aid memory—and thereby performed better at the task. Wertsch concludes, drawing upon Vygotsky’s analysis of this study, that “the inclusion of signs in action fundamentally transforms the action. The incorporation of meditational means does not simply facilitate action that could have occurred without them.” In fact, it was Vygotsky’s view, quoted by Wertsch, that “by being included in the process of behaviour, the psychological tool alters the entire flow and structure of mental functions.18 Writing, simply by virtue of its being “included in the process of behaviour,” intrinsically adapts aspects of the “flow and structure of mental functions”—and thus, inevitably, our sense of identity. In line with Vygotsky, then, I posit that we are fundamentally altered in our engagement with writing. The pen and paper (or computer) with which we write can serve as a psychological “tool” for organising the self into and 15

Wertsch, 18. Wertsch, 15. 17 Wertsch, 32. 18 Ibid., 32–33 (emphasis added). 16

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amongst socio-cultural “signs.” My theory advances beyond this, however. I propose that the textual artefacts resulting from writing—our worded selves—continue to serve as psychological tools as we read, re-read, revise, and share them. This view is in keeping with the work of Sophie Nicholls on “Making” and “Being Remade” in writing.19 Each of these many iterative phases, all inherent to the writing process, may fundamentally alter “the entire flow and structure of mental functions,” as Vygotsky claims. Ivanič’s treatment of writing builds upon the thought of Wertsch, Vygotsky, and Bakhtin. Ivanič adopts a social-constructionist view of self. She acknowledges Kenneth Gergen’s observation that "self finds its origins in human relationships,”20 whilst simultaneously challenging this view. ...people ARE agents in the construction of their own identities: they send messages to each other about these socially ratified ways of being, and thereby reproduce or challenge them in the micro-social environment of every-day encounters.21

Ivanič stresses the import of this interpretation of self-as-agent, even within social-constructionist thought. She utilises terminology by Anthony Giddens,22 which casts the self as a “reflexive project” and applies this to writing, suggesting that: ...writing makes a particularly tangible contribution to ‘the reflexive project of the self,' with a three-way interplay between the writer’s life experience, their sense of self, and the reality they are constructing through their writing.23

Ivanič develops this view of the “interplay” between self, life experience, and writing by drawing upon Bakhtin’s conception of the “overpopulated” nature of language. Bakhtin argues that “each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life.”24 Ivanič adds to this by arguing that how we use language serves to either 19

Sophie Nicholls, “Writing the Body: Ways in Which Creative Writing Can Facilitate a Felt, Bodily Sense of Self” (Ph.D. thesis, Sussex University, 2007). 20 Gergen, “The Social Construction of Self," 635. 21 Ivanič, Writing and Identity, 19. 22 Anthony Giddens, Modernity, and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 23 Ivanič, Writing and Identity, 16. 24 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel," 293.

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uphold or contest these “values, beliefs and practices” as they surface “within particular contexts of culture.” 25 Even a single instance of language use, Ivanič claims, both makes use of these conventions and serves to reinforce or oppose them. In even a single instance of language use—perhaps only a solitary word—we not only reinforce or oppose the word in context, but we ourselves inhabit or “populate” it. In Bakhtin’s terms, we “expropriate” words: employing them to represent, replicate, and communicate our selves and our "inner speech." Writing can, therefore, be viewed as a form of wording the self. This is not a straightforward process. Rather, a multifarious mesh of identities—or levels of selfhood— inhabit the self that writes. In Ivanič’s terms, “an individual’s identity is a complex of interweaving positionings.”26 Herbert Hermans echoes Ivanič to contend that, contrary to the Cartesian model of “one centralized I responsible for the steps in reasoning or thinking,” the self is more accurately described as “many I positions that can be occupied by the same person.”27 Also in line with Ivanič, Hermans’ evokes the Bakhtinian concept that language is "the concrete living environment in which the consciousness of the verbal artist lives" and which “is never unitary,” 28 thus offering a useful theoretical bridge between the fields of psychology and literary studies. This makes Hermans’ theory particularly valuable for querying the intersections between self, identity and creative writing. Whilst much scholarship has challenged the dualistic distinction between brain and body, Hermans argues that less attention has been given to the presumed “separation between self and other.”29 Drawing upon the work of the phenomenologist Erwin Straus, Hermans adds: Descartes’ Cogito implies not only a dualism between mind and body but also a dissociation between self and other. When we are speaking about an ‘outside world’ or about ‘the other,’ Straus reasons, we are in fact using a Cartesian terminology, implying that the world is outside of consciousness, and that, reciprocally, consciousness, including sensory experience, is outside of the world.

25

Ivanič, Writing, and Identity, 42–43. Ivanič, 10. 27 Hubert J. M. Hermans, “The Dialogical Self: Toward a Theory of Personal and Cultural Positioning," Culture & Psychology 7, no. 3 (2001): 249. 28 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel," 288. 29 Hubert J. M. Hermans, “The Construction and Reconstruction of a Dialogical Self," Journal of Constructivist Psychology 16, no. 2 (2003): 92. 26

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Hermans echoes Vygotsky in countering this dualism—arguing that the other is intrinsic to the self: The words of other people, invested with indignation, anger, doubt, anxiety, or pleasure, enter interior dialogues and create an “inner society of voices” that, in its oppositions, agreements, disagreements, negotiations, and integrations, does not, in essence, differ from the communications in the outside world.30

Thus Hermans et al. challenge “the sharp self-nonself boundaries drawn by Western rationalistic thinking,”31 a position also taken by Paul John Eakin in his work on the autobiography.32 Hermans and colleagues propose, instead, that the self can be “conceived of as a dialogical narrator” that is “(a) spatially organized and embodied and (b) social, with the other not outside but in the self-structure, resulting in a multiplicity of dialogically interacting selves.”33 For Hermans and colleagues, this dialogue typically occurs within the “self-space” of the intra-psychological realm. Yet recently Hermans has acknowledged that this “dialogical space” “can also be felt when writing a diary or when practicing forms of creative writing” 34 as Hunt has suggested. In the writing process one’s intra-psychological and multifarious “I positions" can be viewed as becoming a part of the externalised inter-psychological world, and vice versa. On the page, we are witnessed and witnessing, beholding and beheld. Put another way, in writing we become readers of ourselves as well as imagining ourselves to be “read” by others. For Hermans, “a dialogical space” typically emerges when individuals are “involved in constructive and generative communication.” He continues: A dialogical space can be described as an invisible, in-between arena that has semipermeable boundaries with its surroundings... Typically, this space

30

Hermans, 94. Hubert J. M. Hermans, Harry J. Kempen, and Rens J. Van Loon, “The Dialogical Self: Beyond Individualism and Rationalism," American Psychologist 47, no. 1 (1992), 30. 32 Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Cornell University Press, 1999). 33 Ibid., 23. 34 Hubert J. M. Hermans, “Self as a Society of I-Positions: A Dialogical Approach to Counseling”, The Journal of Humanistic Counseling 53, no. 2 (2014): 147. 31

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is felt by [individuals] as something that is emerging between them and linking them in invisible ways.35

Wording the self in the writing process makes this “invisible, inbetween arena” visible, offering us a sense of “linking... in invisible ways” with others. Central to my theory of worded selves, therefore, is the recognition that any meta-structure of self, like Hermans’ theory, necessarily requires our “I-positions” be not only affectively experienced, but also cognitively translated into language. 36 There is surely some difficulty in sustained, significant internal dialogue between I-positions, without first the cognitive formulation—a wording—of such positions. It is worth noting that this worded conception of identity would necessarily exist largely in the domain of Ulric Neisser’s extended self, which “is based primarily on our personal memories and anticipations”; or the conceptual self, the “‘self-concept’ which draws its meaning from the network of assumptions and theories in which it is embedded”.37 This is as opposed to Neisser’s more primary ecological self—our personhood in relation to physical place and space—or interpersonal self, which is specified in the context of “immediate unreflective social interaction” 38 with others. Hermans does stress the embodied nature of the dialogical self and includes affective self-experience in his discussion. Yet he is somewhat ambiguous as to whether a purely affective I-position can exist. He writes of “Composition Work,” wherein objects such as “stones are used to represent I-positions and their dynamic relationships.”39 In such cases “the affective quality of I-positions can be expressed by the color, [sic] shape, texture, or weight of the stones.” 40 Yet, what quickly follows is the admission that one is “using stones to represent I-positions” thus “giving them a voice" so that the stones act as “a transition from the nonverbal and 35

Hermans, “Self as a Society of I-Positions," 146. This might be considered somewhat parallel with Eugene Gendlin’s notion that “meaning is formed in the interaction of experiencing and something that functions symbolically. Feeling without symbolisation is blind; symbolisation without feeling is empty”. See Eugene T. Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective (Illinois: Northernwestern University Press, 1962), 5. 37 Ulric Neisser, “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge,” in Self & Identity: Contemporary Philosophical Issues, ed. Kolak Daniel and Raymond Martin (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 386. 38 Neisser, 391. 39 Hermans, “Self as a Society of I-Positions," 152. 40 Hermans, 153. 36

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affective level to more explicit and verbal ways of understanding.”41 Thus worded I-positions appear to remain the standard for dialogical “understanding” of the self. In this vein, one might also argue that writing down these worded I-positions is not only one form of “dialogical space” but is, in fact, one of the most potent; a tangible method of giving our various I-positions “a voice” in the world. Echoing Hermans, Charles Fernyhough has also advanced Vygotskian and Bakhtinian theory into the proposition of a “dialogic mind.” 42 In particular, he has advanced Vygotsky’s theory on the social, dialogic nature of our “higher mental functions.” He outlines the concrete implications of Vygotsky’s theories to modern developmental psychology by setting out some “characteristics of higher mental functioning” 43 including the ability to accommodate multiple perspectives; the fact that these perspectives are “manifested... in words (spoken and written), gestures and other signs”; and that these perspectives are socially derived, internalised, often conflicting, and open-ended. He summarises: ...the higher mental functions develop through the progressive internalization of semiotically manifested perspectives on reality, such that mature functioning involves the simultaneous coming-into-conflict of differing internalized perspectives.44

Whilst I concur with Fernyhough, from a more positive psychological perspective (discussed shortly) we might well reject the pejorative implication of the word “conflict” in this context, and propose that these multiple internal perspectives—whilst at times in debate with one another—could just as easily be considered largely interactive, interreliant, and in community. This is not to say that the ability to tolerate internal conflict is not important or, indeed, potentially a sign of maturity. Rather, I suggest that possessing a dialogical mind need not always denote the inner world as a battleground where conflicts are fought. To use the analogy of a society: whilst any society can be defined by its inhabitants' “coming-intoconflict,” it can equally be defined by spirited debate and discussion that is

41

Hermans, 153. Charles Fernyhough, “The Dialogic Mind: A Dialogic Approach to the Higher Mental Functions," New Ideas in Psychology 14, no. 1 (1996): 47–62. 43 Fernyhough, “The Dialogic Mind," 51. 44 Fernyhough, 53. 42

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gradually worked out and resolved. 45 In the creative writing process specifically, any number of one’s “internalized perspectives” may come into contact—indeed, intense dialogue and debate may ensue, perhaps leading to a resolution, or not—without the writer necessarily ever experiencing this as an inner conflict. Fernyhough nevertheless presents a useful framework for the advancement of Vygotsky’s theory in contemporary psychological research, indicating the enduring value of a dialogical interpretation of the individual amongst psychologists. In developing a more positive interpretation of the literary arts—as recently proposed by Tim Lomas46—another major critical influence on my theory, and particularly on how wording the self relates to psychological well-being, has been Vygotsky’s The Psychology of Art (1971). Equally cogent on the topic of literary theory as with psychological theory, Vygotsky was “a man comparable to Bakhtin in productivity and interdisciplinary brilliance.”47 For Vygotsky, as Emerson notes: ...the Word is a powerful amalgam: part sign, part tool, it is the significant humanizing event. One makes a self through the words one has learned, fashions one’s own voice and inner speech by a selective appropriation of the voices of others.48

Emerson also stresses Vygotsky’s stance that “we learn, through the word... who we might yet become”,49 echoing Ivanič’s "possibilities for selfhood" that we find in language and can inhabit or oppose via the writing process. My theory of wording the self similarly presents creative writing as a profound form of this "selective appropriation" of words, which may, in turn, help the writer to "fashion" positive aspects of identity. This encourages a view of writing as something over and above a quelling of internal conflict. Instead, it emphasises the writing process as a constructive, socially-embedded negotiation of one's identity. This “social function” of the literary arts as having “positive tasks [and] purposes for man’s psyche” is developed by Vygotsky when he 45

This may be purely an issue of semantics but is important to note given that my theory highlights a more constructive or “positive” conception of human individuals. 46 Tim Lomas, “Positive Art: Artistic Expression and Appreciation as an Exemplary Vehicle for Flourishing,” Review of General Psychology 20, no. 2 (2016): 171. 47 Emerson, “The Outer Word and Inner Speech," 251. 48 Emerson, 255. 49 Ibid., 260 (emphasis original).

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criticises classical psychoanalytical interpretations of the arts—specifically literature—as a fantasy within which to enact repressed desires: Such an interpretation of art reduces its social role; art begins to appear as an antidote whose task is to save mankind from vice, but which has no positive tasks or purposes for man's psyche... the very problems of repression and inhibition (what is repressed or inhibited and how it is repressed or inhibited) are contingent upon the social environment in which the poet or the reader must live. Thus, psychoanalysis fails to explain the reasons for the historical evolution of art and changes in its social functions, since art has remained constant from its very beginning...50

This view refutes the traditional psychoanalytical view of artistic creativity as “phantasy”51 and prioritises the more positive—or, to use a slightly more focused psychological term, adaptive—elements of the literary arts, including their social value. Vygotsky views literary art as “an intelligent social activity,” distinct from “the senseless formation of pathological symptoms” or “disorderly accumulations of images in dreams.”52 He adds: Unlike dreams and symptoms of illness or neuroses, works of art are both social and socially conditioned... It takes a total rejection both of reality and social psychology to state that a writer in his work pursues only subconscious or unconscious conflicts without ever confronting any conscious social problem or task. This extraordinary flaw of the psychology of art becomes most evident when it is applied to the study of the nonfigurative arts. How can it explain music, ornamental painting, or architecture, where the language of form cannot be translated simply and directly into the erotic language of sexuality? This gaping void helps us reject the psychoanalytical approach to art...53

Whilst Vygotsky’s rather sweeping statement about the “psychoanalytical approach” may be said to lack nuance, I have taken some encouragement from his viewpoint. The construction of literary texts is often an adaptive, social, and dialogical process. Writing these worded selves embeds authors in their social context, whilst also asserting the 50

Lev S. Vygotsky, The Psychology of Art (MIT Press, 1974), 79. Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming," in On Freud’s Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, by Servulo A. Figueira, Peter Fonagy, and Ethel Spector Person (London, GBR: Karnac Books, 1908). 52 Vygotsky, The Psychology of Art, 81. 53 Vygotsky, 79–83. 51

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agency of the author as actively negotiating and constructing their identity within this context. By employing the term creative writing in this chapter, I have intended to imply instances whereby an individual chooses to write imaginatively and artistically, either via prose or poetry, as a pastime or for profit, recreationally or as an elected career (and often through any number of combinations of these). However, I do not imagine a strict binary distinction between creative forms of writing and non-creative forms. Indeed, much literature attests to the psychological benefits of writing in both modes. Hunt speaks to the “arbitrariness” of the definition of creative writing as “imaginative” writing and, in fact, acknowledges that all writing “can be regarded, to an extent, as a form of fictionalised autobiography, or ‘autofiction.'"54 This is a view I adopt here. The reason for such a position is, as seems self-evident that even ostensibly factual writing is to some extent, creative and much creative writing necessarily utilises and relies upon certain “true” facts—the sun rises each day, human beings are not immortal, and so on.55 Even the process of wording one’s “very deepest thoughts and feelings” as in the scientific expressive writing paradigm,56 arguably involves some level of imagery or metaphor, given that this is characteristic of human language,57 as well as, perhaps more often than not, the inclusion of a narrative or “plot.” Both metaphor and plot, of course, are features of creative writing. Equally, crafting a fictional narrative will typically involve evoking “what we know”—with the literary arts providing something of a simulation of real life. 58 Thus, almost invariably, creative writing will require drawing on one’s own “deepest thoughts and feelings” about the world, and one’s experiences of their world. 54

Hunt, “Creative Writing and Problems of Identity," 231. In the case of fantasy fiction or magical realism, whereby the norms of the world we know are subverted, we will usually still find widely held values, or human “truths”, reflected back to us: Harry Potter comes of age and falls in love; Frodo Baggins succumbs to his baser greed, only to ultimately overcome it for the sake of a greater good, etc. 56 James W. Pennebaker, “Writing about Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process," Psychological Science 8, no. 3 (1997): 162. 57 See Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 58 See Raymond A. Mar and Keith Oatley, “The Function of Fiction Is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience," Perspectives on Psychological Science 3, no. 3 (May 1, 2008): 173–92. 55

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Ivanič offers a persuasive account of the interaction between identity and academic essay writing amongst mature university students. 59 Her argument is one that analyses at length the conventions of academic writing, and the struggle that students with diverse life experiences can face in trying to assimilate their identity into this style of writing. Creative writing, too, has its own set of conventions—particularly within its subgenres like literary fiction, or if we seek to publish—yet it can be far more accommodating of diverse experiences. In other words, the possibilities for our sense that we can inhabit this type of writing are more multifarious. Whilst there certainly are formal norms and restrictions in creative writing, these are easily subverted. In fact, subverting norms is often considered central to the idea of being creative in writing, versus, for example, academic writing. Kreitler and Kreitler write of the tendency “to use in literature less familiar words and a richer vocabulary than in nonliterary contexts” emphasising "remoteness from the habitual. 60 This “placement of usual words in unusual contexts or unusual words in usual contexts can hardly fail to alert the reader.”61 Thus one could argue that this might potentially alert the individual to new possibilities for the self, and hold stronger implications for psychological transformation. If we consider any kind of writing as a tool that intersects with our identity, then creative writing—in offering increased options for interpretation and autonomy vis-à-vis other modalities of writing—is likely to have broader implications for the construction of this identity. The process of creative writing relies, of course, on our creative employment and manoeuvring of words—a process that is neither simplistic nor occurs in isolation from one’s cultural context. Kreitler and Kreitler write that “when one concentrates on words, each word emerges as a microcosmos embedded in a multifaceted, multi-layered, multidirectional space of meaning.” 62 This echoes Bakhtin’s influential thesis of the “multivoiced” utterance. 63 Despite this emphasis within literary studies on what Kreitler and Kreitler call the semantic space of the word, in social and developmental psychology there has been less 59

Ivanič, Writing, and Identity. Hans Kreitler and Shulamith Kreitler, Psychology of the Arts (Duke University Press, 1972), 223. 61 Kreitler and Kreitler, 230. 62 Kreitler and Kreitler, 225. 63 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, US: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–422. 60

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emphasis on the possibilities contained within words, and far more of a focus on psychological narrative identity.64 It is my contention that we do not only sense ourselves as inhabiting protracted narratives but also as inhabiting this semantic space of the word. The “space” offered by even a single word is large and dense with what Ivanič calls possibilities for selfhood. It is, therefore, a space that provides the building blocks of narrative identity, and yet, by itself, is equally as complex in regard to identity construction. Kreitler and Kreitler write of the different “meaning values” contained within this space of the word, and that “some meaning values may be highly personal and idiosyncratic,” whilst “others may reflect conventions.” 65 Again, this is in line with Bakhtin. Thus this semantic space of words “is not constant. It undergoes changes on both interpersonal and personal levels. In the course of historical, cultural, and social developments, new values... may be added to a word’s meaning, old values are reinterpreted.”66 Kreitler and Kreitler, therefore, add that ...on the level of the single individual, the semantic space of a word is an open system which undergoes changes not only developmentally but also from one occasion to another. The degree of expansion or contraction of a word’s semantic space depends on situational factors, on the individual’s set, and on the context in which the word is used.67

As the self enters into, engages with, and employs words creatively, then, this vastly complex, fluctuating, and mercurial “open system” would appear to offer manifold possibilities for the construction of our identity— and, consequently, for our psychological well-being. Of course, as I addressed in the opening paragraph of this chapter, my understanding of psychological well-being is largely informed and shaped by the semantic space of the words positive psychology. Whilst positive psychology is often conceived of as the exclusive study of positive experiences, Stephen Joseph and P. Alex Linley argue that. ...a positive psychological perspective on the discipline of psychology [implies] that the focus of scientific research and interest should be understanding the entire breadth of human experience, from loss, suffering,

64 Dan P. McAdams and Kate C. McLean, “Narrative Identity,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 22, no. 3 (June 1, 2013): 233–38. 65 Kreitler and Kreitler, Psychology of the Arts, 226. 66 Kreitler and Kreitler, 227. 67 Kreitler and Kreitler, 227.

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With this point in mind, I do not mean to limit discussion of psychological well-being to those studies that analyse positive processes in isolation. In a sense, my emphasis on positive psychology principally represents an ethos. It is a privileging of studies that seek to understand and to emphasise humans at their best, countering the psychopathological slant traditionally favoured in creativity research. As Kay Redfield Jamison writes in her book on the topic of creativity and bipolar disorder, Touched With Fire, the “possible link between madness and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent cultural notions.”69 Within psychological science, Martin Seligman has critiqued the pervasive understanding of positive experiences as inauthentic, and even motivated by our baser instincts—a viewpoint that I would argue has also pervaded in literary studies: There has been a profound obstacle to a science and practice of positive traits and positive states: the belief that virtue and happiness are inauthentic, epiphenomenal, parasitic upon or reducible to the negative traits and states. This ‘rotten-to-the-core' view pervades Western thought, and if there is any doctrine, positive psychology seeks to overthrow it is this one. Its original manifestation is the doctrine of original sin. In secular form, Freud dragged this doctrine into 20th-century psychology where it remains fashionably entrenched in academia today. For Freud, all of civilization is just an elaborate defence against basic conflicts over infantile sexuality and aggression.70

Conversely to Freud, and in line with Seligman, I contend that individuals and collectives hold an innate potential for good and are equally, if not markedly more so, motivated by this tendency. The humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers proposed that human beings have an actualising tendency towards self-development or selfenhancement, and this viewpoint has deeply impacted my understanding of why we might be drawn to write creatively. For Rogers, this predisposition of actualising is:

68 P. Alex Linley and Stephen Joseph, Positive Therapy: A Meta-Theory for Positive Psychological Practice (Hove, East Sussex: Routledge, 2006), 5. 69 Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched With Fire (Simon and Schuster, 1996), 50. 70 Martin E. P. Seligman, “Positive Psychology: Fundamental Assumptions," The Psychologist 16, no. 3 (2003): 126.

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...the inherent tendency of the organism to develop all its capacities in ways which serve to maintain or enhance the organism. It involves not only the tendency to meet what Maslow terms ‘deficiency needs' for air, food, water, and the like, but also more generalized activities. It involves development toward the differentiation of organs and of functions, expansion in terms of growth, expansion of effectiveness through the use of tools, expansion, and enhancement through reproduction. It is development toward autonomy and away from heteronomy, or control by external forces.71

I have come to consider writing as a process of, amongst other things, our self-actualisation. Writing is one profound form of Rogers’ “expansion and enhancement”— a replication of identity into worded selves. This is supported by my own qualitative research, which I now outline. Joseph and Linley, in mapping out a meta-theory for a “positive therapy,” propose that in therapy it “is not so much about what you do, as it is about how you do it.” 72 Thus we might say that a positive psychological approach to the literary arts is also about the "how" rather than the “what.” A fundamentally appreciative view of the person is the backbone of my research. This is evidenced in the primary research question of a recent qualitative study of fourteen practicing writers: how does the practice of creative writing contribute to psychological wellbeing or “flourishing”? In response to this research question, I developed a Grounded Theory of psychological well-being in creative writing that has served to explicate the process I have called wording the self, as well as the potential outcomes of this process. Much literature has posited a practical “writing therapy”; 73 journal writing as “self-therapy”; 74 or writing as “scriptotherapy.” 75 Yet in the present study, I focused upon a group of self-motivated, creative writers in order to examine what the specific processes and outcomes of such a 71

Carl R. Rogers, "A Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal Relationships, as Developed in the Client-Centered Framework," in Psychology: A Study of a Science, Vol.3: Formulations of the Person and the Social Context, ed. S. Koch (New York: McGraw Hill, 1959), 196. 72 Linley and Joseph, Positive Therapy, 15. 73 Soul Mugerwa and John D. Holden, “Writing Therapy: A New Tool for General Practice?” British Journal of General Practice 62, no. 605 (December 1, 2012): 661–63. 74 Jeannie K. Wright, “Dialogical Journal Writing as ‘Self-Therapy’:‘I Matter,’” Counselling and Psychotherapy Research 9, no. 4 (2009): 234–240. 75 Richard J. Riordan, “Scriptotherapy: Therapeutic Writing as a Counseling Adjunct," Journal of Counseling & Development 74, no. 3 (1996): 263–269.

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“writing therapy”—or wording of the self—might be: what does wellbeing, as mediated by the writing process, look like? How is it lived and experienced? What are its potential outcomes? My theory represents an initial answer to these questions, grounded in the lived experience of writers themselves. The core category of my theory—described as the “central point” of a Grounded Theory, which “integrates all of that theory’s various aspects” 76 —was drawn from a particularly noteworthy in vivo code: writing as becoming more. This was mentioned when one participant, Isabel,77 reflected upon her experience of the writing process. She noted that …because you're writing you are becoming more. It's not like splitting yourself, so you are less, you are multiplying it, you're copying it, so you are—however much you write, you are that much more than you were...

This core category of Becoming more draws together four main conceptual categories. The first two of these categories are Owning experience and Sharing experience. These depict how the fourteen participants in my study described writing as preserving their lived experience, which they were compelled to share with others. This seemingly rather simple process, however, appeared to hold far-reaching implications for the self. The two further categories, Valuing the self and Transcending the self, depict how the participants in the study described writing as distinctly bolstering their positive self-concept, as well as—almost paradoxically— promoting self-transcendence. The writing was therefore described as a process both of self-validation and self-enhancement, and simultaneously as a form of self-surrender: a method of becoming more oneself, and of becoming more than oneself. Thus, Becoming more in creative writing evokes our sense of selfreplication into the discrete, worded selves of written documents, as Norman Holland has implied. Yet it also evokes becoming more oneself through experiences, during the writing process, of self-affirmation and self-improvement. Finally, it hints at becoming something more than oneself in writing or moving beyond the ego-of-one. Wording the self, it seems, offers us a ceaseless, cyclical process of realising, and willingly relinquishing, our selves; the eternal waltz of Emile Durkheim’s homo76

Jane Mills, Ann Bonner, and Karen Francis, “The Development of Constructivist Grounded Theory”, International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5, no. 1 (Nov 24, 2008): 30. 77 The names of participants are pseudonyms.

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duplex between autonomy and relatedness. In constructing worded selves, we become more our selves—and this occurs through our sense of interconnection with others. A primary limitation of the study conducted is that subjective firstperson accounts have inherent limitations as data from which researchers can draw generalisations. In such studies, there are always potential issues as to the validity of participants' self-reports, participants' possible desire to please the researcher, and relatively small sample size (although this latter point is, I believe, a necessary factor in conducting qualitative research in this depth). It is my hope that future research on psychological well-being in creative writing will draw upon a varied range of data in order to further test and validate the categories and subcategories proposed here. A second limitation of the study, in part due to its inductive and exploratory nature, is that I interviewed already practising writers who in most cases were either making professional careers as writers or aspired to do this. These writers, therefore, possessed an intrinsic motivation to write, which members of the general population might not possess. This means that the psychological impact of the writing by the participants in this study must be placed in the context of their personal goals. Many of the “feel good” factors of their writing might be partially attributed to a sense of furthering their career ambitions, or to personal goal-achievement. Therefore, another suggestion for future research would be for studies to employ both qualitative and quantitative methods to establish these boundaries and potentially control for them. This would help to explicate further the extent to which writing creatively may serve a more general population as a wellbeing-focused intervention. In this chapter, I have posited a theory of creative writing as a form of constructing worded selves, informed by a Grounded Theory study of Becoming more in creative writing. To conclude this chapter, it bears stressing that, as Ivanič claims, “when a writer words something in a particular way, by a particular choice of words and structures, they are... making a statement of identity about themselves.”78 We write, in a sense, to “speak” to the world about who we are, who we would like to become, and to place the self in context. Another of my research participants, Allison, stressed this point when she said, “sharing [writing] is just one more step to me figuring out who it is I am in connection with the world around me.”

78

Ivanič, Writing and Identity, 45.

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However, in addition to making a statement about the self in writing, this chapter has argued that we are in some way actually making selves in this process: extended, textual selves that serve on our behalf in the world. Crafting these worded selves may have potentially far-reaching consequences for both our identity and our wellbeing.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 259–422. Austin, US: University of Texas Press, 1981. Cole, Michael, and Sylvia Scribner. “Introduction.” In Mind in Society: Development of Higher Psychological Processes, by Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, 1–14. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Cornell University Press, 1999. Emerson, Caryl. “The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and the Internalization of Language.” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1983): 245–64. Fernyhough, Charles. “The Dialogic Mind: A Dialogic Approach to the Higher Mental Functions.” New Ideas in Psychology 14, no. 1 (1996): 47–62. Freud, Sigmund. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” In On Freud’s Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, by Servulo A. Figueira, Peter Fonagy, and Ethel Spector Person. London, GBR: Karnac Books, 1908. Gendlin, Eugene T. Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective. Illinois: Northernwestern University Press, 1962. Gergen, Kenneth J. “The Social Construction of Self.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Self, edited by Shaun Gallagher, Reprint edition, 633– 53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1991. Hermans, Hubert J. “Self as a Society of I-Positions: A Dialogical Approach to Counseling.” The Journal of Humanistic Counseling 53, no. 2 (2014): 134–159.

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Hermans, Hubert J., Harry J. Kempen, and Rens J. Van Loon. “The Dialogical Self: Beyond Individualism and Rationalism.” American Psychologist 47, no. 1 (1992): 23–33. Hermans, Hubert J. M. “The Construction and Reconstruction of a Dialogical Self.” Journal of Constructivist Psychology 16, no. 2 (2003): 89–130. —. “The Dialogical Self: Toward a Theory of Personal and Cultural Positioning.” Culture & Psychology 7, no. 3 (2001): 243–281. Holland, Norman N. “Unity Identity Text Self.” PMLA 90, no. 5 (1975): 813–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/461467. Hunt, Celia. “Creative Writing and Problems of Identity: A Horneyan Perspective.” In Psycho-Politics and Cultural Desires, edited by Jan Campbell and Janet Harbord, 217–33. London: Routledge, 1998. Ivanič, Roz. Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing. John Benjamins Publishing, 1998. Jamison, Kay Redfield. Touched With Fire. Simon and Schuster, 1996. Johnson, Mark, and George Lakoff. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Kreitler, Hans, and Shulamith Kreitler. Psychology of the Arts. Duke University Press, 1972. Linley, P. Alex, and Stephen Joseph. Positive Therapy: A Meta-Theory for Positive Psychological Practice. Hove, East Sussex: Routledge, 2006. Lomas, Tim. “Positive Art: Artistic Expression and Appreciation as an Exemplary Vehicle for Flourishing.” Review of General Psychology 20, no. 2 (2016): 171. Mar, Raymond A., and Keith Oatley. “The Function of Fiction Is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3, no. 3 (May 1, 2008): 173–92. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x. McAdams, Dan P., and Kate C. McLean. “Narrative Identity.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 22, no. 3 (June 1, 2013): 233–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721413475622. Mills, Jane, Ann Bonner, and Karen Francis. “The Development of Constructivist Grounded Theory.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5, no. 1 (November 24, 2008): 25–35. Mugerwa, Soul, and John D. Holden. “Writing Therapy: A New Tool for General Practice?” British Journal of General Practice 62, no. 605 (December 1, 2012): 661–63. https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp12X659457. Neisser, Ulric. “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge.” In Self & Identity: Contemporary Philosophical Issues, edited by Kolak Daniel and Raymond Martin, 386–403. New York: Macmillan, 1991.

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Nicholls, Sophie. “Writing the Body: Ways in Which Creative Writing Can Facilitate a Felt, Bodily Sense of Self.” Unpublished, Sussex University, n.d. Pennebaker, James W. “Writing about Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process.” Psychological Science 8, no. 3 (1997): 162–166. Riordan, Richard J. “Scriptotherapy: Therapeutic Writing as a Counseling Adjunct.” Journal of Counseling & Development 74, no. 3 (1996): 263–269. Rogers, Carl R. “A Theory of Therapy, Personality and Interpersonal Relationships, as Developed in the Client-Centered Framework.” In Psychology: A Study of a Science, Vol.3: Formulations of the Person and the Social Context, edited by S. Koch, 184–256. New York: McGraw Hill, 1959. Seligman, Martin E. P. “Positive Psychology: Fundamental Assumptions.” The Psychologist 16, no. 3 (2003): 126–27. Vygotsky, Lev S. The Psychology of Art. MIT Press, 1974. —. Mind in Society: Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978. Walter, Guy. “Foreword: The Courage of Words.” In The Novelist’s Lexicon: Writers on the Words That Define Their Work, by Villa Gillet and Le Monde, xi-xii. Translated by Catherine Temerson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Wertsch, James V. Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Wright, Jeannie K. “Dialogical Journal Writing as ‘Self-Therapy’:‘I Matter.’” Counselling and Psychotherapy Research 9, no. 4 (2009): 234–240.

CHAPTER ELEVEN MEMORY, NARRATIVE, AND VIOLENCE IN PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE LITERATURE MANAL AL-NATOUR There is a significant consensus on the differences in Palestinian responses towards the Israeli occupation that originate from the implications of national identity discourse and the division imposed by the catastrophe (nakbah) that befell Palestinians in 1948. This imposition forced some citizens to leave their land and become “outsiders,” while others remained on the occupied land and came to be known as “insiders.” While most critics and scholars tend to characterize Palestinian subjectivity as a dichotomy of insiders and outsiders, this study analyses the literary representations of Palestinian works that document, in particular, the complexity of Palestinian subjectivity after the June War and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and offers a new vision of Palestinian subjectivity that challenges this traditional dichotomy. The complexity of Palestinian subjectivity stems from Palestinians’ relationship with Palestine and its memories, creating overlaps and undercutting among subjectivities, allowing for an array of modes of subjectivities that are not limited to the traditional dichotomy of Palestinian “insiders” and “outsiders,” and constantly furthering boundaries among Palestinians as “them” and “us. Further, informed by a psychoanalytic approach, the study examines the complex emerging subjectivity and explores the realities from which they originate. Among the works I examine are: Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns, Ghassan Kanafani's Return to Haifa, and Mourid Barghouthi's I Saw Ramallah. In these works, the junction of memory, narrative, and violence represents a limited experience where unbearable violence leads to suppression, rupture of the symbolic order, and embodiment of the social fantasy. Some of the women characters in these works, I argue, negotiate a mediated space between insiders and outsiders, occupying a third category; other characters move fluidly between all three categories. While abjection and violence are presently repressed from the characters’ consciousness, the reality is never completely erased, leaving

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traces that I call codes of violence. The codes of violence and mementos, the physical objects that function to remind one person of another, serve as mechanisms for these women to reach psychological balance by creating a social reality that assures their existence. The codes of violence in these works allow the Palestinian characters to come to terms with their experiences of pain and, in some cases, communicate them to others by bridging the gap between symbolic and biological death, while in other cases, they help the Palestinians obtain their psychological balance and create a social fantasy. This study invites further examination of the complexity of Palestinian subjectivity and the variety of responses to violence and oppression in Palestinian literature. Several critics have examined our relationship to place and emphasized its intricacy and complexity. “Of Other Spaces,” in which Michael Foucault claims that our relationship to place supersedes any other connection, is perhaps one of the most prominent works in this regard (1986, 22). Our relationship to the place in which we live is complicated, according to Richard van Leeuwen, and shaped by memories, imagination, and narratives that create a particular sense of belonging and, subsequently, cultivates either a sense of solidarity or fragmentation among people (2003, 199). The traditional dichotomy of Palestinian “insiders” and “outsiders” is grounded in the notion of land as a source of integration or fragmentation. This fragmentation, van Leeuwen claims, transcends the social aspect of reaching the psychological and intellectual life dimensions (2003, 199). These emotional and intellectual aspects are what Palestinian people strive to possess with their attempts to regain the land. Their efforts are articulated in literary works that reflect "the complexity of the function of the land as a source of the collective and individual sense of identity" (2003, 199). This essay is concerned with this very notion of the “complexity” of Palestinian identity and subjectivity that has emerged as a result of the predicaments of the Nakbah (catastrophe) in 1948 as well as the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in June 1967. The complexity of Palestinian subjectivity stems from Palestinians' relationship with the place, Palestine, and its memories, creating overlaps and undercutting among subjectivities, which allows for a variety of subjectivities that are not limited to the traditional dichotomy of Palestinian “insiders” and “outsiders.” The literary works I examine in this study, Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns, Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, and Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa, best explore the Palestinians’ varied responses to the Israeli occupation, intelligently and eloquently exploring the complications

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and complexity of Palestinian subjectivity after the June War and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Further, these literary works are deliberately chosen as they move chronologically through wartime and occupation. Returning to Haifa depicts the story of Said and Safyyia as exiles who spend twenty years in Ramallah after their exodus from Haifa in 1948. I Saw Ramallah opens with Barghouti crossing the Allenby Bridge in June 1997 after thirty years of exile, which occurred in June 1967 when he was denied entry to his homeland after completing his final examinations at the University of Cairo. Barghouti’s account weaves together his reflection on his thirty years as an exile with the insiders’ perspectives on the predicament of occupation into a profoundly poetic narrative arc. Additionally, Wild Thorns serves as a microscope focused on the struggles of insiders after the 1967 June War and its impact on the sociopolitical and economic circumstances in Palestine. Crafted by authors who lived through the aftermath of 1967 June War, many consider the works to be the most prominent that tackle the issue of Palestinian insiders and outsiders and reveal the complexity of the Palestinian subjectivity and its expansion beyond the dichotomy of insiders and outsiders. The 1967 June War resulted in the exile of all Palestinians who were abroad on June fifth in 1967, a decision made by Israeli authorities after seizing Palestinian land and considering those who were abroad as foreigners. This decision imposed unbridgeable physical and temporal gulfs among Palestinians, and subsequently among their life experiences, ideologies, and interpretations of the Palestinian national discourse. The examined literary works illustrate this rift by depicting a journey back to occupied cities at a critical time for all Palestinians. Osama in Wild Thorns, Said in Returning to Haifa, and Barghouti in I Saw Ramallah return to their occupied cities after spending five years, twenty, and thirty years, respectively, in exile. Their life experiences have been shaped by their exile, and their relationship with their homeland has been mediated between the previous memories before their exile and the reality they find in Palestine after their return. The exiles’ vision of their homeland is distorted from history because there is a chasm between the time they lived in their real homeland and the one they imagined while in their exile. However, the ideologies of insiders and their relationship to the homeland have been simultaneously grounded in their daily struggles and life experiences under occupation, furthering the boundaries between the insiders and the outsiders to be “them” and “us.” Thus the characters’ exile from these occupied cities is not merely a backdrop in these literary works; rather it is fundamental in the creation of this gulf between insiders and outsiders. Therefore, the rift created by exile is integral in generating

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the complexity of Palestinian subjectivity. This complexity is inextricably intertwined with the juncture of memories of the place as well as life experiences of trauma and violence under occupation or living in exile, as it appears in the examined literary works in this study. The traditional dichotomy between insiders and outsiders has received notable attention from scholars who have examined its influence on Palestinian ideology1. In his After the Last Sky, Edward Said discusses the discrepancy between the insiders, or what he calls “interiors,” those who live in al-dakhil, and outsiders. “Interiors” refers to those who live in the “regions of the interior of Israel, to territories and people still Palestinian despite the interdictions of the Israeli presence. Until 1967, therefore, it meant the Palestinians who lived within Israel; after 1967 the phrase expanded to include the inhabitants of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, and since 1982 it has meant the Palestinians (and Lebanese) of South Lebanon. [… They are] Palestinians whose lives on the edge, under the gun, inside the barriers and kasbahs, entitle them to a kind of grace denied the rest of us [outsiders]” (1999, 52). Due to their direct living under Israeli rule, Said contends that the insiders enjoy a better sense of the Palestinian issue than the exteriors “who can only talk about Zionism while experiencing the unlovely solicitude of our Arab brethren on the outside” (1999, 52). However, outsiders, or what he calls Palestinians "‘in the exterior' or the manfa and ghurba (‘exile’ and ‘estrangement’) have been singularly unsuccessful, progressively graceless, unblessed, more and more eccentric, de-centered, alienated. We [outsiders] lost our status in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt” (1999, 51). Thus, the outsiders, according to Said, see the insiders as privileged and their possession of Israeli passports and mastering Hebrew are questioned as they are indicative of their lack of the sense of Arab nationalism (1999, 51). It is worth mentioning that the 1967 June War had a special impact not only on Palestinians and Palestine but also on the Arab countries as that conflict has shaped the geopolitical condition in the Arab world and its international relations with the world. The defeat in this war began a chain of subsequent fatalities and losses such as: the October 1973 War with Israel that ended with the Camp David Accords; the heroic reputation of the PLO resistance being defaced after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon; and the Palestinian Intifada resistance being devalued, followed by the signing OSLO treaty with Israel. The 1967 June War is “the one definite 1

See, Yaziji, Nejd, 1996. “Exile and Politics of (Self-) Representation: The Narrative of Bounded Space and Action in Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns” In Cross-Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders, edited by John C. Hawley, 87-107. New York: State University of New York Press.

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milestone for what followed and is following now” in Palestine, so much so that the number 67 became a symbol of pessimism and misfortune, representing multiple categories and subjectivities of Palestinians (Barghouti 2003, 176). The references to the number 67 are restlessly changing and extending to the Palestinian departure and the arrival, and the Palestinian dead and the alive. The number 67 is not only a number; it is a “number frozen in its frame. […] a statue of a number, in wax, in granite, in lead, in indelible chalk on a blackboard in a black hall. […]. It moves from the unconscious to the conscious for a transient moment” (Barghouti 2003, 171). The number 67 represents the repressed experience of the war that keeps surfacing in Palestinians’ lives as well as Arabs’ lives. The occupation of Palestine and the 1967 June War have politicalized Palestinians and Arabs, and their ills have reached the souls of men and women. Thereby, the psychological impact of the 1967 June War has been lingering in Palestinian and Arab generations more than any other war had. Barghouti asserts: “Is that June defeat a particular psychological problem for me? For my generation? For contemporary Arabs? Other events took place after it, other disappointments and setbacks no less dangerous. Wars raged, massacres were committed, political and intellectual discourses were alerted, but ‘67’ remains different” (2003, 172). The literary works examined in this study delve deeply into the impact of the 1967 June War, and their plots chronicle its problems on multiple levels and in chronological order. For example, Returning to Haifa, published in Arabic in 1969 and set in the Palestinian city of Haifa, compellingly spans twenty years of Palestinian history. Through the framework of the Exodus story of Said and his wife Safiyya, Returning to Haifa revolves around the traumatic mass forced the removal of Palestinians from Haifa in 1948 and their plight when Israel seized the remaining Palestinian land in 1967 and gave them temporary permission to visit what used to be their hometowns. The novel opens with Said and Safiyya on their way to Haifa to see their home and son Khaldun whom they were forced to leave behind twenty years ago due to the Israeli invasion of Haifa in 1948. Overwhelmed by the past traumatic memories that Haifa evokes, Said and Safiyya have a tragic reunion with their son Khaldun, now called Dov, who has been adopted by Poland family and raised to serve in the Israeli army. Their conversation with Dov and his adoptive parent Miriam complicates the notions of home and parenthood and impedes Said and Safiyya’s sense of belonging to their homeland or their son. At the time that Dov denies his biological parents and decides to continue with his life as an Israeli soldier, Said’s involvement in the

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Palestinian national struggle becomes clearer and his appreciation of his other son Khalid, who now wants to join the Palestinian Liberation Organization, grows unexpectedly. Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns, published in 1976, treats the aftermath of the 1967 June War. In Wild Thorns, Khalifeh demonstrates her acute awareness of the variety of Palestinian responses to the 1967 Israeli occupation, responses more diverse and elaborate than can be classified as those of insiders and outsiders. She takes her readers on a journey that depicts the Palestinian experiences of physical violence and political, social, and economic repression that took place in the West Bank and Gaza after the occupation in June 1967. The novel begins when Usama arrives in Palestine after working in the Gulf for five years. He is outraged by the Palestinians’ detachment from national discourse and so sees them as traitors and accuses them of lacking “clarity of vision” despite their daily struggle to survive and sustain life to their families (Khalifeh 1976, 6). Nuwar, Basil, and Salih are some of the characters who resist bowing down to Israel, while Abu Sabir, Shehadeh, and Haj Abdullah are engaged in supporting the Israeli economy by working in Israeli factories or selling Israeli commodities. Toward the end of the novel, Usama blows up a bus that carries both Israeli and Palestinian workers to Israeli factories, and after the Israeli soldiers suspect Usama's cousin, Adil who is the breadwinner of his large family and real asset for his Palestinian peers to survive Israeli conditions of work, of storing weapons in his family's home, they demolish the house. Adil regards his father's treatment of his family as of a kind with the Israeli oppression and so decides to leave his father's dialysis machine to be blown up in the house. This act symbolizes the disintegration and burdens Israeli occupation, and 1967 War impose on Palestine and its economy. In short, the novel captures, among other things, the impact of the occupation of Palestine on the complexity of the Palestinian subjectivity. The third literary work I examine in this study is I Saw Ramallah. Written in 1997, I Saw Ramallah expands on the story of 1967 War that Returning to Haifa and Wild Thorns began. I Saw Ramallah opens with Barghouti crossing the Palestinian borders, specifically the Allenby Bridge that connects the West Bank of the River Jordan to the West Bank, to reach Ramallah after thirty years of exile. The book exposes the Palestinians’ predicament concerning the impact of 1967 War and the subsequent seizing of the West Bank and Gaza strip, in addition to Israel denying all Palestinians, who were abroad at that time, entry into Palestine, considering them as foreigners, including Barghouti. During that time in 1967, Barghouti was taking his final examinations at the

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University of Cairo. In his exile, Barghouti embodied the dilemma of the Palestinian who is unable to settle down and relate to a place; he moved between Kuwait, Beirut, and constantly between Cairo and Budapest where he served the PLO. In 1997 and after the establishment of the Palestinian Autonomous Authority on West Bank and in Gaza, Barghouti succeeded in receiving a permit of reunion and decided to visit Ramallah. The book chronicles Barghouti’s visit to his hometown of Ramallah and documents the absurdity of occupation, highlighting the impossibility of returning home and successfully revealing the contradicting visions, realities, and life experiences of Palestinian outsiders and those of insiders. As the book progresses, Barghouti’s reading of the Palestinian situation after returning to Ramallah becomes unclear, and he drifts into silence, indicating the complexity of the Palestinian situation that forges, in its turn, more complex Palestinian subjectivities and responses to the occupation. The narrative of Wild Thorns, I Saw Ramallah and Returning to Haifa suggest the complexity of the Palestinian subjectivity, challenging wellestablished definitions that present this subjectivity as a dichotomy of insiders and outsiders, and negotiating a new perspective that would reshape the implications of Palestinian subjectivity. Palestinian subjectivity in these works takes on four distinct groupings: rupturing the symbolic order established by the Israeli occupation; surviving trauma and accepting roles in what Slavoj Zizek calls “social fantasy” created by Israel; negotiating the mediated space between the extremes of the other two groups, and finally constantly fluctuating and continuously oscillating between all these categories to reflect by that the complexity of the Palestinian situation (Zizek 1989, 133). Interestingly, while the first two categories seem to be disoriented and in an arduous struggle, whether trying to survive or regain the land, the mediated group proves to be more efficient in coping with the trauma of Israeli occupation. This third group manages to achieve a psychological balance through conquering anxiety and repressing trauma by means of language (codes of violence) and objects (mementos). The fluid, fluctuating group is the most successful in representing the complexity of the Palestinian situation and Palestinian subjectivity in responding to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. A psychoanalytic critical perspective best captures the dynamics of modern Palestine and adequately unravels the deep, unconscious characteristics of the Palestinian subjectivity. Critical examination of Palestinian subjectivity involves exploring the connection between a psychoanalytic approach and social fantasy, and their mutual influence on representations of Palestinian subjectivity.

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In her Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Jenny Edkins examines the intermingling of trauma and memory within a psychoanalytic framework that sheds light on the “existence” of the subject and its relation to the “Real” and the “social reality,” using Slavoj Zizek’s term social fantasy (2003). Edkins states that our sense of existence as subjects stems from the sense of security that social order, which represents the state, allows us to have (Edkins 2003, 4). Social order, which “gives our existence meaning and dignity,” is exemplified in family, social circles, educational institutions, and so on (Edkins 2003, 4). Our sense of completeness or wholeness within a social order is what creates our existence and shapes our satisfaction with who we are and what roles we play in life, or our roles in what is known in psychoanalytic theory as a symbolic order. However, if we believe that the social order has failed, then our sense of existence becomes destabilized, and in such a case, the only method of restoring stability and a sense of safety and security is to “forget the uncertainties involved and adopt a view in which what we call social reality—which Zizek calls social fantasy—is basically knowable” (Edkins 2003, 13). Hence, the process of “forgetting” the uncertainties and “adopting” a new image of the state and our relation to it as subjects becomes crucial to maintaining our sense of the social fantasy which creates our sense of existence. Edkins adds that because there is no total completeness between the subject and the state, the flows and the “betrayal” of the state that threatens this completeness, could be avoided by hiding or veiling the Real, the “traumatic real” (Edkins 2003, 12). In other words, the Real represents the trauma, the betrayal, and the dishonesty of the state that affects the stability of the subject-state relationship; therefore, the Real should be veiled and hidden somewhere in the memory, as it is inexpressible in language. In the literary works examined in this essay, the characters whose subjectivities occupy the mediated sphere adequately cope with this reality by employing codes of violence in their narrative and speech as well as in their possession of actual mementos. I draw upon Luis Restrepo’s definition of codes of violence; nevertheless, I explain the particular form of these codes in the works (2005). Codes of violence are language and gestures, such as prayers and songs that are loaded with violence and stem from the unconscious. They can also take the form of obsessive and compulsive behaviors. In the examined works, those who employ codes of violence use them as an outlet to reach psychological balance and regain the meaning of their existence. Mementos are physical objects that are kept as a reminder of the dead. These objects bring hope and positivity. For example, the headdress (kufiyya) of Abu Usama is a memento that Um

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Usama keeps to smell and regain her psychological balance whenever she faces a dilemma. In the following sections, I examine each of the four types of Palestinian subjectivity separately, beginning with the subjectivity that ruptures the symbolic order.

The Violent Struggle of Decolonization: Rupturing the Symbolic Order In the first category come Usama in Wild Thorns and Said in Returning to Haifa who believe that violent struggle is the sole way to achieve decolonization and defy the Israeli occupation. Usama’s first call is an invitation to work on the land; to reunite Palestinians with the land through rupturing the symbolic order of the Israeli social order. He claims that he holds special connections and belonging to the land. From a psychoanalytic perspective, I read Usama’s feelings about colonization as coming from the time when he left boyhood and entered the symbolic order, when he understood himself as a being independent from his mother, having sexual desire for his mother, and aware of his father, who impede with the attainment of this sexual desire. In response, he begins to use language as representation. Usama is unable to cope with the absence of his mother, Palestine, and suffers from the loss of his imaginary wholeness with it. His relation to his colonized country resembles that of an infant attached to his mother and treats her and himself and the world in which he lives in as one entity. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Usama resembles an infant who enjoys a desired fusion with the world, and especially with his mother. During this stage, the infant enjoys what Lacan refers to as object a: elements that foster the sense of imaginary wholeness, such as the mother’s body parts, which, for Usama, could be dignity and land. When Usama realizes that Palestine is occupied by Israel, he sees himself as having lost his wholeness. Palestine is no longer his; it is no longer part of his being. Instead, his mother, Palestine, is now subject to the law of the father, Israel. Accordingly, Usama strives to be whole again with his land despite the strenuous disappointments and the sense of exile that he faces outside Palestine as well as inside it. Moreover, as an outsider and an upper-class citizen belonging to the Al-Karmi family, which commonly wealthy and conventionally inherits land, Usama holds a special perspective about belonging to the land. Usama believes that national resistance should be initiated from the inside at the hands of the insiders, regardless of the daily struggles they face

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because of the occupation. The notion of belonging to the land has always been associated with the upper-class Palestinians, who, prior to occupation, had “historically maintained possession and authority” over the land; however, the lower classes do not share this nationalist fervour2 (Nejd Yaziji 1996, 98-99). Realizing the negative impact of the Israeli economic exploitation on Palestinians, Usama considers working their land one of the steps Palestinians should take towards regaining it. To him, working the land nourishes the relationship between the land and the Palestinian people, which in turn would restore belonging and wholeness between Palestinians and their mother, Palestine. Hence his outrage that Shehadeh prefers to be exploited in Israeli factories rather than working on the land. He asks Abu Shehadeh, who cares for Abu Adil’s land, “‘Why doesn’t Shehadeh work on this farm?’ ‘Over there is better,’ the old man answers. ‘Over there is a lot of money and fun.’” (Khalifeh 2000, 49)

This passage critiques two different struggles: Usama’s personal nationalistic struggle to regain the land, and the social and economic struggle of his countrymen. While Usama and some other Palestinians have strong spiritual and physical ties to the land, others, like Abu Shehadeh, alienate themselves from the national struggle and belonging to the land. Incapable of understanding the matrix of economic, social, and national conflicts, Usama adopts the cause of nationalism and calls for a violent uprising from within Palestine (Yaziji 1996, 98). Throughout the novel, Usama’s nationalistic ideas prove to be disconnected from the realities on the ground, and, his beliefs lead him to blowing up a bus filled with Palestinians, including some of his friends, and Usama himself. The clash of Usama’s vision of reality and other characters’ is a clash that furthers the boundaries between insiders and outsiders to be “them” and “us.” Usama’s subjectivity in his rapturing the symbolic order and inclination to the idea of ‘belonging to land’ is similar to Said’s in Returning to Haifa. In Returning to Haifa, rupturing the symbolic order is strongly connected with the Freudian notion of repression and past memories, 2

Yaziji, “Exile and Politics,” 99. In his article on exile and self-representation. Yaziji points to an inextricable connection between national discourse and the affirmation of upper-class Palestinians’ to their title to the land: lower-class Palestinians are unable to identify with the national discourse in Wild Thorns because those who advocate the Palestinian national struggle are mainly upperclass Palestinians who had traditionally inherited the land.

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along with the divorce between reality and imagination. Said, by the end of Returning to Haifa, calls for a rupturing of the Israeli social order and armed resistance to defy the oppression inflicted upon Palestinians whether they are under occupation or in exile. Said reaches this conclusion by the end of his temporary visit with his wife, Safiyya, to Haifa after twenty years of forced displacement that was imposed on them because of the Israeli invasion of his hometown in 1948. The author of Returning to Haifa, Ghassan Kanafani, takes us on a journey that reveals the impact of repression and past memories, which can be seen in Said’s dialogues with his wife, his monologues, and his discussions with his son Khaldun (Dov) and Miriam, the adoptive mother of Khaldun and the widow of Iphrat Koshen. All of these conversations present the psychological pressure that leads to Said’s conclusion that armed resistance is the sole solution to the Israeli occupation. In their exile, Said and Safiyya spent twenty years trying to hide the morbid real and repress the memories of their forced displacement to create peace with their present. Their dispossession in 1948, which resulted in missing their son Khaldun and leaving their home in Haifa, is the traumatic real that they strived to hide throughout the past twenty years. They even avoided uttering their missing son’s name, Khaldun, in the past twenty years, or to give any of their children that name (Kanafani 2000, 158). However, as the Israeli authorities in 1967 gave those who were abroad a temporary entry to see what used to be their hometowns, Said and Safiyya decide to reunite with their hometown and son Khaldun. During their temporary visit to Haifa, once their house loomed before them, the repressed past memories and the abject experiences of the day they left Haifa rushed back as if they had never been part of the past, as if “the past twenty years had been put between two huge presses and crushed until they became a thin piece of transparent paper” (Kanafani 2000, 161). The memories "fell upon [Said] like a blow from a rock" (161), came as strong as the "rushing wave" of the crowd that pushed him to the port to leave Haifa on a British boat on April 21, 1948, came as “sharp as a knife” when he reached the King Faisal Street that leads to his house (Kanafani 2000, 155, 152). The return of the repressed is what Said and Safiyya need to face in order to be able to move into the future. Realizing that the memories have never been erased, Said decides to get out of his car because he was afraid he would change his mind and go back to his exile in Ramallah without confronting the reality in Haifa. He releases some of the psychological pressure of facing memories by employing a number of "sublimation[s],” such as slamming the car door behind him and “absently jingling the keys in his palm” (2000, 161). Sublimation takes place when socially unacceptable

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behaviours are sublimated with an acceptable social act. Keith Booker states that: “Healthy individuals can relieve the psychic pressure caused by repression with their unacceptable desires into acceptable activities” (1996, 30). Said adopts such mechanisms throughout the book to release his psychic pressure and regain balance several times, especially when talking with Miriam and debating with his son Khaldun (Dov) about the issue of man as a cause (Kanafani 2000, 181). Among his other mechanisms are “pressing his palms together between his knees,” laughing with bitterness, and talking too much during his journey with Safiyya from Ramallah to Haifa about everything except his son Khaldun (Dov) (2000, 171-172). These mechanisms and sublimation are of paramount importance for Said in order to maintain a psychological balance that is threatened by the return of the repressed. However, the impact of the return of the repressed is coupled with the divorce between reality and imagination that Said faces in Haifa. The divorce between reality and imagination that Said finds in Haifa leads him to realize that a rupture with the symbolic order through armed resistance is necessary to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Upon his arrival to Haifa, Said clings to the idea that the place has not changed and that it still belongs to him, an attempt to confirm a vision he built on his memories of the place during his dispossession and thus kept out of time: The outside of the house is still as it was twenty years ago, including the parking spot where he used to park his car twenty years ago and the balcony that is still painted in yellow (Kanafani 2000, 161). From the first sight, Said notices that the house is still arranged as it was twenty years ago. However, once Miriam opens the door to Said and Safiyya, Said becomes overwhelmed by the intensity of his failure to build affiliations with the real setting of the living room and its objects that soon seem to him “crude and out of harmony” (Kanafani 2000, 163). Said is shocked to the core that there are now only five peacock feathers in a wooden vase, instead of the seven feathers that used to be in a glass vase twenty years ago. They become an indication of the change that the city has undergone in the past twenty years and are symbolic of the permanent occupation that has interfered Said’s house and life, including his inability to be acknowledged as Khaldun’s father by Khaldun himself and his adoptive mother, Miriam. Said’s discussion with Miriam about who deserves to be acknowledged as Khaldun’s parents invites a psychoanalytic reading and confirms the divorce between reality and imagination that Said did not expect to face in Haifa. This discussion is particularly prominent in Said's conclusion that rupturing the symbolic order is the answer to the occupation. Said asks

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Miriam about what time Khaldun arrives home, and she answers that he “never was on time getting home. He’s just like his father,” his adoptive father, Iphrat Koshen (Kanafani 2000, 171). Miriam’s reply not only denies Said’s parenthood but also emasculates him, leaving him “trembling as if he’d been hit by an electric shock” (2000, 171). Although Miriam, to some extent, tries to restrain her comments in the presence of Said and Safiyya, her slip of the tongue castrates Said’s masculinity as it came from the unconscious mind and detonated in an unanticipated fashion. This Freudian slip left Said more puzzled about his belonging, not only to Palestine but also to his son Khaldun. In the meantime, Safiyya tries to lessen Said’s emasculation, assuring him that he is the only father of Khaldun: “‘Like his father!’ As if Khaldun has a father other than you!” (Kanafani 2000, 172). The divorce between the reality and imagination manifests in Khaldun’s character. The fact that Khaldun is now called Dov serves as an officer in the Israeli army, and has been immersed in the culture of the Israeli society is the reality that Said and Safiyya have repressed for twenty years. They had instead imagined that Khaldun could have either died or lived but never imagined that he could have been stripped of his Palestinian identity. Upon learning through their discussion with Miriam that Khaldun is now called Dov, Said and Safiyya “stood up as if the earth had flung them up” (165). Changing Khaldun’s name represents changing his identity and his belonging to the Palestinian homeland, a change that creates an emerging new Palestinian subjectivity that pushes the boundaries between Khaldun and his father from “father” and “son” to be “us” and “them.” Said’s tense dialogue with Dov brutally confirms this divorce between reality and imagination. As Dov condemns Said’s parenthood and masculinity for leaving Haifa, Said raises questions about Dov’s identity and belonging to the land. Although at the beginning of his meeting with Said and Safiyya Dov seems to be confident about his beliefs and feelings towards his biological parents, he becomes more confused about belonging to his adoptive parents and the adoptive state of Israel by the end of that meeting. Said expresses Dov’s ambivalent subjectivity: “The young man had withdrawn into himself in the chair, defeated. Said thought: ‘We’ve lost him, but surely he’s lost himself after all this. He’ll never be the same as he was an hour ago’” (Kanafani 2000, 183). The complexity of Dov’s ambivalent subjectivity emerges from the undercutting of his Palestinian identity and the overlap of the subjectivity that advocates rupture. As Said starts to realize that Dov is the traumatic real that he tried to hide in his unconscious for twenty years, he concludes that a psychic rupture and armed resistance are the answers to the

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occupation. Said realizes that the son who embodies the Palestinian belonging to the land is his other son Kahlid, who has never visited Haifa and who has been forbidden by his father Said from joining the Palestinian freedom fighters, fedayeen3. Although Khalid does not cling to memories and cultural objects of his hometown, he reaches the decision that the rupture of the Israeli social order is the answer to the occupation. Khalid represents "the child of the Occupation" who enjoys "a complex personality, combining certain transparency of the emotions with pushiness," as Barghouti claims (2003, 160). Complex personality and subjectivity are not unique to Palestinian children who reside under the occupation but also concerns those who live in exile and displacement such as Barghouti’s son, Tamim, in Saw Ramallah. Tamim who was “born by the Nile in Dr. Sharif Gohar’s Hospital in Cairo to an Egyptian mother and a Palestinian father carrying a Jordanian passport—saw nothing of Palestine except its complete absence and its complete story” (Barghouti 2003, 131). Tamim’s thick, political jokes and knowledge of Deir Ghassanah and their recitations in their peasant dialect "exactly as though he has been born in Dar Rad" are manifestations of the occupation memories that he carries on from his parents' generations and are embedded in his life (Barghouti 135-136). Marianne Hirsch refers to such manifestations as "post memory," where the memories are not experienced on the individual level but still impact the social life of the individual; "post memory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and history by the deep personal connection. Post memory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (1997, 22). This type of memory drives the continual flux between the past and the present that constantly impacts the new generation’s social lives and unceasingly shapes their subjectivities and sense of belonging. Tamim’s and Khalid’s lives are impacted by the post memory of the occupation of Palestine their parents witnessed; yet, their deep personal connection to Palestine is compelling. While the first subjectivity form is associated with those who reach a state of rupturing the social order, the second form is a more horizontal type of subjectivity, and consequently, the characters who enjoy this mode of subjectivity are more content in their political and social circumstances. 3

Fedayeen are Palestinian civilians who voluntarily left their homes and families in order to form an unofficial army in order to regain the Palestinian land that was invaded and taken by Israel in 1948.

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Content Subjectivities: Palestinians-Israeli Collaborators Live in the Occupation Social Fantasy Palestinians-Israeli workers and collaborators represent the second category that adheres to the rules of social order by fully engaging in the Israeli-imposed social fantasy. Abu Sabir and Haj Abdullah in Wild and a wide range of intellectuals in I Saw Ramallah are examples of this second category. Abu Sabir, like many Palestinians, works in an Israeli factory, where working conditions are poor, and yet the workers are willing to stay. He loses his fingers while working in the factory and does not receive worker’s compensation or emergency medical care, yet he is still willing to continue working in the factory. He prefers to embrace the social fantasy rather than rupture the symbolic order. He does not have what Usama calls the “clarity of vision” to see the true purpose behind Israel’s employment: to create Palestinian economic dependence on Israel (Khalifeh 2000, 6). Similarly, Haj Abdullah, a shopkeeper who is content with his social role of supporting the Israeli economy by selling Israeli commodities, does not see a need to rupture the symbolic order. He sees inflation as a justification to sell Israeli commodities and explains to Usama the complex economic situation in Palestine created by the 1967 occupation: “Now, sir, the inflation! Inflation’s a fire roasting the whole country. People who used to buy by the pound now buy by the half. Middle-class people like you are in a terrible fix. Everybody is—except for the workers with jobs” (Khalifeh 2000, 71). Usama cannot grasp the anxiety brought on Palestinians by the Israeli occupation, nor can he comprehend the complex intermingling of the political and the personal in an economy where the crisis has been escalating since the 1967 June war. He views Haj Abdullah as nothing more than a passive Palestinian who is involved in his social fantasy and has no desire to rid his life of oppression. The different life struggles of insiders exemplified by Usama, and insiders as in the case of Abu Sabir and Haj Abdullah galvanize the complexity of Palestinian subjectivity and furthering the boundaries among Palestinians to be “them” and “us.” Other collaborators and intellectuals are much more content in the social fantasy than Haj Abdullah and Palestinian workers in Israeli factories. Barghouti claims that these collaborators have “cooperated with Israel in return for a few piasters or some simple perks” (2003, 120). A more complicated role is played by Palestinian intellectuals who “fell in line with the authority, got closer to it than was wise, rested on its seats, took pleasure in imitating it and identifying with its features” (2003, 124).

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Barghouti concludes that there is no difference between oppression exercised at the hands of politicians and that practiced by intellectuals; both types of oppression are two sides of the same coin. He explains: “The intellectual’s despotism is the same as the despotism of leadership of both sides, the Authority and the opposition” (2003, 124). Similar to the subjectivity of the intellectual and politician collaborators is that of Palestinian residents who collaborated with Israel against each other. While there are honourable stories about the Palestinian residents who took care of the outsiders’ properties without being registered in contracts to prevent occupation authorities from taking them, there are also those who refused to return properties to their original owners (2003, 105). This type of character grouping reflects a Palestinian subjectivity that is content in the social order and benefits from such circumstances; and thereby, their pattern of subjectivity pushes the boundaries further among Palestinians to be "them" and "us." The third trend of Palestinian subjectivity is more complex and applicable to psychoanalysis reading.

Meditating Subjectivities: Palestinian Women Coping with their Pain The third category of Palestinian subjectivity negotiates a mediated space between rupturing the Israeli order and accepting fate by embodying the social fantasy, depending on available options. Some of the characters who enjoy such subjectivity are Um Usama, Um Sabir, and other Palestinian women, suffer most from the Israeli occupation because they have witnessed violence that cannot be erased from their memories, nor can be expressed in words. They prove to be the only group capable of reaching psychological balance, doing so not by rupturing the symbolic order, but by keeping mementos and codifying their collective memories in prayers (duaa) or songs to communicate with people and acknowledge their pain. These codes of violence, according to psychoanalytic theory, in some cases, function to suppress the survivors’ memory of having witnessed violence, which could be seen as the Real in the psychoanalytic perspective, while in other cases, they mask the return of violence and the desire to respond to violent actions, creating psychological balance characteristic of this type of Palestinian subjectivity. Mementos and codes of violence bring the characters to a level of psychological balance by bridging the gap between two kinds of death: “biological death” and “symbolic death.” According to Zizek, there are two kinds of death: "biological death" and "symbolic death” (1989, 132). While biological

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death is actual physical death, symbolic death signifies the end of a way of being within a certain framework of existence which may or may not include social position (1989, 132). In this section, before discussing the mementos in the examined literary works, I investigate the reasons Palestinians’ suppress their pain rather than using spoken language, exploring within the framework of psychoanalytic theory the ways in which mementos and codes of violence create psychological balance. Edkins stresses the fact that “language itself is social and political, and not individual” (2003, 7). Acknowledging that the expression of language is an indication of social position in relation to power, Um Sabir and Um Usama in Wild Thorns, use duaa to communicate their inexpressible pain and opposition to the occupation4. Edkins maintains that unless witnesses to violence seek social reality, they cannot communicate with others because their view of social order is disrupted; to reach this social reality, trauma survivors codify their testimonies; otherwise, it is impossible for them to tell, and difficult for others to listen, due to their unstable and disoriented emotional and psychological states (2003, 190). Hence, if social order is altered from what is understood as normal, language becomes meaningless as it loses its ability to convey the senses and meanings of torture or violence (Edkins 2003, 11). Social order is a product of language, and symbolic expression as language labels the things that exist in the world and then divides the world in particular ways to produce a reality for every social group (Edkins 2003, 11). In Wild Thorns, Khalifeh exposes the way in which Israeli violence complicates the colonial relationship between Palestinians and their own language through the characters’ usage of mementos and codes of violence, as well as the depiction of Palestinians struggling to express their unimaginable experiences under occupation. The words used to describe and articulate the Palestinian’s situation are compared to knives that cut deep into the soul of each Palestinian citizen (Khalifeh 2000, 6). Even the words of romantic songs are loaded with sadness and inflict stabbing pain that speaks to the Palestinian situation. The impact of colonial violence on Um Sabir’s and Um Usama’s speech is exemplified in their prayers (duaas), which can be read as Freudian dispossession.

4

Elaine Scarry stresses that the inexpressibility of pain is the main characteristic shared by all languages. She declares that "Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language." Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4-5.

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In Wild Thorns, Um Sabir and Um Usama wish for the ability to put an end to the Israeli occupation, so they express the inexpressible through duaas. When Um Sabir sees Israeli soldiers mistreating children, she prays, “May God break your arm! May seventy evil eyes get you! May your children all die young! May God destroy you by the glory of the Prophet Muhammad!” (Khalifeh 2000, 105). Unable to physically express her pain regarding colonial violence, Um Sabir, to some degree, succeeds in finding a way to use speech as a means of communicating her pain to the Israelis as well as other Palestinians. Similarly, the duaas Um Usama utters when Israeli soldiers come looking to arrest her son function as mechanisms of resisting occupation and lessening her pain. When the soldier asks, “Do you fast Ramadan?” she answers, “I pray to God to take you all away and relieve us of the sight of you…May God never grant you peace. Don’t tear my soul to pieces! May God poison your body now, this very evening!” (Khalifeh 2000, 168). Here Um Usama's fear and anger about her son's impending arrest is expressed through the language of prayer as she suppresses her desire to resist the soldiers physically. I argue that Um Usama’s and Um Sabir’s duaas are an affirmation that language resists the unforgettable and inexpressible oppression and that minor narratives serve as mechanisms to capsulate and suppress pain. Restrepo confirms the impossibility of forgetting the violence that one witnesses as well as the violence that one represses (2005, 1). Consequently, the symptoms of repressed violence reappear at a later time. In the case of literature, he postulates that violence reappears in the small details in the narrative of the text: The catastrophic and incommensurable violence of conquest emerges into consciousness and language is a belated, transformed and narrative mediated way. As a result, colonial violence appears mostly through highly stylized, literary, and bookish representations. In this view, the traumatic truth of the violence of the colonization may be contained not in the most realist depictions of war, but in the most fictive passages of [the text]. (2005, 6)

Restrepo claims that the colonized do not forget colonial violence, but they suppress and condense it into forms of literary representations. Wild Thorns actively engages repressed violence through negotiating the context of colonial violence and creatively incorporating minor details. Restrepo reads such details and short narratives in colonial and postcolonial literary texts as “the filters of representing the pain” (2005, 7). In the same manner, I propose that Um Sabir’s and Um Usama’s duaas

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are means of encompassing their trauma and coping mechanisms to obtain a psychological balance. Moreover, I interpret the ululations and songs the Palestinian women sing after the Israeli soldiers announce the curfew as I do Um Sabir’s and Um Usam’s duaas, to wit, as codes of violence. The Palestinian women defy the occupation and the Israeli soldiers who have attacked the children and blew up a house after they announced the curfew. They feel stripped of their freedom, deprived of their right to leave their houses to buy food and feed their hungry children. The Palestinian women, in Wild Thorns, suppress their anger, hunger, and wish to confront the occupation by bravely ululating and singing: The walls of the old house crumbled. In one massive piece, the roof caved in and settled on the trouble. Clouds of smoke rose from the ruins. The old man whose house it had been stood on a neighbouring roof and called out the adhan, his voice breaking: ‘Allahu Akbar! God is most great!’ ‘God is most great!’ repeated the neighbours in unison. Gathered at the windows, the women raised their voices in loud ululations, while the girls continued to beat out a rhythm on the empty tin cans. A single piercing girlish voice began the song of solidarity once again. The boys took up the melody until the whole street was filled with the cry, “Palestine! Palestine!’. (Khalifeh 1976, 105)

The Palestinian women long for imaginary wholeness with their motherland and use ululations and songs as a substitute for their inability to fully possess the land. Their desire for a dignified life in their own land is denied or "castrated" by the Israeli occupation, and, so they displace this desire into the language in the form of ululating and singing to release their repressed pain. The Israeli soldiers are so agitated by the Palestinian women's songs and ululations that they grabbed a boy, Basil, and shoved him into their patrol car ((Khalifeh 1976, 106). The women recognize the power of their ululations and songs to fuse them with their maternal body, Palestine; they also recognize the fear that the ululations and songs put into the soldiers— fear that the Palestinians will rupture the social order. Perhaps the soldiers sense a relationship of the women’s voices to the human psyche (Cixous 1986, 93). In this regard, Hélène Cixous contends that the musicality of a woman’s voice takes us to our first love, mother’s love, thus invoking imaginary wholeness. She projects that the intricate relationship between women’s writing, their speech, and their bodies is due to the strong bond between their voices and their deep psyches, and it follows that women’s

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songs echo the voice of the mother that directs the imaginary order, where there are no laws that restrict freedom and liberty (Cixous 1986, 93). Cixous contends that women's songs emanate a sense of freedom from all restrictions and limitations as they spring from "a time before the law before the Symbolic took one's breath away and re-appropriated it into language under its authority of separation” (1986, 93). She further claims that women’s songs do not only impact women’s sense of freedom and “jouissance” but also influence those who hear her singing: “In feminine speech, as in writing, there never stops reverberating something that, having once passed through us, having imperceptibly and deeply touched us, still has the power to affect us—song, the first music of the voice of love, which every woman keeps alive” (Cixous 1986, 93). The Israeli soldiers in Wild Thorns are clearly touched by the women’s musical voices, which express, even to the Israelis, a deep love for their homeland. Aggravating the Israeli soldiers through ululating and singing is a relief that brings not only psychological balance for the women, but also spells joy and solidarity among the community of Palestinian women who entice the children to sing along, “the children had not been cowed, but were still energetically beating their drums and chanting” (Khalifeh 1976, 106). Palestinian women appear to be able to handle the occupation curfew and oppression more effectively than either Usama, the advocate of violent struggle, or Haj Abdullah, who embodies his role in the social fantasy. Similar to the Palestinian women’s duaas in Wild Thorns and their employing of their voice to codify their resistance to occupation is Farha’s screaming and crying to claim motherhood to Palestinian boys under arrest in I Saw Ramallah. Farha, the peasant woman, and protagonist in a documentary produced by Anis al-Barghouti, is a representative example of women who claim motherhood to boys who are under arrest, crying and screaming at the soldier to leave their “son” until the soldier surrenders to their screaming. “To Cixous, the voice of the woman, raised loudly enough, threatens to shatter the patriarchal tradition” (Booker 1996, 94). Clearly, the occupation has not only transformed the Palestinian women's lives but also politicalized it and influenced the emergence of new subjectivities. Politics is not only facts; it is reality "which includes all the emotions of people and their positions," as Barghouti claims (2003, 43). Barghouti contends that the Palestinian women’s resistance “deserves unhesitating admiration,” and their “small daily sacrifices … form the backbone of what we intellectuals call ‘heroism’” (2003, 119). The

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examined literary texts depict several Palestinian women 5 resisting occupation on a daily basis to reach the level of ‘heroism' that Barghouti describes, revealing that their mediated subjectivity successfully negotiates resistance and embodying the social fantasy. The phenomenon of employing a Palestinian woman's voice to codify resistance and reach the psychological balance when witnessing fear and trauma is indicative of emerging new Palestinian subjectivities. Like codes of violence, mementos function in the same manner to influence Palestinian subjectivity. While mementos refer to physical reminders of someone beloved, codes of violence are actions that function as substitutes for the rupture of the social order that the actors cannot carry out. In her examination of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and her analysis of the mementos that people bring to leave by the names of their dead soldiers, Edkins claims that mementos are tools of healing and closure (2003, 86-88). Edkins adds that mementos function as the Real in the psychoanalytic perspective: “[E]ffective memorials, in reflecting the real or encircling the trauma, express the impossibility of closure and the inventible contradistinctions of any society. […] [B]y providing space for that which is unsymbolisable they encompass the realm of the real” (2003, 87-88). She adds: [Mementos] are objects that encapsulate memories and often things that have outlived their original owners. […] [T]he gift is not only a memento

5 Sadiyya in Wild Thorns is an example of those women who survive under occupation and resist it by survival. Sadiyya becomes a breadwinner after the death of her husband, Zuhdi, in the bus that Usama blew up. Sadiyya sublimates her sorrow and buys a sewing machine to tailor clothes for factories and provide for her family, embodying a mediated subjectivity and enjoying a psychological balance. Sadiyya gains her psychological balance by entering a social fantasy, in which she is able to tolerate her husband’s death by resisting occupation by survival. Similarly, Um Khalil’s leadership in I Saw Ramallah is a remarkable example of the Palestinian woman’s steadfastness that reflects steady psychic balance. She sublimates her frustration of the daily struggles under occupation and redirects her energy towards helping people survive; she establishes The Society for the Support of the Family that creates jobs, such as sewing and embroidering, food preparation, and crafting, for people in need, especially women (Barghouti 2003, 115). Um Khalil’s leadership that stems from her strong psychic balance prompted her to nominate herself as a presidential candidate for the Palestinian Authority, where she is the only rival to President Arafat (Barghouti 2003, 113). Palestinian women’s subversion of the patriarchal authority is emblematic of the emergence of new subjectivities in which people survive the daily struggles of occupation and resist it without losing psychological balance.

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To Um Usama, Abu Usama’s, her husband’s, kufiyya serves the same function as the mementos visitors leave by the engraved names of dead soldiers at the Vietnam Memorial; whenever she faces a hardship, her only relief comes from smelling her husband’s kufiyya which allows her to regain psychological balance6. The kufiyya helps Um Usama to capsulate the real, the traumatic experience of her husband’s death, and cope with his absence under the Israeli occupation. When Israeli soldiers come to her house to arrest Usama, they torture Um Usama’s soul and mind by attacking her house and questioning her about Usama, whom they define only as a terrorist. The fear caused by the Israel attack on Um Usama’s house and their calling her son a terrorist has brought the traumatic experience of her husband’s death and all she has encountered after his death to life. Um Usama loses her psychological balance and starts breathing in short gasps, sweating from her forehead, praying that God protects her son, and calling for her friend Um Sadiq to ask for the kufiyya: Um Usama cried out faintly. “What is it, Um Usama? Just tell me what you want, dear!” Um Usama sighed. “Can you look in the top drawer for the white kufiyya that belongs to my husband?” she asked. “Please give it to me, Um Sadiq, let me smell my dead husband’s fragrance in it. It will bless and comfort me.” (Khalifeh 1976, 171)

I read Um Usama’s dead husband’s kufiyya as a memento and her actions of keeping and smelling it for relief as a code of violence. When Um Usama makes spiritual communication with her husband by smelling his kufiyya, the boundaries between life and death and between present and past become blurred. Um Usama regains psychological balance by entering a social fantasy, in which she is able to tolerate her anxiety and

6

Ted Swedenburg defines Kufiyya as a male peasant headdress that has become a “national signifier” which illustrates “the processes whereby national unity is forged through the forgetting of difference.” He adds that it is “an image- which stresses transitoriness, impermanence, and fragmentation; signifies the dangers posed to Palestinian existence, as well as to the constructed nature of the national past, and points to the contingent character of national identity” Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936- 1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian Past (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003), 30.

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fear that Usama will be arrested by being able to imagine her husband alive and her son safe. This scene supports Edkin’s notion that witnesses to violence create a social fantasy that comforts them and enables them to tolerate anxiety and regain their existence whenever they go through trauma or frustration (2003, 13). It follows that the subject obtains a psychological balance that keeps him or her stable in society. Hence, the relationship between the individual’s existence, his psychological balance, and social order are intertwined. Drawing on Zizek’s notions of biological death and symbolic death, Um Usama’s act of smelling the kufiyya bridges the gap between Abu Usama’s biological death and Um Usama’s symbolic death. This symbolic death is the dehumanization Um Usama has suffered under Israeli occupation. Um Usama considers it imperative to smell the kufiyya, to bridge the gap between symbolic and biological death, because she is afraid that violence will return in the form of her son’s death. Bridging the chasm between biological and symbolic death fosters Um Usama’s capacity to imagine a social fantasy and regain a meaning for her existence. Symbolic death appears again in Wild Thorns after Abu Sabir loses his fingers while working in the Israeli factory and does not receive financial compensation or medical treatment. He feels socially dead; he is excluded socially and economically from the very challenging market. He expresses fear of his symbolic death to Adil: "[T]ears welled up in his eyes. ‘I'm done for, Adil.'" He imagines himself "queuing up outside the charitable association, waiting to receive the monthly hand-out. Five dinars, perhaps? […] What good would that be? What could you buy with that, apart from bread?” (Khalifeh 1976, 50). He has lost his role as a provider, which had nourished his sense of virility and masculinity. He imagines his “wife doing the rounds of the neighboring houses carrying an empty bowl to borrow some food. […] Tears spilled from his eyes. […] ‘We’re finished, Adil’” (1976, 51). Worst, he feels dead in his wife’s eyes, knowing that Um Sabir’s main concern about her husband’s disfigurement will be the financial problems it will bring on the family: Beating her breast in a frenzy, Um Sabir screamed, "His right hand? Oh no, I can't stand it!" […] She came to a halt and began moaning, “How will we eat? How will we eat? […] I just can’t stand it.[…]” I used to be afraid of what the Jews would do, I used to be afraid of the curfew. From now on our life’s going to be one long curfew. (Khalifeh 1976, 54, emphasis is mine)

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Unlike the temporary curfew imposed by the Jews, the fall of the social order that is imposed by Abu Sabir's symbolic death is permanent. When Adil tries to console her by saying, "God will provide, Um Sabir," she pays "no attention to his words," though she is "staring at him in uncontrolled terror” (Khalifeh 1976, 54). The social order will economically exclude her husband and her family; knowing this causes her to lose psychological balance, and she begins “pacing quickly between kitchen and bathroom, bathroom and bedroom, bedroom and kitchen” (Khalifeh 1976, 54). Conquering her distress in codes, which include slapping herself across the face and praying, allows Um Sabir to regain her existence in the social fantasy, enabling her to encounter the Real, the traumatic experience that language itself is unable to express. Edkins contends that the inability of the subject to reveal the Real and circulate it equivalently in language as it happens proves that the “subject in relation to language is flawed”; I argue, however, that Um Usama’s and Um Sabir’s ability to contain their anxiety attests to the capability of Palestinian women’s subjectivity to defuse stereotypical images of Arab women as pawns and victims (Edkins, 2003, 214). Through negotiation of the mediated subjectivity and enjoying having mementoes and codifying violence, Um Usama, Um Sabir, and other women regain the meaning of their existence and the psychological balance that the insider and outsider characters strive only vainly to achieve. From a psychoanalytic perspective, mementos in the examined literary works prove to have varied impacts on Palestinians and their subjectivities, and it is important to expand on this impact before moving to the examination of the Palestinian fluid subjectivity. Mementos create psychic balance for insiders as in the case of kufiyya for Um Usama in Wild Thorns; however, mementos disrupt the balance of outsiders when they see them after returning to their homeland for a temporary visit as in the case of Said and Safiyya in Returning to Haifa and Barghouti in I Saw Ramallah. The mementos for insiders “treat time as absent” and “the dead as present”; thereby, they impose “a linear temporality,” bridging the chasm between the present and the past, so history seems as whole and meaningful, providing them with a sense of completeness in a special social fantasy that the mementos successfully evoke (Edkins 2003, 85). On the other hand, the mementos fail to bridge the chasm between the past and the present for the outsiders when the outsiders return to their homeland after a long time of being apart. In the outsiders’ case, the chasm between the past and the present is intensified by the discrepancy between the realities under occupation that outsiders do not witness and the imagined vision of the homeland they conjure while in their

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displacement and exile. In their displacement, the outsiders treat the mementos as their means of connecting with the past memories of their homeland; they are symbols of their belonging to the land and indications of their Palestinian identity7. However, as the outsiders suffer from the unbridgeable gap between the past and the present, the impact of the non-linear temporality on their psychic balance grows unexpectedly and denies them any sense of wholeness. In their first return and reconnection with their homeland, the outsiders deliberately and constantly search for these mementos as a means of self-affirmation and a sign of their belonging to the land. As these outsiders come to recognize the discrepancy between life actualities and reality within their homeland, and their imagined vision of their homeland they built in their displacement and exile, the value of the mementos decreases until these outsiders reach the conclusion that bridging the chasm between the past and the present is impossible and mementos are no more than things–they are not the homeland. It follows that the outsiders’ vision of the homeland at this point becomes more centralized and situated in the future rather than revolving around the past. They face the real in their homeland and mementos fail to mitigate its pain. Place, the homeland in this case, which is intricately constituted and shaped by time, denies the outsiders and labels them as strangers, as “them,” for they do not speak the same language of pain and memory the insiders speak. Edkins claims that to communicate effectively in a language, there “has to be some provisional agreement, accepted ideology or central authority structure that will halt the fluidity of terms and make language meaningful” (7). Outsiders do not speak the same language of the daily struggles that insiders live and vice versa; thereby, their diverse subjectivities imply different ideologies and different senses of belonging. Barghouti repeatedly reminds his readers that he constantly strives to bridge this chasm between the time of the past and the time of the present in order to have a genuine sense of returning home, but he fails, as all other outsiders do, and he admits that: “It is always the same problem: the problem of stitching two times together. It cannot be done. Time is not a length of calico. Time is a mist that never stops moving” (Barghouti 2003, 76). He repeatedly reminds his reader of this dilemma as it is the core issue for the outsiders never to be able to truly return (2003, 76, 85, 87, 163) The inability of returning home is vividly represented in Returning to 7

This explains the phenomena of Palestinian women in exile wearing the map of Palestine in a golden chain as an ornament or memory. It also clarifies the phenomena of Palestinians hanging a big key on their wall in their exile as an indication of their return to Palestine and their hometowns.

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Haifa in the scene where Said and Safiyya examine the objects of their house when they have visited Haifa after twenty years. In Returning to Haifa, Said’s and Safiyya’s examination of their household objects that they were forced to leave behind twenty years ago brings the congruity of the function of mementos and Palestinian subjectivity to the fore. After the Israeli authorities in 1967 allowed Palestinians in exile to temporarily visit and see what used to be their homeland, Said and Safiyya decide to revisit their home in Haifa. When they reached the entrance of their house in Haifa, Said and Safiyya avoided to ponder on and examine the little things, the mementos that they were clinging to in their imagination in their displacement during the past twenty years: “They began to climb, and [Said] didn’t give neither of them the opportunity to see all the little things that would jolt and throw them off balance—the bell and the copper lock and the bullet holes in the wall and the electricity box and the fourth step broken in its centre and the smooth carved balustrade which the palm slid over and the unyielding iron grillwork of the masatib” (Kanafani 2000, 161). However, once Said and Safiyya entered their house, they started to examine the objects that they kept alive in their memories for the past twenty years. Said examines the photograph of Jerusalem and the Syrian carpet hanging on the wall of the living room, and he becomes enraged about the absence of two peacock feathers. The juxtaposition in Said’s reaction towards the exterior of his house as opposed to his reaction to the interior of the house and its objects serves as a metaphor that can be extended to the relation between the insiders’ subjectivity and mementoes and the outsiders’ subjectivities and the mementoes. Kanafani describes the gap between the two times, trauma time and linear time, as “a long period of unconsciousness” that Said has been experiencing as he walks around the house and examines its objects (2000, 162). As Said realizes the impossibility of stitching the two times, the time before his exile (linear time) and the time after his exile (trauma time), he begins to realize that these mementos are just things and are not the homeland. Unable to overcome the gap caused by the non-linear temporality because of his exile, Said’s vision of homeland has shifted from being an ideal situated in the past to become a new concept centralized in the future, a new vision of the homeland that requires a new form of subjectivity and a sole resistance path to occupation, the armed resistance—the rupture of the symbolic order. Said says: I was just asking. I am looking for the true Palestine, the Palestine that’s more than memories, more than peacock feathers, more than a son, more than scars written by bullets on the stairs. I was just saying to myself: What's Palestine with respect to Khalid? He doesn't know the vase or the

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picture or the stairs or Halisa or Khaldun. And yet for him, Palestine is something worthy of a man bearing arms for, dying for. For us, for you and me, it's only a search for something buried beneath the dust of memories. And look what we found beneath that dust. Yet more dust. We were mistaken when we thought the homeland was only the past. For Khalid, the homeland is the future. That's how we differed, and that's why Khalid wants to carry arms. Tens of thousands like Khalid won't be stopped by the tears of men searching in the depths of their defeat for scraps of armor and broken flowers. Men like Khalid are looking toward the future, so they can put right our mistakes and the mistakes of the whole world. Dov is our shame, but Khalid is our enduring honor. Didn't I tell you from the beginning that we shouldn't come—because that was something requiring a war? Let's go! (Kanafani 2000, 188-187)

As the outsider Said realizes that mementoes are only things and recognizes the impossibility of stitching different times, he recognizes the rift between insiders and outsiders, between “them” and “us,” and eventually reaches a conclusion that armed resistance is the only answer for the occupation. While Said’s decision now represents a firm subjectivity and clear perspective about the occupation, other characters enjoy subjectivities that are constantly vacillating as in the case of Adil in Wild Thorns, and Barghouti in I Saw Ramallah.

The Complexity of the Palestinian Situation: Vacillating Subjectivities Like Said, Barghouti strives to stitch the trauma time and the linear time by visiting Ramallah in 1997, after thirty years of exile, and subsequent to his receiving a reuniting permit from the Israeli authorities. Barghouti’s attempt to reconnect with the place and its people and objects is, in its very essence, an attempt to regain a sense of completeness and wholeness of his subjectivity. From the moment Barghouti steps on the Allenby bridge to cross into Palestine for his visit, he recognizes the bond between place and time as a primary factor in shaping the complex Palestinian subjectivity and wonders which subjectivity and role he embodies while crossing that bridge that separates Palestine from its own people, and from the rest of the world: “visitor, guest, citizen, or refugee?” (2003, 11). This continual flux of the Palestinian subjectivities is pertinent to the clash between various visions of reality, visions of outsiders and those of insiders, of “us” and “them,” of Palestinians and the rest of the world. Richard van Leeuwen explains that the “complexity of the function of the bridge as a boundary is reflected by its many names. The bridge is not a mere

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borderline separating geographical entities; it is a point where various visions of reality clash, where many different kinds of human experiences are concentrated” (2003, 202). This clash between realities is embedded in the divorce of the realities Palestinians live in Palestine and the vision of Palestine that Barghouti has created in his exile, a separation in the vision of Palestine that Barghouti lived before his exile and kept out of time and place and the reality he encounters currently in his visit to Palestine. Barghouti realizes this divorce in multiple ways: the proliferation of the settlements and how they encircle the village of Deir Ghassanah as well as the desertification in which Ein al- Deir is ruined and overrun with brambles (2003, 31). This divorce also appears in the spread of the barricades and widening roads that prevents Palestinians from reaching Jerusalem and other Palestinian cities, enforcing an eternal exile on Palestinians and the cities, cutting them off from growth and human development, and causing a rupture in time that is reflected in the psychic balance of its people (2003, 31). Barghouti adds: “The occupation forced us to remain with the old. That is its crime. It did not deprive us of the clay ovens of yesterday, but of the mystery of what we would invent tomorrow” (2003, 69). This rupture in the history of the cities makes the Palestinian cities seem “a rural hinterland for the Hebrew State” (2003, 147). Furthermore, this rupture in the sequence and coherence of the history of the place is reflected in the coherence of its geography and, accordingly, in the psyche of its inhabitants, influencing the emergence of “uncertainty of return” and the “clarity of displacement” (73). Barghouti’s use of “uncertainty of return” and “clarity of displacement” can be read within Henri Lefebvre’s notion of rhythms of place (73). The conditions of exile and displacement force special experiences pertaining to place. Henri Lefebvre postulates that every place has its own rhythms that create its own space (1991, 31). As every place has its own rhythms, these rhythms produce a special connection with place and, accordingly, shape the subjectivity of its inhabitants. Lefebvre adds that we cannot study the space of any city or place without understanding its “genesis and its form, with its own specific time or times (the rhythms of daily life), and its particular centers and polycentrism” (1991, 31). Thus these rhythms of daily life are a key in the formation of the space in Palestinian cities and the production of Palestinian subjectivities. Barghouti refers to these rhythms of daily life as “vibrations” that require time to allow repetition and “feelings of comfort” then acceptance until they reach a state of normalization and naturalization (2003, 73-74).

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Because rhythms of place within Palestine are drastically different from rhythms outside of Palestine, people’s life experiences and connection with place differ; therefore, their sensibilities and ideologies vary. These rhythms of the place that Barghouti and people in exile, in general, live forge a sense of "uncertainty of return" to the homeland, and van Leeuwen explains in this regards that: “The experience of exile disrupts the structuring functions of time and place” (2003, 201). Even when there is a physical return or a visit, the outsiders are unable to reunite with the place. This “uncertainty of return” to the homeland is similar to the uncertainty of a return to a sense of wholeness and completeness of subjectivity after experiencing exile that disrupts the coherence of the time and the structuring function of place. It follows that the gulf between the insiders and the outsiders, “them” and “us,” becomes more definite since insiders live the constant rhythms of the place that shape their life actualities to the extent that they can see the signs of displacement and acknowledge the “clarity of displacement” inflicted upon the outsiders: “the one who returns comes back with burdens on his shoulders that a sensitive person[insider] can see as he sees a porter bent double in the fog of a port” (2003, 73). The rhythms of the place that create its peculiarities are a keystone in sustaining the complexity of the Palestinian subjectivity. Barghouti, as an exile, finds himself forced to have a very temporary relationship with places, a relationship that is reflected in the temporality of the hotels where he lives as he constantly travels: Hotels “taught me not to hold on to a place, to accept the idea of leaving. […] Hotels absolve you from immortalizing the moment but at the same time provide a theatre for short acts and surprises and a widening of the monotonous horizons of life. [The hotel] gives you something of the taste of temporary permanencies” (2003, 92). The hotel’s temporality is projected onto the exile, Barghouti's life in this case, as his subjectivity and psychology are accordingly shaped by the temporality. Barghouti's fluid subjectivity is reflected in his refusal to join any political party and be committed to one monolithic tribal vision of the world, an action that he views as a “vice rather than a virtue” (42). The fluid subjectivity that Barghouti represents refuses fixation and denies limitations; a mutability that is depicted and demonstrated during his twelve-day visit to Ramallah, as Hazem Fadel claims, which “resulted in a long narrative which gives space to contradictions, prolonged mediations and lyrical moments where the author’s connection with and disconnection from his native city are described at length” as opposed to Kanafani’s brief visit and short literary work that “leaves little room for elaboration or mediation” (2016, 64). This juxtaposition in the duration in the “return” to

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the homeland and the length of the literary works of Kanafani’s and Barghouti’s is representative of the authors’ different psychological states and their different subjectivities as well as the subjectivities of their characters. Said’s subjectivity in Returning to Haifa calls for a shortcut solution–a rupture of the symbolic order–while Barghouti’s subjectivity in I Saw Ramallah represents restless vacillation and denies limitations. Similar to Barghouti’s fluid subjectivity is Adil’s subjectivity in Wild Thorns. The variety of Adil’s responses to violence and oppression results in a more fluid concept of subjectivity, a subjectivity that can move from category to category over time. While the women who employ the codes of violence and possess mementos can exist in the mediated space and eventually keep the cycle of violence closed in the long term without rupturing the order, Adil occupies the mediated space category for a short time, during which he enjoys a psychological balance, but eventually his distress leads to a build-up of pressure that compels him to appear in a different category as he does not possess an outlet to release it. For characters like Adil, tension from the occupation builds, and with no mementos or codes of violence as outlets, he eventually loses his psychological balance, and toward the end of the novel, he desired to take a stand against the political and social oppression he lives with. When he learns that the Israelis are planning to blow up his house because they suspect hidden weapons, he leaves his father’s dialysis machine inside to be blown up with everything else there. For him, the dialysis machine symbolizes the indirect oppression of Israeli occupation and the direct oppression of Palestinian patriarchy exemplified by his father. His father, Abu Adil, inflicts another type of oppression upon his own family. He takes out his frustrations on his family members, constantly humiliating them and creating tension within his family rather than fighting actual financial and political oppression that is taking place in the lives of Palestinians following Israel’s occupation of the territories. Adil sees similarities between his father and the Israeli officer, symbolic of the occupation, whom Usama has stabbed to death. Adil carries the officer on his back, symbolizing the burdens that Palestinians carry. Similarly, he takes care of his domineering father at the expense of his private life and personal comfort. But when he realizes that the existence of both the Israeli soldier and his father are real threats to his life and everyone else’s, he decides to stand against both of them, realizing that political and patriarchal oppressions are two faces of the same coin. He even notes similarities between the Israeli officer’s face and his father’s:

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That face! That man! You carried [him] on your back! You stripped off his stars and carried [him]. You carried a human being. And you felt your own sense of humanity swell and deepen, as you became aware of the Israeli officer as a human being. Your father too, you’ve carried him for a long time. But when his existence becomes a threat to your own humanity…Now this officer…his face is like my father’s. (Khalifeh 1976, 204)

While the Israeli soldiers are blowing up his house, Adil tells himself: Take a deep breath [.] […] Tears. Dust. Fog. […] A thirst for revenge, for rebellion, stirred deep within him. I’m not cruel, but I’m filled with rage and bitterness […]. But the will to live still beats within you, defined and instinctive. […] Your heart rages and storms, yet the energy’s suppressed by the machinery of oppression. If only you knew how to begin! If only you were more cruel or harder of heart […], you’d turn everything upsidedown. And begin again. (Khalifeh 1976, 206, emphasis is mine)

Adil’s interior monologue supports Restrepo’s notion of “the return of violence” (2005, 1). Adil is not a violent person by nature, but he is “filled with rage and bitterness,” and is willing to “turn everything upside-down” and “begin again” by leaving the mediated space and entering another realm of subjectivity. (Khalifeh 1976, 206). Restrepo stresses that the violence of colonization, as difficult as it is to understand, reemerges in different ways, even if the experience has been repressed for a long time (2005, 2). After rupturing the symbolic order, Adil is able to answer the question he had earlier asked his friend Zuhdi: “But can I make roses from thorns?” From the beginning of the novel, unlike his cousin Usama, Adil tries to make roses from thorns: he resists the occupation in a realistic way (Khalifeh 1976, 191). While Usama casts the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a solely nationalist struggle, Adil welcomes negotiations and mediations as mechanisms to survive the occupation. Adil higher priority is to feed his family and try to solve his co-workers’ problems. He resembles the cactus or subar in his capacity to adapt and cope with difficult situations; while he seems tough, he is also kind, similar to the rough and spiny cactus that is filled with sweet fruit. Although some would view Adil as betraying his father when he leaves the dialysis machine in the house, this tough exterior may be interpreted as the protector of the sweet interior. Like the cactus fruit whose leaves become harder while the inner fruit becomes sweeter as it resists heat and drought in the desert, Adil toughens to meet the conditions of oppression yet becomes kinder and more empathetic at the same time.

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Both of Adil’s and Barghouti’s form of subjectivity, which manifests in those who strive for stability but never achieve it, denies limitations to dichotomies and invites greater examination. This form of subjectivity represents the intricacy of the status quo of Palestine and the entanglement of occupation that only forges more complex Palestinian subjectivities. Adil’s and Barghouti’s form of subjectivity explains a Palestinian turning point when the only thing to do is to “turn everything upside-down” and “begin again” (Khalifeh 1976, 206). This form of fluid subjectivity that is unable to enclose the circle of pain, exemplified by Adil’s and Barghouti’s mode of subjectivity, is a product of politics—the occupation. As the social order remains undomesticated, the circle of violence is still incomplete, and the actions of people like Adil and Barghouti are political; and thus, their fluid subjectivity will remain in flux, a state that invites more investigation to better understand the varied and unpredicted political responses of Palestinians to the occupation, in particular, and colonized people, in general.

Conclusion In this study, I analysed the literary representations of three Palestinian works that document, in particular, the complexity of Palestinian subjectivity after the June War and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and propose an advanced vision of Palestinian subjectivity that challenges the traditional dichotomy of insiders and outsiders. The examined works in this essay provide a sophisticated, and yet comprehensive description of the intricate relationship between personal experiences and political oppression that shapes Palestinian subjectivity. The authors’ vivid portrait of the daily life struggles imposed by borders that separate Palestinian insiders from those in exile makes for a reliable testimony of factors that influence the formation of Palestinian subjectivity. The complexity of Palestinian subjectivity springs from Palestinians’ relationship with Palestine, and its memories, creating overlaps and undercutting among subjectivities, which allows for a variety of subjectivities that are not limited to the traditional dichotomy of Palestinian “insiders” and “outsiders,” and constantly furthering boundaries among Palestinians as “them” and “us.” In the examined works, the nexus of memory, narrative, and violence invites analysis through a critical psychoanalytic perspective that reflects on Palestinians' subjectivity and their plight under the Israeli occupation. This nexus leads to suppression, rupture of the symbolic order, and embodiment of the social fantasy. In other cases, it urges women to develop mediated

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subjectivities while other subjectivities constantly move fluidly between all three categories. As the texts show, Palestinians’ experience of enacting violence and becoming uninspired is the product of the continual weaving of their personal lives and the political situation in Palestine. The Palestinian experience of rupturing the symbolic order and enacting violence begins with a character perceiving imaginary wholeness, reaching the symbolic order stage, and finally rupturing it. Ultimately, the texts demonstrate that the cycle of violence comes to an end only after reaching psychological balance through the use of mementos and codes of violence. It is the women characters in the works who utilize mementos and execute codes of violence, and accordingly, their capacity to reach balance and cultivate a sense of stability makes them the most capable of ending or containing the cycle of violence. The complexity of Palestinian subjectivity, as the examined texts reveal in this study, cannot be captured by the traditional dichotomy of insiders and outsiders; rather, it invites examination on a broader level to better comprehend the wide range of Palestinians’ subjectivity and their varying responses to the conditions of occupation.

Bibliography Barghouti, Mourid. 2003. I Saw Ramallah. Translated by Ahdaf Soueif. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Booker, M. Keith. 1996. A Practical Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism. White Plains, NY: Longman. Cixous, Hélène. 1986. The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P. Edkins, Jenny. 2003. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fadel, Hazem. 2016. From Damascus to Beirut: Contested Cities in Arab Writing (1969-1989). Lady Stephenson Library, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowise. Diacritics 16.1: 22-27. https://sfaiph304.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/foucault_of_other_spac es.pdf Harlow, Barbara. 1987. “Narratives of Resistance.” New Formations 1: 131-135. Kanafani, Ghassan. 2000. Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories. Translated by Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Rile. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, INC.

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Khalifeh, Sahar. 1976. Wild Thorns. Translated by Trevor LeGassick and Elizabeth Fernea. Jerusalem: Galileo Limited. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Levi, Primo. 1989. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. London: Abacus. Restrepo, Luis. 2005. “La Araucana and the Trauma of the Conquest: The Amerindian Love Stories and the Representation of the Pain of Others.” Paper presented at The American Comparative Literature Association, Altoona, PA. Said, Edward W. 1999. After the Last Sky. New York: Columbia University Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Swedenburg, Ted. 2003. Memories of Revolt: The 1936- 1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian Past. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Van Leeuwen, Richard. 2003. “A Journey to Reality: Murid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah.” In Crisis and Memory: The Representations of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative, edited by Ken Seignueurie, 199-212. Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag. Yaziji, Nejd, 1996. “Exile and Politics of (Self-) Representation: The Narrative of Bounded Space and Action in Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns.” In Cross-Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders, edited by John C. Hawley, 87-107. New York: State University of New York Press. Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

CHAPTER TWELVE COLLECTIVE MEMORY FROM THE ASPECTS OF TIME AND PLACE INGRIDA EGLĖ ŽINDŽIUVIENĖ

Introduction The article focuses on the dimensions and the role of time and space in collective memory. Although the theme was inspired by a number of examples in fiction, non-fiction, and my personal experience, the general issues that help to form and preserve the collective or national memory are the main focus of this research. Drawing on trauma theory, I am going to examine ways how national or collective traumas become "ingrained in collective memories and provide reference points to draw upon when the need arises.”1 The questions of the role of describing trauma in both fiction and autobiographical writing related to the representation of historical trauma of the twentieth century, focusing on the painful period of 1940–1990 in Lithuania and other Eastern European countries, will be examined. The collective trauma of the mass deportations to Siberia and Central Asia in the period of 1940-1956, one of the most tragic periods in Eastern Europe, is known as the on-going trauma of the majority of the countries in this European region. This trauma can be rightly labelled both “collective” and “transgenerational,” as this traumatic experience once having being silenced and then finally voiced (after a fifty-year period of inflicted fear and silence) still encompasses sensitive issues dealing with the long-lasting process of recovering. The research aims to disclose different variables that influence the process of dealing with or recovering from the collective traumatic experience. The main object of this study is two dimensions (time and space/place), which are closely related to the formation of national identity. The proximity of the author of a trauma narrative to a collective 1

Neal 2005, 7.

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trauma will be discussed, and ways of its representation in a trauma narrative will be examined. The general term "trauma narrative" is used in this article to refer to the works of fiction and non-fiction (autobiographical writing and memoires). In addition, examples of other forms of art will be mentioned. In a trauma narrative, often the writer’s standpoint is based on and influenced by personal experience. In addition, the dimension of time becomes one of the most significant issues in describing trauma: the time span that separates the traumatic event(s) and the time of reflection on trauma often determines the tone and style of narration. In addition, the dimension of time directly influences the concept of the place of trauma and may determine symbolism connected with the place. The dimension of time can also be viewed from the perspective of the duration of the posttraumatic period. It is necessary to raise a rhetorical question whether it is possible to determine the end of the posttraumatic period or its continuous duration. Moreover, the posttraumatic period in itself can be considered a part and an indicator of the on-going collective trauma. Inevitably, the dimension of time is related to the generational transmittance of trauma and, thus, may shape national identity. Finally, different types of collective memory from the aspects of time and space/place will be discussed.

The Multiplicity of Trauma Narratives I would like to explain my on-going interest in the issues of collective trauma and trauma in general. Looking back on my research spheres, I must admit that soon after 2001 and its label of 9/11 trauma I closely followed the rise of 9/11 literature, especially focusing on different American and European authors and their works. One of the first 9/11 novels in the world, Frédéric Beigbeder’s renowned Windows on the World (2003/2004) gave a start to the genre of 9/11 fiction. However, as many had expected, the response of American authors (John Updike, Don DeLillo, Art Spiegelman, Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Philip Roth, Paul Auster, and many others) have displayed a sensitive consideration of the collective trauma, turning the readers, to quote Anne Whitehead, into the “learning witnesses”2. In my articles on American 9/11 fiction (on John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Laila Halaby’s Once in A Promised Land (2007), Paul A. Toth’s Airplane Novel 2

Whitehead 2004, 8.

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(2011), and many others, I had investigated the binary existence of the personal trauma and the collective one. Consequently, it is through 9/11 American fiction that I then later turned to other types of collective trauma; however, still emphasizing the relationship between the personal experience and the collective one. I have examined literary discussion of historical traumas, also traumas caused by natural disasters (for example, in Alan Drew’s novel Gardens of Water) (2008), and the spread of diseases (in Victoria Hislop's novel The Island) (2005) and other types of traumas. This process consequently made me turn to the issue of collective traumas in my own country, Lithuania. Therefore, one of the biggest collective traumas of the twentieth century, mass deportations during the Soviet regime before and after World War Two, became the focus of my further research. This collective trauma has been under-researched and, until recently, has not been given much consideration by researchers. In addition, the very fact that a surprisingly small number of works of fiction on this national trauma exist in the languages of the Baltic States, while the amount of memoirs and other pieces of biographical writing is very big and is still increasing, may explain the continuity of trauma. The number of translations of both fiction and memoirs is very small, and only a few novels by foreign authors have been published. When Ruta Sepetys, an American-born author, wrote her first novel Between Shades of Gray (2011) on the issue of the trauma of forced dislocation during the above mentioned period, despite her thorough knowledge and personal interest in this collective trauma, her novel (when translated into Lithuanian) caused a quite unexpected reaction from the former deportees: some of them agreed with the author’s standpoint and ability to produce a work of fiction on this trauma, but there were many readers who objected to the rendering of events, stating that the whole experience had been much worse or more tragic. Such considerations explain a rather fragile position of the authors of trauma fiction; this issue will be explained further in the article. Thus, this particular misbalance between the abundance of autobiographical writing and a still relative absence of works of fiction on the mass deportations in the Baltic States encouraged me to investigate the relationship between fact and fiction in the representation of the longlasting collective and personal trauma and to question the dimensions of deep memory and common memory. It was particularly interesting to see if any trauma narrative makes it possible to empathize and identify with those who have experienced trauma. Dori Laub states that massive trauma, described in the "narrative of extreme human pain," psychic and physical, bears "historical evidence" to

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the traumatizing events3. Thus, a trauma novel includes a realistic and historical dimension and is often based on the documents and testimonies of the victims. In the trauma novel or any other piece of trauma narrative, the reconstruction of massive trauma becomes a process of the restatement, during which the response to the work of fiction contains both personal and transpersonal dimension. However, in autobiographical writing and memoirs, the personal approach to trauma is of utmost importance. Representation of historical trauma in fiction and non-fiction gradually became the major sphere of my scholarly interest and brought me closer to the trauma theory of Cathy Caruth (1995, 1996), Dominick LaCapra (2001, 2004), Laurie Vickroy (2002), E. Ann Kaplan (2005), Anne Whitehead (2004, 2009), Gabriele Schwab (2010, 2012), Pierre Nora (2011) and others. Subsequently, I started investigating the representation of historical trauma of the twentieth century in Lithuanian literature, focusing on the painful period of 1940-1990 in my country, and, especially, on the mass deportations to Siberia and Central Asia (1941– 1956)–a tragic period in Eastern Europe. As it has been stated above, numerous testimonies of the survivors exist, life stories have been published (most of them in the national languages of the Baltic countries; therefore, hardly accessible to readers and researchers in other countries) and historical studies on this form of the Soviet genocide have been published (for example, Arvydas Anušauskas’ Terror and Crimes against Humanity (2006), Anne Applebaum’s Gulag (2003) or Stéphane Courtois et al.’s Le livre noir du Communism: Crimes, terreur, repression (1997) (The Black Book of Communism) and others). The reason for the absence of a small number of the works of fiction may be the long period of inflicted silence: during the period of Soviet occupation any reference to this trauma was prohibited; sometimes even the closest family members did not talk about their traumatic experience of deportation. Mass deportations of the citizens of the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) to different remote areas in the former U.S.S.R. started just a week before the beginning of World War Two and continued in 1945–1950s, when six hundred thousand prisoners were taken from the Soviet-occupied Baltic States. Every third Lithuanian became a victim of Soviet terror; more than one hundred and thirty-two thousand Lithuanians were deported to Siberia, the Arctic Circle Zone, and Central Asia. Approximately seventy percent of the deportees were women and children. More than thirty thousand of the deportees died there because of starvation, severe living conditions, and slave work. During the same 3

Laub 1992, 57.

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period, another two hundred thousand people were arrested and imprisoned; one hundred and fifty thousand of them were sent to the Gulags, Soviet concentration camps or Soviet prisons. In the Foreword to the book Children of Siberia, Irena Kurtinaitytė Aras presents the following facts: During the years 1940–1957 in Lithuania, 24,303 people were murdered: soldiers, national guard, local defense, partisans, and other members of the resistance movement and their families. [...] During the years 1940-1953 in Lithuania, 198, 367 people were imprisoned. Of these, 20,000 perished in prisons and labour camps. Some died from starvation, unbearable cold, and hard labour. Others were tortured to death or shot. 127,000 Lithuanians were deported to various locations in the Soviet Union. Of these, 55,350 were children up to sixteen years of age, who were exiled with their parents. 28,000 persons perished, and among them were 2,047 children. In 1948 one of the largest groups sent into exile included 12,271 children. 18,306 Lithuanian children were born in exile.4

There were several big waves of mass deportations to Siberia: in 1940 the Soviet government’s task was to decapitate the Lithuanian nation by annihilating its cultural and political elite (according to the original plan approximately fifty percent of the inhabitants of Lithuania had to be deported and destroyed); after 1944, partisans of the anti-Soviet Resistance War and their supporters were deported; in 1948, over forty-eight thousand farmers or owners of some property were deported.5 The deportations continued until Joseph Stalin's death in 1953. The main aim of the Soviet mass deportations from the Baltic States was to exterminate educated and well-known people, formerly engaged in the creation of the statehood, the national value system, culture, education, and politics. When distinguishing the crises precipitating a national trauma, Arthur G. Neal determines two types–“an acute crisis that impinges upon the normal course of events in an abrupt and dramatic fashion” and a “chronic, enduring, and long-lasting”6. The period of Soviet occupation, mass deportations and political repressions represent both of these types: one–a shocking understanding of disruption of the social system, harmony and life in general, and the other one–lasting for many years. The period itself and its representations in different forms of art have been under-researched compared to other genocidal atrocities during different historical periods 4 5

Kurtinaitytė Aras 2013, 9.

Kuodytė and Tracevskis 2004. 6 Neal 2005, 7-8.

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in the world. As it has been mentioned above, the topic of mass deportations was forbidden during the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries (1941–1990), and, thus, was deeply suppressed within the boundaries of families or within the memories of a single person. After Lithuania regained independence with the Act of Re-establishment of the State of Lithuania in 1990, the testimonies of survival and tragic accounts of the atrocious death of many others during the long years of deportations started to pour out. To use Shoshana Felman’s phrase, “liberation from silence” started–it was as though the unhealed wound started to bleed again and had to be treated anew7. However, it is difficult to exactly predict the true scope of the ongoing and future effects of this traumatic experience or foresee the end of “transgenerational haunting”8. After recovering from the long years of occupation, the three Baltic States have been trying to cope with this transpersonal dimension of collective trauma for over twenty-five years now. Amidst the numerous testimonies of witnesses, the absence of fictional narratives itself becomes an important fact: to many survivors it seems impossible, to quote Anne Whitehead, to “narrate the unnarratable”9, while others most probably consider it a sacrilege to fictionalize the harsh truth. Similarly, Kristiaan Versluys observes that many problems arise “in connection with the narrativization of collective trauma” and states that “as trauma is deemed to be unsayable, any saying of it may be seen as a cheapening, a reduction of its irreducible atrocity to something less threatening, more controllable”10. In researching the representation of trauma in different memoirs and fictional narratives (only very few of them in English or translated into English and a very small number in Lithuanian), I came up to the question of different types of readers: (1) a reader-victim, still haunted by traumatic events; (2) a person whose family members were victims (the author of this article); (3) a person who remembers the period of the traumatic events, but was not a victim himself/herself; and (4) a present-day reader of the narrative who becomes emotionally involved and turns into a partial participant of the trauma, or to quote again Anne Whitehead, becomes “a learning witness”11 or is a “researcher” of the trauma. Mainly, these considerations then later brought me to the question of the author’s and the reader’s proximity to trauma and the importance of these two types of proximity in the process of dealing with the traumatic experience. When Vladas Kalvaitis (1929–) 7

Felman. 1995, 47. Whitehead 2004, 29. 9 Whitehead 2004, 4. 10 Versluys 2009, 11. 11 Whitehead 2004, 8. 8

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published his autobiographical novel Sustiprinto režimo barakas (A Maximum Security Barrack (2011), in which he told the story of his arrest in 1948 by the Soviets, deportation to Siberia and life there until his return to Lithuania in 1966, many readers became a part of trauma community. E. Ann Kaplan observes that “politics intervenes in how […] trauma is ‘managed’” and states that “traumatic events may affect the discourse of an entire nation’s public narratives”12 Kaplan rightly notices numerous “examples of national “forgetting” or displacement” of memory13; however, in the case of the collective trauma of deportations the memory had to be hidden or suppressed. Only recently psychologists and other specialists have started investigating psychological and physical consequences of mass deportations. Trauma theory explains the role of silence or distancing effects: the Holocaust studies have put fundamentals in this direction in trauma research. In the explorations of the Holocaust victims’ memories, the reference to a historical gap in the collective witnessing and memory as outlined by Dori Laub14 becomes a controversial concept in the analysis of other traumatic events of the twentieth century. For example, in the case of Soviet genocide, this historical gap comprised both “the self-inflicted emotional imprisonment”15, a similar psychological state experienced by the Holocaust victims, and the continuous fifty-year political and emotional imprisonment–political repressions and emotional suppression– that happened in the lives of the citizens in the Baltic States and other East-European countries. In my considerations of the national trauma and the wound culture, I came close to the examination of the Soviet-inflicted trauma and the results of its silencing or suppression during the years of occupation. In such way, the results of repressed emotions, or repression, what Freud regarded as "a special defence mechanism in coping with trauma" gained quite another form16. Upon their return, former deportees experienced various forms of repressions. For example, they were denied access to higher education; the first ones to come back from exile had only one choice–to go back and study in Russian universities, as they were not accepted in the national ones. Later, when the children of deportees were allowed to study in Lithuania, many were denied access to postgraduate studies unless they joined the Communist Party. In fear of new repressions, deportees had to hide their past for a long time; some of them 12

Kaplan 2005, 66. Kaplan 2005, 66. 14 Laub 1995, 64 15 Laub 1995, 64. 16 Smelser 2004, 50. 13

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did not even share their experiences with their own children17. The suppression of trauma resulted in what Gabriele Schwab calls “the crippling sense of inferiority”18. In their study The Psychology of Extreme Traumatization. The Aftermath of Political Repression (2005), Lithuanian scholars Danutė Gailienė and Evaldas Kazlauskas state that “political repression had a long-term traumatic effect”: persecutions or fear of persecutions led to the separation of families or to social distancing transmitted to later generations19. For fifty years (1940–1990), “the sufferings of the victims were not recognized, and, even worse, they were concealed from the public”20. This endless traumatic period has made a profound impact on the "construction of identity within three generations," and the outcomes can be noticed in current socialization forms, values, community relationships and personal behaviours"21. Personally, I think that this posttraumatic period has not finished yet: new forms of autobiographical writing appear; in addition, there has been noticed a slowly starting increase of fiction, based on this collective trauma. While first memoirs written or told by the deported people contained a distinct emotional tone, the more recent ones are published in collections of documented stories with real names, facts, photos of people and places, maps, copies of documents or letters written form the exile, and other illustrations (e.g., Sibiro Alma Mater (Siberian Alma Mater) (2009), Lietuviai Arktyje. Lihuanians in the Arctic by Jonas Markauskas and Jonas Rytis Puodžius, Tremties vaikai (Deported Children) (2012) by Stanislovas Abromavičius and others). Neil J. Smelser has rightly observed that collective trauma might be interpreted “as indelible (a national shame, a permanent scar, etc.)”22. The latter idea reinforces the relationship between a collective trauma and national identity. For the survivor of trauma, Cathy Caruth observes, "the truth of the event may reside not only in its brutal facts but also in the way that their occurrence defies simple comprehension"23. This reasoning may aid in understanding the dangers that a trauma narrative may encounter: as van der Kolk and van der Hart have argued, “traumatic memories are the unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences, which need to be […]

17

Gailienė and Kazlauskas 2005, 73. Schwab 2010, 76. 19 Gailienė and Kazlauskas 2005, 70. 20 Gailienė and Kazlauskas 2005, 75. 21 Ibid. 22 Smelser 2004, 42. 23 Caruth 1995b, 153. 18

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transformed into narrative language”24. Van der Kolk and van der Hart pose a question whether “it is not a sacrilege of the traumatic experience to play with the reality of the past” and, in doing this, they predict the possible reactions to a trauma narrative, especially trauma fiction25. I will give an example of 9/11 novel. When Amy Walman’s novel The Submission (2011) appeared, even 10 years after 9/11, strong emotions outpoured making the gap between the opposing social groups even bigger. Based on re-imagining of the aftermath, the novel focuses on the issue of collective memory and its forms. It also questions the role of collective memory and emphasizes its impact on social processes. The novel aims at disclosing the essence of memorializing and the meaning of it: it forces a memory on us by the conspicuous and continuous physical presence of a monument” or conveys “the message that now we have paid our respects to a trauma” and now are “justified in forgetting it”26. Likewise, when Ruta Sepetys’ novel Between the Shades of Gray was published in Lithuanian, for many readers the very fact that this is a work of fiction was a shock. The novel was published in many countries of the world and, thus, can be seen as an informative and empathic source of information on deportations. However, in Lithuania, although the author has received notable awards from Lithuanian Government for her input into disclosing Lithuanian history, many readers could not reconcile with the fact that their own trauma was the inspiration for a work of fiction, and, moreover, was exposed to the world. Trauma narratives can recreate the experience for those who were not there–for example; readers may encounter someone’s experience, which may supplement their knowledge or inform them of the tragic event. Historical traumatic experience is the source that marks and defines contemporary individual identity as well as cultural identity. Trauma narratives containing the transgenerational sharing of experience of violence, loss, and suffering, disclose ethnic identity. Collective memories of massive trauma haunt descendants and re-inscribe the trauma on later generations. Thus, a trauma narrative, the theme of which is based on traumatic historical events, describes how they "change both individual and social identity"27; often such narratives explore multidimensional pain, creating “continuing legacies of pain” that are passed from one generation to another28. Similarly, Cathy Caruth observes that “the story of trauma, 24

Van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995, 176. Van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995, 179. 26 Smelser 2004, 53. 27 Vickroy 2002, 195. 28 Vickroy 2002, 218. 25

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then, as the narrative of belated experience, far from telling of an escape from reality […] rather attests to its endless impact on a life”29. Aurelija Daukšaitė states that “transmission can take place within the same generation or even across generations and not necessarily among people who are related by familial bonds”30 Therefore, traumatic experience functions as a distinctive national bond, uniting people, making them stoic or simply accepting the fate. E. Ann Kaplan rightly observes that "the question of when and how a national discourse can allow recognition of its past sufferings or can permit knowledge about violent crimes […] to surface in the public sphere, is extremely interesting"31. Kaplan outlines the following set of relationship to perception of trauma: 1) direct experience of trauma (trauma victim); 2) direct observation of another's trauma (bystander, one step removed); 3) visually mediated trauma (i.e., moviegoer, viewing trauma on film or other media, two steps removed); 4) reading a trauma narrative and constructing visual images of semantic data (news reader, three steps removed); 5) hearing a […] trauma narrative (perhaps the most complex of all the positions, since it not only involves both visual and semantic channels but includes the face-to-face encounter with the survivor)32. Thus, for the writers of trauma narratives the mode of relationship with different readers (a reader-victim or a reader-witness) becomes a significant factor in describing a collective trauma. According to Kristiaan Versluys, “trauma makes time come to a standstill as the victim cannot shed his or her remembrance and is caught in a ceaseless imaginative reiteration of the traumatic experience”33. Therefore, one of the writer’s tasks is to render this impossibility of sharing the traumatic experience. Following Kaplan, it is possible to state that different levels of the proximity to trauma narrative exist. Especially useful in this observation is the definition of different types of attitude to trauma narrative. Similarly, the writer's proximity to trauma is important. Here, I will consider the first instance of the dimension of time in the rendering of trauma: (1) the author–victim; (2) the author–the narrator of someone else's traumatic experience; (3) the author–a creator of a fictional narrative, based on facts. The discussion of the first group of authors leads us to the second understanding of time: (1) Was the author writing the memoirs/narratives at the time of trauma or soon after that? (2) Was the author writing after a 29

Caruth 1996, 7. Daukšaitė 2017, 8. 31 Kaplan 2005, 67. 32 Kaplan 2005, 91-92. 33 Versluys 2009, 3. 30

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prolonged period of silence? (3) What were the influential factors for the silence/suppression period? Then other related questions may follow: e.g., what were the influential factors in the process of writing? Whether memory processes interfered with the reconstruction of trauma? What factors made the author of the narrative consider outpouring the traumatic experience? Many other questions may be posed. Kristiaan Versluys, when dealing with the issue of time related to the trauma narrative, discusses the level of proximity in time: "how much time has to elapse before one can take enough critical and meditative distance to deal with" traumatic event34. Most Lithuanian memoirs on the period of deportation and life in exile were written after a prolonged span of time: it has been already stated above that any reference to this topic was forbidden during the years of Soviet occupation. Thus, the first autobiographical stories were published in the late 1980s and during the beginning of liberation period (early 1990s). Since then a great number of them were published: personal memoirs, collections of reminiscences of people of different ages and professions, retold autobiographical stories by the children of the victims, who died in Siberian prisons or labour camps. The whole process can be likened to the treatment of a long-lasting wound: the suppressed suffering finally could be exposed and widely shared. Therefore, the aspect of time is equally important in discussing the reader’s role (this has been already mentioned) and its influential effect on transgenerational trauma or recovery. As it has been already stated, the constructs of memory are naturally linked to or built on the dimension of time. Robert Eaglestone draws attention to the "rethinking of ‘afterwardsness' and the structure of experience and time [which] is inextricably tied to language not only to the sinews of tense but also through the deeper existential questions"35. Another equally serious question is the one related to what is unforgettable and what its role in the process of recovery after trauma may be. The semantic meaning of recovery is worth our attention: (1) recovery may be used in the sense of getting over traumatic experience or (2) recovering from the traumatic past. Accordingly, the time dimension can be applied to the discussion of these two meanings. Jenny Edkins suggests a new understanding of "trauma time," implying the continuous aspect of it.36 Following the latter idea, it is possible to state that the three Baltic States are still recovering (in all the senses) from this particular traumatic experience. Such statement can be proved by the subtle approach to any 34

Versluys 2009, 11. Eaglestone 2014, 18. 36 Edkins 2014, 127. 35

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degree of fictionalization of the events, while documentary and autobiographical writing remains acceptable and is understood as a norm. Amidst different useful studies, which analyse this particular aspect, the most inspiring source for me has been so far Gabriel Schwab’s Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (2010). Her standpoint makes it possible to relate both the recovery after trauma and recovery of traumatic experience to the challenges that many authors of trauma narratives and readers may face in dealing with different types of trauma. Schwab's formulation of "opening of the crypt" used to describe the process of narrating the traumatic experience gains particular importance in surveying different traumas in the twentieth century. Schwab ascertains that “secret pathways into the crypt […] hold the promise of transformation and social recognition” and states that “the process of traumatic encryptment and its impact on psychic and social life, thus [… bringing] a different social recognition to histories of violence not by revealing the silenced violent act but giving testimony to its lingering toxic effects and its transmission to those forced to suffer the silence”37. Following such an allegoric view on the traumas of the past, it is possible to view the writer’s role differently: there is certainly some danger included in this process of coming closer to the national crypt, opening it and uncovering the wounds of the past. Should it be done? Who has a right to do it? What is the purpose of this whole process? Will the opening of the crypt mark the end of the posttraumatic period or will it extend still further, resulting in the formation of “wound culture”38? Discussing the impact of trauma on a person, Lars Weisæth outlines different dimensions (“the whole traumatic situation, its biological, psychological, social and existential aspects”) and takes into account such issues as the time, duration, extent, and meaning of the trauma for the individual and examines survival mechanisms39. For example, most of the deportees still remember the things which helped them survive: faith, another person, inner strength, particular character traits, stoicism or, simply, accidental good luck40. However, many deportees admit that they survived because of the idea that the destiny of many others was similar to theirs or that their personal trauma was similar to or was the same of their whole nation. Therefore, the understanding of collective trauma helps in coping with the personal one. Although Kuodytė and Tracevskis pessimistically observe that “the great crimes of Soviet communism are 37

Schwab 2010, 56. Berlant in Schwab 2010, 114? 39 Weisæth 2005, 26. 40 Kuodytė 2005, 23. 38

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mostly just remembered in the hearts and souls of the victims,” sharing with others and transmitting the memories to later generations may serve as a curing method or a tool for the consolidation of the nation and formation of identity41. Similarly, Arthur G. Neal observes that “conditions of trauma grow out of an injury, a wound, or an assault on social life as it is known and understood. Something terrible, deplorable, or abnormal has happened, and social life has lost its predictability”42. These issues bring us closer to the aspect of place or space, related to traumatic experience. The place of trauma plays a very specific role: it functions to portray trauma’s effect through metaphoric and material means. Descriptions of the geographical place(s) of traumatic experience and the memory of them may express a larger cultural context, built on the clash of different social values that influence the recollection of the event and the reconfiguration of the self and even the statehood. The physical environment offers the opportunity to examine both the personal and cultural histories attached to the described landscape(s) (traumascapes). Thus, in the trauma novel or other forms of trauma narratives, the place or setting becomes a structural element that organizes the memory and meaning of trauma. Versluys states that “trauma must be given a place within one’s recollection in order to be (se)cured”43. The place may become a signifier of trauma (for example, Auschwitz, Twin Towers, Siberia, etc.), which functions most evidently and in different forms of memory. The memory place refers to an internalized place, which could be either remembered or imagined. The term “sites of memory,” coined by Pierre Nora (lieux de mémoire)44, denote, according to Whitehead, "any significant entity, material or immaterial, which has become a symbolic element of the material heritage of a community. Sites of memory are where culture crystallizes itself and can include places such as archives, museums, or memorials; concepts or practices such as commemorative rituals; objects such as emblems or manuals; and symbols"45. The place may serve as a password among the witnesses and, therefore, can be recognized by the readers of the traumatic narrative. The place can also form or transform the memory sites and become a part of national or collective memory. The place of trauma can in itself become a powerful symbol, on which collective memory is constructed.

41

Kuodytė and Tracevskis 2004, 51. Neal 2005, 4. 43 Versluys 2009, 3. 44 Nora 2011, 159. 45 Whitehead 2009, 161. 42

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The proximity (not necessarily physical) to the place of trauma can become one of the leading structures or themes of the trauma narrative. It may also help to inscribe trauma on collective memory. Let me again draw on an example of my national memory. Since 2005, a youth mission to visit the places of former deportation camps in Siberia, called “Mission– Siberia” (Lith. “Misija–Sibiras”)46, has been organized annually. Each year, a surprisingly big competition is held (of approximately 100 applicants to one position) to select some 20 young people, who would like, and, who would be prepared (both physically and emotionally), to spend a difficult summer in Siberia. Each year young people spend some two or three weeks searching out the places of the former camps and neglected graveyards for the deportees. There they meet local people and try to regain the graveyards from the wilderness. Interestingly, the historiographic and sociocultural explorations of this national trauma are more abundant than in different forms of art: as I have already mentioned, fictional narratives that might tell the story of this national trauma are still scarce in Lithuanian literature as well as in works of literature of the other Baltic States, Estonia, and Latvia. The same applies to other forms of art (painting, sculpture, cinema, theatre, etc.). This still relative absence of artistic/aesthetic forms of representations (with the exception of two films on the theme of deportations–the Lithuanian film Ekskursantė (Excursionist) (2013; film director Audrius Juzėnas) and the Estonian production In the Crosswind (Risttuules) (2014; film director Martii Helde)) may lead us to the question of a still-open wound, or still continuing posttraumatic period. What could become relevant in the artistic representation of the national trauma would be not so much the facts (the process of deportation, life in exile), but the emotional dimension of the collective trauma, built on instances of the "affective memory"47. As Jeffrey C. Alexander states, it is important to restore collective psychological health by lifting societal repression and restoring memory. To achieve this, social scientists stress the importance of finding–through public acts of commemoration, cultural representation, and public political struggle–some collective means for undoing repression and allowing the pent-up emotions of loss and mourning to be expressed.48

Neil J. Smelser states that collective memory is built of generation after generation engaging “in compulsive examining and re-examining, 46

Misija Sibiras. https://misijasibiras.squarespace.com/ (27 September 2017). Nora 2011, 307. 48 Alexander 2012, 12. 47

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bringing up new aspects of the trauma, reinterpreting, re-evaluation, and battling over symbolic significance”49. Therefore, it is possible to state that collective memory "is a reservoir of hundreds of different renditions of the memory–some dead, some latent, some still active, some ‘hot,' but in all events many that are available for resuscitation"50. I would like now to consider a different form of the memoir of the place of collective memory–a vase that my aunt brought from Siberia, where she as a child was deported together with other members of her family. The vase was made at a local Siberian ceramic factory. My aunt told me that after ten-year imprisonment in the Siberian camps for deportees, when her family was at last allowed to return to Lithuania in 1958, she wanted to have at least one pleasant souvenir from the days of her youth spent in an emotionally and physically unbearable place. Thus, she took this vase, which travelled with her all the way along from Siberia and stayed with her for 58 years until the end of her life in January 2016. As she had told me, she wanted to prove herself and probably the others that memory can be multi-fold: the places painted on the vase are very different from the places inscribed in the memories of victims. I think that she had kept the vase to remind herself both of the lost opportunities of her youth and the on-going wound. However, it can also be viewed as an example and a reminder of the sites of memory–a sign of this collective memory. Many scholars have observed the fluidity and flexibility of collective memory, which is similar to the description or levels/types of the personal memory: habit (repetition)/pure memory (survival of personal memories in the unconscious); voluntary/involuntary. In her book Memory (2009), Anne Whitehead states that "memories are transmuted even as they are transmitted, and evolve as the society changes"51. Whitehead states that “the ‘memory’ of traumas is thus not subject to the usual narrative or verbal mechanisms of recall, but is instead organized as bodily sensations, behavioural re-enactments, nightmares, and flashbacks”52. Delbo emphasizes a distinction between “deep memory” (bound with the senses) and “external memory” or “intellectual memory”53. The term “collective memory” became a widely used term in the twentieth century. Maurice Halbwachs’ works on collective memory (On Collective Memory (1925; 1992) and Collective Memory (1950)) emphasized the fact that memory 49

Smelser 2004, 54. Ibid. 51 Whitehead 2009, 39. 52 Whitehead 2009, 115. 53 Delbo in Whitehead 2009, 118. 50

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can be interpreted as a social phenomenon, and, thus, moved memory studies further from the understanding of memory as a ‘solitary act' and pointing at its possible variants of collective performance. Group memory is seen as a special act of "shared concerns and ideas"54. We may here consider the close relationship between the individual memory and group or collective memory: collective memory may have a strong influence on the capacity of the individual or personal memory; likewise, individual memory influences the generality of collective memory. Taking into account the dimensions of time and space, it can be observed that these both types of memory can draw gap-filling elements from one another. This point of view has inspired many scholars to investigate the role of collective memory further: thus, new terms have recently appeared ("shared memory" corresponding to Halbwachs' theory of collective memory; "common memory" (meaning collected memory). These discussions emphasize the platforms for the construction of shared and social memories. Another issue that becomes important when we consider collective trauma, is the distinction between collective and cultural memory. The main distinction between the two lies in the relationship to the dimension of time: cultural memory is concerned with events from a more distant past, beyond living memory55. Thus, the term “collective trauma” can be used to denote sharing of traumatic experience and, consequently, the term “collective memory” is used to describe shared memory, emphasizing the inter-generational and cross-generation transmission of trauma. Following Jeffrey C. Alexander's consideration on institutional arenas where the narrative of social suffering may take place, it is possible to create the levels on which collective memory functions: religious, aesthetic, legal, scientific, mass media, state bureaucracy and others (such as politics)56. On these levels, special types of narratives and means are undertaken to construct collective memory. In the questioning maintenance of collective memory on these levels, Alexander poses the following questions: Who owns the newspapers? To what degree are journalists independent of political and financial control? Who controls the religious orders? Are they internally authoritarian, or can congregants exercise independent influence? Are courts independent? What is the scope of action available to entrepreneurial legal advocates? Are educational policies subjects to mass movements of public opinion, or are they insulated by bureaucratic procedures at more centralized levels? Who 54

Whitehead 2009, 128-129. Whitehead 2009, 132. 56 Alexander 2012, 19-23. 55

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exercises controls over the government?57 Alexander rightly notices the relationship between the collective memory and collective identity. As collective memory may influence shifts or changes in collective identity, this may result in "a searching re-membering of the collective past, for memory is not only social and fluid but also deeply connected to the contemporary sense of the self58. Whitehead also notices the role of the social networking, stating that institutions who initiate different rituals and processes, although sometimes “highly formalized, [or] easily predictable” are based on regular repetition: Their power arises from their habituation so that they form an automatic sequence of movements that can readily identify those who are members of a particular group. Commemorative ceremonies are distinguishable from other rituals because they explicitly refer to prototypical persons or events, which are understood to have a historical […] existence.59

This ritual re-enactment is central, according to Whitehead, to the shaping of collective memory. Again, we may here see the different role of time: a regular return to the past may be regular, but not exactly the same–with altered variants of rituals. In explorations of national or collective memory, Pierre Nora defines the difference between collective memory, which is living in different forms, and history, which is the reconstruction of the past. If discussing the central issues of collective memory, it must be stated that it is built on the pillars of personal memory, which becomes collectivized and turns into a significant factor shaping collective identity. As Arthur G. Neal observes, “all collective traumas have some bearing on national identity. While in some cases national trauma results in enhancing a sense of unity within a society, in other cases collective traumas have fragmenting effects60. Danutė Gailienė states that in case of collective trauma, the effect of trauma is very complex and multifold, as protective social and cultural bonds are destroyed61. Subsequently, the continuity of national and historic memory is disrupted, and the transmission of national memory to later generations contains gaps: as bonds between the family and society, or among different social groups and generations become distorted62. The dimension of time, which is most naturally exploited in 57

Alexander 2012, 25. Alexander 2012, 26. 59 Whitehead 2009, 133. 60 Neal 2005, 29. 61 Gailienė 2008, 73 (my translation from Lithuanian). 62 Gailienė 2008, 73 (my translation from Lithuanian). 58

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the collective memory, stands together with the collective memory of the place. Therefore, these two aspects–time and place–are always significant when we consider collective traumas and their memory.

Conclusion The stories of collective traumas emphasize humanistic values and the limits of human endurance. They may also raise a question for the reader: What can be learned from the representation and testimonies of the traumatic events? The readers face fragile boundaries between empathy and identification with the victims; thus, it is possible to state that the typical feature of trauma fiction, a “mourning function,” is present and becomes one of the “continuing legacies of pain” which still needs to be resolved.63. However, this mourning function becomes particularly important in the case of unfinished or earlier suppressed mourning, an issue which emphasizes different steps and stages of recognition of trauma or even inability to mourn due to externally inflicted factors. According to Gabriele Schwab, "trauma can never be completely silenced since its effects continue to operate unconsciously"64. Discussion of historical and political origins of massive trauma may inspire changes in the “cosmopolitan form of memory.”65 Different interpretations of any trauma narrative (of any aesthetic form) may help to understand the effect of the collective trauma on personal and national identity, and to disclose the significance of fictionalized narratives of collective trauma for the analysis of world history. In his article “Beyond Eurocentrism. Trauma Theory in the Global Age,” Stef Craps observes that “today the concept of trauma is widely used to describe responses to extreme events across space and time, as well as to guide their treatment.”66 Trauma narratives in any form can do both heal, inflict further suffering or become pillars on which we construct our collective memory. At the same time, a trauma narrative can have a very special role of filling in the gaps in the collective memory of the world.

63

Vickroy. 2002, 218-222. Schwab 2010, 79. 65 Whitehead 2009, 150. 66 Craps 2014, 48. 64

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Bibliography Abromavičius. 2012. Tremties vaikai. Kaunas: Lietuvos politinių ir tremtinių sąjunga. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2012. Trauma. A Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Anušauskas, Arvydas. 2006. Teroras ir nusikaltimai žminiškumui. Pirmoji sovietinė okupacija (1940-1941). Terror and Crimes against Humanities. The First Soviet Occupation (1940-1941). Vilnius: Margi raštai. —. 2012. Teroras 1940-1958. Vilnius: Versus aureus. Applebaum, Anne. 2003. Gulag. A History of the Soviet Camps. London: Penguin Books. Baltutis, Romualdas. 2009. Sibiro Alma Mater. Šiauliai : Šiaulių universitetas. Caruth, Cathy. 1995a. Trauma and Experience: Introduction. In Trauma. Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth (ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 3-12. —. 1995b. Recapturing the Past: Introduction. In Trauma. Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth (ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 151-157. —. 1996. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Courtois, Stéphane, Werth, Nicolas, Panné, Jean-Louis, Paczkowski, Andrzej, Bartošek, Karel and Jean-Louis Margolin. 1997. Le Livre noir du communism: Crimes, terreur, repression. Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, S. A. Craps, Stef. 2014. “Beyond Eurocentrism. Trauma Theory in the Global Age.” In The Future of Trauma Theory. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. London: Routledge, 45-61. Daukšaitė, Aurelija. 2017. Historical trauma in Contemporary Novels in English and Lithuanian. Doctoral Dissertation. Kaunas: Vytautas Magnus University. Eaglestone, Robert. 2014. “Knowledge. ‘Afterwardsness’ and the Future of Trauma Theory”. In The Future of Trauma Theory. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. London: Routledge, 11-21. Edkins, Jenny. 2014. “Time, Personhood, Politics.” In The Future of Trauma Theory. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Eds.

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Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. London: Routledge, 127-139. Felman, Shoshana. 1995. Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching. In Trauma. Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth (ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 13-60. Gailienė, Danutė, and Evaldas Kazlauskas. 2005. Fifty Years on The Long-term Psychological Effects of Soviet Repression in Lithuania. In The Psychology of Extreme Traumatisation. The Aftermath of Political Repression, Danutė Gailienė (ed.). Vilnius: Akreta. Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, 67-107. Gailienė, Danutė. 2008. Ką jie mums padarė. Vilnius: Tyto Alba. Kalvaitis, Vladas. 2011. Sustiprinto režimo barakas. Kaunas: Kauko laiptai. Kaplan, E. Ann. 2005. Trauma Culture. The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Kuodytė, Dalia. 2005. Traumatising History. In The Psychology of Extreme Traumatisation. The Aftermath of Political Repression, Danutė Gailienė (ed.). Vilnius: Akreta. Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, 13-25. Kuodytė, Dalia, and Rokas Tracevskis. 2004. Siberia. Mass deportations from Lithuania to the USSR. Vilnius: Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania. Kurtinaitytė Aras, Irena 2013. Foreword. Transl. Vita Milaknis Markevičius. In Children of Siberia. Memoirs of Lithuanian Exiles, Irena Kurtinaitytė & Vidmantas Zavadskis (eds.). Trans. Živilė Gimbutas. Kaunas: Naujasis lankas, 7-12. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Laub, Dori. 1992. Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening. In Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York: Routledge, 5774. —. 1995. Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle. In Trauma. Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth (ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 61-75. Markauskas, Jonas, and Jonas Rytis Puodžius. 2010. Lietuviai Arktyje. Lihuanians in the Arctic. Vilnius: The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania. Misija Sibiras. https://misijasibiras.squarespace.com/ (27 September 2017).

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Neal, Arthur G. 2005. National Trauma and Collective Memory. Extraordinary Events in the American Experience. 2nd ed. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Nora, Pierre. 2011. Présent, nation, mémoire. Lonrai: Éditions Gallimard. Schwab, Gabriele. 2010. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press. Sepetys, Ruta. Between Shades of Gray. 2011. London: Puffin Books. Smelser, Neil J. 2004. “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 31-59. van der Kolk, Bessel A. and Onno van der Hart. 1995. The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma. In Trauma. Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth (ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 158-182. Versluys, Kristiaan. 2009. Out of the Blue. September 11 and the Novel. New York: Volumbia University Press. Vickroy, Laurie. 2002. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Weisæth, Lars. 2005. Psychotraumatology: An Overview from a European Perspective. The Psychology of Extreme Traumatisation. The Aftermath of Political Repression, Danutė Gailienė (ed.). Vilnius: Akreta. Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, 26-66. Whitehead, Anne. 2004. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —. 2009. Memory. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN AN ETHICAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SELF IN KATE ATKINSON’S LIFE AFTER LIFE1 MARÍA MAGDALENA FLORES-QUESADA

This piece of writing will deal with the manifestation of ethics along with trauma in the British contemporary historical novel and how these two elements affect the construction of the self. My aim is not only to show the relevance of ethics or trauma in literature, but rather to demonstrate that the encounter with the other, especially under traumatic circumstances, is essential for the self to develop as a morally mature person. I will first provide a brief approach to the history of ethics and its connection with literary studies; a very old and close relationship as Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods state: “literary and ethical questions have always been related, whether through the ethical nature of literary criticism, or through the use of literary texts to provide the basis for ethical thinking” (1999, 13). In order to study the connection between the self and the other, I will explore the ideas of authors such as Emmanuel Lévinas, Zygmunt Bauman, and Maurice Merleau- Ponty, who explore the relationship with alterity in a way that is strongly connected to the ethical component. With their notions as a starting point, I will discuss what happens when the encounter between the self and the other takes place, how the self must overcome her/his own preconceptions about the other in order to understand her/him and consider the other as a person who is equally important as oneself. I will indicate how even when the self is able to overcome her/his prejudices; other barriers may appear that may problematise the encounter with the other, for instance, a traumatic event.

                                                            

1 The research carried out for this article has been funded by the Spanish MECD (ref. FPU16/04163).

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In this way, other concepts will also be relevant under these said situations, such as empathy, emotion, indifference or identity. Once I provide the theoretical framework, I will apply it to the novel under analysis: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (2013), which, as I hope to demonstrate, can be used as a good example of how contemporary historical fiction can be read as an ethical reflection. This novel, regardless the fact that won the Costa Novel Award in 2013, has not received much critical attention regarding its ethical and psychological complexities, which is why I believe it is worth exploring from an ethical viewpoint. The novel focuses on a recent historical past: the two World Wars and the inbetween years, with special attention to particular events such as the Dunkirk retreat or the London Blitz. The author places the characters in those moments that, as we know, were crucial for history, but also, Atkinson shows how the characters’ choices have important moral repercussions on their relationship with others. Ursula Todd, the main character, will be crucial for the analysis given that, by observing her behaviour, the encounter between self and other can be identified, its consequences and the self’s development from that moment onwards. Finally, after the analysis of the text has been carried out, I will move to the conclusions of my study. I will stress the idea of the other as a necessary element for the self's ethical development. Following the analysis of the text, the reader will be able to observe that the encounter with the other has direct consequences on the self's personality. By making a parallelism between literature and our world, I will also re-examine the role of contemporary historical fiction, reconsidering what authors do when they create stories within this genre and the effect this has upon readers from an ethical viewpoint. The conclusions will briefly reflect on the role ethics is having in contemporary literary studies.

Ethics of the other Although ethics has had a presence in history as a branch of philosophy since more than two centuries ago, the appearance of ethics as an independent field of study that is applied to literature is relatively new. The reasons to explain its origins are very different: it could be said that ethics appeared because of the rise of some political parties, or that ethics has always existed, but that it was forgotten during a long period of time. However, the most feasible option is understanding ethics as a reaction against the formalism of other critical theories like structuralism, post structuralism and especially postmodernism that were predominant in Europe during the late 70s and early 80s. In this way, there was a clear

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division in countries like Britain at that time between those critics who still preferred a more linguistic analysis of the text and those who were starting to move towards a more humanistic approach (Hadfield, Rainsford and Woods 1999, 1). Whichever the reasons for its appearance might have been, the result is that nowadays ethics is a rich area of study with its own specific characteristics, or as “a quasi-autonomous discipline possessing its own conceptual and applied challenges, a conceptual vocabulary, a ‘thick’ sense of how moral beings function or might function in social environments, and a belief in the centrality of ethical discourse to all forms of social descriptions” (Freadman, 1999, 17). Thus, ethics is opening up a new way to study literature from the point of view of a human side that had been almost overlooked, exploring areas such as emotion, morality or empathy among others and expanding into many other fields of contemporary studies. This is why we can find many different types of ethics specialised in concrete areas such as feminist ethics, political ethics, racial ethics or bioethics, to name a few. In fact, the field of ethics is so popular now that authors like Steven Connor speak of a “current ubiquity of ethical debates in literary studies” (qtd. in Hadfield, Rainsford and Woods, 1999, 1), that is, a constant presence of ethics in many contemporary critical discourses. Although ethics has become a wide area of knowledge that includes many sub-branches, among all the topics that different authors of ethics have been studying, my aim to focus on a group of concepts that I found useful for the later analysis of the text together with particular authors whose studies are key for the purpose of this project. The main idea to be used is the connection between the self and the other. Also, concepts like identity, the recognition of the other, solipsism or empathy will acquire importance. It is difficult to speak about the self and the other dynamics without mentioning Emmanuel Lévinas, whose works about the encounter with alterity have been crucial for any later research on the area. In his work “The Trace of the Other” (1986) Lévinas explores how the self or “the same” sees the other, how they meet and how a connection or at least, a change in the self can occur. In this work, Lévinas brings ethics and literature together when he defines how the other is seen by the self. He makes a comparison by saying that the other is influenced by the world around her/him “like a text by its context” (351), that is, that no other is just an independent other, but that s/he carries a whole personal background that is necessary to acknowledge if we try to understand her/his full alterity.

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It is a “contradictory operation, since I ought both to distinguish him from myself, and therefore place him in the world of objects, and think of him as a consciousness” (Merleau-Ponty, 1967, 349), given that because each of us is our own self, we have a limited experience of the world, and we are bound to ignore what otherness is. In the encounter between the self and the other that Lévinas explains is where this “contradictory operation” resides, in trying to move from our own experience to somebody else’s, in trying to see the other as equally real as the self. This opposition is not as simple as the fact that the self does not understand the other, the self also has her/his own ideas or preconceptions about the other, making even more difficult the approach between the two of them. Thus the question would be how the self is able to overcome this contradictory operation. According to Lévinas, this is possible because the other appears through what he calls “a face” (1986, 351). Lévinas makes clear that thinking about the face as a simple representation of the other would be a mistake (1986, 352). Instead, also using Lévinas’s words, “the face is the way in which the Other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the Other in me” (1961, 50), that is, the face overcomes any kind of prejudice that the self may have about the other before that moment, it goes beyond the self's preconceptions, and it triggers the beginning of the approach between self and other. When this happens, when the face of the other appears and the self begins to see the other beyond her/his preconceptions is when the self must make a moral decision. At this point, Zygmunt Bauman’s understanding of the Levinasian encounter with the other is quite revealing, as he develops the concept of the “primal moral scene” (1995, 64): the moment in which the self, having seen the other’s face, stands at a crossroads where s/he must choose between two moral extremes. These two poles are what Bauman calls “being-for the Other” and “being-with the Other” (1995, 62). The former can be defined as an ethical responsibility towards the other that precedes the moral decision between good or bad, whereas the latter is a rejection of that responsibility, resulting in the form of egotism. Bauman places emotion as the bridge that connects both states together, as the element that can help the self to move from unconcern to responsibility. Emotion fulfils three essential stages in the ethical encounter: Emotion marks the exit from the state of indifference lived among thinglike others […], pulls the Other from the world of finitude and stereotyped certainty, and casts her/him into the universe of under-determination, questioning, and openness. Third, emotion extricates the Other from the

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These three achievements of emotion open up a possibility for the self to answer the other's moral call. Emotion enables the self to see the other as equally real as her/himself and connects the self with a sense of responsibility in relation to the other. On the contrary, the lack of this emotion produces indifference and problematises the ethical encounter. The implications of this process have not only direct consequences on the other but also in the construction of oneself. In Totality and Infinity (1969), Lévinas explores what he calls the “asymmetry of the interpersonal” (215), which years later he clarifies in an interview with Kearney. Lévinas explains that for him, reciprocity does not exist in the ethical encounter, it is always “asymmetrical in that it subordinates my existence to the other” (1986, 24). Therefore, the self is bound to protect, to save the other even when her/his own life is at risk: “my duty to respond to the other suspends my natural right to self-survival, le droit vitale. My ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-theworld, within the ontology of sameness.” (Lévinas and Kearney 1986, 24). He goes back to this idea in a later work, adding: I am in reality responsible for the other even when he or she commits crimes; even when others commit crimes […] I also think that it is the essence of the human conscience: All men are responsible for one another, and "I more than anyone else." One of the most important things for me is that asymmetry and that formula: All men are responsible for one another and I more than anyone else. (1995, 107)

Lévinas’s understanding of the ethical encounter as one in which reciprocity does not exist makes the self responsible towards the other regardless the other’s behaviour or choices, not expecting anything in return. The self’s responsibility towards the other, is thus, unavoidable. Even not choosing at the primal moral scene means choosing indifference over emotion. Therefore, all the decisions the self makes have an impact upon others and upon her/his own personality. This is why we should bear in mind that every action we do and every decision we make will have consequences for us and for others, not only as a result but also, as the cause that shapes our own personalities. It could be discussed, though, if this process is always constant or on the contrary, if particular circumstances may modify the ethical encounter. Given that the novel under analysis can be considered as a piece of

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contemporary historical fiction, we could wonder how extreme situations, such as those living in a world war, affect the self and other relationship. If we depart from the idea that each person is different from another in “normal” situations, how different would they be in a war? How can their decisions be influenced by such a conflict? How the other’s face changes when s/he is part of the self’s opposite political or social side? We could be talking about a new concept that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been defined yet and that I propose to call meta-otherness. If we take the definition of the prefix “meta” that the Oxford English Dictionary describes as “beyond, above or at a higher level” then, meta-otherness will be the existence of an other who is part of a wider group considered an other as a whole; or what is the same, an other who loses her/his uniqueness to acquire the characteristics of a group in the self’s eyes, problematising in this way, the ethical encounter. Thus, if nowadays, a British meets a German in, for instance, a journey to Berlin, the former would see the latter in a completely different way that if the same British had met the same German in the II World War. As we will see later in the analysis of the text, this idea, as simple as it seems, can be crucial to understand human behaviour and our approach towards the other. It can imply that the self will not be able to find that “face” in certain situations, so the “primal moral scene” never occurs and if so, emotion is more likely to be ignored. In fact, Bauman also defines “being-with the other” in a way that is close to my understanding of metaotherness: “pointing my finger at the rules, re-presenting my bond with the Other as an item in the set of similar bonds, a specimen of a category, a case of a general rule” (1995, 63). That is, seeing the other as an ordinary part of a group that is alien to the self for some particular reason. I do not imply that the ethical encounter is impossible in cases like the British of the previous example, but I believe that in situations of metaotherness the choice of emotion over indifference is less likely to occur, given that the self must overcome two “othernesses” (that of the individual, and the group’s). Then what is likely to happen is that the self’s prejudices are stronger than anything else, so that the other’s face can be easily ignored. This would explain Lévinas’s idea of how sometimes, the self can reach certain extremes of indifference towards the other, something that he explains going back to the idea of the face: [T]here is, consequently, in the Face of the Other always the death of the Other and thus, in some way, an incitement to murder, the temptation to go to the extreme, to completely neglect the other—and at the same time (and this is the paradoxical thing) the Face is also the "Thou Shalt not Kill." A Thou-Shalt-not-Kill that can also be explicated much further: it is the fact

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These two apparently contradictory ideas actually support Zygmunt Bauman's "primal moral scene" that we commented above: the idea that when the self encounters the face of the other s/he must choose between the two completely different options we mentioned before. What Lévinas adds here is another level, a wider view of this encounter that can happen under specific conditions. On the one hand, Lévinas explains that in certain situations the self is able to go to the extreme by completely ignoring the other's face, totally annulling the other's uniqueness, so s/he is able to kill the other, a level that we could only get by choosing the path of indifference. On the other hand, the self can be moved by emotion and compassion and not "let the other die alone." David K. O´Hara, who has also studied Bauman’s and Lévinas’s works within the frame of the ethical encounter, mentions an idea that I think is close to my understanding of meta-otherness in extreme situations by saying: “war, however, as an exercise in killing, endorses a certain dichotomy, dividing Us from Them. Other minds must necessarily be cheapened, and the problem of the Other is alleviated by means of generalization: he/she is merely one of the enemy” (2011, 82, emphasis in original). That is, what the self may do in a situation like the war against the enemy is simplifying the figure of the other to her/his role in a specific moment, to the colour of her/his flag or her/his uniform. This simplification is what enables people to go to the extreme, to kill or completely ignore others: the belief that a justification of any kind is more important than a face. This reduces the other to their religion, their race, their country or their political ideals and makes the road of indifference easier to be taken. On the contrary, following Lévinas's previous idea of "not let the other die alone," we could think of other examples in historical fiction where we find soldiers fighting on the same side, helping each other, trying to survive together. In fact, this notion of “not let the other die alone” is central to the novel that is going to be analysed, because it speaks about the importance of staying with people until the end, or even beyond the end. Up to this point, I have been discussing meta-otherness as external to the self, that is, traumatic or extreme situations that affect the relationship towards the other, but we could also argue if the otherness may be found within the self. As Suzanne Keene says: “just because we may be predisposed to care about others…however, does not mean that we will choose to act on another’s behalf when our feelings are aroused” (2007, 15). That is, the self must overcome her/his own personal emotions as

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well, in order to look at the other as a real person and have an active response towards the other. Therefore, external circumstances can reshape one’s character, re-constructing the self in a person closer or farther from the other. In this way, characters that are portrayed as traumatised after the war, like shell-shocked soldiers, can be understood as characters with a fragmented sense of themselves, emphasised by the sense of trauma, which can lead them towards further emotion or a deeper indifference towards the other. At this point, I would suggest another element that I consider crucial for the self to achieve that ethical encounter, even under the traumatic fragmentation of oneself, which is empathy. In his book Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra indicates: “empathy marks the point at which the other is indeed recognized and respected as other, and one does not feel compelled or authorized to speak in the other’s voice or take the other’s place” (2001, 27). Here LaCapra gives an important role to empathy in the self-other dynamics, given that his definition of empathy is very close to that of Lévinas’s face. We could argue that empathy is necessary to get to reach the other’s face. That is, like a domino effect, without empathy there is no face of the other, nor the primal moral scene and therefore, the self could never get to the possibility to choose between responsibility and indifference. If empathy plays a key role in the self and other dichotomies, we may wonder why. According to Diana Tietjens Meyers, the reason is that morality is not possible if people are unable to feel how others feel, if people do not consider the possible consequences that their actions may have on others (1994, 29); and she adds: “without empathic understanding of others, one would be left in the dark as to whether one’s actions have proven effective as measured by one’s own values and goals” (1994, 29). We could consider empathy as an intrinsic human characteristic, to the point that the lack of it has usually been considered to be a mental pathology or at least, not a normal, socially accepted behaviour. Empathy is what makes us see others as people who have feelings and realities as important as our own, rather than objects useful to our own aims. In a society where people are simplified into a pre-established category reduced to be customers, patients, voters, employees, users…rather than people in all their complex spheres, empathy becomes more and more valuable and more and more necessary. When we act out of empathy, we treat other people considering the other’s reality, thus our relationship with the other is personal, whereas if we choose to act following exclusively our own needs or desires regardless the other’s reality, our relationship with the other is what can be called utilitarian, using people as tools for

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our own purposes. If we remember the previous distinction of emotion and indifference and their respective results, that is, responsibility and indifference, we can see that they can also be easily and respectively connected to these personal and utilitarian relationships. After having seen all the elements that appear in this self-other dynamics, how the process is, how it can change depending on the situation or the subjects’ identities and the role that empathy plays; now we could wonder: what is the importance of all this? In On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, Ricoeur, David Carr and Charles Taylor say: This was Emmanuel Lévinas’s message that for us to be there is, in a certain way, to usurp a place. It may also be said that every event, by the fact that it has been realised, has usurped the place of impeded possibilities. It is fiction that can save these impeded possibilities and, at the same time, turn them back on history; this reverse-face of history, which has not taken place, but which had been able to take place, in a certain way has been, only however in a potential mode. (1991, 187).

Thus, according to Lévinas and Ricoeur, the fact that we are in a precise place at a specific moment means that we are preventing others from occupying our place. By doing what we do, we are restricting others’ possibilities. We had said above that every decision we make has a repercussion on others and here the authors go further saying that what we do is "to usurp a place." The fact that we choose means that we take one option and we leave others behind, so other people, mainly the people around us, will be influenced by our decisions as well as we all are conditioned by others' choices. This is why what may seem like a trifle or an irrelevant choice, for example, whether you buy a dress or not, as we can see in Life After Life, may have huge consequences, results that could have been totally different if we had made a different decision. But we do not have access to those alternative results, to the consequences of our undone actions. Here it is where Ricoeur adds that fiction is what enables us to create those possibilities that were “usurped” by the course of history. Literature has the power of rewriting those lost possibilities in real life and recreating them on the pages of a book and in the imaginations of countless readers. In real life, however, as we do not have access to our other possible choices, to those events that do not take place because we choose something different, it is usually only in retrospect when we realise of the importance of our actions or when a decision was crucial for us and for others. This is a repeated fact in the novel I am going to analyse, given that different characters recognise key moments of their pasts and they wish they had acted otherwise only when it is too late to change their

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present. Then, going back to our question of why this matter is relevant, we could argue that what is important is whether the self learns something from the encounter with the other, whether s/he is conscious of having usurped a place. This notion is going to be explored in the analysis of the text, where the consequences of one’s decisions are very clear. In Life After Life, we can infer that the self learns something from her experiences with the other every time the self, Ursula, "usurps a place." That is, every time the self makes a decision. Tietjens Meyers also states something along these lines: Posing the question of what sort of person would choose a particular option spurs people to think about who they are and who they aspire to be. This approach to moral reflection presupposes that one has a moral identity and that one should try not to betray one’s moral identity…By focusing attention on one’s moral identity and on how it can be enacted (or how it would be betrayed), asking whether one wants to be the sort of person who would act in a certain way makes self-recognition central to moral reflection (1994, 17).

Therefore, the act of making choices in our lives makes us move to a more transcendental level where there is room to think about who and how we are, where our identity is in connection with morality and ethics. The decisions we make, how we treat others and our own personalities interweave in real life, and they are portrayed in literature through stories like Atkinson's. Literature helps us see different human behaviours more clearly and makes us reflect on our own decisions in life. In fact, we could argue if the act of reading and empathising with characters that are purely fictional helps us to be more empathic towards others in real life. Along these lines, Paul Ricoeur explores the connection between what he calls "narrative identity," that could be understood as literature and "ethics identity," what we have been discussing above, saying: The pleasure we take in following the fate of the characters implies, to be sure, that we suspend all real moral judgement at the same time that we suspend action itself. But in the unreal sphere of fiction, we never tire of exploring new ways of evaluating actions and characters. The thought experiments we conduct in the great laboratory of the imaginary are also explorations in the realm of good and evil (1992, 164).

This is another way of saying that while we read any literary work, we are making judgements, evaluating characters and situations, that is: ethics and literature go hand in hand, regardless the fact that these two identities belong one to the real world and the other one to fiction. If we follow

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Herbert Grabes’s idea, we could think of literature as a rehearsal area for ethics, where human theories are explored through narrative works and can make people think about all kind of possible moralities and relationships among humans, or as he puts it: “a field of demonstration and testing ground for responsible and rewarding human behavior […] even superior to the abstract argumentation of the ethical discourse of philosophy” (2008, 1). Thus, literature is a very useful tool to bring ethics closer to everybody; or what is the same, it invites people to ask themselves about their role in the world, how they see and treat other people, how relationships are established, how they feel and behave. Following this notion of how literature and ethics interact, authors like Kate Atkinson manage to create a connection that goes beyond the pages of the book; through literature, authors can also create another level of the self-other relationship. They include the reader as part of this dynamics, being the self, and the one who is given a story and who has the power to decide whether to choose emotion or indifference and be with or for the other, towards those characters presented as "others." In the same way, that specific circumstances like the war can change the way the self sees the other, authors can modify readers’ views on the characters and can influence them at the “primal moral scene” that we commented above. This is why literature has the power of producing feelings in readers because it has the power of provoking emotion which will produce if not responsibility –given that we are talking primarily about fiction–, at least, empathy towards the characters and the events in the story they read. I think it is important to underline the crucial role that literature—and historical fiction in particular—have nowadays from an ethical point of view. Literature can serve us to reflect on forgotten episodes of history, on people who were ignored, on the reasons why certain things happened the way they did. I am referring to events such as the World Wars, or the September 11th attacks that traumatised half of the world, but also to more recent events, that unfortunately keep happening: bombings, shootings, those terrorists attacks in Niza, Manchester, Brussels, London or Barcelona, political radical changes and social problems that hide millions of personal stories with “others” in need of moral connection, but that are forgotten after a considerable period of mourning behind our everyday routines. Literature has the power of breaking in that routine, making readers to be witnesses of those stories. Literature creates new levels of the self-other dynamics, involving the reader in the process of empathy and reflection about the world s/he inhabits that hopefully can serve to transform our reality into a friendlier atmosphere.

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Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. If we understand a war novel as a literary work that takes place where an armed conflict is happening or in a domestic sphere where characters are very concerned about that conflict, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (2013) could be labelled as such. In fact, the novel under analysis combines the recollection of the two World Wars with family matters happening in an English country house. However, Life After Life offers a narrative complexity and a deep psychological approach to the main characters that make the novel being worth analysing from an ethical point of view in the terms I have been commenting above. Kate Atkinson plays with the characters in this novel by placing them in crucial situations where they must make decisions that will determine their future. It is at these crossroads where it is easier to observe the characters’ identities and their degree of responsibility towards the other. This is why I will focus on specific moments of the novel for a better ethical analysis of this literary work. Kate Atkinson presents in Life After Life a wealthy, traditional English family living in a beautiful house called Fox Corner. The novel opens in 1930 but covers previous and later years going from 1910 up to 1967, including a detailed depiction of both World Wars and the effects they have on the characters that are introduced in the book. The story in Life After Life is built around the Todd family and the character of Ursula in particular, one of the four children of the house. Atkinson imagines the different lives Ursula could have depending on the decisions she makes at different points of these possible lives. Sometimes her decisions lead her to different deaths, and when that happens, the narrative goes back to Ursula’s birth in a snowy night of 1910 or to the moment when she decided to do something that turned out to be crucial for her fate. This pattern is repeated throughout the novel once and again. By relying on Ursula’s experiences, the story moves back and forth so that “the novel interweaves the personal affairs of the Todd family, particularly, those related to Ursula, with historical occurrences, thus neatly interlocking the private and the public” (Arias-Doblas 2015, 126). In that interlocking, Atkinson also shows the close relationship between the individual and the community, through Ursula’s choices and the effect they have on others. One of the most powerful parts of the books is devoted to the constant bombing of London during the Blitz, more than two hundred pages that have been considered as “the best fictional depiction of life in the Blitz” (Lakeland, 2014, 25). In one of her lives, Ursula works as a warden of the Air Raid Precautions services during the Blitz, and during this time she is

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in contact with all kinds of human suffering. This part of the novel is particularly explicit in the descriptions of the physical torture that the Blitz caused. Ursula has to undertake every type of job which leads her to get used to physical pain and death: “Ursula splinted a broken arm, bandaged a head wound, patched an eye and strapped up Mr. Simm's ankle […] she labelled two unconscious survivors (head injuries, broken femur, broken collarbone, broken ribs, what was probably a crushed pelvis) and several dead” (Atkinson 2013, 461). She is present when a friend and partner, Mr. Palmer, breaks in two parts “as a Christmas cracker” (Atkinson 2013, 485) and when her neighbour's dress is hanging with her arms and hands but nothing else of the woman's body (Atkinson 2013, 502), just to name a few of the images she witnesses. These traumatic images, along with the fact that she experiences, in different lives, the bombing of the same cellar in Argyll Road, leave a traumatic mark on Ursula’s character that affects the way she interacts with those around her. The harsh images she witnesses in London become the unspeakable when she talks with her sister Pamela, whom she wants to protect: “she didn't mention wading in the effluent from ruptured pipes, certainly didn't mention drowning in that same effluent. Nor did she mention the gruesome sensation of putting your hand on a man's chest and finding that your hand had somehow slipped inside that chest” (Atkinson 2013, 468, emphasis in original). However, what this brutality causes in Ursula is not horror, but rather a tremendous love for the human race and a new understanding of the war: not as good and evil people fighting, but as normal men and women who are doing what their countries have asked them to do: “it was war itself that was evil, not men” (Atkinson 2013, 481). Thus, empathy is also presented to Ursula through the other’s physical pain, and this enables her to have a better understanding of human relations and to be more open towards emotion. In this way, she is able to stand outside the metaotherness that the war creates and to see the face of the other in everyone, with only one exception: Hitler, because “that man is quite, quite mad” (Atkinson 2013, 481). Nevertheless, it is true that Ursula has a gift: she has the power of living multiple lives, of dying and being born again and again, and what is more important, of learning from her past lives. Although this is not explicitly said in the book, there are some hints that enable the reader to fill the gaps of Ursula's narrative with information about previous lives that she does not fully remember. This includes slight changes in Ursula’s perception of the war or in her own personality. For example, at a certain point, Miss Woolf, the senior warden in the ARP team, and Herr

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Zimmerman, a German refugee, are speaking about how terrible the situation is also in Germany during the Second World War. Ursula says that she knows that, regardless the fact that she does not have any friends there, but that “sometimes one just knows” (Atkinson 2013, 497, emphasis in original). However, as readers, we do know the reason: in a previous life, Ursula has studied in Munich, got along with Hitler sympathisers, has been friends with Eva Braun and met Hitler, she has married a German man and had a daughter, Frieda, with whom she suffered the battle of Berlin that led her to kill her own daughter and commit suicide. Her German life is one of the most terrible in the book because she also suffers the despair provoked by not being able to protect her own daughter. However, it is one of the most useful for my point, given that only when she has empathised with the enemy, as one of them, becoming "the other", she is able to overcome the meta-otherness that the war creates and is able to emotionally connect with those on the opponent side in her next lives. According to Adam Mars-Jones what happens to Ursula is that “her behaviour is being shaped by residual trauma. She has a secondary vulnerability, like a passive smoker’s, that is real nevertheless” (2013). In fact, Atkinson's depiction of Ursula's constant sense of déjà vu is close to LaCapra's understanding of trauma: "a disruptive experience that disarticulates the self and creates holes in existence; it has belated effects that are controlled only with difficulty and perhaps never fully mastered" (2001, 41). Ursula is forced to reconstruct once and again her sense of self in the protection of her own life and others’. She uses this "residual trauma", along with her power of dying and re-living her life, to physically put herself in somebody else’s place, to the point of becoming the other, one of them, of the enemy. In this sense, Ursula does what Ricoeur, quoting Lévinas, referred to as "to usurp a place" (1991, 187), given that her choices lead her to feel directly what the other feels. Even Atkinson, in an interview with Martha Shulman, states: "I had to have her have a life there. In Germany, Ursula goes through the looking glass, and it changes her. I wanted her to feel different after she's been in Germany; throughout the book, she's becoming less passive, and I knew when she came back from Germany she'd be more vigorous" (2013). Thus, Ursula's ability helps her to be more inclined to emotion rather than to indifference because, after each life, she integrates what she has felt being the other into her own personality as the self. What Atkinson calls “less passive and vigorous” is what Bauman called “being-for the other” and choosing “responsibility” as I mentioned above. What seems significant as well is that the images that Ursula witnesses during the Blitz seem not to have an alternative version. Other parts of the

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novel are rewritten with different results, in fact, the exploration of “what ifs” is a constant idea in the book: the novel “explores the ‘what ifs?’ of a life” (Lakeland, 2014, 24). Every new life is an examination of a what if: what if Ursula had not been strangled with her umbilical cord, what if she had not been drowned in the sea, what if she had not studied in Germany, what if she had not been raped by her brother Maurice’s friend, and so on. According to Rachel Hore, the literary purpose behind the fact that the war always appears in Ursula's lives is that "the war should not have been allowed to happen" (2013). Although I agree, I also believe that the war is portrayed as an opportunity that enables Ursula to experience trauma in a way that makes her feel the emotion in first hand towards the other, she empathises with those she encounters, and she decides to be responsible towards them. This assumption of her moral responsibility towards the other is what makes her live and die once and again, re-shaping her own self with everything she learns from past lives and from her ethical encounters with those around her. Readers can discover this almost at the end of the book when we can infer that Ursula is at last, totally aware of having multiple lives and the power to rebirth after death. Once she knows this, she is determined to use her power to die for a bigger cause, that is: helping others, and climbing to her attic window, she thinks: She thought of Teddy and Miss Woolf, of Roland and little Angela, of Nancy and Sylvie. She thought of Dr. Kellet and Pindar. Become such as you are, having learned what that is. She knew what that was now. She was Ursula Beresford Todd, and she was a witness. She opened her arms to the black bat, and they flew to each other, embracing in the air like long-lost souls. This is love, Ursula thought. And the practice of it makes it perfect (Atkinson 2013, 592, emphasis in original).

This passage encapsulates my main arguments in these pages. Ursula’s encounters with the other in her previous lives make her choose emotion over indifference towards the other; make her able to empathise with the communal trauma that the war is. Then, thinking about her beloved ones, who died in several ways because of the war, she throws herself out of her attic bedroom in order to start her new opportunity to make things right for them again. This is the only way that serves her to fully become a morally mature person, to finally reconstruct her own sense of self, to the point that she verbalises who she is by saying her full name. Ursula's taking on full responsibility towards other, of being-for-others, is ultimately, as she expresses, an act of love that she hopes to repeat and repeat until no mistakes are made. To avoid mistakes, her ultimate plan is killing Hitler, an act of revenge

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according to a critic: “in previous lives, Ursula has died in the Blitz, lost a brother to an ill-fated Royal Air Force mission and starved in a Munich apartment during the brutal final days of World War II. Ursula doesn't have a score to settle with der Führer ─she has several” (Arnold-Ratliff, 2013); although this is true, I think Ursula's aim goes further. When she makes her resolution, she does not mention Hitler but remembers her beloved ones instead, so I am more inclined to believe that Ursula’s final aim is based on being for the other, is to protect those that she loves, has loved or will love in future lives. Yet, it is true that she never fully achieves it, or at least, the novel is structured in a way that makes readers think that we only get to observe one small part of the continuum that Ursula’s existence is. But Ursula’s failure is not essential for her self-construction, quite the opposite. It could be argued that her multiple lives are connected to Julián Marías’s understanding of what he calls “trajectories”: the different lives that you may have depending on the decisions you make. For him, the trajectories that are not realised in the end are as real and valuable as the final path that is chosen, and the combination of both is what constitutes human life (1995, 77). Thus, the fact that Ursula cannot get it right does not mean that her efforts are useless: each of these unsuccessful trajectories helps her to become who she is and to accept life as it comes, which is also related to another repeated idea throughout the book: “amor fati." This concept is first introduced in the novel by Dr. Kellet; the psychiatric Ursula is forced to visit because of her constant feeling of “déjà vu” (Atkinson, 2013, 151). Ursula defines it as: “acceptance. Whenever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced” (Atkinson, 2013, 551). However, it could be argued that if the self must maintain a stoic attitude towards life, as the Dr. Kellet proposes, the role of ethics loses its importance, as the subject may consider good and bad as equally acceptable, but one example from the novel may help to observe that the contrary occurs. At one point, Ursula’s mother, Sylvie, declares: “well, we all get on […] one way or another. And in the end, we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there" (Atkinson, 2013, 300), whereas Ursula thinks in a different way: “it seemed to Ursula that how you got there was the whole point” (Atkinson, 2013, 300, emphasis in original). These two characters embody in different ways, the two moral extremes that have been commented on these pages. Almost at the end of the book, the narrative goes back to the day Ursula was born, when she is almost choked with her own umbilical cord, the same death we see at the very beginning of the book, only that this time Sylvie has kept a pair of

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surgical scissors in her bedside table: ‘One must be prepared’, she muttered. ‘Hold the baby close to the lamp so I can see. Quickly, Bridget. There’s not time to waste.’ Snip, snip. Practice makes perfect.” (Atkinson, 2013, 602). The parallelism of this quote with the one mentioned before regarding Ursula’s suicide and Sylvie’s apparent knowledge of a previous life seem to indicate that Sylvie has the same ability Ursula has. However, whereas Ursula chooses the emotion and being with the other as we have already discussed, Sylvie embodies indifference towards the other, the being-with. In fact, she stands out for her lack of morality in the novel: she thinks of another man while she is in bed with her husband (Atkinson, 2013, 74), blames Ursula for being raped (Atkinson, 2013, 240) and prefers one of her children (Atkinson, 2013, 538), just to mention a few examples. It is not surprising then, that for Sylvie, how to get on in life does not matter, as she is indifferent towards any significant encounter with others. On the contrary, Ursula’s understanding of life and the moral of the novel seem to be the opposite: how you behave along the way and the decisions you make will be key for your life as well as for others’. As, to our knowledge, we do not share Ursula’s ability, what is left to us is Miss Woolf’s statement that leaves a mark on Ursula forever: ‘We cannot turn away,' Miss Woolf told her ‘we must get on with our job, and we must bear witness.' What did that mean, Ursula wondered. ‘It means, Miss Woolf said, ‘that we must remember these people [people who are suffering or dying in the war] when we are safely in the future.’ ‘And if we are killed?’ ‘Then others must remember us.’ (Atkinson, 2013, 457-8).

This is what Ursula tries to accomplish at the end: to do justice to those who were ignored. Ursula keeps dying and living to try to amend all the suffering that the war caused to innocent people. We can observe that in the end, she achieves to be-for the other in different ways and that she is open to emotion, open to personal relations, open to the encounter with the face of the other. In other words, we must pay justice to those who do no longer have a voice. We must encounter the other, look at her/his face and choose emotion rather than indifference and be-for her/him. Not only because of others but because this is how we can be able to re-construct our attachment to reality as social individuals, our own sense of selves and our ethical responsibility.

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Conclusion Having discussed the novel, we can conclude that ethics is one key aspect of Atkinson's literary work. I hope to have proved the goal of this study: showing that the encounter with the other is essential to the self's development. This can be observed more clearly by paying attention to the moments in which Ursula takes a decision that changes her life (or lives) after encountering with the other: when she decides to use her power to save others’ lives. Thus, a conclusion can be drawn from this: the encounter with the other is sometimes a revelation to the self, it is an inflection point where the self must decide whether to behave ethically or not. As we have seen, this decision is equally relevant to the fact that the self is able to learn from that choice, regardless the consequences. In the case of this novel, the protagonist learns from what she does and the decisions she makes and acts in consequence. Nevertheless, we have seen that the encounter with the other is not always easy. The self must overcome her/his own prejudices or ideas, and in some cases, s/he must also overcome a situation of what I called metaotherness. I hope this concept can help us to understand the self’s behaviour under specific circumstances, given that it is an element that adds another layer of complexity to the ethical encounter. We have seen that the war can serve as a good example of a scenario that provides conditions of meta-otherness quite easily, dividing sides within sides and creating new others. As suggested in the previous sections, the metaotherness requires a strong sense of self to be able to see the other’s face and act accordingly. In the analysis of Life After Life, it can be observed that the decisions the characters make and what they do following those decisions have a direct impact on other characters, but also on their own lives and their own personalities. This shows that our decisions will lead to concrete feelings: regret, pain, happiness, etc. and the way we live our life afterwards may be different depending on our previous choices. In my view, this leads to two important conclusions: firstly, that every decision we make has personal experiences as consequences, and as all our experiences are part of our lives, they are also part of what we are. In other words, our decisions will shape our identity. Therefore, the encounter with the other is also an encounter with oneself; it is an exploration of what we are and how we behave. The way we treat others is going to determine how we are in the long term. Then, when one chooses how to behave towards the other, one is also choosing how to be. Secondly, that we are all relevant in this world. If we think that our choices, for small or insignificant they may seem can

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determine ours and others’ future, then, we are an essential part of this world. It is true that in the novel under study, the choices may determine big events such as somebody’s death or the beginning of the Second World War. However, this idea can be easily brought from literature to real life and we can reflect on how little actions in our everyday lives can have direct impact upon others: a call, a hug or the right word can make somebody happy in a specific moment and vice versa, which goes back to the previous distinction between personal and utilitarian relationships. As one critic has considered, Life After Life is “a story about the creation of self” (Kellogg, 2015, 2), and that creation is made through Ursula’s commitment to her ethical responsibility towards the other. Modern societies have made us learn how to dehumanise the other; we are masters at ignoring her/his face. By saying this, I do not mean to imply that we are intentionally evil, but I think that a parallel could be established between our first-world and Ursula’s reaction to the invasion of Norway in one of her solipsistic lives, previous to her self-realisation: when she says “poor Norway” and then keeps drinking tea (Atkinson, 2013, 364), as if an invasion of a country was as important as the weather. A reaction that does not distance much from the contemporary superficially empathic tweet or Facebook post, before continuing with normal, comfortable lives. I believe that to some extent, we have substituted emotion for pity, which is another way of ignoring the other, of being with the other, as Bauman would say. We are so used to see the others’ suffering every time we watch the news or read the newspaper that I believe that we have lost at least a part of our ability to see that the other is as real as we are, the same that happened to Ursula at the beginning of the novel. The proof to this is that we only start to empathise with the other when the problem s/he has (an illness, a war) touches the ones that are on the other side, it touches us, as it happened not long ago with the Ebola virus in Europe, the Ukraine conflict or diverse terrorist attacks. Having this in mind, the role of ethics in literature seems to be clear: to take us back to the encounter with the other and to remind us of the importance of the other in our lives and in our development as individuals. In fact, the ethical moral of the novel analysed in this piece of work can be open to misunderstanding: The story deals with the idea that we only have one life and that it can change completely in the blink of an eye; thus it could be argued that the message is "carpe diem." However, I would say that their moral is choose wisely. Its intention is, in my view, to offer a warning to revise our behaviour, to make us reflect on our future and past decisions and see if they are correct; and to invite us to make amends if we

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should do it, “until we finally make it right” as Ursula states. Furthermore, it is my contention that Life After Life implies that the way in which we behave is important but that there is always a possibility to change what we do not like about ourselves, given that “there is room for individual variation in the selection and the weighting of value, and there is room for change as one discovers new values or reassesses the importance of familiar ones” (Tietjens-Meyer 1994, 17). I think that the encounter with the other is also an opportunity to rediscover the values to which TietjensMeyer refers to. Historical fiction works in the same way and that this is the reason why sometimes the reader feels deeply touched by the narrative. Writers bring together historical events that can make the reader consider why things happened in history in the way they did and why they let those things happen; as well as they present personal, emotional relationships among characters that involve the reader in a kind of encounter with the other through literature. Writers have the power to create a midpoint that is neither fictional not real that enables the reader to encounter with the other even if s/he is not able to do it in real life. This process is connected to Herbert Grabes’s metaphor of literature, as a rehearsal area as I commented before. For him, literature is a space that enables readers to be in touch with ethical matters with which they can identify even if those matters are fictional. Thus, I believe that through narrative, writers create a kind of fictional face of the other with which the reader may empathise. I would like to conclude my argument with a quote from the novel Miss Webster and Chérif by Patricia Duncker: “We are, after all, each other’s keepers” (2006, 115). I believe that this quote summarises the idea that I hope to have made clear here: the assumption of our responsibility towards the other because that responsibility is not only possible but necessary for the self and for society as a whole. Historical novels, like the one examined here, revise the role that an individual has had in History, and by doing so, they invite the reader to observe the consequences it has for the collective. This process transforms the reader into an inheritor of the consequences of someone else's decisions in the past and creates a continuum of ethical interaction among past, present, and future; between the individual and society and between literature and real life. I think that this continuum is opening up new debates in contemporary criticism, in which the ethical component still plays a fundamental part.

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Bibliography Arias Doblas, Rosario. 2015. "Telling Otherwise: Collective and Personal Remembering and Forgetting in Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life." Prospero, 20 (1): 125-142. Arnold-Ratliff, Katie. 2013. “Once and Again.” Review of Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson. Time, April 15, 2013. Atkinson, Kate. 2013. Life After Life. London: Black Swan. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1995. Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Duncker, Patricia. 2006. Miss Webster and Chériff. London: Bloomsbury. Freadman, Richard. 1999. “Ethics, Autobiography and the Will: Stephen Spender’s World Within World.” In The Ethics in Literature, edited by Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, and Tim Woods, 17-37. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. Grabes, Herbert. 2008. Introduction to Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values Through Literature and Other Media, edited by Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning, 1-15. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Hadfield, Andrew, Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods. 1999. Introduction to The Ethics in Literature, edited by Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, and Tim Woods, 1-14. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. Hore, Rachel. 2013. “Review: Life after Life by Kate Atkinson.” Review of Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. The Independent, March 9, 2013. Keen, Suzanne. 2007. Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press. Kellogg, Carolyn. 2015. “Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life Is a Clever Creation.” Los Angeles Times, August, 11, 1-2, 2015. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lakeland, Paul. 2014. “Born-Again Fiction.” Commonweal, March 21, 2014, 24-25. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburg: Duquesque University Press. —. 1986. “The Trace of the Other.” In Deconstruction in Context, edited by M. Taylor, 345-59. Translated by A. Lingis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1998. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshaw. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Lévinas, Emmanuel, and Richard Kearney. 1986. "Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas." In Face to Face with Levinas, edited by Richard A. Cohen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 13-35. Marías, Julián. 1995. Tratado delo mejor: La moral y las formas de la vida. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Mars-Jones, Adam. 2013. “Darkness and so on and on.” Review of Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. London Review of Books, June 6, 2013. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1967. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge. "Meta." 1997. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. O’Hara, David K. 2011. “Briony’s Being-For: Metafictional Narrative Ethics in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Critique: Studies on Contemporary Fiction 52 (1):74-100. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul, David Carr, and Charles Taylor. 1991. “Discussion: Ricoeur on Narrative.” In On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, edited by David Wood, 160-187. London: Routledge. Shulman, Martha. 2013. “The Making of a Heroine. PW Talks with Kate Atkinson”. Review of Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. Publishers Weekly, February 22, 2013. Tietjens Meyers, Diana. 1994. Subjection & Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism & Moral Philosophy. New York and London: Routledge.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN HOUSES AS REPRESENTATIONS OF THEIR INHABITANTS IN GEORGE ELIOT’S MIDDLEMARCH EVA OPPERMANN

Introduction Apart from food, there is not much of equivalent importance for maintaining human physical life as a place to live; be it a cave, a hut, a castle, one’s own family house or a flat. As Lorna Reynolds (149) writes: “We cannot imagine civilised life being conducted in any part of the world without imagining a house. The house is for human beings the equivalent of the carapace or the shell within which some lowly creature can get on with the business of living.”1 This corresponds to Le Corbusier’s definition of a house, which is, “a shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive.2 However, this ‘place of one’s own’ not only serves as a shelter or as a location where to keep one’s treasured property.3 It also is a social space in which friends meet, guests are entertained, and contracts are discussed and signed. In this respect, a house becomes a status symbol since it reveals both the taste and the wealth of its inhabitant. Due to the high importance of houses for humans, it does not come as a surprise that

1

Lorna Reynolds, “‘The Last September: Elizabeth Bowen’s Paradise Lost,’” in Ancestral Voices: The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature. Ed. Otto Rauchbauer. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1992), 149. 2 Quoted in: Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness: The Secret Art of Furnishing Your Life (London: Penguin, 2007), 57. 3 Compare C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005), 171. Lewis here emphasizes the difference between the naïve, God-trusting life of his yet-unfallen woman in contrast to our sinful life on Earth: without trust in God but in control over what we own.

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houses often have symbolic and psychological importance in works of literature: Entscheidend für die Fragen der Interpretation sind die Einsichten, dass die [Raumdimension] in der Lit. nicht bloß ornamentalen Charakter hat, dass Räume nicht nur als Schauplätze fungieren, sondern eine Erzählfunktion erfüllen, und dass räumliche Oppositionen zum Modell für semantische Oppositionen werden.4 [For the aspects of interpretation it is significant to recognize that the spatial dimension is not merely of ornamental quality, so that rooms are not just settings, but that they have a function within the narrative, so that spatial opposition becomes the semantic opposition.]5

Neither is it surprising that the human habitat has a considerable psychological influence on its inhabitants. As Flade emphasizes, they have created surroundings,6 and whoever lives there will identify with their home–the better, the more it corresponds with their characters–socially and psychically.7 The plots which develop around a character’s dwelling place can be manifold. An important motive and motif in teenage novels is leaving one’s parental home in order to start a life of one’s own. One example is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn8. Another common plot develops around maintaining a certain house as a status symbol, such as the new house at Fischergrube for Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks: Once he has moved there, Thomas is eaten up by worries about his ability to finance it. Bachelard comments this phenomenon as follows: [Nos enquêtes] visent à déterminer la valeur humaine des espaces de possession, des espaces défendus, contre des forces adverses, des espaces aimés. Pour des raisons souvent très diverses et avec les différences que comportent les nuances poétiques, ce sont des espaces louangés. A leur valeur de protection qui peut être positive, s’attachent aussi des valeurs imaginées, et ces valeurs sont bientôt des valeurs dominantes.

4

Ansgar Nünning, „Raum/Raumdarstellung, literarische(r),” in Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, Ed. Ansgar Nünning. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008), 606. 5 If not otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 6 Antje Flade, Architektur psychologisch betrachtet (Bern: Hans Huber, 2008), 16. 7 Ibid, 27. 8 Christopher Clausen, “Home and Away in Children’s Fiction,” in Children’s Literature 10 (1986): 142-3.

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Chapter Fourteen [These investigations] seek to determine the human value of the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended against adverse forces, the space we love. For diverse reasons, and with the differences entailed by poetic shadings, this is eulogized space. Attached to its protective value, which can be a positive one, are also imagined values, which soon become dominant.9

These indirect values, such as respectability, means of representation, and a location for the Buddenbrooks’ business, are what Thomas is afraid of losing. A third plot is centred on building one’s own house, which includes founding a family and the main character’s establishment in business. Examples are Dickens’s David Copperfield or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Houses in literary works also reflect the personalities who live in them: "Typically, a figure is exposed to a sequence of experiences that permit a critical reflection on the milieu, the social structure, and the prominent thought of the age."10 Due to these experiences, a literary house has a tendency to gain a symbolic meaning.11 With this background in mind, I intend to investigate into several settings of the houses which George Eliot created in Middlemarch (18712).12 I will concentrate on Lowick Manor, Dorothea's married home, Stone Court, Fred's finally deserved heritage, and Mrs. Bretton's house, where Lydgate and Rosamond live. Eliot's masterpiece not only identifies all three house plots, but each of the houses concerned is also closely connected to the psychological fate of at least one main character. All three houses change ownership during the novel. Furthermore; between Lowick Manor and Mrs. Bretton's house, there exists a significant contrast which I would like to pursue. It is surprising how little critical interest Eliot’s houses have received. Among more than 750 entries on Middlemarch in the MLA Bibliography, there are merely nine which deal with places, and among these only Kagawa’s dissertation, which I could not get, is really of thematic interest

9

Bachelard, Gaston. La poétique de l’espace (Paris: Seuil 1981 [1957]), 17 and Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969; xxxv-xxxvi. 10 Horst S. & Ingrid Daemmrich, Themes and Motives in Western Literature (Tübingen: Francke, 1987), 7. 11 J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (London: Penguin, 1998), 884. 12 George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin, 1994). Hereafter quoted as Middlemarch.

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in this context. Therefore, this study will close a gap in research concerning Middlemarch as well as offer a new perspective on the novel. George Eliot has been characterized as master of realism. According to Nitsch, erscheint der physisch begehbare Raum als ein atmosphärisch ‘gestimmter Raum’, als Resonanzraum menschlicher Wahrnehmung und Erfahrung [...]. Wenn die Spezifikation zurückverweist auf ein kulturelles Imaginäres, gewinnt der solchermaßen gestimmte Raum Züge eines ‚symbolischen Raums’.13 [physical room is ‘tuned' because it resonances human perception and experience […] Should this specification indicate some cultural imagination, such ‘tuned' space gains the qualities of ‘symbolic space.']

Eliot’s works are full of symbolic elements, some of which I intend to investigate more closely. “The presence of symbolic elements in George Eliot’s realism [...] indicates that all fictional modes are mixed, that all modal changes are shifts of proportion and relation”.14 This does not contradict Eliot’s intention to present realistic scenes: [M]any of Eliot's most characteristic scenes do not display a notable contribution of meaning. An important element of her realism is its concern with, indeed its insistence on, the normal, and several scenes in her novels [...] are largely devoted to rendering normality, creating a sense of ‘the flow of real and ordinary life.15

Nevertheless, even the ordinary contains the typical which, by cognitive connection, is related to the symbolic. Furthermore, Eliot’s realism carefully depicts her characters’ psychological conditions, which her symbolic notions reflect in a surprisingly impressive manner.

Lowick Manor: The Ice Castle of Frozen Scholarship [Eliot] cannot look at anything without analysing and diagnosing. With the result that her world gets its life and character not, like those of other Victorians, by the individual impression she gives of it, but by the 13

Wolfram Nitsch, “Topographien: Zur Ausgestaltung literarischer Räume,” In Handbuch Literatur & Raum. Ed. Jörg Dünne and Andreas Mahler. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 32. 14 Peter K. Garrett, Scene and Symbol form George Eliot to James Joyce (Yale: Harvard UP, 1969), 6. 15 Ibid, 15.

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Chapter Fourteen individual way in which she diagnoses its constituent elements. [...] What interests her are those features in her scene that distinguish it from other places–the neat prosperity of cottage and parsonage, [...] And she further enriches her pictures by indicating behind these visible features the causes, historic, social and physical, which are their origin.16

This is also true of her dwellings in Middlemarch, especially of Stone Court and Lowick Manor. I do not agree, however, with Cecil's opinion that "George Eliot does not set out to convey an emotional impression at all.17 Although her descriptions are analytical and even distanced (and so is her look at the inhabitants), she nevertheless manages to evoke the coldness of Lowick Manor and the rich fertility of Stone Court by her choice of words right from the beginning. “In George Eliot imagery is the servant of concept.18 According to Alain de Botton,19 “[b]uildings speak–on topics which can readily be discerned." Lowick Manor has something to say from the first moment Dorothea, and the reader see it: The building, of greenish stone, was in the Old English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy looking: the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows and little vistas of bright things to make it seem a joyous home. In this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in stillness without sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr. Casaubon, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown into relief by the background.20

Apart from "the long library" with its "dark book shelves,21 Dorothea’s future boudoir is the most important setting within this house: The bow-window looked down the avenue of limes, the furniture was all of a faded blue, and there were miniatures of ladies and gentlemen with 16

David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists (London: Constable, 1966 [1934]), 296298. 17 Ibid, 297. 18 Garrett, Scene and Symbol, 29. See also Hugh Witemeyer’s (George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven (Ct.) and London: Yale UP, 1979), 126-7) comments on “the George Eliot landscape” (127). Witemeyer comments both on the richness of Eliot’s descriptions as well as on the Pre-Raphaelite and Wordsworthian traditions by which they are influenced. 19 Architecture of Happiness, 71, emphasis original. 20 Middlemarch, 67 21 Ibid.

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powdered hair hanging in a group. A piece of tapestry over a door also showed a blue-green world with a pale stag in it. The chairs and tables were thin-legged and easy to upset. It was a room where one might fancy the ghost of a tight-laced lady revisiting the scene of her embroidery. A light book-case contained duodecimo volumes of polite literature in the calf, completing the furniture.22

Generally, it is a place where "one can imagine the past literally being reanimated and present.23 This house is what Nitsch calls “gestimmt” [tuned]: The description adds up to the impression of a place which is both old, cold–blue certainly is, and green in stones tends to being a cold colour24–and dark. Although Dorothea’s room appears light-flooded, it looks frosted over.25 Even the trees have certain barrenness; neither oaks (except in very bitter times) nor limes nor yew trees bear any fruit valuable for human nutrition. Furthermore, having "risen high, not ten yards from the window,26 the yews keep out the light and warmth–significantly, on the southern side. It is unlikely that a house in the English Midlands will need shading of this kind in any summer. Yews, in addition, are connected to cemeteries, and thus, to death and dying.27 These trees in front of the windows in front of the library further hint at the symbolic cemetery inside the Manor: Dorothea’s first marriage will end barrenly, and her expectations of education and mutual support shared with her husband quickly wither. Similarly, Casaubon’s research is sentenced to death. Even though he has a powerful symbol before his eyes, the great symbolist is psychically unable to recognize it. While the cave-like, death-invoking qualities of Lowick Manor have been noticed before, its coldness was not. The idea of a ghost in Dorothea’s future room adds to this impression because it evokes an additional cold. In this respect, the house resembles the state of Dorothea’s life there. “The freedomloving [sic!] Dorothea, who we are told is also passionately susceptible to the sensuous delights of 22

Ibid, 68. Wright, Adam. “The Representation of Place in Middlemarch,” George Eliot Review 41 (2010): 52. 24 Johannes Itten, Kunst der Farbe (Ravensburg: Maier, 1970), 45 25 Itten (Kunst der Farbe, 45) reports experiments with both humans and animals which both resulted in the effect that blue-green rooms are experienced as colder than red-orange rooms although their temperature was identical. See also Flade, Architektur psychologisch, 161. 26 Middlemarch, 67. 27 “Starke Symbolik–Eiben auf Friedhöfen, “Forstbotanik Göttingen, accessed 18 August 2015, http://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/mythen/60944.html. 23

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horseback riding, [...] is walled up [...] in [a] private labyrinth of sickly scholarship”.28 This impression is increased even further by considering that, according to Hamm, “Grün ist die passivste der reinbunten Farben. [Green is the most passive of pure colours]”.29 Dorothea’s energy will be bound in this passivity-inducing habitat. With a meaningful purpose before her, the subdued, cool colours of both her new home and especially her future boudoir may have appealed to Dorothea’s Augustan ideals (why change a room which she supposes not to use often while she can work with her husband?). Furthermore, Dorothea’s willingness to abstain from changes at Lowick Manor can be seen as a sign of her wish to receive Casaubon’s offer of wisdom: “[Dorothea at first] seems overly pleased to know that she will be surrounded by all of [Casaubon’s] physical belongings and preferences, as if they will magically transmit the aura of his knowledge as well”,30 thus she accepts submission even when, according to Eliot, she should use her power of temporary dictation.31 The only thing transferred, however, is the freezing influence of the fruitlessness of Casaubon’s project to write the Key to All Mythologies. Dorothea came to Lowick Manor with high expectations. However, her attempts are soon frustrated: How was it that in the weeks after her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?32

The answer to this question is not long to be awaited: Mr. Casaubon [...] had perhaps the best intention of acquitting himself worthily, but only of acquitting himself. What was fresh to [Dorothea's] mind was worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.

28 Elizabeth Sabiston, “The Prison of Womanhood,” Comparative Literature Vol. 25 no 4 (1973): 345. 29 Hamm, Ulrich. Farbe (Stuttgart: Klett, 1982), 18. 30 Liana F. Piehler, Spartial Dynamics and Female Development in Victorian Art and Novel: Creating Women’s Spaces (New York et. al.: Lang, 2003), 112. 31 See Middlemarch, 66. 32 Ibid, 183.

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When he said, “Does this interest you, Dorothea? Shall we stay a little longer? I am ready to stay if you wish it,”–it seemed to her as if going or staying were alike dreary [...]33

I disagree with Shuttleworth’s statement that “Casaubon imprisons his young bride in his labyrinthine research, forcing her to transcribe alien Greek characters she is not permitted to understand.”34 Casaubon neither forces her nor restrains her wishes to learn. However, he regards what is of interest to her as a hindrance to his own plans as if he, like Kay in Hans Christian Andersen’s “Snow Queen” (publ. 1844), bore a piece of the magical mirror in his heart.35 Dorothea herself refrains from her plans with the hope to be of further service to her husband, but she does not realize that he cannot be rescued but drags her with him into the freezing of selfdisdain due to his failure. Because “Edward Casaubon arbeitet unwissenschaftlich”36 [Edward Casaubon does not work in a scholarly manner], he has nothing to show for his effort and keeps her away from everything which could enable her to discover his failure-prone research: Once he has recognized Dorothea’s potential of assistance as well as criticism, he is afraid of her recognizing the truth. There was no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous and lovely a young lady as he could have obtained for a wife, [...] but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him [...] with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as part of things in general.37

In Welsh’s words, "Dorothea [has become] like one of those dreaded reviewers arrived in Casaubon's own study, from which he immediately wants to exclude her instead of welcoming her help.38 Like Lowick Manor, Casaubon’s research is an empty, cold, lifeless uninhabitable building which “winding passages [...] seem to lead nowither”; an extremely traumatizing experience for the lively young woman. 33

Ibid, 184. Sally Shuttleworth, “Middlemarch: An Experiment in Time,” in New Casebooks: Middlemarch. Ed. John Peck. (Basingstoke: macmillan, 1992), 129. 35 Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Snow Queen,” in Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Ware: Wordsworth, 1993, 184, 186-187, hereafter quoted as "Snow Queen." 36 Martina Engel, Außenseiter und Gemeinschaft (Frankfurt/Main et al.: Lang, 2002), 153. 37 Middlemarch, 389. 38 Alexander Welsh, "The later novels," in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot. Ed. George Levine. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 66. 34

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Its owner seems to have adopted several of Lowick Manor’s psychological effects,39 and one wonders if the yews have not slowly poisoned him40 who "live[s] too much with the dead.41 Casaubon only regards others with regard to his Key to all Mythologies, which works like the hobgoblin’s mirror.42 He subjects Dorothea to his great work too, but without any esteem for her qualities and abilities. Similarly, Kay was subjected to the Snow Queen’s freezing kisses.43 Even Casaubon's death cannot liberate Dorothea immediately. "Casaubon hat [zwar schon] keine Macht mehr über sie [Casaubon has already lost his power over her],44 after she has judged him in Ch. 54, but she still remains bound to the house. Only the shock of recognizing her love for Will enables her to break free finally. In this respect, her nightly epiphany is revealing: “Oh, I did love him!” In that hour [...] she lay on the bare floor and let the night grow cold around her; while her grand woman’s frame was shaken by sobs as if she had been a despairing child. [...] The fire of Dorothea’s anger was not easily spent, and it flamed out in fitful returns of spurning reproach. [...] But she lost energy even for her loud-whispered cries and moans: she subsided into helpless sobs, and on the cold floor she sobbed herself to sleep. In the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim around her, she awoke–not with any amazed wondering where she was or what had happened, but with the clearest consciousness that she was looking into the eyes of sorrow. [...]45

Even if her stream of consciousness only reveals Dorothea's anger at Will for "[having] come obtruding his life into hers, hers that might have been whole enough without him,46 one can assume that other thoughts, such as regret of her having bound herself to Casaubon’s heritage instead of listening to her heart in time, will have come up during this hour-long vigil. The emotions which Dorothea had suppressed ever since her return from Rome now burst out and conquer even the triple effect of the coldest 39

See de Botton, Architecture of Happiness, 18. “Eiben auf Friedhöfen," see also Sabiston, "Prison of Womanhood," 347. 41 Middlemarch, 15 42 Snow Queen," 183. 43 Ibid, 188. 44 Engel, Außenseiter, 156. 45 Middlemarch, 734-5 46 Ibid, 735 40

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hours in the coldest room in the coldest house in Middlemarch–and the effect is yet not destructive. "Dorothea's blue-green boudoir is the setting of her most intense private experiences, and some of her most difficult moral decisions [...] The room is often presented to the reader as both a concretely realized space and as a projection of Dorothea's state of mind or of her feelings during moments of crisis".47 In this scene, however, Dorothea’s feelings oppose the state of the room: “If one room can alter how we feel," de Botton asks, “what will happen to us in most of the places we are forced to [...] inhabit?”48 Gerda’s arrival at the Snow Castle has a similar effect on Kay.49 Will, of whom Foltinek writes that he “soll unter anderem einen jugendfrischen Kontrast zu Dorotheas Mann [...] bilden und obendrein mit ihrer schwärmerischen Gesinnung wetteifern können [is meant to evoke a youthful-fresh contrast to Dorothea’s husband […] and, furthermore, to compete with her quixotic attitude, manages, with his Werther-like love]”50 to liberate Dorothea from the freezing influence of Casaubon’s Ice Castle. In correspondence with Dorothea's age, the Lowick Plot resembles Huck Finn's leaving home to find a place of his own after a phase of the adventure. Both Huck and Dorothea leave a house in which they are materially supplied but subjected to unbearable forces. Since Dorothea's marriage to Will and his London career are only reported in the Epilogue, the plot does not fit the establishment of her own family This plot is reserved for Fred and Mary on Stone Court. Dorothea, in her submissive femininity, is not strong enough to rescue the “ice-god” Casaubon51 from his life-draining project. The only way for herself to regain freedom is by leaving both Lowick Manor and her heritage–both financially and intellectually–behind. That she and Will will have to live from her own heritage for a while not only corresponds to her lifestyle (“We could live quite well on my own fortune–It is too much– seven hundred a-year–I want so little–no new clothes–and I will learn what everything costs”,52), it also gives her back the freedom of acting which was denied her by the wealth she had in Casaubon’s yew-infected ice-castle of Lowick Manor. 47

Annette Federico, “Dorothea’s Boudoir: Dream Work and Ethical Perception in Middlemarch," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language 56 (2014): 401. 48 Architecture of Happiness, 13. 49 Snow Queen," 210. 50 Herbert Foltinek, George Eliot (Darmstadt: WBG, 1982), 106. 51 David Daiches, George Eliot: Middlemarch. (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), 43. 52 Middlemarch, 757

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Due to its stasis, which is caused by cold and death, Lowick Manor is a fossilized place. In this respect, I cannot agree with Wright's (56) statement that it is "continually defined, and redefined, by individuals.53 On the contrary; Dorothea changes under its static influence. According to Butter, "[t]he feeling of belonging plays a central role in [our] cultural ideal of home.54 Dorothea does not really feel as if she belonged there. The other house described similarly is the Garths'. Despite its being much poorer and supposedly smaller than Lowick Manor, which is "somewhere between the parsonage and the palace,55 this house is filled with life and children, and it provides some fruit from its orchard. The contrast to Lowick could not be bigger.56 This former farmhouse also is an example of de Botton’s principle of a seducing house57 which is contrary to all principles of elegant architecture. Supposedly this is so because it is filled with life and happiness despite its relative poverty and ill-matched crockery. One wonders if the Ladislaws’ household in London may be a similar combination of relative poverty and liveliness (and love). Interestingly, while Tipton Grange, Stone Court, and Mrs. Bretten's, are introduced and evaluated largely by means of their monetary value, Lowick's price is not given until the end of the novel, and even then indirectly at best.58 Before, we only learn that Mr. Casaubon "has a handsome property independent of the church.59 Freshitt Hall is not valued either because it is only a minor setting.

53

Wright, “Representation,” 56. Stella Butter, “Literature and the Making of Home(land): Transnational Fictions of Home,” in Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 23 (2008): 122. 55 Trotter, David. “Space, Movement, and Sexual Feeling in Middlemarch,” in Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Karen Chase. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 48. 56 See Middlemarch, 225. 57 De Botton, Architecture of Happiness, 173. 58 Tipton Grange is said to be “worth about three thousand a-year” (Middlemarch, 7), the land of Stone Court, as Fred’s heritage, is valued at about ten thousand pounds. (Middlemarch, 101-3, 312-3). When Dorothea lends Lydgate the money to pay Bulstrode back, she says that "I have [...] nineteen-hundred a-year that Mr. Casaubon left me", which likely correspond to the value of the Manor. 59 Middlemarch, 36. 54

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Stone Court: A Heritage Worthy of Its Heir According to Squires, in Middlemarch "[t]he rural world, though not free from evil, is re-created largely in idyllic terms.60 One example of this is Stone Court, originally the home of "rich old Mr. Featherstone,61 and finally Fred Vincy and Mary Garth's property. Although it is not valued, at first sight, its monetary worth is important. Stone Court looks as if it had been arrested in its growth toward a stone mansion by an unexpected building of farm-buildings on its left flank, which had hindered it from becoming anything more than the substantial dwelling of a gentleman farmer. It was not the less agreeable an object in the distance for the cluster of pinnacled corn-ricks which balanced the fine row of walnuts on the right.62

Like the Garths’ orchard, the house promises harvest, and the warm, inviting colours to add to the pleasantness of the scene: "if we compare Lowick with Stone Court, we see just how much can change in a mere two miles.63 Its description reveals it suitable for Fred Vincy, who "likes being on the land" and "has a turn for farming," as Garth finds,64 and who says that he “might go into farming”65 himself if he had any capital. Later, Stone Court is addressed as "the excellent farm and fine homestand,66 which further increases this connection. Like Lowick Manor, Stone Court can be considered as a “speaking house” in the Bottonean sense. Their messages, however, are opposed; Stone Court promises a substantially secured and content future to its owners. Although its actual monetary value is not given in the novel, Stone Court is a heritage from which many wish to profit. Eliot, not without satire, demonstrates this by the large number of Featherstone relatives who, vulture-like, watch over the dying old man. These “Christian carnivores”67 can hardly wait for Featherstone's will to be declared: "It was time that the old man died, and none of these people are sorry.68 In this 60

Michael Squires, The Pastoral Novel (Charlottesville: U. of Virginia Press, 1975), 88. 61 Middlemarch, 89 62 Ibid, 96. 63 Wright, "Representation," 53. 64 Middlemarch 381, 772 65 Ibid, 478. 66 Ibid, 484. 67 Ibid, 306. 68 Ibid, 303.

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respect, Stone Court in Mr. Featherstone's ownership also symbolizes some amount of power which may bestow wealth to at least some of his relatives, and the old man knows this. He bullies Fred about his possibilities to change his will as he pleases, and he enjoys letting his other relatives wait and guess. "Mary is the only character Featherstone cannot buy.69 Apparently, his wife’s family appears to be closer to him than his own poorer siblings because everybody assumes that Fred will be the heir of the land and, most likely, the house. Fred himself speaks “with some confidence [...] about his prospect of getting Featherstone’s land as a future means of paying present debts”.70 Since Mary Garth resists Mr. Featherstone's wishes concerning the two wills, she thus opens the possibility for Fred to earn his heritage genuinely. The farm itself is robbed of its nourishing capital after Mr. Featherstone's death: [E]veryone had expected that Mr. Rigg Featherstone would have clung to it as the Garden of Eden. That was what poor old Peter himself expected [...] But how little we know what would make Paradise for our neighbours! [...] The cool and judicious Joshua Rigg had not allowed his parent to perceive that Stone Court was anything less than the chief good in his estimation, and he had certainly wished to call it his own. [...] Joshua Rigg looked at Stone Court and thought of buying gold.71

Neither is Mr. Bulstrode interested in the farm for its own sake; "He had bought [it] simply as a retreat which he might gradually enlarge as to land and beautify as to the dwelling, until it should be conductive to the divine glory that he should enter on it as a residence [...]".72 A banker through and through, and only interested in increasing his fortune, its manager, however, is Caleb Garth who, thus, not only educates Fred from the “unsteady hero”73 he was at first to an able and successful gentleman farmer and agent but also supports him in getting just the right estate for him; the most promising farm in the whole of Middlemarch. In this respect, Goethe’s statement “Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen! [What you have inherited from your fathers, earn it

69

Brian Swann, “Middlemarch: Realism and Symbolic Form.” In ELH vol. 39 no 2 (1972):300. 70 Middlemarch, 101. 71 Ibid, 485. 72 Ibid, 484. 73 Welsh, “Later Novels,” 65.

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to own it!]”74 best describes his relationship to Stone Court. In contrast to Bulstrode, Featherstone is honest; first in finally revealing his past and illegitimate child, and second in his love for his place. In this respect, too, Fred is a worthy heir because in the end he rather sticks to the land and hard work instead of hypocritical albeit scholarly preaching. Whereas all other potential heirs and owners only judge Stone Court for what money it may gain, Fred recognizes the idealistic value of both farm and land as his home and guaranteed income. Although Fred and Mary’s family is only introduced in the Epilogue, Fred’s way towards the ownership of Stone Court is more obvious than Dorothea’s towards London. Fred’s love for Mary does not change throughout the novel, and his development is Eliot’s main concern with this character. Furthermore, he and Mary remain in Middlemarch.75 When he first reflects on his possible future heritage as a deus-exmachina fortune, Fred, “the family laggard”76 is an idle, pampered boy even in his twenties, who is much more interested in riding and gambling than in his B.A. degree. Fred seems to have been forced into studying by his father, who "has no room for [him] in his trade.77 It is not so much the notion of possible poverty which keeps Fred from taking orders but his fear of becoming a hypocrite. Nevertheless, Fred’s studies supposedly supported his own work on farming; the one research in Middlemarch successfully completed–it is another fine hit of Eliot’s irony that the failed scholar publishes his work while the self-celebrated sage fails with his own project. Worse yet, Fred still expects others to take care of his trouble as if he were still a child: “When Fred got into debt, it always seemed to him highly probable that something or other–he did not necessarily conceive what–would come to pass enabling him to pay in due time.78 Because Fred had always (at that time) his father’s pocket as a last resource, [...] his assets of hopefulness had a sort of gorgeous superfluity about them. [...] But it was in the nature of fathers, Fred knew, to bully one about expenses: there was always a little storm over his extravagance if he had to disclose a debt, and Fred disliked bad weather within doors.79 74

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil,” in Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Albrecht Schöne. (Frankfurt/Main: Klassiker-Verlag, 1994), vol. 7, I, 682-3. 75 Wright, “Representation,” 51. 76 Middlemarch, 90. 77 Ibid, 478. 78 Ibid, 124. 79 Ibid, 214.

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Fred loves only himself. Washed by the stream of life, he has been swept along without cares by the Vincy money and expectations of gaining the Featherstone estate. He has never known trouble; he has bound others to his problems, and now must watch them suffer. His actions have been directed only toward pleasing himself.80

Only when he cannot pay his debts to Caleb Garth and realizes that he will lose not only one of his oldest friends but also Mary's love, Fred understands that he has to take his life into his own hands. Here, a traumatizing experience leads to a profound change of character. That he finally finishes his B.A. degree is the first step towards his future solidity: "Mary weds the highly fallible Fred with a tender comprehension of his limitations.”81 Had Stone Court fallen into his hands as an unearned heritage at this early stage of his development, Fred would have failed as a gentleman farmer because of his immature interest in the idea. We must not forget that he “had not thought of desk-work”82 before Caleb Garth took Fred's training into his hands. Like Rigg, Fred might have sold Stone Court for ready money. He must earn his way towards his original heritage first. He is fortunate to be trained by the strict but utterly benevolent Caleb, who teaches him the fundamentals of his work: "You must be sure of two things: You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work and think it would be more honourable to you to be doing something else”.83 For Fred, the greatest price to win is Mary’s love. Although he "never became rich," Fred "became rather distinguished in his side of the country as a theoretic and practical farmer,”84 and he finally manages to buy Stone Court, so that, at the end of the novel, he has righteously gained his heritage and knows its value. His marriage to Mary Garth is harmonious, too, so the prosperity the farm promised in its first description is fulfilled. Furthermore, as with the Ladislaws and the Garths, Progress starting with limited means results in a happier, enduring state of living: “Only one paragraph of this chapter is written in present tense. Fred and Mary ‘still inhabit’ their garden at Stone Court where the flowers 80 David Leon Higdon, “George Eliot and the Art of the Epigraph,” in NineteenthCentury Fiction vol 25 no. 2 (1970): 141. 81 Diana Postlethwaite, “When George Eliot Reads Milton: The Muse in a Different Voice,” in ELH, vol. 57 no. 1 (1990): 206. 82 Middlemarch, 526. 83 Ibid, 522. 84 Ibid, 775 and 777.

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‘still’ bloom, frozen in the eternal amber of domestic life”.85 Talking of amber, the word ‘preserved’ may have been a better choice: Both amber and ice conserve, but ice destroys the cell structures, amber locks up the object enclosed in its original state and allows it to be studied millennia later. Furthermore, traditional anbaric colours (yellow, orange, red,)86 are warm colours opposed to blue in Itten’s Circle, so there is another definitive contrast to Lowick Manor.87 So, Fred’s connection to Stone Court psychologically reveals "the effect of environment on what a man is.88 This house does not have the strong symbolic qualities of Lowick Manor, but then, its emanation is not characterized by strong fairy-tale intertextuality either: “Fred Vincys Wandel vom liebenswerten Tunichtgut zum verantwortungsvollen Familienvater liegt [...] noch auf der Ebene des Gesellschaftsromans [Fred Vincy’s change from loveable rogue to responsible head of a family is situated on the plane of the societal novel]”.89 Furthermore, while Stone Court does not offer too much to investigate, the house takes a middle position between the two extremes of Lowick Manor and Mrs. Bretton’s House.

Mrs. Bretton's: Appearance Unkept According to Postlethwaite, “George Eliot seeks universal meaning in the everyday.90 Since, in this respect, Eliot’s greatest novel is “a study of provincial life”, this confirms Saint-Exupéry’s opinion about the consideration of wealth in one’s house: Si vous dites aux grandes personnes: ‘J’ai vu une belle maison en briques roses, avec des géraniums aux fenêtres et des colombes sur le toit...’ elles ne parviennent pas à s’imaginer cette maison. Il faut leur dire: ‘J’ai vu une maison de cent mille francs’. Alors elles s’écrient: ‘comme c’est joli!’91 85

Postlethwaite, “Eliot Reads Milton,” 218. See Itten, Farbe, 45-6. 87 Furthermore, according to Friedrich Schmuck (Farbe und Architektur 2. (Munich: Callwey, 1999), 41), red “macht eins mit der Natur, sobald es warmtonig, gebrochen und damit braun ist [connects one to nature, if it is warm and dimmed, that is, brown].” the reds discussed here belong to the anbaric spectrum]. 88 Jeanette King, Tragedy in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 30. 89 Foltinek, George Eliot, 69. 90 Postlethwaite, “Eliot Reads Milton,” 199-200. 91 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (Paris: Gallimard, 1999 [1944]), 20. 86

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Like "les grandes personnes" in general, the Middlemarchers can be assumed to judge a man or family by their habitat. Eliot comments on the Garths' house, otherwise so favourably presented, that “in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service”.93 [M]oney [...] is present in the prospect of Peter Featherstone’s wills and the solidity of Arthur Brooke’s lands, [and] in Fred Vincy’s debts [...] Moreover, every character’s economic behavior indicates something of his or her character: thrift marks Dorothea Brooke’s austerity and extravagance and Rosamond Vincy’s vanity [...] while gambling exemplifies Fred Vincy’s temporary dissolution.94

Both Lydgate and Rosamond wish, and need, to present a respectable house to the Middlemarch community; Lydgate as the new and promising doctor who wishes to gain influence in order to set his reforms into action, Rosamond as the perfect result of female education. This plot resembles the Buddenbrooks’ moving to and maintaining the house at Fischergrube for comparable reasons. Therefore, it is no surprise that Mrs. Bretton's is presented much more in terms of its monetary value than Lowick Manor and Stone Court. It is rented for "ninety pounds a year,95 situated in Lowick Gate; rather a wealthy neighbourhood, and it "is very large.96 Furthermore, the reader does not gain any insight into the Lydgates’ private rooms. Most scenes there are set in the living room, and often visitors, especially Ladislaw, are present. Even the intimate conversations between Lydgate and his wife take place there, if not in front of visitors.97 The emphasis on material value and representation increases the readers' impression that Rosamond's dream has come true. According to de Botton, 92

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de: The Little Prince. Trans. Katherine Woods. (London: Egmont, 2002 [1945]), 16. 93 Middlemarch, 216. 94 Chinnie Ding, “‘Myriad-headed, Myriad-Handed’: Labour in Middlemarch,” in SEL vol. 5 no. 4, (2012): 927. 95 Middlemarch, 604. 96 Ibid, 319. 97 Cf. ibid, 549-56.

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[w]e may occasionally and guiltily experience the desire to create a home as a wish to vaunt ourselves in front of others. But only if the truest parts of ourselves were egomanical would the urge to build be dominated by the urge to boast. Instead, at its most genuine, the architectural impulse seems connected to a longing for communication and commemoration, a longing to declare ourselves to the world through a register other than words, through the language of objects, colours and bricks: an ambition to let others know who we are–and, in the process, to remind ourselves.98

Rosamond and the first of her married homes can be counted as one example, which also corresponds to Bachelard’s description quoted above. Lydgate’s house is based on false assumptions kept by Rosamond. Rosamond has been overly pampered especially by her mother, the young new doctor perfectly fits the image of the interesting outsider she imagines: “[A] stranger was absolutely necessary to Rosamond’s social romance, which had always turned on a lover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher, and who had no connections at all like her own”.99 In contrast, Ned Plymdale who, according to his mother, “could certainly better afford to keep such a wife”100 is regarded as "Middlemarch gentry, elated with their silver-headed whips and satin stocks, but embarrassed in their manners, [without] a notion of French, [who] could speak on no subject with striking knowledge, except perhaps the dyeing and carrying trades, which of course they were ashamed to mention.101 It is hardly surprising that Rosamond cannot bear the thought of the house being given to Ned Plymdale because Lydgate cannot afford it. This trauma would be more than her pride could bear, especially since one’s habitat generally is a significant social symbol: The wealthier the house, the more important its inhabitants.102 Neither does Rosamond regard Lydgate honestly. She deliberately overlooks his relative poverty because of his relatives and because his practice is likely to grow. She sees him as the nephew of a wealthy baronet, regardless of the fact that "rich men may have very poor devils for [relatives].103 The baronet she dreams of is nobody but the fairy tale prince so often expected by girls of any age. “Repeatedly, characters depend on [...] flattering illusion to read and write their own narratives. Rosamond [...] reads the world through the filters of her desires, always 98

De Botton, Architecture of Happiness, 126. Middlemarch, 109. 100 Ibid, 275. 101 Ibid, 249. 102 Cf. Flade, Architektur psychologisch, 63. 103 Middlemarch, 93. 99

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anticipating the favourable rather than the realistic outcome”.104 Rosamond's way of acting her own character links her to "just the sort of beautiful creature that is imprisoned with ogres in fairy tales.105 In this respect, Rosamond resembles Dorothea, whose “self-narration is also distorted by egoism. The ‘romance’ that she creates for herself out of the prospect of marriage to Casaubon depends on the priority she gives to her ‘own dreams’ over the ‘realities of his lot’”.106 Both have married men according to their own ideas about a perfect husband to suit themselves, and both have to learn, quite painfully, that their ideas do not correspond to the men chosen. "‘Happily ever after' turns out to be a dangerous fantasy.107 Rosamond has grown up in a Nouveau riche environment despite the Vincys’ being “old manufacturers, [who] had kept a good house for three generations”;108 she has never learned to look after herself: The Vincys lived in a profuse easy way, not with any new ostentation, but according to the family habits and traditions so that the children had no standard of economy, and the elder ones retained some of their infantine notions that their father might pay for anything if he would.109

Accordingly, Rosamond "never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide."110 She rather begs for money than giving up her dreams. Her pride is so strong that she is unable to even to recognize how much Lydgate is in trouble because of her: "the poor thing saw only that the world was not ordered to her liking, and Lydgate was part of that world.111 “Rosamond Vincy's tatting and piano-playing [...] are [...] in accord with the nineteenth century's generally accepted definition of the ‘accomplished young lady’”.112 For her, the world largely consists of being an exquisite ornament to the drawingroom, and she needs an adequate surrounding: “Rosamond, accustomed 104 Pauline Nestor, Critical Issues: George Eliot (Basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2002), 135. 105 " Middlemarch, 127 106 Nestor, Critical Issues, 136; see also Engel, Außenseiter, 147. 107 Rose Gruner, Elizabeth. “Telling Old Tales Newly,” in Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature. Ed. Mike Cadden. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 4. 108 Middlemarch, 89. 109 Ibid, 214. 110 Ibid, 250. 111 Ibid, 604. 112 Sabiston, "Prison of Womanhood," 349.

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from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply of ordering the best of everything–nothing else answered."113 Exupéry’s adult attitude comes to mind. “To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song.114 Rosamond keeps her internal song in harmony rather with her surrounding than with the man at her side. This makes Mrs. Bretton's a highly eulogized space.115 Lydgate first establishes himself as successful: Apart from many of his predecessor's patients, he manages to win the Chettams, the Casaubons, and the Vincys as new, wealthy patients. In addition, his practice is supposed to be "worth eight or nine hundred a-year.116 His reputation is that of a good doctor. Thus, with “the eight hundred pounds left him after buying his practice [... h]e was at a starting-point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting”,117 and he plans to make the best of it. The same is true for his marriage: “He was not going to do anything extravagant, but the requisite things must be bought, and it would be bad economy to buy them of poor quality. [...]”.118Lydgate has to learn that his idealistic care for the poor among his patients, along with his making enemies–medical and otherwise–does not help his economic situation: When a man is setting up a house and preparing for marriage finds that his furniture and other initial expenses come to between four and five hundred pounds more than he has capital to pay for, when at the end of a year it appears that his household expenses [...] amount to nearly a thousand, while the proceeds of the practice reckoned from the old books to be worth eight hundred per annum have sunk like a summer pond and make hardly five hundred chiefly in unpaid entries, the plain inference is that, whether he minds it or not, he is in debt.119

Even if furnishing had to be done only once, “everything [...] in Middlemarch [...] does have a cost”.120 If Lydgate intends to keep his wife, he has to (and does) compromise his ideals of assisting those in need. This tale of keeping up appearance is not outdated. Status symbols are maintained even in times of financial crisis, and at the price of risky debts 113

Middlemarch, 546. De Botton, Architecture of Happiness, 107. 115 Bachelard, poétique, 17. 116 Middlemarch, 328. 117 Ibid, 139. 118 Ibid, 329. 119 Ibid, 546. 120 Postlethwaite, “Eliot Reads Milton,” 207. 114

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or credits. Eliot’s parable of the house as a status symbol which alone supports Rosamond’s social position serves to remind us that psychological values may be more important than the costliest dinner service. A house thus void of life will never be a real home. In this respect, Rosamond’s stillbirth is not surprising. Both Mrs. Bretton's house and Stone Court represent the wishes of the establishment which the young Vincys dream. However, while Fred is both able and willing to give up his idleness (and rewarded by success), Rosamond cannot give up a lifestyle according to her upbringing. Therefore, she loses Mrs. Bretton's and has to go into exile. Thus, the fact that Eliot neither describes Mrs. Bretton's nor its furnishings despite her otherwise "very descriptive style"121 makes sense: The look of the house is not of importance. Its cost and the wealth it represents symbolize Rosamond’s, if not Lydgate’s, success in keeping the appearances of her supposed class.

Conclusion [George Eliot’s] novel is a picture,” Henry James wrote in 1873, “vast, swarming, deep-coloured, and crowded with episodes, with vivid images, with lurking master-strokes, with brilliant passages of expression.122 This Wimmelbild of a provincial town thus corresponds to Massey's "simultaneiety of stories-so-far,123 which both characterizes Middlemarch society and Massey's "space as the product of interrelations.124 This gives character to some locations: "[Dorothea's boudoir] gathers memories, the view has a communicating power, the stag has reminding glances, and the miniatures are interested.125 Therefore, these places “hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people.126 The descriptions given of Lowick Manor and Stone Court contain these invitations; the first as a warning of the internal, freezing cold of ultima ratio, the second as a promise of prosperity. Eliot uses certain colours, the readers’ imagination of harvest, and authorial comments to create the impressions to be gained. In contrast, Lydgate’s house, newly established, reflects its lady’s state of mind, the emphasis on monetary value reflects the image Rosamond wishes to create 121

Ding, “Myriad,” 920. Henry James, “Current Literature,” in George Eliot. Ed. Harold Bloom. (New York: Infobase, 2009), 160. 123 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 12. 124 Ibid, 9. 125 Federico, "Dorothea's Boudoir," 416. 126 De Botton, Architecture of Happiness, 72. 122

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for her visitors. Both Dorothea and Rosamond are unable to recognize the warning signals because they are caught in their dreams, and both lose the houses into which they have married without serious consideration. Only Fred and Mary manage to turn Stone Court into the prosperous house it is meant to be. Eliot's tendency to support her realism by the use of symbolic and mythic elements is visible mostly in the descriptions of Lowick Manor. The coldness of reason, failure and death is expressed in the blues and greens which characterize Dorothea's boudoir and the outside of the house. Mrs. Bretton's is an excellent example of a status symbol; its description mostly is given in monetary value. Stone Court, again, maintains a middle position; its value is both expressed in the money connected to the farm but also in its fertility and promise of warmly coloured harvests. "Symbolism thus remains a reinforcement, though a highly powerful one"127 (Garrett, 66), in Eliot’s descriptions of domestic settings. In short; Eliot uses the houses in Middlemarch not as material background settings of domestic social and familial scenes but as reflections about the lifestyle and condition both of their families especially and society in general. Thus, Eliot’s use of houses corresponds to the psychological aspects of domestic analysis which I intended to investigate.

Works Cited Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Snow Queen.” Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Ware: Wordsworth, 1993, 183-212. Bachelard, Gaston. La poétique de l’espace. Paris: Seuil 1981 [1957]. —. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Butter, Stella. “Literature and the Making of Home(land): Transnational Fictions of Home.” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 23 (2008), 119-137. Cecil, David. Early Victorian Novelists. London: Constable, 1966 [1934]. Clausen, Christopher. “Home and Away in Children’s Fiction.” Children’s Literature 10 (1986), 141-52. Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin, 1998. Daemmrich, Horst S. & Ingrid. Themes and Motives in Western Literature. Tübingen: Francke, 1987). Daiches, David. George Eliot: Middlemarch. (London: Edward Arnold, 1963). 127

Garrett, Scene, and Symbol, 66.

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de Botton, Alain, The Architecture of Happiness: The Secret Art of Furnishing Your Life (London: Penguin, 2007). Ding, Chinnie. “‘Myriad-headed, Myriad-Handed’: Labor in Middlemarch.” SEL 52:4 (2012), 917-36. Engel, Martina. Außenseiter und Gemeinschaft. (Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 2002). Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Ware: Wordsworth, 1994). Federico, Annette: “Dorothea’s Boudoir: Dream Work and Ethical Perception in Middlemarch," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language 56 (2014), 400-427. Flade, Antje, Architektur psychologisch betrachtet (Bern: Hans Huber, 2008). Foltinek, Herbert. George Eliot. Darmstadt: WBG, 1982. Forstbotanik Göttingen, „Starke Symbolik–Eiben auf Friedhöfen.“ http://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/mythen/60944.html (18.08.15). Garrett, Peter K. Scene and Symbol form George Eliot to James Joyce (Yale: Harvard UP, 1969). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil.” Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Albrecht Schöne. Frankfurt/Main: KlassikerVerlag, 1994, Vol. 7. Hamm, Ulrich. Farbe. Stuttgart: Klett, 1982. Higdon, David Leon. “George Eliot and the Art of the Epigraph.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25:2 (1970), 127-151. Itten, Johannes. Kunst der Farbe. 8th ed. Ravensburg: Maier, 1970. James, Henry. “Current Literature.” George Eliot. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2009, 159-166. King, Jeanette. Tragedy in the Victorian Novel. Cambridge: CUP, 1978. Lewis, C.S. Perelandra London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2005. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Nestor, Pauline. Critical Issues: George Eliot. Basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2002. Nitsch, Wolfram. “Topographien: Zur Ausgestaltung literarischer Räume.” Handbuch Literatur & Raum. Ed. Jörg Dünne andAndreas Mahler. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 30-40. Nünning, Ansgar. „Raum/Raumdarstellung, literarische(r).” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008, 604-607. Piehler, Liana F., Spartial Dynamics and Female Development in Victorian Art and Novel: Creating Women’s Spaces (New York et. al.: Lang, 2003).

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Postlethwaite, Diana. “When George Eliot Reads Milton: The Muse in a Different Voice.” ELH, 57:1 (1990), 197-221. Reynolds, Lorna. “‘The Last September: Elizabeth Bowen’s Paradise Lost.’” Ancestral Voices: The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature. Ed. Otto Rauchbauer. Hildesheim: Olms, 1992), 149-58. Rose Gruner, Elizabeth. “Telling Old Tales Newly.” Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature. Ed. Mike Cadden. (Lincoln/London: U. of Nebraska P.), 2010, 3-21. Sabiston, Elizabeth. “The Prison of Womanhood.” Comparative Literature Vol. 25:4 (1973), 336-351. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de: Le Petit Prince (Paris:Gallimard, 1999 [1944]). —. The Little Prince. Trans. Katherine Woods. London: Egmont, 2002 [1945]) Schmuck, Friedrich. Farbe und Architektur 2. (Munich: Callwey, 1999). Shuttleworth, Sally. “Middlemarch: An Experiment in Time.” New Casebooks: Middlemarch. Ed. John Peck. (Basingstoke: macmillan, 1992), 106-143. Squires, Michael. The Pastoral Novel. 2nd ed. Charlottesville: U. of Virginia P., 1975. Swann, Brian. “Middlemarch: Realism and Symbolic Form.” ELH 39:2 (1972), 279-308. Trotter, David. “Space, Movement, and Sexual Feeling in Middlemarch.” Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Karen Chase. Oxford: OUP, 2006, 37-63. Welsh, Alexander. “The later novels.” The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot. Ed. George Levine. (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), 57-75. Witemeyer, Hugh. George Eliot and the Visual Arts. New Haven (Ct.) and London: Yale UP, 1979. Wright, Adam. “The Representation of Place in Middlemarch.” George Eliot Review 41 (2010), 51-59.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION OR FICTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY? GEORGES PEREC’S UNIQUE TESTIMONIAL MODE DANA AMIR

Georges Perec’s book W or The Memory of Childhood (2010) consists of two seemingly unrelated texts that are nevertheless intricately and thus inseparably intertwined. While one is a fictional text, and the other presumes to be an autobiographical account, neither is entirely what it claims to be. The fictional clearly carries autobiographical elements, while the autobiographical often straddles the boundary between reality and fiction. The narrator presents his "witness position" quite at the beginning of this book: "I am not the hero of my tale," he proclaims, "Nor am I exactly its bard" (p. 4). Not only was he a passive eyewitness rather than an agent in relation to the past events, as a present witness, too, he tells a story that is not his. By emphasizing "I am not the hero of my tale. Nor am I exactly its bard" (p. 4), the narrator touches on the question of his relation to the traumatic events to which he bears witness. This question, concerning the possibility of being the owner of his own biography, will be discussed throughout his book in many complex variations. The narrator’s first attempt to engage the above question is through the presentation of two biographical statements at the beginning of the book: The first statement (which appears in Chapter 1) recounts his father's death when the narrator was 6 years old; the narrator's subsequent adoption by a neighbour who raised him as a workman; his enlistment in the army, his desertion with the help of an organization of conscientious objectors, his subsequent move to Germany, finding a job as a garage mechanic and spending most of his evenings at a bar. In this biographical

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statement, his mother is not mentioned. The second biographical statement (in Chapter 2) begins with the words: "I have no childhood memories," immediately followed by an alternative biography which, while interacting with some aspects of the first one, completely differs from it. In this biographical variant, his father died when he was 4, and his mother died when he was 6; he resided in various boarding schools during the war and was eventually adopted by his father's sister and her husband. The setting up of two biographical variants, one alongside the other, conveys a message that cuts across this entire testimonial text: where there is no "continuous core" (Amir, 2016a), what we call "biography" is no more than the singular way in which the narrator fills in the empty holes and blind spots of memory with his unconscious projections and phantasies. This is why different variants can certainly exist for the same biography. As we will see further on, the narrator interweaves "living" memories, which he refutes no sooner than he has recounted them, with "dead" memories that did in fact occur – but to which he has no vital link. That these two types of memory keep occurring side by side is no coincidence. It reflects the author's determination not to choose between them. As we progress through the allegedly autobiographical and the fictional parts alike, it becomes clear that even the memories the narrator has "borrowed" from others, as he declares, are not random. In certain cases, it seems that the only way for him to preserve a vital link with his nameless pains is by means of "borrowing" from other's biographies "plots" that can make those pains meaningful, and in that way deposit them within himself. One example is a dubious memory of an event that turned out to not have happened at all: the memory is of his scapula being broken after he crashed into a sledge while skating. As a result of this fracture, his right arm was "strapped" behind his back to allow the scapula to heal. Further on, he tells of an encounter in 1970 with a friend who told him that the accident, which he clearly remembered, did not happen to him but to another friend. He most likely witnessed it, but was certainly not its victim: I can see perfectly well what it was that these easily mendable fractures, which could be remedied simply by keeping them still for a stretch, were meant to stand in for, although today it seems to me that the metaphor will not serve as a way of describing what had been broken – and what it was surely pointless hoping to contain within the guise of an imaginary limb. (p. 80)

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Thus, these fractures which he invented as memories, these "marks of suspension," as he names them, "indicated pains that could be named" (p. 80) and thereby served to justify his need for attention, the real cause of which remained unspoken. But beyond their undeniable symbolic significance, one can view these planted, fictitious memories, as another attempt to construct his life as a continuous story. Since the pain he felt was psychical and not physical, and since the psychical pain remained unspoken, the only way to explain this pain to himself was to make up physical injuries that would serve as a reason. The tales of fractures and injuries were part of this child’s attempt to establish a coherent sequence, to rehabilitate the thinking apparatus which was under constant attack by the arbitrariness of the experienced reality and which lacked the discursive access that could endow it with meaning (Amir, 2017). This was achieved by creating a story that could render those experiences meaning in terms of causality (I was injured, and therefore I'm in pain), space (I was injured as a result of crashing into a sledge while ice-skating) and time (the crash preceded the pain which preceded the binding of the scapula). It was his way of defending his incessantly attacked thinking apparatus by creating "a-symmetrical" proper relations (Matte Blanco, 1975) where "symmetric logic" (Ibid) hitherto prevailed. Since the narrator lacks the experience of being either hero or owner of his story – writing turns into an act of weaving, placing biographical and allegedly biographical strips across one another in order to create the fabric of memory. The narrator demands that the reader will be an active witness – in contrast to the passive witness he himself chooses to be – so as to create, on behalf of him, an act of integration. Just as he borrows the memories of others, so he borrows the reader’s ability to connect, in order to stitch together what he himself cannot make into one piece. I was excused [from the question about the nature of his history, D.A.]: a different history, History with a capital H, had answered the question in my stead: the war, the camps. (p. 6)

One of the most difficult tasks in bearing witness to trauma is, indeed, that of discerning between personal and general history. It is so easy, the narrator suggests, to use the objective history in order to erase the subjective one; so easy to use history to erase biography. When the inner witness (Amir, 2012) is fragile and unstable, History with a capital H offers a means of escape, holding out articulation and expression, and providing an artificial coating and context. When he was 13 years old, the narrator recalls, he wrote and illustrated the story "W," which constitutes this book's main fictional part. This

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situates "W," the fictional story parallel to the autobiographical one within the narrator's own autobiography (“if not the story of my childhood, then at least a story of my childhood” – p. 6), mixing up again the allegedly biographical and the allegedly fictional parts of the book: W is no more like my Olympic fantasy than that Olympic fantasy was like my childhood. But in the crisscross web, they weave as in my reading of them I know there is to be found the inscription and the description of the path I have taken, the passage of my history and the story of my passage. (p. 7)

Testimony is not just "the story of the passage," but also "the passage of the story": rather than a one-dimensional text that lists the facts, it weaves and revives these facts, often precisely through memory's tortuous paths and mazes. In this sense, the story of the passage, that is, the manner in which the story is both internalized and externalized is no less important than the passage of the story. For years I had tried to sidetrack or to cover up these obvious facts, and I wrapped myself in the harmless status of the orphan, the unparented, the nobody's boy. However, childhood is neither longing nor terror, neither a paradise lost nor the Golden Fleece, but maybe it is a horizon, a point of departure, a set of co-ordinates from which the axes of my life may draw their meaning. […] I have no alternative but to conjure up what for too many years I called the irrevocable: the things that were, the things that stopped, the things that were closed off – things that surely were and today are no longer, but things that also were so that I may still be. (pp. 12-13)

Where childhood is either terror or a golden fleece, the nostalgic lost paradise – the ability to bear witness is obliterated: These are the areas where the position of the witness is lost, since the psyche, overwhelmed by either idealization or anxiety, cannot hold on to the story. Thus, as he goes back to his childhood, he refutes each memory no sooner than he recalls it, turns it upside down, strips it of one meaning and attributes another, presenting the recollection as part hallucination, part fantasy, and part dream. The first memory he mentions is an excellent example: he is three years old, he says, and all the members of his family have gathered around the baby "which was just born" (a moment later he wonders, in parenthesis: "but didn’t I say a moment ago that I was three?"– p. 13). The spectators are in awe since the baby has just pointed to a Hebrew letter and called it by its name. He remembers identifying the letter "‫‘( "ג‬gimmel’), yet the letter he remembers looks nothing like a Hebrew gimmel, rather resembling a gaping, upside down variation of the Hebrew character

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"mem" ("‫)"מ‬." In addition, the painting which the recollection reminds him of ("Jesus amid the Doctors") doesn't actually feature Jesus the infant, as one might expect, but rather the adult Jesus. This memory is so unreliable that it undermines not only itself but any possibility of memory. The letter is not the letter, the painting is not the painting, and the infant’s age is not his age, and further on the narrator recounts having been told that he knew how to recognize French letters, but not Hebrew letters – thus could not have recognized the Hebrew letter as he allegedly did in his recollection. The significance of this detailed scrutiny of his childhood memory is not necessarily related to the particular memory itself, but to the way in which it disintegrates in the attempt to grasp it. It's as if the narrator wants to prove both to himself and the reader, as he does many times throughout this book, that there is really no such thing as a childhood memory. Since memory is a fiction fabricated through "deferred action," it resembles a dream narrative much more than any form of historic documentation. The second memory the narrator introduces has several versions that keep changing and tipping over: The simplest statement of it would be this: my father comes home from his work; he gives me a key. In one version, the key is made of gold. In another version it is not a golden key, but a gold coin; in yet another version, I am on the potty when my father comes home from his work; and, finally, in yet another version, I swallow the coin, everyone fusses, and the next day it turns up in my stool. (pp. 13-14)

Here, too, the description comes to bear out the built-in illusion of memory. As we move back and forth between the different versions, we try to find something to keep hold of in order to determine whether it was a key or a coin, whether he received it, swallowed it and then excreted it, or just received it, or perhaps never received it at all. What appears consistent throughout the versions is that the father returns home from work and that there is a boy who awaits him; the latter receives something from the former or perhaps expects something of him, yearns for him but may also be angry at him (since he swallows the coin but also excretes it, thus turning the golden key/coin into shit). This thin thread of the child's expectation from his father, and perhaps also his yearning to grant him a gift in return (in the only productive way he knows, which is by defecating), can indeed be detected in the various versions. What seems important is that this thread only becomes manifest when one examines the combination of all versions while cannot be observed in any single one of them alone. Apparently, it is the abundance of factual and fictitious variations that brings to the fore what repeats itself

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and therefore proves important: the father, the boy, a gift that is swallowed and ejected. This relation between essential and incidental, or between the factual and the fictitious, has a constant symbolic presence in this book through the relations between the main text and the footnotes: throughout, the footnotes appear in a similar font as the main text and as its continuation. Not only are they not "footnotes" in terms of their length and content, but the text itself is often situated as a reference to them. This blurring between centre and margins, between essential and incidental, is the very issue Perec addresses in this book with regard to the subject of testimony: What is essential and what is incidental? Does truth reside in the facts or in our unconscious phantasies? This question resonates with the story of Jasper Winkler, the boy after whom the narrator of the first fictitious part of the book is called. Jasper Winkler was a sickly and puny, deaf and dumb eight-year-old son of a famous Austrian singer who found refuge in Switzerland during the war. In order to alleviate his suffering and in the hope of curing his infirmity, which was diagnosed as psychosomatic rather than organic, his mother took him on a trip around the world. Due to a technical error, the narrator was given the boy's passport, enabling his own escape, while the child was listed in his mother's passport. The boy and his mother set out on their expedition: As the days went by, hopes of the boy's recovery diminished, turning the trip into an erratic wandering in futile search for a place "where suddenly it could all happen – the veil sundered, the light turned on" (p. 24). One day, a cyclone hit the ship on which mother and son were traveling, and it sank. Upon reaching the ship, the rescue team found five corpses, which did not include the boy's body. Otto Apfelstahl, who traced Winkler (the protagonist) in order to ask for his help in solving this mystery, asks him to set out on an expedition to find his lost double, the boy with the same name. Otto has been able to trace the circumstances of the shipwreck and has concluded that it is unlikely that the boy fell off the board. There is, hence, a possibility that the boy escaped the ship at some earlier stage, and that the ship turned back to look for him. Another possibility is that they abandoned him and only later regretted it and returned. What is the significance of connecting this first fictitious story, which breaks off in the middle and has no continuation whatsoever, with the second fictitious story in this book – the tale of the fictional island of W? And what is the relationship between each of these stories and the story of the narrator's own childhood?

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The story of Jasper Winkler is probably the book's most mysterious part, mostly since it opens up something that will never be resolved. The five chapters revolving around the fate of Jasper Winkler are written like a suspense story. The reader’s expectation from this genre is that the mysterious details eventually add up to one, fairly tight plot. Here, however, the exact opposite happens. The details don’t add up at all, and if, for a moment, they seem to merge and form some kind of pointer – we discover all too soon that this is a false track. These chapters’ resemblance to a detective story is an illusion, a signpost leading to a dead-end, thus constituting one more enactment of the theme that Perec repeats in this book in every possible variation: his biography is a path leading to no horizon that he can identify. Perec himself relates to this in his introductory note: […] the adventure story is rather grandiose, or maybe dubious. For it begins to tell one tale, and then, all of a sudden launches into another. In this break, in this split suspending the story on an unidentifiable expectation, can be found the point of departure for the whole of this book.

Thus, the content here is enacted by the form, creating in the reader's experience a reconstruction of the writer's detached and aimless stance. It is not difficult, however, to see the similarities between Jasper Winkler's story of disappearance and the story of Perec's own childhood. Both stories feature a boy who sets out on a journey which is supposed to save him from his deafness and dumbness. While the first boy's deafness and dumbness are presented as concrete phenomena (though it is implied that they have no organic cause and may rather be post-traumatic), the second boy suffers from deafness and dumbness in relation to his childhood memories. While the disappearance of one child is a concrete one – the other, unable to trace his own biography, disappears symbolically. Both stories recount an experience of fragmentation. In both cases, the story does not unfold along a distinct chronological and causal continuum. They both feature a traumatic event (one or more) that tears a rift in the story, alongside an attempt to mend this rift: the narrator does this by means of writing his memoirs, and Winkler by setting out in a symbolic search of his missing double. In both stories, abandonment and rescue intermingle: the deaf boy is taken on a rescue journey during which he is most probably abandoned, while Perec the child is sent on a journey, which he experiences as his mother's abandonment of him, in order to be

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saved. The letter W that connects all three stories (the autobiographic1 and the two fictional ones) indicates that horror weaves through all three of them like an invisible thread and that this perplexity is their common subject. W signifies the lacuna. The place where memory collapses into fiction, but no less the place where fiction collapses into memory. In the allegedly autobiographical chapters of the book, the narrator recounts how he "made up" the image of his father, who died "a slow and stupid death" (p. 29), reinventing him as a figure who died heroically. Similarly, he makes up his mother's history, by way of a compilation of Andersen's "The Little Match Girl" and Cosette from "Les Miserables," weaving in biographical descriptions which he constantly contradicts in the footnotes. As suggested before, the narrator inserts struggle and unease between text and footnotes. He contrives this by means of the sheer length and location of the footnotes as well as through their clashing content, thus creating a circular experience of construction, fragmentation, and reconstruction. In that way he reconstructs his mother's history but maintains the fictitious version by its side, omitting to arbitrate between them. There is no "correction" in light of the facts: instead, concrete facts and fiction blend into a single fabric in which incoherency is the main rule. It is no coincidence that in describing his mother's life, future and past get mixed up so that here he seems not to allow her to grow up while elsewhere he makes her older than she really was. As the time of trauma is circular (Mate blanco, 1975; Fink, 1989; Stern, 2012; Laub, 2014; Amir, 2016b), he can place her anywhere in time or even outside time. But due to this same circularity he feels, again and again, cast outside any possible continuity, in a way that prevents him, too, from generating a hierarchy of any sort (time and space, cause and reason, essential and incidental). Thus, since he does not own the story he tells, the narrating subject himself becomes in this text a sort of illusion. Perhaps this explains the sudden shift to the third person when he describes a photograph of himself and his mother:2 "mother and child make a picture of happiness" (p. 49). Interestingly, this movement into a more remote, impersonal mode of description occurs when he points to an experience rather than when he deals with facts (he describes details of dress and facial features, for

                                                              1

In this context, see the discussion of the letter x as the basis of a geometrical fantasy, in which the basic figure is the double V, whose many configurations form the major symbols of his childhood story (p. 77). 2 Here too, as in many other places in the book, there is a gap between the concrete and fictional facts: on the back of the photograph is written “1939”, but when he describes the photograph he says: "I think it dates from 1938" (p. 49)

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instance, in the first person). Thus, it is the experience, not the facts, which he does not own. In the same chapter, he describes another photograph in which he appears by his mother's side in a Parisian park. Here, too, he renders in minute detail his and her attire, her facial features as well as his own face. On the edge of the photo one may glimpse something that could be part of the overcoat of the person taking the picture, who might be his father; and in the background appears a little girl in a light-coloured coat. These two details, supposedly marginal, shed light on the portrait to which this picture is really dedicated: the portrait of the absent, of what the picture cannot contain: a dead father and a little sister who didn't survive after her birth. It is no coincidence that he recounts that his first memories pertain to the period after the escape from Paris and not before it and that he has no recollection of the flight itself (p. 51): The flight, much like the figures of the dead father and the still-born sister, was a missed traumatic event, remaining outside the frame of his memory picture. Three anecdotes are registered in his memory from his days at school (p. 53).3 Of these three memories, the first is the haziest: they are crowded in the school basement, trying on their gas masks. He recalls big eyes (probably the goggles that are part of the mask), a protruding object dangling from the front and nauseating smell of rubber. In this recollection, there is reference neither to fear nor to the reason for trying on these masks. Thus, it is only in mentioning nausea and the image of the "big eyes" that his anxiety, neither spoken nor experienced at the time, is somehow reflected. The second memory describes him as a boy rushing down the street, holding a colourful drawing of a brown bear on a dark brown background, and calling out here come the cubs, here come the cubs. A seemingly innocent, even joyful childhood memory. Here, too, context is lacking. It is unclear either what the boy is running from, or indeed where to; it is also unclear whether somebody sent him or is waiting for him. The unknown that lurks in the centre of this memory picture constitute, as it were, the boy's addressee: the figure towards which he directs his movement in space. The third recollection is the most coherent one. Here he receives a medal for good behaviour at school, and the medal is pinned to his smock.

                                                              3

While recounting these memories in writing – he recalls an additional memory, and yet he does not change the number of memories to "four." Does he wish to maintain the sequence of the recollection as is? Or is this rather a conscious or unconscious attempt to undermine every fact and every attempt to constitute a linear sequence?

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He is halfway up the staircase, which is crowded at the end of the school day, when someone shoves him and falls on top of him, thus making him accidentally push a little girl standing by his side. The teacher pounces on him and tears the medal from his smock. He remembers himself running down the street, and the sense of that shove in his back, which caused him to lose his balance, is so powerfully imprinted on his memory that he wonders whether it conceals its opposite: "not the memory of a star torn off, but the memory of a star pinned on" (p. 54). Whether this memory does or does not conceal the memory of the yellow star (which as we later learn is a collective memory rather than a personal one, for the narrator himself, was never required to wear the yellow star), the sense of injustice and arbitrariness, the sudden whimsical change from good to bad, the reversal of the caressing hand into the hand that strikes – all this cuts across his entire childhood experience. The relation between memory and reality resembles here the relation between conscious thinking and dream: the memory, just like the dream (Freud, 1900), is saturated with symbolic distortions, relations that are difficult to comprehend, facts that masquerade as other facts (a yellow star of David poses as a medal), all that in order to protect the psyche from an unbearable encounter with painful contents while at the same time enabling that encounter. The fourth memory, which not by chance emerged while writing, is of a childhood pastime in which he would place colourful cardboard strips cross-wise over each other, so as to form paper placemats. It seems that contrary to reality's guiding rules which were almost impossible to discern, in this simple game the guiding principle was apparent and clear. Contrary to the disrupted sense of continuity – how immense was the binding power of weaving. What marks this period especially is the absence of landmarks: these memories are scraps of life snatched from the void. No mooring. Nothing to anchor them or hold them down. Almost no way of ratifying them. No sequence in time, except as I have reconstructed it arbitrarily over the years […]. (pp. 68-69)

The chronology, if there is any to speak of, is arbitrary: the product of a reconstruction based on a random and meaningless choice of details which do not form a real continuum: No beginning, no end. There was no past, and for very many years there was no future either; things simply went on. You were there. It happened somewhere far away, but no one could have said very precisely where it was far from […]. Things and places had no name, or several; the people

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This text precisely describes the thinking processes characteristic of the territory of symmetrical logic, as suggested by Matte Blanco (Matte Blanco, 1975; Rayner, 1981; Sanchez-Cardenas, 2011): the absence of a sense of space (it is unclear what the distance is and between which two points it extends), the absence of a sense of time ("The only thing you do know is that it went on for years and then one day it stopped"), the absence of a sense of specificity resulting in an inability to discriminate one object from another ("in the end you didn't much care which one it was and anyway you didn't really care whether there were any aunties at all or not"). In the territory of symmetrical logic objects undergo ongoing generalization until they become an indiscriminate bloc. The ability to remember the past, like the ability to imagine the future, implies the ability to diverge from the present. When there is no experience of time and space, it is hence impossible to stray from the concrete present, whether forwards, backwards or inwards. In an attempt to mend the cracks in his thinking, Perec reads books, trying to internalize their sequential plots: […] not only as if I had always known them but, much more, as if they were, to my mind, virtually part of history: an inexhaustible fount of memory, of material for rumination and of a kind of certainty: the words were where they should be, and the books told a story you could follow; you could re-read, and on re-reading, re-encounter, enhanced by the certainty that you would encounter those words again, the impression you had felt the first time. (pp. 142-143)

The books provided what life took away: a sense of linearity, of narrative continuity. For in these books the words remained, images and episodes stayed fixed in their places, and the plot proceeded sequentially and logically; there were a beginning and an end instead of a merely circular, senseless movement. Literature, as opposed to life, provided conditions that enabled the rehabilitation of thinking.

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What was striking about the first three books that captivated him, was that they were "incomplete books": either they had a sequel which he didn't know or a beginning he hadn't read: "they presupposed other absent and unfindable books" (p. 143). So, on the one hand, those books created a stable reality which provided conditions for thinking, but on the other hand they, too, concealed black holes, blind spots, lacunae of all sorts. They simultaneously rehabilitated the reality of his childhood but also repeated it, preserving contact with it by virtue of the fact that they too, like him, lacked something that preceded or followed them. Perec's testimonial mode in the "Memory of Childhood" chapters may be described as a "metonymic testimonial mode" (Amir, 2016b), one which enacts in the reader's experience the thing to which it testifies: feelings of disintegration and lack of orientation, as well as an experience of being "external" to the narrative sequence. This external experience is enacted by means not only of the content but also through the detachment of the autobiographical part from the fictional part in a way that makes it very difficult to put them together in terms of any continuity. Much more misleading in its allegorical richness, Perec’s fictional writing meets the criteria of an "excessive testimonial mode" (Amir, 2016b). Contrary to the autobiographical text, the fictional story of the island of W is tightly knit, has a clear narrative sequence, laden with details that follow a calculated and exact logic, without associative deviations or slippages into the inner world of the narrator. However, this excessively rigid and detached text forms a distinct testimonial narrative in itself. For the text not only suffers from all the characteristics of the regime of the Island of W, but also enacts them on the reader who finds themselves lost in the abundance of details, collapsing under the burden of the laws and their implications, trapped helpless in the logic of the horror which gradually strangles their own capacity to remember and think. Perec’s authorial position in the story of W, even more than in any of the chapters of "The Memory of Childhood" includes no narrating I that is capable of bearing witness to himself. As such, through a process that resembles projective identification, it deposits in the reader the demand not only to bear witness to the actual contents – but also to struggle against the attack on thinking (Bion, 1959) caused by the absence of a "narrating I." The excessive quality of this testimonial text originates in the suffocating, hermetic wealth of details that flood the reader and finally block his or her inner ability to react to them autonomously. Despite being a story – the W chapters include no plot. On the contrary: they constitute an obsessively dry report which does not miss any technical detail – but which at the same time persistently passes over any detail that might create

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a specific image or character. Instead of a story told from the specific perspective of one narrator, conveying, thus, through the private laboratory of his personality and history the story of the state as a whole – the story of W is recounted in an encyclopaedic style without any personal point of view, opinion or experience. There seems to be a fundamental contradiction between the lack of hierarchy and logic that typifies (and nullifies) the chapters of "The Memory of Childhood" and the rigid organizing principle of the “W” chapters, as if these are two clashing territories of thinking: the one is characterized by a symmetrical logic in which the rules blend into one another so relentlessly that they result in an experience of no rules, an experience in which nothing follows and is discriminated from anything; whereas the other is enacted by an absolutely a-symmetrical logic, in which rules and regulations cover every area of thinking and nothing is left to imagination or arbitrariness. In the course of reading, however, it appears that what was set up as a contradiction is in fact one and the same thing, for both territories, are crucially marked by the absence of a narrating I: Whether it sinks into the abyss of non-memory, or it is worn down under the oppressive wheels of the encyclopaedic memory – it is equally absent in both. Not surprisingly, towards the end of the book, the "W child" and the child Perec are linked: "a W child knows almost nothing of the world in which he will live" (p. 137). Perec writes in the preface: In this break […] can be found the point of departure for the whole of this book: the points of suspension on which the broken threads of childhood and the web of writing are caught.

While seemingly aiming to create a sort of puzzle which strives to connect its different pieces, the connection never happens. “W” does not connect to "The Memory of Childhood”; It remains unclear how Winkler and W are related; there are indications of a suspense story or a mystery crime, but what happens is the very opposite: while the parts of a regular suspense story are eventually woven together into a conclusion that sheds light on everything, including that which seemed marginal and incidental – here the parts not only fail to intertwine but rather continue to fall apart. This story ends as it begins, with no attempt to clearly demarcate its margins or mark its centre. W or The Memory of Childhood chillingly exemplifies what trauma inflicts on memory: perforating it, it renders the testimonial narrative itself into a text that oscillates between the mechanic adherence to the details of horror and the collapse into the black holes of no-memory.

Autobiographical Fiction or Fictive Autobiography?

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